Sunday Morning

The breeze is peeling off the easy leaves, the handful of yellow ones hiding up in the green canopy that is the ash tree. It’s layering them evenly on the grass, my table, the deck. Piece by piece my sunshade is being removed until there won’t be anything between me and the autumn sun but … me.

On Saturday the smoke cover returned, completely obscuring the San Juans south of us. Pieces of California and of Oregon passing overhead. Parts of homes and forests that used to be. What a basket of sorrows is America this year for so many, more than enough for a full-bore lamentation. Can I have a that’s for damn sure, brothers and sisters?

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From The New Yorker

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I’m presently running a side by side comparison of Spotify and Apple Music, trying to see if one of them suits my warps and woofs better than the other. I think that I’m about done with buying music after three-score plus years of doing just that. The only time I have to own a tune is when I need one to put up on the Jukebox for you folks. Let’s say that I have maybe ten or twenty thousand songs on my hard drive … hey … Apple has 50 MILLION for me to listen to if I want to give them a few bucks each month. I was not a math major but I think that 50 million is way bigger.

Right now I’ve pulled up a Ry Cooder playlist on Spotify that goes on for four hours. I believe I won’t even move from my chair and I’ll have my supper served out here on the deck, s’il vous plait. Jus’ put my plate down over there and do it ever so quietly, there’s a dear.

But the idea of having a record library is so ingrained in me that it is a wrench to make this change. However, there have already been quite a few changes in recorded music that some of us have had to deal with.

• Going from 78 RPM and 45 RPM records to those lovely 33 1/3 RPM vinyl LPs with all that great artwork on their covers
• Evolution of tape players, first reel-to-reel, then 8 track, then cassette.
• Making my own mixtapes – such a great thing for the compulsives among us
• Advent of the compact disc – no more skips or static, but now that lovely album artwork was tiny and cramped
• Online selling of music by the album or by single cuts (think iTunes)
• Death of the music stores. R.I.P. Musicland, R.I.P. Tower Records, etc.
• Advent of contract digital music services like Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, etc.

As hard as it is to contemplate not owning new music, it was harder back when I realized that if I made a mixtape or burned my own CD (same thing), no one wanted a copy any more. Why would they when they had access to these monster collections online?

[But something was lost when the mixtape went away. You picked out the songs, and then there was the all-important sequencing on the tape. If you made one for a girl you were interested in, you wanted to have her play it and end up thinking warm thoughts about you … it was half gift, half psychological implant.

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Here’s the original clip.

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