It Was a Good Year in Books

 My year in reading.

File Under: Positive Thinking

One advantage to my chilly apartment is that it’s more energy efficient to stand in front of an open fridge pondering the next thing to be stuffed into my pie hole.

 

The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (2020)

“It’s classic 60s guitar pop sound, but then it had another thing going on. You’ve got the brothers singing, and when you’ve got brothers singing, it’s like an instrument nobody else can buy.”

 - Noel Gallagher

I mostly grew up listening to these guys as I had no choice; they were all over the radio (at a time when that’s how you ingested music, for the most part). I also admit that until just now when I looked on Wiki, I didn’t know their names. Barry is the only one alive and the one I thought was the group member most resembling Chewbacca, although that fury pop icon came well after The Bee Gees hit the scene.

I have to say that I wasn’t much of a fan of their music. This isn’t to say that I didn’t like it, I liked some of it. It’s just that their sound was so ubiquitous back in my youth that I mostly just thought of it as ambient noise, like car traffic when you live on a busy street, not that I'm comparing their music to road noise. Maybe I was a closet fan. I wasn't cool enough to openly admit that I liked these guys back in the day. I don't listen to rock these days, at least not voluntarily, not because I'm cooler now, but just because I'm sick of rock and have moved on to other genres.

Chewy Gibb, The Forgotten Bee Gee

 

Number Five Killed My Brother.

 This is pure comedy gold. I didn't even know that I liked the Backstreet Boys. From Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Spring Before Winter?

Coming off a very cold snap, this heat wave is welcome news. This will make for perfect cycling weather, not that it was bad before, it’s just that I’ll need one or two fewer layers. It's a bit windy, but that's normal here.

I heard the news today, oh boy.

I just heard the news this morning that Christmas has been canceled this year, so I guess this virus thing hasn’t been all bad. Can you put a price tag on not hearing "Jingle Bell Rock" for an entire year?

 

Piano Practice: Shelter from the Shit Storm

I sit in a café to write on many afternoons. There’s a radio playing top forty hits on a constant loop, los cuarenta, as the ditty promises over and over throughout the hour. This station plays some of the most godawful excuses for music that I’ve ever been forced to hear in my life. If I’m even a little careless with hygiene, I’ll find myself with the malignant virus of one of these dreadful songs playing in my head,

Much like how we are instructed to wash our hands and use sanitizer when making contact with any potentially infected surface, I must repeat a similar process to flush the remains of one of these shitty songs from my psyche. I do this by sitting down at my piano before I go to bed and playing something, anything in my modest repertoire, even scale training will suffice, as these exercises have more to do with music than the hate crimes against art passing for pop hits that had rained down on me in the café