Savagely edited Wednesday evening version.
The longer text contained other musical threads and also more remarks about comments others have made on my "work" in progress, but I want to explore those themes in their own right.
You may recall how Cindy, who has taken to producing striking images of the local wildlife like a chickadee and a chipmunk currently knocking on her neurons and Dusting Her Brain, once told me I'd collect more comments here than 0 most days if I left my mark at other people's places.
I do more often now, but it makes no difference. And I don't mind given the turn of my writing, which is hardly concise and won't change much if this is to be a book of Lilith. At home, though, wisitors make impudent remarks about my choice of people to adorn my Mac's desktop, but sometimes that's because they don't recognise them and, perhaps understandably mistake my motives.
 The current woman, Natalie Imbruglia (her place) is fairly renowned and thus less likely to inspire salacious comments than others who inspire me.
Natalie is also among those I'm listening to most, when they write poetic songs that aren't always upbeat. Like Imbruglia on an album I'll cover soon, I'm good at solitary moods at the moment and in no state for being rushed into anything!
On Tuesday, I slept through two alarm clocks again and woke up only 20 minutes before I was due in the office, which wasn't early. That meant an apologetic phone call to people whose understanding I greatly appreciate. I couldn't rush it simply because I was so late, but took precautions to try to avoid waking up the next morning with a terrible migraine that isn't caused by the illness that takes some of us down, though for years I thought it was.
zzz
There is more to life than meets the ear as well as our eyes and other physical senses, including a theory found in both contemporary scientific and ancient mystical literature that might, as a poetic image, be expressed by saying what made me late for work was almost literally the need to get rid of the migraine by "getting soul and body together". But I'll throttle back short of a discourse networking analogies between the Tibetan Book of the Dead and research going on at the frontiers of the mind sciences into people like me!
In a Métro full of people with music players, I listened to more Sheryl Crow then Ms Imbruglia and read a stupid magazine column about how allegedly wonderful so-called Push Music will be.
"Push! Music" is a much-blogged and abhorrent idea that will doubtless become fashionable. The New Scientist explains how adding
"new songs to your digital music player could become as easy as passing someone in the street. Push Music, designed by Lars Holmquist and his team at the Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, automatically transfers copies of songs between Wi-Fi enabled MP3 players when they come within 20 metres of each other. 'We have developed a way for music to find the user, instead of the user always looking for the music,' says co-creator Maria Håkansson."
To their credit, the people at the Viktoria Institute (Eng) are more cautious and list misunderstandings. But these largely concern the technology and the law.
What of the people who make music? What of music itself? And what of all it does for us?
Call me a Luddite, but to get excited about how mobile 'phones doubling up as .mp3 players might be a great thing when creative work is thus pushed at you raises nightmares about music as "product and commodity". The concept may be interesting if it opens ears, for sure, like methods of sharing I commend, along with far-sighted legislation that serves the aims of both the artist and the listener. But it would be absurd and a wretched insult to musicians to make it a lasting social phenomenon, exactly like music compression methods that can take the heart out of the sounds we hear.
I'm not interested, as a general rule, in writing about the details of sound technology, though I'm well-informed about them and make choices that cost me space and time in the interest of quality and "high-fidelity". If I wanted, my big iPod could have more than around 10,000 songs on it, but that would require a sacrifice in sound quality I refuse to make.
zzz
It's going to call for courage to bring to bear in my writing about music the "extrasensory" faculties that come into play whenever I'm listening to it or hear the "music" of people in odd ways without explanation, because the tales of Lilith are just an aspect of things I've spoken about having found I know or learned without yet understanding. Now I've begun to be grateful for comment that has stopped coming on the Log, which is hard to answer, but in conversations and mails that venture on to the new ground to be explored.
Though it was excellent and has served me so well I've dished it out to others when they seem to need it, I can no longer take advice to "Stop Thinking!" too literally. I must, hand in hand with musicians, and in ways that are new to me, but seem to invite far less ridicule when I'm open about them than if I try to play down strengths people tell me to cultivate.
zzzOn literally regarding the qualities of others, I want beautiful musicians on my desktop and scour the Net for pictures of the unknowns because some lines once written here, what seems an eternity ago, were true: these people are so lovely because of what they do and who they are and the beauty is usually an indissociable part of their nature.
The idea of getting some kind of iPod that will one day assault me unfeelingly with music I haven't sought out or that is wrong for the moment when my own magic finger can do far better with what's already in the library would take more courage than I have. It appals me. When I see people in the street yanking out their earphones with horrified expressions or stopping dead with a smile of "What's this?" beatitude in the path of a hurried oncoming taxi I'll know what's going on.
Two or three people asked me, meanwhile, to remember to update the "going solo" part of the list on the left and "stop being so lazy about it". It is true. I forgot, so I have made a start tonight, but not a complete change because I'm getting used to things taking plenty of time and again to the idea Sheryl Crow -- who is among Famous Babes with whole webrings, the poor thing -- shares about "creating it".
While writing this, my iPod has been shedding a heap of music from CD samplers I stupidly put on it when I never listen to them except as background on the home stereo, so that I can leap to explore whatever strikes me without getting an aural overdose. So the iPod has more room to be random with what I actually know I want. Roll on, all the Infamous Babes...
If you need your music as much as I do, this, in sum, is really is no time to push me around, while other people -- like Cindy and a few of the others into the new camera craze -- are much better than I am at the visuals...
12:49:50 AM link 
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