the rix mix

A few times each week I stop by my facebook page. Between visits, whole days of friend postings have scrolled off the page. I have 72 friends. I ditched one yesterday, nothing personal, but he was posting literally dozens of daily entries for his 350 other friends & I figured he wouldn't miss me. Didn't notice the "hide this friend" button until afterward, so I'll add him on again. I'm at the point where the list of suggestions for new friends rarely uncovers someone I've overlooked. I searched the maiden name of an old girlfriend & discovered her married name - probably have it in my box of old letters in the closet but I was never curious enough to dig around & find it. I was hoping her friends list would include some musicians & artists I knew in the 90's; no luck there. Glad to know she's still an artist & still making goofy faces in photos.

Meanwhile, a friend at My Space, which I rarely visit anymore, was complaining in her My space blog that nobody was reading & commenting on her blog. I wrote her & said that nobody follows My Space blogs except on band pages; if she wanted to be a blogger she ought to switch to Blogspot & write more often than twice-a-month, but even blogs with regular postings & a core of readers didn't necessarily generate comments. I suggested that she join Facebook. Facebook has toys. You can post Twitter length comments without twittering. & everything you post spends a few hours on the home pages of everyone on your friends list. The more friends they have, the less time your posts are visible on their pages. I play with some of the applications. I found out that Patti Smith is punk rock star I most resemble. The other day I used an application to choose five albums that shaped my life, from the available database. I wasn't gonna put a lot of thought into it. I quickly chose:

• Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (representative, not specific)
• Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
  
• Gustav Holst, The Planets
• Henry Mancini, Music From Peter Gunn
• Morton Subotnick, The Wild Bull (weird sounding electronic music from the Sixties, an example, I had several such "mind-blowing' LPs).

This is the kind of list hipsters use to advertise their coolness. But I can't be too revisionist in the matter; my cultural code is that one should openly embrace what one likes. Nearly my entire music collection past & present could be extrapolated from those five albums. To be fairly complete, it needs only two more: a Greatest Hits of the Four Seasons including "Candy Girl" & "Marlena," & Balinese Gamelan "Music of the Morning of the World," a 1967 Nonesuch LP that opened up a musical world & was, at the time, the most exotic music I'd ever heard outside of movies. Life shaping hit singles is another list. The top of that list has long been the same song: "Little Darling," first by The Diamonds, then by The Gladiolas when I heard the original.

There's another Facebook fun list, "Albums I like that I shouldn't." Wrong attitude. Right attitude: Everything I like is cool.

Labels: culture, music