Here comes the sun

 A good day was had.

Ah, the sun is shining
An LP on the turntable
Freshly brewed coffee
And a #QueenBee I am!
Life is good 😇#NYTSpellingBee #SpellingBee pic.twitter.com/6P87YsgiPa

— Sriram K (@congoboy) October 27, 2022

An upside to the premature retirement is that I can make the metaphorical hay when the sun shines!

(No, listening to LPs is not a retirement hobby.  Here is a post, for instance, from 2011.)

Only after moving to this part of the world do I truly experience the "make hay while the sun shines."  Back in the old country, with the abundant sunlight and heat for most of the year, it was not the sunny day that was rare. 

Halfway between the old home and the north pole, here in the valley where misty rain and cool temperature will be the norm through the end of May, I have become a sun worshiper. It is up here in these latitudes that people really need to do the surya-namaskaram.  Too bad that the yoga students in their Lululemons stay inside the studios while they chant om and do the surya-namaskar.

There is more than a fascination for the old that tempts me to play the LP.  I imagine that every song in every LP at home is available for streaming through any number of services.  I can only imagine that because I do not subscribe to Spotify and the like.  It is creepy to think that "they" know what I am listening to.  But, more than that, why should I listen to what somebody else tells me to listen to?

When I was young, we had no choice but to listen to curated collections of movie songs that were broadcast on the radio.  Often we would also wonder why they played more crappy ones and less of the good songs.  We had no option because of the dark times when there was neither a turntable nor a tape-player at home.

Conditions began to change when we acquired a Telefunken tape-player.  We could now begin to own our own collection of songs.  We could create our own mixed-tapes. 

Later, with the digital revolution came CDs.  Depending on my mood, I could listen to Hank Williams or Blondie or Pavarotti or Ali Akbar Khan.  The music world was my oyster.

Why stream music!

Streaming music in the age of abundance appears to give us more choice than ever before, but what does that choice make us do?

In theory, these developments have been boons to consumer choice. But they’ve also aggravated what [Simon] Reynolds calls “the porno-logic of franticity” that keeps us compulsively clicking (or swiping) to “the next, the next, the next,” increasingly isolated in our own algorithmically defined cultural spheres.

The more feedback a user gives to these algorithms, the more the user gets trapped in cultural spheres, without the user ever wondering about the choice paradox.

My father and his friends grew up in a time when live music was practically the only available music.  Attending a live concert meant that sometimes they walked quite a few miles from Pattamadai to the neighboring village or town, and then walked back home in the dead of the night.  Early in his engineering career, it was not unusual for him to travel to the big city in order to listen to live music.

I suspect that he, and people like him, found incalculable value in that kind of an experience with music and interactions with musicians, musicologists, and fans.  Unlike now.

Technology has reduced the formerly expensive and inconvenient task of listening through the discographies of such artists, however prolific they may be, to a matter of will and commitment—qualities now in short supply, though perhaps only somewhat less abundant than they were before the onrush of the sixties. “In societies with fewer opportunities for amusement,” W. H. Auden wrote in an essay more than half a century ago, one could more easily distinguish “a mere wish from a real desire. If, in order to hear some music, a man has to wait for six months and then walk twenty miles, it is easy to tell whether the words, ‘I should like to hear some music,’ mean what they appear to mean, or merely, ‘At this moment I should like to forget myself.’ ” Now that the distinction between the two has all but vanished, listeners hoping to remember themselves—as well as their time, place, and context in cultural history—have to stick to a strategy.

While writing this post, I had to walk over to the turntable and flip the LP to the other side, and play a second LP too.  Mindful listening is my strategy.  What's yours?