Music of Travel

So I've been doing too much traveling altogether, and it's not conducive to new music listening. I'm supposed to be doing this whole thing called "being a music director" at WJCU but the fact that I don't have a walkman and can't carry around stacks of like 80 CDs in my carry on don't really help me get that job done. Suitcases and briefcases don't make much room for hipsters. Can't somebody invent a bag with built in space for CDs?

When I come home, I pretty much just cry. This life is sometimes too short to try so much new music. (I reread that sentence, and thought, the word trying sounds like I'm experimenting with hallucinogens or something. Which I kinda am. I'm in Arizona and I'm eating prickly pears, chollo buds (pieces of cactus), and all kinds of crazy Native American food.) Do you know what I mean? Music-wise, that is. It's so hard to keep up with everything being released in this internet age, and then when I do find something I really like, I start to feel guilty about listening to it for too long, too many times over, because I have priorities to listen to so much other music. It gets to be much to keep up with all this when the rest of my life also seems to have a mind of it's own, pulling me in 8 million directions and forcing me unto paths that I was never even meant for.

Speaking of 8 million directions, let's discuss why I currently feel like I belong in an insane asylum. I am sitting in a hallway, waiting for my main clients to arrive. As I write this post, I am listening to the music I've loaded onto my work computer on shuffle (currently Josh Ritter, previously Phantogram). I have a headset in my ear, where my co-workers are talking event-planning things in my ear concurrently. The hotel hallways echo of an eerie Native American tribal music that - wait, let me pause my music and take my headset out for a second - sounds like a (OMG THE CREEPIEST MAN EVER JUST WINKED AT ME AND ASKED ME WHEN AM I GOING TO THE POOL WITH HIM. BAAAARF. Also, this blog post just became a pre-pubescent girl's diary entry. I love caps lock and internet abbreviations as much as my 7th grade self did.) Anyway, the music the hotel is playing sounds like Bambi's death scene, if Bambi was an ancient tribal antelope and her death was laid upon her with the slow and repeated stabbing of an arrow.

Moving on, I finished reading my book. It's called This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Summary: Interesting at times, I'm glad I read it, but it was so dry at times that I felt like I was living an episode of The Big Bang Theory, and it took me 3 months to finish. The first chapter is a pretty good summary of what I learned in Intro to Audio Production, so I do think it could be a very good helper text for a class like that... maybe not the most pleasurable read, though.

I've moved on to a recent volume of Rolling Stone with Lady Gaga on the cover. It's the volume that got General McChrystal fired. I'll save my beef with RS for later, but let's leave it at this: how are liberal music magazines bringing more change than the mainstream media? Think about it.