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Music for Funerals

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  I was gone for five minutes. Like five minutes. (Not really five minutes.) And so much happened from my musical favorites list. Unbelievable. Like I was gone for 10 days at most. And all this new stuff was both stressful (because I couldn't attend to it, tied up as I was with family arriving for my mother's interment, that being the end itself of a five-year long transitioning) and yet it was also very comforting, that I would have something to look forward to afterwards and that something would go on when all the realizations of my mother finally being gone were ready to set in.  Actual Funeral Music  This is not actually a post about music for funerals. But my mother did have requests for music, particularly Andy William's singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in 1968 (her final political sayonara)...  ...and a recording of a my Dad's cousin (no longer with us) singing "His Eye Is On the Sparrow" which she loved and which is played digitally and ...
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From Unguarded to The Me That Remains: The Tao of Amy Grant

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This is an updated version of a piece previously published in 2003 in the pop-culture magazine Ape Culture .  This is going to be a long haul. Just like life. Anything worth having is worth working for, I say. As far as religion is concerned, I was raised with the very simple yet highly effective mantra for being good: don’t be a selfish asshole. And literally that was it. It was easy to follow because it was both easy to remember and not open to vague interpretations. No weekly sermon was required. No bizarre rituals. Hypocrisy was easy to spot within its parameters. It’s worked so well, I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket. (I've since gotten a speeding ticket.) In fact, it’s possible I go overboard from time to time. For example, before Thanksgiving of 2003 while I was transporting my new pet fish home from his office fishbowl in downtown Los Angeles, I turned down the volume on my car radio in sudden dismay that ‘maybe Basho doesn’t like Abba as much as I do.’  (B...
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The Best 80s Music Videos (According to Me)

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  Well, I wouldn't be a proper gray-haired Gen-X music blogger if I didn't post my list of favorite MTV videos.  Kids who were raised on YouTube can't possibly understand the impact a plethora of music videos had on young minds in the 1980s, particularly young teen-girl minds. Spellbound is a good word. The arrival of MTV kept us riveted to our TVs for the entirety of our high school years.  We would stay up all night watching MTV on the weekends. The cable channel played in the background while we did our homework and at our parties. We watched it when we couldn't sleep at night. We played our favorites over and over, taped down from VHS machines. As a courtesy, we pretended to like what our friends liked and they pretended to like what we liked.  It was such a supermarket-surprise in the beginning. And the channel had something for everyone back then, before videos were eventually segregated into overly-curated and boorishly-hosted hour-long "shows" by the 1...
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