Music, Sinatra, and e-Networking

By Barbara Groark

Some time in the 1970s, when disco came in, I started listening to jazz and classical music, even though what felt like home to me was more the Beatles, Motown, Laura Nyro, Bonnie Raitt, and the Roches. Having decided to reconcile with my father’s generation, if not my father himself, I later started listening to Sinatra and other music of the 1940s and -50s. And guess what – I liked it. Maybe it’s because it was always music for grownups, and I’m finally a grownup, or so I hope. I like old Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn records, and this is what has pulled me through the rap, head-banger, and general incoherency - or female bombastic anthem for every song – eras in music. Some of the new kids today, from the Puppini Sisters to Amy Winehouse, are even mining old song collections.

And when you listen to love song followed by love song followed by another love song, you realize why there was a Baby Boom in the first place. Something Christmas-y happens when you listen to that optimistic and confident and sometimes hokey old music. [By the way, Dennis Murawski just became a new grandfather.]

With opera and classical I’m just a visitor, but there is some power in those crazy stories and liftoff is achieved with some of that sound. I visit country and bluegrass music once in a while, too – went to see the Dixie Chicks one time as well as the people from the O Brother, Where Art Thou film soundtrack. And I like some of Beck and some of the new guys and girls.

But if the Chairman of the Board were alive today, he might appreciate the following:

http://americancomedynetwork.com/animation.html?bit_id=25239

That’s a link from my uncle, who keeps sending “spam” email a few times a week, and occasionally they are funny.

Not that this isn’t an awkward transition, but on the same subject of Internet social networks, such as MySpace, Facebook, and others, let alone YouTube, some of which I have been investigating for business reasons, here is an article by Karen Heller, a columnist in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who sometimes sounds like someone I went to school with. By the way, I have a niece who has something like 2,352 MySpace “friends.” I don’t have any, except you guys of course, and several others.

[The article is called “Beware strangers asking to be friends.”]

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/19309699.html