Thursday, June 11, 2015

Terror management theory...

Playlist
Various - Blue Big Bands
Various - Blue'n'Soul
Various - Blue TV
Ornette Coleman - Beauty is a Rare Thing
Ornette Coleman -Sound Grammar
Ornette Coleman - Tomorrow is the Question
Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny - Song X

We all know we all have to die sometime...

That's why we have culture and fill our lives with "good stuff"...

It helps us to forget the ultimately crushing inevitability of death...

Of course, as you get older, you find icons of that culture, some you may have loved, some you may not have loved, start to "pop off" with increasing regularity...

Today Christopher "Dracula" Lee went the way of all flesh and, a couple of days ago James Last breathed his very own, erm, last...

These were two old men (93 and 86 respectively) and it is the way of things that they should go...

If I live to 93 and have all my faculties intact, I'll be quite happy...

My mum and dad were fans of James Last - and the one recording of his sitting in my collection, "Classics Up to Date", is there solely to remind me of my parents in the seventies...

Back then, they were over ten years younger than I am now and they liked James Last...

But each to their own and the world would be a boring place if everyone liked the same music...

In fact I do quite like that James Last LP...

Then, this afternoon, news came that Ornette Coleman had also died...

He was also an old man - born the same year as my mum, my dad and a year after James Last...

This afternoon, I did not feel an urge to listen to James Last but I did feel an Ornette Coleman evening session coming on...

Few people who are IN music, CHANGE music...

Mr Coleman certainly did...

But, I think, on balance, the world is a slightly better place for having had all three of these old men's achievements added to our cultural environment...

Something which is unlikely to be said about my own pathetic contributions to the collective consciousness of the human race...

But hey ho, on we go...

In other news...

Summer seems to be continuing...


...and breakfast was enjoyed in the living room...


...with Anne's latest displays...





Out under blue summer skies...





...where weeds were not really that bad...


...and monkeys seemed to be continuing to entertain...




As predicted, a goodly amount of this evening was spent listening to the works of Mr Coleman...

There was also some TV viewing re the Thursday staples...

All without thinking about dying...

And, instead, enjoying living...

Onwards and upwards...

Highlight of the Day : Celebrating the work of Ornette Coleman

P.S. Approximately 172,798 other people also died today but are not mentioned in this post...

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