Black Dog

A friend at work told me her 12 year old does not listen to current popular music, preferring instead the music of the seventies - Zeppelin, Floyd, etc. So do several of my teenager nephews, so I'm inducing that this is a common phenomena - tired of the same old tired music being mass-produced these days (by computers, I'm suspecting), kids are turning back to the days when rock music was being invented - when talented folks were experimenting with new sounds, new song structures, new wave, when record companies were prepared to ride initial failures to get to the more mature later goodies (Genesis, Elton John, Yes all had rather feeble first offerings), when artists produced an album a year (or more - look at the prodigious Elton collection) - remember those days?

So it's not just the old fogeys like me complaining about today's music nadir - the current audience is complaining too, and doing what I did the other day - slipping Led Zeppelin 4 into the CD player and marvelling at what those "heavy metal" guys did - a song for vocal duet accompanied by mandolin and acoustic guitar only, a song (now legendary) that starts out with vocal and recorders (the kind you blow, not the kind you tape), and a song with the raw energy and excitement of Black Dog. I remember when I first heard Black Dog. It was not awesome - it was awe a lot!

I feel sorry that our youth are not getting the excitement from popular music that we did in the 60s and 70s, even 80s. It really was better back then!

Fourtaying

I have come up with a new form of rhyme that is proving productive - for me anyway! It's my answer to the haiku! I call it the fourtay, and there are four rules:

1. There are four lines in a fourtay
2. Each line has the same meter - akin to the first line of a limerick
3. Each line has the same rhyme
4. The fourtay is about something whose proper name is in the first line

Here is my first foray into fourtay writing, one about my daughter's beloved toy cat Stitches:

There once was a young cat called Stitches
Who had such a strong fear of witches
That he used to go hiding in ditches
Although then he got covered in itches

Or take one of my favorite things, the LHC:

There is a Large Hadron Collider
That has fast balls of protons inside her
That are thrown by the magnets astride her
That sometimes deliver a slider!

We can get silly:

There once was a beautiful Rose
That began one day growing a nose
Now why was that do you suppose?
Well the truth is that nobody knows!

or political:

So Johnny chose one Sarah Palin
Who at answerin' questions is failin'
But she knows about huntin' and whalin'
But VP? not for me, I'm bailin'!

what's your fourtay?

Now We Are Six

My daughter recently turned six-and-a-half. So only six months of her sixiness to go. I mention this because six is such a great age. The baby-stuff - learning to walk, talk, pee and poo appropriately, feed oneself, etc. - is long gone, the personality is blooming, it's the first year of real school, learning exciting concepts like time-telling, calendars, addition/subtraction, even science and Spanish. And yet the innocence and joy is still all there. The love of pretending, dressing up, playing, drawing, picking flowers, strewing petals, swinging on swings is at its strongest, the excitement of the best friend ringing the doorbell, the treat of ice-cream or going to ballet class is at its freshest and the attention to the details of dress, band-aids, food-placement, and routine at its most precocious. Zoe is as purely authentic as she will ever be!

Sixteen may be sweet, but six is precious.