Tuesday, August 22, 2006

day 4: "More List Yourself"

A couple of entries from the fifth chapter (I'll come back to fourth chapter later) of More List Yourself: Listmaking as the Way to Personal Discovery.

Chapter Five: Culture Club

List the injustices on the planet that trouble you.

God's letting bad things happen to the defenseless. The idea of free choice should have a limit.

Animals being exploited.

Idiots not caring about the environment. This includes drivers of monster SUVs, pickup trucks, etc.

And the standard murder, rape, wars, hunger, etc., etc.
and

List all the people you'd like to be stuck with on a desert island.
all my family, Jerry, cats, a doctor, a therapist, an inventor, an outdoors expert, a chef, a dentist
and finally,

List the songs that have affected or touched you the most.
Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World": He seems to really mean what he's singing, and the song itself is so simple...just a downward scale.

Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards singing "When You Wish Upon a Star": From 1940's Pinnochio. Edwards makes the song so sweet and innocent. It's a beautiful performance, one in a vulnerable range (the tessitura, that is) for a man.

the humming chorus in Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly: plaintive and delicate

Charles K. Harris's "After the Ball": This was, for a very long time, one of the most popular songs in the world. I wish I could've been alive to see the world as it was then.

Kirk Franklin's "Why We Sing": My mother played it for my sister and me one day and said she wanted to have it played at her funeral. I instantly felt like crying.

The transition between life and death in Richard Strauss's tone poem, Death and Transfiguration: I'm usually a dope when it comes to hearing what it is a composer is trying to portray in a tone poem. But to me there's no doubt when the tone-poem protagonist's (?) heart pounds in its last attempt to remain alive.

and more I'll think of later.

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