It is dark and wet here, better than dark and icy; and I hope you are enjoying your holidays, whatever they be...

...I am going to a Christmas meal tomorrow evening, then my guy is calling me on Christmas morning itself - hopefully I will be awake and coherent...last night was all fruitcake and cheese and crackers and biscuits...

I wish I had some sort of grand year-ending list to provide you, my dear readers, but I don't. I saw no movies this year bar the ones (Over the Hedge, Shaggy Dog, Mission Impossible: III and Take the Lead) I saw crossing the Atlantic. I have read books this year but not from this year; musically I am a little bit better, but on the whole, not much. (I am quite proud to have introduced Sloan to Marcello and of course it's my favorite album of the year.) In truth my relationship with Marcello has changed me in so many ways that I find it hard to describe, but one of them is an almost blithe regard to anything transient or superficial. The other day I wandered around HMV for a while (repeating my steps so many times that the clerks there must have thought I needed help - I didn't, but thanks anyway) comme un idiot, looking for music the way people in deserts look for water. I knew it was there but where was it?

Because he is with me all the time, and I am therefore shopping for not just me but us, this is our music I'm buying, I am pickier than ever. The loud demanding crowds ("Where's Gordon Lightfoot?" one woman bellowed to a hapless employee..."I want The Wall by Pink Floyd, the one with two cds and a book!" demanded another) (at least they were looking for music & found it right away; I was in Sunrise Records once this week and any ambience at all was ruined by a woman who was barking into a cellphone about God knows what and who seemed to be audible in the store no matter where she was)...it was all pretty distressing, but I managed to escape with two very fine cds - Newk's Time by Sonny Rollins and Epiphany by Chaka Khan. The Rollins cd was on sale, and as has happened before, the code on the sticker was wrong and it was a few minutes before things were sorted out; I didn't mind, as at least I wasn't standing in line (or being yelled at to stand in line...)

But beyond the outside problems there's the inside ones. I have arguments with myself over cds and artists. Should I get something even though we have a copy already? (And how can I know what we have?) If everyone says such-and-such is a good album, and my inner ear draws back and hisses like a cat, then I have to obey it. If I walk by two people, a guy and a girl, and the guy is trying to explain the importance of the Beatles to her and how she should get Love then there is nothing I can do, nor is there anything I should do. Everyone in the store is following their own wants and needs and that is that. I look for Archie Shepp, whom my father loved, and he isn't there. Neither are the Walker Brothers. The best part of the whole thing was listening to the incredible mix they were playing in the hip-hop/r&b/electronica/world music section - one song after another, all blended into each other in a frothy cocktail...and for a few moments bullshit like this decade vs. that decade don't matter...and hauntology (which is, as I vaguely understand it, is a deliberate variation on the word 'ontology'; I don't know who coined it), the music writer subject du jour, means nothing. I giggle as ABC plays, blending into "Finally" which then turns into "Got To Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye. I smile inwardly as one clerk tells another (both younger than me) that this is the best mix on the album...

Music at its best can sound haunted, haunting; in fact I am sure that there are those who heard, say, Kraftwerk in 1977 and either rejoiced or despaired because they knew that this was music that sounded like the future, would haunt the future...the despair coming from those who were scared of machines, their mechanical cold rationalism (which was far more in their own minds than in the music - and as for machines, all instruments are machines)...while others, in northern England, in the Bronx, completely flipped out...and there are so many strands leading from Kraftwerk to just about every other (post)modern kind of music around that it would exhaust me to even try to make a credible list...

...I take hauntology in a friendly-ghost kind of way; perhaps it is because I am in love (I stand in love up to my hips, as Erich Fromm didn't quite put it), the old school mix didn't make me nostalgic because I am happy now and I'm hearing it now...I feel the songs in a new way, understand them better...and so I can write about Scritti Politti, or at least I hope I can, not in a things-were-better-back-then way (um, they weren't) but with the most complete understanding I can have of love, which is of course the subject of the album...and kudos to the near-anonymous comment at youtube for "Perfect Way"; "He has soul." Yes, he does honeegirl. Yes, he does.