While surveying the state of the Internet today, I decided that what the online world really needed was another blog. Luckily I have never been short of opinions to share. And so I proceeded to do some research into the best approach to my new endeavor. Several sites told me that if I hoped to acquire actual readers I should choose a narrow niche and hew to it rigidly. Others told me that with a bit of planning I could actually make a living off this blogging thing. One helpful fellow said I should review as much music as possible as quickly as possible, linking in each review to the Amazon.com product listing to make some money off every happy consumer I sent Amazon’s way. I needn´t waste a lot of time actually listening to the music I reviewed, he informed me; I need only use the snippets of songs on the Amazon site to get a “good impression” of an album, and so could I be on my way to riches with a minimum of critical effort. I thought about combining these two pieces of seemingly excellent advice, but quickly realized I would have a problem almost immediately: if I built a blog about, say, flugelhorn players who recorded during the 1970s, and reviewed as many flugelhorn albums from the era as possible as quickly as possible, I would soon be out of material. So I decided to throw out all this advice.
Instead, I’m going to use this blog to write about an eclectic mix of things that actually interest me. I may be commiting a sort of Internet-traffic suicide, but maybe one or two of us can have some fun while it lasts. So, you can expect updates on my various projects here along with lots of opinions on music, books, games, and who knows what else. And you can expect a bit of theory, and perhaps some cultural observations, and perhaps even a personal anecdote or two. Or maybe I won’t get to all of that. Who knows?
Defensive self-effacement aside, I have no idea where this blog will go. I tell myself that, as a writer by at least one of my trades, it’s good practice for me to write someplace like this frequently, to keep the old chops sharp, as it were. That’s true enough, and it’s also true that plenty of people before me have kept diaries and journals just for their own satisfaction. But I won’t lie; I’d like it if a few people actually started to read and comment as well. So, whether this is the start of a big thing or a failed experiment or a literary masterpiece whose importance will be understood (a la Samuel Pepys) only a century from now, it’s definitely the start of something. Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!
