Administrative announcement

So, you can tell I've slacked off some over the last few months, despite my thinking I had excellent reasons for it. If a new marriage, a new job, a new house and the latter stages of my wife's pregnancy aren't enough, then I don't know what you want from me. Prison time?

Nevertheless, I still stand behind The Benign Comedy. Way behind it. Actually there's a column blocking my view of it. But I fully intend on resurrecting it into a full-time blog, standing side-by-side with the other folks compulsively brandishing their most significant and insignificant pearls of thought to the online arena.

There will be a few changes.

Number One, it will no longer be exclusively essays about albums. I'll still write them, but the dread I experienced in prolonging new entries to the blog was partly because I felt I'd been straitjacketed with the format. So the pieces won't always be about albums, though they're good as anything to start with.

It will still be pretty exclusively about music. No politics, unless they come up as a direct result of music. No religion, unless I want to push Mahalia Jackson on you (and I do). No beekeeping, because I don't know the first thing about it, except I would probably not want to be a kept bee. And unless it directly relates to the music, nothing too personal either. I tried taking that stance before and it didn't work out, but this time I really mean it, simply because there's just not much about my personal life that's fairly interesting to outsiders. Well, except for my 3-year-old daughter teaching herself the words to "Roadrunner" with astonishing success, but again, that's music related. Nothing about my harrowing time as a kept bee. And nothing about work, either. I like my job, love my co-workers, and think blogs about work are usually interminably boring to read, unless you work at the Pentagon. And if you're blogging about your job at the Pentagon, you've just endangered the casual whims of the Bush Administration national security, so nerts to you.

I'd like to be talking about more new stuff. The "Best Of 2007" business was especially cramping, because I found myself rushing to listen to every album I was interested in towards the end of the year. Other things intruded. So hopefully this whole process will move more organically. It is my hope that the new stuff and the old stuff will commingle on this site and form a shimmering, unified Vision Thing of Music. That was the original plan.

I am hopeful we can put shorter pieces here. Writing something the length of the average BC piece usually happens late at night and implies sleep deprivation. Short stuff can be most impactful and affords me the chance to be flippant.

I am also trying to refocus on the "comedy" component of this blog title, because a lot of people's favorite moments from the last year involved my writing about UFO's in classic rock.

And finally, I'm hoping to start a new series I just thought up last November. I think it's a good idea, and the few people I've told seem to think it's a great idea as well. I won't spoil it, but I'm hoping to get the first installment up on the page in January. It will be very self-explanatory, and fun. And could possibly entail audience participation as well. Don't worry, you'll figure it out.

Thanks for the support of The Benign Comedy. I really appreciate it. Now let's rev this baby up and see what she can do.

If I don't see you, have a perfectly reasonable holiday.

Yrs,
Paul