another pop culture observation

Sitting in a Zamalek café, which for some reason is playing a bunch of Blues Brothers songs, first time I’ve heard them in years.

And… John Belushi’s voice sounds utterly atrocious to me now. The reason that’s interesting is because it never sounded that bad to me when I was around 16-19, even though that’s precisely the age at which I was listening to lots of the original stuff that I can now detect that Belushi is completely butchering. If I ever should have been offended, it was in my late teens. And yet I wasn’t.

The moral probably has something to do with increasingly refined critical capacity in all fields as one ages. My practice is simply to record unusually intense reactions to anything whatsoever on this blog, regardless of whether I yet have an explanation for it… Why? Because much of what gets said on this planet is completely insincere, and the only way to avoid that disease is to build philosophy out of things to which you have genuinely strong reactions.