Mea Culpa

Roger Bourland's blog post about bad first impressions provides the nudge I needed to offer him an overdue public apology. Many years ago, when I first started in this gig and was laboring under a variety of misconceptions about how it should be undertaken, I made some regrettable remarks in print about his music; it's one of the handful of things I'm most ashamed of having written, and I trust I would never write something similar today. I'm sorry, Roger.

As he says, many of us neglect to update our first impressions, and I've always figured that if he thinks of me at all, it's with the assumption that I'm still the same old schmuck. Not so. I might still be a schmuck, but I'm not that schmuck.

Why I Love Blogs

Because of things like this, which brought a burst of joy to a largely sorrowful day.

Agree or not, that hardly matters. But take the historical view for a moment. Here's a person who is clearly both wise and smart, plus funny and eloquent and generous and broad-minded and demanding. And until a few years ago, he would have been dispensing these pearls where? Presumably in one-on-one conversations and at dinner parties and salons that I would never have been invited to.

Now everything's changed, and for my benefit (the only relevant metric, in the end). It's as though — to conjure up an image not remotely at random — there are all these digital Boswells running around, making sure no one's sparkling table talk gets lost. And that's why I love blogs.

That, and La Cieca dubbing the forthcoming product of the Schrott-Netrebko double love cadenza Li'l Schrebbs.