Muse Sick

Musical Musings Tracing through the norms, trends, expositions, implications, and assorted perspectives of melodic/rhythmic, cultural expression From Medieval to Classical to Jazz to Metal From Scale Theory to Concept Albums From Artistic Notion to Personal Growth to Business Acumen Essays covering my musical growth, from 1998 thru 2015

Grammy-winning music producer, Ian Brennan’s seventh book, Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes, acts as a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and actions plans, Muse-Sick is a concise and affordable pocket primer follow-up to Brennan’s two previous music missives, How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the arts and Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth. Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people’s homes and haunting their psyche through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something that the average citizen might have little influence upon leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where some change can concretely occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and pre-packaged fruit, we begin to re-balance the world, one engaged listener at a time. In fifty-nine concise and clear points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local culture and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick’s narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author’s ongoing field-recording chronicles with widely disparate groups, such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers. Marilena Umuhoza Delli’s striking photographs accompany and bring to life each tale. As John Waters says: “I didn’t think it was possible to write a shocking book about music anymore. But Brennan has.”

This dictionary is, in the very best sense, a good read.It explains the meanings and derivations of the medical terms, abbreviations, mnemonics, and slang used by doctors, nurses, and health-care professionals publicly and privately. It defines, for instance, the abbreviations doctors use in writing prescriptions and explains the Latin and Greek derivations of medical terms. The author writes clearly and often humorously, not hesitating to voice his personal opinions. He guides his readers through the world of medical language like a good friend-clarifying, cautioning, and teaching with wit and laughter. About the Author: Fritz Spiegl has written many books, including Dead Funny, The Joy of Words, and The Guinness Book of Musical Blunders (in prep.), and is a popular BBC radio commentator, especially revered for his mastery of the English language.

The Muse Sings and the poet sings songs of love and longing from states of joy, self-doubt, vexation, curiosity, affection, observation, mock-indignation The poems speak for themselves and sometimes “they talk all at once.” In seductive acts of language itself, they invoke and embrace the Muses as much as they do the writers who would become muses, from ancient Homer and Shakespeare to poets of contemporary time. These poems are the seasoned work of a trickster poet in his prime with a crow’s eye trained on the world. No silent words on the page, these: they are alert, thoughtful, at turns cheeky and saucy. The poems all but produce decibels despite the inked imprint on the page that would fix them silent in place, until a living voice sets them free.