Being a musician myself, I have often participated in these odd discussions musicians have once in a while, late at night, usually after some gig somewhere and the few too many drinks at the club after packing away the gear. I recall one in which we debated which parts of the body we could do without and as a drummer, I always said that I needed my ears and all four limbs. Invariably, of course, the guitarist would then retort that drummers obviously had neither ears nor brains to control those limbs. Later, Rick Allen of Def Leppard proved that you could do some nifty drumming with only one arm and some electronic gear, but I’m not sure I would want to do that.

Now that I’ve been partially losing my eyesight for some months, I often remember my answer in that discussion and regret it. I don’t want to go into too much detail and bore everyone to death, but for some mysterious reason - and the “mysterious” part of that sentence is the problem - my right eye has been literally shutting down and the left eye has been so strained because of it that in summation one could say that I am presently as blind as a bat tiger beetle. The above-mentioned guitarist would have probably frowned and stated that from my sight-reading skills I surely couldn’t have had better eyesight before either, but I know I had 100/100 vision because it was tested in August of last year when the problems started… so there!

For livingwithmusic.com this means that I have to have this problem taken care of before I can continue posting here. I’m typing this entry virtually blind and I’ve typed a whole bunch of the past entries in this state as well. Because I’m a perfectionist, that’s no way to run a site, so I’m going to take a break until the doctors have figured out what can be done.

I have been told that this can take anywhere between a few days and several months and because that is such a shaky time frame, I thought I’d better announce that there won’t be any updates here for a while. I feel very sad about all of this because ever since I entered the CSS Fall reboot with the new livingwithmusic.com and joined the 9rules Network soon after, the number of regular readers has grown steadily, Google traffic pretty much exploded and I had the chance to meet lots of nice people via my site. Just recently, livingwithmusic.com won a small prize in the pMachine Shootout and lots of other good things happened before that as well.

Maintaining a site like this one in one’s spare time is a lot of work, especially if you have a day job that usually keeps you busy from very early in the morning until very late at night, and I know that letting a site lie dormant for too long makes all the time and energy invested disappear after a while. Believe me, I’ve tried it. So, I hope I won’t have to let go of my baby here for too long.

If you keep my feed in whatever program you use to read it, you’ll notice when I’m back online. If you want to be notified, send a mail to …

back[squiggly thing]livingwithmusic.com

… and I’ll let you know when things are picking up again.

Before I leave you to the 624 other feeds or sites you have to read up on, allow me to suggest a couple of places to go and visit for your daily music fix.

To get a more personal spin on things, I would suggest heading over to the Organissimo forums, the web’s best board for jazz. If you are more into trying to find the latest on other types of music, check out the Steve Hoffman Forums - but do try not to blame excessive spending on me because I sent you there.

For all other matters, the 9rules Network offers such a broad range of quality material that I don’t need to send you anywhere else. They do, indeed, “[...] highlight the very best web content in the world, and package it in a nice bow for you to unwrap.” I’m not a member there for nothing.

Most of all though, don’t forget to listen to some good music, because that’s what it’s all about. The furniture we store it in, the exclusive packaging of many collector’s editions some of us fetishists praise to the high heavens, the gold-plated exclusive editions and the many excellent books (German site) on the various subjects we read to get more background information sometimes have a way of taking precedence, of pushing the music out of the way.

At the moment, the music is what I’m going to be concentrating on because my ears work perfectly (despite the abuse they had to take by constantly being exposed to what drummers do when they [try to] do it) and when I return, I’m sure I can tell you about some great things I’ve heard.

In short, I’m going to go with Paul Gaugin who once said:
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
Haven’t done that properly for a while.

Let’s see what’s there.

Categories: (07) Site
Tags: hiatus, livingwithmusic.com, news, website