Music videos…or rather, some videos about music…

In the last several weeks, I’ve been posting some pretty negative stuff, mainly dealing with Proposition 8 in California , my bout with pneumonia , the economy, my own unemployment, federal bailouts and business ethics. (See here , here , here and here .)

I’ve sprinkled in some happier moments about wild turkeys in our yard and the first snowfall of the season , but admittedly it has been a bit gloomy around here.

My personal situation has certainly been at the bottom of some of the negativity but I must say, the shit about the economy isn’t all in my mind. It’s easy to get bitter when the newspaper comes each morning with more outrageously bad news. Thanks to Mr. Blagojevich for this morning’s dose. Jerk.

But my personal situation might be changing for the better before too long and so you might find the happier Tim on this page as the next few weeks pass.

Besides, it’s kind of tiring to be so bitchy. Those tirades have a way of taking it out of you for the rest of the day.

And so today I want to just give you a couple of interesting videos to watch. One of them is kind of cool and historical and the other one is positive, upbeat and even inspiring.

So chin up. I’ll work on being a bit more positive and we’ll just see what happens.

This first video comes from Current.com and kind of ties in to my note about the 28th anniversary of John Lennon’s death . I’ll let the copy from Current’s page do the explaining…

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a
reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto and
convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon's "bed-in"
phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to
promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the
original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a
visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading
flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by
James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a
spell-binding vessel for Lennon's boundless wit, and timeless message.

The next video was brought to my attention by my friend Molly from the blog A Little House In The Clouds .

It features Benjamin Zander, known as a leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, giving a talk at the Ted Conference this past February.

Zander is energetic and charismatic with a passion for teaching people about classical music and this talk explains why. (This clip is about 20 minutes long. But then I wouldn't have posted it here if I didn't think that it was worth your time would I?)