Mural To Music

I knew that the word I was looking for belonged to the mural family but was not exactly that. I was wanting to suggest that S get a trompe l'oeil of a rustic courtyard bathed in warm sunlight on one of the walls so there would be an illusion of the tropics in the Midwest. He managed to get the drift even as I fumbled for the word trompe l'oeil.

"Where do you find those things ?" he asked. I had no idea but figured getting one painted would cost an arm an leg. "You can look it up on the net" I said. "My nephew would suggest I download the image and print it out on wall paper. Kids these days will never buy if it can be downloaded. He thinks I am old fashioned because I buy music CDs" he laughed. So from talking about the best shade of yellow for kitchens, we wandered away to discussing the ethics of using Gnutella type file sharing services.

Back in the 80s when we were kids, mixed tapes were cool, hip and fun. Everyone borrowed from everyone, you copied from copied tapes ad infinitum until the sound quality was so severely degraded that you no longer recognized the song. As kids, we thought it was a harmless pastime and adults did not tell us any different.

The storage media today are different but kids are still being kids and doing what comes naturally at that age - they want to rip, burn and mix until the ultimate desert island album is born. It is a project that takes years, is often punctuated by coming of age experiences, love, loss and heartbreak. Then in the mid twenties, you begin settle and you start to buy more than you burn. Trying to put the brakes on Napster clones is as futile as trying to take the raging hormones out of a teenager.