An early Christmas gift: a holiday song (p.s, not meant to be funny)
I DON’T USUALLY share much personal stuff in this column. Okay, okay, I’m lying, I give you way too much information most of the time, that’s true. But put it this way: I don’t usually share stuff that’s not demanded by newspaper and magazine editors. Loyal readers suffer enough.
But I feel that you guys have become close family and friends, so perhaps I will ask for your indulgence and share this.
Some of you know that Mr Jam has a secret Other Life as an amateur musician, under various names. In particular, I have a tradition: Every year I write a Christmas song or two. Usually, these aren’t funny, or at least they are not intended to be funny. (For me, Christmas is a sentimental time of year, since I have kids.)
Last night reader Karen Teoh and I recorded this. If you check it out, you’ll see that it is deliberately very low tech. We recorded it in my toilet (for the good acoustics) and filmed it using a low-resolution pix (snapped by someone with no experience of cameras) for simplicity’s sake.
As I review the video before pressing the “publish” button, a question strikes me. We did manage to get a few pictures in focus. But they don’t look nearly as appealing as the out-of-focus ones. Why is this? It seems counter-intuitive that one should feel drawn to delete the in-focus ones.
But there’s something oddly artistic and appealing about the out-of-focus, blurred, motion-filled ones. So in the end, we ONLY used those.
I can’t explain why. The human mind is a strange, strange thing.
