LENGTHY PREAMBLE: Are you a creator or a taster?

(this is of course a false dichotomy, but I imagine it’s a good headline for this lengthy preamble.)

I’ve lately been seeing the world a lot in terms of creation and taste.  Taste is something that we all try to cultivate, and it’s really kinda the opposite of creation: winnowing the cream from the chaff, or whatever.  If you have good taste in music, you’re good at cutting down everything that you don’t like, and (presumably) really savoring the stuff that you do like, but mostly you know what not to like.  Similarly with food or movies or whatever: if you “have good taste” it mostly means you don’t like crummy stuff.

It’s everyone’s problem with hipsters: by cultivating taste so hard, they just end up sneering at everything.

Far better, I think, to just create a lot.  My best moments of taste, of explaining why Lady Gaga is an acceptable and praiseworthy pop culture icon while Katy Perry is not, or why “Feels” is better than “Merriweather Post Pavilion” despite what Pitchfork thinks, pale in comparison to even okay moments of creation.  Beertable and my door knocker, and even One Photo Every Minute despite its lackluster success, are the sort of things I’m proud of.

I really want to work “maintainer” into this, so we can group people into creators, maintainers, and destroyers, and thereby connect this to another grand concept that’s been around since sorta the dawn of time, lending it some grain of Truth with a capital T.  More likely that this is all just nonsense, and I dreamt it all up so that I could proclaim myself a creator and tap into various cultural biases there.

END LENGTHY PREAMBLE; commence main post:

Despite all that, and how I like to create things blah blah, I heard some Christmas songs in the Trader’s Joe last night, and remembered how I am a great destroyer of Christmas music.  Up until this year I was convinced that all Christmas songs should perish, except for 13: The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.  However, maybe I should be a little less humbuggy; some other ones are nice too (only when performed traditionally, and not melodramatically):

- O Come O Come Emmanuel
- O Holy Night
- God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
- Good King Wenceslas

… okay, I’m spent.  Well, we’re up to 17, anyway.