conspicuous consumption

I said yesterday that Miles probably never watched a documentary. I wonder about the lives of persistent creators; whether they are too busy producing to pay much attention to what others are doing. Miles obviously listened to (-- at least while playing with --) other jazz musicians, and I remember reading in his autobiography that he listened to contemporary "classical" music at home: Bartok, Khachaturian, Ravel. But how many CTO's read Slashdot? How many high profile actors go out to the movies, or sports stars watch Monday-night football?

I've cut back writing here quite a bit, somewhat because I don't feel like saying much right now. At the same time, though, my consumption of blogs has risen. This latter fact is partly due to the ease that RSS & newsreader aggregation provides, but I wonder if there is some inverse proportionality in my consuming and producing.

This medium, like jazz, is collaborative, though -- I'd say "A-List Bloggers" consume quite a bit, as well as produce. Nevertheless, I'm going to cut back on my blogreading somewhat, and keep an eye on the effects. I've always prided myself on having no attractions or entanglements in things like TV series and professional sports. Even though I can justify positives of net surfing and newsreading, it's, all the same, a similar vice, and I regret the vicariousness of reading about what other people are doing instead of doing, myself.