Sandi Kimmel is a Musical Motivational Speaker, and mentions on her blog: “Of course, I also love singing with people who are not moving on but staying here. I love how the music makes their stay better and lighter and filled with healing energy. For example, Anne is an 84-year old friend who is bedridden with degenerative osteoporosis resulting in compression fractures in her spine. A once-spunky lady, she was wilted and depressed when I started visiting her. While she enjoyed my songs and my singing, I felt that something wasn’t clicking. One day, I asked her what kind of music she liked and she started singing a Jeanette MacDonald song. I asked her husband if they had a tape player but the antique machine he produced barely worked. I bought them an inexpensive stereo cassette player and put it next to her bed. Then I went through their tape collection and put ones I thought she’d like within her reach. Since that day, she’s been singing non-stop with the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy tape, happy as a lark with a voice to match. And yes, she’s been feeling much better lately, too.”

Times changing for film critics
Younger generation shuns print for web
By ANNE THOMPSON, Variety

For a generation of film lovers weaned on Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, imagining a world where moviegoers make their pic choices without the help of film critics is nearly unthinkable.

Fact is, that world is already here.

My USC film criticism students — who are film-obsessed and hardly representative of their non-cinephile peers — can’t name a working critic other than Ebert, and that’s thanks to his TV fame.
…
Gone are the halcyon years when Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael inspired debate. Today, no critics dominate cultural discourse the way they did during the ’70s and ’80s. New York Times critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis have built passionate followings, and will likely become even more powerful as the NYT moves into the void left by newspapers that see no option but to cut back on their cultural coverage.

And while newspaper attrition continues, criticism both amateur and pro proliferates on the Web, aggregated by the inclusive Rotten Tomatoes and the choosier Metacritic.

“I used to think what I did ended up as fish wrap,” says Rickey. “But online movie reviews live in perpetuity.” Three months ago, she received a rush of mail about her 2005 review of “Brokeback Mountain.” A feature on the centenary of Jeanette MacDonald yielded more than 200 emails, including college students comparing Ernst Lubitsch and Nelson Eddy. “That piece was sent all over the Internet,” she explains, “all over the world. The Internet has made reviews not fish wrap anymore.”

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