we play the blame game and then we blame the game because we lose

I was watching The Soloist starring Robert Downey Jnr & Jamie Foxx just then and it is definitely one of the best movies i've watched in a while. Which brings me to post this article i found from The Australian.

The Grammy award-winning violinist -- who has been described as a "classical music superstar" and who is a regular fixture with the world's top orchestras -- was standing incognito in jeans, T-shirt and baseball cap on a nondescript concourse at a metro stop in Washington DC.

During his 43-minute set, which opened with Bach's D-minor Chaconne, 1070 people walked past and didn't pay him the slightest attention. Seven stopped to listen and threw money into the open violin case in front of him. His total earnings: just more than $32.

It seems just as painful, more than three years after the event, for the Indiana-born, New York-based Bell to talk about it. He did it as a favour to The Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten, who won a Pulitzer prize for the piece he wrote about the experiment.

"It wasn't something I'd ever do again, it wasn't enjoyable, it wasn't the way music should be heard," says Bell, who will be performing in Brisbane next month, in much more conventional circumstances, with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

Different people took different things from the busking experiment. "It certainly made me appreciate a captive audience," Bell says. It made him think, too, about music being an accompaniment to so much of life today "that you get used to it, you don't even think about it . . . You sit at a restaurant and have Beethoven coming through speakers at low volume, which is also not the way music is meant to be heard."

It's amazing how our perception of people can change based on the physical attributes and the aspects of the environment they're placed in. Appreciation of the smaller things in life is what should be noted because let's face it before we can face all the monsters and the demons, we have to be able to face ourselves. Unfortunately, as a society we have disregarded an immensely large variety of traits and treated them nothing more then flaws. Our freedom, our knowledge of perfection and ability to judge has made recognising the value of the simpler things in life irrelevant in our daily routine. But i guess that is what makes people that do appreciate so great. They do it knowing they don't really have to.