Older material is housed in my mental jukebox his week. A little more Etta James was played yesterday, followed by Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. But today’s theme song outlasted them all.
I haven’t heard the song, ’96 Tears’ or the group, ? and the Myserians, in decades that I remember. Then, again, as I write, I realize that it’s connected with the same era as my cousin, who appeared in my dream. Some subconscious excavation and exploration is underway.
Here it is. It’s easy to sing along in your head. I hope you enjoy it.
I saw the movie ‘La La Land’ yesterday. As I watched it, I thought, this is the movie that writers should see.
‘La La Land’ is a song and dance musical staring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone about a jazz musician and a struggling actress, Seb and Mia. I thought I was going to be seeing ‘Manchester by the Sea’ but my wife called an audible. We met friends, went to the movies and had drinks and nibbles afterward.
Let’s start here.
I discovered the dream of writing when I was in my early twenties, and young and arrogant. By then, I’d served four years in the military, and had tried and failed as a restaurant owner. Needing an income, I returned to the military. I ended up retiring after serving twenty years on active duty.
Let’s start here.
It had been my dream and plan to use my military pension to fund my writing career. I was thirty-nine years old so there was plenty of time. But the SF Bay Area where we were stationed and where I retired is expensive. I wanted to move to somewhere affordable.
But…my wife convinced me she wanted to stay in the SF Bay Area and Silicon Valley to pursue her career. Her career with advertising had started just a few years before but now she thought it could go places. It was making her happy. I agreed to put my writing dreams ‘on hold’. Note that the writing dreams were never really ‘on hold’; I was always learning and writing, first short stories, having a few published, and then pursuing novels.
Meanwhile, that region was an expensive area and my wife worried about finances. I sought employment. By the time six years had passed, a chronic disease, the dot com implosion and advertising companies consolidating and merging had snuffed her dreams.
But I flourished. Starting with medical device start-up companies and moving to Internet security companies, I went from success to success before spending my final years with IBM and electing to bail on all that jazz when I turned sixty last year.
So let’s start here.
As any aspiring/struggling/dreaming writer can attest, keeping the balance between marital harmony, life and family requirements, while working and sustaining the energy needed to pursue your dreams is daunting. It’s a candle aflame on both ends and the middle. Support is required. We make compromises and choices and withstand challenges. Our energies are taxed to breaking. We endure fears, setbacks and doubts. Sometimes we break, and sometimes, we try hiding. We often struggle and suffer in solitude, misunderstood and underappreciated, striving to remain hopeful.
Which is essentially what ‘La La Land’ is about.
As Mia sings in an audition, and I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words, here’s to the dreamers and the messes we make, foolish as we often seem.
The other point in the movie that seems powerful to me is made by Seb’s friend, Keith. Seb is the jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling; Keith is played by John Legend.
So let’s start here.
Seb loves jazz music but he is enamored with the traditional musical styles. Jazz is dying, he laments. Yes, Keith agrees, and you’re killing it by playing those old styles. In order to keep jazz alive, it needs to change and adapt to attract new audiences.
It’s a telling point to me. To keep literature, reading and writing alive, change is required. We may love the literature that we read as we grew up but we need to face the new morning in the world. That’s what self-publishing and e-publishing is about.
Pursuing the dream, no matter what talent, skill or education is required, is about being strong and making the sacrifices required to achieve. Some of us are not strong enough to make them. We put others first.
Some of us are more foolish. We believe we can do it all, that we can sacrifice and compromise, and still achieve our dreams.
No particular reason for this song today. It’s a classic R&B tune, flows through the head like an unraveling thread, easy words to remember and sing, with an appropriate key and subject matter. It helps you have a legendary singer and group performing it.
Here is ‘Shop Around’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 1960.
I’m feline the mood: nap, nibble, nap, repeat. Guess it’s the Christmas hangover, the letdown after the holiday, with catalysts provided by the nippy air and frozen landscape.
So here we go, from 1981, ‘Stray Cat Strut’, by who else? The Stray Cats.
Academy darling Eddie Redmayne stars in this movie adapted from J.K. Rowlings’ work. A fantastic idea with lots of extrapolation of earlier ideas presented, this is a popcorn movie. The Harry Potter world expands into America and adulthood. There is light love, light comedy, light suspense and expected resolution. It’s a visual movie, and in my experience, movies dependent on visuals play longer.
Which it did.
Rotten Tomatoes rates it at 74. I put the assessment a little higher: 79.
Amy Adams is the star of ‘Arrival’. Again, we experience many ideas previously presented but with a few interesting twists of quantum mechanics and human biology. Like ‘Somewhere In Time‘ (Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour, 1980) this movie delivers more questions than answers. It’s a fun exercise and experience. I do feel that Jeremy Renner, an actor whose work I enjoy, is under-utilized, and the ads stating that Amy Adams is a linguist leading a team seems a little misleading, as she does most of the solving. There is rarely a sense of teamwork. It’s more about her hunt for the solution and how it fits into her personal grief.
Rotten Tomatoes gives it at 94 but I assess it at 90.
Barry Jenkins is the writer and director behind this movie. Brutal and human, depicting humanities’ complexities, fragility and strength, this is more like a play in three acts. I enjoyed the acting, directing and writing. There are gaps; nothing is cleanly explained, and pain and love is endured, much like most of our messy lives. I prefer fiction where full explanations aren’t given.
The RT rating is 98, and I agree.
Coming Attractions offers many interesting choices.
‘La La Land’ has a slightly different look but my exposure limits impressions. With its cast of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone and its release date, there are Oscar nomination expectations. My wife wants to see it. I’m not overly drawn to it but I’ll give it a go.
‘Passengers’, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, has already been heavily panned. I can see why. It seems like a neat idea that was rendered shallow and specious. That’s my impression. That’s a bummer.
‘Fences’ looks quite powerful and employs several favorite actors. It’s getting some excellent reviews. The trailers (or are they previews) had me grimacing with pain and sympathy. I’ll probably seek it out when it hits town.
‘Manchester by the Sea’ has already arrived in theaters. It has received good reviews, there’s some Oscar talk, and friends like it. We plan to see it tomorrow.
Of others offered, ‘A Monster Calls’ calls to me. The novel on which it’s based and its back story offer their own compelling reasons for seeking this movie. Featuring a child who doesn’t fit, experiences grief and depends upon his imagination for assistance in coping with life, I’ll be on the look out for it.
One movie that wasn’t presented but I know is coming is another ‘Blade Runner’ movie. You know I’m getting ready for it.
This song, from 1985, was a friend’s favorite. He was part of our military ‘circle of singers’, so it was incorporated in the closing part of our parties.
We were stationed at Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale, California. We were the people inside the Blue Cube, helping to watch and guard space. I was the Command Post Superintendent during my first few years and lived on Moffett Base Housing (close to Hanger One) not far from many others of my unit. We loved throwing summer parties to celebrate holidays and special events. They included volleyball games and grew big and popular, including people form outside my org.
We tended to end the parties with the circle sing of core members. We were just in a circle belting out a song at the top of our lungs as the stereo blasted away.
For one memorial Labor Day celebration, all the neighbors had attended, eaten, played and partied, so noise wasn’t a problem…in the immediate area. But the party became quite loud, affecting people a few streets over. They called the security police to complain, and those esteemed officers came to our door. Fortunately, the commander of the SP squadron, along with the acting base commander, were in attendance at our party, participating in our circle of song. We turned the music down and behaved ourselves and all were happy.
We had great times in those days.
Here’s Tears for Fear with ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’.
Songs are bouncing through my head. Why today and now?
I don’t know.
They’re happening against the writing, dreaming, holiday, marriage, and life background. Each of those arenas inject their own spectrum of influences. All feel equally strong this week but writing is affecting the others. I’m deeply involved in the novel writing process, so much so that I’m losing track of the calendar and holiday, and I’m withdrawn into my thinking and writing. This, unsurprisingly, triggers my spouse’s deep irritation and some resentment.
I see her point. Yet, that is me, an emotional cripple, and a writer. I write to explore what I think but also what I feel. It leaves me at the crossroads at midnight, waiting to consummate a deal with the devil. I can’t abandon thinking about the novel and its elements of chi-p, Pram, Brett, virii, time-travel and the like. It’s too late for that; the novel’s presence is embedded in my psyche and will likely remain there until the story is fully told.
Yet I look for the leap from my life cycles to the song cycles. I wonder how songs are connected to smells and smells are connected to sights and sights are connected to emotions and emotions are connected to intelligence and intelligence is connected with memory and memory is connected to songs. It’s all wired together but something charges the wires, making some wires come alive, opening and closing switches, and taking me to unexpected places.
Like these songs.
Against the backdrop of writing and living, I’d been thinking about Mike Posner’s song and his lyrics.
I took a pill in Ibiza To show Avicii I was cool
And when I finally got sober, felt 10 years older
But fuck it, it was something to do
I’m living out in LA
I drive a sports car just to prove
I’m a real big baller ’cause I made a million dollars
And I spend it on girls and shoes
But you don’t wanna be high like me
Never really knowing why like me
You don’t ever wanna step off that roller coaster and be all alone
You don’t wanna ride the bus like this
Never knowing who to trust like this
I was particularly hooked on the lines, ‘But you don’t wanna be high like me, Never knowing why like me’. From there, drifting through the lyrics last night, I awoke today singing:
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
It ain’t kodachrome and it isn’t black and white
Take me for a fool if you feel that’s right
Well I’m never on my own but there’s nobody in sight
I don’t know if I’m scared of the lightning
Trying to reach me
I can’t turn to the left or the right
I’m too scared to run and I’m too weak to fight
But I don’t care it’s all psychobabble rap to me
Tell you ’bout a dream that I have every night
It’s in dolby stereo but I never hear it right
Take me for a fool well that’s alright
Well I see the way to go but there isn’t any light
That song is ‘Psychobabble’ by the Alan Parsons Project. The album containing the song was released in 1982. I listened to it on cassette tape while I lived and worked on Kadena Air Base on Okinawa.
I can see how the two songs, Mike Posner’s ‘I Took A Pill in Ibiza’ and Alan Parsons Project’s ‘Psychobabble’ fused in my mind. There’s a thread of questioning identity in both and reflections about our minds and choices. It’s more a question of why those songs nestled into the thinking and feeling about everything else this week.
And as I wrote it, I saw it. These songs arose from the morass because I’m conflicted; because guilt assails me. Because responsibilities and desires are torn and my frustrations are running high.
I thought one of these songs should be today’s theme music for my day. I finally decided to go with ‘Psychobabble’ because it’s more recent. See, it’s the latest one that I’ve been singing.
This choice for theme music, ‘Road to Hell’, has been around for a while. It’s hard to find a good recording of it online. A good recording is important; the song begins with the sounds of rain on a car and the sweep of wiper blades across the windshield.
The song’s sentiments, that we’re on a the road to hell, are reflected by various people and organizations. No matter the issues, politics or religions, who wins or who loses, someone will declare, this is the road to hell. Funny enough, every time I think of the road to hell, I think of a book by one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny, and ‘Damnation Alley’, which wasn’t a terrific novel. It’s appropriate to think of Zelazny and Rea together on a day like this, when surreal is the ‘word of the year’.
Back to the music, Chris Rea, ‘Road to Hell’, 1989. The song was originally listed as Parts I and II. Part I is like an essay with accompanying instruments:
Stood still on the highway
I saw a woman
by the side of the road
With a face I knew like my own
reflected
in my window.
Part II of Chris’ lyrics begins, “Well, I’m standing by a river, but the water doesn’t flow. It boils with every poison you can think of.” Too frequently, here in America, we’re encountering poisoned rivers and drinking supplies. Flint, Michigan leaps to mind, but a small city not far from my town has been enduring several months of boil and do not drink orders for their water supplies. Googling for such news turns up multiple more examples.
It does make one think, “Yeah, we’re on the road to hell.” Just in time for the holidays.
Back into the wayback machine for this choice – which puts in mind the fantasy, wouldn’t it be cool to have a wayback machine? “Yes, but the paradoxes, what you would do to time,” naysayers moan. Yeah, let’s suspend logic; suspend physics, quantum mechanics, all the thinking and all the relative theories. Just pretend you’re a child and play with ideas of all the time travel variations possible.
Here’s one.
Just about every house is getting one. It’s the hot holiday gift, and it’s on sale in dozens of places. You, disliking crowds and cold weather, and feeling bored, restless and wanting a change, surf the net and turn to Amazon to check out the offerings and read the reviews. They come up immediately: Wayback Machines. They’re priced at just under six hundred dollars. If you order today, sites claim, “Receive this by Christmas with Free Shipping!”
Okay, but six hundred eggs. Cards are already heavy with spending for the season for toys and clothes, dinners out. But you’re intrigued. You read.
“What’s included: computer interlink, two bracelets, headgear and software.” You skip into the specs and the system requirements, bringing up your system’s information and running a mental checklist.
You have the computer speed, the computer power, an approved OS, the USB ports, everything needed. Well, hell, you should, you blew a wad on this laptop just a year ago for your own special Christmas present because, WTF, you deserve it.
“This is not virtual reality,” a review says. “This the real thing. You are there.”
Yeah, you’ve read the ads, seen them on television during football and baseball games for half the year, talked about them at work while waiting for meetings to begin, swapped information with friends over wine and beer. You know what it’s supposed to be, what it can do.
So you order your Wayback Machine.
Three days later, it arrives. Boxes are in boxes. You’re usually so organized about opening and unpacking boxes, especially things like this, but you’ve become really excited about what it can do.
“Where the fuck is the quick start?” you ask, and it’s right there, the very first thing you pulled out after opening a box, a DVD. There are cables and the headgear, which looks like one of those half-helmets, the small console, the size of your first Roku, resembling a blue and black cigarette back, and the silver and black bracelets.
It’s a clean set-up and install. Breathlessly you power everything up, starting as the program booms, “Welcome,” even thought it’s a soft female voice. Lights are green. The program shows up on your laptop’s screen. You’re sweating and trembling. Well, the heat is running. It’s snowing outside. The wife, children and grandchildren are all out shopping. Then they’re eating somewhere and going ice-skating. You tell your phone to turn down the heat.
Snow falls more heavily outside past the windows. Inside, it’s just you. Your anticipation amazes you. You hope you won’t be disappointed. You put on the bracelets and headgear. The system checks you out. The Wayback program asks, “Do you want to sync with your Fitbit and smart phone?” Hell, yes.
Thirty seconds later, that is done. “Select a year from your life,” the program says.Feeding off a memory, a hope, a dream, you select 1964.
Then shoves now aside. It feels a little violent, more violent than the reviews said it would be like. Your pulse breaks out into something appropriate for finishing a hundred yard dash. Your body –
Oh, my god, you’re back in it, you’re ten years old ago. You’re so skinny. Jesus. It’s amazing how much you look like your grandson, Yuri.
Your young entity is reading a book. The pages swim into your understanding: ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’.
You tear your attention from the page. You’re back in your parents house, Jesus, a place they sold during their divorce in the mid-1970s, back in the wood-paneled game room, built from the finished basement downstairs. In the corner is your father’s bar, positioned back there where he can see the television or play pool. You’re on that leather sofa he and your mother bought for the room. You remember, “This is where the dog barfed,” a disgusting moment that will happen in another year. You won’t even have the dog for a few more months.
There’s the big console TV. Brand new, the huge Zenith can broadcast in color. Taking over your young self – he doesn’t seem to notice – you pick up the remote control, amused at the differences between the technology of your youth, when color TV was new, and the technology of your life, using a computer to come back here. How the fuck is that even possible? You want to explore but you begin carefully, by turning on the television.
There is a show on in black and white. OMG, it’s the Kinks. Jesus, are they still even alive?
Then, releasing everything but enjoyment of the moment, you’re ten and watching the Kinks in your basement in black and white. Everything old is young and new, and you are free to believe that you can change the world.
It’s an ordinary winter Sunday in an extraordinary year.
The statement causes a reflexive gaze across history at all the extraordinary years in recorded history. The statement requires adjustment to put me more accurately upon the spectrum of what I know and have experienced. I ‘know’ a sliver of American history and a granule of western history. I need to context ‘know’ because I ‘know’ what was often taught in books as fact and knowledge. Much was later revealed to be false or misleading, part of a paean to the victors who wrote or interpreted the history.
We could take a swing at our Christmas practices, beginning with the time of year that we celebrate and the pagan rituals we practice, processes adopted to encourage people to be Christians. Or we can take a deep dive into how Jesus is often portrayed as a blue-eyed white man with brown hair compared to the image of a dark-haired brown man forensic scientists put forth early last year.
‘For those accustomed to traditional Sunday school portraits of Jesus, the sculpture of the dark and swarthy Middle Eastern man that emerges from Neave’s laboratory is a reminder of the roots of their faith. “The fact that he probably looked a great deal more like a darker-skinned Semite than westerners are used to seeing him pictured is a reminder of his universality,” says Charles D. Hackett, director of Episcopal studies at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. “And [it is] a reminder of our tendency to sinfully appropriate him in the service of our cultural values.”
‘Neave emphasizes that his re-creation is simply that of an adult man who lived in the same place and at the same time as Jesus. As might well be expected, not everyone agrees.’
~ Mike Fillon, ‘The Real Face of Jesus’, Popular Mechanics, January 23rd, 2015
It all leaves me a little ‘Unsteady’. The song is a repetition of many of the same words but I like it. Hold onto me and sing along with the X Ambassadors’ song from 2015.
At least it’s more recent than most of my theme music.
