Eclectic Music

I often have reason to recall the time I went to a music store in California and bought Billie Holiday, Judas Priest, and Leonard Cohen CDs. The clerk smiled something about me buying gifts, and I said no, these are all for me - pretty sure I got a gleam of respect for the breadth.

It may be a reasonable sample to illustrate just how wide-ranging my tastes are. When I was younger, I'd say, "I grew up in a house with a dad who loved classical, original Broadway musicals (circa 1940s and 50s), and used to wake us up with Switched-On Bach at top volume. My mom was into country and church music. My brother was a punk rocker."

I mean, yeah - of course the elastic broke on whatever bag it was that should have contained my musical tastes.

But I think there's a lot more to it than that. I am intensely easy to bore. Always was. But ...

I'm also easy to interest, if the right odd thing comes along. I still recall the ease with which I could become utterly absorbed in staring down the pattern of the pebbles and mica flecks in the asphalt on the playground, when they had me playing the outfield in kickball. You can get a LOT of absorption-time in when you're not the popular kid, and just what falls in front of your eyeballs (when your eyeballs are perfect and young and can focus or defocus with alacrity).



There was a time in my life I spent almost entirely with musicians. I was still in college, but dating a TOWNIE (gasp - but then, an awful lot of the frat boys were entitled, molest-y jerks), and he was in a band. The music scene where we lived in the Midwest was pretty tight, and very talented, and it was a big interbreeding soup of interesting people I still miss and think of often.

But as dynamic a crowd as we were, we were predominantly white, and pretty much centered on a certain docket of Acceptable Music. Oh sure, they felt it was varied - and I did too, as far as I had forgotten my dalliances with the Dead and disco and the soundtrack from Breakin'. But I can recall the extreme prejudice with which, say, Beloved Ex regarded rap.

Rap and hip-hop (a term we really didn't know, honestly - rap was a blanket for an awful lot of Black music) were NOT music, he felt. All he/we saw was guys posing with their arms crossed. Maybe the unfortunate white-suburban perspective on Flava Flav. Scratching.

Scratching, and sampling, were just STEALING. That wasn't music - it certainly wasn't creation.

And this from a man who was a musician himself. His feeling sprung from a common theme amongst our friends - that "music" involves playing instruments.

Last night, I was struck (not for the first time) by the thought that ... not all instruments have strings, keys, or sticks ...

Episode 6
(No Empire Required)

PBS has been running a series - as so often is the case, excellently researched and peopled, with one hell of a soundtrack - called Soundbreaking. For almost anyone who cares about where music comes from creatively and practically, how it is actually made, its history and impact and the impulses that lead to new music and the ones that come from hearing it, Soundbreaking is immensely, essentially, worthwhile. And I'm not big on the whole "you HAVE to read this/hear this/see this" as a rule.

Last night's episode centered on hip-hop and rap quite a lot, and I was reminded of my periodic obsessions with Rakim, or Tupac, or Nas - of the enjoyment I got as a kid out of Run DMC - of an awful lot of music that wasn't supposed to be interesting to me.

And I realize, one of the million reasons I have never quite been able to lay claim to being a punk, or a goth, or a classic rocker or any one subcultural or pop-cultural thing that strongly associates with any music is that there is no music I'd be happy LIMITING myself to. Sure, I'm not the only person in the world who LOVES combinations like Grandmaster Flash and Warren Zevon and Southern Culture on the Skids (I once dated a guy who was both a huge KISS fan and also Color Me Badd - at the turn of the Millennium, no less, talk about past the sell-by date). But I'm actively, constitutionally incapable of committing to any one music above all others, because I have this stupid fear it'll define me, or I'll lose everything else.

Blame my family for raising me not only eclectic, but literalist. Bastards! :)

So last night, some old white woman bounces around her bedroom thinking, good gravy I am so wrong for this particular bouncing, and just incapable of caring.

I'm like Michael Bolton (not. that. one.).



There is something important, to me, in not accepting the music I'm supposed to be into - not limiting myself to the role of bland, frankly-past-middle-age (I do *not* wish to live to be 100, so I'm not in any sort of middle anymore) suburban woman. And I think, right now, reaching beyond boundaries is perhaps the best thing any American can do.

Where do you cross the lines, or blur them? Where can you bleed out of expectations, and understand a perspective that's not supposed to be yours?

Watch Soundbreaking and realize - or remember - one or two of the places you push your own envelope, break the bubble your everyday life leaves you in.

And maybe get a heck of a laugh at the bit with Sean Puffy Combs. Because that is a cackle-worthy damn DISS, y'all.

My Letter to you, Damien Echols

It's hard for me to say for how many years I've followed the story of the West Memphis Three, but fifteen years may be about fair, for paying specific attention and actually seeking reading (and the documentaries) about the tragedy.

For those unfamiliar with the story, I won't link Wikipedia, only provide the simple story. The West Memphis Three were Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin. In 1993, amid Satanist panic and public furor, these teenaged boys were convicted of the murder of three young boys in West Memphis Arkansas, in one of the more famous miscarriages of justice in the twentieth century. The details abound, so I will not recount them here, but it is a cruelly fascinating episode, and shameful beyond description.

The most famous, and oldest, of the convicted Three, is Damien Echols. He has become well known both for his past and also for his recovery (I will not use the term rehabilitation), but it is always his writing that clings to me when I look again toward this story. It feels cruel to call it a story, though. Perhaps I should say, look again toward these people.

I wish I had a handful of dust
--Damien Echols

One of the things that always strikes me in the heart about these kids - about this one - is that he reminds me indelibly of two of the three great loves of my life. His melancholy and his coloring are powerfully like Mr. X. And his expression of what a disadvantaged - what a battered - life is like echo sometimes in the communications with my first love, who reappeared almost a year ago, and who still breaks my heart at times (not in the way we once felt, of course).

And, seven years younger than I am, I know he's not a child, but his experience sparks in me something like a maternal outrage. The wish it had been possible to protect him. He was just a boy, barely older than the murder victims themselves really, and so the offense at his wrongful conviction and confinement - on death ROW, no less - is compounded by whatever vestige of protectiveness washing around in my guts.



Humanity is filled with so many who respond so much worse to wounds so much less - or illusory - his is an example of grace.

In recent months, face to face with another kind of grace, reading the link above today was inspirational. And, I will admit it, entertaining. In the sense that art entertains, that great writing does - even as it may elevate, or relieve, or release, or evaporate with no ghost but pleasure had - to understand the experience of solitary, of death row, of imprisonment is ... how to choose a word carefully here ... "stimulating" is accurate, but larded with inaccurate implications ... "educational" is right too, but almost so spare of deeper meaning as to fall short rather than overshoot ...

Enlightening. It lightens the soul to know another soul is not burdened by the worst we can do to one another - or has been set free. And it lightens the world to illuminate corners of it most of us will never see, G-d be praised for it.

Image: Wikipedia

His writing is extraordinary, evocative. The piece linked above reads like engrossing fiction; and the fact that it is not is an outrage. Something beyond poignant, something so much more important.

Certain shade of agony have their own beauty
--Damien Echols

Read his writing at the link. It is life itself.

Collection

Tiny "hands" in ancient cave art are not babies' hands, nor even human. They are lizards' paws! (Parallels to the short-fingered vulgarian? Create your own joke.)

We haven't taken a trip to J. V. Cullen's A Few Random Thoughts for a while; how about today? March 8: the day Thomas Paine (?) discussed American slavery, the day Queen Anne ascended to her throne, and the day The Hitchhikers Guide guided us to where our towels were.

Lauren at American Duchess shares her fascinating experience as an extra on a documentary production about the Donner Party. Cool photos, as always, boots in the desert, and heat ... and I can't wait for part 2!

At an Age

Very recently, I ran across a talking head in one of those documentaries I so enjoy, discussing a historical figure at age sixteen.  She described the woman as being “at an age” where she would be highly self-conscious, while events played out in her life which would have been humiliating and difficult.

In a way, the point is valid; though we invented the teenager in the twentieth century, those things that cause humans genuine embarrassment and pain are not unique to any particular time period.  Yet I was struck by the implication of tortured adolescence.

The figure in question, hardly a personage famed for a typically twentieth-century persona (indeed, almost a symbol of precisely the opposite, when that time came upon her), is not one I would readily cast in the image of tortured adolescent, no matter what happened to her at age sixteen.  I also, as an amateur student of and writer about history, find the tendency to view the population of our past, no matter how far back, through the lens of the psychological and social expectations of the past century or so a little bewildering more often than not.

A part of my personal fascination with history is not just taking myself out of the present and an ordinary world I know, but also taking myself out of the present and ordinary mindsets and people familiar from my own life.  So when I see all-too-identifiably contemporary characters waving the occasional fan or scimitar or what have you, it is frustrating.

Let it not be said that I am any expert at honestly, fully, and accurately rendering a 5th-century Frank in all his glory, but I did what I could in relating Clovis’ story to address both the misconceptions about what “Barbarian” means, and to avoid, as much as possible, turning him into a corporate raider or king of the surfer dudes.

This goes beyond *not* modeling his character on anyone I know, but into an honest consideration of those things that make up the whole of who he might have been, given what I know.  I didn’t throw around a lot of self-consciously antique language, but did work hard avoiding anachronism.  I thought about the smell of the air in his cities, northern and on down to Paris, the quality of air containing different kinds of pollutants, the manner of food, the way time would worked and been observed.  One of the deepest dives I took into Clovis was the examination not only OF his religion, but its ultimate expression in the novel.

In sum, while I didn’t gadzook my way around the place, I did *look* around it, really consider motivations, remember that humans in every age are funny … and maddening … and go from there.

This. will. NOT. satisfy everybody.

There will be some who quite love a good gadzookering, and will resent not finding it in *Ax*.  There will be others who’ll find the voice alienating and foreign even without a thou to be seen.  And that is the world WE live in.  I’m too old to try to create one where I can make everyone happy.  It would take far more hallucinogenic drugs than I am capable of dealing with, and there’d still be some guitarist with commentary about the décor.

You Will Believe ...

... a Moai can walk!  Goodness, NOVA is so great.  Don't raise your kids without it, please!  Here is the show plus details on Netflix.

Image:  PBS

"Bloodline"

It's funny, the places you can run into wisdom.  I've thought for a while now, but continued to avoid, posting about exactly what my religion (as opposed to my faith) really means to me.  At times, it seems like it could be important; but mostly, I know that my heart is my vanity.

A couple of days ago, I fired up "Bloodline" on Netflix, and finally finished watching it just now.  This documentary is the breathless following, over a couple of years, of an investigation into the Merovingian Heresy.  It could be funny, I could play a game of (pardon the offensive terminology, yet it is exactly the right phrase) "bait the 'tards" - making fun of the whacko conspiracy nerds (as one could play the same way with so many docs - about Trekkers, about ferret lovers, what have you) - but I chose to put it in my queue just because the heresy, named for the very dynasty Clovis I founded, is one which, while maddening, is also of at least a passing interest to me.  I have a hard time abiding Dan Brown and this sort of thing (Foucault's Pendulum, which I allowed myself to read twice, with a decade or more between attempts, I have confirmed as a nuisance read), but anyone who knows me or reads here regularly won't be surprised to know this is exactly the sort of car wreck I succumb to rubbernecking.

So we started off this post with mention of wisdom.

I don't find wisdom in the games people play, performing edge-of-your-seat-AWFUL "archaeology" while following TV-series-Batman-level-silly/convoluted clue games and digging up bright shiny bottles they've caked with mud and swear are generations-old buried treasures.  I don't find wisdom in missing the point that, in debunking something passionately, you actually accept its premises in order to deconstruct them.  If you really don't believe a mythology, it isn't particularly necessary, for most people, to spend time and energy (and, in the name of making a documentary, one assumes many many thousands and thousands of dollarse/euros) obsessing about it.

The wisdom I found in "Bloodline" crops up near its end.  With ten minutes left in its nearly two hour run, we come to an interview with the Right Rev. John Shelby Spong, DD, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.  The documentary introduces him as controversial, and, though I must state that even as a relatively newly minted Episcopalian, I know nothing about him - I can believe he's controversial.  Like many in this Church I was drawn to for its compassion, Spong sees change, and perhaps even the abandonment of certain traditions, as growth.  I want to quote him at a little length here:

I think that traditional Christianity, that institutional form of Christianity, is probably dying.  And I'm not sure that letting it die wouldn't be a good thing to happen, because I think When you look at the manifestations of traditional Christianity, they're not very life-giving.  We blessed slavery with the Christian scriptures.  We blessed anti-Semitism with the Christian scriptures.  We stood by and watched Hitler destroy six million Jews, and then we were negative about women, and then we were negative about gay people, and we've been negative about left-handed people and we've been negative about mentally ill people and we've been negative about divorced people.  The Church has victimized a great number of people in this world; now how does that square with the portrait of Jesus drawn by the Fouth Gospel, that says the purpose of Jesus is that we might have life and that we might have it more abundantly?  Is the way we treat gay people giving them life?  Is the way we have treated women giving them life?  ... and so the traditional way in which we have told the Jesus story I think is inaccurate, and I think it will die.  But I don't think the Jesus story will die, and I don't think the power of a G-d presence in human life will die.

As a rule, I write this blog to the standard that anything here could be read by my coworkers, my boss, my government, my nieces - my mother.  This post is not one she'd have a happy time reading.  It's also possible that, apart from being described as "controversial" by a conspiracy documentarian to whom he agreed to give an interview, the Bishop holds views or has done things I might find anathema.  For some reason, I prefer not to start worrying about that with facile research; because in many ways what he says resonates with me.

At bottom, the very concept of divinity is beyond the ability of the magnificent, and yet wee and paltry human brain to actually comprehend.  Those of us who believe in it choose mythologies to cope with it, to guide us, to grapple with *everything* we encounter which is beyond our wee and paltry brains (spirits and hearts).  Some believe those mythologies very deeply indeed.  Some believe an "essence" of these roadmaps to faith. Me, I give up on the particulars, rejoice in the spiritual leader I have been fortunate to find,  and bless what wisdom can be gleaned, without (as above) trying to peer too closely at its provenance.  Staring into the sun is bad for the eyes, and doesn't look interesting enough to justify doing it.  Take the light, live in it, hope it shines on a good path, and try to stay on *some* track, for the most part.

Or explore, be brave, bless the light and still proceed at night as well.  If that means concerning yourself with conspiracies, go with G-d  as they say and try not to hurt anyone including yourself.

It's an interesting watch, in some ways.  But could have been edited down significantly and still have said everything it does.  Watch it, or don't.  This is just the story of what I accidentally seem to have gotten from stumbling on this in my own path.


Edited 07/29/13 to add this - turns out the hoax is admitted.  Hardly a pearl-clutching revelation, but does make taunting the fakers less fun.

YELLOW Journalism

Those notorious kings of yellow journalism, National Geographic, have really gone too far with their reality TV offerings.  This is the price we pay when ANY person or culture or society can be put up for sale for entertainment purposes.  On the one hand, I find it difficult to believe NG is genuinely a villain, nor the producers of this series.  On the other, though, the extent to which sensationalism and certain aspects of "reality" TV DO have a place, even on PBS, is unquestionable.  It does make money.  And that is sad.  Because then, even the naive, and even those who would scorn the reality sluts (LINK****) of the infotainment landscape become susceptible to a blurry and barely navigable path ... leading - where, exactly?

NG's logo:

It does have that unfortunately-colored rectangle, after all.

In Honor of Beer

Beer has NEVER been my drink, and never will be - yet I admit a certain fascination with its history.  If you want to hear something about the stuff before it was canned and cold, take a spin and give it 43 minutes or so.  "How Beer Saved the World."

Beer even gave us writing ... so it says.  So I can be grateful for that.  (Feel free to assume my indulgently skeptical *eyebrow* here.)

How Good Does A Whore Have to Be?

... or ... "Yet Another Pop-Culture Critique/Rant/Hypocrisy" ...

When we were together a few weeks ago, I was admitting one of my worst guilty pleasures and we got to talking about reality TV.  He asked me, quite sincerely, because he believes there has to be a reason for things, "What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"  He wanted to know who reality TV "stars" are - or what they do - that people would want to watch.

The thing about it is that he misunderstands the concept of content in this context.  He and I come from a mindset in which "entertainment" is defined by a certain set of expectations, and "content" is a commodity with demands upon it.  We grew up in a world where television (for instance) was more often written than not.  Entertainment was expected to be about something, involve a plot, make a point, cause some sort of emotional reaction.  It wasn't necessarily sophisticated; it was just the mechanism of "the entertainment industry" in a different time.

Human beings, though, are natural voyeurs, and happy to find lazy ways to make money too.  When we learned (a) how wide an audience there is for "reality" - for peering into other people's supposedly "real" lives - we made fortunes for, at first, the Sally Jessy Raphaels of the world, the Maurys, even the Robin Leaches.  Over the years, one hour of "reality" ceased to be enough, and we began to see The Real World and its ilk, and the genius move was made.

All it takes to make a mint, for anyone who can stomach participating, is to find ostensibly pretty people (the idea of what constitutes "telegenic" is another post I may indeed never have the stomach - nor even the hypocrisy - to write) willing to go on camera for "life".

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I can tell you pointblank that watching the Sally Jessy's and the like had an effect on my expectations of myself.  My being a lycra-wearing eighties girl obsessed with whether every man in the world found me attractive in that limited and specific way which seems important to some people (particularly at a certain age) was NOT born of the man who loved and married me back then, nor of my family and lessons I learned from anything resembling life.  It was born of those things I chose to expose myself to, even those things I still pretend to be a snob about and think I am superior to.  It was born of shouty talk shows and Kelly Bundy and commercials glorifying screeching "femininity" and brashness of the sort centered entirely on getting attention, regardless of its type or ramifications.

The diet available today frankly makes me blanche.  I'm daily given reason to be glad I am as old as I am - because if the girl I was then happened to be a girl NOW, I would unquestionably be first in line (in, likely, multiple lines) attempting to sell my "life" so I could be famous, could prove myself interesting, could prove myself "hot", could make money doing so.

The irony, of course, is that my very lack of substance, perhaps to some extent my very lack of certain appeals - that would have been exactly what would have made me what passes now for a wild success.  The tawdriness and emptiness is "what makes these people worthy of a TV show."

Rather than expecting a plot or a point, huge swaths of entertainment now are based on the goal to elicit that glow of schadenfreude which tells viewers they are superior to what they're watching.  Laughs or shocks are always good - and, of curse, there's always that genre of shows pitched at women telling us we are supposed to consider highly saturated magenta and blue lighting on tatty LA mansions as "fairy tale" settings for vicarious love and romance (and, indeed, certainly conditioning younger women and girls in the lessons of hideously distorted gender roles, body image, and social behavior) - but, at the end of the day, SENSATION has come to replace the content middle aged folks like me and X once expected.

It doesn't matter so much who the whore is, willing to be pimped to unseen watchers for the release of sensation their televised experiences will engender.  It doesn't matter which whore you get out of the phone book, if that's a call you want to make, as long as they fit the general description you request.  Willing to abdicate privacy and a personal life, or willing to perform certain unspeakable services - as long as they are, it doesn't matter who it is.  Success is measured not by talent, nor charisma - but only by the reaching of that sensation, the release, the short-term goal of a disinterested consumer.

It doesn't matter who provides their personal exposure - there is really no "who are these people" factored into this transaction, nor the financial rewards of the industry it has given gargantuan birth to.  As long as a fairly minimal interview with casting agents and a perhaps even more minimal background check is perfunctorily satisfied - the human fodder need not be particular nor honestly individual (*peculiar* is not the same thing ...) in order to satisfy the demands of reality TV.

"What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"

Worth is the wrong choice of words, perhaps.  "Willing to do it" might be more to the point.  And it's a heartbreaking, dispiriting point, really.

I think of the number of women of my generation who wore stripper shoes and tiny dresses on talk shows for one hour of fame back in the eighties, and whose doing so was essentially ephemeral, is now over, and probably forgotten ...  Then I think of the number of women just in a single day, now, whose self-abasement for others' entertainment is likely to live on in a way those talk shows could not have made possible.  I think about how many of them parlay their appearances on The Bachelor or any one of those "Wives" shows or any one of a thousand competitive quasi-beauty or quasi-talent or quasi-game shows into *careers* of selling off further parts of themselves, and it makes me so sad.

And, of course, so superior - about "those kids today" and every possible other middle-aged (having lost my own twentysomething physical appeals) cliche'.  Superior because I escaped the opportunity to sell my entire life like that, and thank G-d I am old enough to have escaped it.  Superior over even the middle-aged, telegenic barbies of my own age, staging hyper dramatic middle school cat fights for a living.  Superior to those who think game shows yield love and commitment worth the name.  Superior to the entertainment itself.

I respond EXACTLY, in short, as I am supposed to.

And it still makes me so sad.  Kicking the whore out of the room when you're done must feel like that.

Finding Articles Like This ...

... is a large part of the appeal of Twitter, for me.

Mmmmm, rich medieval-y goodness!

Illuminating Illuminators

As an inveterate marginalia-ist, I loved this and wanted to share the link.

I Just Love Stuff Like This

Even if I don't ... oh dear - there's no other way I can think of to say it (my apologies) - take it at face value ...

Ahem.  Neat, though.  At least to me.  (Your morbidity may vary!)


There are links, as of course YouTube would have it, to all sorts of other "portraits" like this - most of them idealized, all of them rather airbrushed looking.  Marie Antoinette in particular gets quite the cosmetic job.  Oddly, a couple of the ones from antiquity are the ones I have the easiest time accepting as (nearly) "authentic".  And one of them is actually a character in my next novel.  Shhh!!!!

Dad! Was That You?

I mean Clovis' dad, of course.  Childeric was rather a randy one.  Can't picture him as slim or young as this guy, but that's my own mindpic to manage or ignore.

If you stay tuned, a few mini-documentaries about Merovech (a generation back) and Clovis (you-know-who) follow, in a fairly strained non-order.  The overall quality isn't overwhelming, but if you ever need a teeny tiny bite of popularly accepted history these'll fill up the pause while America's Next Top Model is taking an ad break.