Month: November 2016

You Are the Everything

R.E.M. – You Are the Everything

So, the other reason I was superstitious about this election is that it falls on the same day as my first presidential election, November 8, 1988. That one didn’t turn out so well.

At this point the prospect of having George H.W. Bush would be a godsend in comparison to what seems poised to happen here tonight. I’m not going to wait up to find out. Not that I think I’ll sleep but I’m going to stop watching.

This album came out 28 years ago today. I hated it. I hated it, hated it, hated it. I won’t say that I thought they sold out but it was not the album I wanted them to make. And I hated that people who had made fun of me for the way I looked and the things I felt were important, suddenly were listening to R.E.M. This was my band and how dare they like them now. I felt like I’d lost a lot that night. I’d lost the election, and I’d lost my favorite band to something that I didn’t understand.

I’m very scared for this world but there is still beauty out there. Deep breaths.

Rise Up and Walk

Poi Dog Pondering – Rise Up and Walk

My Election Day playlist is nearly ready. I’ve been testing it out on the commute and I’m pretty happy with it but it might need one more song.

Since there isn’t a video for this song, I really hope you have Spotify and are logged in when you press play because it’s important to hear the song from the beginning, and stick with it to the end, even if it doesn’t feel like your jam. It really sets the tone for the rest of the playlist.

It also reflects my saving grace of this past week. I was added to a secret Facebook group on Wednesday last week and quickly became addicted to it. I stopped checking Twitter, I didn’t bother to read the onslaught of articles my friends posted on their accounts because I couldn’t take any more bad news. Enter Pantsuit Nation.

Even someone like me, a former Bernie voter, couldn’t help but get swept up in how incredibly good it felt to read all of these positive feelings about voting for Hillary and celebrating nasty women and bad hombres. It was contagious. Because the group is secret, people felt free to unburden themselves with their enthusiasm for Hillary. I remember during the primaries a few women friends of mine said they’d voted for Hillary but said so defensively and hadn’t wanted to be very public about it. You opened yourself up to a heaping of shit from the other side if you did. To be fair, you could get it from the left too. But in Pantsuit Nation, people know they are among friends and post story after story about why they are”with her” without worrying they’ll be shouted down.

When I was added I think there were about 80,000 members. Soon it had ballooned to 400,000, then 750,000. The growth was explosive and over the weekend it hit 1,000,000, then yesterday 1.5 million. Today it hit 2 million members all of whom had been added by friends so there are no trolls. The closest thing I’ve encountered to it is the Humans of New York on Facebook.

It has been the most refreshing thing after the trauma that has been this election season. It’s people of every stripe; life-long Republicans who won’t dare say they’re voting for her but who are actually relieved to have a candidate who is smart and experienced that they can vote for. Women in their 90s and even a couple over 100 who have proudly gone to the polls to cast a vote for a woman, which they never thought they’d live to see. Every category of person that Trump has insulted is represented and they are enthusiastically behind Hillary. No lesser of two evils, no vote against Trump, all firmly FOR Hillary. In the process of just finally being able to say why they’re happy to choose Hillary, they have also rounded out a picture of who she is for those of us who only got the soundbites.

My playlist reflects my mood thanks to Pantsuit Nation. It’s a party guaranteed to get your grandma out on the dance floor. I may be living in a blue bubble and I may have my head in the sand along with two million of my newest close friends, but it’s beautiful here and I’m ready for Election Day.

Left of the Dial

The Replacements – Left of the Dial

By now you’ve probably heard that Tim Kaine is a Replacements fan. He included two Mats songs on his Spotify playlist, “I Will Dare” and “Bastards of Young” (I approve of this message!). He definitely earned a couple of points in my book for that. He’s still not as far left of the dial as I’d like to see but I can understand the reasoning behind picking a moderate Democrat from a swing state who speaks Spanish. This year is all about securing the White House and if that’s going to help, I’m thinking a vice president who can sing along to “Androgynous” is by far a better pick than a guy who would like nothing more than to outlaw anything that has even a hint of an LGBTQ undertone.

Superstition

Stevie Wonder – Superstition

I woke up to the news that the Chicago Cubs had won the World Series, breaking a historic 108-year drought. A number of posts on Facebook were celebrating the win and pointing to Hillary as being from the Chicago area and a Cubs fan and surely this was a harbinger of another kind of historic win.

Normally I don’t think of myself as being superstitious but immediately I felt a sense of panic about conflating historic baseball victories and presidential elections. Those of us living in Red Sox nation (whether you are a fan or not) will well remember 2004, when the Red Sox won the World Series, breaking the Curse of the Bambino, and a Massachusetts Senator was the Democratic candidate. Living in my comfortable blue bubble I was buoyed by the Red Sox win, even if I don’t care a bit about the team or baseball in general, simply because it felt like it meant something. Massachusetts all the way, baby! Yes!

Needless to say, I was never more crushed than I was on the day after Election Day 2004. I’ve had a lot of disappointing outcomes over the course of my voting life but that one had been so clear cut for me and I couldn’t believe we were going to have to endure four more years of W. And the Red Sox win hadn’t done a thing.

I was already nervous about this year long before the candidates had even been chosen because of the date. November 8th. My first presidential election occurred on November 8th and, until that John Kerry loss, it had been my most disheartening Election Day. I’ll save that for another post but it sure wasn’t helping me to feel optimistic about things when I realized it. Adding the World Series connection to this upcoming contest was not helping.

I started looking for some ways that this year wasn’t going to be déjà vu but rather, a do-over. Someone else posted that in election years, when there was a 7th game in the World Series, a National League win has always equaled a Democratic win. I looked it up and it checks out. In the process I also realized that Curt Schilling was part of that Red Sox team in 2004 so, you know, he was probably a spoiler.

Anyway, as Stevie says, “superstition ain’t the way.” I’m working hard to not get spooked. The music is helping. It’s hard to be anxious when you’ve got a groove going on.

 

O Mio Babbino Caro

Kiri Te Kanawa – O Mio Babbino Caro

This evening we went to my daughter’s chorus concert. The group she is in and the orchestra performed this song together and I am sure I was not the only one in the high school auditorium who had these scenes running through their mind.

A Room With a View is largely responsible for my fascination with British period films, Merchant Ivory productions, and a longing for Italy that five years of Latin classes never managed to spark. I actually went to graduate school with hopes of killing two birds with one stone; have the study abroad experience I didn’t have in college because I’d been too busy trying to transfer, and put myself on a path to working, somehow, with making film adaptations from books. This movie was going to be my thesis.

Ever since I first saw the film, and I can’t even remember now when that first was, I believed that all I needed to be able to start living the life I was meant to live, was to travel to somewhere as beautiful as the places so many movies I loved had been filmed. I was sure that if I could throw open my double window like Lucy Honeychurch and see the splendors of Florence all around me, my George Emerson would appear in a field of waist high wildflowers, just like that. And if that was too far-fetched, well, there was no shortage of other films to choose from as inspiration. Enchanted April, Howard’s End, all the Jane Austen film adaptations, everything Kenneth Branagh did, it’s a long list.

My first attempt at this was my first European trip in 1994. I’d quit my job and had this plan of settling in Prague and doing something to support myself. It didn’t matter what, I was just going to live in this beautiful city and things would click into place. I did have contacts and I’d done a lot of research, but after only two weeks I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I continued on to Austria, spending close to a week in Salzburg so I could see every inch of the place that had been burned into my brain from years of watching The Sound of Music. I returned to Washington D.C. from Vienna and figured I just needed to recalibrate this plan. Prague was beautiful but it was still shaking off the Cold War in a lot of ways and I was probably too young and uncertain about myself to have really made a go of things.

I wound up back in Maine by the summer of 1994. Always intending to leave before the snow flies, I was still there for winter, and the two after that. There’s nothing like a Maine winter to make you wish for sun-kissed foreign vistas. I spent a lot of money at the video store borrowing more and more films to transport myself to someplace else. Even soggy British countrysides were an improvement. That dream of the perfect place and the perfect life was still there. I felt like I needed a more realistic goal though, and that’s how the graduate school idea took hold.

“Oh, but dreams have a knack of just not coming true.” I finally made it to graduate school, in the middle of nowhere in mid-west Wales, and the professor who taught a course about film adaptations was on sabbatical for the year. Foiled again.

 

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding

Elvis Costello – (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding

It’s November 1, the start of NaBloPoMo, and I haven’t written a post since July. I’m not sure I have the stamina for NaBloPoMo this month but the longer the gap gets, the harder it will be.

Mostly I have just been flattened by this election. I have read plenty of articles dissecting and analyzing how we ended up here and none of that makes me feel any better about anything. It is beyond my comprehension how there can be so much bigotry, vitriol, and hate. I had to step back for a while because it was all just so mean and even if I felt like I was fighting the good fight, my preaching to my tiny choir wasn’t going to be the thing that changed anyone’s mind.

But I find that I need to change my mindset or I’m going to have an ulcer. The only thing that has ever helped me through really hard and stressful times is music. A month of posting music every day might help me, at least, and it certainly can’t hurt. I’m sure there will be some political songs, because it’s November and it’s me, but I also might just post a song I heard that distracted me for three minutes. Apologies in advance for saying too much, or not enough.