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.
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.
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.
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.
The world seems genuinely crazy right now. Each and every day there’s something else to add to the heap. I keep seeing “dumpster fire” being used to explain it but I feel more like it’s one of those tanker ships full of trash, on fire, giving off toxic fumes, and it’s coming for us. You can see it and smell it long before it crashes into land but can we push it back out to sea in time?
Today was not a good day. The ceiling (do you call it that?) in my car is drooping and feels gross. The on/off button on my iPod is stuck so it’s essentially broken. These are minor annoyances compared to the anxiety-inducing Bernie supporters who are booing and shouting over progressive politicians just because they’re sad their candidate didn’t win. Look, I understand the person you wanted to win, and were really excited to vote for, didn’t get the nomination and that sucks. Really, I do. Do you know how many times the person I wanted to have as the nominee didn’t win? Nearly every time.
Clinton/Kaine is not an exciting ticket. We don’t need exciting though, we need to pack the bench on the Supreme Court and get whatever we can through Congress. Push for more progressive and inclusive policies from the inside. It will be work but it won’t be impossible, like it would be if Trumppence and the orange shirts should come into power. I can’t understand how the prospect of that doesn’t terrify the vast majority of the nation, but especially anyone who claims to believe in what Bernie was preaching, and that you wouldn’t do everything you could to prevent it.
“There are no answers, only reasons to be strong”
I’m not crazy.
(The Pylon live album came out today. Get it here.)
Two weeks ago at this time I was driving my daughter home from a show in New York. A couple of YouTubers from England that she follows were performing at the Beacon Theatre. I bought a single ticket for her to go and figured I could amuse myself for a couple of hours in Manhattan while she was at the show. She didn’t mind going alone and I didn’t see any harm in her sitting by herself. I’d let her go to a similar event closer to home last summer and it had worked out fine so I preferred to save the money and not have to sit through the show myself. She had a great time, I met up with my cousin for dinner and wandered around New York on a gorgeous evening, we were home by midnight – a success.
The next day at school she proudly wore the sweatshirt she’d bought at the show and told her friends all about it. One of them remarked, “I can’t believe your mom let you go to a show, in New York, on a school night!” She just laughed and said, “You don’t know my mom. She is always going down to New York for shows so it would be pretty hypocritical of her to say I couldn’t go.” She is only 14 and I’m her parent so when she asked about the show I could have easily found good reasons to say no, but it’s true that I have no qualms about driving down to New York, or several other places, to go to a show. Even on a school night. I place a lot of value on live performances and being there in person, to soak it all in. If I can make these memories happen for her, I’m happy to do it.
Later that week I took myself down to see Frightened Rabbit. I’d been looking forward to the show ever since tickets went on sale. Not only was it closer to home than the last two shows I’d been to (Boston and New York) but I’ve been wanting to check out this venue for a while. It’s been open for about a year and I’d heard only great things about it. I’ll definitely be back, which is what Scott Hutchison said at the end of the night too.
I keep looking for concerts that I think I could bring my daughter along to and that she might actually enjoy. There’s one at the end of the month that I have my eye on but I’m not sure she’s sold on the idea. The older she gets the broader her musical tastes have become but she’s still greatly influenced by her friends. Going to see a band she doesn’t know doesn’t sound hugely appealing and she’d prefer to spend her time listening to her own music than something I suggest.
I have friends who have taken a really active role in shaping what their kids listen to but I have had more of a hands-off attitude. Sure, I’d love it if she liked all of my bands but I think it’s important for her to find her own way and create her own path. After all, it was my siblings, much more so than my parents, who prepped me for all the music I would discover on my own and the very act of digging in and finding my music, is something that I have always felt, as the fifth of six kids, helped me forge my identity.
Which is how we found ourselves yesterday at a big chain store (after first checking out my local record store and another independent record store, at my insistence) so that my daughter could buy her first record.* It’s her own money and again, far be it from me to tell her she can’t or shouldn’t spend it on a record. Yes! Please! Buy a record! A double album, even! I wish it hadn’t been Twenty One Pilots and I feel bad that it came from a big corporation’s outlet rather than the guy down the street but I still felt it was a worthwhile purchase. For one thing, buy the music and support the musicians you love so they can keep making music! If I teach her nothing else in this whole musical journey, let it be that. Then the added bonus of having the lyrics sheet and the liner notes to pore over while you listen. New records these days usually come with a digital download too so you can still take your music with you wherever you go.
As she peeled off the shrinkwrap and took one of the records out I did intervene and tell her the proper way to handle the vinyl and to be especially careful when putting it back in the gatefold cover to make sure to have the open side of the inner sleeve at the top so that the record won’t roll out while you’re looking at the inside, and always keep your hands over the opening because otherwise it will crash to the floor and break and you will cry. Why yes, I was speaking from personal experience. Fittingly, my first record was also a double album. Embarrassingly, it was the Grease soundtrack. Give me a break, I was in sixth grade! As I stood in the living room where the stereo was, looking at all of the pictures from the movie, out rolled my brand new record and before I could react it had hit the wooden floor and snapped into several large, black, pointy pieces. Kind of like trying to remove snow from the roof or hood of your car with a shovel, you only make that mistake once.
Our house is very old and creaky and the turntable should only be used when no one is walking around. I had suggested she might just listen to the digital download yesterday and wait to give the record a spin until she got home from school today. I forgot to show her how it all worked though. She called me at my office, having already removed the record I’d left on it (though not following my strict instructions about putting it away properly, ack!) and had hers on but sound wasn’t coming through the speakers. I spent way more time than I thought it would take to walk her through this old fashioned technology. First push the button on the receiver (what’s that?) that says phono (huh?!?). Then find the switch on the turntable that says cue to raise the needle, move it above the edge of the record, close the lid, move the switch back the other way to lower the needle, ta-da! It’s a slow start, but I feel like she’ll get there. If I can do it, so can she.
* She has CDs and other stuff she’s bought on iTunes but this is her first LP.
The videos are not online. Or, if they are, they won’t be there for long. It was a strange mourning, to be at work and wanting to listen to the songs that we all knew but knowing that they wouldn’t be available to illustrate the shared grief. Luckily I had a meeting that afternoon in a room at the library. I did a quick catalog search and wrote down the call numbers and headed over to the meeting a few minutes early so I had time to stop in the music collection.
I grabbed Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, and Sign O’ the Times. I really wanted 1999 but they didn’t have it. I was not a huge Prince fan but I turned 13 in 1980. That means the entirety of my teenage years occurred during Prince’s biggest decade. If you can remember the videos, I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that Prince was responsible for kick starting a lot of teenagers’ sexual awareness back then. Let’s not forget it was Prince’s “Darling Nikki” that shocked Tipper Gore into founding the PMRC.
I still didn’t listen to the CDs when I got back from my meeting, I saved them for the car ride home. I decided Purple Rain should come first. When “Let’s Go Crazy” started, and those lyrics I hadn’t paid much attention to came on, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life…” I lost it. Then the drums kicked in, and he was talking about the afterworld, and I cranked that song up so loud I thought my rear windshield was going to shatter. I pulled out of the parking lot and into traffic and I didn’t worry about anyone seeing an errant tear falling down my cheek because I was sure everyone else would hear the music and feel the same.
It surprised me that I reacted so strongly. Of course I knew all of these songs. Of course they were a part of my life, but it wasn’t music that I had felt especially tied to or even thought about frequently. I respected Prince and I acknowledged the huge role he had played and the love a lot of my friends had for him but I wasn’t among the truly devoted. I even tried following him on Twitter just two weeks ago or so and gave up after a day because I couldn’t make sense of his tweets. As I drove home and listened to all of Purple Rain and then started it over again, I teared up again.
I spent last night watching news come in of late night block parties in Brooklyn and an all night dance party at First Avenue in Minneapolis, and watching all the cities turn their lights to purple. Because none of his music is available online (come on, do you know anyone with a TIDAL subscription?) the legions of his faithful fans had to physically come together, turn on the radio, bring out their albums, just like we used to do. Hell, even MTV was relevant again. Back in January we took to our computers to reach out to friends when David Bowie died, to share obscure videos and pictures, favorite songs, memories. We met there. It helped us all to feel less alone and isolated in our shock and grief. This time it wasn’t enough.
The video above is from the curtain call of Hamilton on Broadway the night that Prince died. I saw it come up on Twitter and I blinked away tears again. I think what moved me so much was watching how people had to be together. These songs were so much a part of our formative years, so much a celebration of living, dancing, sex, love. Even if I never thought about those songs as having special meaning for me, when I listened to them in the car I realized that they are a part of me. And I don’t feel old enough for this piece to be over.
This morning I got an email from my best friend that threw my whole sense of self spinning. She was just feeling nostalgic, brought on by the fact that tonight, just like 31 years ago, Villanova is in the NCAA basketball tournament final game. If you’re a March Madness fan, you might know that Villanova won that game over Georgetown in 1985. Let this be a lesson to all parents of high school seniors and college admissions people; when your school wins the NCAA tournament during the yield season, that school will suddenly be flooded with more acceptances than you had bargained for when those fat envelopes went out. If you’re a 17-year-old who hasn’t quite made up their mind yet about where to attend college, there will be serious consequences for that waffling. You snooze you lose, in the housing assignment game at least.
For 31 years I have believed that I got shafted on the on-campus housing front simply because they were overrun by people accepting the offer of admission and that my number was just unlucky. No. It turns out, corroborated by my best friend’s roommate who was also on this email, that because we had all waited to send in our deposits until after that fateful game, we were joined by hundreds of people that were swayed by the win. Those who got their deposits in early were all set with dorm assignments while we were stuck on a housing wait list. We all wound up over at a nearby Catholic women’s college that often had enough dorm space to take in (female) Villanova students. I somehow managed to screw this up too because I didn’t even get a room there either. I got a letter from the Mother Superior a week before I was due to arrive saying that they had too many students as well (Villanova winning increased their attractiveness by proximity and an agreement to allow for the opportunity to take classes) so I lived in a large basement room with four other girls. That’s a story for another day.
I always felt like I had really just continually had the rug pulled out from under me in those months, weeks, and final days before I arrived on campus. First, it wasn’t where I wanted to be, and getting rejected by the schools I had dreamed about attending* was a sore point. Then to be told, after we’d sent the deposit in by the deadline, that there wouldn’t be housing for me, was really adding insult to injury. Finally, to have the back-up housing solution be a complete disaster was really the last straw. I had been to campus in April, after the championship but before the deposit deadline, and thought, hey it’s spring and it’s lovely here. Maybe this will be ok. But by the time I arrived at the end of August, I was dead set against the place. Forever.
It’s pretty well-documented** that I spent probably 25 years wondering how my life would have been different if only I’d done better in school my junior year of high school. Or if only I’d applied to a different group of schools. Or transferred to someplace else. On and on. But in all those years, it never once occurred to me that if I had put my deposit in right away, and I had been on-campus from the beginning, that my life would have been just as different even though I was at the same school. All that bitterness wouldn’t have been there, for starters, and I never would have met my best friend. I am sure of it. The number of things that would never have happened as a result, some of the most important and defining moments of my life, poof! Gone! Just like that. The best concert I’ve ever seen? I never would have been there. Road trip of a lifetime? Doesn’t exist. I had to stop thinking about it this morning and concentrate on driving in the snow(!) but it’s crazy.
In hindsight, my entire college experience was certainly a character building four years. I’ve always said that the only good points about it were the location, my job at the costume shop, and that that’s where I met my best friend. It’s only been in the last five years or so that I have also been able to see that I learned how to be true to myself and hold firm in my beliefs despite what other people may say or think. Maybe that’s how it was meant to be.
*UNC, the other team in tonight’s game. Oh the irony!
**Click on the College category if you’re curious.
Today I got a notification from Bandsintown that Belly had added some more dates on their recently announced tour. When the word got out that they had reunited and would play a few shows, I remembered seeing a ticket for Belly at the old 9:30 Club the last time I looked through my old stubs. For the life of me I couldn’t remember the show though. I did spend a ton of time at the 9:30 Club back on F Street and I’m sure I saw a lot of bands I don’t remember but I felt like I should remember this show more. I tried looking on Setlist.fm but that didn’t help. I pulled out the envelope where I have the stubs and looked again.
Upon closer inspection I realized this wasn’t a stub, it was the whole, unripped ticket. It was also still smooth and flat, not showing the tell-tale signs of a stub that had been shoved in my pocket and suffered the effects of one of Washington D.C.’s sweatiest and smelliest establishments. I stood there turning the ticket over in my hands trying to remember if they had cancelled or I had blown it off, though neither felt likely. Then it hit me. The date. This show was about a week after one of my three housemates had been shot in the head, after parking her car on our street. At first it seemed like a random drive-by but just before the Belly show, another woman was shot about a block away. Things were incredibly stressful and the only consistent part of the attacks in the pattern that police pieced together was that the gunman went after people walking alone. I typically went to these shows by myself and there was no way I was up for it. We had my housemate’s dad staying with us while she recovered (she did recover, thankfully, though she lost an eye from the gun shot) and we would come home from work in groups, go inside and stay there until morning. I liked Belly, but not enough to risk being the next victim of a madman.
I’ve just finished a novel, Every Anxious Wave*, in which time travel to concerts of the early 1990s plays a big part. In the past year or so, there seem to be a lot of bands that broke up in the 90s getting back together and going on tour. My interest in going to any of those shows was directly related to whether or not I’d seen them back in the day. If I had (the Replacements, Ride) then I preferred to have those old shows stand as the definitive memory of what their live concerts were like. Things are different now. It could still be great but it is different, there’s no way around it.
But I missed the Belly show. I could look at this new tour as a do-over. So far all the venues are a little too far away, and they’ve been selling out ridiculously fast, but I’ll keep an eye on it. Maybe reunion shows are as close to time travel as we’ll get.
*I have more thoughts on the topic after reading this book but they’re still scattered so perhaps that’s a post of its own.
Do you know anyone who will be old enough to vote in November who isn’t registered yet? Do you know anyone who says they don’t vote because politicians are all the same? Or maybe even someone who is so devoted to one Democratic candidate that they claim they won’t vote in the general election if the person they’re supporting doesn’t get the nomination? Possibly more than ever before, there is no time for any kind of foolish grandstanding. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation this year and we are all going to have to be way more engaged in this battle.
I hope you don’t know any Trump supporters because I think turning one of them around may be an insurmountable task. It’s getting scarier every day. Truly frightening. Trying to get them to see that he’s only using them isn’t likely to work but perhaps it’s possible to get the disenchanted to realize how much is at stake. You have to tell them, yeah, it sucks when everything feels like a lost cause and you don’t like your choices. I don’t care. This is a true national emergency. I sometimes wonder if we’ll even make it to November or if the whole thing will implode before then.
What also scares the crap out of me is even in the best case scenario, what happens with all of those people that Trump has whipped up into a frenzy? He’s legitimatized their anger and given them the space and support to grow. To me this has always been the biggest threat. I don’t really think Trump even necessarily holds the beliefs he spouts at his rallies, he just says what he knows they want to hear. He’s just priming their fear and hatred. It’s all going to blow sooner or later. Do you think they’ll just slink quietly back into the shadows where they were hiding before? Not a chance. I don’t know who or what can diffuse it and it’s ugly. Really ugly.
</political rant>
I admit, I laughed at the Chris Christie memes, but this is no joking matter.
Noisy Cats 