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I was never cool enough to like The Cure or Depeche Mode — at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Those were groups for poetic, dark-clothes-wearing kids, the kind who were hip by dint of their very outcastness. The music, I imagined, was heavy and weird and dark. I lumped the groups together and wrote them off.
To be honest, I’m still wildly ignorant about both groups. For instance, I probably didn’t give Depeche Mode a single thought between the moment in 1990 when I was sitting next to a friend on a (yes) youth-symphony field trip who let me listen to the group on her Walkman for a couple of minutes, and the moment in 2002 when I was playing a new Johnny Cash CD and my housemate hollered out, “Is he singing Depeche Mode?!”
Even this morning, when I heard the song that inspired this train of thought, I looked it up as Depeche Mode only to realize it was by The Cure. File under Foreigner/Journey, I guess — except in this case, the pairing seems to be more common (and neatly broken down in this Cure vs Depeche Mode post, which I haven’t read in its entirety but whose very existence I appreciate).
ANYHOW. My point here, and it’s a short and sweet one despite all evidence to the contrary, is that I have grown to know and like some of each group’s music, and I especially love the song “Just Like Heaven.” I occasionally bust out with a “show me show me show me” with no context at all, and when I hear the song I deffffinitely stop the radio.
That’s it. That’s the story. It’s a song, and I like it. Happy Tuesday!
I cannot forget to post and comment on THIS, so full of so many of my favorite things. The GLEE. The SPRINGSTEEN. The HURLEY. The (this is a new one, but a strong one) SESSY JOEL MCHALE.
OH! JOY.
Let me tell you about my friend Al.
Al and I went to college together, and I wanted to be his friend long before I actually met him. He always had a smile on his face and a crowd of smiling friends around him, and just gave an easy impression of openness and fun, like he couldn’t wait to meet everyone in the world and invite them to join his party.
I’m pretty sure I first interacted with Al when he hit me on the head with a frisbee. (And I know I am supposed to capitalize that last word, but it irks me to have to do so, so I SHAN’T.) To be bopped out of nowhere with one of these flying discs was not an uncommon occurrence on our campus, where something like 90 percent of the student population played on ultimate frisbee intramural teams, where the trademark whoop of our (very good) men’s ultimate team filled the air, and where one was forever wandering unknowingly into the middle of a round of frisbee golf.
I walked into one of Al’s games, and got bopped on the head. He ran over and hugged me, laughing and apologizing all at once. We became friends for real months or maybe a year later, when I was rooming with the girl he was in love with and several little groups of friends were becoming one big, sloppy, lovely group.
Al was goofy and he was kind. He was the kind of guy who would spot you across campus, point at you, then head in your direction doing the Jim Carrey ape walk from … whatever movie it was that Jim Carrey did the ape walk in. When he reached you, he’d plop down and put his arm around you and want to know everything about your life.
Al played on the men’s ultimate team but also basically lived in the library. He was part of the Room Full O’ Dudes that always hosted our dance parties, and he was a splendid dancer. I remember boogying down with him in his dorm room and cutting a fine rug in our college’s ballroom, thanks to his able swinging lead, at the annual Midwinter Ball.
I must regretfully report that he also decided to nickname me Butt Nugget. Nugget, for short. I had made the mistake of being icked out the first time I heard him use that expression, so he gleefully made it my name. Ew, so gross.
Al was just — and I expect still is — one of the coolest, funniest, sweetest, goofiest, smartest, most driven people ever. I adored him, and am very sad that the years since college have found our paths crossing only twice: once, just after we graduated, when a group of our friends got together on Cape Cod, and again only fleetingly when he swooped in from med school to stand up at his best college bud’s wedding. He has become a very successful and fancy doctor; that best college bud recently told me that he’d even been wooed to a new city to do his fancy doctoring.
I hope he’s happy. I hope he’s the same Al as ever (I’m sure he is). And I hope he knows that if he ever calls me Butt Nugget again I’m going to tell all his patients to demand that he do the Jim Carrey ape walk every time he enters an exam room.
Sorry to be all Patty Griffin, all the time, but as I sit at work weeping over the news that my parents’ sweet yellow lab, Mia, had to be put down last night, all I can think to do is post a love song for a dog. And go home and hug my own lab extra hard tonight.
I’ve noticed a certain theme of late, on our blog and in my life: bemoaning the impossible oldness of being thirtysomething. I don’t think we’re the only ones who feel this way — it’s the decade where people tend to find themselves settling into certain appropriate adult patterns and then wondering how the hell it happened — but I’ve decided to try to shake it.
I want to shake it because I look at my 80-year-old relatives and think, what they wouldn’t give to be 35 again. I want to shake it because my back hurts and I’m stiff when I stand up, and I know I’m too young to ache, and I want to move instead of moan. I want to shake it because if I am lucky enough to live another few decades, I don’t want to spend the whole time listening to myself talk about the fact that I feel old.
I didn’t intend this post to be about this topic. It was “Hot in the City” that brought me here, and I intended to share light tales of how wonderfully hot it was this weekend and how I kept singing that song and how Jr spent all afternoon in wading pools yesterday, first his and then a friend’s, and how I love summer and am so glad we’re getting a little more of it. Furthermore I did not know this was a Billy Idol song, so once again AutoTunes has educated me.
But when I looked up the lyrics, this line jumped out at me. OK, first it was the fabulous line about “a long-legged lovely walks by,” but this one was a close second. Since I’d just read TGOTS’s post from Friday about wanting to write a novel, and since I was talking with the fella this weekend about all the above stuff, it seems fitting.
Don’t forget you’re young. The wisdom of the Idol.
There was a woman on the radio this morning talking earnestly about how much better she knows herself now that she’s well into her thirties. She, like, really feels comfortable in her own skin, she said, and like has a good grip on her, like, priorities, and doesn’t like care like what anyone like thinks about her.
Soooo … good for her, I guess.
I too am well into my thirties, but I couldn’t with a straight face claim that any of the above is true. I have just as many questions about who I am and what I’m doing with my life as I ever did — in fact, I think I’ve got more. I am only about 20 percent comfortable in my own skin, and while I have a solid grasp of my priorities, I’m not always great about ensuring they stay in line. As for caring about what others think … I fear I’ll always be saddled with that ridiculous concern.
Am I failing as an adult? Am I supposed to have it all figured out by now? Sometimes I worry that I’ve lost the plot somewhere along the line. Sometimes I worry about that a lot.
BUT: I digress. What this perky, well-adjusted woman on the radio really made me think of this morning was that while I may not have matured as I think I ought to have done by now, in terms of self-knowledge and self-confidence, I do find I have more and more respect for (and jealousy of) those who have talent and use it. I deeply admire creative people, even the ones who are only vaguely creative, or creative in a way that isn’t quite my taste; I envy those who produce something expressive and affecting or intriguing or even magical.
WHICH brings me to what I have really been wanting to talk about for a while: this blog. After a year, I remain so grateful for the daily exercise of some kind of personal, vaguely creative expression. Even on the days when the radio offers little inspiration, I look forward to reading what MK has to say and to digging for something to say for myself. Even though part of me wishes we had hundreds of avid readers, I mostly just like the chance to send something out into the ether, letting it land wherever it happens to land, or even letting it waft away entirely. It’s the doing of it that’s the point.
And it reminds me, daily, that one thing I know about myself is that I feel a need to produce … something. Something substantial; something I can be proud of. That something is probably a book. And it’s probably a novel.
Sigh. It took me fifteen minutes to get that word down in type. I kept hemming and hawing and beating around the bush, not wanting to admit that, plain as it is to me. Which is dumb, but is also the reason I haven’t done it yet.
Strong as I feel this creative urge, sure as I am that I want to write something big and real, I’m daunted by the prospect, and embarrassed to voice this wish out loud. (See questionable self-confidence and self-knowledge items above.)
But this Auto Tunes comforts and reassures me. We’ve done a year of this blog, a little bit at a time, piece by piece, and we’re loving every minute of it. Surely I can put the same amount of energy into something else, too.
Right?
MamaKitt, you and I are in the same classical — i.e. music without words — headspace today.
This morning I heard a jaunty little number that sounded like it might be the overture to the musical Chicago. It wasn’t, but it was perky and fun. I listened through to the song’s conclusion, and enjoyed the pep it gave me as I headed for another plodding day at work. The deejay reported that the piece was the “Chatterbox Rag,” by George Botsford.
And that’s all I know about that.
But I did have Chicago on the brain, having just read this little piece about how it’s now been running on Broadway for 14 years. That makes me feel very old, as I can recall watching a TV clip of this production’s original Velma and Roxie, the fab fab FAB Bebe Neuwirth and Ann Reinking, with MK.
(YES, I often do these moves when alone in my house. I could not love this number — as performed by these ladies — more, and yearn for long limbs and black minidresses.)
I also remember seeing the movie version of Chicago in the city of Chicago. I was there at a mini-reunion of some college friends (I think over New Year’s), and at the end of a long, hilarious, and wonderful day of wandering the city, we tumbled into a downtown theater to see this flick. I’d like to say others of our number were as excited about seeing it as I was, but it’s also possible I convinced them we should go.
This was a happy moment, and is a very happy memory for me. Surrounded by some of the people I love best in the world, spending a day wandering with no agenda but adventure and camaraderie, capped off by a ridiculous (oy, with the wretched Zellweger) but nonetheless enjoyable musical.
Lovely.
The first thing I heard this morning was the Bach composition referenced in the title. Which definitely did not make me giggle. Because I am a grown-up, not a middle-schooler. Right?
As I stifled my giggle, I thought about the concept of humor in classical music. In my limited frame of reference, this was something that was hot in the 1970s and 80s, with people like PDQ Bach and Claude Bolling doing their best to lighten up a genre known for taking itself a mite seriously. (Although I guess Bolling must be more appropriately filed under jazz, all I knew as a kid was that his music didn’t have words, which landed it in the same mental file folder as classical.)
I remember standing at our piano bench, measuring only a few inches taller than its brown wooden legs and embroidered floral seat, puzzling over a classical album cover that I knew was supposed to be hilarious but whose jokes I couldn’t quite get. Bolling’s covers, on the other hand, were easy for even a kid to enjoy: anthropomorphic flutes and guitars and such, frolicking in swimming pools and on picnics. And then there was Herb Alpert, with his ladies covered in whipped cream … but I digress.
The concept of Fun with Classical wasn’t exactly new then; after all, Mozart was reportedly a rollicking bag of fun, and even wrote a “Musical Joke” (my mother always cracked up, and probably still does, at the idea that this discordant piece was considered hilarious in its day). Still, I have this sense that there was a uniqueness to the brand of silly classical in the late 20th Century — and a sense that it has gone the way of all good things, like velvet breeches and ruffles.
I don’t have any overwhelming associations with “Wonderwall,” other than the haze of mid-’90s nostalgia that washes over me whenever I hear songs of that ilk. But I do like to mutter the names of Liam and Noel Gallagher, because they are so very deliciously U.K.-ish. I’ve known a few Liams in my day, and we even considered naming Jr. that briefly. But I’ve only ever met one Noel.
It was at a wedding. The bride and groom were friends of my fella, but only friends in that loose way that means “co-workers I’ve occasionally had an extracurricular beer with.” Which means he was slightly out of place, and I, as his plus one, was completely out of place. I hadn’t met the happy couple and didn’t know a soul there.
I remember oddly a lot about the event, from the pre-ceremony cocktail hour to the bride’s heels sinking into the lawn as she tried to walk elegantly across it to the position of our table, filled with fella co-workers, in the back corner of the reception. And I remember Noel, the bald brother of one of those co-workers, sitting next to me.
While my fella got caught up talking with his seatmate, this Noel was charming and attentive on my other side, and when it got chilly he gave me his suit coat, and before that he noticed a scar by my elbow that very few people have ever noticed, and asked about its provenance. I don’t recall what else we talked about, but I do recall the great roaring wave of gratitude I felt at having this stranger to spend time with in the most awkward of social situations. It’s not like he liked me — he was just giving chivalry a good name, as opposed to his brother, who was telling dirty jokes across the way. Each has its place. That day I appreciated both.
The bride and groom, as it happens, have since split.
The good MamaKitt and I have known each other long enough — and spent enough hours in a car listening to music together — that there are a mess of songs that remind each of us of the other, for no real or identifiable reason other than “There was this one time? When we were driving somewhere and this song came on? And you were funny about it?”
Not all such songs — few, probably — are classics for the ages. Just see the list MK made about me a few weeks back. See also the following, which came on the radio this morning and suddenly filled me with joyous thoughts of my dear hilarious friend. I couldn’t tell you when or where, but I can tell you every fiber of my being believes she once sang this, in full voice and earnest Carnie/Chynna/Wendy theatrics, and that it was splendid.
Oh, man, how awful. And DELICIOUS.
PS: It’s possible this song only resonates because all MamaKitt and I really want in life is to be part of a girl group. And to sing on beaches and mountaintops. And get bangs that go straight across our foreheads.
O TO BE WILSON PHILLIPS.
