Twenty Fifteen of the Common Era

Into Year 2015

MMXV 

14 Nivôse CCXXIII

New Year's, a wedding of Space and Time, requires: 

Something Olde

Something New

Something Borrowed

Something Blue . . .

A Sixpence in your Shoe

All such elements are jammed into my newly vamped gym jukebox iPod mix. Before last year lurched into this one, I purposely deleted my entire playlist and began a new one. It was high time.

The new stripped down core-first-round playlist, to be expanded during this year  -- already fondly known as Twenty Fifteen -- goes like this . . . playback is in random order, and sometimes I switch earphones or headphones to highlight different aspects of each track for the benefit of both the other ear and the other side of the mind . . . a good way to keep it fresh, keeping it reel-to-reel.

Open Up Like a French 75 -- drink or artillery, take your pick:

Breaking Glass  (David Bowie)

Chinese Rock (Ramones)

Editions of You (Roxy Music)

Feeling Good (Nina Simone)

Get Up Offa That Thing (James Brown)

I'm a King Bee (Slim Harpo)

The 'In' Crowd (Bryan Ferry)

Lust for Life (Iggy Pop)

See-Line Woman (Nina Simone)

Shake Your Hips (Slim Harpo)

Sound & Vision (David Bowie)

Super Bad, Parts 1 and 2 (James Brown)

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (Bob Dylan)

What in the World (David Bowie with Iggy Pop)

You Know I'm No Good (Amy Winehouse)

This stuff works for me. Specifically for the time blocks spent on things like the stationary bike, moon walk or regular treadmill. 

I've picked up a whole new appreciation for "Get Up Offa That Thing" (1976) -- can listen to it, the extended version, dozens of times and hear something new. For now, it's the side track electric funk guitar parts and embedded mutter-rapped words such as "Melvin Parker [on drums] . . . North Carolina . . ."   

2015: The adventure continues . . .

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Roxy Music: Mother of Pearl

A short string of words rising into consciousness like the aroma of honeysuckle and roses off the back porch. Springtime.

It feels like a demand. Search and recover from a lost world. Words rise to the present, when the present is not a memory but a new now.

In my mind's hearing came the phrasing, garbled as it turns out when compared to its source:

It's the same old story / About heaven and glory . . .

Was it Bob Dylan?  No, not quite his style. Leonard Cohen? Nope. Motörhead? Nope, or should I say, Nein, danke? (They do have "Death or Glory," not too far off track). Not the Clash, either, but getting warmer. 

Finally, finally, finally it fully surfaced, I reconnected with the source, which turns out to be Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl" track from Stranded (1973), written by Bryan Ferry. Eureka! 

And the actual lyrical snippet goes like this:

It's the same old story / All love and glory / It's a pantomine.
If you're looking for love / In a looking glass world / It's pretty hard to find.

"Mother of Pearl" starts off fast and wild -- "It's a crazy scene," Ferry sings. Then about 1 minute and forty-five seconds into the song, it shifts gear like a party crash, toward reflection and musing that continues all the way to its conclusion. Very cool song -- cool enough to trigger memories of itself across space and time.

Today's Rune: Joy.  

Jill Sprecher: 13 Conversations About One Thing

Jill Sprecher's Thirteen / 13 Conversations About One Thing (2001) dovetails nicely with the work of existentialist writers like Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and Hanna Arendt. On the one hand, we can do certain things, make certain choices; on the other, we take our chances anytime we wake up and get moving. Besides that, there's an uncertain amount of randomness and entropy at play in the universe.

A snippet of the Roxy Music song "Editions of You" (1973) covers the gist of it:

They say love's a gamble, hard to win, easy lose
And while sun shines you'd better make hay
So if life is your table and fate is the wheel
Then let the chips fall where they may
In modern times the modern way . . .

And the rejoinder:

Love me, leave me
Do what you will
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

When somebody came a knockin' at her door, Dorothy Parker would occasionally mutter, "What fresh hell can this be?"

In any case, the film makes clear that kindness is rarely a bad thing, certainly preferable to cruelty, violence or indifference. As Tennessee Williams put it, attention must be paid.  

 

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing is not a documentary. It's a dramatic film structured around statements made by characters, unspooled in nonlinear form. The disjointed structure invites a second look, once the basic contours of the storyline are better understood. 

 

The one thing?  That state of being/perceiving called Happiness.

 

Jill and her sister Karen Sprecher have here woven together a meditative, sometimes brooding film, but physical events do occur, significant ones in the lives of the characters played by heavy hitter actors, including Alan Arkin and Clea DuVall (both now in Argo), Amy Irving, Matthew McConaughey and John Turturro. The last named reminds me that Thirteen Conversatons has a similar sort of take on life as the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009).

 

Today's Rune: Joy.   

SLC Punk!

James Merendino's SLC Punk! (1999) evokes certain music-based subcultures of 1985 in the US and UK, but more specifically in Salt Lake City. It centers around Stevo, Heroin Bob (who doesn't actually do heroin) and various aquaintances. The soundtrack, including songs that are not included in the "official" soundtrack, is a good one, and includes three well-placed songs from The Stooges (1969), plus individual tracks by Roxy Music, Blondie, Velvet Underground, and other thematically connected bands.

The narrative technique is sort of an out-of-time remembrance in which the main character (in this case Stevo) tells the story in retrospect, but also by commenting on action seemingly as it occurs -- sort of like in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). Considering it was shot on a very modest budget, SLC Punk! has some neatly executed scenes, and it breathes life back into the mid-1980s.    

I was working at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (North Carolina), in 1985, and was pretty aware of the various music genres and various "tribes." To me, Stevo and Heroin Bob are more like the local "hardcore" music scene of North Carolina, of which there were several bands carrying the torch. There was also a ska-tinged eclectic scene inspired by the English Beat, the Specials and bands like that. 1985 was, too, the year the Pogues released Rum, Sodomy & the Lash. Punk as in the Sex Pistols or even the Clash was long over, or so it felt. Even Dead Kennedys and the Cramps had almost burned out by then, as far as producing exciting new material. But SLC Punk! got me to thinking, and remembering. What else can one really ask of an indie flick?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.             

Both Ends Burning

Roxy Music -- "Both Ends Burning." Viva Roxy Music!

I'll be back to visiting blogs soon -- catching up at work, giving an exam tomorrow, all that fill-in-the-blank essay short answer jazz.

Happy Easter, dear readers!

Today's Rune: Strength.

Who Knows What Tomorrow Might Bring?

The other day, I was listening to "Editions of You" -- one of the coolest Roxy Music songs, going all the way back to 1973 -- when the lyrics jumped out and seemed perfectly apt for today. A snippet goes this way:

So love, leave me, do what you will

Who knows what tomorrow might bring?
Learn from your mistakes is my only advice
And stay cool is still the main rule
Don't play yourself for a fool
Too much cheesecake too soon
Old money's better than new
No mention in the latest Tribune
And don't let this happen to you . . .

Whatever happens to the Big Three American automakers,

1) it's been a long time coming;

2) it's sad;

3) it'll be weird whatever happens next;

4) maybe there'll be some cool, durable gas sippers that'll break on through to the other side.

I love my sporty two-door 1997 Pontiac Sunfire GT economy wheels (similar to the one above, only in black). I bought my Sunfire used from former co-worker and buddy Trent Vanegas for a great deal at just under 100,000 miles just around 9/11/2001. It now has about 200,000 miles, the AC is long busted and the driver-side window is stuck about an inch down from the top, it's got a dent and the trunk won't open from the outside (but it's still accessible from the back rumble seat). Main thing is, it still runs. Even new, it would have been affordable when credit was readily available. My next car, when it happens, will also be an American car, used. Why, I don't know for sure. Seems like the right thing to do is all, still living in the USA and all.

In other matters, got to see Ingmar Bergan's last major movie, Fanny & Alexander, for the second time since it came out in 1982. Really like it much more than back then -- I'm older if not wiser, and I kind of like the slow pace. Plus, I'm a sucker for existentialism and things Swedish now more than ever.

And let's not forget surrealism, which these days seems more like realism. Here's Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour, the classic 1967 Luis Buñuel flick. This scene could be called "thinking outside of the box." Oh, ha ha ha.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

As I Was Drifting Past the Lorelei

In praise of Roxy Music -- some weird sinful cross between David Bowie, Talking Heads, New Wave and Punk -- back in 1973 . . . . . Definitely worth (re)discovering on iTunes. . . . .

Today's Rune: Signals.

Jimi Hendrix: Left-handed Sagittarian

Jimi Hendrix died so young at twenty-seven that if he was alive today, he'd only be sixty-three. Contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Van Morrison and Lou Reed still create and perform in their sixties, and they'll keep going until they drop.

I always remember when it's Jimi's death day because it's always a day before my sister Linda's birthday -- just as I know the date John Lennon was shot because it's the day before my own birthday. Funny, that.

I'm not a big subscriber to top ten lists, greatest this and that labels, but I never have heard anyone who could play guitar like left-handed Hendrix, nor sound anything like him when it comes down to it. Hendrix is one of a handful of musicians I can listen to with headphones to catch more of their nuanaces -- John Coltrane and Miles Davis with their backing musicians are the other regulars. They also sound -- all of them -- most excellent when blasted from a stereo.

Over the years, I've collected a stack of various recordings, the "official" ones and posthumous releases of all kinds; can never get enough and since he's been gone for thirty-six years, that's probably a good thing. The music, as they say, lives on. I've got a ratty vinyl record copy of Are You Experienced? hanging on one of my apartment walls like a little shrine.

Since this is the date on which Jimi Hendrix died, it's worth remembering that he died in London, where his career had really taken off, though he had also maintained a base pad back in Greenwich Village, where he had picked up initial momentum back in 1966, until the end.

There are all sorts of nutty notions about how he died, but the best evidence comes down to this: he mixed red wine and nine Vesparax sleeping tablets (50 mg brallobarbital, 150 mg secobarbital and 50 mg hydroxyzine each, and no longer on the market) before going to bed. Sometime in the night he puked up this lovely combo and, so zonked out he couldn't rouse himself to clear his throat, suffocated and died. A sad end to a creative genius, and nothing romantic about it.

Today's Rune: Possessions.

Viva Jimi Hendrix (11/27/1942-9/18/1970)!