In Memoriam: Prince

The first girl I ever seriously kissed was a major Prince fan. I didn’t see the appeal.

The appeal of Prince, I mean. The kiss was awesome. I can still remember it with almost shocking vividness. But Prince… really?

Sure, “Let’s Go Crazy” was as infectious a tune as any I’d ever heard. But this girl’s interest in him wasn’t confined to his musical ability, if you get my meaning. She wanted him bad, and she wasn’t shy about telling me either, and that made me kinda crazy. I just didn’t get it. Even on TV, where everybody looks taller, he was visibly tiny — scrawny even — and with all the lace and the purple velvet suits and the high-heeled boots and such, he looked… well, he didn’t look much like me, you know? I was sixteen years old and insecure as hell, desperate to unravel the mysteries of sex and masculinity and how exactly to get girls to like me. So naturally anyone who seemed to be making a bigger impression on them than I was, someone who had an entirely different style than my own denim-and-long-hair thing, was a tremendous threat to my ego. Even if that someone was an completely unattainable fantasy figure. I didn’t like Prince back in the day because, quite simply, I was jealous of the foppish little squirt. It was a classic case of “What’s he got that I haven’t got?!”

Everyone reading this has no doubt heard by now that Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson, died yesterday morning at the age of 57. Preliminary reports said the cause was complications from the flu, but later I started seeing more troubling rumors about an overdose. There’s going to be an autopsy, of course. But whatever happened to him, his death — like Michael Jackson’s a few years ago — triggered a surprising stew of emotions in me, not only because his passing at a relatively young age was so unexpected, but because I hadn’t realized how much of a touchstone he and his music had become for me until he was taken away from us. I may not have liked him when I was sixteen (although truthfully, I think I probably did like him more than I was willing to admit, just as I secretly liked MJ too), but sixteen was a long time ago. Somewhere along the way, I grew up, and Prince won me over.

Maybe it was the funky beats he contributed to several key scenes in the 1989 Batman movie. (Sorry, Heath Ledger fans, Nicholson is my Joker.) Maybe it was the adorable vision of Julia Roberts singing “Kiss” to herself in a bathtub in Pretty Woman. Or the bright springtime mornings when I’ve heard “Raspberry Beret” on the radio and found myself feeling happy for no good reason. It could have been the way “1999” took on a whole new relevance for Generation X as the actual turn of the millennium approached. Or the times Anne and I have sung along to “Little Red Corvette” at the top of our lungs while driving with the top down.

But I think what really, finally brought me around on the Purple One was his 2004 performance at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, when he played George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and George’s son Dhani. Prince’s guitar solo during that performance was a thing of beauty, a display of virtuoso skill by an artist at the top of his game, who has nothing left to prove and simply plays for the sake of playing. You can’t help but admire someone who can make it look so effortless, and who very obviously derived so much joy from doing it. The man was having fun playing that song, on that stage, with those other performers. And that’s something about this performance that’s really striking too: as someone pointed out yesterday in a Facebook discussion I read, Prince wasn’t grandstanding or overshadowing the others. As flashy as his playing was, it was in support of the song and of the band. And even the moment when we lets himself fall backwards into the hands of an assistant who pushes him back upright… as ridiculous as that moment was, it was also charming. It was cool. Just look at the grin Dhani Harrison flashes at that moment; he gets it. He knows that that little bit of theater was pure rock and roll. It was James Brown’s business with the cape, Chuck Berry’s duckwalk, Elvis’ karate poses.

Other people have a deeper knowledge of Prince’s catalog than myself — I’m pretty much limited to an entry-level “greatest hits” discussion — and those folks are no doubt better qualified to write about the technicalities of what, exactly, he did as a musician, and why it was significant. But it’s clear even to me that Prince — like Bowie or Michael Jackson, or Tom Jones or Willie Nelson or Ray Charles or any of the other performers who become cultural institutions — transcended any one genre and was simply himself. He wasn’t a rock star, he was just a star… one that burned out while it still had light to give.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since the news broke yesterday morning, about how young 57 really is, how much time he might have had left, how many things he might’ve been able to do with that time. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that girl I knew who loved him so much. We only went out a couple times. Remember, I was sixteen and I was stupid. Maybe she could’ve loved me if I’d had more confidence; maybe not. Who knows, and after 30 years, it doesn’t matter anyhow. But I still remember that first kiss in the glare of a porch light. And the way the baby’s-breath she wore the night of the big school dance seemed to glow white against her dark hair. And I remember dancing with her on her back lawn one chilly evening, dancing slow and close to “Purple Rain.”

If for no other reason, I mourn the death of Prince Rogers Nelson because he gave me that moment.

Apr152016

Friday Evening Videos: “If We Make It Through December”

[Ed. note: I should have had this one up last Friday, for reasons that ought to be obvious, but it was one of those days — all of my Fridays have been those days recently, which really bums me out. Because Friday is a day to think about music videos, not 25-page white papers that leave you too mentally drained to bang out even a brief blog entry. Anyhow… ]

We’re mostly into rock music around this place — you may have noticed — but I confess to having a soft spot for a certain flavor of country music, too, primarily the stuff that was popular when I was a kid in the 1970s and early ’80s. That’s not as incongruous as it might sound, though. There was a lot of cross-pollination between the genres back then, and the line between country, pop, and rock was often pretty blurry, especially to an unsophisticated child who grew up listening to whatever Mom was playing in her pickup while she drove me around town as she ran her errands.

You’ve no doubt heard that one of the giants of that era, Merle Haggard, died a week ago Wednesday, on his 79th birthday. Haggard was practically the Aristotelian ideal of what we think a country musician is supposed to be: a populist poet who drew on his own difficult history — child of Dust Bowl refugees, incarcerated in San Quentin, married five times, the obligatory struggles with substance abuse — to evoke the lives and losses of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth types. In a career that spanned half a century, he scored a mind-boggling 38 number-one hits and continued to record and tour up until mere weeks before his death. (He played one of the Nevada/Utah border casinos only a couple months ago; I wish now I’d made the drive out there to see him.)

His signature hit “Okie from Muskogee,” from 1969, is either an ode to or a spoof of a particular set of redneck attitudes, and I frankly despise that one no matter which he intended it to be. More often, though, I found relatable authenticity in his lyrics and his natural vocal stylings, which were so different from the phony twang that nearly everybody in the genre uses these days. Unlike all the modern-day Garth Brooks wanna-bes, Haggard didn’t need to demonstrate his country bona fides with any affectations; he just told stories of quietly brave people who’ve drawn bad hands but keep on striving. Case in point, this week’s video selection and my favorite Merle Haggard song, “If We Make It Through December.”

Initially released in October 1973, the song is frequently classified as a Christmas tune because of its references to the holiday season, and the fact that it came from a Christmas album. But in fact, it’s more a song about economic hardship and loneliness, and also about resilience and hope for a better future, as expressed in the lines about summertime and California. The song spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, from December ’73 through January 1974, and it also crossed over to reach number 28 on the Billboard Hot 100. Whenever I hear it, I think of the farm town I knew as a boy, and the blue-collar men and women I saw every day, the ones who raised alfalfa and worked at the nearby Bingham Canyon copper mine, and who lingered over coffee and cigarettes at Orton’s Cafe and went boating or horseback-riding on the weekends. This song sounds like home to me, a form of home I haven’t known in decades.

The video clip I found is a 1976 performance on The Donny & Marie Show, which is a whole other gift basket of nostalgia:

Apr132016

Nostalgia’s a Bitch, Man, But She’s My Bitch

So, do you suppose that during all those years Luke Skywalker evidently spends standing on a rock in the ocean on Planet Ireland, brooding about how everything went to hell for him after his twenties, he ever got misty-eyed about the good old days of zooming around the desert in his landspeeder and hanging with Fixer and the gang at Toshi Station?

Just something that occurred to me this morning as I was remembering the little farm town I grew up in and the faceless suburb it’s become…

Apr072016

“You Just Pity Him and Get on with Your Life.”

I wasn’t inclined to see Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (or as I like to call it, The Super-Bat Showdown Show) from the very beginning. For one thing, the movie’s premise was obviously cribbed, at least in part, from The Dark Knight Returns, the hugely influential 1986 graphic novel by Frank Miller that I’ve never especially cared for. Yes, I know, I know… that’s heresy to the comic-book faithful. But I never claimed to be a full-fledged member of that particular cult. More of a dilettante hovering around the fringes and talking a good game. As for the color-desaturated visual style and the bleak, humorless, self-important tone that has come to define Warner Brothers’ film versions of DC Comics’ flagship characters in the post-Christopher Nolan era… well, let’s just say that’s not to my taste either. Contrast those dour slogs to the Marvel movies, whose characters also wrestle with questions of responsibility, power, and personal demons but somehow still manage to spare a moment or two to actually enjoy being superheroes. I mean, come on… part of the appeal of the entire superhero genre is wish-fulfillment. If you could fly or lift cars over your head or were effectively immortal, don’t you think there would be times, at least once in a while, when you’d just break out in an enormous grin because of the sheer awesomeness of what you’re capable of doing? And then there’s the whole matter of bright colors being more pleasing to the eye…

Still… I kind of had it in the back of my mind that I’d probably catch The Super-Bat Show eventually, maybe a few years from now when I stumble across it on television some Saturday afternoon. But after sampling the seemingly endless stream of bad reviews and even worse word-of-mouth over the past couple weeks, I’ve decided to not only not rush out to see this movie, but to actively avoid it. I suspect I’m receiving more entertainment from the bad reviews and rants I’ve been reading than the film itself could ever provide me

However, in all that tremendous, rushing torrent of boiling-white snark, disappointment, anger, and occasional cogent analysis of where, exactly, director Zack Snyder went wrong, there was one comment, one metaphor, that has really stood out for me, one that really encapsulates my sense of malaise over the whole Warner/DC thing. It comes from the writer Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Once all is said and done, I can’t even bring myself to despise Batman v. Superman the way I do Man of Steel. The latter has an arrogant contempt for the source material that is simply wrong. This one… Batman v Superman is a hapless kid who sits in the back of the class and eats paste all day. You can’t hate that. You just pity him and get on with your life.

Like the fanboys writing into the old letter-to-the-editors column used to say, “Make mine Marvel!”

Apr012016

“I Must Leave This Planet or Lose My Mind”

In lieu of the usual music-type video, I thought I’d offer a different sort of distraction for this Friday evening…

I’ve seen a lot of Star Wars parody videos over the years. I mean, a lot. There are nearly as many of those silly things out there on the InterWebs as there are cat videos. But every once in a while, one comes along that is truly sublime in its creativity, its unique take on the source material, and yes, its side-splitting, coffee-spewing, tear-inducing hilariousness. My buddy Robert sent me one such gem today, which re-imagines several key scenes from The Empire Strikes Back as a Spanish-language telenovela, and the results are… well, just take a look:

Ah, man. I’ve watched this half a dozen times this afternoon, and I’m still laughing. But you know… seeing Our Heroes as, ahem, young and horny only highlights how deeply unhappy I am with what becomes of them in The Force Awakens. One of these weekends, I’ve got to clear my calendar and write up exactly what I thought of that movie…

But it probably won’t be this weekend. I may post some more in the next 48 hours, but I’ve got other subjects in the chute ahead of my TFA review. In the meantime, have a good one, kids. Hope you have some nice spring weather to enjoy.

Mar302016

The Dark Came Down on All Hallow’s Eve…

From A Breath of Snow and Ashes, the sixth volume in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series:

The dark came down on All Hallows’ Eve. We went to sleep to the sound of howling wind and pelting rain, and woke on the Feast of All Saints to whiteness and large soft flakes falling down in absolute stillness. There is no more perfect stillness than the solitude in the heart of a snow storm.

This is the thing time, when the beloved dead draw near. The world turns inward, and the chilling air grows thick with dreams and mysterry. The sky goes from a sharp clear cold where a million stars burn bright and close, to the gray-pink cloud that enfolds the earth with the promise of snow.

I took one of Bree’s matches from its box and lit it, thrilling to the tiny leap of instant flame, and bent to put it to the kindling. Snow was falling, and winter had come; the season of fire. Candles and hearth fire, that lovely, leaping paradox, that destruction contained but never tamed, held at a safe distance to warm and enchant, but always, still, with that small sense of danger.

The smell of roasting pumpkins was thick and sweet in the air. Having ruled the night with fire, the jack-o’-lanterns went now to a more peaceful fate as pies and compost, to join the gentle rest of the earth before renewal. I had turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth.

Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence. Waking to the shock of frozen lakes under waning moonlight and the cold sun burning low and blue in the branches of the ice-cased trees, returning from our brief and necessary labors to food and story, to the warmth of firelight in the dark.

Around a fire, in the dark, all truths can be told, and heard, in safety.

I pulled on my woolen stockings, thick petticoats, my warmest shawl, and went down to poke up the kitchen fire. I stood watching wisps of steam rise from the fragrant cauldron, and felt myself turn inward. The world could go away, and we would heal.

No point here, nothing much to say, just a piece of writing that I found especially lovely and evocative. And enviable…

Mar222016

Moving Forward with Tiny, Stumbling Steps

Today, an American president is visiting Cuba for the first time in nearly a century and calling for an end to the last vestige of a Cold War that supposedly ended 25 years ago, an ineffective embargo that accomplished nothing of practical value but certainly generated a lot of human misery.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, barbarous fanatics murdered a bunch of innocent people. One step forward, two steps back, round and round she goes.

On days like this, it’s easy to give in to despair, to allow yourself to think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing we do matters because the problems we face are intractable. One step forward, two steps back. But one paragraph of President Obama’s speech to the people of Cuba this morning stood out for me:

But just stop and consider this fact about the American campaign that’s taking place right now. You had two Cuban Americans in the Republican Party, running against the legacy of a black man who is President, while arguing that they’re the best person to beat the Democratic nominee who will either be a woman or a Democratic Socialist. Who would have believed that back in 1959? That’s a measure of our progress as a democracy.

I participated tonight for the first time in a Democratic caucus in my home state of Utah. I’d heard stories of caucuses in years past where only a dozen people showed up, but today, tonight, the lines were stretched around the block. I had a pretty quick and easy experience myself, but I saw accounts on Facebook of people waiting hours to cast their ballots. In Utah, the reddest of the red states, where membership in the Republican party is all but assumed. Were all of these people Democrats? Can there possibly be so many Democrats in this entire state? Probably not. But if that many independents and, yes, probably some Republicans too, were moved to get involved tonight, something big is swirling around out there. And my gut feeling is that it’s pretty positive.

I grieve for the people of Brussels, just as I did for the people of Ankara and Paris before them. And I am genuinely worried about the possible outcome of the general election this fall. But no matter what happens in November, I firmly believe the forces of civilization are moving forward step by fumbling step. And the barbarians and fanatics of all descriptions — including our homegrown ones — can’t stop it. Not in the long run, anyhow.

As Andrew Sullivan used to frequently say on his departed and much-missed Daily Dish blog, know hope.

Mar222016

Happy 85th, Bill

Today we continue my silly annual tradition of wishing a happy birthday to William Shatner, a Canadian actor of some note who played my first childhood hero in an obscure old television series with which the readers of this blog may or may not be familiar.

At the age of 85, Shatner is — or at least presents himself as — more active and engaged with life than I am at slightly more than half that many years old. I envy him that. And yet…

It’s dangerous to make assumptions about the emotional state of a person you don’t know, especially one who pretends to be other people for a living. But I have to say that Bill Shatner seems really sad to me these days. (As in, he feels sad, not that he is sad, you smart-alecks.) He strikes me as a lonely man coming into the final stretch of his life with the dawning realization that he’s missed out on something deeply important. While the rest of his Star Trek costars have appeared to enjoy a lively camaraderie with one another over the years and have taken genuine pleasure in being part of such a cultural landmark, Shatner, for whatever reason, has held himself aloof from all of it until very recently, and even now his convention appearances tend to be… awkward. (Full disclosure: I’ve met him twice in convention settings and found him far more cordial than his reputation would suggest, but he’s still not at all comfortable interacting with fans, a tremendous contrast to all the other Trek alumni I’ve encountered.) By his own admission, his only real friend among the Trek cast was Leonard Nimoy. And now Leonard is gone… and in his recent book about his friend, Shatner reveals they weren’t even speaking at the time of Nimoy’s death. That little tidbit really breaks my heart.

I keep thinking of a line delivered by his alter ego in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — easily the worst of the original-cast Trek features, but one that nevertheless has its moments. In one of those moments, following yet another narrow escape, Captain Kirk tells Spock and Bones that he wasn’t afraid because the two of them, his closest friends, were with him. “I’ve always known that I would die alone,” he says. The boundary between the character and the actor often seems pretty thin anyhow, but now that Leonard and Deforest Kelly, who played Bones, and Jimmy Doohan, who was Scotty, are gone… with Nichelle Nichols diminished from a stroke and Walter Koenig not looking very well at all when I met him last fall… well, I wonder if Bill ever thinks about that line and gets a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach, and regrets the choices he made when he was younger.

I’m just speculating, and maybe I’m even projecting some subconscious fear of my own onto a man I only feel like I know. I’ve got no grounds and no right to have any of these ideas on behalf of another person who wouldn’t know me from Adam. Besides, George Takei will probably outlive all of us.

And yet… these are the impressions I get whenever I see The Shat these days. I hope I’m wrong.

In closing, I’ll just repeat what I wrote for this occasion last year:

If I could, I’d buy him a drink. And I would be honored to raise a glass with him…

To absent friends.

To life going on.

May you have many more happy returns, Bill.

Mar182016

Friday Evening Videos: “Call to the Heart”

Isn’t it funny how things occasionally bubble up out of the collective unconscious? I haven’t thought about the band Giuffria or its lone top-20 hit in years, but quite inexplicably, I’ve run across three references to both in the past week. So now, naturally, I have the song running on an infinite loop in my head, and I thought I’d do my part to boost the signal.

I don’t have any specific memories of “Call to the Heart,” aside from the fact that I always liked it. Curiously, I tend to associate the song and its corresponding video with my freshman year of college, 1987-88, when I spent much of my free time between classes in the student union watching MTV on the giant rear-projection television screen that used to dominate the dining area. However, a quick check of wikipedia reveals that the song was released several years earlier, in 1984, and that the band had in fact broken up by the time I would’ve been hanging around the union. So why then does my mind insist on placing it three years later in the timestream? No idea. Perhaps the video was back in the MTV rotation at that point, or maybe it just reminds me of similar-sounding pop-metal ballads that were on the charts around that time. Or it could be that I’m just getting old and all my memories are compressing into each other as the hard drive fills up. I prefer to think it’s one of the former options, but I have a good hunch of which one it really is.

As I mentioned, Giuffria — named for its founder and keyboard player, Gregg Giuffria — had a brief lifespan comprising a mere four years during which they produced two albums. Their self-titled first album did fairly well and spawned “Call to the Heart,” which peaked at number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100. The band’s second album, however, crashed and burned, and the group broke up not long after. In 2015, three of the original members got back together to play a few live shows, but Gregg himself wasn’t with them, which frankly baffles me. How the hell can a band named for a specific person go on without the person for whom the band is named? That’s a real paradox there.

I’ll concede this video isn’t anything remarkable. If nothing else, these weekly rambles down memory lane have taught me that most music videos were pretty lame, once the initial burst of creativity that accompanied the break-out of MTV had passed. But as John Scalzi pointed out in his usual tongue-in-cheek fashion, the video for “Call to the Heart” is an excellent time capsule of a particular moment in time, preserving forever the hair and clothes that defined the middle 1980s. Some of that stuff still looks pretty good to me — I tend to dress a lot like the lead singer’s first outfit, the white trainers, snug jeans, and leather jacket — but some of it… well, some of it does not. (Zebra and leopard prints, and spandex. Oy.)

Regardless of the look, though, I still like the sound. That moody opening and closing synth riff evokes neon-soaked alleyways on muggy summer nights, and the kind of angst that you couldn’t wait to outgrow but which nevertheless made you feel completely alive…

Mar172016

“Don’t Get Discouraged, Start Again”

Anne Rice, the author of Interview with the Vampire among many other things, has developed a remarkable relationship with her fans via her Facebook page. She posts regularly and frequently — and it really is her posting, not a staffer pretending to be her — on a wide variety of subjects ranging from archaeology to politics to which old movies she enjoys watching at night. She reveals a great deal of herself — I find it kind of adorable that a woman her age evidently has a tremendous crush on Jon Bon Jovi — and she engages with her fans who frequent the page to a highly unusual degree. I’ve had a couple of direct exchanges with her myself (we’ve shared our experiences as diabetics).

And of course, like many other writers who are active on social media or blogs, she offers a lot of practical advice and encouragement to those who would follow in her footsteps. Now, I don’t usually care what successful writers have to say about the craft or business, because I’ve read enough of their comments to know they all followed different paths to get where they are, and that one has to pretty much find your own way. And for me, all that advice is an abstraction anyhow, because I haven’t been writing in recent years, not fiction and not even as much here on the blog. In fact, lately I’ve been wondering if I even deserve to call myself a writer anymore, or if that’s something I ought to just try to let go of.

And that is probably why Anne Rice’s latest thoughts on writing, posted today, struck such a chord in me:

First and foremost: write. What makes an author is writing. Write no matter what. If you stop writing, start writing. Keep writing. If you go through a long period without writing, don’t get discouraged, start again. I don’t think it’s true that a “real writer” writes every day. I don’t write everyday and I think most people consider me a real writer. Just write in your own way. Protect your ideas and protect your material. Guard against criticism. If you hear something critical that helps you, take it, seize on it and use it. But if you hear a lot of bad things, don’t pay any attention. Just keep going. It’s very easy to criticize someone else’s writing. If you want an insight into how easy it is, just think of the classics you may not like personally, or how easy it is to make fun of them, or criticize them. It’s very easy for people to attack you and discourage you. Ignore them; be polite to them, but ignore them, and just keep going. Keep protecting your ideas and your work and stick with the feeling you have when you’re writing. If you enjoy what you’re writing, someone else is going to enjoy reading it someday. So just stick with that feeling; be faithful to that. Go where the pain is when you write; go where the pleasure is. Create the book that you would like to read, the book that you want to live in as a writer. Just keep going. Your first obligation, as Ernest Hemingway said, is to survive. To survive as a writer you have to have nerve, you have to be almost stubborn. There are many people who’ve told me I have no talent, and that my writing was no good. I simply ignored them. You have to do that if you want to succeed as a writer. The arts have always been rough. Nobody is really owned anything in the arts; nobody’s entitled to be published or to succeed. You do it by doing it. You do it by believing in yourself, and that faith in yourself is the most important thing you have.

“If you go through a long period without writing, don’t get discouraged, start again.” Those words give me hope that the flame hasn’t guttered out for good. Now, if I can just figure out how to actually, you know, do it…

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