Thursday, January 28, 2016

We Aren't Family

“Where your biological family has failed you, you always have me, your surrogate family … If it’s any consolation, I’m not happy about it either.”
-- Sheldon Cooper, Big Bang Theory

One of the most heartbreaking things to ever happen on Mad Men took place in the series finale. Don Draper shows up on the doorstep of his surrogate niece, Stephanie, supposedly to return the engagement ring her aunt Anna, his closest friend (and one-time legal wife; it’s a long story) had given him. Realizing he’s in bad shape, she takes him along to a California spiritual retreat, and then, stripped emotionally bare in a therapy session, she lashes out at him: “You’re not my family.”

It’s so painful because it’s nothing but the literal truth. Whatever she is in his mind, he isn’t her family. It’s not just (entirely) a rejection of the screwed-up Don, who has no family of his own, and barely ever did. It’s a slap to the whole romantic notion that we can create our own families apart from the pre-existing structure of spouses, children, and nuclear families of origin. Of course, we've all seen cases where it works, sometimes, for some people. But, as in this case, it can happen that the severing of one tie can reveal the whole idea as illusory.

Even if your relationships are strained, for example, your sister's children will still be your nieces or nephews. Your mother's siblings are still your aunts or uncles. Even if you're not close, even if you've barely met, the bond is still recognized as one that exists. But even the closest relations of your closest friends are connected to you only through the voluntary relationship that exists between you and those specific people. It may, if you're lucky, end up extending. But voluntary relationships are still not seen in the same light as as involuntary ones. As the saying goes, you can pick your friends, but not your relatives, and the fact that you can choose to pick them or not means the connections aren't seen as objective and unchangeable -- just something that's there, whether you want it or not.

Despite all the changes in society, blood is still, often, blood.

So I wanted to yell at Stephanie: "You are too family!" Where there's been a bond of love and friendship, it shouldn't just unravel. Of course, we'd seen this character be an idealist and a hippie, so maybe she'd just seen how, so often, it doesn't work. Me, though: I still believe in the possibilities of the surrogate family. We live in a fractured time, and most of us need all the support we can get.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

I Ran to the Street, Looking for Information

Like everyone else who was blithely celebrating Mr. Bowie's birthday one minute, and mourning his death practically the next, I have my opinions about which of his songs are the best -- especially once you get past the less obvious choices. James Gunn had a great list (which is no surprise), but enough of the similar retrospectives have made me go "oh, please" that I've written my own.

"Fill Your Heart." Hunky Dory, like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars right after it, is an almost perfect album. I mean, "Queen Bitch"! "The Bewley Brothers"! But I have always been unaccountably, uncontrollably in love with this song. It took all these years before I realized it was written by Biff Rose and Paul Williams (king of '70s easy listening and star of the kitschfest Phantom of the Paradise). Which makes sense, since it's catchy and poppy and full of goofy, hippy-dippy lyrics. But it seems perfect for Mr. Bowie! Despite being someone with a reputation for calculating artifice, he delivers a performance bursting with naive sincerity. When he sings "Love heals the mind and makes it FREEEE!" I want to fling out my arms like Shah Rukh Khan, and hug the whole universe.

"Five Years." As true today as it was in 1983 -- this is my favorite Mr. Bowie song, hands down. This pre-apocalyptic tune introduces the premise of Ziggy Stardust, but works equally well as a stand-alone. Both despairing and inspirational, it tells of a world in which the Earth is doomed to an unspecified destruction, which will take place in, you guessed it, five years, itemizing the transcendent joy of perfectly ordinary, mundane human life: exactly what something like Ziggy was designed to help his fans escape from. Weird, right? But it's beautiful. I have often related to the line when, dazzled by everything that's going to be lost, he sings "My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to space/I had to cram so many things to store everything in there." Then follows that up wistfully with "I never thought I'd need so many people." I could cry just thinking about it. It's perfectly book-ended with the also-amazing and more-often-played "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide," which closes the album. 

"Hang Onto Yourself." Bonus Ziggy track. If anyone wants to know what glam rock sounds like, this is it. You can just hear the crazy outfits and outrageous makeup in it! I don't even know what you call what those guitars are doing at the end: distorting? But combined with the heavy breathing and the "come on"'s, this is fun and a little bit campy, and there is no reason that can't be as artistic as something more serious.

"Watch That Man." "He talks like a jerk, but he could eat you with a fork and spoon." Aladdin Sane tends to get lost in the shuffle because it's just great, not perfect, but it has some of my favorites, mainly this one. I like its scenario - a party that, typically, devolves into a dystopian vision -- and the clever lyrics, with references to Benny Goodman and the "Tiger Rag." Said by some to be a hasty Rolling Stones knock-off, but if this is someone's substandard throw-away, they're operating at a way higher level than most of us!

"Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family." Well, this was inevitable. It's a really weird piece that concludes the 1984 section of Diamond Dogs. I kind of have to include the song "Big Brother" with it, because one song segues right into the other. And that one's pretty great too, if not quite the whackjob tour-de-force that "Chant" is.

"Always Crashing in the Same Car"/"A New Career in a New Town." The yin and yang of Low? I've always thought of them as companion pieces: one about doing the same thing over and over, the other about starting fresh; one with coolly delivered lyrics, the other an instrumental; both of them very short (just over and just under three minutes, respectively). They sum up that time in my 20s when I was in fact doing both of those things at the same time.

"Joe the Lion." From the "Heroes" album, this shares that vibes-y, Wall of Sound style with the title track, plus a bombastic vocal style that makes it larger than life. This is a Bowie song that's little remarked upon, so I have no idea who Joe is supposed to be, why he's "the Lion," or what his deal is. The Wikipedia says it was inspired by Chris Burden, the performance artist who was literally nailed to a car, but I can't help thinking that Joe's nailing is a bit more metaphorical.

"It's No Game (Part I)." This is Mr. Bowie at his punkest. The aggressive Japanese lyrics (performed by Michi Hirota), followed up by Bowie practically shrieking them in English, is amazing. The line "to be insulted by these fascists is so degrading" was practically on my coat of arms in the Reagan years -- in fact, the one Bowie button I generally wore was his face from the cover of this album, Scary Monsters.

"John, I'm Only Dancing." This single was on the Changesonebowie cassette that pretty much changed my life. There's something about his voice here, that turns up in other early (and early-ish) songs as well, where it sounds almost like it's breaking. Whenever I hear it, it twinges a chord of weirdly emotional intimacy. The about-to-crack sound moves me more than the polished croon of, for example, a "Young Americans." Which is a great song, but I just don't react to it the same way.

So that's my Mr. Bowie collection. One of these days I'll listen to Blackstar, with my broken heart.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Who Else Will Toot It?

An update on my various doings around the web, and in so-called real life. It feels very horn-tooty to talk about, but I've got to get over that if I want to survive in the modern world. And it's January 1st, so a good time for a review.

Most recently, I fulfilled a long-time ambition and did an audio recording for LibriVox, whose motto is "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain." Here's me, reading James Thomson's "The City of Dreadful Night," as part of a short poetry collection.  I'm track 3. Currently, I'm recording an audiobook of one of my favorite, lesser-known Gothic novels. More about that later!

In 2014, I had my first blog post on the awesome Robert E. Howard site Two Gun Raconteur. I ended up tweaking that post, "I Put a Spell On You: Robert E. Howard's Voodoo and Conjure Stories," and presenting it at this year's PCA/ACA Conference in New Orleans, where I got to meet some of my REHupa colleagues  in person. (That's the Robert E. Howard United Press Association). The essay was nominated for a Robert E. Howard Foundation award, and although it didn't won (I voted for the winner myself, because it deserved it), it netted me the Venarium Award as an Emerging Scholar. Which is an amazing honor, and I'm still kind of floored. I did some more work on Howard, and on the amazing Welsh weird writer Arthur Machen, about which there'll be more to know in 2016.

The TGR blog (as we shorten it) also published my essay "The Brazen Peacock," about the appearance of the Yezidis in Howard's fiction.
In the summer, also to my great surprise, my poetry book Votive: Poems and Oracle was selected by artist Marjorie Schlossman as the basis for a series of paintings, which will be part of the local Arts Partnership's Community Supported Art project. That's also still in the works. I've seen some of the series, and the style and concept fit so well with my poems, it's like they were written just for this. Which is bizarre, considering I didn't think anyone would even like them, but awesome.

I've got three different book manuscripts out: two are in the submission limbo, and one has already had some rejections, but is still sauntering forth into the world, with hope in its heart.

Also, I'm continuing with the belly dancing: notably with Shimmy Mob 2015, which was fracking FREEZING.

And I "acted" and did behind-the-scenes production assisting on a few short horror trailers for the GrindFlicks Fargo events.

Plus I got a new job.

Whew! It's no wonder it's taken me so long to update my blog!