You know the play, right? This unattractive guy Cyrano is in love with a beautiful woman, Roxanne, who is, in turn, in love with a handsome dumbo called Christian. In order to express his true feelings in secret, Cyrano volunteers to write love letters for Christian from the front, where they’ve both been posted (it is set in the year 1640, and France is at war with Spain) and tragedy ensues.

Cyrano is a witty farce from long ago, but to me its themes are timeless. Also, I think the true test of a classic’s, well, classicalness, is how easily it can fit into the current zeitgeist. Cyrano was written in 1897, but it feels really relevant, if you consider how Cyrano’s act of ventriloquism – creating a whole persona for Christian – is a little bit like the role ChatGPT has offered to play for people. One of my students recently told me she uses the nonsense machine to craft responses to texts from guys she is flirting with on Tinder, and I was appalled.

“But what if HE’S doing that too?” I gasped.

My student just laughed but I don’t think it’s very funny. If that’s the case – which it likely is – then all that’s happening is two chatbots are engaging in idiot banter.

Cyrano’s role in this romance is a bit different than using Chat would be, because he’s really in love with Roxanne, so his letters to her ring with sincerity rather than smarm. But it is also similar, because he makes Christian seem like someone who is smarter than he is – and like someone he is not, just like social media does. By the end of the play, Christian himself is aware of this problem, shouting at Cyrano, “I have my own feelings, sir!” And Roxanne herself isn’t that crazy about the news when she finally gets it: “I have loved one man and lost him twice,” she concludes sadly as Cyrano expires in her lap.

Anyway, it is all very romantic, although I think that the perennial relevance of Cyrano isn’t so much that aspect; rather, it is that it exhibits the perennial human impulse to get someone else to do your homework for you. And also, though less obviously, that wars are wrong and stupid and endless, and finally that judging people on by their looks is just never going to work out for people how they want.

But then, almost nothing does, and nothing less seldom than technology. According to an interesting article in the most recent issue of LARB, the problem with AI is not its ability to overwrite our own feelings or make things up: as the article says, “the real threat is not the flamboyant hallucination. It’s the impossibility of knowing whether any text we now come across represents an individual sensibility or a synthetic hybrid.”

Now that Chat GPT and Claude are overtaking our communications, we’ve all become like Roxanne after learning that everything she thought about her lover was fake, i.e. living in a state of constant suspicion and dread. Maybe that’s why we all feel like we’re going crazy: because giants await us, and our courage has failed.

The night after seeing Cyrano, I went to a punk rock show on the Golden Hinde, the ancient ship that Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in in the year 1578, supposedly landing at Drake’s Bay in Marin, shooting sea lions at the Farallones, and giving his name to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Despite my proximity to the scenes of his exploits, I have never really thought about Sir Francis Drake but a quick peek at Wikipedia in advance of the show advised me that he was the worst kind of colonizer, a pirate and an early slaver; he even once had one of his shipmates – someone he didn’t like very much -- beheaded for witchcraft, and I mean, how bogus a charge can you get? No wonder Sir Francis Drake High School recently changed its name to Archie Williams High.

According to the podcast “Empire,” Drake, his pal Queen Elizabeth, and some other well-off people in the 16^th century invented the concept of private equity in order to justify their wretched pursuits, so, in keeping with the comments I made previously about relevancy, the Golden Hinde’s relationship to actual piracy is pretty relevant to stuff going on today, since private equity and pirates and grifters and corrupt heads of state aren’t exactly a thing of the past. Still, it felt weird to be at their actual fount.

The show featured two women who fronted punk rock bands in the 1970s: Helen McCookerybook of the Chefs, and Pauline Murray of Penetration. Helen and Pauline had played a gig the day before in Brighton which had somehow got mixed up in a fascist riot, and they were still a little spooked, I think. But nothing could be more spooky than playing below decks on a ship this historic. For obvious reasons, the Golden Hinde is not ADA compliant, and it was a little bit uncomfortable in there, in part because people were much shorter back then. We all had to crouch a lot to avoid banging our heads on things, and at one point I sort of had to crab walk past a bunch of cannons. Everyone attending (myself included) was really quite old, so I woke up the next morning feeling very achy from sitting on a hard bench, and the whole time I was in there I kept imagining all the tiny sea dogs, together – at least 59 of them, which was how many returned from the voyage – crammed together in there for three years, with no real toilet arrangements and mad old captain Drake bullying the living daylights out of them.

If walls could talk, we would probably all have run out there screaming our heads off.

But this isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy going to the concert because I absolutely did. I’ve been in tons of odd venues and this was the most special one ever, indeed, it would be hard to compete with it. The performers were both playing acoustic guitars, and the sonics were great down there in the hold; as aurally resonant as the hard wood was aromatic. The room smelt and sounded like authenticity itself, and if there was any link at all between the events of 1587 and those of 1977, the year when Penetration had a hit with the song “Don’t Dictate,” it was that, and that alone. There was nothing the least bit modern about either the ship we sat on or the music we listened to: it could have been played on lutes in the renaissance or banjos in the south, it didn’t need anything but the strings and the fingers and the lungs of the artists, and the sentiments in all the songs were ones that will always resonate with humans, frustration, grief, joy, anger, irritation…the palette of punk, as it were.

But if there were any happy moments aboard that ship, then probably it was when someone was playing a sea shanty and everyone was singing along, and it probably didn’t sound all that different than what we were hearing. The past may be a different country, but they don’t do things THAT differently there. As Andrew Marvell says, “…at my back I always hear/time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” On board the Golden Hinde, the chariot is right overhead.

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So I went, and I’m here to tell you, if you are an old person who likes classic rock music, this is a film that will go down easy. It’s got all the tropes we old people like in films about music, from the struggling artist to the evil music industry villains, and although those things are almost outmoded in today’s real world music industry, it’s still kind of fun to watch a fantasy flick about What It Used To Be Like.

So many movies are like this, I find. They are either about NOW and everyone in the movie is on their i-phone messaging or pinging people, or they are set before 2004, and thus the characters have to go to a lot more trouble to get things done. For example, my friend and I wrote a ticking clock screenplay about a road trip to see a band and we had to make sure it was set before the invention of the smart phone so that our girls could legitimately be broke, get lost, and end up sitting on the side of the road for a long time needing to be rescued.

It’s true of all media now but it’s especially true of movies about music, since the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of it is so stark. “Power Ballad” sits uneasily between the old world of music and the new one, because it’s about a washed up rock practitioner - played by Paul Rudd - who had dreams of stardom in the 80s or 90s (someone in the film mocks this era, as “whatever the hell that was about.”) But he lives in the here and now. So when the song that is the crux of the film’s plot goes viral, it gets “millions of streams” rather than sells a million copies - and honestly, that’s different, since there’s no real revenue in streams, and record companies aren’t quite like how they used to be either.

But movies like this have to suspend our disbelief a bit about things like that.

I actually expected a lot from “Power Ballad,” because it has a lot of elements I like, such as Dublin and Paul Rudd, and it also lacks things I don’t like, horror, super heroes, murders. I mean, yeah, it was smack in the genre of movies about Sad Middle Aged Men who somehow didn’t get their dream life because WOMEN. But this kind of movie almost has to be like that, because a) that was the era, and b) most movies that get made are written by men of that age. I’ve stopped being surprised or hurt by that, but it feels worth mentioning: as with life, everything is about men men men men men, and maybe if we’re lucky, how we ladies react to them. But just as with Dublin, if I boycotted that perspective, I’d get to see exactly nothing. Such is life.

Anyhoo. The main character, Rick Power, is in an Irish wedding cover band that plays familiar songs like Celebration and Man Eater (and of course “The Boys are Back in Town” because we are in Ireland, after all), and he perfectly dates himself by having named his daughter AJA. He is depicted as a family man with an orderly life and a house with a mancave in which he writes his own music, and a wife and daughter who sort of tolerate him because he is cute.

Being that kind of a man, he forces his 14 year old daughter to listen to his newest song, and she doesn’t like it. She says, “Dad, girls aren’t lonely now, we don’t like songs about being all lovelorn.”

“What do you want them to be about then?” he asks, and she responds: “Revenge.”

Ironically, the song he eventually writes that becomes a global hit is NOT about revenge, and IS about love, and there may be a message in that, as well. Movies about music always suffer from one main issue, which is that they are dependent on the song in question being great - or at least good enough to support the theory that it would be a world wide hit, earning its writer tons of money. The song that stands in for this is OK - good enough to support the premise I guess - but in a way, it also supports the idea that such songs are mostly popular because of their production values and who sings them. Even in this fictional universe, the only fanbase worth any actual money is for a brand, not a person, particularly not an old guy in his 40s, however cute. Here, the song is a hit for a Harry Styles-like boy band reject, played by Nick Jonas. I.e. a human brand.

Jonas’s character is actually the most interesting person in the film, and the most true to life. Rick Power is a fantasy good guy, but Jonas’s Danny Wilson is what actually exists in this world now: kids who have grown up famous, who have talent but no moral compass, and whose existence is so incredibly different from those of us in the real world that they cannot possibly relate to our problems. He reminded me a little bit of Liam Payne, the member of One Direction who had the least currency, and who leapt off a building in Brazil in despair last year. And he reminded me of, well, Nick Jonas.

Which is fine. In fact, juxtaposing a boy band reject and a wedding band has-been is quite clever; as it gets right to the heart of how the music industry works and two contrasting ways of commodifying music. “Power Ballad” insists that there is a third, more noble and satisfying, path, which is actual songwriting, and I guess that’s true, though it is hard to illustrate, narratively, the act of creation. In both “Deliver Me From Nowhere” and “Michael,” this is shown by the main characters staring intently at recording equipment and twiddling knobs. In this movie, at least, we see the two protagonists - or rather, the protagonist and antagonist - drinking and jamming together all night long, and we at least get a sense of how muddled-up the process is.

Both types of scenes, however, add to the idea the musical creation is some kind of magical alchemy that belongs to the past and not the present. Deep down we all know that AI is coming to get us, and music, so maybe movies like “Power Ballad” work because they allow us to think there is still some way to escape.

All day long the streets of my town had been overrun with the BTS Army. So-called soldiers in ripped tights and bunny-ear hairbands were sitting in long lines outside the Trader Joe’s eating pre-packaged salads. Groups of families identically dressed in BTS basketball tops were milling about downtown; svelte twenty-somethings with lilac-tinted hair wearing white minis and fur boots were mobbing the shopping mall, and lines and lines of people were walking in between the train station and campus on El Camino Real, threading their way in between many many little stands grilling delicious-smelling Mexican sausages.

On the corner by the High School stood the ladies of Indivisible in pink blow-up unicorn outfits. They were handing out voter pamphlets and registering people under a sign that read, “The Epstein Files Are Not in Iran.” Across the street, younger protesters flew Palestinian flags. Cops were directing the traffic flowing between the two sides, girls were handing out baggies of homemade pins, barrettes, and stickers, and as I was crossing, I overheard a teenager say to a very little boy wearing a Jimin T shirt, “Hey Jimin’s my bias too!” (In the Army, “bias” means your favorite member).

It was cool and funny and friendly and happy, and as I biked home I noticed that the stadium had started to glow a funny shade of green, like a spaceship about to takeoff.

BTS were booked to play three nights in my town, at a venue - the football stadium - that is close enough to my house that you could walk there if you wanted to. A couple of days before the first show was scheduled to begin, some old curmudgeon wrote a grumpy post on Nextdoor.com complaining about the millions of trucks and the impending noise and chaos, and that person was ratio’ed to hell by the collective ire of every single one of her neighbors. The post’s been deleted so I can’t quote it directly but basically she was accused of being a wicked old witch who couldn’t bear to see kids having a little fun. “Oh, lighten up” was the nicest thing anyone said to her.

It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of this kind of thing, since the City of Palo Alto must have made absolute bank on the human influx, rivalled only by the vast sums taken in by the BTS merch booths that lined the stadium walk. AND YET. Capitalism notwithstanding, in a funny way, to me, BTS represents all that is pure and good and bright and kind in the global imagination.

When you see the audience shaking their light sticks in unison - light sticks that cost $68 each, and which light up together in sequence programmed by the concert -- it can feel like you are part of some kind of fantastical machine, a factory that churns out fans who’s sole purpose is to provide a background set...or worse, income.

But as I said to my friend Kammy as we were walking home through throngs of kids who were literally tear-stained with the dregs of their pleasure after the concert: who DOESN’T want to spend a few hours in the company of 50,000 people who are having the best night of their entire lives?

On Sunday night, BTS took the stage at 7:10 pm in more or less broad daylight, and I can only tell you the song they opened with (“Hooligan”) because I looked it up. I am unfamiliar with the latest album, Arirang, from which much of the set was drawn, and what old songs I knew (“Butter,” “Dynamite”) came very late in the set. It wasn’t at all like concerts I am used to seeing, anyway, because there was no band or instruments: rather, the group sang live (or possibly live-ish) to backing tracks, surrounded by dancers who Did Things while they did so.

BTS also danced, but a bit less than formerly: rather than the hypnotic precision formations I associate with them, they spotlighted their individuality and joked around with one another, freestyling and jumping on each other’s backs. Every time the camera framed one of them on the big screen 1/7th of the audience - for whom the showcased artist was their ‘bias’ or favorite - would scream its collective head off.

The set, which was in the round, had great sight lines. No one had a better seat than anyone else, and everyone was encouraged to interact with one another, or the video, rather than with the people on stage. Mostly people just danced in their seats, shaking their light sticks, but there were some memorable moments, such as when the band, followed by their dancers, formed a parade and marched all the way around the arena track, and when they set off confetti, and it filled the sky like colored snow, falling, like mercy, upon the place beneath.

The show split itself into three acts, with breaks between each one, and a thing I especially enjoyed was when they were off stage and the cameras roamed the stadium, throwing up on the big screen the signs and costumes of audience members. Some were children holding signs that said things like, “My name is HOPE and I love BTS!” (One of BTS members is called J-Hope). Another little kid’s sign said: “In the Army since BIRTH”.

Some were calls outs to songs or biases, but others just called out their extreme happiness of being there. One sign said, “Life Can Be Fun!” Another said, tellingly: “Finally I am home.”

In his Nobel Prize winning book “Crowds and Power” (1960), which was the basis of my PhD dissertation and book, Elias Canetti writes of crowds which are contained in stadiums or other buildings thusly.

“The closed crowd renounces growth and puts the stress on permanence…It creates a space for itself which it will fill. This space can be compared to a vessel into which liquid is being poured and whose capacity is known. In this way the crowd sacrifices its chance of growth, but gains in staying power. It is protected from outside influences which could become hostile and dangerous and it sets its hope on repetition. It is the expectation of reassembly which enables its members to accept each dispersal. The building is waiting for them; it exists for their sake and, so long as it is there, they will be able to meet in the same manner. The space is theirs, even during the ebb, and in its emptiness it reminds them of the flood.”

Clearly those words describe the BTS crowd, and who can blame them for wishing to shut out a hostile and dangerous world? There are people who say that KPOP is appropriative and, but I am not sure that’s true: there is something about the way the band members interact with one another, something about their particular sense of humor, which is super Korean, deeply attractive and also, very much not American, diverging from American pop, rap, and r & b in the same way that Miyazaki’s children films differ from Disney’s. There is a relationship between BTS and western boy bands, but they aren’t quite the same thing.

Besides, the one overwhelming point that stood out was that the concert arena radiated joy. BTS may be a factory bent on generating fans, cash and attention, and its metaphor for itself may be disturbingly military, but at least it is an army which is non-patriarchical, gender fluid, LGBTQ friendly, age non-specific, and on the side of justice…as when, for example, in the year 2020, the BTS Army mobilized to book themselves all the free tickets to rightwing rallies across America...and then just didn’t show up, leaving the arenas half empty.

Sad to say, in the end, the only thing I don’t really like about BTS is the music. I don’t dislike it, but it doesn’t really move me. On the one hand, I am of an age to find aggression-less rap songs to be soothing rather than toothless, but I am also exactly the wrong age to be slain by the gorgeousity of the performers with their unreal good looks and super polished movements. To me, they seem like robots, or anime characters come to life - which is of course the whole point. To young people, that’s what’s great about them, but to me it is merely spooky.

That said, I do recognize the power of a boy band, the power of a fandom, and the power of crowds in general (see: Canetti). And even though I am not a huge fan of KPOP music, I do love things from Korea, and here’s why: from 2008-2011, I spent three summers in a row teaching a class in Seoul to Korean high school seniors on their way to the states for college, and it was easily the highlight of my entire time in graduate school. Ooh, how I loved living in and teaching in Seoul: the hilarious kids I taught, the wonderful walks I took, and the blazing fast internet in the safe and cool subway...the coffee shops, the pajama-and-umbrella kiosks, the little notebooks with silly sayings on them...it practically hurts me to remember it all now. I can remember how I was reading Cloud Atlas, still my favorite reading experience of all time ever, and how we would go to the local Noraebang after work and sing stupid songs at the top of our lungs, and how, when I got back to my hotel, I would order up a plain baked potato from the Outback Steakhouse that was in the basement of my lodgings.

But I didn’t eat it with butter, because butter was so expensive there - $8 for a tiny cube.

BTS (who began in 2009) reminds me of those glorious summers, just as I am reminded whenever I taste kimchi, or hear cicadas, or smell hot rain on cement in the middle of a summer downpour. Some Saturdays, I would walk around the Olympic Park listening to the tinny sound of K-pop which would be blasted from tiny speakers hidden in the shrubbery, and some evenings in Gangnam I would come upon a K-pop band performing impromptu on a makeshift stage for all the kids who were milling around shopping and eating donuts. (American donuts were a craze that year.)

In the years I spent in Seoul, K-Pop was already huge in Korea, but not so much in the USA, where it was still just a subculture. Bands like Super Junior, Girls Generation and Big Bang were bigger than BTS then, and I was dying to go to a KPop concert, but like seeing a baseball game, it was a little beyond my ability to get to one. Fast forward fifteen years, and here I am, at my very first, and I know full well I am late for the party: BTS are just having a victory lap. I have a 25 year old friend had tickets for all three nights, and she is probably typical in that she loved them as a teenager and now has the money to buy her own tickets.

For her and those like her, this tour is really BTS nostalgia, a night for the longtime fans, as J-Hope said in his little impromptu speech, ‘make happy memories;’ after all, the title of their latest album is Arirang, a word that in Korean means something exactly like that. Arirang is also the title of Korea’s most famous folk song and it invokes longing, love, enduring hardship and Korean history. I think that is the proper word for the feelings that BTS invoked in me, and maybe everyone else in that stadium, as the fireworks popped off. Arirang, arirang, aririyo: 청청하늘엔 별도 많고 우리네 가슴엔 꿈도 많다 .

Bubbles’ dramatic role is to remind us that Michael Jackson was the loneliest boy in the universe. But he has another, and possibly less deliberate, role as well: with his big eyes and tidy diaper, he twitches on that twin sense of the uncanny valley versus real life dichotomy which Michael himself always wanted to breach.

Bubbles’ palpable falseness, which, like the fakeness of this simulated Michael Jackson, shines through his extremely appealing exterior, speaks volumes about the film. But they aren’t quite the words you think they are – or at least not to me. Michael scored a lowly 39% with ‘real’ film critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but a whopping 98% with real people, and I am here to tell you that I side with the people on this one. Doubtless all the criticism of Michael, which is getting dinged for its corniness, sanitization, and its omissions, are valid. But I enjoyed every minute of it. So maybe it IS a fairy tale, the sanitized version of Michael’s life that his family (who produced it) wants to believe is the truth. But it is also the version that we want to believe is the truth.

So what’s not to like? Fairy tale or not, the basic plot points are true, however outlandish. Did Michael Jackson, the son of a poor black steel worker growing up in the rust belt during the mid-20^th century’s cultural oppression of black population, become rich and famous beyond the wildest of imaginations? Check. Did MTV, out of sheer racism, refuse to play his videos, despite his album being the top seller of all time ever? Check. Did the entirety of the black-tie clad audience at Motown’s 25^th Anniversary rise to their feet in unison, shrieking with orgasmic pleasure when he did the Moonwalk on TV for the first time? And did everyone else on earth talk about it non-stop afterwards despite there being no YouTube in those days to view it on?

Check check check check and check.

xx

Michael may leave out or condense a lot of the messy awful of his life, and the dialogue is admittedly stiff. But the main character, played by Michael Jackson’s actual nephew Jafaar Jackson, is utterly convincing in the role, and the main points about Michael Jackson’s weird psychology – that his dad was an abusive tyrant whom he was terrified of, that he grew up extremely lonely due to his childhood rock stardom, and that he was a once-in-a-generation, talent -- are very much to the fore.

Besides, if you grew up in the late 20^th century, when you’re watching Michael, you’ll know all the stuff they’re not saying, anyway. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that the years after the final scene were all going to be downhill, and I certainly didn’t need to see what is in fact a terrible American tragedy played out before me. What I needed to see was a sweet recreation of the Jackson Five singing “ABC” and “I Want You Back” in small theaters around Chicago, complete with all the 70s fashions. I needed to see them performing on sound stages for television shows I faintly remember watching when I was a child, and to hear those songs ring out like bells of freedom – to ring out, and I quote, from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city… to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last”. Michael Jackson didn’t say that, but it works for me here, because honestly, there is probably no more joyous and hopeful American music, no music that will make you feel like everything’s going be alright, than the music of the Jackson Five.

Later, the film dwells largely on an incandescent adult Michael Jackson performing solo in front of screaming crowds at Wembley and Dodger stadiums, and these scenes too worked brilliantly. I loved that the film maker allowed us to see entire songs performed, rather than snippets, and I loved that we saw the faces of the crowds reacting to him. The scenes were akin to the ones shot by the Canadian Film Board in 1961 of Paul Anka’s crowds at Freedomland in the film Lonely Boy; showing the crowds as supplicants, biblical in their fervor, and this was exactly right approach, because the pleasures of Michael Jackson’s work have always been physical ones: you enjoy them with your ears and eyes, and not exactly with your intellect.

Of course, the movie definitely has its dumb side. For example, like a few other things I’ve seen lately – like “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” “A Complete Unknown,” and the play “Stereophonic” -- this is a film that tries hard to capture the act of creation by dwelling on old media forms like tape recorders, microphones, magazines, and just plain elbow grease. So we see Michael in the studio, twiddling knobs, Michael, standing alone in front of the microphone, trying not to move his feet, Michael, in the living room, practicing his steps, Michael, directing his music videos, and practicing his dance movies, scribbling down lyrics, and so on. It’s pretty cliched, but on the other hand, after being confronted with a host of AI-generated idiocy in the endless previews we watched beforehand, it is a relief to see such devices. In some ways, the movie works as a relaxing treatise against AI, arguing against short cuts, mechanization, and technology, in favor of sheer human individuality, hard work, and actual brain-driven creative endeavor.

On the other hand, you could argue that it is just the opposite, for just as Bubbles is CGI, Jafaar Jackson is not Michael Jackson, but a simulacrum (albeit a very good one). Michael is a tribute act, but then, who are we kidding? If we want to see the artists of this era now, that is what we are fated to look at.

Michael Jackson died in June of 2009, and it was the first instance I remember of the speed of social media. Thanks to twitter, which I had only just acknowledged, I knew of his death less than an hour after the ambulance got to his house, and that in itself was pretty shocking. The death itself was shocking too, although of course it followed a similar pattern of so many rock stars: But unlike those artists, a lot of people I knew at that time didn’t care much about Michael Jackson. His lawsuits, his finances, his facial stuff, and finally, the crass and demoralizing trials he was subjected to, and so on, all had taken their toll on his reputation.

The kind of people I knew back then thought he didn’t matter anymore, but in the summer of 2009, my daughter was 7 years old and attended a camp with an almost universally nonwhite personnel, and when the news broke of his death, the counselors went into a brief fugue state of mourning before buckling down to prepare a tribute. Every day for the rest of the summer, instead of going to arts and crafts, the kids were forced to practice the Thriller zombie dance for hours, and at the end of the summer when they performed it on the library lawn, all the siblings and the parents and neighbors and the whole city of Menlo Park joined in, and everyone sang Jackson Five and Jackson songs until well into twilight.

It was absolutely spectacular, one shiny moment of love and musical oneness, and like it or not, that’s the spirit that this movie captures.

I’ve never had the slightest desire to go to Coachella, but the truth is, until this year, I wanted to go to Couchella even less. I don’t really like being glued to the TV that much and also, watching streamed music puts you at the mercy of the camera people. It always feels to me like they’ve seized your head between their hands and are moving it wherever they want it.

But it turns out that - as with real festivals -- it can be fun if you go with the right people, and also if you have the right snacks.

What’s not to like? No lines, no crowds, no dust, no aching feet, no parking snafus or traffic and you can go to the bathroom whenever you like. Also, rather than trudge miles between drunks on a lengthy trail between stages, you can move from one to the other with the magical click of a button. In other words, the two experiences have almost nothing in common whatsoever. Except for the similarity in the lineups, the are utterly unalike, and they allow for different insights.

There’s always more bands at Coachella than a normal person could see, so all we saw this year we saw Addison Rae, Sombr, Nine Inch Noize, Pink Pantheress, Laufey, the Strokes, FKA Twigs, BigBang, Karol G and Justin Bieber and I have opinions about them all - but especially Addison Rae who was truly the worst thing I have ever seen in decades. According to Wikipedia, which was never out of my hand during Couchella, she is one of the most lauded artists of the year and her last record did well on the charts, but that is a meaningless stat in the age of streaming, since no one buys records except probably the label itself. In fact, if you look up any of these acts on wikipedia now, you can’t tell them apart, because all it lists are fakey stats like that one. For the first time, reading this nonsense, I caught a glimpse of what we lost when we lost mainstream rock criticism: there seems to be no place for someone to say in print what utterly manufactured and meaningless plastic crap she represents, how degraded it all is.

I’m still mad at rock criticism though, for being so shitty and basic and toxic and awful to me personally. Fuck you, rock criticism. That’s why I am not going to tell you what I thought about all the other names up there, except to say that I thought Sombr was the Strokes until I realized he just looks like Julian Casablancas did twenty years ago, that Laufey and Pink Pantheress put on very fun shows, and that Justin Bieber, lying flat on his back on a sort of pancake shaped bulge on the stage, clad in a hoodie over a beanie so you couldn’t see his face, and singing his plaintive little catchphrases to the sky, really and truly seems like the loneliest boy on the planet. That final shot of him in front of the fireworks broke my heart a little bit.

Oh plus: I’ve always suspected that Nine Inch Nails was just enacting the most cliche’d idea of what people who think rock is satanic imagine it’s like and Nine Inch Noize’s set confirmed this opinion. We enjoyed looking at the naked people writhing around in a big pile of flesh under glowing red lights AS IF IN HELL because it made us laugh. Then the exact same naked people piled up in a flesh tower on the FKA Twigs stage the next night. Sillikins!

So much of Coachella (not Couchella) seems so over the top like that. Everything is such a huge production that the sets are interplanetary -- in the sense that you could see them from outer space. I am sure there are many pleasures of Coachella that I am not experiencing on my couch - the warm night air, for example, the smell of the California spring, the swooping views over the desert, and the body-presence of hot crowds pressing in on one. I’ve had fun at festivals in the past, but that was before they went out of control in terms of size, cost and crowds….all of which I think can be attributed to the invention smart phones and social media, for it is only by broadcasting themselves AT Coachella that the people there get their money’s worth.

It’s weird how all the shots of the crowds just show them with their hands held high selfifying themselves into the picture. It’s as if they don’t exist unless they can show themselves there. Perhaps the kids are suffering from pre-stalgia, wherein they prepare themselves to remember their experiences, before they even have them.

xx

I went to Couchella on Saturday night and on Sunday afternoon, I went to a different kind of Couchella. At the first one, I sat on my couch in my own living room and watched the TV and at the second one, I sat on a couch at a guy named John’s house and watched one of my favorite bands, the Young Fresh Fellows, play for real, right in front of me. Guess which experience was better?

It probably goes without saying that, though the couches were similar, the two experiences were not the same at all, and one was indeed better than the other. The Fellows-at-John’s house was probably more like the real Coachella, in that the band utilized guitars, amps, drums, and there was a certain amount of downtime during which I ate pulled pork and macaroni, petted the band dog, Gladys, discussed the finale of The Pitt with new friends, and had my nails painted a color called Emflowered (”like empowered, only with an F,” the painter explained).

Otherwise, it was more like Couchella, in that I sat on a couch and rocked out. It was slightly shambolic, but in the best way possible, i.e. they took requests and played whatever you asked, even if they didn’t know it. They also played their own songs, old and new – “Taco Wagon” and “Hillbilly Drummer Girl” and “Get Out of My Cave”; 3 Gasconading Saints and I’m a Prison, respectively, as well as a bunch of covers, including 2 by the Who (“The Kids Are Alright” and “I Can’t Explain”) and others we are more used to hearing from them, like Mott the Hoople’s “I Wish I Was Your Mother” and the Kinks’s “Picture Book.”

“Pictures book/of people with each other/to prove they love each other/A long time ago.”

I did not take a selfie, like a Coachella-goer, because that would have been weird; instead, as I sat on the couch and they played it all out right in front of me, I sort of selfied privately, by reliving my youth in my brain. But isn’t it funny how, looking back, you can see when the tippy top of your journey through the world is? A hundred thousand years ago, the Young Fresh Fellows allowed me and my friend Lisa to accompany them on a ten-day tour across Europe. That trip was right before the fall - by which I mean, the fall of rock, not autumn. Two months later I was back in Europe with a book contract and Nirvana, but that trip - chronicled in my first book, Route 666 - was not the real zenith of my career; the zenith had already occurred, in some nightclub on a hilltop in the Basque Country that had a wall right up the middle and which, I am told, was bombed to bits by ETA in the year 2000.

It’s hard to believe that journey was so long ago, but here we now all are, in another country and what in many ways may as well be another planet, since cyberspace, GPS and cell phones would have changed that trip a lot, and not necessarily for the better. The point, however, is that the Fellows are people who punctuate my life. Every decade or so they jump back in, right where we left off, and it’s always fantastic to know that they’re not going anywhere and that neither am I.

Recently, however, my coach at diving practice asked me to choose the music, and I blanked. “Anything but classic rock,” I said, and he said, “But isn’t that your JAM?”

Sob. Later, I posted this on my feed asking for suggestions, and one friend commented, “Talking Heads!” Talking Heads are totally classic rock, but even so, I thought that was a great suggestion. Everyone likes Talking Heads, even little kids, though obviously they’ve only heard them through their parents. Last year I saw a super group with 1 ½ members play all of Remain in Light, and that was pretty fun. This weekend, I went to see David Byrne play a similar setlist, and it was also fun, but in entirely different way.

The Remain in Light tour (as you will find out if you click and read) was more a reminiscence of what a groove band is like at the height of its power. By contrast, Byrne’s performance is watchable, rather than groovable: it’s more like seeing theater than going to a club, but it’s actually neither. On stage, he conducts a 12-piece band, all dressed alike in jumpsuits and trainers the color of the first Talking Heads album but, rather than the usual static guitar/bass/drum set type combo, this band moves across the stage like a marching band in formation whilst dodging in and out of video backgrounds that make the stage into a deep, ever-moving wormhole. It is an illusion but the depth it creates in your mind is mesmerizing. There was one video taken by drone that wafted across the roofs of a neighborhood, and the video was so nimble that it could easily make you feel carsick.

It did me, anyway.

x

The show was at Frost Amphitheater on the Stanford campus, a venue I can walk to. (I didn’t, but I could have, which is kind of why I went.) Near the beginning, Byrne broadcast on the screen behind him some recent pictures he’d taken of places around this town while tooling about on his bicycle. One was of the Tesla dealership. Another was of some used tires by the Baylands. Both were of scenes of places that we, who live here, can see at any moment, but by including them in this show, Byrne allowed us in on a different perspective, his, and this, I think is his greatest talent. In his work – for example, the film American Utopia which is about marching bands – he fixes his gaze on something we thought we knew and creates new thoughts in us about them.

This show drew from both Talking Heads and Byrne’s solo work, which is far more whimsical: in both cases, the songs tend not to be about individual feelings or events so much as about moods: head spaces, or maybe just space in general. Indeed, so many of the songs are about physical space that it reminded me of this very famous quote about rock music, often attributed to Frank Zappa, which goes, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s meant as a BIG BURN on rock critics, but I’ve always thought it was a burn on whoever says it, especially since the quote is usually trotted out by bands who’ve gotten bad reviews. Besides, dancing about architecture wouldn’t be difficult, any dancer could show how it makes them feel or how it constricts their movements.

Anyway, the point is that David Byrne has written many songs about buildings, including a newer one called “My Apartment Is My Friend.” The Heads’ second album was called “More songs about buildings and food,” for god’s sake, and the choruses of his two most famous songs are shoutouts to houses. In fact, the entire set was highly informed by architecture, writ large, from the video landscapes that gave depth to the performance, to the subject of the songs themselves. Indeed, now that I think about it, so many of his songs refer explicitly to architecture in some way that it may even be that he is slyly referencing the original quote.

This show drew from both his older and newer, solo work, and it was absorbing and enjoyable whether you knew the songs or not, because there was a lot to look at. For the most part his music is lighthearted, evoking a mood that is lightly ironic and wholly arty, and at this juncture, when both those things feel swamped by reality, it feels good to immerse oneself in the warmth of that standpoint.

But there’s no real escape from the precarity of now, is there? So it was impossible to listen to the song “Life During Wartime” without thinking how awful it was that one is now listening to it, well, during wartime. I am deadly sure Talking Heads never meant that song to be prescient but what are we meant to think at lyrics like:

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You oughta know not to stand by the window
Somebody see you up there.

Alas. Throughout the song I was reminded of the meme, “Nobody thought the revolution would start in Minneapolis. Except Prince.”

And I thought also about Alex and Renee, and the six other death-by-Ice victims, not to mention the thousand others which have been incurred in the last few months elsewhere, and I mourned for a time when we could joke about surveillance as the song’s lyrics do; when we could yell, “This ain’t no party! this ain’t no disco!” with irony, rather than, as we have to do now, a kind of sickly comprehension. When, near the end, the background finally exploded into images of ICE targets and protests, beginning with that famous video of that kid on a bike who evades them after making them run around like chickens, the crowd let out a collective sigh of contentment.

These days the lyrics of that song speaks for itself; I am sure everyone listening to it was having the same thoughts. But then, that is why we go to concerts, to think the same thoughts as a crowd of people we are in. To feel just a little bit stronger.

The Madonna Inn, for those who don’t know, is an enormously vulgar way station on the side of Highway 101, more or less exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Build in the late 1950s by a super-rich developer named Mr. Madonna, it is a monument to tackiness, i.e., the insides of it are all pink and it has turrets. Native Californians of a certain age all know it because it’s where we all stopped when driving on parental field trips between LA and SF but my daughter had never seen it because she’s only either flown or gone on the other highway.

So we went on a jaunt there for her spring break, in order to indulge in slutty food like Giant steaks and 2 foot high 7 layer champagne cake, and we had a lot of fun. And as the set wound down, Jeff said: “To finish up, I’m going to play my very favorite song,” and I said, I bet it’s “What a Wonderful World” and guess what, it WAS.

“Mom! Are you psychic?”

“No,” I said glumly, “I am just very in tune with the minds of the Jeff Elliots of this world.”

In the last episode of this blog, I wondered if the spirit of America was in the midst of being psychically crushed by the sheer weight of tackiness and AI Slop – of ugliness and cruelty, to put it more succinctly. Despite its devotion to all those things, going to the Madonna Inn feels weirdly celebratory in a shamefaced way, but our destination was a real castle – “real,” I mean -- that is, Hearst Castle, in San Simeon, the truly bonkers edifice built by William Randolph Hearst and Julia Morgan, which looms over that part of California as a monument to the spoils of wealth.

Hearst Castle doesn’t represent actual bad taste in the same way that the Madonna Inn does, which is why you can’t laugh at it or enjoy it in the same ironic way, but it does have some weird hold over the imagination of this state. There are nice things inside it, although some, like the 15^th century choir stalls, or the 3,000-year-old statue looted from Egypt, are puzzlingly out of place, to say the least. Only the swimming pools feel sort of organic, in that swimming pools R us here in California, so having the best ones ever conceived of makes a bit of sense. No one who has ever been there has disagreed with the statement that they are the best swimming pools ever made, in spite of their dangerous diving facilities.

Otherwise, the architectural pastiche, the child-like grandeur, the pirate’s booty of looted treasures…it’s like all the more colonially suspect rooms in the British Museum have been shoved into some rackety-packety cathedral, all run by the National Park Service. For example, in the main hall, there are some priceless French tapestries of enormous historical importance. In France itself, they only have copies of them.

The Visitor Center – perhaps influenced by the Hearst Foundation – pitches this as some kind of hallowed environmentalist, preservationist, sacred site, but that is not the whole truth of the matter. Lest we forget, William Randolph Hearst was just a spoilt nepo baby who inherited his money from his dad, who had made it by discovering the Comstock Lode. According to the 45-minute movie you can watch whilst waiting for your daughter to complete her second tour of the edifice, little Willie was boundlessly impressed as a ten year old by the splendors of Europe on his grand tour there in 1873, so much so that he decided, later in life, to despoil the whole continent.

That’s not how they put it, but that’s kind of what happened: after he got enormously wealthy on his own, by using his dad’s money to buy newspapers and then inventing wars and scandals to make them more exciting, Willie managed to acquire a lot of enormous and valuable artifacts, some from countries who needed to raise cash after World War 2, and then transported them to his mountain idyll in San Luis Obispo County, mostly via ship. In order to do so, he had to build an entire wharf and an airstrip, as well as a long road up a steep mountain, where he then had to blast off the tops of the hills with significant amounts of TNT.

In addition, he built and stocked a little village in San Simeon where he could house and feed an enormous workforce for 15 years, not to mention tend all the zoo animals he kept. When later he went bankrupt from his efforts to maintain this castle, the zoo animals were the first things to go, because their feed was so expensive.

Anyway. Touring Hearst Castle is probably the most engrossing educational experience you can have for $30, and although the education part isn’t very critical – in fact, it’s not critical at all - it’s unlikely that many people leave the place without having some kind of reflexive realization that the whole thing represents a wasteful squanderation of wealth and is ultimately sort of gross. Are there people who leave this place thinking, ‘Ooh, that was so cool – if I had a ton of money, I’d like to do this”? I doubt it. As I said, the whole project is quite obsequiously run, so on the bus that takes you up the mountainside, the voice of Alex Trebek assures us that Hearst Castle is an important heritage site in California and that the meaning of Hearst Castle is that it teaches us to “follow our dreams.” But isn’t another takeaway that some people – well, rich people – sometimes have really terrible dreams that maybe shouldn’t be followed up upon at all?

Given what fun it is to visit, it seems too harsh to call Hearst Castle an evil dream. But it’s not merely a fever one, because it really and truly exists. I do encourage people to go, because like the Madonna Inn, it is truly an ur-California-experience, that expresses something deep about this state, or at least this state in the 20^th century. Back then my parents took me once when I was little and I distinctly remember my Dad’s haughty attitude, which was that it was a thieves’ den and ugly to boot. But my dad was, a) European, and b) an architect and devotee of the Bauhaus school, so you can only imagine his mystified horror. It was also, I see now, only about 25 years since Hearst himself had died, a factor that must have changed its tenor: when we went, you could still see lots and lots of the zoo animals around, zebras and giraffes and the like, though the kangaroos and the polar bears were long gone.*

Hearst Castle has existed through the ages, and a few years ago, I went again with a friend and found it extremely interesting, and this time, I liked it better still because contextually, first of all, it no longer seems quite as tacky as compared to whatever is going on aesthetically at Mar a Go-Go and the White House, and second of all, its very existence seems totally in keeping with today’s mega billionaires – you know, the ones who decide to fund a fruitless Missions to Mars, or who shut down all of Venice in order to get ostentatiously married there in front of a host of strange, degraded celebrities, or who park gold plated Rolls’ in front of Harrods for months on end, or who buy yachts that are so large they can’t get under historic bridges so then they petition to blow up the bridges. It all feels very here and now, or maybe a better way of putting it would be, ‘twas ever thus.

XXX

*It makes me mad he kept polar bears.

The film, titled EPiC for “Elvis Presley In Concert,” really gets that idea. Directed by Baz Luhrmann, it is an amalgam of two previously released, but remastered, live Elvis concerts from the early 1970s Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970), and Elvis on Tour (1972), as well as never seen before footage of rehearsals for those concerts that was discovered in a salt mine in Kansas. It has all been restored, edited, and then overlaid narrative taken from many released and unreleased interviews with the King, and it shows indubitably how seeing Elvis – or loving him, I should say -- was about a lot more than just his songs. The first twenty minutes in particular, a compendium of clips of his career from 1954 to 1956, when he was drafted, captures the frenzy and excitement and the absolute modernity of what he was doing, the ground that he broke, the intensity of the feelings he churned up, the cultural chasm he rent in the fabric of the 50s. It shows why, when Elvis Presley died, in 1977, the critic Lester Bangs wrote a piece about him in which he famously stated, “We will never agree on anything the way that we agreed about Elvis.”

But did we? The film’s clips from interviews with Elvis emphasize the way the mainstream media, to quote a review I read by Sheila O’Malley, didn’t interrogate Elvis at the time so much as litigate him. Sober commentators ask him time and again if he is sick of rock, ashamed of rock, and if, upon his return from the Army, he would be, in essence, willing to put away his childish things. Is the era of rock almost over, someone asks him. Elvis, unruffled, answers: “It won’t be over until they find something awfully good to replace it.”

Well, they didn’t.

When you’re a college professor, every year the kids know fewer and fewer of your points of reference. One by one they fade, like Cheshire cats, and you can no longer expect them to know who REM, U2, or even Richard Nixon, is. This year my students didn’t know of the cartoon “Recess,” and quite a few haven’t even read or seen Harry Potter. Someone I know was also complaining that their students no longer know who Elvis is, but that isn’t quite as jarring, given that his heyday – 1955- 56 – was 70 years ago. 70 years prior to when I was in college, commercial radio hadn’t even been invented yet.

Elvis was still very, very famous when I was little, but to me he was an ugly old fat guy in a white jumpsuit, a joke. My parents didn’t listen to his music – actually, they didn’t listen to any music. And when he died, I just thought, what’s the big deal, he is OLD.

He was 42.

It’s important to remember that age gap when you’re watching this movie, because it really comes off like ancient history. In fact, I always watch movies like this with an eye towards whether my daughter would like it, and for the first twenty minutes I thought she would. It did a fantastic job of explaining the cataclysmic effect of Elvis on culture itself and how, to quote Bangs again, “he gave us all an erection of the heart.” But it may be that there are two types of Elvis fans, the type who enjoy his music and then the type, like me, who were influenced by Greil Marcus’s description of his music in his monumental book “Mystery Train.” I felt about the book the same way as the critic Dwight Garner, who says in the introduction to a new, 50^th anniversary edition: “It reverberated in my young mind like the E major chord that ends the Beatle’s A Day In the Life.”

“Part of Elvis’s achievement, Marcus saw” (Garner continues) “was to plant new questions, over a thousand radio transmitters into the American mind. “Why not trade pain and boredom for kicks and style? Why not make an escape from a way of life…the question that trails off the last page of Huckleberry Finn – into a way of life?”*

This is, of course, no longer a fashionable way to think about Elvis Presley – if one even thinks about him at all. For years, probably since rap was invented, many people have thought that he epitomizes the popular music bent towards appropriating and monetizing black music, and while this is not to say his work didn’t do that, the montage argues that there is something a lot more intense going on. Sure, his oeuvre took songs like ‘Hound Dog” and “That’s Alright,” and presented them appealingly to white audiences. But there is another argument to be made that a) given the history of white appropriation, if it wasn’t him it was definitely going to be someone else and b) he did something else entirely - something unique -- in addition. In a way he presaged hiphop’s seminal invention of the mashup. In the film we see him singing gospel with his band and one immediately understands just how much his weird mishmash of that genre with dirty blues was a) original b) sacrilegious and c) just so much fun.

By the early 70s, when the rest of the film takes place, that sense of danger, wonder, and modernity surrounding Elvis Presley had completely receded, and from here on in it might be hard to make a case for this movie to the younger set. It’s replaced by something else, something tacky and vulgar, something inherently empty and maybe even incoherent, but also very singular. This is the Elvis that Greil Marcus captures so well in the first part of the chapter of “Mystery Train” on Elvis, when he says, “History without myth is surely a wasteland; but myths are compelling only when they are at odds with history. When they replace the need to make history, they too are a dead end, and merely smug. Elvis’s performance of his myth is so satisfying to his audience that he is left with no musical identity whatsoever,.”

EPiC captures this Elvis, the smug one whose version of America is contained in a trilogy of songs meant to sum up all of American history - “Dixie,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the slave song “All My Trials.” It is, as Greil tells us, as if “the culture he has made out of the blues, las Vegas, gospel music, Hollywood, Schmaltz, Mississippi and rock n’ roll can contain any America you might want to conjure up…Elvis recognizes that the Civil War has never ended, and so he will perform the Union.”

And it is, he adds, a complete illusion. No one can reconcile American history to itself, but the attempt that Elvis made is pretty amazing, even if its dénouement was a tragedy. Well, especially if its dénouement was a tragedy. Because, to quote the book again, “Compete assimilation really means complete acceptance. The immigrant who is completely assimilated into America has lost the faculty of adding whatever is special about himself to his country; for any artist, complete assimilation means the adoption of an aesthetic where no lines are drawn and no choices are made.”

“Mystery Train” is now 50 years old itself, but unlike EPiC, it feels as contemporary as the first day I read it. It is surprising to realize that when it was written, Greil was only 30, Elvis was still alive, and most astonishing of all, the distance between early Elvis (Good Elvis, if you will), and the then-current Elvis, the one Greil describes here, was only 20 years, i.e. the same distance as between now and 2006, the year that “Mr. Brightsides” and “Hollaback Girl” were hits, the year that the first Taylor Swift album was released.

“Mystery Train” has amazing insights into what is important about Elvis Presley and about the invention of rock and its incredible effect on the 20^th century and the American psyche. When I first read it, I bought those insights whole hog, and I still do. And yet, both then and now, watching this film, I was still kind of felled by the aesthetic shipwreck that Elvis became. He himself is still beautiful beneath his weird hair and makeup, but the music can’t overcome the sight of his gestures and his clothes: the overall effect of the awful haircut and the white jumpsuit and the bedazzled belt buckles and the gaudy jewelry and most of all the capes is just very shocking. Clothes may not make the man, but I simply cannot get past them when they are on Elvis’s body. Everything he means or could have meant is obliterated by the vision of his beautiful container stuffed into those terrible, terrible garments. They may as well be blackboard erasers in how efficiently they are able to remove all trace of who he is, was, and still could be.

But erasure-via-vulgarity may be the perfect prism in which to regard Elvis’s legacy. At this particular juncture in history, everything we ever thought about creating, upholding, establishing, escaping or imagining America has been sunk in a similar mire. Indeed, it seems almost right and fitting that the brightest emblem of 20th century America would be crushed by the weight of sheer tackiness, for that is what one sees going on in current culture, be it Mar a Lago or AI slop. Elvis always was ahead of his time.

*At the end of the novel, Huck has decided to go West. “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

In the bedroom, on the floor, were a million t shirts with bands’ names on them, and 75% of them said Glass Eye, his absolute favorite.

Then there were the mix-tapes, because we came from the analog generation and that stuff – real stuff – was so important to us. When you look at the remains of an analog past, you are looking at someone’s inner life. And when it’s a person you lived with for so many years, then it’s your own inner life you’re looking at as well.

I picked up one cassette and noted that it said, “Ray Davies, the Fillmore, 10-12-1995.”

“Hey, this is mine,” I said to C, and I meant not only that it had once belonged to me, and that I had left it behind all those years ago when her dad and I split up, but that the memory it contained was mine as well, the memory we shared of it, the intensity of going to that particular show together. There was going to be so much contained on that thin bit of magnetic tape, and I couldn’t take it. So I put it in my bag and forgot about it.

Then one day recently at practice one of the kids I coach, aged 15, was revealed to be unable to use a key. Not the key to a pie chart or a musical key, like A minor, but an actual metal key, specifically the one that unlocks the equipment room at the pool.

“Well, how am I supposed to know how to use that thing?” she said. “It’s VINTAGE. And I’m YOUNG.”

“I’m young too,” scoffed her friend. “And I know how to use it.”

“I,” she added proudly, “know how to use a cassette deck!”

The exchange reminded me of that cassette, and, a few weeks having passed and having calmed down a bit, I hankered to play it. But I realized that though I too know how to use a cassette deck, I didn’t actually HAVE one anymore, so I acquired one.

For fun I ordered a see-through one, so you can see all the mechanisms at work as it spins. It felt very visceral. Also for fun I asked C if she could figure out how to open it, put the batteries in, the tape itself in, and turn up the volume, and she struggled for a bit trying to do those things before I snatched it away and showed her. She probably could have figured it out herself but it was nice for me to reconnect with the hardwired feeling of doing those things with my hands, and also I don’t think she understood how fragile a tape like that was. It occurred to me that, at 31 years old, it was possible it no longer worked and I didn’t want to risk it getting spoiled. Remember how we used to put a pencil into the wheels between spindles to wind them up better?

Remember pressing play?

Remember tape hiss?

Remember how, when side 1 is over, you flip it – or else make the player play in reverse?

It was a vintage experience alright, and so was lying on my bed stock-still for 120 minutes and listening to it through headphones (because the player didn’t have an external amplifier). If anything, that was the hardest part. I haven’t done something like that in ages. Today, everyone goes around with headphones on, listening to music throughout their daily life, but not me. I notice that they are also always multi-tasking, and that’s not how you’re supposed to listen. You’re supposed to concentrate. Yes, you can do some things simultaneously, like make bead bracelets, sort your laundry, or play with the kitten, but you can’t – or I should say, shouldn’t -- do other things, like read, or play word games, or do your homework. You should immerse yourself, and that’s what I did, and wow, did it feel intense.

It’s possible that getting this cassette from Dave’s ruined house made the immersion experience heavier than it might have been. Also heavy: listening to it on the first day that the US was bombing Iran. These were saddening things. But it was also a lovely thing, because I think that it is also quite possible that this cassette was actually a record of the very best show I ever went to? And given my history, that is saying a lot.

Oct. 12, 1995 was my Dad’s birthday. On that day, in 1995, Ray Davies was 49 years old, considerably younger than I am now although of course I thought he was old. He was doing a solo tour in order to promote his book “X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography,” which was a memoir about growing up in post-War London, going to art school, forming the Kinks, opening for the Beatles, touring the U.S. for the first time, and basically experiencing what might now be called a classic ‘mid-century modern’ youth, London style. Well, experiencing it, and also shaping it, in his own way.

The book is great, my absolute favorite music memoir. I don’t have it anymore or I’d quote you the passage about England winning the World Cup in 1966. But the tour, on which he read from the book and sang songs from it, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar (with one backing musician, Pete Mathieson, on drums) was even better. You can see versions of it on YouTube but for reasons I can’t quite explain, it feels important to me to listen to this show, i.e. the one I was actually at. The set consists of “Victoria,” “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon,” “20^th Century Man,” “You Really Got Me,” All Day and All Of The Night,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” “Autumn Almanac,” “Village Green,” “Days, “Waterloo Sunset,” “Lola,” “I Go To Sleep,” and a whole lot more.

There are also a number of songs penned for the book, like “Art School Girl, “Julie Finkel,” and “London Song” (quoted below), but mostly it is him narrating his experience of growing up in London and participating in that captivating, unusual, and utterly gone-gone era.

And if you’re ever up on Highgate Hill on a clear day
You can see right down to Leicester Square

Crystal Palace, Clapham Common, right down to Streatham Hill
North and South, I feel that I’m a Londoner still

A CD version of it was released in 2006, under the title “Storyteller: X-Ray”, but my memory of the actual show was that it was a lot more extensive and better than the record, and the tape proves that beyond a doubt. You could (and should) read the book and listen to the record, or look up versions of the whole show which are floating around on YouTube. All will show that both the show and the material were far better than I even thought at the time, because Ray Davies writes the kind of music that stands outside of time. His songs seem to get more relevant and therefore more poignant as time and experience teach us its ever more awful lessons about life.

Like when he says:

“I’m a product of the century which started at the height of class conscious imperialism, and ended with a society so reduced to totalitarianist commonness, that in my last years at art college, the saying, ‘mediocrity rises’ proliferated.”

And then he sings:

I was born in a welfare state, ruled by bureaucracy, controlled by civil servants, and people dressed in grey…Got no privacy. Got no liberty. Because 20^th century people took it all away.

Sigh. Is it fair to say those words hit harder now that I’m listening to them here in the 21^st century? I think they do, partly because death seems to reshape how you experience the music you experienced together with someone, but also because the world he describes, and his sadness at its passing, feels more like how I feel now about now. When I used to listen to Kinks LPs like “Village Green Preservation Society,” “Arthur” and “Something Else” I thought they were such poignant and tuneful descriptions of London in the 1940s and 50s – i.e. the time when my Dad was growing up there. Thus they matched my delight in books like “Lucky Jim” and “The Fountain Overflows” because they illustrated that past so well, and also what made that past worth escaping.

Ironically, it was Ray Davies’ work, his songs and his life story, that turned that grim black and white era into living color. Perhaps what made listening to that story this week was that nowadays MY past – the 90s – seems like a simpler and more poignant long gone time, and the things that I did there which were once in living color now seem to have become black and white.

In the end, I had to teach my diver how to use a metal key, a skill she claims she has no use for - much like diving, the sport I coach her in, but then, having a bunch of useless skills are part of old age, and in addition to diving and using a cassette deck, my useless skills include listening to, and writing about, old music. After Dave died, I said to my brother, “It’s funny how when someone dies you suddenly feel differently about them,” and he said, “Yes, it’s like how you don’t really know how you feel about a book until you’re finished with it.” Maybe that explains why a 30 year old tape of Ray Davies sounded even better than it did when I first experienced it, because the history of the Kinks has a period on it, it isn’t going to change now, nor would I ever want it to.

The individual skaters aren’t required to conform to a theme, but the music many of them choose did anyway. Here’s just a few of the songs I heard:

--Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)

--Like a Virgin (Madonna)

--Send in the Clowns (Judy Collins)

-- Last Dance (Donna Summer)

--MacArthur Park (The Donna Summer version)

--What A Wonderful World (performed by Lexi Walker and the Piano Guys)--Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)

--Like a Virgin (Madonna)

--Send in the Clowns (Judy Collins)

-- Last Dance (Donna Summer)

--MacArthur Park (The Donna Summer version)

--What A Wonderful World (performed by Lexi Walker and the Piano Guys)--Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)

--Like a Virgin (Madonna)

--Send in the Clowns (Judy Collins)

-- Last Dance (Donna Summer)

--MacArthur Park (The Donna Summer version)

--What A Wonderful World (performed by Lexi Walker and the Piano Guys)

I’m not exactly sure what the theme is, but it’s a big emotional change from last Olympics, when one of the Russian competitors skated to the song “I Want To Be Your Dog.” She said she was influenced by the film “Cruella” but it was hard not to think it was a coded message for help regarding her cruel termagent of a coach, Eteri Tutberidze, who was seen flogging her skaters – not literally, but verbally – to the point where she has now been banned from the kiss and cry. The 2022 final ended in chaos and opprobrium; NBC did a whole segment on how incredibly mismanaged, frightening and even physically abusive the sport was. Even the IOC, not known to respond to that kind of thing, have subsequently increased the minimum age for the competitors to 17.

Elsewhere in those games, Russian and Chinese athletes dominated in some sports, and were also caught doping, though little was done to stop that. And a few days after the Olympics concluded, Russia invaded Ukraine, having seemingly waited for that moment; one of the things I highly disliked that year was seeing Putin being saluted at the opening ceremonies.

But that was then. In the ensuing four years, the world has changed a lot, and almost entirely for the worse. How weird would it be though if the Olympics was the one place where that wasn’t the trajectory?

In a 1996 article titled The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing, Annie Goldman writes that (American, specifically Western, ski resorts like Aspen, Vail, Taos and Squaw Valley (sic)) “serve as compelling historical sites where relations of race and ethnicity, class, and labor enable (d) the carefree frolicking of those on the slopes,” and this seems doubly true of the Winter Olympics. Obviously the countries with more mountains will do better in the Winter Olympics, and the countries with more money to build ski ramps and resorts and bobsled runs do better on top of that. It’s all a big shell game, produced and exhibited for us so that advertisers can grab us by the pocketbook.

And yet. There is something about the Olympics that allows us to gauge certain things about global politics, national mood, and the values we are told to hold dear. To me these Olympics are most interesting for the weird volte face that the media has taken about - wait for it - American values as a whole.

Put briefly, this is the first Olympics I’ve ever watched where the media and the world have been super kind to the American competitors who have failed to medal: not just kind, but laudatory. Ilia Malinin, for example, pitched as the “quad god” for months by advertisers, networks, magazines and so on, choked big time. But instead of berating or shaming him or acting endlessly disappointed, as they have done in the past -- instead of even letting their faces fall -- the media is lauding him for his good sportsmanship, and using him to remind us that hey: WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES.

This is great, obviously. It’s a fantastic message! I endorse it wholeheartedly. But it’s also...unexpected? Since when America? Since when have sports stars - and by extension us - been told it’s actually OK to lose?

But that’s what I heard, again and again, around the story of Ilia Malinin, and his was only one story which was spun that way. Lindsay Vonn also tanked, and her story is now one of resilience and bravery. Same with Amber Glenn, Chloe Kim, and many others slated to “bring home the gold,” as the network likes to put it. And even our girl Alysa Liu, who did pull off the old cliché’d narrative with a gold medal run, managed to upset expectations by insisting throughout the entire competition that she was just there for fun, that she didn’t care if she medaled, and that she felt totally relaxed throughout the proceedings, because, she said, being there was enough.

Alysa was a huge breath of fresh air, but even she went smack against the dicta of the US sports narratives, which invariably say that sports stories need to end in victory. If you’ve ever had anything to do with sports, you know that’s not real life, and one can only hope that sports movies going forward will have plots that mimic the media’s new tone, where someone does a sport just until they are sick of it, ditches their parents’ coaching for someone more neutral, or is asked to ski down a mountain on a torn ACL and says, “Hell no.”

I have thoughts on why the media’s message has changed so much. It may reflect the fact that American athletes aren’t that great at winter sports and are therefore bound to place far down the medal count. It may reflect the fact that AMERICA is in that position right now: globally, politically, even economically, we are now losers, so being America, our message now is, let’s smile and accept it and even maybe, tell people it’s better to be loser?

Possibly, it’s just a reaction to the prevailing political mood: people, today, are in need of a jolt of kindness and good sportsmanship, to offset what they are actually seeing on the ground here, which is the polar opposite.

Or maybe bullying and showing off really IS going out of style, and we are seeing it on the playing field first. My favorite quote about music is, “Music is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society,” meaning that music sometimes tells us what’s going to happen next. Maybe that’s the same with sports coverage, maybe it too changes faster than the zeitgeist. Wouldn’t that be neat?

As I said, directly after the last Olympics, the world was plunged into two horrid wars, which have truly changed the world order, and thinking back, you could almost feel that about to happen there, especially during the awful drama on the figure skating ice. Winter was coming, to coin a phrase. But if the mood at the Milan Olympics is anything to go by, than the snow may be about to melt and summer is icumen in.

Too many people have now weighed in on the Bad Bunny moment for me to be able to add anything new to the discussion, but I did wonder what my man Guy DeBord would have said about that show. If the spectacle is, as he says, “The permanent opium war meant to make people identify…satisfaction with survival,” then what happens when the spectacle itself actually reenacts that equation in front of our eyes?

Because the Super Bowl Half Time show had a message to send to America, and by now, everyone knows what it was. I didn’t need to do a lecture on it for my students, because the facts behind the images spoke for themselves. Indeed, you could line them up by bullet points in a power point presentation and read them off, thusly:

--1898, Puerto Rico (PR) became a US possession solely so the US could invest in, exploit and profit on its sugar production…sugar, and the Caribbean, being one of the key commodities that supported slavery.

--Today PR has 3.2 million people, making it the 33^rd most populous US territory, ahead of Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota, etc. But its citizens have no representation in Congress and are disenfranchised from the Presidential election.

--In 2017, Hurricane Maria knocked out the power grid of the island and it has yet to be repaired.

Plus:

50 million Americans speak Spanish.

That’s pretty much all you needed to know to understand the subtext of the spectacle. That’s it.

Despite apparent criticism in certain quarters, it should be said that everyone I knew or met or read actually loved Bad Bunny’s show, not so much because they love his music, but because the show expressed joy rather than fear, and joy is a much-needed emotion at this time.

It also acknowledged, or rather, made visible, a colonial history and culture that are currently under attack in our country, and that felt brave, and also relevant, in a way that Super Bowl Half Time shows generally don’t. Even Kendrick, whose show last year was also fantastic, felt like he was engaging in an argument that the people it was aimed at weren’t paying attention to.

This one was different, perhaps because times are more desperate. I would also like to suggest that it was riveting because it was singular. Guy DeBord says that the spectacle is, “money one can only look at,” and its purpose is in part to hide the miseries of capitalism, but Bad Bunny’s performance somehow reversed that equation. From the people dancing on the sparkling power grids to the human sugar cane plants that turned the football field into a Caribbean plantation, this spectacle played with the notion of what and who gets to entertain who…and how.

One thing this performance reminded me of was the notion of “the white gaze.” This is something Toni Morrison has talked about, and it is the idea that the default reader or observer is coming from the perspective of someone who identifies themselves white. A place where you see it most clearly is in photographs in National Geographic, where the white man gazes on the non-white subject in ways that direct our thoughts to a white point of view, but it informs a lot of our cultural texts as well, particularly those proffered by people of color. Morrison has described it as a “little white man on the shoulder” that judges, checks, and validates, acting as a gatekeeper of narratives.”

The white gaze was entirely absent from the Super Bowl Half Time show, and that may be what unnerved so many people. Bad Bunny disregarded their version of events. He did not adjust his perspective, or his language, for a white audience, and that caused discomfort amongst people who have never felt in that position before. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand Spanish that really bothered them – I think everyone who has ever listened to heavy metal music, classical music, the Cocteau Twins or REMs early albums knows you don’t need to understand language to understand music – it was that they couldn’t understand a world that didn’t cater to their own vision of it.

Anyway, to have engaged honestly with Bad Bunny’s performance would have been to acknowledge so many uncomfortable things, and many people can’t do that at the moment. The show destabilized a particular world view, so no wonder some people squawked about it.

But then, the Super Bowl is also always a reminder of America’s essential isolationism. The truth is, no one in the rest of the world cares about tackle football, and even a lot of the people in the US don’t. Because I live in a super-rich community that happens to be right by the stadium, I know a number of millionaires who could easily have afforded tickets, and not one of them went to the Bowl because it’s such a niche interest. All my millionaire friends are either European-adjacent or women anyway, so of course they don’t give a damn. They are far more likely to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, which conformed more to DeBord’s concepts.

Like the Super Bowl Half Time, it was intended to showcase a country’s culture. But wow, did it feel different. It’s aim, I am afraid, was more the one that Guy Debord would have attributed to it:

Debord: “The spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery.” The Milano ceremony had its beautiful moments, but overall, the Canova-carved statuary that came to life, the enormous paint tubes squeezing paint onto the playing field, the dancing espresso pots and so on, all just ended up expressing the chaotic and messy nature of now. Why Mariah Carey? Why Charlize Theron? Who knows? Everything just seemed jumbled together. Even just eliminating televising the Oath ceremony seemed super symbolic, like the Olympics, or the media, were endorsing the lack of accountability which characterizes the current zeitgeist.

And then we had the baying, I mean booing, at the VP. I am old enough to remember when the world booed Russia at the Olympics, not the United States. But we are in our villain era – or rather, maybe we’ve always been, and it’s only now that the rest of the world feels comfortable telling us so.

Anyway, so much for this weekend’s TV viewing. Actually, I had to buy a dryer on Sunday and the appliance store I went to was across the freeway from Levi’s stadium. It was late morning on Sunday, and it was weird knowing that in a few hours the eyes of the nation would be focused on this exact location. This is what it looked like:

In the grand scheme of things, protest billboards on the freeway and the Superbowl Half Time shows aren’t going to change anything. Things got this way for a reason, and it’s not because of social media. But at least the baddest of the bunnies made us all feel better for a little bit, and sometimes that’s all you can hope for.

NOTE: Bad Bunny has a charity which supports young people in PR. It’s called Good Bunny and if you want to take a look at it, click here.

The name sounds a little imaginary, like something out of Peter Pan or the Wind in the Willows, and very in keeping with the day I spent a few weeks earlier at Gingerbread House City, only Eel Pie Island is a real place, not a commercial entity. In a way, Eel Pie Island is like the Gingerbread House City, in that there is something eternally whimsical about it, and it is truly a place that could only exist in England. But it is not an act of imagination like The Thousand Acre Wood": rather, it is as a post-war heritage site where cultural history actually happened. If you grew up in West London in the late 1960s, you might have gone to it one weekend night, stopping at the Richmond station, walking across the river at Twickenham Bridge, and then stepping onto a little flat skiff that ran by a chain-link mechanism.

Eel Pie Island - a tiny tuft of land in the middle of the Thames, kind of between Twickenham and Hampton Court – has been a destination for pleasure from time immemorial. In the days before people took holidays abroad and when even the seaside seemed far away, Londoners would go there for the day to get away from the big smoke: Alexander Pope hung out there in 1719, Dickens wrote books there in 1860 something, and other notable men parked their mistresses there throughout a large swathe of English history. If you’re interested in the British Invasion or 60s music in general, you might have heard of Eel Pie Island but I was surprised to find out that there has been a hotel and ballroom there since at least the year 1748, i.e. prior to the American Revolution. There’s a been a dancehall at the hotel there ever since, and in the 1950s, it began hosting jazz concerts featuring famous black musicians.

Then in the early 60s, some of the local venues who were sick of the racket that teen pop groups were making at nearby pubs, sent them off to Eel Pie to play at a what later was called eelpie club - bands like the Kinks, the Faces (featuring Rod Stewart), Screaming Lord Such, the Mannish Boys (Bowie’s first band) and Pink Floyd. Later on, Genesis and Hawkwind (proto Black Sabbath), and way too many others to name, played there as well. From 1963 to 1964 the club’s house band was the Rolling Stones, and there are still people today - people in their 80s - who remember seeing them there and some of them volunteer at the museum to give tours.

The building itself burned down in the early 70s, so you can’t go see the actual place these gigs happened, but the museum that exists now on the shoreline nearby the site is packed with pictures, ephemera and memorabilia. One entire wall is taken up with a list of every gig that happened there in the 60s, and when I sent a picture of it to my brother he texted back, “I wish every club did this!”

In many ways, the Eel Pie Island Museum is like the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, but it’s different in a crucial way. The Hall of Fame is in a huge and shiny new building on the shores of Lake Erie, and contains hallowed (and not so hallowed) artifacts that have been gathered from all over the country, and from every era and genre. But the Eel Pie Island Museum is locally sourced and generated and is run by the people who attended it back in the day. It is a place that colored the worlds of the people who live around there in a way that I found both poignant and intense. So for me, the Eel Pie Museum is a reminder of what music’s real place in the world is: of how it has stained the landscape with its and shaped people’s lived experience.

The Eel Pie Island Museum is actually pretty new. It only opened in 2018, spearheaded by a local legend and Eel Pie Island resident, Trevor Bayliss, who was known for inventing the wind up radio. (Note to self: remember to get one for the upcoming Civil War.) The museum is run on donations and by volunteers and when I was there I was shown around by a woman named Wendy who was 73, i.e. just old enough to catch some of the last shows on the island before its demise. She never saw the Stones there, but she hitchhiked to the Isle of Wight Festival to see Jimi Hendrix (“It was scary”), and once, years earlier than that, she found that the Beatles, then at the top of their fame, would be coming to town the next day to film part of Help or Hard Days Night, one or the other.

Wendy and her friends all cut class the next day to go hang out over the bridge and scream their heads off when the band appeared, and on the following day it turned out that only one single student had turned up for school. Her name was Marion and she was the class brainiac.

“She was always studying, and probably didn’t care about pop music,” Wendy told us, but I wonder how Marion spins the story at this date. Is she proud that she was the only one at school that day? Did she ace her A Levels and wind up at Oxford because of it? Maybe Marion now tells everyone she actually did see the Beatles, or maybe she is still sad and that she didn’t have any friends to tell her they would be there…but either way, she reminds me of that story by Ray Bradbury, about the planet that only had sunshine for one hour every 7 years, and the little girl who gets locked in a closet by some bullies for the duration. In other words, sixty years after it happened, it still sort of breaks my heart.

But then music does, doesn’t it? It saves lives and it breaks hearts, sometimes simultaneously. It did mine, anyway. I mean, I have loved and written and thought about rock music for the past century, but my connection to it has waned as I got older, and, anyway a lot of what iIdid in the past was just sales: I was just a barrow boy of sorts, a noisy little hawker, and I was also blinded by some crazy sense of music having a right kind and a wrong kind, which is obviously very wrongheaded. No, I don’t love seeing live music like I used to, but Wendy told me she goes to gigs two or three times a week, all of them at the local pubs, and I think that speaks to the way that history functions. Like all the best heritage sites, the Eel Pie Island Museum and Eel Pie Island connected me to a past which was also my future. If you’re in London anytime soon, I highly recommend you visit.

I will just go see “Sunflowers”, I thought, and then be on my way. And that is what I did. Outside a storm was coming on (”Storm Goretti,” it was called, hilariously) but inside the rooms were full of beauty and light. Pro-tip: go to the National Gallery when the weather’s bad, it is so much emptier! Indeed, for a brief moment, I found myself alone in the room with Water Lilies - and irises, and circus performers, and fields of wheat, and water, and bathers, and ballet dancers, and all the rest of it, and it was like listening to the Beatles through your eyes instead of your ears, or something. Those paintings are so familiar that they feel almost trite. It is so easy to forget what it is that makes them masterpieces, but they truly are.

“Sunflowers” was still surrounded, of course. But when you look at it from afar, it actually lights up the room. And warms it up as well. It warmed my cold sad heart.

And then I stepped back out into the cold grey world and it was colder and greyer than ever. I grieve for it. I am in mourning for the planet earth. I always thought this part of history would be left to people who came after me but I was wrong. I have so many feelings about what is happening in America, and by America, and to America, but I can’t sort them out at all. It is happening too fast.

After the Gallery I went home and put myself to bed with tea and biscuits. The weather was growing steadily worse and it felt allegorical. The storm clouds gathering. The storm clouds about to burst. The storm clouds having burst.

The deluge.

So yes indeed I got very sick and had to put myself to bed, meaning I was forced to sit around and watch some TV. There was a newish series on BBC called “Riot Women” and the title intrigued me. I sometimes like to refer to the Beach Boys the Beach Men and Sonic Youth as Sonic Adults as a joke, so I pictured it to be a comedy, like “We Are Lady Parts,” the excellent show about a band of Muslim girls in south London. You could imagine the writers pitching this to the network: “What is funnier than a female Muslim rock band? A band of menopausal women!”

According to one of my relatives, menopause is all the rage here. They had to even go through “menopause sensitivity training” at her work.

Perhaps that’s why “Riot Women” isn’t a comedy, it is a drama. Someone at the BBC probably said, ‘It’s not sensitive to laugh about menopause!’ And that’s true, but sadly, the concept of a menopausal rock band doesn’t lend itself to drama either. Or at least, not to the kind of drama that the series calls up. In fact, I know a lot of menopausal women in rock bands, and their bands are nothing like the ones in this show. (Have you heard the music of The Would Be Goods? Gina Birch? Amy Rigby? Helen McCookerybook? if not click here.) However, needs must, so I settled down to watch it.

The show opens with one of the future Riot Women preparing to hang herself, and it gets less funny from there. Two, no three, members of the band have mothers with dementia that they have to care for, their husbands or partners have all left them, and they all have obnoxious children. It certainly is not a pretty picture of life as a middle-aged lady!

However, my interest in the show was musical, rather than dramatic. I wondered if they would write their own songs, and if not, what songs they’d sing instead. Given the title, “Suck My Left One” (by proto-riot grrls Bikini Kill) seemed appropriate but unlikely. At first, it looked like the band was going to sing “Waterloo” by Abba, but that soon becomes an allegory for what people would THINK women like them would sing.

At their first band meeting, Beth, the suicidal one, moots it, and says, “What’s the greatest rock song of all time?”

“Back in Black?” says one. “Layla?” “Smells Like...armpits?”

It turns out the answer is, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” which Beth thinks it would be funny and poignant if they sang. But the gang does not agree, and the first meeting breaks up in disarray.

If you have seen any movies about rock bands in your whole life you will know what happens next: as Beth is walking home in high dudgeon she hears a voice singing from a distant pub window which she is drawn to. She walks toward it slowly, as if dragged by an invisible magnet...and guess what, it is a menopausal woman singing, and she is angry! She is singing as if her life depended on it and what she is singing is...”Violet” by Hole.

Because of course it is.

I didn’t need to watch the whole thing to find out that playing in a “punk” rock band ends up solving everybody’s problems. First, it makes their families suddenly respect them; and then, it is an outlet for their menopausal rage! Thanks to its curative properties, Kitty cleans up, Beth cheers up, the lady with OCD loosens up; the obnoxious kids will come to respect their elders, and who knows, next season even the moms with dementia may be invited on stage to perform.

In real life, playing in a rock band, liberating though it may be, has not once solved anyone’s problems. I wasn’t expecting it to actually reference the riot grrrl movement, or their music, but I disliked the way it referred to everything as ‘punk’ in such a loose way: punk, in this series, means yelling, spitting, getting a tattoo, wearing spangles, getting a pink stripe in your hair, and so on, and honestly, that seems pretty reductive. Granted, I did like watching a series with six female lead characters and literally no meaningful male ones; that felt pretty radical to me. And I know that the writer of this series, Sally Wainwright, has been acclaimed for several other series - “Happy Valley” and “Last Tango In Halifax”. Nevertheless, I didn’t think it was her finest moment.

One critique I read of this series was that it wasn’t queer enough, when the riot grrrl movement from which it takes it name, was such an important queer space. And while I wasn’t really expecting to see even a single shard of anything grrrl-riotous in it, it does irk me when people in series like this say things like, “we’re a punk band” or “punk is our era’ and then start alluding to songs by Garbage and Alanis Morissette. The first song the band writes is a ballad that could be sung by anyone EXCEPT a punk band. (The songs were written by an English duo called Arxx.)

Later, the band sings a song which could be termed more punk - but even that wasn’t exactly riotous: music is not the real point of this series, which to my mind is a pity. Even before I binged all six episodes, I knew that as the show continued, the lead singer, Kitty, would have a drug or alcohol problem and at least one of the older women will discover their true worth by becoming sexual again. That’s not a bad thing, dramatically, but it’s not very original. A more original, if small, moment in the first episode came when one of the potential band members got super irritating by insisting that practice schedule times set in stone and everyone else felt squirrelly about committing. That seemed like a more real-life moment to me.

Riot Women is now out in America on Britbox, and I know that Amy Rigby, for one, really likes it, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt. But just in case you are planning on watching this, please be forewarned that one of the subplots is extremely and horribly violent, to the point where I had to leave the room during it. Truly as bad as it gets, so if you don’t like to see women beaten and sexually tortured, you might want to pass.

Bob Weir’s 9th grade Menlo School yearbook photo, ca 1962. Menlo School was a prep school for future Stanford students, located on El Camino Real in Weir’s home town of Atherton. Atherton was a well-to-do suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, 30 miles South of the City, and just North of Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

Bob Weir (1947-2026) died this week. The Grateful Dead are part of Palo Alto’s invention of itself, like Stanford University, Perry Mason and Google. The Grateful Dead have both more and less to do with Palo Alto than everyone thinks, but Palo Alto’s role in the universe is to make everything about Palo Alto. If we have to invent Semiconductors or make LSD popular in order to make that happen, well, that’s what we do. The Dead aren’t my thing, however, so I’m not really qualified to comment; such that I am interested in them, it is because we share a geographical past, rather than a musical one. They are my brother’s thing, though (he even has a blog about them), so this week, I will pass the baton to him. Corry, on Bob Weir:

Girl Scouts marching in a downtown parade c.1970, past Magoo’s Pizza at 639 Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park. The Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) played their debut concert at Magoo’s on May 5, 1965.

Bob Weir’s recent death inevitably triggered a flood of memorials. Weir had kept the Grateful Dead flag flying for another 30 years after the initial 30-year run had ended with Jerry Garcia’s death on August 9, 1995. Amazingly, the Dead seem to be even bigger now, 30 years after Garcia’s death, and Weir’s ubiquitous performing is a huge part of that post-longevity. The Grateful Dead are not just a band, but a genre, with groups inspired by, and re-inventing, the Dead’s music playing in bars and theaters every weekend, all over the country and the world. Elvis impersonators implicitly require you to remember Elvis, but the Grateful Dead multiverse doesn’t mandate any such recollection.

The Grateful Dead is always about Palo Alto for us, however, because we’re from Palo Alto. Every Weir obituary or historical tribute to the Dead evokes them as a Palo Alto band. Yet Weir was the least and most of the Palo Altans in the band. Unlike his original bandmates, Weir never actually lived in Palo Alto. Weir was from Atherton, two towns over from us, and in those days a much wealthier community (Palo Alto has since caught up), and he was just a dozen or so years older than us, so our families drove the same roads. Weir’s engineer father and our architect one must have been on the same train to San Francisco many mornings. Since Atherton (famously) had no retail businesses (on purpose), downtown Menlo Park was their main drag. Weir’s mother and ours must have parked next to each other at Stanford Shopping Center, or stood in line together at the Pink Pastry bakery on Santa Cruz Avenue downtown, across the street from where the Warlocks would debut in May 1965.

Menlo School JV football team, from the 1962 Oak Leaves yearbook. Freshmen Bob Weir is bottom row, fifth from the left.

In another way, Weir was unlike any of us because his family wasn’t really like ours, and Weir himself was unlike other members of his band. Garcia’s father was a musician, Pigpen’s was a DJ and Lesh and Kreutzmann’s families actively encouraged their music. Weir seemed destined to be a more typical Atherton product, a handsome preppy headed for Stanford and social status. He went to Menlo School, a jockish Stanford feeder Prep School, and played on the football team. Handsome, smart, affable and dyslexic, Weir was kicked out of Menlo School, as well as other prep schools and even the local free-thinking proto-hippie school. He ended up at the public Menlo-Atherton High School in the Fall of ‘65. Lindsey Buckingham was probably a sophomore there at the time.

Given Weir’s wealthy background, good looks and charm, he was arguably a bigger hippie than anyone in the Grateful Dead, and that’s saying something. Garcia, Pigpen and the rest of them would have anticipated a life in music or the arts, having fun, being on the margins and maybe being beatniks. Weir, however, was on the football team and had the implied access to wealth and success that supercharges good looks and financially sound parents. Yet he threw it all over to play folk music. When the psychedelic revolution dropped by, Weir got on board with no hesitation and didn’t look back. Garcia and Lesh had already chosen to be oddball musicians, but they would have been that anyway. Weir actually had a choice, and he chose the Grateful Dead.

Weir liked performing and touring, long past the time that he had money and a family and could have put it on hold. In the last few years, he regularly played the Guild Theater on El Camino Real in Menlo Park. The Guild had been a movie theater until 2019--it was just around the corner from the site of the Warlocks debut at Magoo’s Pizza. In 2022 The Guild re-opened as a snug concert hall, seating 200 (but 500 if everyone stands). Bob Weir played there a number of times, not because he had to, but because he liked to play. He had surely seen movies at the Guild. It was just a few miles from where he grew up, and where he was kicked out of prep school, and where he dropped out of high school, and where his band got their start. Weir had completely rejected his Atherton “heritage,” and yet ended up as the King Of The Peninsula by a road of his own devising.

None of us will pass this way again. Sic Transit Gloria Psychedelia.

Usually I look forward at Christmas time to singing carols, because there is true bodily pleasure in singing. I thought it was mean of him to deny us an opportunity to sing “O Come All Ye Faithful” in favor of some 3^rd century chanson; that pastor reminded me of those guys who have record collections full of obscure acts or alternate versions, and who say snobby things like, “They were only good before they signed to Warner Brothers.” Anyway, the only other time a person gets to unselfconsciously belt out songs aloud is when seeing they go see a tribute band, at a bar or a wedding or a waterfront, or what have you.

That is why, a few days later, I was reminded of that incident whilst watching the new movie “Song Sung Blue.” It’s a biopic, of sorts, only instead of being about a rock star, it’s about a rock star impersonator. It stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as a duo called Lightning and Thunder, who performed what they call a “Neil Diamond Experience” at restaurants and casinos around Milwaukee sometime in the early 1990s.

Back when I was a critic, I thought that tribute acts, and even cover bands, were quite a degraded exercise, and I never would have deliberately gone to see one, but lately I’ve changed my tune. True, the ones I’ve seen lately aren’t the same as the ones depicted in the movie. Today’s tributes are born of necessity, as when the artist is dead, like Warren Zevon, or the band, like REM or the Talking Heads, has disbanded. I like to think seeing such things is more like going to the symphony and hearing music by Mozart, as opposed to going to the theater and seeing someone dressed up as Mozart, but this may be splitting hairs.

If you believe in the importance of aura, then it’s like buying a print of the Mona Lisa instead of going to the Louvre.

Anyway, the point is, there is an economic aspect to the world of tribute acts. At that time the movie is set, in the 1990s, Neil Diamond himself still toured, so seeing an impersonator of him was a cheap simulacrum. And there’s nothing wrong with cheap, but I wish the movie had discussed the economics of that world better: the economics, and the mindset, and the aesthetics, such as they were.

Instead, it sticks to the concept as a very basic love story. Mike Sardina (the real-life Diamond impersonator portrayed by Hugh Jackman’s character), falls in love with a woman named Claire, played by Kate Hudson, who believes in his dreams, both of making a living as a musician, and of Neil Diamond as some kind of monolithic cultural giant whose music deserves to be aped.

Mike can – and does -- play the music of many other dad rock legends, but the one he most adores is Neil Diamond. He feels an outsized reverence for this corny music. Of course, taste is objective, and judging people by it now seems very classist: in my old age, I have come to believe that there is no such thing as “bad” music, and that our attitude towards acts like Diamond back in the day was simple snobbery. Clearly there is pleasure to be had in a song like “Africa” or “Don’t Stop Believing” or, to bring it back to the movie, “Sweet Caroline,” all of which my friends and I despised at the time they were released. But there is also danger. In 1939, Clement Greenberg described kitsch culture – and I am going to put Neil Diamond in this category, feel free to disagree – as being a dumbed down form of high culture, adopting many of its exterior trappings but none of its subtleties.

“Kitsch,” he wrote, “is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch changes according to style but remains always the same, Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money – not even their time.”

Surely there is a great movie to be made exploring how kitsch operates in music, and in America, but alas, “Song Sung Blue” isn’t that movie. I did like that it took place in a regional space and class status area which is ignored area in films about music and that it treated music fans with dignity. It also showed how tribute bands allow a musical role for people who love music but have nothing to add to it. Especially in this day and age, where music-making is considered a valueless skill in the marketplace, there’s something to be said for seeing a way for it as a career path, and also, kudos to the Mike Sardinas of this world, who not only have nothing to add to the music world but love.

That said, it is evident that people like Sardina appreciate rock’s gestures more than its content. No doubt he loved the songs themselves, but he’s also extremely interested in wearing spangles, and making his arm go round and round like Roger Daltrey and then pointing at the crowd and waggling his finger.

I so applaud this film’s basic tenet, which is that the spirit of rock lives everywhere – at karaoke bars and in Thai restaurants, at AA meetings and county fairs -- but I also think it’s a pretty limited take on a complex topic.

To the Mike Sardinas of this world, ‘rock’ is a sensibility, not a genre. In her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag calls a sensibility, “A private code, a badge of identity even,” and adds that, “to describe it is to betray it.” In this film, the sensibility that is betrayed isn’t Neil Diamond’s; it’s grunge. As previously mentioned, the movie takes place in the 1990s, and the world it shows is very different from the musical world that I inhabited at that time, but there is one scene in which the two intersect, and that is when Lightning and Thunder are asked to open for Pearl Jam, and Eddie Vedder performs “Forever In Blue Jeans” with them. This is an incident that really happened, and in this film is portrayed like a straight up triumph. But I am not sure that’s what it really was. Indie bands in the 1980s loved to send up cheesy acts of the 1970s, and grunge bands went one step farther, performing songs by a wide array of ever-stranger pop acts to stamp them with their own sound, or, more generally, just to be ironic and funny.

“Camp rests on innocence,” said Susan Sontag. “But also, when it can, it corrupts it.”

Did those artists LIKE Tony Bennett, Neil Diamond, Frank Sinatra and so on? Yes, in a way, but it isn’t the same way that the movie sees the gesture, and the misinterpretation – the lack of humor – jarred. In the scene in the question, the warm embrace of the grunge audience, which is in direct contrast to an earlier scene where the band is met with angry jibes at a biker bar because the patrons want to hear Skynyrd, is correct: that is how a grunge audience would have met with Lightning and Thunder, but it would have been because the duo was seen as earnestly humorous, not because they saw it as great art.

For me, this scene pointed out the great flaw of this movie, which is that we, the audience, are required to be rooting for a protagonist whose metier is deeply suspect. But nevertheless, it made me tear up. I wasn’t at that particular Pearl Jam gig in Milwaukee in 1995, but I saw them many, many times in that era, in places like Missouri, Salt Lake City, Prague, Budapest and Istanbul. The actor playing Eddie Vedder didn’t look a bit like him, but the scene correctly evoked the time and place that informed my whole youth, and I can’t even name how weird it is to see that being portrayed (or even mis-portrayed) as historical, on film.

That was my world and my world view, my outlook, my people. And now it is gone. Real, real gone.

It’s one thing to feel that way about our personal memories but now that sense of loss and longing is creeping into every public space and place on earth. Many years ago I spent a single day alone at Bondi Beach and it was so sharply beautiful, so much more better than I’d even thought it would be…I can still remember the number of the bus I took to get there, and how the beach itself appeared out of the blue as the bus rounded a steep corner. And now it too is stained by sadness and chaos.

But enough. I was going to call this episode of Bring Me Giants Fell On Black Days because obviously, that’s what we have done, but then I rethought, and what I thought was: why wallow? It can’t possibly do any of us any good. So here is a completely inconsequential column about a good thing that happened to me this year, and how it utterly redeems 2025, albeit for me, and me only.

Our beloved cat Pandora died in November and four days after her passing a tiny smol cow-kitten jumped out of a bush and into my daughter’s arms. We spent some time trying to find her family and get her into shelter care, but all the foster places we all work with were overcrowded and just said, ‘keep her ‘til she’s old enough to adopt out and then bring her back.’ This week she hit two pounds – the mark of adoptability – and we were like, she leaves this house OVER OUR COLD DEAD BODIES.

We called her Ivy because that’s what she emerged from, but it is also the name of the lady who drove my cousins and I around the island of St. Helena last January, when I took my big bucket list trip to the South Atlantic site where Napoleon Bonaparte died and where my first cousin twice removed was, in 1925, the acting governor. I’ve wanted to go there almost my whole life, because my father is named after him. Hence, whenever I took my students to the computer history museum in Mountain View, I would sit at the giant Google maps simulation and spin the wheel over acres and acres of ocean, until it finally landed on St. Helena, and then zoom in. But even so, it felt imaginary.

But it isn’t. It’s real, and I went there last January, and I still can’t believe it.

St. Helena is home to 4000 people. It’s little, smaller than Maui, but it is very, very steep. Driving up the sides of the mountains is super scary, which is where Ivy came in. Ivy was an actual Saint, which is what they call native islanders, like how we say “Angelino” or “Minneapolitan”, so driving didn’t scare her but it scared the heck out of me.

“Oh no,” I gasped, as the car lurched along the side of the very narrow road, which was etched into the cliff it was climbing up. A tipsy panorama of the town of Jamestown appeared way beneath us. It looked like a set of pastel pez blocks that had been jammed into a brown fissure, or like a postcard of a town which a child had drawn with a crayon.

We were midway between the sky and the sea at this moment -- “between one world and the next,” as one of Napoleon’s guards had long ago described the island upon finding themselves exiled on it – and Ivy stopped the car. Ahead of us, or above us really, a truck had appeared, on its way down the same path. I tried to remember the road rule I’d been told. Down goes forward, up backs up. Or was it the other way round?

Like the roads of Dorset and Somerset and Bali and places like that, the roads that creep along St Helena’s steep inclines are only just wide enough for one vehicle, and they are really only mentally bearable because of long low walls made of stones propped up along the cliffside of the drive. Cars only came to St. Helena in 1929, about twenty years after the rest of the world, and before that it was all horses, like the one Napoleon took to Longwood, the house they built for him to be imprisoned in, somewhere on the road up above us now, in 1815.

A horse probably would have been preferable to me at that moment, but happily, Ivy knew how to do the back-forward thing OK, and presently, we reached the top of the grade, where we got out of the car to look out at the spectacular view of James Bay over Jacob’s Ladder, the 699-foot stairway connecting the lower town to the upper one. The bijou bay sparkled at the bottom of it, beautiful and blue, dotted with small boats and one very large catamaran inside the tiny inlet that accommodates all incoming water vessels. According to Ivy, in the old days, she and her friends used to have to walk up Jacob’s Ladder every single day to go to school, and in the afternoon, they slid down it. On the banister.

Ivy also said that when she was a kid they were allowed to ride on Jonathan’s back, four at a time. Jonathan is the world’s oldest living mammal. Despite the ill treatment, Jonathan is officially 193 years old, and he lived at the Governor’s mansion at the time my great cousin did.

My relative loved St. Helena, which is maybe why there is a plaque in the town square that calls him “St. Helena’s Greatest Friend.” He went there to be the chief medical officer to the prisoners in the Boer Prison Camp and then more or less stayed there the rest of his life, but if he loved it there, he was practically the only one who did. One of Napoleon’s servants called it “an island the devil shat out,” but then, according to their catty diaries which were published in the years after his death, they were all cooped up together in the house in Longwood, with that beautiful view and no escape. The whole time, Napoleon was hoping someone would come and fetch him off the island, like they did when he was on Elba. But no one ever did.

Weirdly, getting to St Helena today is almost harder than it was in his day, because in those days ships called there all the time – alas, it was a port of call for all slave ships, which is a whole other story – but today, hardly any ships call there and the whole flight business, which only began a few years ago, is pretty fraught. One day, maybe I will find a way to tell people the saga of my trip there – like how many times I have now crossed Namibia -- but it’s super fraught and lengthy for here. Suffice to say, it is a magical place. Not imaginary, like I used to think, but enchanted. Now that I’ve been there, I belong to every possibly internet group (they only got internet access in the last couple of years and it is very jenky!), so I know that this week my relative’s cenotaph is the site of the Christmas Play and four whole parking spots are going to be blocked downtown because of it.

I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t think about my trip there, and how lucky and happy I am that I got to go there. When I think of 2025, that’s what I want to remember about it: sitting at the top of Jacob’s Ladder with Ivy and John and Gillian and June, and feeling, for the first and only time, that I was absolutely in the center of the universe.

(If you’re interested in this story, here is a radio interview I did with my cousin while I was on the island, with a few more details.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gNbmjBgtwJZ6UMCom6qLnhJu3JBin0b_/view

Now you might think those 4 books had nothing in common except that they fell into my hands in the month of November, but they actually fit together pretty well. The Congo interlude was a rumination on Empire and its consequences. But the final ones forced me to stare into the heart of darkness in the waning years of the Empire we call America, and PHEW. Just to begin: it’s astonishing how little Jenette McCurdy’s experience working as a child slave laborer in the America in the early 2000s differs from that of kids in the Congo in the 1890s. Both involve 14-hour days, physical abuse and starvation.

Literally.

McCurdy’s work is also important because of today’s obsession with celebrity and the exploitation of adolescent girls, a subject we can’t get away from in the political news as well as elsewhere. In a topsy-turvy way, the book reminded me of Joan Didion’s essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” from The White Album, which is also about growing up in Southern California. In that chapter, Joan describes the murderess’s home milieu:

This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.”

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, we learn what it is actually like being the offspring of a “dreamer of the golden dream.” Briefly put: it sucks.

I’m Glad My Mom Died has been incredibly successful, and spent more than 90 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. I hope the same will be true for Mary Lucia’s new book, which chronicles her experience being stalked by a fan of her radio show, an experience which hits a lot closer to home. At the beginning of the book, she introduces herself thusly: “It is I, rogue DJ. The cilantro of radio,” and if that doesn’t hook you, what will? Anyway, take it from I, the cilantro of former rock critics. If you like the kind of thing I write about, this is a memoir you might want to pop your head into.

“Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me” is about a lot of things - aging, for one; pets and parent death, for another - but mostly it is about fear. Here’s the logline: Mary Lucia was a drive time DJ for a public radio station in Minneapolis, and about ten years ago a listener started to harass and stalk her, sending her packages of raw meat, digging in her back yard, threatening to kill her dogs, and sending her lascivious letters describing the (imagined) blow jobs he wanted her to give him. The response to this terrorism was indifference. “Bummer,” said her boss at the NPR station she worked at, while the cops shrugged and said variations of “Get a boyfriend” an/or “get a gun.” Nice.

Lucia’s memoir explains in detail all the ways the law isn’t written to protect women in her situation; indeed, in the end, after the man was finally located, tried, and found guilty, the courts merely fined him and let him back on the streets. Fortunately, after he was released on his own recognizance, he left her alone. Unfortunately, he started stalking her co-worker instead. And still is, as far as I can tell.

“What Doesn’t Kill Me” is a good book in its own right, but in addition to explaining much about the current, post-twitter world that shouldn’t surprise people (but for some reason does), the experience Mary Lucia had inevitably reminded me of my own life in the public eye, when I got death threats and rape threats all the time, and my editor at the East Bay Express would congratulate me for doing so. “You’re really hitting a nerve,” he’d say enthusiastically. And many other writers I knew – it goes without saying they were guys – also just seemed either envious or dismissive of my experiences. Nothing nearly as disturbing as happened to Mary Lucia ever happened to me, but it easily could have, and in my imagination, it did.

That experience warped me. It made me weirder and harder to relate to. But so did life itself, and that is another takeaway from my reading, because Lucia’s book isn’t only about being stalked. It’s also about a life lived deeply in the throes of love of rock ‘n’ roll fandom…and about how that love can unfit you for the practice of everyday life. Most of Lucia’s working life has been spent as a radio DJ, a job which is almost nonexistent in these post-algorithm times, and that’s another thing we have in common. We both come from terrestrial times, and our jobs no longer exist, and that is endlessly jarring. At one point in this harrowing book, Lucia describes finding out that her record collection has been ruined by a leaky pipe housed above it: “It was like I lost my identity.”

And yet, losing one’s identity feels like a signature move in these crazy times, though, don’t you think? It’s practically inevitable if you’re sentient. Anyway, Georg Lukacs once described the function of the modern novel as being about “existential homelessness,” and that phrase also describes the world we live in, since Lukacs meant that the novel describes the modern condition whereby we recognize that the world we live in is chaotic and meaningless. In 1915, Lukacs’s disillusionment with the nonsensical nature of the world events going on around him, led him to name the eternal sense of heartbreak, and reading “I’m Glad” and “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me” felt similar…as does reading the news.

As Mr. Kurtz said: the horror, the horror.

Ha ha, not really: that would be ridiculous but it was fun to say it. And it is true that a project I worked on did, and I can’t tell you how surprised I was to see it on the list. So old school! But the Grammys have always had a lot of categories that don’t get aired on TV, and many are rooted in old media. Both the category this was nominated for - best recording package (i.e. box set) - and the Grammys’ newest category, best album cover art, are a little bizarre because not so many people actually buy records with covers anymore, but that’s all the more reason to reward them for existing, and especially their artistic aspects. After all, we live in a very anti-art direction times, so congratulations to Farbod Kokabi and Emily Sneddon, who were responsible for this package, on their nomination, and also congrats to the Numero Group who still support these kinds of projects. To celebrate, please enjoy the liner notes I wrote for inclusion in it.

One night not that long ago, I went alone to a nightclub in the middle of a forest to see a band called the Meat Puppets. I didn’t know anyone who would want to drive up a wooded glen on a week night to see an old loud punk band, but as I sat quietly in a nearby café staring at my phone waiting for the show to begin, I saw a message on my Facebook page from someone who was sitting alone in their hotel room in San Francisco on a business trip.

“Grab a cab over the Golden Gate and come see the Meat Puppets with me” I wrote on her feed, and astonishingly, she did.

Jenny Toomey and I had actually never met, but I loved her old band Tsunami, and it turned out that was enough. There is a very particular lived experience we share which could very shortly be put as, “Going to see the Meat Puppets.” Or, Scrawl, or Helium, or Autoclave, or any of a hundred-odd other bands whom you may never have heard of but whose gigs and music and overall outlook stitch our pasts together into one cohesive whole.

In my case, it could also have been called, “Going to see Tsunami,” and in hers, “Being IN Tsunami.” In those days, those two things weren’t actually all that different.

In other words, our pasts were sort of interchangeable, which meant in a weird way that we were. And because our heads were full of all the same musical furniture, seeing the Meat Puppets together that night was exactly like we were two little children holding hands and entering a fairy tale. Again. As it had been before it ever shall be, and so there were Jenny and I, huddled together in confines of a shadowy nightclub, embanking ourselves against a cold hard world, burying ourselves, briefly, back in the past. What we did there was a secret we shared, and now I’ve been tasked with sharing it with you.

In those days, we didn’t have invisible music on digital files, we had large bulky record collections that fit into bankers’ boxes and had to be hauled around with great difficulty whenever we moved house. And we didn’t carry around little cameras or computers in our pockets, either, because we didn’t have the internet or GPS or even e-mail.

How did we even find out about new music, or shows that were happening near you, I hear you cry. And how did you get there when you did?

Well, to begin, we heard the music on this thing called “college radio,” or we read about it in some printed matter called “fanzines” that were passed from hand to hand. Then we went to the shows that we knew about because of an item of paper called “flyers” which were taped to walls of nightclubs and cafés and telephone poles in the neighborhoods where we lived. Often – I know it sounds crazy – we had to actually buy the music in order to hear it, or we’d go see the bands even without hearing them when they came to our town.

And then we would meet them at the club and if we liked them, we would ask them if they wanted to sleep on our floor after the show, or at least stay in touch with one another via postcard, as if we were love-struck ladies in a Victorian novel, or else we would just write our phone numbers on tiny slips of paper which we kept safe, somehow. Sometimes we would just write the number on our hands.

It all sounds very elaborate and primitive in retrospect, but in the midst of it, it felt very new and modern and cutting edge, and it also felt very connected. We formed communities that way in a time when all the other ways to form them were rigid and formal and dusty, i.e. joining church groups, or sororities, or swim teams, or even just getting married.

Indie rock saved us from that horror. Instead of shutting down our options, bands like Tsunami created tiny networks built through their production of fanzines and singles and the use of one beat-up van that traveled from town to town.

And all of this starts with the music. 1991, the year I found out about Tsunami (more or less) has subsequently been called The Year That Punk Broke because of the release of “Nevermind,” although in fact 1992 is probably a better date for that, since that was the year that Nirvana toured the fuck out of it and every single human walking down the street in Seattle got signed to a major label, practically. But Nirvana was just the volcano that stuck out of the ocean: roiling around beneath it were hundreds of little bands and one of them was Tsunami. In those 24 months, Tsunami put out an EP, “Headringer,” as well as a number of singles like “Genius of Crack” and “Punk Means Cuddle” which are collected here on LP 4. Today these songs sound surprisingly contemporary, thanks to the twin magics of digitization and postmodernism, which has smashed the music of every era together. But hearing them at the time was like running into a person who had read all the same books – and remember, before social media, it was really hard to find someone like that even in your own neighborhood, much less someone from all the way across the country. Listening to it felt romantic in a way that no longer exists, because it was my music, my experience, my friendships and people…not those imposed by someone else, and that seems all the more miraculous in these days of virality and TikTok, when everything we consume is consumed by everyone else and anonymity and singularity are considered the most degraded of situations.

But ours was a small world, after all, and unlike the work of the many bands of that time who wrote from the vantage point of either the Lower East Side or from a sky-bar on a private jet, Tsunami’s songs took place on a local level. They were set at the playground, the amusement park, in your bedroom, or on a class trip…which were the only places that let’s face it, any of us had ever been. We hadn’t been anywhere else. They sounded so doable, very different musically from speedy runs on the upper neck of a guitar or the high keening wail of contemporaries like Vedder or Cornell or Staley -- though it should be said there is a Pearl Jammish feel to the rhythms of “World Tour” and “Flameproof Suit” which surprises me to recognize at this remove.

Indeed, the songs of Tsunami involve minute experiences and feelings, the opposite of the sweeping and anthemic ideas that swept over hits of that era. They were songs which you could fill in the blanks to fit in with your own experience: “You felt false.” “You fell far?” “You felt you fell far?” Most pop music of that time (not to mention now) glided through your brain, shouting simple slogans about romance or addiction in words of exactly one syllable. Tsunami’s music was so different from that, it was as if it had been made in two entirely difference centuries, on a totally different set of instruments, by two entirely different species.

Recently, in honor of writing this, I put Tsunamis’ songs from that era on Sp*$%^y and after they had played, the algorithm spewed out a bunch of other acts it thought I would like. This included the music of the Breeders and Belly and the Throwing Muses and while I felt the site did me a big disservice by thinking I only like music with two women vocalists, it also reminded me what a rich time it was, and that a lot of it wouldn’t have happened – or at least I wouldn’t have experienced it in the same hands-on, up-close-and-personal way -- if it weren’t for the tireless work of Tsunami.

There were a lot of reasons I wasn’t attracted to seeing the new Springsteen bio-pic “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” I was down on it in part because it starred Carmy from The Bear, and partly because Bruce Springsteen was my dear cousin Jeff’s favorite artist and I have had a hard time listening to his music ever since Jeff died in 2011. I had a feeling I’d end up going anyway, and I did, but I need you to picture me entering the Cineplex the other day with my arms straight out in front of me and walking straight-legged like a Zombie. It was like I was being dragged in, as if magnetized, from a wire connected to a hard place in the center of my heart.

I tried to be open-minded, as did my companion, my cousin Jeff’s sister (who is also my cousin, obviously). We were trepidatious, thinking we might end up in a weep-fest, but in the end, it was OK and we didn’t think about Jeff once throughout the entire movie. You know why? Because, as I texted Jenn later, I did not believe that Jeremy Allen White was Bruce Springsteen for one single second.

As I said, this was a good thing in that it prevented us from unnecessary sadness. But it probably doesn’t speak well of the movie. There is a scene in it when Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau (played by Jeremy Strong) plays the tape of what will become “Nebraska” to the head of the record label for the first time, and the label head says, “This isn’t for me. And I don’t know who it is for.” And that’s exactly how I feel about this movie. If it’s for you, then great! I wouldn’t risk taking anyone under 50, or anyone who isn’t already deeply into Springsteen, but I know people who have enjoyed it a lot, and more power to them.

There are many things I didn’t like about the film, but I’d rather concentrate on its strengths, and what I liked best about it, was the set design. The year is 1981, and visually and aurally it was extremely evocative of that era. I loved the drab cars and clothes and houses, and the enormous amount of wood paneling we saw in every room we visited. I loved the wall papers, the haircuts, the posters that were (or weren’t) hanging in the boardrooms of Manhattan, the lamps in the bedrooms, and the recording studio itself.

Another thing that is good about the movie is the music. Everything to do with music is great, like when Carmy, I mean Bruce, lies on the floor listening to “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide, or when, to comfort him, Jon Landau plays “Last Mile of the Way,” by Sam Cooke. At one point Carmy – oops, I mean, Bruce – drives to a split level house in suburban Jersey in a 280Z and the radio is playing “Urgent” by Foreigner – I know, horrible, but it really helps to contextualize what a huge contrast Nebraska was going for, why the record company was so squawky about it, and why, in the end, its authentically haunting sound was so admired by critics.

As those scenes indicate, the whole movie is full of old worlde media. Phones hooked to walls, answering machines, cassette tapes with no covers (kids, ask your mom why that’s a problem), reel-to-reel tape machines, car radios, and an emphasis on songs chart positions on Billboard (a magazine that kept track of airplay), and I liked seeing them the way I like seeing ponies prancing around in old westerns. And there’s also a beautiful scene where they’re pressing the vinyl onto a master, and as that scene definitively proves, this was a movie for vinyl fetishists.

But here’s the thing. While I don’t mind that the film overtly, and un-objectionally, fetishizes the way music was made and distributed in the 20^th century literally, I did have trouble with the way it also fetishizes a particular world view from that time, in which the hero’s journey is characterized by the hero being both a jerk and a genius, a man-baby whose depression or daddy issues or whatever is taken very seriously, such that everyone around them falls into sympathetic ecstasies. This is also what I don’t like about The Bear – and why it’s so difficult to separate Carmy from Bruce: not because JAW is a bad actor, but because both characters follow that narrative arc. I know it’s a common trope. But to me it feels quaint.

None of this is meant as a critique of Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska” or the book this film is based on. I wrote about seeing him perform last year, so please click on this if you want to know my opinion about any of that. Nor am I saying that Bruce’s struggle with depression (or anyone’s) is unworthy of serious film-making. But it’s a hard thing to capture on film – as is the process of artistic creation, this film’s other big ambition. To that end, we are asked to watch a lot of I Carmy – I’m sorry, I mean Bruce -- staring mournfully at the gaping maw of speakers and amplifiers. They reminded me of the video for the Replacements song “Bastards of Young,” which just depicted the amp playing the song for four minutes. But that was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, whereas this movie is anything but humorous.

As I said, if you liked this movie, great, but it was made for you, not me. I knew that it wasn’t made for me early on, during a scene where Bruce plays an impromptu gig at the Stone Pony to a crowd of ecstatic women. I looked at that scene and immediately thought, oh look, there I am! That was me, and my role in that world…or at least, that seems to be how it, or I, came off. But looking at how my role in that world was being reflected by these filmmakers did not please me, because in some weird way it is inaccurate to my own truth about experiencing live music. One day I’d like to see a film – or let me put it differently, I’d like to WRITE a film – in which the hero’s journey is not that of the beloved but struggling rock star, but that of the person in the audience whose life has been transformed through the humility of listening to it.

The same logic goes with relationships and guess what, that’s happened to me too.

Anyway, I felt truly awful about it – as bad as can be – but right after I found out I went to see the B-52s and Devo anyway. I thought it would cheer me up, but no such luck. For the first time in my life, I left a good show feeling worse than when I arrived. And that’s a pretty severe statement because there are probably no cheerier bands on the planet – or on Planet Claire! -- than Devo and the B-52s.

Honestly, a more fun, upbeat, tuneful, vibrant, alive, and just plain sunny pair of bands does not exist. I had felt like it was a safe bet they would make me feel better, but I was wrong. I sat there stone-faced, amidst lots of people wearing flowerpot heads and actual head-to-toe lobster costumes, and they played bright and funny songs like “Private Idaho” (a personal fave) and “Dance This Mess Around.” Everyone in the whole audience except me was having a great time. Indeed, when they go to “Roam,” a tear dribbled down my cheek. There was something so poignant about it, you know? Roam, if you want to – roam around the world…Roam if you want to, without anything but the love we feel…”

If you can sit through a B-52s set and not leap to your feet with your arms outstretched in ecstasy by the time they get to the love shack, then something is very wrong with you indeed. And the same goes for Devo, although they are a different kind of band. My brother has a master list of these things, and he tells me that the last time we saw Devo was on April 13^th, 1990, at this club called the Omni on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. I don’t remember a thing about it, but I do recall seeing them earlier than that and – get this – dressing up for it! As one does, when one is a child. People dressed up for this show too, mostly in the flower-pot hats which cost $60 at the concession stands. Between them and the lobster people, it was a very festive crowd indeed. I felt bad feeling bad there.

Like the B-52s, Devo is a band with a super strong, clear, personal vision of who they are, and also like the Bs, they wear costumes, which has served both bands well now that they’ve aged. Both bands are also utterly unique, and just came kind of bang out of nowhere, back in the before times when you could be a crazy art student on the cutting edge of culture – in fact, well beyond the cutting edge of culture -- and somehow wind up a millionaire.

It used to feel like Devo’s whole thing was a schtick – something-something about mechanization, automation, uniformity, and conformity; the lost promises of America and the deception in them, as well. They made fun of those conventions via the easily embraced notion of “de-volution;” to me, they are the living embodiment of the idea of ‘chaotic good.’ Their work was funny! But now, honestly, it just feels…true. Indeed, every word out of their silly mouths seems downright political, like when they opened the show with the song “Don’t Shoot.”

“Don’t Shoot, I’m a man.” Not. Funny. Are we not men?? This also lacks humor in times when so many are being treated so inhumanely right in front of our very eyes. Even the line, Crack that whip! Give the past a slip, was almost too apropos for me on this night of all nights; it reminded me of my imminent erasure as both a writer and now as an educator. After all, we are all a product of our times, and my times, which are also the Devo and B-52 times, have somehow failed me. I read this really good book about the B-52s called “Cool Town” by Grace Elizabeth Hale, which really gets at what this make-believe world of long ago was all about. In it, she retells how the band used to drive all night from Athens to New York City to play CBGBs, and how all of Manhattan were floored by their wigs and their dresses and their charm and their wonderful music, and she talks also about what it meant to come of age in the deep south with parents who were benefiting from post-war prosperity and who felt unconstrained by the previous era’s values.

“We did not want to be rednecks or racists or conservative Christians or live in subdivisions or work as middle managers,” Hale writes. “We dreamed not of the Reagan-era Sunbelt but of a different world, a new, new, new South. And in the university’s libraries and archives and studios and galleries and concert halls and the town’s old buildings, we found resources to try and make that world a reality”.

“The scene,” she adds, referring to the musical community that birthed bands like the B-52s, Pylon, and R.E.M., “was our answer to what we understood as the failures and limits of our America. And our participation in this collective creativity transformed us.”

Well, it transformed me, that’s for sure. But now I think it also may have unfitted me for life as it is lived now, which is more similar to what came before. “Cool Town” ends with this beautiful evocation of the town of Athens, as it was back in the day:

Late at night, after working until closing at the Downstairs or seeing a band there or at another club, I would head home on my old three-speed bike, cutting diagonally through bank and church parking lots and jumping the seams in the pavement that mapped old boundaries and foundations of building already gone. The wind would cool the sweat of dancing or mopping. The chrome fenders would rattle. The basket would squeak. And jarred by the motion, the rusty bell would let out a series of little dings. Even my bike made music then, a love song of course, the story of a young woman and a place where she learned to make history.

That was me, too – me and you too, probably, if you’re even reading this. But as I walked out of the arena along the Google campus through the Gradient Canopy – an area filled with jaunty-colored bicycles, by the way, which are ridden by the googlers between the chrome white buildings where all the world’s information is now processed - I just felt like things had changed too much. Too much. I don’t think I’ll go to many more shows like these. Perhaps, to quote Robert Frost, I am overtired/of the great harvest I myself desired.