Dearest... Darlin' (RIP Burt Bacharach)

 In honor of the passing of the great Burt Bacharach... 

20 years ago (or more, date is unclear), I wrote a short story (to amuse myself mainly) inspired by the great Burt Bacharch/Hal David tune "Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa". My Mum was a huge Gene Pitney fan growing up, so this song was a major part of my universe from birth, basically. And I've always loved it. But it always amused me to think of what it would be like to actually receive a letter like that. 

Anyway, I'm thinking about the great Burt Bacharach who passed today, and how maybe somewhere in that big studio in the sky him and Hal and Gene are getting together to make another hit record. Heavy on the horns. 

I guess my story technically honors Hal David's lyrics but I truly wrote the story with the song playing in my head and the music tells the story too so it's a team effort, like all great Bacharach/David songs. Anyway. Don't think too hard on that.  Have a listen to the song, pour yourself a glass of something sad and sexy, and enjoy. 

********************

SOMEWHERE IN TULSA…

written by Sharon Penny (circa 2000-ish - 2023 edit)

[Inspired by Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa (Bacharach/David) 1963 ]

I stood on the front porch, staring at the letter in my hand, postmarked Memphis.
I don't know anyone in Memphis. The handwriting on the address looked kind of like Gary's. But why would he be writing to me? He’s coming home in a couple of days. 

Maybe it was a really boring business trip? 
I opened the letter. Hotel stationery from the Peabody Hotel, Memphis. 
And, yes, signed by Gary.

Dearest darling...

Dearest darling? Maybe I opened someone else's mail. I checked the envelope again – nope, that was definitely my name. Are you drunk, Gary? 

Dearest darling, I had to write to say that I won't be home anymore. 

What? We're getting married next week. What do you mean you won't be home?

Cause something happened to me while I was driving home and I'm not the same anymore...

What? A car accident? What the fuck?

I was only twenty four hours from Tulsa, only one day away from your arms.

No, wait, go back to the part where you said you're not the same anymore. You can't skip past that! Ok now I'm worried. And confused. Never coming home? And annoyed. What’s this 'twenty four hours from Tulsa' shit? Just tell me where you are! Isn't it easier to just say you're in Memphis? Why are you being so dramatic?

I saw a welcoming light and stopped to rest for the night, and that's when I saw her.

You saw 'her'? Who did you see? 

As I pulled in outside of a small hotel she was there. 

Did you hit your head and forget how to use pronouns, Gary? WHO IS SHE?!

So I walked up to her, asked where I could get something to eat and she showed me where. 

Still no idea who ‘she’ is. Seriously Gary, what the fuck? This shit reads like a Days Of Our Lives ‘Dear John’ letter. I don't understand what...Oh. Wait. "Dear John letter." Oh my god jesus I’m so stupid, of course that’s what this is. 
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK. 

Seriously Gary, go fuck yourself. 

I was only twenty four hours from Tulsa, only one day away from your arms.

You really are serious. You're trying to tell me that that you were almost home and now...what? You're staying? Because this, this, TOUR GUIDE showed you where to get something to eat? You’re killing me.  

She took me to a cafe; I asked her if she would stay. She said “OK”. 

You low-down cowardly cold-feet-having motherfucker. It must be such a lonely existence when you've been on the road for all of, what, two days? You're supposed to be on your way home your fiancée FOR YOUR WEDDING. Nice breakup Gary. Great job. No notes. 

 
I was only twenty four hours from Tulsa- 

Okay now you're being passive-aggressive. 

Oh the jukebox started to play, and nighttime turned into day. 

As we were dancing closely all of a sudden I lost control as I held her charms

So… you blew your top slow-dancing with a tour guide?  Of her many, yet unnamed 'charms', which ones exactly did you hold, Gary? I'd love to know.

And I caressed her, kissed her, told her I'd die before I let her out of my arms. 

I'm sorry what?
Who the fuck is this woman? Jesus, Gary, I get it, you got cold feet. Just say that. But what's all this you'll “die” before you let her out of your arms? Why? Because she showed you where to get a decent meal? This letter makes no goddamned sense.

I was only twenty four hours -

Shut the fuck up, Gary.

I hate to do this to you but I love somebody new. What can I do?

‘I hate to to this to you’? 'What can I do?' Please. Blow it out your fucking ass, Gary. Don't act like you're sorry. You're loving every second of this you fucking drama-queen. Anyway how can you be sorry when you haven’t technically told me anything. This whole stupid letter is nothing but subtext! 
“Sorry for avoiding the subject altogether anyway I met a tour guide BYEEEE”

And I can never, never come home again. 

Yeah no shit you can’t come home. I wouldn't let you in the house even if you tried. Also, you broke up with me BY WRITING ME A LETTER? You're too much of a coward to call and tell me. It’s just so mundane, that’s what really pisses me off. I mean, at least fake your death or do something crazy. But nooooo. Instead I get your weird passive-aggressive cryptic crossword letter. You're an asshole, Gary. I can't believe I ever wanted to marry you. 
FUCK you and FUCK your letter. I would rather spend the rest of my life under the misapprehension that you were eaten by wolves than to know that you were twenty four hours from Tulsa drooling on a fucking jumped-up tour guide. 

Rot in hell, Gary.

THE END

Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood: How Do I Love The Soundtrack? Let Me Count The Ways

Let me get this out of the way first: with a track list that includes the Bob Seger System, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and Deep Purple, this soundtrack is 100% Sharon-bait. Throw in The Mamas & The Papas and Neil Diamond and I’m set. All of this is to say that henceforth critical distance will not be maintained: this is going to be a love fest, pure and simple.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is one of Tarantino’s most personal movies, and you can tell by the specificity of the soundtrack and the role played by radio. Radio is the key. The music isn’t just an ode to AM Radio: that would be an altogether different animal. This soundtrack, filtered through Tarantino’s own childhood memories, is a love letter to KHJ Los Angeles’ Boss Radio. Radio is the thread that connects the characters throughout the movie, and the majority of the music heard in the movie is through a car radio, a transistor, or the built-in radio in the home stereo console. Weaving together the music with actual aircheck tapes from KHJ, Tarantino improves upon his Reservoir Dogs soundtrack concept with something that’s much less of a nostalgia stunt show and much more of a personal history.

For me, it’s this concept that makes the entire soundtrack work;  the commercials and weather updates and the music all feels not just specifically 1969, but specifically Los Angeles in a way that’s not alienating to someone who didn’t grow up with it; I was born 10 years later on a completely different continent yet  it draws me in, lending the movie a real warmth and a sort of, I dunno, inherited familiarity?

But it’s not just the KHJ specificity; it’s of course the songs themselves; the choices made by Tarantino and his longtime music supervisor Mary Ramos are endlessly intriguing to me. I decided to wait until after writing this missive to read in detail about the reasons behind the music choices – so most of what I’m writing here is my own interpretation of how the ways the various songs work with the movie and my own guesses as to the reason behind the choices.

Anyway. Onto the music. “And awayyyyy we go….”

Early in the film there’s a really playful musical choice that stuck out to me. Cliff drives Rick back to his Cielo Drive home and swaps Rick’s cream-colored 1966 Cadillac DeVille convertible for his own dirty blue 1964 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible, which he starts up in a cloud of smoke, right as Billy Stewart’s “Summertime” kicks in: Stewart’s gleeful “RRRrrrrrrrrrrr” a cappella exclamations seem to mimic the little car’s shuddering start and burbling motor, then the summery horn-laden groove kicks in as Cliff adeptly swerves and fishtails the nimble car back down through the hills on his way home to the Valley.  It’s a great cut – especially when you listen to the whole track and realize they had to identify just the right moment clip the song start to finish. I don’t know for sure if they did it to match the car but god I hope they did. It sure feels that way.

Hand in glove with radio, cars and car music are essential to Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. This is a time when car travel was cool, and Los Angeles the ultimate car city, routes and freeways innate to the city’s personality.  All of this is baked into the music. On his drive home, Cliff nimbly weaves through the downtown traffic to tracks like Joe Cocker’s “The Letter” and as the pedal hits metal on the the freeway here comes the glorious bottom-heavy crash of Bob Seger System’s ‘Ramblin' Gamblin' Man’. As Cliff takes off from Cielo, so too Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, dressed in their dandiest partying clothes tucked into Polanski's jaunty 1962 MG TD, take off to the Playboy Mansion to the deeply heavy, deeply groovy sounds of Deep Purple’s “Hush".

One of my joys of the movie is Margot Robbie’s portrayal of Sharon Tate, and through her character's obvious delight in music and dancing she’s used as our way into various songs. Resplendent in yellow she dances her heart out Michelle Phillips and Mama Cass to ‘Son of a Loving Man’ by the Buchanan Brothers in the Playboy Mansion backyard;  as she walks into the Village Theater to watch herself in The Wrecking Crew, she can’t help but groove to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels ‘Jenny Take a Ride’ playing over the CC and Companyr trailer on screen; and, most iconically for me, Sharon at home dropping the needle on Paul Revere and the Raiders ‘Good Thing’ as she un-selfconsciously dances around her bedroom while she packs for a trip. The way the music delivers us these small, joyful, wonderfully human moments are true delights, for me primarily because it’s Sharon Tate; a woman whose name is not tied to happiness or joy, but visions of victimhood and murder.

Paul Revere & The Raiders get not one but three shots at the soundtrack with “Good Thing”, “Hungry” and “Mr Sun, Mr Moon”. I was initially a little peeved by this; surely Tarantino could see fit to squeeze in at least one Tommy James and the Shondells track in lieu of one of the THREE Paul Reveres?  But then I remembered that history is why Paul Revere earned their rightful place. There's a Charles Manson connection; the band was produced by Terry Melcher. Invoked by Tarantino (and Manson himself) in the movie but unseen, Melcher was a primary target of Charles Manson’s single-minded, obsessive quest for musical fame and one of the many convoluted “inspirations” behind the Manson Family’s terrifying murder spree. Melcher was also the former tenant of the Tate home, and a good friend of Dennis Wilson and I could be here all day talking to you about Terry's illfated intertwinings with old Charles. (Also: the son of Doris Day. Ok I'll stop.)

Cliff crossing paths with a Manson Girl provides a couple of good/interesting musical moments that I really liked.  Over the excellent opening lines of Neil Diamond’s ‘Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show’ (the song itself a wry opposite-day nod to Manson and his cult), Cliff spies Pussycat, one of the Manson girls, thumbing for a ride. He pulls over and agrees to drive her out to Spahn Ranch. Having flirted from afar twice before, in the car now the flirtation dial is alllll the way up to eleven, even though her vibe is immediately a little...weird. As the Cadillac sails down the on-ramp onto the freeway, Dee Clark's 1959 "Hey Little Girl" kicks in, a bouncy little ode to, well, getting it on with highschoolers. Such were the times. Between all the eye-fucking going on between Cliff and Pussycat and the song choice, I assumed that Cliff picked up Pussycat for sex reasons and curiosity. But the song tricks you; when she casually offers to "suck his cock while driving," Cliff, though amused, doesn’t take the (jail)bait. Can she prove she's over 18? She cannot.

Hey *little* girl.

Not that this makes him a great guy (he's a wife-killer after all), but the script-flip of the song cue serves the Cliff Booth mystique. Just who the hell is this guy?

I can’t quite string the rest of this into a cohesive narrative so I’ll just effuse over some other  moments.

One of my favorites is the unmistakable string intro of "Out of Time" by the Rolling Stones kicking in as Rick and Cliff arrive at the airport after 6 months of shooting Spaghetti Westerns  in Italy. It’s a bonafide “radio” song for one thing;  I swear it was still getting radio play on our local station in Australia in the late 70’s when I was a kid, it’s that much of a classic.  But thematically there's a lot of signposts working here if you want to start getting literal; we already know from the off that Rick and Cliff are both men out of time culturally, and the movie has just established that Rick and Cliff's working relationship is out of time because Rick can no longer afford to keep him employed; but also perhaps a trick being played here too; with the date emblazoned on screen the nerdier among us know (or think we know) that Sharon Tate and her friends are tragically, literally out of time.

Also it’s just cool because it’s a goddamn great song.(Sadly not included in the official released soundtrack).

Like Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Mamas and the Papas get three spots on the soundtrack; and like Paul Revere and their Melcher connection, the choice has everything to do with history. The short-lived quintessential “LA hippy” band had many links to Sharon Tate & Roman Polanski and the murders;  Sharon, Michelle Phillips and Mama Cass had a social connection,  Polanski had an affair with Michelle and post Sharon’s murder even accused John Philips of committing the murder as revenge for the affair (wtf dude); and notoriously, the sheet music for their song “Straight Shooter” was one of the items found by police in the Cielo Drive house the morning after the murder. (And all of this drama is really saying something because the group was a wall-to-wall soap opera  *without* their connection to the murders.)  

Dispensing with the happy summer vibes attributed to the Mamas and The Papas, Tarantino starts deploying the music at the precise moment when the tone of the movie darkens. First, Jose Feliciano's elegiac cover of "California Dreaming” scores Cliff's drive away from Spahn Ranch. Here Feliciano seems to pine for a lost idea as the inherent ‘wrongness’ of Cliff’s Spahn Ranch excursion has at the very least forever poisoned his fond memories of shooting Bounty Law there, and these raw, desperate hippies surely leaves the unflappable Cliff even more uncertain of the future.

6 months later as the movie sets up for its violent finale, Cliff returns home from "a good old fashioned drunk" with Rick. He takes Brandy for a midnight walk down Cielo Drive; as he fades from view, the headlights of a beat-up Ford Galaxie crest the hill; cue the opening verse and chorus of my favorite Mamas & Papas song, "12:30 (Young Girls Are Coming Into The Canyon)".  Hunkered inside the vehicle are the Manson Family’s Tex, Sadie and Sofie, full of ill-intent : maximum portent for those in the audience who know that these are the three who initiated the Tate murders.  John Phillips’ beautiful hippy paean to …groupies… provides perfect contrast to the slow build of dread (hilariously cut short by a drunken Rick in his robe and slippers waving a blender full of frozen margarita demanding these hippies get their “mechanical asshole” off his private street). 

Simultaneously at around midnight this same evening, just next door at the Tate home, Abigail Folger entertains Sharon, Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski with a solo piano rendition of "Straight Shooter”. It’s not a musical gut punch unless you know. But if you know? Oof.

A brief musical moment that I loved was as Cliff's encounter with the Manson Family begins ramping up, we cut to Rick Dalton, drunk on margaritas lounging in the pool with his radio, singing along at the top of his voice to "Snoopy and the Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsman  It's a hilarious scene that cuts the rising tension briefly; made even funnier if you recognize this classic novelty song (kids of the late 60’s and 70’s surely delighted at the very existence of a song about Snoopy. I know I did!).  And as a character moment, it deftly underlines the simplicity of Rick Dalton while also illustrating that novelty songs are best enjoyed at the top of your voice when you are drunker than shit.

Cliff and Rick's bloody finale is underpinned by Vanilla Fudge's freak-out cover of "You Keep Me Hangin' On" As Cliff starts to peak from his acid-dipped cigarette, he tunes the radio to KHJ and Fudge’s slow psychedelic wall of sound builds to a roar. Portent reaches full climax as the Manson Family come a-creeping into…. Rick's house. From there it’s mayhem. The long, insane crescendo of Vanilla Fudge’s incredible cover matches the long, insane crescendo of the violence on screen and feels a little bit like Tarantino finally (maybe) getting one up on Paul Thomas Anderson's iconic deployment of "Sister Christian" in Boogie Nights? Maybe? Musical insanity matching on-screen insanity one-to-one, this moment is hard to beat. (And as a nerdy aside, I love that along with garage and pop and folk we get gnarly heavy late 60’s rock, starting out with early Deep Purple and ending with the legendary Vanilla Fudge. According to Ritchie Blackmore, when Deep Purple started out, they intentionally set out to be clones of Vanilla Fudge. Which hey, there are worse bars to set for yourself. Hail Fudge!)

So. Obviously I loved the movie and the soundtrack to a ridiculous degree. And I didn’t even talk about Los Bravos, The Box Tops or Maurice Jarre! I could go on forever but also I honestly don’t know how to even finish this deep dive! Ugh!  

The end.

Me vs Myself aka Mecha vs Kraken

It's been two months since I was laid off from my job and I want to talk about resilience, and lack thereof.

So far I've learned...well... that I'm a snowflake. A big baby. A mess.

I didn't know there would be so many tests! Everything from basic multiple-choice comprehension tests to bizarre skills tests where you fake-open an email and fake-respond to a live-chat while filling out a spreadsheet. Personality tests that mess with your head worse than an optometrist lens test (better? worse? always? sometimes? oh god oh god I don't know maybe? sure?). Proofreading tests. Writing tests. Math tests. MATH tests. Ugh. You want to see me in wild-eyed red-alert mode, watch me take a multiple choice mathematics test.  Some tests I've passed, some I have failed, some I have cartwheeled down the side of the mountain with my skis inexplicably on fire.

Plus interviewing is the ultimate test: can I behave like a hireable human being in a way where I feel kind of like myself but also please the people interviewing me without being super obvious that I'm trying to please them but that's the whole point and oh it falls apart so easily. I haven't crashed and burned yet but even the non-responses, the no-callbacks, they feel like failures. 

Failing gets in my head. 

Even though it's for jobs I won't get; hell, jobs I never had to begin with, all these micro-failures solidify in my mind as confirmations of my fraud. That I don't belong here, doing any of this. That I'll never get anywhere. It awakens the Kraken-voice from inside my deep self-hating soul, the one that loves to tell me that I suck, that I have no business trying, that I am the worst, etc. 

I know that Kraken-voice is a liar, and the worst thing I can do is believe it. I tell my friends that all the time. Knowing it and believing it are two different things. In the past few years I got really good at keeping it at bay, but that was when the failures were few and far between. When you start a pattern of failing, the Kraken-voice gets loud and constant. Learning from failure becomes impossible because you're so overwhelmed by doubt. Soon you're just the helpless captain of a tiny rowboat cowering in front of a gigantic sea monster that's shouting at you.

It's been a long time for me since that voice has been so constant. Friends and colleagues say 'You're awesome, you'll find something!' or 'I'm so not worried about you, you'll be fine! Don't worry!' and that worked really well when it was only one or two failures but eventually I started whispering to myself  'Have you seen what it's like in here?'

When the shit hits the fan I'm a sentient attic full of spiderwebs. Picture me running to my emotional toolbox and all I have is a broken ruler, a tiny screwdriver and a hair-tie.

Cool. Great. I guess I'll just cry then.

I self-medicate with caffeine, music and bingewatching European crime procedurals. I always get back on the horse, I haven't retreated to bed permanently. But every time I get back on the horse I feel a little more unsure of myself, more confused about who I really am, and less sure of where I'm even going or what I'm supposed to do.

I'm not saying I'm unique or suffering from any special brand of depression that other people aren't battling on a much bigger scale. What's happening here with me is the mundane reality that the chickens of a lifetime's worth of low self-esteem are finally coming home to roost.

What I've seen within myself these past two months, what I'm learning, is that you can't magically ~become~ confident. It doesn't work that way. It's like having a sportscar in the driveway for 40 years and you suddenly decide you want to take it out for a spin. You jump in the driver's seat and turn the key...and the battery's dead. And the tires are flat. And there's a family of mice living under the dashboard. Confidence has to be maintained, it doesn't just appear. The value of maintaining it, of practicing belief in yourself when you don't need it, is that when it's strong enough it can shout down that Kraken-voice. The Kraken-voice says "You suck" and your confidence Mecha strides through the water and choke-slams the Kraken saying "Pfft whatever. I don't suck, I was under-prepared. I'll know next time to spend longer on preparation." and the Kraken slips away back under the waves. (Or perhaps I have watched Pacific Rim too many times.)

It takes a while to get to that point, but eventually that's what it can look like. Or so I've heard. I'm still getting there.

Practicing confidence for me right now boils down to practicing being my own friend. It sounds corny! I sound like a self-help book! But it's true and it works.
Like, I might say to myself "I don't really want to look for jobs this morning. I think I'm just gonna read this morning and recharge for tomorrow."
I might reply "Dude, I get it. The book IS really good. But isn't that kind of playing it safe? You're too good at what you do to take yourself out of the game just yet. Make a cup of tea and spend an hour jobsearching, and then reward yourself by reading your book. C'mon, it'll be fine."
On the other hand, if you're jobsearching and you're like, "I'm just going to apply for these, I don't care, I know I'm not qualified but I have to do something or I'll feel like I've failed."
Then I might reply, "No way. You're doing this for you. Not for anyone else. It seems like you're getting a bit wiggy on the jobsearching today, maybe it's time to take a break and go do something that will take your mind off it? Go see a movie or take a walk or take a day trip. Change of scenery. It'll still be here tomorrow when you're in a better frame of mind. Don't punish yourself."

Ughhhhhhh I know I know it sounds cornier even more now that I've written it like that and I probably sound like more of a mollycoddled snowflake but the honest truth is that it feels nice to be my own friend. It really does. I'm not usually that nice to myself, and it's a lot less stressful. And, with practice and regularity, over time it starts putting actual helpful tools in my emotional toolbox for when I need them.
So that there's not just spiderwebs in my attic.
So that my sportscar will actually start when I turn the key.
So that the Mecha can always chokeslam the Kraken. 

It really does help an awful lot of metaphors.

 

I Showed You Stars You Never Could See: Tom Petty

Seems more and more like this blog is turning into 'musings on dead heroes' since I don't hardly ride my bike anymore. This past week I've been thinking about Tom Petty a lot. 

This photo is how Tom Petty makes me feel. 

Cool. Mysterious. Cuban-heeled. Coy...but confident. Approachably androgynous. And a tractor-beam death-ray stare that will make you forget your own name. The Eddie Cochrane album sitting next to him is like a cherry on a delicious sundae, but the god's honest truth is I'd listen to John Phillips Sousa with him if that was what he was into. He's a guy you don't just want to be with, you want to be ~around~. 

His look was the lure but the songs were the bait. The way he sang about women, about love, was where his real power lay. Even when he was old and beardy I could forget that he looked like Farmer Gandalf. Because those songs, man...those songs were...are...everything.

The women in Tom's songs have agency, control, and independence. His wry insecurity never gave you the impression that any of these women were His. Tom Petty's women were more like bolts of lightning that he was trying to grab onto, ever the unsure-yet-sincere paramour. One stray thought that came to me tonight is that Tom Petty was the emo corollary to Dion: Dion cautioned to keep away from Runaround Sue; but if that song had been written by Tom Petty, he would have declared that he was in love with Runaround Sue. Despite his intense love for the 50's and 60's, he let his women live outside the stereotypes  adhered to by his musical heroes. Tom Petty was never threatened by a women who held all the cards; if anything, he loved her all the more.

That's why I hold the devout opinion that Rock Guys don't sing women like Tom Petty sings women. There are very few Rock Guys that can thumbnail sketch the life of a fictional woman that actually feels lived-in, but Tom does it repeatedly. 

Listen: I love Bruce Springsteen more than life itself but Bruce hasn't come close to writing a woman with an inner life like the woman in 'American Girl'. (No tea no shade, Wendy.) I don't even care that Tom calls half his women girls. That's how good he is. It's the tiny details and the blank spaces that make them so real. From the short-story sketches of the woman in 'Mary Jane's Last Dance' to the wisp of smoke woman that can't be held in 'The Wild One, Forever', to the woman who speaks French in her sleep in 'Shadow of a Doubt (Complex Kid)'. Even that poor Elvis-loving broken-hearted good girl in 'Free Fallin'' feels like a real girl. 

Tom Petty doesn't tell you what a woman is wearing, or the color of her hair, or how good she looks in lingerie or on his arm or what she's like in bed; he brings his women to life by describing how they feel, what they want, (and how they kiss), and makes them live from the inside out. 

That's why I will always hold Tom Petty and his music so deep in my heart, and that's why when we finally meet in the great hereafter, I'll totally lie down on the shag carpet and listen to Eddie Cochrane records with him.

It's Just The End of the World: Chris Cornell and Me

I've been trying for a while to write a longer piece about Chris Cornell... but everything I tried to write sounded like a high school journal entry. 

And then I decided that was something to embrace. That's where my musical life truly began. That's where his music began for me. Removing the high school feeling from anything I wrote would be like removing the submerged portion of the iceberg, i.e. most of the iceberg. 

 
Everyone who knows me knows I've been blah blah Pearl Jam blah blah Soundgarden for pretty much ever. Their music has been a huge part of my life for 26 years. But it wasn't just an 'oh I really dig their music' kind of fandom; it was classic teenage capital O obsession that included but was not limited to papering my closet doors with posters, writing their names on my shoes, stealing billboards and crying actual (private) tears just because I loved them so very much. It was the first time where music - understanding it, absorbing it, enjoying it, learning more about it, listening to it - took over my whole life.

It was almost like I joined a quest the moment I first heard 'Alive' and 'Jesus Christ Pose'. It was suddenly VERY important that I find out everything there was to know about these bands: what they looked like, how they spoke, what they thought about pretty much anything, what bands THEY liked, what bands they'd been in before, what those bands sounded like, what those bands looked like... on and on. My friends and I pored over lyrics, wrote out lyrics, studied liner notes, stood in the local newsagent and scoured imported music magazines for interviews and articles and photos and posters; we recorded their music videos, pored over TV appearances and studiedt heir every word and mannerism like our own Zapruder films. And constantly, in every free moment, we listened to the music. 

It was a collective obsession. It wasn't just me on my own, it was all of my friends. We all had varying levels of obsession, but we just somehow formed this unspoken Voltron together to find new information, sharing our finds with each other and celebrating this ongoing acquisition of knowledge. From Pearl Jam and Soundgarden we were led to Temple of the Dog, to the Singles soundtrack, to Mother Love Bone, to Green River, to Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, Nirvana. We were living in a small country town in Australia in the pre-internet 90's... none of this information was at our ready disposal. It was a lot of leg work! Every new mention of a band created an opportunity to uncover more of these exciting secrets that this music promised to reveal. Every new band meant a trip to Geelong or Melbourne to find used tapes or new tapes; we had no hope of finding back-catalog gems in our one-record-store town. We saw Singles together; bought Doc Martens together; raided Army Disposals stores for army greens, nicked our Dad's flannel shirts, and worried our mothers that we were lesbians with our newfound love of men's clothing (always a plus). 

As my obsession grew I made a pretty good show of making it seem like the music was the most important thing to me. Oh how I sneered when I heard other girls talk about how 'cute' Eddie Vedder was, or how handsome Chris Cornell was. Pshaw. I was above such things. For me the 90's was about enjoying the music for the music and not for its image .... 

Sure, Sharon. Sure.

The truth was that at 16 years of age, Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder were the most mesmerizing men I had ever seen. I mean, god bless him, Chris Cornell spent almost the entirety of the 90's without a shirt. I know teenage me AND adult me are thankful for that. Like the music was fucking great and it got me through a lot of stuff but all of the hours of just straight up looking at him and feeling a certain way is worth a LOT. 

Chris Cornell IS the Magic Man foretold by the great prophets known as "Heart". 

Which brings me to a side note. For 16 year old me, this music was a revelation of non-threatening masculinity. It was a big turning point for small-town me. I'd spent my early high school years obsessed with glam metal bands like Poison and Motley Crue, whose aggressively sexual lyrics were somewhat softened by the fact that they feminized their *appearance* so as to be less threatening. But the music was still unquestionably *for* men, and designed to attract women as an added bonus. It wasn't until I started listening to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam that I realized how different it was. I didn't have to think about being a girl, or sex, or anything when I listened to this music. The lyrics weren't always about anything that you could directly figure out. Nothing sexual anyway. They weren't overtly trying to attract women in the way that Poison or any of those other bands I liked had been; they were just kind of there, in a band, playing and there wasn't a sex-related gimmick. There was a lot of freedom in that. And relief. Because being a teen is a lot, and it's nice to have something in your life that doesn't point back to sex or your weird body or your dumb hormones for a goddamn change.

Another beautiful thing about this music - not just Soundgarden, not just Pearl Jam, but their whole spiderweb of interconnected music - is that it didn't pull me away from people. I mean, sure I still moped in my room and wrote terrible poetry and deathstared the world in general, BUT. From that first day in 1991, all of this music was a shared experience. 90% of the music that I came to love was discovered with the help of my friends, or given to me by someone. It was not solitary by any means. It was definitely quest-like...but also kind of like being in the Scooby Gang where each band was a new mystery to be solved. And they would've gotten away with it too, etc.  

We built a life raft out of this music. Hell...it was better than a life raft. It was sturdy, bulletproof, like a D-Day landing craft. Our shared enthusiasm created a barrier against the life-shit that was raining down upon us. And for me personally, it speaks a lot of that music and those friendships that while a lot of my teenage memories are of difficult times, they are as much of shared moments with my friends and this music. Even though individually we might have not quite fit in at school, we fit in with each other and collectively made our own weirdness cool to each other. We stopped noticing where we fit in with everybody else; it didn't really matter.

But back to Chris Cornell, and my high school journal thoughts about him:

During the 90's, Chris was the (beautiful, shirtless) axis at the center. His friendship with Andy and his tendril-like connections to all of the bands that I loved gave him a seniority of sorts, and made him feel more knowledgeable somehow. The older brother, in a way.  When Eddie or Kurt or Layne or Weiland were careening under the weight of their fame and/or clearly struggling, Chris was steadfast. He was my north star, a constant light in the distance. I know he struggled privately with addictions of his own. But his outward calm during that time meant something to me, and it gave me a kind of hope. Soundgarden, while they were together originally, were solid; perfectly, heroically unbothered, nonchalantly bulldozing through the hype of those years and I fucking loved them for it.

Chris Cornell's voice is a string that vibrates all the way back to my 16th year. Every song is a memory. In my grief, I am putting my energy into trying not to feel selfishly bereft over what I am now without, and instead trying to be thankful for all that he left behind.   

To finish up, I leave you with a memory:

October 1999. I visited Sacramento for the first time to meet Clay (my now-husband) in person after almost 4 years of emails and newgroups. During my stay, we took a road-trip from Sacramento to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. We had quite a few CD's in the Acura's CD changer, including Nine Inch Nails The Fragile, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas soundtrack, Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love; but the one I remember most was a brand new album that had just released in September that year: Chris Cornell's Euphoria Morning. To this day the album evokes California and Nevada landscapes blurring past my eyes in a haze of orchards, coastlines, cities and deserts...of looking over at Clay every now and then and just smiling because he was real... of laughter and a fun adventure...of the promise of an endless highway stretching to the horizon. 

Thank you Chris. For everything.

Perfection, Failure and Why The Great British Bake Off is Great

* Even though it's aired in the US as The Great British Baking Show, I like to refer to it by it's original branding. It just sounds better.  

** The first 3 seasons of the Great British Bake-Off remain unaired in the US, so the numbering of the US seasons is totally different. It's wacky and confusing, so for some attempt at clarity I'll refer to both versions where possible.

When I was a kid I watched my Mum melt the bottom out of a jug making toffee in the microwave.  

I invented ‘gravel loaf’ by accidentally putting bulgur (cracked wheat) into a multigrain loaf instead of wheatgerm (it was inedible).  

I burned my first Thanksgiving pumpkin pie so badly that the crust was actual charcoal and the bottom half of the filling was black. We had to eat the pie out of the tin with a spoon.

In home-baking, perfection is an outlier. We strive for it, we imagine it, we see pictures of it in books and we hear stories of it, but there’s a thousand variables that stand in the way: self-inflicted wrong-turns like accidentally using salt when the recipe calls for sugar, or forgetting to turn on the oven; technique slip-ups like over-mixing, or over-kneading; environmental obstacles like hot days that wreak havoc on butter and chocolate; or the universe randomly deciding to fuck with you because you used “stale” eggs or because you walked in front of the oven at the wrong time. These endless, confounding variables and failure at seemingly every turn is why many shy away from baking; but the joys that lie within the struggle for perfection is why so many more of us worship at the altar.

The struggle between perfection and failure is a huge reason why I’m obsessed with the Great British Bake Off  (or GBBO for short). (Another reason is because it’s delightful.) The show embraces the unpredictability of home-baking and allows room for acceptable failure, even abject failure, in a way that reality cooking shows usually don’t. Even though the ultimate goal is the perfect bake, GBBO doesn’t frame failure as a spectacle or an aberration to be shamed.  Here in the pleasant surrounds of the GBBO tent, the unspoken subtext of the show and the contest itself is that failure is a natural part of baking. Each week there may only be a handful of contestants who actually create picture-perfect bakes; the majority of bakers present bakes that are imperfect and far-from perfect; and others still contribute a few outright disasters.

Each week contestants enter the tent aiming for perfection: this in and of itself is a crazy goal.  The judges delight in setting the bar high, and ascertaining perfection is the point of the Bake Off; but the judges are experienced bakers and are well-aware of the difficulty of what they’re asking. To an outsider, setting the bar so incredibly high for these amateur home-bakers seems like cruelty; surely the show is setting them up to fail. But the beauty of the GBBO tent is that it provides a safe space to try. Through a rigorous audition process, these bakers have earned the chance to show what they can do, and the tent is a place where perfection is believed to be possible. No-one is going to laugh these amateur bakers off the show for attempting to bake 36 petit fours. Go ahead! You want to make a dozen sourdough bagels in 4 hours? Have at it! The show is their opportunity to try, and try they do. There’s no abject humiliation meted out by the judges; even the harshest critiques are balanced with positive reinforcement and kindness.  

The show is a symphony of emotional highs and lows. The highs are thrilling, there’s no question: seeing a home-baker achieve perfection or something close to it is truly exciting. The constant fight against failure is what makes winning The Great British Bake Off, or even just winning a challenge, such a feat for these amateur bakers. But the secret strength of this show is in the lows. Cakes are dropped. Caramel is burned…repeatedly. Sponges fall flat, or turn to rubber. Ovens are put on the wrong setting. Or time simply runs out. We see these failures and we see ourselves...but I think in our hearts, we give these very human bakers more leeway than we give ourselves. After seeing a baker reduced to tears over a 'creative' lattice topping on a treacle pie, it doesn't feel quite like the end of the world when your cake doesn't turn out quite right. And in watching so many tearful flops and catastrophes, we also know that it doesn't always mean the end.  There's always a chance. The beauty of the GBBO is that the glimmer of possibility remains right up until the final judgement. (Unless of course you do your block and throw your melted Baked Alaska in the bin. Poor Iain.)

Watching the bakers struggle against failure and push for perfection becomes even more fascinating for me personally when it’s combined with a baker’s struggle against low self-esteem. This "war on two fronts" makes for some of the show’s richest moments, in my opinion.

Take lovely Jo (un-aired in the US/Bake Off Season 2).  A Mum from Essex married at 17 who lived her life solely for her three now-almost grown boys.  The Baking Show is Jo finally ‘doing something for herself’. Jo is bubbly but beneath her smile is tangible self-doubt. She’s not sure she belongs in the tent, mutters to herself when she screws up, her eyes fill with tears over a failure she’s sure will send her home. Each failure seems to confirm what she feels is the truth, as though the universe is telling her ‘you should never have come here’. But oh how the compliments make her brighten, as though an invisible hand reaches down and lifts her chin slightly. Fellow baker MaryAnne muses that hopefully Jo’s will see that she's as good as they keep telling her she is. 

There’s Ruby (Baking Show Season 2/Bake Off Season 4). A young baker, a mere 20 years old, wide-eyed and crippled with self-doubt from the off, certain that she will be called out for a fraud and sent home after the first round. A failed creme patissiere in the first challenge sends her into a heartbreaking flood of panicked tears, and throughout the episode she seems on the verge of apologizing for her very existence and/or bolting from the tent never to be seen again. But as the season progresses, it’s clear to us, and the judges, that she can bake. The tension, and ultimate joy, comes as wait for Ruby to realize it too. When that moment finally comes, when she beams and stands tall with dazed, giddy pride, is a beautiful moment of television.

And of course, there’s my favorite, Nadiya (Baking Show Season 3/ Bake Off Season 6).  Her face would contort with worry over every challenge, but her creativity repeatedly delighted the judges. Failing at the technical challenges weighed her down, and she constantly feared going home, as though the technical was somehow a confirmation that she wasn’t ‘good enough’. The self-doubt was palpable in those moments. But soon, there came a sea-change. Her genuine delight over her first technical win should be bottled and sold, it’s so magical to watch. Watching her transform into a force pushing back against failure is still one of my favorite things to watch on the show. The judges knew that she had the potential within her; but it took Nadiya to realize it herself.

I think part of my fascination with this aspect of GBBO stems from my former life as a teacher-in-training; Jo, Ruby, and Nadiya and so many of the struggling bakers in GBBO call to mind the thing I loved about teaching: giving someone room to find their potential. Find their wings, so to speak. Seeing someone's face when they discover they can fly, after a lifetime of believing they barely deserved to walk, it's a beautiful thing.    

GBBO is a place that encourages home-bakers from many backgrounds to seek perfection. Some may never have even conceived that such a thing was possible for them; others may have wished for it but never had the tools to try; others may have tried but been cut short before their dreams were realized. There’s so many ways that these bakers come to this tent. 

Ultimately what I love about GBBO is the joy of watching a group of people learn how to fly. Some try and fail, some try and land with a bump, some soar. All of them exceed their own expectations just by trying. And there's nothing else like it on TV.   

 

Me and Mr King

I wrote about Stephen King on FB yesterday, but it turns out I had this huge blarp waiting to come out as well. It’s pretty emo, so sorry if you were hoping that I’d do some kind of postmodern critical reassessment of my attachment to a problematic author etc. This is definitely not that.

I was 12 when I stumbled onto my first Stephen King book. It was 1988 and it was my first day at Colac High School, and I visited the school library. (I was already a lifelong library-dweller by then. I spent so much time in my primary school library that the librarian sometimes made me her ‘helper’.) That first day the high school library felt new and exciting. It had its own building, for a start, like the town library; my primary school library was just a room. It had a lobby with a display case and TWO doors: one to go in, and one to go out. There were full-length windows in the back, so there was actual sunlight inside; and most importantly, LOTS of books. I remember walking through the fiction stacks, excited that there were SO many new books I’d never heard of. There’s nothing more exciting to a book lover than MOAR BOOKS. 

Anyway, one book stood out to me on that day: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King. 

When I went to the front desk to check it out, the librarian, Mr. Martino was waiting at the counter. He was a tall wiry man with black hair and a kind face hidden behind a full beard and big wire-rim 80’s glasses. He always wore plaid shirts and sneakers and walked on the balls of his feet like he was about to break into a full sprint. He looked at the book and then peered over his glasses at me.

“There’s some pretty scary stuff in here. Won’t it give you nightmares?” 

He smiled at me but his eyes held just the slightest hint of concern. I remember nervously laughing and saying, “I hope not!” and secretly hoping like crazy I was right. Something told me I could handle it. Or at least I wasn’t afraid of trying. I was feeling brave, apparently.

My biggest memory of actually reading Skeleton Crew was firstly of how scary some of the stories were – ‘The Mist’ and ‘The Raft’ scared the PANTS off me – but I also vividly remember being excited by how ‘grown up’ it was. Nothing was more illustrative of that than ‘Survivor Type’. Even for Stephen King that story was just plain bananas.  A surgeon smuggles heroin onto a cruise ship that then sinks. He ends up marooned on a desert island with his pile of heroin. After trying to eat seagulls and whatever else he can find, he starts amputating his own body parts for food, while loaded on heroin. And he narrates all of it in his journal. By the end he’s amputated almost everything from the waist down. It’s crazy. CRAZY.

Remember: I was twelve. I barely knew what heroin was! I knew about ‘drugs’ as a catchall from different ‘very special episodes’ of TV shows (Punky Brewster, Diff’rent Strokes, even Little House on the Prairie had a two-parter where Albert got hooked on morphine) but I was far from worldly about them.

The fact that the scary/horror element didn’t deter me is interesting. You have to understand: at twelve I was afraid of the IDEA of horror movies; just seeing the trailer for Death Ship was enough to make me cry. I would sneak down the horror movie aisle at the video store & look at the covers but then I’d get real scared and run away back to the ‘normal’ sections. Even Alice Cooper album covers scared me!  Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video was about as scary as things got for me back then. And I don’t remember ready scary books up until that time. For some reason, Skeleton Crew with its cannibalistic mists and oil slicks and limb amputations didn’t send me scurrying back to my Enid Blytons.

I’m not 100% sure why, but I have a theory.

For me reading scary stuff in print was different to seeing it. I could deal with written material more rationally. And more importantly, with print, I felt like I had more control.

When I read Skeleton Crew, I imagined what was being described, but I was in control of what I saw in my mind’s eye. And I could always stop reading if I got too scared and think about something else. 

The scary stuff in movies always felt like it was going to come out of the TV and get me.  I wasn’t able to think on my feet quickly enough to tell myself it wasn’t real. With a book, I knew that it was just words on a page and that the monsters I imagined were in my head: nothing could tangibly hurt me.  I always subconsciously knew I wasn’t in any danger; whereas with movies and visuals I was scared as soon as I saw something scary, and it was hard to dial that back; it was a lot harder for me to consciously know that I wasn’t in danger.

And that dovetails into an aspect of my childhood that bears mentioning. Life at home during my tweens and teens was tumultuous;  much as I loved her, in those days Mum could be downright terrifying sometimes. The fear that horror movies brought was too similar to fear I had already felt: and as a kid fear was something I wanted to avoid more than anything. I did not like being afraid. It wasn’t fun being scared back then, so why would I want to watch something that scared me? But reading Stephen King was empowering; I believe that over time those early books made me brave. They helped me to understand my relationship with fear. I mean, I don’t think it’s 100% because of the books, obviously a lot of that was just part of growing up and maturing mentally, but I think being able to independently process certain types of fear in Stephen King novels helped me develop critical-thinking about fear in my own life. They also gave me an escape during times when I couldn’t handle what was going on around me. I could escape to his imaginary places. By escaping to a place where things were supernatural and terrifying, the scary things in my own life didn’t seem quite so bad.

From Skeleton Crew onward, Stephen King’s books were all-consuming for me. Especially in my high school years. If I was brushing my teeth for bed, I was reading. I remember wishing there was a way I could read on my bike on my way to and from school.

Recently I wondered what it might be like to meet Stephen King in person. I thought about it for a minute or two and I started crying. Because when I thought of seeing him face to face I immediately thought back to my teenage years.  I cannot shake the feeling that he gave me something more than just books to read. I can’t think of Carrie, or Salem’s Lot, or Christine, or It, without thinking of them as a kind of Stephen King treehouse where I could go and hang out and hide and get myself together.   That treehouse gave me happiness and courage during times when I don’t think I could have found those things on my own. Thinking about it overwhelms me. It makes me feel like I owe him something more than just a thank-you. But I don’t think I could ever articulate that in person.