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.