That ’70s Song

A couple of weeks ago, a local station played a marathon of songs from the 1970s. Even though I was a teenager during the ’70s, I can’t say I really like the music; I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed that I grew up during the decade that gave us “Feelings” and “Muskrat Love.” But recently all those ’70s songs have started to show up on—God help me—the “oldies” stations. So here I am, officially old and getting misty-eyed over my teen years…and, you know, some of those songs aren’t sounding half bad.

     So while I was listening to that ’70s marathon, I found myself jotting down song titles and snippets of memories that flashed through my head like so many Sensurround movies. Here are a few.

“Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”

Steely Dan (1974)

I actually don’t have strong memories of this song, but it sounds like a lot of songs on Steely Dan’s Aja album*—and that always makes me think of my high school boyfriend. In 1977, he and I binged on that album. We played that thing to death on the cassette player in his barn where we hung out for hours while he worked on motorcycles. To this day, whenever I hear a Steely Dan song—especially “Deacon Blues” or “Josie,” but “Rikki” does it too—I can smell motor oil and see vise grips and feel my boyfriend’s strong wrists. It was probably the happiest time in my life, and you don’t forget the soundtrack to that.

“Miss You”

The Rolling Stones (1978)

My boyfriend again. I vividly remember listening to this song while we were eating in his car outside Bruno’s, a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria somewhere near Springfield, Massachusetts. Bruno’s made this fantastic square pizza with a thick crust, which we considered the best on Earth and worth the drive of a half hour or so. I’m guessing we were stoned, which would partly explain why we were eating in the car. But we rarely ate in restaurants because my boyfriend had such a snarly, tough-guy attitude that I pretty much couldn’t take him anywhere—a fact that I found both exhausting and irresistible. We weren’t big Stones fans and didn’t give a rat’s ass that they’d released a disco song. Didn’t matter. It sounded good. And the pizza was great.

“Heartache Tonight”

The Eagles (1979)

I hated the Eagles during the ’70s. They fired their opening barrage with the sticky “Best of My Love” and finished me off with the endless “New Kid in Town” (to quote an editor friend, “It’s long, but at least it’s boring”). But thanks to those oldies stations, I’ve come to love a few Eagles songs, especially “One of These Nights,” which I now think is a perfect pop tune that encapsulates the ’70s but never sounds dated. But “Heartache Tonight” is another story, a cloying mess of handclaps and kick drums that was destined for bar-band hell the instant it was recorded.** A few years ago, I stayed in a motel at Lake Shasta that was next door to a little bar. It was Saturday night, and a cover band was playing in there to a jam-packed audience. By 1:30 a.m., people were spilling out the door and smoking on the sidewalk and yelling and laughing as I lay in my motel bed, pressing the pillow over my head, trying to sleep. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any louder, the band ripped into “Heartache Tonight.” It was like the song was taunting me: “The handclaps are cloying? Here’s a room full of drunk people doing them! How do you like me now?”

“Hollywood Nights”   

Bob Seger (1978)

I like to pick on Bob Seger. Who doesn’t? And this song has the bonus of being, like a few other tunes of the era (including a couple of Eagles hits), a “story song” about the wicked state of California. In these songs, there’s always some small-town hick who moves to CA and gets sucked in by drugs and shallow people and ends up disillusioned or dead (or, I don’t know—you tell me what happened in “Hotel California”). So, funny story: I moved from a small town to California in 1979, and it was actually like that: big parties, fast cars, pretty people…and more drugs than I’d ever seen in my life. The only thing that didn’t match up with the “wicked California” songs was the ending; I certainly got sucked into drugs and disillusionment, but that was only a stop in a much longer story. And a lot of those shallow, pretty people ended up PR executives and owners of restaurants and are now 30 pounds overweight and toting their grandkids around in Priuses.

“Dream Weaver”  

Gary Wright (1976)

Every time I hear this song, I think of the school bus. I was a sophomore the year “Dream Weaver” came out, and like most kids in my town, I rode the school bus every day. The buses all had radios (presumably to calm down troublemakers), and around 1976, my bus got upgraded from AM to FM. This was a quantum leap, marking a dividing line between the “pre” years of bright AM pop (like Tony Orlando and Linda Ronstadt) and the moody-broody stuff of FM like this hit by Gary Wright that, for about two years, you could not get away from. As soon as I hear those burbly, sci-fi synth effects, I’m right back on that green Naugahyde seat, my hair brittle with sleet from standing at the bus stop, hunkered down and hoping the smoke-stenchy guy wouldn’t sit next me, or the pretty, popular girl that I didn’t want to be compared to, or the short girl whose mother made her wear bobby socks and lace dickies and was even lower on the social scale than I was.

“Born to Be Alive”

Patrick Hernandez (1979)

I include this disco megahit…because I’d never heard it until that radio station played it during their ’70s marathon. I had to look it up—who the heck was this? On the surface, the reason I never heard it back in 1979 was because my friends and I were squarely in the “disco sucks” camp. We never listened to disco, and I didn’t know a single person who liked it. But the cause for that, which I didn’t realize until many years later, was a little more subtle: The small town where I lived was racially divided, and quiet undercurrents of bigotry ran through it. I actually type this with held breath now, because it was something no one talked about. It’s like a delusion that only I have; I’m sure some of my high school friends would scoff at the idea that there was any racism in our sweet little town. But the only people of color in town were a handful of Puerto Rican families, some of them black, who kept largely to themselves, an arrangement the rest of the city seemed fine with. There was an “otherness” between the two communities that I could never put my finger on. But once in a while I heard friends toss off the “n” word, especially when we were talking about disco or soul music, which some felt was not music that white people listened to. This bothered me, but I didn’t really think it through. These were my friends, and I didn’t question them. They weren’t perfect or pure, but I wanted them around me more than I wanted to quibble with their ethics. Looking back, this scares me; if my friends had been farther out on the spectrum, harassing black families or vandalizing their houses, I’m not sure what I would have done. I like to think I would have stood up to it, but I don’t know that. Sometimes when I see what happened in Nazi Germany and Cambodia and Rwanda and countless other places, I think about this and wonder if that’s how it begins***. I was a teenager; I don’t even know that I was a fully formed person yet. I wanted so badly to be liked.

     The gay component of disco was way, way off my radar—back then, to most people I knew, homosexuality didn’t exist****. It happened in places we didn’t know or understand, like San Francisco—the city I would later live near and work in for many years, and which I now consider the home of my heart.

* The reason "Rikki" sounds like those later Steely Dan songs is because that band only wrote three or four songs and then just rearranged the chords to make new ones. I’m kidding a bit—Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are fine musicians—but when I saw them in concert a few years ago, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t tell their songs apart. They’d start in on one, and I’d think, “Oh, it’s ‘Hey Nineteen’” or “Oh, it’s ‘Peg.’” But it would turn out to be “FM” or something. Then it happened again…and again. The only song that really jumped out as being different was “Reelin’ in the Years.” And I hadn’t realized it before, but a lot of their songs are about men desperately hitting on much younger women. And at that concert they had a jumbotron next to the stage, with live video from a camera pointed up from the floor very, very close to the band. So for two hours, we were literally looking up Donald Fagen’s nose.

** “Heartache Tonight” always reminded me of Bob Seger at his worst—which, in my opinion, is all of his songs. And it turns out that’s no accident; when I looked up the release date for “Heartache Tonight,” I found that Seger co-wrote the damned thing.

*** From “The 8 Stages of Genocide,” by Gregory Stanton: “Stage 1: Cultures…distinguish people into ‘us and them.’”

**** Thankfully, that’s changed: Both Northampton and Springfield, Mass., are now known for their LGBT-friendly culture. In 2010 Springfield was named as one of the “Top 10 Gay Cities in the U.S.”

Three Poems in Elohi Gadugi

I’m stealing this idea from Oregon poet Katie Eberhart, who recently did a blog post with some comments on four of her poems that were published in the online journal Elohi Gadugi. Sort of like liner notes for poems. I liked that, so I’m doing the same: Happily, I have three poems in that same issue of Elohi Gadugi, which has the theme of “Root and Branch.” Click on each poem’s title to go to the site and read them.

Crocus

This was the first poem I wrote after moving to Ashland in 2006. I pulled into town on a cold February night, tired and frazzled after a six-hour drive over the mountains with my three cats in a Mazda with a bad transmission. I hauled the cat carriers into the new house and discovered that it was literally freezing in there; the heat had been off for weeks. That first night I struggled to figure out the Byzantine heating system and unpacked the few belongings I’d stuffed in the car. (My furniture, on a truck somewhere, wouldn’t arrive for another week.) A queasy feeling crept over me, the same one I get when I’m traveling and find myself stuck in a dirty motel room, cars roaring by outside: What the hell made me think this was a good idea? The next day—sunny, bright, and still ice-cold—a friend arrived with a pot of crocuses that were just starting to poke their pointy leaves above the soil. The crocuses and I lived together over the next few weeks. I can’t say I blossomed as they did; that’s too pat, too simple. In truth, it took me a while to get my bearings and figure out who I was in this new world. But I kept looking at those crocuses and envying their apparent faith, how they climbed toward light regardless of what they might find up there.

March: A Round

A few weeks after I moved into that first house in Ashland, I heard a frog one night. It sounded brave and lonely, a sweet, squeaky-hinge kind of croak. A few days later, a higher-pitched buddy joined in—now there were two ribbits competing. Soon a third one added his voice, then a few more…and by mid-April, it sounded like there were about 6,000 of them out there, a raucous, love-starved Hallelujah chorus every night. They all seemed to be crowded into my next-door neighbor’s yard, and when I met this neighbor, the first thing out of her mouth was, “Hi, sorry about the frogs.” It turned out this was a yearly ritual in her backyard pond: The frogs would start doing their thing in March and keep at it until summer. Even though I moved away two years ago, those frogs still show up in a lot of poems. I never, ever got tired of them. They always reminded me that I lived in the Northwest, where wild things happen.

Tomato Season

In late fall, I always seem to be the last gardener on the block to tear out the summer vegetables. I wait and wait until the tomatoes and beans and squash are finally, brutally, irrevocably burned and blackened by frost. Similarly, I’m often the last to leave a party. I guess it gets back to faith again—the idea that something exciting and unexpected could still happen, even though the hosts have fallen asleep on the couch. We could get a weird warm spell in December and maybe the beans will bloom again. I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of a miracle. But part of it is also a fascination with how unripe tomatoes go into a sort of suspended animation in freezing weather: They look alive, but they’re green and hard as marbles and will pretty much stay that way unless you bring them inside to ripen. Even then, they’re not quite what they should be, as if part of them has been drained out and refilled in a chemistry lab. Bite into one, and it’s like tasting an ersatz life. It’s all part of the dream of winter, like those barefoot summer days that seem like they happened to someone else.

What Crossword Puzzles Can Teach Us

Like most people, I grew up tinkering with crossword puzzles—the easy ones in the back of TV Guide and the quickies designed for killing time in waiting rooms. But a few years ago I got hooked on New York Times puzzles. With my special puzzle-only subscription to the Times, I download a few every week and work on them at odd hours, usually during meals. And while I’m sitting there pondering clues, I often think about how much I learn from doing crosswords—and I don’t just mean the names of R&B singers (BLUCANTRELL) and silent-film stars (MAEMURRAY). Some of the lessons are a bit more metaphorical.

1) All knowledge is useful.

Lately I’ve been appalled to find that most of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has fallen out of my head like so much crumbling plaster, yet the entire theme to Gilligan’s Island is still in there, maddeningly intact. But crossword puzzles are a great leveler—every fact counts, and pretty much everything you know, from horse anatomy to foreign swear words to Forrest Gump’s military rank, will come up sooner or later. So that makes it equally OK to browse People magazine (RACHAELRAY), eavesdrop on fishermen (STONEFLY), and brush up on your Egyptian board games (SENET). In the crossword universe—and, I like to think, in life—no knowledge goes to waste.

2) Your brain sees things differently on different days.

Sometimes I get stuck on a crossword answer that won’t come and won’t come, and I finally give up and put down the puzzle. Then I pick it up the next day, and that elusive answer pops out at me like one of those 3-D images in the Magic Eye books. It’s like some days my eyes can’t fill in the gaps and recognize the patterns, and other days they do it effortlessly*. There are two life lessons in this: 1) If you can’t solve a problem now, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to figure it out later, and 2) If our eyes can make connections on some days when it couldn’t see them before, then maybe other things involving our “vision”—like intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and bigotry—aren’t set in stone, either. These too may change over time—perhaps suddenly, perhaps tomorrow.

3) Sometimes we’re wrong.

Once in a while, I feel like I’m cooking along pretty well on a section of a puzzle: I get one easy answer and a few others seem to fit, but then I get stuck and can’t fill in the rest around them. Much later, I figure out that my first answer—the one that seemed so obvious—is actually wrong. (It’s CAPEANN, not CAPECOD.) This reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers: “Don’t believe everything you think.” It also serves as a reminder that we all make mistakes—I do, and so does the driver who almost hit me this morning, the one I growled at and almost flipped off. And among all those mistakes we make, most of them aren’t deal-killers; nine times out of ten, we get to just fix them and move on (and question our assumptions next time).

4) Difficult things take time.

Times Sunday puzzles used to scare me just because they seemed so ridiculously hard. I’d sit there and look and look at the clues, and not one answer would come to mind. Frustrated, I’d toss the puzzle aside and go do something easier, like caulk the bathtub. But in time, I figured out the secret to doing the Sundays and their much harder brethren, the Fridays and Saturdays: simple, dogged persistence. To get started, I just have to figure out one word somewhere in the puzzle—the thin edge of the wedge. This often takes a while, but if I look at it long enough, I’ll at least be able to guess at one. And then, after I keep pushing at it and thinking and thinking and thinking on it—sometimes over the course of several days**—things start to happen. Patterns emerge, red herrings get tossed out, blanks get filled in. And then—pop—it’s done. And what a rush that is, to do something that seemed virtually impossible at first. I can’t speak for other puzzlers, but for me, there are no shortcuts to this—it’s just a matter of putting in the time and not giving up. This philosophy comes in handy in other difficult parts of life, like writing a novel, or finishing a project at work, or even recovering from an illness. In our fast-food, quick-cut culture, it’s easy to forget that some things have to happen in a series of small increments, not all at once. So we sometimes give up on a difficult task before we even take the first step. And then we never get the satisfaction of doing that hard thing—a thing was actually within our reach all along.

5) There’s more than one path.

Crosswords are a bit like religion, in that there are no one-size-fits-all rules. Some salesman in New Delhi may be plunking away on the same New York Times Sunday puzzle I’m working on right now, and so is the retired woman across the street from me, but that doesn’t mean we’re all doing them in exactly the same way. There are no classes where we learn this, no set of printed rules we have to follow. And in fact, one person’s “cheating” is another’s “standard procedure.” For example, my dad always kept a crossword dictionary next to his reading chair. But to me, that’s cheating, so I don’t own a puzzle dictionary. But I will, on occasion, look up an answer in a reference book if I’ve been stuck on that spot for days and I know I’ll never get it because, going one way, it’s “the city where Jonah preached,” and going the other way, it’s the aliens in Avatar***. But some would consider that illegal, and would never look up an answer. On the other hand, some people think it’s OK to peek at the answer in the next day’s paper or the back of the book, but to me, that’s the ultimate disgrace; I usually won’t look at the answer even after I’m done. If I’ve got a little fudgy spot that I’m not sure about—that IPAD might be an IPOD, and that Macedonian river might be misspelled as a result—that’s OK; I can live with it. The important thing to me is to finish the puzzle, even if it’s not quite perfect. I find it comforting—and subversive, in a way—that we’re all doing crosswords while adhering to our own completely arbitrary set of rules. We all get to the same place at the end, so what does it matter? Like I say, a lot like religion.

*Case in point, a couple of weeks ago: “She’s no naïf” ( - - M - - - - T - - - - - - - ) turned out to be WOMANOFTHEWORLD. It stumped me and stumped me, and then one morning I looked at it and could just see it. How my eye could piece that together from only two letters, I’ll never know.

**I recently did a stinker of a Saturday puzzle that took about a week. I had to break down and look up a couple of things, because there was no way I’d get them otherwise. One was the highest mountain in Australia—KOSCIUSZCO; the other was a 1902 Kentucky Derby winner named ALANADALE.

***NINEVEH and NAVI. One unfortunate thing about crosswords is that they point out the holes in your education, much like those Jeopardy categories that make you groan. Among my weak spots are the Bible, British royalty, and bloody Roman numerals, which trip me up every bloody time. I’m actually pretty good at James Cameron movies but have never warmed up to the cartoony blue people in Avatar.

Alan-a-Dale in 1902, with Jay Winkfield aboard.

4 Things Writers Love about Downton Abbey

It’s more popular than religion, it clogs up Facebook every Sunday night, and it’s an out-of-the-park homer for PBS. I know—what’s not to love about Downton Abbey? But there’s more to this show than scheming footmen, Maggie Smith’s one-liners, and “Bates is hot.” For writers, the show is a special pleasure because it hits on so many issues that authors grapple with all the time.

1) It’s a lesson in potboiler writing.

Like many bestselling authors, Downton creator Julian Fellowes keeps viewers engaged by employing two simple strategies that any fiction writer can use: delayed gratification and sudden setbacks.

       Delayed gratification sometimes plays out over entire seasons, with a desired result—Bates being cleared of the murder charge, or Matthew warming up to Mary—getting pushed farther and farther away as the complications mount and hopes are dashed. But Fellowes also uses this trick in miniature, teasing delayed gratification out of the smaller moments. Remember when Mary was trying to figure out whether someone in the house had mailed a crucial letter that would save the estate from ruin? She went to the servants’ dining room to ask the staff if anyone posted the letter, and no one had. She turned away, deflated, and the viewer’s hopes were thwarted too—what would happen to Downton now? But then Daisy, the kitchen maid, came into the room and asked what was going on—and it turned out she posted the letter, and all was saved. OK, it was manipulative, but notice that Fellowes didn’t give us an easy win even in this small scene; a delay of a minute or two stretches out the drama that much more and keeps us watching.*

       Then there’s the other side of the coin: While he’s delaying our gratification, Fellowes litters the show with unexpected setbacks and tragedies. Brides are jilted; people get sick and die. And while that kind of continual jarring would make most of us crazy in real life, in a story, it’s a surprise—and fun, in a roller-coaster sort of way**. It makes us wonder what’s around the next corner, and the next, and we keep watching to see what disaster will happen this time. So while Fellowes pulls us along on the rope of delayed gratification, he smacks us silly with sudden tragedy. And we like it, because it’s good storytelling.

2) It’s bubbliciously soapy.

Most Downton fans will guiltily admit that part of its attraction is that it’s a big soap opera—a serial about love and betrayal among a large cast of characters. So were Dallas and Dynasty (a friend used to call them Dallasty); so were ER and NYPD Blue and even the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, in its way—and so are countless successful shows on the air now. There’s a reason why TV writers draw from that well again and again: The serial structure hooks viewers, and the machinations keep them watching. Fellowes has avoided some old soap clichés—so far, we haven’t had any babies switched at birth or lovers who turn out to be siblings, though this season I smell a dead-person-who’s-not-really-dead (the heir in India?). But he has trotted out a few chestnuts like amnesia (the soldier with the burned face), villains who do evil just because they’re spiteful (Thomas and O’Brien), ill-starred lovers who have to overcome outlandishly complicated obstacles (Mary and Matthew), and the old standby of rich people who keep their cognac in glass decanters and are constantly in danger of “losing everything” and being forced to flee to their spare mansion, the little one with only 10 bedrooms.

3) Julian Fellowes is a late bloomer.

I have a soft spot in my heart for Julian Fellowes. I first noticed him when he was an actor on the BBC series Monarch of the Glen in the early 2000s. He played Kilwillie, the mischievous blueblood neighbor, and got stuck doing a lot of slapstick scenes. But he always played that character with zeal and a deliciously snooty accent. And it turned out that at the same time, he was quietly nurturing his career as a writer, penning the screenplay for Gosford Park that later won him an Oscar. He also wrote two bestselling novels. And his dual careers of acting and writing really took wing when he was in his 50s—older than I am now. I love that.

4) It ain’t Big Rich England.

These days, we’re plagued with a bevy of “big rich” reality shows—I call them “fat-lip shows”—like Big Rich Texas and The Real Housewives of This City That Will Not Surprise You by Having Rich Housewives in It. These shows take us inside the mahogany walls of America’s zillionaires and show us that 1) they rarely work, 2) they bicker constantly, 3) they fuss a lot about their appearance, and 4) they take a long time to eat dinner. Of course, Downton Abbey is like that too, but it’s all concocted by a writer***, which somehow makes it more palatable. And, hallelujah, it gives that writer a really good job.

           

* The creators of the sci-fi show Eureka had a similar storytelling trick that they called “the big button”: The heroes slave away through the whole show on a machine that will stop some looming disaster, and in the last act, just as all hell is breaking loose, they finish the machine and push the magic button—and nothing happens. Or something happens that appears to save the world, but that causes another disaster, and they have to solve that. By the end, the viewer is spent and satisfied from all the tension and release (and that connection between storytelling and sex, folks, is a whole other topic).

** I can’t imagine that it’s healthy to desensitize ourselves to tragedy like this all the time. It might explain in part why we’re willing to go to war and don’t step in to stop human rights violations. We accuse kids of being desensitized to violence through video games, but anyone who consumes popular entertainment—perhaps even novels—is in the same boat. Or is it good to have thick skins? Would we all die of fear if we weren’t toughened up by tales of little kids being cooked by witches and eaten by wolves?

*** Reality shows do employ writers, at least to edit the footage and make the “stories” hang together better for viewers. And writers for some of the game-show types, like Survivor and The Great Race, basically contrive the whole show. (Great article here on the inside scoop by a reality-show writer.) One show, Storage Wars, recently suffered a scandal when former star Dave Hester accused the producers of planting valuable items in the storage lockers to give an edge to some competitors and make the stories more compelling. I must come out here and admit that, scandal or no, I love Storage Wars—it’s one of my favorite guilty pleasures, and I’m squarely on Team Brandi. I was also a big fan of the tragic-in-retrospect Anna Nicole. One critic summed up my feelings about that show: “Why doesn’t somebody put down the camera and help her?”