This is another one of Townes’ more oblique and allusive songs (cf. “Our Mother the Mountain”), and I certainly see how one could interpret in different ways–most obviously as about alcohol and/or drugs. As I am now looking at those as sort of a way of avoiding the anxiety caused by avoiding rather than confronting mortality, I of course place the song in the visual context of grief, loss, isolation, and death. As you might guess, I’ve been reading Irvin D. Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy, and its explorations have unquestionably had an effect on me. In some sense this is another slideshow about existential dread, and about some of the more dysfunctional ways we deal with pain. At the same time, Townes has created a beautiful, mysterious song about pain, loss, and how we flawed human beings deal with such things, and I hope that the images, timings and movements I have chosen for the slideshow do it justice. I really believe that quote from Kathleen Raine above, by the way, and it also ends the slideshow.
Here’s a video that I just ran into last night for the first time (I didn’t even think Moby was still relevant–obviously, I just hadn’t been paying attention). In some sense it explores some of the same issues–isolation, pain, grief, empathy, and how we deal we such things–but on a much more universal and apocalyptic level.
Previously posted, in somewhat different form, on The Daily Kos. The Who song “Substitute” always seemed to be a perfect description of how I lived my life, displacing or substituting easier or less anxiety-producing people, goals, and life perspectives for ones that I seemed unwilling or unable to cope with. Studying medieval literature and religion thus substituted for the Catholicism I was raised in, my mentor became a kind of substitute father who I felt it was at least possible to please, and alcohol replaced romantic relationships. Everybody does this to some degree, in part simply because circumstances or the inner drives of our personalities force us to.
This slideshow applies this playful early Who song to our current president, who of course displaced Obama (displacement being basically part of how our political system is structured), a change that I believe represents a yearning to return to an even earlier time and president when—at least in the cultural memory of certain segments of the electorate—“other” people knew their place and ethical behavior was neither practiced nor really expected as long as a superficial respectability and deniability was maintained, even in the face of considerable factual evidence.
On a personal level, you don’t usually actually marry your Mom, but you might marry someone who styles their hair in a remarkably similar way; when booze loses its ability to depress your anxiety or create a false sense of self-confidence, you find other substances or life strategies to substitute for it. In its extreme form, you end up living a kind of fake life, in which legitimacy is conferred by status symbols and your ability to get other people—and by a kind of feedback loop even yourself—to accept them as authentic. Oh well, before digging myself into a hole I can’t get out of by pretending to a knowledge of human psychology and motive that I don’t actually have, here’s the brief slideshow. This is the 2nd version of “Substitute” from The BBC Sessions album (a kind of substitute “Substitute”), which I liked for its crispness, concision, and the overt sarcasm in Roger Daltrey’s vocals, which is much more muted in some of the group’s more pop recordings of the song. I kept the count in, possibly as a symbol of inevitable repetitiveness of such behavior, but mostly because it sounds pretty cool.
By the way, that rather cryptic photograph I picked to illustrate the lyric, “the simple things you see are all complicated,” showing Woody Guthrie, Trump looming over an apartment block, and Trump’s father Frederick, refers to this story, which I hadn’t been aware of before. Speaking of things I had not been aware of, here is a possibly even more danceable, and even more depressing vision than the one above. Here is a song–not from half a century ago, but from “Now,” that I ran into about five minutes ago, and was apparently first posted to YouTube two (now three) days ago. Wow. This so nails me, or at least the me of a just a few months ago. It doesn’t help that the “viewer” character who ages during the video really comes to look like a thinner me, the fear is certainly there in the eyes, giving way to a kind of tired, hungover stare. If the Townshend song focuses on how substitution works in personal relationships, the Moby song wants to illustrate its psychological cost in the most devastating way possible. Anyway, although I had nothing to do with this video, it seems to be about me, and this is a personal blog, so I’m posting it here.
Apart from a considerable production budget, Moby’s singing, writing, arranging talent, and producing his song and the video attached to it, and his rather penetrating ability to express the depressive mind and how it reacts to the world around it, what’s his got that mine hasn’t?
In my memory, buying David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album is inextricably connected with getting deeply into music, at least in terms of buying record albums. I’m sure I had a few before (I…
In my memory, buying David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album is inextricably connected with getting deeply into music, at least in terms of buying record albums. I’m sure I had a few before (I remember having the Beatles Second Album, which may have been a gift, and a couple of Monkees albums growing up), but it was probably about this time (I would have been fifteen in 1973 when the album was released) that I started working, making money, and having money of my own which I spent almost exclusively on books and records. By the time I had finished my teens, it was virtually impossible to get around my bedroom as stacks of albums or science fiction and fantasy novels basically filled every available inch of floor space except for narrow pathways so I could reach my record player and the closet where my clothes were.
I was very aware of music, and read Robert Hilburn, the longtime popular music critic at the LA Times, religiously. While he had his detractors, and I didn’t always like every musical suggestion he made, I will always be grateful to him for exposing me to so many different artists and genres. In the early seventies, glam rock was happening, more in the UK than America, but it certainly had an impact in the big cities, including Los Angeles, and I was an Anglophile from very early on, so the fact that Bowie was more popular in his homeland than in the US was–if anything–a kind of recommendation to me. Bowie’s very conscious experimentation with multiple personas and public bisexuality was a source of both attraction and anxiety for me and one day, having somehow scraped together four dollars, I determined that I was going to buy his new album, Aladdin Insane, which was being praised to the skies by Hilburn. The punning title, with its promise of both magical transformation and a kind of companionship in my own mental struggles with the “strange changes” that I was going through, was undeniably an attraction too, while the striking cover art seemed both a more overt statement of a kind of gay aesthetic, and a more hidden one than the limp wristed photo of David in a phone booth that graced the back of Ziggy Stardust, an album which I was very much aware of, but hadn’t yet quite summomed up the courage to buy.
As I remember, at this time the only local record outlet, which sold a very limited selection of music, was Thrifty Drugstore, a big chain at the time. I think only the sleeves were out in the racks, so you had to take the sleeve to the cashier and exchange it for a copy that actually had a vinyl album inside. I remember taking the sleeve out and putting it back several times as I built up and then immediately lost my nerve. I think I finally realized that I was making more of a spectacle of myself in my public indecision than I would do actually purchasing the record so, like ripping off a bandaid, I walked briskly to the counter where the young, dark haired, female clerk checked me out. I think she gave me an odd, slightly searching look, but that was probably my imagination (Does she know? I’m sure I thought at the time).
After that, I was off, getting into Mott the Hoople, T. Rex, and even the New York Dolls, and very quickly into many other musical genres as well. I soon got a license, then a used car, and after that the record stores of the San Fernando Valley, and even the iconic Tower Records down on Sunset, suddenly became accessible to me and I discovered not only used records, but really esoteric things like imported singles and albums, which were instrumental in getting me into punk rock a few years later. I actually saw Bowie once in 1974, on his Diamond Dogs tour when he did a five day stint at the Universal Amphitheatre (here is a link to a video of “Cracked Actor” recorded at one of these shows, and a live recording drawn from the entire run has also just been released–I had completely forgotten, by the way, that he performed the song with a skull, although I remember the shades and the sweater). Anyway, here is my video tribute. I chose these two Who covers not so much because they reveal anything about David, but because they really nail what he meant to me at the time: a slightly inexplicable attraction coupled up with a sense of the opening up of near limitless possibilities: gender, art, politics, literature, everything. Where have all the good times gone, indeed?
I’m also going to include David’s official video of “I’m Afraid of Americans,” partly because I identify with it (which is odd, at least according to my Passport, I am an American), and partly because I had been thinking of making a slideshow about it. After looking at it, however, I doubt I could do better, and there is simply no way I could replace David’s magnetic presence in it. So, if you haven’t seen it, enjoy; even if you have, it’s probably worth watching again. Sort of unfortunately, it seems even more timely today than it did when it was released.
Another meditation and mortality and what constitutes a well spent life, inspired by another Townes Van Zandt song. Like Phil Ochs, he’s just another gift that keeps on giving, even long after he is gone. For Townes, obviously. And for Karen.
passage2truth 