Friday Earworms

Is everyone having an excellent start to the weekend? If you need some musical accompaniment, you've come to the right place.

Currently, I am preparing for our trip to Charlotte for HeroesCon... unfortunately, it will be even hotter tomorrow than it is now. Hydration! Packing extra kombucha and Tramadol.

Maybe I'll even meet up with my Blogdonia heroine and alter ego, Fanboy Wife. Perhaps we should have some kind of 12-Step meeting while we're there, modeled on Al-Anon: Are you married to a Fanboy? Chances are, you're as addicted to sick behavior as he is!

NO, NO, I refuse to believe it! Denial, denial!

PS: It's been awhile since I've shared my earworms, so here you go.

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I recently heard this gem on our local wonder-station, WPCI-AM, and I've been hearing it in my head ever since. Just beautiful!

Passion Play - Joni Mitchell



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This one also comes courtesy of WPCI... Good Lord, will you listen to this woman SING?! I have no idea how old this tune is, but it sounds ancient... raw and unglossed. Lovelovelove!

A Fool in Love - Ike and Tina Turner



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I was worried, the last time I posted a song by Journey, that I'd jeopardized my musical cred... and whaddaya know, Journey's been rehabbed! Tony Soprano, we owe him.

This is what is known as a "power ballad" (did Journey actually invent the power ballad?), and if I hear it just once, these lovely intertwining riffs stay lodged in my head for weeks.

Weeks, I tell you.

Send her my love - Journey



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This song has plagued me since the death of my father in late April; I'm hoping once I post it here, it will stop continuously haunting me.

Probably not, though.

Mansion on a Hill - Hank Williams



Hope you all have a great weekend.

One of the Living

1) I can't find my phone.

2) My acid reflux has returned, I fear because I am drinking way too much Yerba Mate. (But I love it!)

3) I also love Multilieve (photo at left) an excellent natural pain-reducer, which contains Corydalis Yanhusuo, Chinese Peony and California Poppy.... (Wicked Witch of the West voice: poppies! poppies!) No, I have not been compensated with anything but free samples.

4) Currently reading Maureen Orth's too-fabulous gossip-ridden and scandalmongering book The Importance of Being Famous, which totally rocks the house! How did I ever miss this book when it came out in 2004?

Orth has completely convinced me of the guilt of Michael Jackson AND Woody Allen, sad to say; she is a tireless journalist and investigative reporter (these articles were first published in Vanity Fair). She also writes extensively about Arianna Huffington, claiming she has never totally extricated herself from new-age guru-flake John-Roger. This stuff is fantastic, I can't recommend it enough.

5) One chapter in the aforementioned volume is about Tina Turner, probably the only celebrity interviewed in the entire book who emerges as a wholly-likable person. I started reading and thought, hey (my mind works in strange ways), whatever happened to that song, One of the Living, which I remembered was written by 80s wunderkind Holly Knight. It was used in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

And so I dug it out of the YouTube vaults and listened to it... damn, I still love that! Although it DOES bring back an unpleasant time in my life: my second divorce, just as I was starting to wonder if I could get along with anybody. During this emotionally-overwrought period, your humble narrator would sometimes attend as many as 2-3 AA meetings a day.

From one addiction to another.

Carrie Fisher once described what one does in detox/recovery: not drugs. And that is what I was doing. I was falling apart, financially destitute, with a child not even two years old and a divorce imminent, but I was ...NOT DOING DRUGS!

One nice person who commented on one of my irate Kennedy posts yesterday said "as a fellow 12-stepper" and I did not have the heart to tell this person that I no longer consider myself one. However, after you've done the TOTAL IMMERSION AA-thing (nods to Baptists in readership), you feel like you are stamped with it for life and it is somehow encoded in your DNA, just like LSD.

So, oddly, this song makes me think of AA meetings, one after the other, an endless balm of talk-talk-talk that soothed and tranquilized me in some way I can't readily or sensibly describe.

Don't wanna fight but sometimes you've got to
You're some soul survivor
There's just one thing you've got to know
You've got ten more thousand miles to go

As a bonus, we are reminded by this video that both Tina and Mel Gibson were looking especially hot back in the 80s.

Enjoy!

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One of the Living - Tina Turner from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)



PS: Tina won a Grammy for this, which I didn't know, or didn't remember.

Captain Walker didn't come home

Left: Tommy's mother, Ann-Margret, swims in baked beans, for reasons unknown, in Ken Russell's version of The Who's TOMMY (1975).

If you've never seen Ken Russell's phantasmagoric version of The Who's rock opera Tommy, you will have the chance tomorrow at 6pm EST, on Turner Classic Movies.

As a big Who fanatic, I will admit here: I used to hate the movie. As a teenager, I wanted the story of Tommy to be all hippie-sensitive and Dr Phil... sort of like the Broadway version turned out, I guess. But now? Bollocks, as Pete Townshend would say.

How often do you get to see Roger Daltrey dosed with acid (by Tina Turner, no less) borne by hundreds of hypodermic needles in some kinky-weird lotus-blossom creation? Keith Moon as child-molesting Uncle Ernie? ("Your mother's left me here to mind you/Now I'm doing what I want to!") Check out Jack Nicholson, as Tommy's concerned physician, sagely intoning "He seems to be completely un-recep-tive! The tests I gave him show no-sense-at-all!" And BTW, where did this American doctor come from? And how did American Ann-Margret get to be the mother of Roger Daltrey, with that Shepherds Bush accent of his? And who doesn't want to see Ann-Margret swimming in baked beans? Come on, admit that you do not see that every day.


Ken Russell is berserk, and extended his berserkery to the film. For those of us who had very definite ideas about Tommy, who he was, what he represented, the movie smashed all of that to hell. Of course, I now see that this deliberate iconoclasm was the whole intention; Townshend was giving the finger to those of us who were deifying Tommy, which was the warning delivered in the rock opera: Don't deify human beings. Only God deserves our worship.

Left: Tommy passes the acid test.

There is one truly incredible, bang-up sequence in the movie, delivered by hizzoner Eric Clapton, which I have included below. The blues classic Eyesight to the Blind (written by Sonny Boy Williamson) was the only non-original song in the rock-opera and was simply too perfect not to include, since Tommy IS deaf, mute and blind. This sequence--Tommy's mother taking him to a faith-healer played by Clapton at a Marilyn-Monroe shrine--is Ken Russell at his finest and most trippy. (Other times, if you've ever seen Russell's indescribably bizarre films The Devils or Lair of the White Worm, you know he can drift far off into Andromeda somewhere... Earth to Ken!) This particular sequence manages to be just bizarre enough to be utterly fabulous.

Great observations, meditations and hallucinations about music, God, worship, disability, trauma, child abuse, sexual abuse, religious hucksters and all of that good cosmic stuff. If you've never seen it and you have a taste for the strange, don't miss it.

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