When you enter Mandalay Beach in Oxnard, California you see a sobering sign:
Welcome to our beach. You’re on your own.
Now, millions of folks in California speak Spanish – and quite a few of them speak Spanish, only. Recognizing the need for a sign in Spanish, attached to the back of this sign is the same warning, translated to Spanish:
Something to talk about as you head home.
Just one problem. You won’t see this sign unless you are leaving the beach. So. If you speak Spanish and you survive your day in the Oxnard waves, as you depart you will learn just how lucky you are.
If I must acknowledge getting older, then I prefer to have my birthday celebration spread out over days. This year I’ve got a birthday week – and if I count the concert with a friend in November, I’ve got a birthday season!
Hiking at dawn. It has been too long.
Highlights this year are two dawn hikes (my first hikes with my new hip), a trip to the beach, and dinner at a favorite restaurant. My kids also gave me a book of dustbowl-era political and social photographs:
Looks like an interesting book and its photos are unforgettable.
It’s an awesome book but what really makes it special is the thoughtfulness with which they chose it. (They figured it fit with my love of Woody Guthrie and my recent interest in traditional bluegrass.)
My “desert island” food is the blueberry. My “desert island” place is the ocean. Which proves convenient: I don’t have to bring my favorite place with me to the desert island, it will already surround me.
Desert island. Typing that phrase, I realize how comfortable I am using language when I don’t entirely know what it means. That must get me into trouble sometimes but apparently I don’t know when that happens.
Desert island. Somewhere remote and cut-off, I figure. Checking that infallible source of information, the internet, I learn that a desert island is an island that is not inhabited by humans.
(Sue’s first rule of blogging: start with a digression. Or four.)
Here’s the point: I love the ocean but I have only been to two of them. Mostly the Pacific. Occasionally the Atlantic. Surely I need to see the others, and visit them from more than one location. Which means I had better get busy and travel faster.
Here is what the Atlantic Ocean looked like during my visit to a Florida beach:
The Atlantic Ocean at sunset from a beach in central Florida.
At this beach it was not a good idea to walk while enjoying the view. There were dead jellyfish everywhere! I don’t know whether this was typical for this area. Perhaps I visited during a time of jellyfish affliction.
There are some songs that are so captivating that whatever my mood, whatever else is going on, they grab and elevate. Below are three of my all-time top endorphinators. What are yours?
At their peak -which is saying something! – here are Sly and The Family Stone, “Dance to the Music”.
In the mid 1970s Ireland produced a splendid pop band called The Undertones. Apparently they are back together and touring and their Youtube performance videos are good but lack the magic of the original recording when they were babies. This is “Get Over You”.
If you are a Replacements fan, I don’t have to tell you how special this band was. Everybody else, you might get a chance to see them. Tommy and Paul – half of ’em – have reunited. I avoid most reunions because the old days can’t be resurrected, but there are exceptions (X shows are as good as ever!) and it sounds like the Mats will be one of those. Here is “Favorite Thing” from Riot Fest in Toronto. The sound is murky. It’s the Mats.
This fourth tune is fairly new so I don’t yet know whether it will remain potent over decades as the others have. It’s a Sara Watkins fiddle tune, here played with her brother Sean.
The ocean is my place. It’s where I go to revive, invigorate, find peace. At the shore I feel connected to all that underlies our everyday lives.
I love the way the shorebirds run out as the surf recedes, run back as it returns. They are so in tune with the pattern of the waves and the movements of the other birds. And it often feels like they are playing as well as eating.
Daily Prompt Instructions: Take the third line of the last song you heard, make it your post title, and write for a maximum of 15 minutes. GO!
I don’t know him but I’m worried about him. Crowded room buzzing with hubbub and attitude, he’s in that far corner, slouched tilted because his chair has a broken leg. He could have moved – there are empty chairs on either side of him – but there he tilts.
I don’t have kids. Watching him tweaks a maternal streak I didn’t know I possessed. His hair looks like it was wet when he went to sleep with a hat on. It frames an eternally baby face, with a nose that’s been broken more than once. His eyes are decades older than his face, and when there’s a motion into his corner, they dart like the eyes of an animal who’s lived all its life in a cage.
Some girl talks to him and waits for an answer. He stares at the air between them like her words are written there. He shakes his head in reply, about two seconds after the girl turns away with a huff of a shrug.
Maybe he’s high, but that explanation’s too simple. He’s checking out, he’s had enough, he’s done. I won’t see him again anyway but I fear no one will ever see him again, come tomorrow.
The song lyric of the title is from “No Name #1” by Elliott Smith. Click here to watch a cover version to which I am addicted.
I continue to limp deeper into the retype* of ?Was It A Rat I Saw?, my psychological thriller involving real-life split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. I haven’t read the book in years and retyping also means rereading, which holds surprises for me:
I’m always my harshest critic but I like ?Rat? although I would do everything differently now. I have resisted the urge to rewrite – that way lies madness.
The real brain science still shocks, chills, excites me.
I don’t remember much of my own book and the retyping gets derailed when I read ahead to see what happens next.
I couldn’t write this book today. I am not the same person. This book captures a slice of my life, perspective, attitudes at a particular moment that is now long gone.
I had a plan to publish each of the four sections of ?Rat?, chapter by chapter, to this blog during the four weeks in August. There are several chapters in each section. This week, I published one chapter. Not one section. One chapter.
I call it a sign of psychological health that I no longer calculate how behind I am.
I believe the retype should now pick up speed. First, I have adapted to being back at my day job and getting All Else done in scattered shards of time. When I started the re-type, I was home lounging around after hip replacement surgery, with nothing but time. Second, I have just finished a first draft (yahoo!) of my latest novel, the fantasy detective series opener Frames. That is written in a different style than ?Rat? and I backed off from retyping when I realized it was influencing the style of the new book.
Good excuses for the slowdown, eh wot? No doubt next week I will have occasion to manufacture yet others.
*?Was It A Rat I Saw? was previously published in hardcover by Bantam-Doubleday-Dell. Now I’m publishing it electronically, first as a serial and then as an e-book.
I’m a writer and I love words. I savor the well-strung phrase wherever I find it – a book, stage patter, a movie, an ad, a blog. Song lyrics shape and define me. Early Springsteen’s meandering stage monologues could be my version of a religious experience.
Given all that, you’d think I’d be crazy for singer-songwriters, but I’m usually not. I typically prefer their songs when covered by others. As Noam Pikelny said, introducing a Gillian Welch cover at a Punch Brothers show, “We can’t play it better but we can play it faster.”
I knew Elliott Smith would be an exception. I knew I would love him but despite years of this awareness I still don’t really know his music. A couple people who serve as music gurus to me have long been Smith fanatics. They told me. I heard them but didn’t act. It can take me a long time to get around to what matters. And I confess I was intimidated by the manner of his suicide, ten years ago. He stabbed himself in the heart. Or anyway that was the way I heard the story.
Couple weeks ago, I went to one of four U.S. concerts, organized by his sister and many musicians who knew and loved him. The concerts were in Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, and Manhattan. I attended the show in LA on August 6. It would have been his 44th birthday. The show occurred at my favorite ever venue, the Largo at the Coronet. Smith was a regular performer at an earlier incarnation of the Largo (which I completely missed: I was not in LA and anyway not going out to hear music at that dark time in my life).
The four No Name Celebration shows have already sprouted lots of YouTube clips. Each show had maybe a dozen performers who each sang a couple of Smith’s songs. There were anecdotes about Smith, lots of laughs. It was an intensely emotional night. I like intense emotions, so that was okay for me. And I didn’t even know the songs. I went to learn some Smith. Most of the people in the room knew every song on the first chord. For my son, a Smith fanatic, hearing the songs in that setting was one of those life-altering events that only live music can give us.
Turns out the shows were called No Name #1 because the organizers hope to make this a recurring event, and because Elliott Smith used to name his songs like that. In fact, the first Smith song to become permanently stuck in my head is called No Name #1. To publicize the Austin show, David Garza performed the song at a radio station. It breaks my heart. Amazing how great music can do that and still be uplifting.
If you want to check out Smith performing this instead of Garza, there is an audio-only clip on YouTube, just released by the Largo owner right after this show. It’s from one of Elliott’s old Largo performances.
Garza performed at the LA show also. He was one of the highlights for me. Another standout was Aaron Espinoza, who turns out to be in a band called Earlimart which cites Elliott Smith as one of its major influences. Most of the LA performers were Largo regulars, including Jon Brion and Sean Watkins. (Over the last couple years I have come to love those guys by attending Largo shows. Most Largo shows feature Largo regulars. It’s a place where certain musicians hang out.)
There are beaucoup Elliott Smith clips on YouTube. Here is an oddball one, his performance at the Academy Awards the year Miss Misery was nominated from “Good Will Hunting”. (Director Gus van Sant was the emcee of the Portland No Name Celebration.) We live in a peculiar world where competitions try to compare Elliott Smith with Celine Dion, whose song from “Titanic” won the Oscar that year.
At the Largo No Name Celebration, initially I thought Jack Black (with his partner in Tenacious D) was out of place when he closed the show. But my kids explained it to me. His goofiness returned us to the world in just the right mood.
On the one hand, I wish you all could have been there; on the other hand that would have made it frigging impossible to get tickets.
One of my least favorite traits: when I get overloaded and face an upcoming crazy day at work, sometimes I can’t sleep.
So here I am, 2:42 a.m., alarm set for 7.
Full moon tonight on a warm and bright night. These photos are shadows of tree leaves, cast by moonlight on my car hood. Reflection of the moon also appears.
I tweaked the B&W contrast in Photoshop, with a bigger tweak in the second photo (hence my car hood looks like a poorly paved road).
And now, to bed. Perchance to sleep.
P.S. While we’re at it – impromptu Rorschach test! What do you see in these images? I see a cave painting of a chicken in the bottom photo.
Required Writing 