Hey, I see you out there, checking if I’ve updated lately. Honestly! I have checked, and I feel badly about not putting something up here. I’ve been working on a piece about the two Suspirias, and it’s proving one of those bits of writing I’m slogging through. Right now I’m just going to say that I liked the remake/reboot/whatever and there, I’ve probably insured that I’ll never finish it.
Man, February. This month is rough.
Facebook may be a miserable cesspool, but there is one thing it does, via “Your Memories” – it serves as a snapshot of where you were one, two, five, ten years ago. At least, depending on how much you share/overshare. Turns out for the past several years the week of Valentines Day always tries to kill me; besides my day job, there’s always at least one nighttime City Meeting to attend to, three shows (grab those Valentine dollars whilst you may) and other miscellaneous shoots. Something about this time of year makes people want to schedule events that require reportage. I shouldn’t complain, our entire crew -including the Engineer! – was out shooting Saturday, and my co-worker Pebbles (not her real name) was kind enough to take over one of the City Meetings from me. So it was only one City Meeting, four shoots, three stories edited and three nighttime shows for me with associated load in, set-up, tear down and load out.
This shit is a young person’s game, and honestly, this year the load worried me. I usually preface such weeks with a Tweet that says “Just in case this week kills me, remember I love you,” but this time I meant it. But, you know, one day at a time it wasn’t too bad. Dragging myself out of bed Saturday morning to go to the 10:00am shoot was the mightiest summoning of will power I’ve had to perform in quite some time, and christ only knows what that footage looks like. Then, the stories from the Friday shoot and the Sunday shoot have already been edited and okayed, so the odds seem in my favor on that score.
GIMME!!!!
As you know, my job changed back in October (largely for the better), and I am glad to report that my new health insurance kicked in at the beginning of this month, which means yay! I’m medicated again! We’ll see how much difference this makes, whether I will actually be able to watch a movie again or finish that furshlugginer Suspiria review. I’m actually posting on social media again, and hey look, you’re reading something that dribbled from my brain.
Usually in these little pauses in my movie consumption I fasten onto one of my older loves, reading or gaming. Neither of those are lighting a particular fuse this year, but what is keeping my brain afloat is something I’ve been largely ignoring the last, oh let’s say decade or two: music. At the age of 60 I re-discovered Internet Radio (back in the day Dave and I ran a Live365 station that was meant to underscore gameplay in City of Heroes. Ah, those were the days). Dude, there are stations out there that play trance music 24/7. Yes, yes, there are others that play different genres, but go talk about them on your own blog.
I’m wondering if this current passion is kindled because it’s puts me back in a younger mindspace: the mid-70s, when I was starting to pay closer attention to music right about the time that FM radio was beginning to take off. Those long nights spent listening to AOR stations and wondering just what I was listening to, and hoping desperately the DJ would tell me. (Long distance telephone calls cost money in those days, so calls into Houston radio stations were right out. I was living in the shadow of Texas A&M at the time, and the only two FM stations played easy listening music and country) Research was mainly limited to talking with like-minded friends (not many; my music was “too weird”) and Creem magazine. But mainly those off-kilter off-hours DJs in the days before programming analysts and corporate radio.
So many genres! Including… BIBLE?!
So here I am again, hearing the bit of music that really grabs me and wondering “What is that? How can I hear it again?” After Hours FM has a forum which posts playlists, and some of the sets do still have DJs doing the song announcement bit, meaning I’ve bought six songs in the past week (Russian stations like Anima Amoris are not so forthcoming)(Proofreader me points out that Anima’s actual site tells you what track is currently playing, unlike AH. Спасибо, Ivan!). This portion of the passion (with the brew that is true) takes me back to the late 80s, where there were some weekends when I just had to have new music, and would walk a mile or so from my fourplex hovel in Montrose to the Sound Exchange, a wondrous repository of all kinds of music. Both the fourplex and the store have been developed into oblivion, but at least The Sound Exchange still exists, they just found an equally boho neighborhood for a new location. I am going to be forever embittered by the gentrification of Montrose. But now we’re back to the Old Man phase of life, with me shaking my cane at high-rises where my little apartment and favorite dive bar used to live.
Am I back? Is better living through chemistry finally going to allow me to finish that damned Suspiria entry and even watch movies again?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the little Monkey Dog who would sleep in my lap during movies the past year decided to run away and never come back (guess she’s peeing on someone else’s sofa right now), so drag me up another double shot of antidepressants, cue up some Goa music and kung fu, and I might be able to watch something tonight. I have a rare 24 hours between clocking out and tomorrow’s show with nothing on my calendar. I’d say let’s party, but I am not a partier. Let’s anti-party. Yes, that’s it, let’s anti-party.
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Them too. We did not judge.
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