Bend Me, Shape Me #3: Unearthed

the gateway album.

In 1988, Australian band The Church broke onto the US charts in a big way with the moody, ethereal single "Under the Milky Way". I loved loved loved it and after buying the accompanying album Starfish I started digging into the band's back catalog. Not only were they prolific as a band, but there were solo projects available by the lead singer and songwriter Steve Kilbey as well as lead guitarist Marty Willson-Piper.

Cover art color scheme prepares you for something unusual

Oddly enough, I became much bigger fans of the two solo records I bought than any Church album in my collection. I don't listen to Willson-Piper's Art Attack as much now as i did then (which was quite a bit- it's excellent), but the Kilbey record Unearthed became one of my favorite records of all time, and is still in heavy rotation at the Word Player home 20 years later.

Originally released in 1986, Unearthed is a classic example of a "bedroom record": it feels like it was made in a bedroom and it's best listened to in bedroom conditions. When I was a bachelor, I fell asleep almost every night with headphones on or music playing low on the stereo, and this album has taken me into the dream world hundreds of times.

"Otherworldly" is a good place to start, adjective-wise. The album is both stylistically diverse and thematically cohesive. Sometimes it feels like Renaissance psychedelia, then on to proto-electronica, and even dream sequence soundtrack music from a lost science fiction film.

Weaving dissolving patterns
Forming our uncertain terms
Passing into history
Going to the worms
I'll wait for you forever
In my house all white with dust
Falling into lonely hours
Let the engines rust

Heliopolis

Makes me think of The Martian Chronicles...

He has the look of a shaman about him, no?

Kilbey's lyrics are vague, emotional and surreal, and even the instrumental tracks seem to communicate something palpable beyond simple mood. This is music to get lost to for sure.

It's hard sometimes to identify favorite songs on a favorite album, but in terms of "which songs have made it onto the most mixtapes" there are two clear-cut winners.

The first is "Tyrant", a pulsating, droning ode that seems to be saying more than it says (which, I know, isn't saying much).

Undignified, uncivilized, but always worth a thrill
There's never been a world that didn't end
Unquantified, uncategorized, until we pay the bill
Never ever borrow what you lend

The other track's name says it all, in a way. "My Birthday, the Moon Festival". It's simultaneously absurd and beautiful. What more can you ask for?

My birthday, the moon festival
My life in the sea of tears

My holiday, a misadventure
My soul, a short career
Like a lizard the road crawls forward
Into regions unexplored
By their boats the Mayans stirred
Gold and silver soon flow aboard
My birthday, the moon festival
My legs a wisp of ghost
My clothing, cotton under paper
My shoes, a sharpened post
My birthday, the moon festival

**If you're new to the site, the goal of the Bend Me, Shape Me series can be found here.**

Dog Ears #14: On Writing

I'd planned to take a break from Dog Ear-ing for a while, and had skipped the last book I read (Chip Kidd's The Learners- good, but not great). The next book on my stack was Stephen King's nonfiction On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, a book I'd picked from an assortment of giveaways in the basement of AB and UM over the holidays. When I began I wasn't planning on Dog Ear-ing it either, but there were just too many plums I couldn't resist picking... et voila.

It's always a pleasure when Mr. King leads you down into the cellar

Including On Writing I've now read 22 books written by King, far and away the largest number by any one author. In scanning his chronological bibliography, I also realized that I hadn't read any King since 1997's Wizard and Glass, the fourth installment of the frustratingly ambitious Dark Tower series. I'm not sure why I stopped reading King for so long, but my best guess is that he was just so damn prolific that I stopped trying to keep up and, kind of like a favorite band you veer away from after years of faithful devotion, I realized that I needed a break.

Even though On Writing is nonfiction, it's written in King's instantly recognizable voice, and I realized how much I'd missed it after such a long break. The book's more or less broken up into three sections- King's own personal history and evolution as a writer, his advice on how to manage the art and craft of writing itself, and finally a harrowing chapter on his near-fatal encounter with a

BLOGGER'S NOTE

Above, I stopped writing mid-sentence when Mrs. Word Player walked in the door. We decided to go out and grab some lunch, so I walked away from the computer and this post. What I had been about to write was that King, as a pedestrian, was struck by a car in a horrible accident near his home in the middle of writing On Writing, and didn't finish it for months.

In true, eerie King fashion, we got in the car to drive to lunch today and got in a car accident in an intersection not far from our home. We were both shaken up but uninjured and the other driver (also uninjured) was clearly at fault. As I was driving the rental car home after dropping our car off to get fixed the weird synchronicity struck me, and oddly made me feel a little better about the whole thing. At least no one had to be evacuated by helicopter for emergency surgery...

Fortunately, the other driver didn't hiss "Thinner!" at me while exchanging insurance information

That said, I'm a touch freaked out.

Anyway, here are some of the best Dog Ears from On Writing.

p37 "Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."

p163 "... stories are found things, like fossils in the ground. ... Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible."

p249 logrolling: |ˈlôgˌrōli ng; ˈläg-|
noun
1 informal the practice of exchanging favors, esp. in politics by reciprocal voting for each other's proposed legislation. [ORIGIN: from the phrase you roll my log and I'll roll yours.]
2 a sport in which two contestants stand on a floating log and try to knock each other off by spinning it with their feet.

The boy that launched a million nightmares

Well, it seems that after I cut a few DE's that didn't seem as compelling as I thought they were laying in bed, this installment is a little thin. Let's insert the two DE's I couldn't resist making in The Learners to beef the piece up, yes?

p160 "'Lars once said there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and everyone else.'"

p175. "Miss Preech: 'Your five o'clock is here. The respondent to the shoe ad. A Mr. Harshbarger.'
'Send him up.' Tip rubbed his hands listlessly. 'Oh, I'm just filled with antisappointment.'
'Pardon?'
'Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom."

I think we've all experienced our fair share of antisappointment, yes?

One final note- tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this blog. Feel free to take the day off from work and celebrate with me. To borrow once more from Stephen King, thank you Faithful Reader.

Bend Me, Shape Me #1: A Broken Frame

What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
- Rob Gordon, High Fidelity

I want a room that looks like this

So begins the film adaptation of Nick Hornby's seminal (for mix-tape enthusiasts anyway) book High Fidelity. I can't recall if this is an exact quote from the book (I haven't read it in 13 years) but it feels like one. I think it raises an excellent question, and to take it in a slightly different direction, I believe wholeheartedly that the music I listened to in my formative years had an enormous impact on what kind of person I became and what sort of aesthetic I developed.

A couple weekends ago I read an interesting article in the NY Times "Arts & Leisure" section on the reformed band Portishead and the release of Third, their first album in ten years. As I read I couldn't stop thinking how much I loved Portishead's first record Dummy (1994), and indeed how much that record altered my taste in music while it served as a soundtrack to my life for many months. In the spirit of Rob Gordon, I decided to make a list of the ten most influential records in my life, and amended the time span to records that came out during the most malleable and impressionable period in a music lover's life (according to me anyway)– the fifteen years from 11 through 25.

So, with no further ado, I want to kick off the ten part series "Bend Me, Shape Me" with the first record on my chronological list: Depeche Mode's A Broken Frame, released September 27, 1982.

"Where is she going?" I wondered.

I didn't discover A Broken Frame until two years after its release. Depeche Mode didn't really achieve a foothold in the U.S. until 1984 and the release of the single "People are People" from their fourth studio album Some Great Reward. In 1984 I was living in Cincinnati for the second time, and fell under the influence of their "alternative" record station 97X (immortalized by Dustin Hoffman's character in RAIN MAN who kept repeating their tagline "97X... BAM... the future of rock and roll"). Having recently left classic-rock dominated Charlotte, I was taken in by the sounds of new bands like The Smiths, Tears for Fears, The Cure, New Order, and especially Depeche Mode.

I loved "People are People" (my very first 12" remix purchase) and Some Great Reward and saved up enough lawn-mowing money to buy the Mode back catalog on cassette, including their second album A Broken Frame. It's hard to say with any precision now, but it felt like I listened to A Broken Frame every day for a year. The first track "Leave in Silence" is an all-time fave and defines the early Mode sound: dubby, echo chamber synthesizer loops, chunky synth bass, spare drum machine with occasional low-end boom, interspersed with glockenspiel-esque chimes and other metallic percussion, and singing that alternates between gothic chanting, deadpan narration and earnest wailing.

For a teenager faced with all kinds of awakenings, the album's overall tone of alienation and matter-of-fact desperation hit the sweet spot for me. Fortunately, like most Mode records, it's also cut with just enough hope to keep you from slitting your wrists.

By far the weirdest (and, naturally, my favorite) track on the album is "Satellite". It opens with a lilting synth reggae mood that creepily belies the lyrics:

Now hear this my friends
I'll never be the same again
Gonna lock myself in a cold black room
Gonna shadow myself in a veil of gloom

I will function, operate
I will be a satellite of hate

Looking at them now they aren't exactly sophisticated lyrics (though quite sensational for a 20 yr-old songwriter), but they were very affecting at the time. What is a "satellite of hate" I wondered... and do I want to be one too? What could another person do to you that could make you feel this way?

Disillusioned, I was disenchanted
Forgot the love that had been implanted

When I first heard Radiohead's O.K. Computer I thought that A Broken Frame was its spiritual predecessor, both records cold to the touch, obsessed with the disconnection of the modern technological world, and yet filled with a longing for something better that really resonates with me.

Perhaps for some of those reasons, Depeche Mode were always huge in the Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe, and the album's striking cover photograph strongly evokes the shadow of communist Mother Russia. I was only just becoming interested in politics at this time, and though I wasn't sure exactly what they were trying to say in songs like "Monument" (later covered terrifically by Gus Gus for 1997's up-and-down Mode tribute album For the Masses), I was pretty sure they had something to do with communism.

So we picked up our tools and we worked in the morning light
With the last stone placed wasn't it a wonderful sight?
But it fell back down and scattered all around
Anything passes when you need glasses

My monument
it fell down

Work all of my days for this kind of praise
it fell down

The synthesizer work is especially ominous in this one, with plenty of creepy horn sounds and spare electro touches. It's also one of the few tracks on the album where both Dave Gahan and Martin Gore sing... their voices are both so different yet they blend together quite unusually here.

yes, I even loved their haircuts

Even the more bubblegummy songs on the record like "The Meaning of Love" and "A Photograph of You" were fascinating to my young mind. I was used to songs that told me what love was, not ones that asked me what it meant.

The only song off this record that seems to be known by the casual Depeche Mode fan is "See You", which is a sentimental favorite of mine. When you're in Junior High, you suddenly feel like childhood is over yet adulthood hasn't begun and you're simultaneously nostalgic for the past and the future. The lyrics here seemed to match my frame of mind perfectly.

Well I know five years is a long time
And that times change (oh that times change)
But I think that you will find
People are basically the same (basically the same)

Balancing the Ledger

The first movie I ever took the future Mrs. Word Player to starred Lindsay Lohan.

That may sound like a sure recipe for dating disaster now, but back in August of 1998 (a handful of days after we first met) it was the G-rated Disney remake THE PARENT TRAP title that was the draw, and I'd never heard the name Lindsay Lohan before in my life. I was eager to impress upon my date that we could have G-rated fun together too, and every memory I have from that night is sensational. Thankfully the movie was great, and not at all the "isn't this fun?" (oh-no-we're-exchanging-polite-smiles!?!) bore I feared it could be.

That memory and, for all intents and purposes, that alone is what kept me rooting for Lohan to survive her marathon of death- and logic- and rationality-defying series of arrests, hospitalizations, and rehab stints. Frankly, I didn't/don't want that memory tainted by yet another senseless fatality story.

I think we'll all be looking away from THE DARK KNIGHT posters for a while

Of course, thoughts like this are dredged up by today's news that Australian actor Heath Ledger was found dead of an apparent drug overdose at the age of 28. Here's the twist, for me at least: I've been in a funk the whole day about his death, and (surprisingly to me) I've only seen one of the films he's been in.

Why should his death affect me like this? And, how will I feel about it tomorrow?

I can barely remember seeing MONSTER'S BALL in 2001, and even less can I cobble together a handful of words about Ledger's supporting performance in the film. All I know is that I was/am very excited to see his interpretation of The Joker in the upcoming BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT, and I was bummed to hear last year that the was splitting up with DAWSON'S CREEK's Michelle Williams, his then-fiancee and mother of their child.

That's it. Yet, I still feel something strong tugging at me now that he's gone. I wonder why it was as strong as it was, and I wonder why it wasn't stronger than it was.

Ultimately, we hadn't formed any memories together yet. Ledger's passing didn't immediately affect me in the same way as the following three shocking, completely unsuspected deaths because (unbeknownst to them in life, as virtually all our bonds with celebs are) I'd internalized enough memories about them (in the same vein as me and Li-Lo) that proved (so far) to be far more difficult to shake.

We all knew eventually this blog would feature glamour shots of me.

So, in chronological order...

JOHN LENNON >>> murdered 12/8/1980 >>> his age: 40, my age: 9

I burst into tears when I heard that John Lennon had died. As near as I can remember, his is the first non-family death I can recall. I grew up listening to The Beatles at home on Father Word Player's Teac reel-to-reel, as he'd recorded his collection of vinyl albums to tape and then given them all away. I was allowed to listen to the stereo by myself on Dad's big-ass grey-brown '70s headphones growing up, and The Beatles were extremely important to me and my musical education as a child. No amount of explaining in the world could explain to a nine year-old why someone would shoot and kill someone like John Lennon.

He looks like he could still be alive, doesn't he?

RIVER PHOENIX >>> fatal overdose 10/31/1993 >>> his age:23, my age: 22

I'd thought it cool, during his life, that River Phoenix was exactly one year and one day older than me. Stupid things like that create a superficial kinship between people like him and people like me. I was a HUGE Steven King fan growing up, and after I saw STAND BY ME in 1986 (adapted from King's novella "The Body" from his collection Different Seasons), I'd become a HUGE River Phoenix fan as well. Toss in his we're-grooming-him-for-a-prequel-or-two role in INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (and, yes, fine, a desire to have my short curly dark hair look anything like his long straight blonde hair), and his shocking death hit me like a kick to the sternum.

Several years later, I was living in L.A. and went to the Viper Room to see a friend's band play.

The place still had bad ju-ju out the yin-yang.

Incidentally (and something I just now discovered) River's middle name is Jude, named after The Beatles song "Hey Jude" which was written by Paul to comfort Julian Lennon during John and Cynthia's divorce. There's something comforting about a comfort song, no?

"I move for a bad court thingy"

PHIL HARTMAN >>> murdered 5/28/1998 >>> his age:49, my age:26

Still less than 10 years ago, this is the one I remember the most vividly and the one that still hurts the most when the wind blows just so. Hartman's contribution to the comedy and pop-culture scene was vast, including major roles in PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE, THE SIMPSONS, and SNL. His sensibilities were just so dead-on, and you could count on him to be funny whenever he turned up (which was very, very often) in a show or movie. I guess because he was a company player and supporting actor, most of us didn't talk about him too much before he died (for, after all, it really felt like it was the character Lionel Hutz who immortally referred to bourbon as "the brownest of the brown liquors".)

I was in the office of my new job at a production company in Venice, CA, and my bosses were in Milwaukee when I heard the news of Hartman's murder over KCRW. Alone, I once again found myself weeping over the death of someone I never knew.

Hartman, like Lennon and Phoenix, had touched my life in a way I clearly would never forget. Only time will tell how my feelings towards Ledger will evolve, based mostly, I guess, on how many stars I give his to-be-rented back catalog on Netflix combined with how I felt today.

I'm certain this will come out inelegantly, but doesn't it always feel strange when someone who was just alive is now dead forever?

Re-issue! Re-package!

Best of! Most of!

There was a time not long ago when I made two year-end lists every year, one for the best films of the year and one for best albums. Recently, for a variety of reasons (that can mostly fit under the odious umbrella of getting older), my consumption of new movies and music has declined steeply, which makes it impossible for me to make Top Ten lists for 2007.... just don't have 'em!

I didn't see ten new releases that I loved, and I certainly haven't bought ten records that were released this year... yet I AM in the mood for Top Tens. What better reason to dig through the computer, see what lists have survived, and see if I still feel good about my choices. Maybe you'll find something old to make new again? So, with no further ado... ooh, I can already see some I wish I could change... and some I've numbered and some are in no order at all... and some are missing (damn you catastrophic hard drive crash of '03) oh well...


TOP 10 RECORDS of 2001
Minus 8: "Elysian Fields"
Miniflex: "Sud"
Wagon Christ: "Musipal"
The Avalanches: "Since I Met You"
Jack Dangers: "Hello Friends!"
Daft Punk: "Discovery"
Bjork: "Vespertine"
Syrup: "Different Flavours"
"Dubplates from the Lamp" (Pork Records Sampler)
Herbert: "Bodily Functions"


TOP 10 MOVIES of 2001
LOTR: Fellowship of the Rings
Donnie Darko
Amelie
Mulholland Drive
Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Moulin Rouge
Waking Life
Monsters Inc.
Memento
Ghost World

I admire a proper self-sabotaging band name like Crazy Penis

TOP 10 RECORDS of 2002
Royksopp: “Melody A.M.”
Mr. Scruff: “Trouser Jazz”
Gusgus: “Attention”
Meat Beat Manifesto: “RUOK?”
Playgroup: “Playgroup” + “Party Mix Vol.1”
Tosca: “Different Tastes Of Honey”
Crazy Penis: “The Wicked Is Music”
Funki Porcini: “Fast Asleep”
Jazzanova: “In Between”
Cornelius: “Point”


TOP 10 MOVIES of 2002
1. Punch Drunk Love
2. 24 Hour Party People
3. Adaptation
4. Spirited Away
5. About A Boy
6. Bowling for Columbine
7. The Ring
8. LOTR: The Two Towers
9. Signs
10. Dogtown and Z Boys

Ironically, THE RING may not hold up on video, but it was terrifying in the theater

TOP 10 RECORDS of 2004
Mylo: “Destroy Rock and Roll”
Crazy Penis: “24 Hour Psychedelic Freakout”
Arthur Russell: “The World of Arthur Russell” (reissue)
Kerrier District: “Kerrier District”
Wagon Christ: “Sorry I Made You Lush”
Manzel: “Midnight Theme” (reissue)
Rjd2: “Since We Last Spoke”
Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby: “The New Mixes, Vol. 1”
Jack Dangers: “Forbidden Planet Explored”
Air: “Talkie Walkie”


TOP 10 RECORDS of 2005
Isolee: "We Are Monster"
Annie: "Anniemal"
Eugene McDaniels: "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse" (reissue)
"Cherrystones Hidden Gems" (compilation)
Recloose: "Hiatus on the Horizon"
Boards of Canada: "The Campfire Headphase"
Beatfanatic: "The Gospel According to Beatfanatic"
Madrid de los Austrias: "Mas Amor!"
Tosca: "J.A.C."
Ralph Myerz and the Jack Herren Band: "Your New Best Friends"

Towa Tei is one of the most underappreciated pop musicians of the last twenty years

TOP 10 RECORDS of 2006
Darkel: “Darkel”
The Whitest Boy Alive: “Dreams”
Audion: “Suckfish”
Nightmares on Wax: “In A Space Out Of Sound”
Major Swellings: “Noid 1978”
Van Hunt: “On The Jungle Floor”
Alan Braxe and Friends: “The Upper Cuts”
Luke Vibert: “Kerrier District 2”
Towa Tei: “Flash”
Burt Bacharach: “The Look Of Love” (3-disc compilation)


TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2006
The Queen
Casino Royale
Talledega Nights
An Inconvenient Truth
Thank You For Smoking
A Scanner Darkly
The Science of Sleep
Apocalypto
The Holiday
Inland Empire

Two is the Magic Number

David Lynch won't leave me alone.

I won't leave David Lynch alone.

I have David Lynch's fax number.
I don't have a fax machine.

David Lynch is my favorite director, but I rarely watch his films more than two or three times.
I have listened to the soundtrack to TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME more than any other album, by far.

It's no secret that Lynch explores the theme of duality in most, if not all, of his work. Three of his last four features have dealt with duality explicitly, and its no coincidence that his most famous creation is TWIN PEAKS.

A devoted father... who nonetheless made ERASERHEAD the most unsettling ode to fatherhood in history.

An interesting counterpoint (or, more accurately, accent) to Lynch's apparent fascination with both sides of the coin is that he named his production company Asymmetrical, which, to me, says that he doesn't feel that the two sides in most conflicts are necessarily standing on equal footing.

I've had Lynch on the brain for some time now... pretty much ever since the release nearly a year ago of his last feature INLAND EMPIRE. The other day I forwarded reflections of my second viewing of IE and an interesting psychiatric interpretation of IE to a fellow writer and film lover, and this was his response:

Also, I've been having a great time reading about IE, but the more i
read, the less i think i want to see it. It sounds almost painful.

I simultaneously hear what he's saying 100%, and also am saddened by it. It's not that IE is necessarily "good for you" and therefore should be watched, or even that I necessarily love it the most and want to evangelize it from the rooftops.

It's simply that I was affected by it, and for some reason, want to share that.

I loved his willingness to stump for Laura Dern's IE Oscar chances in untraditional fashion.

I wonder what it means that I am so taken in by tales of madness, murder, paranoia and dissociative personalities. I'd like to believe that it's a sane person recognizing the realities and shades of insanity, but who the hell knows. I DO know that I am plagued by many of the same dualistic fears and insecurities that the characters in Lynch's movies face.

I am a success.
I am a disappointment.

Inherently, I am a good person.
Inherently, I am capable of evil.

I am worldly.
I am naïve.

I am in control of my destiny.
My destiny is in control of me.

I "get" David Lynch's movies.
I "don't get" David Lynch's movies.

etc. etc.

All I know, is that the dark and confusing hallways of Lynch's films also exist inside of me, and that is a good thing, and a bad thing.

Why is it that THESE people still resonate with me where other fictional characters are long forgotten?

A footnote, if you will. Piggybacking on the DVD release of TWIN PEAKS: The Definitive Gold Box Edition is the CD release of TWIN PEAKS: All New Season Two Music. This is truly fantastic news for diehard fans (like myself) of the show's soundtrack music as created by Lynch, composer/musician Angelo Badalamenti, and vocalist Julee Cruise. IMHO, the music from TWIN PEAKS is the most evocative, transporting, emotional, moody, tactile music ever created. Adding something new to the canon of two that has existed with no change for 15 years is extraordinary.

I found a user review on Amazon.com that summarized my excitement for this new release in a way I (or I) couldn't say better myself...

By L. R. Grubb "empathy addict" (Philadelphia, PA USA):

A decade and a half after Twin Peaks ended, six long years since I finished watching the show, and here we are. This is music that I have quite simply been yearning for for years. There is something about Twin Peaks that has created a condensed kind of nostalgia for series itself, the time in my life during which I watched it, and the people I watched it with, as well as something more, an unplaceable, deep and vivid longing for something that does not quite exist. Twin Peaks: Season Two Music has landed softly into my current life, not unlike a telegram from my six-years-ago self, and even with such magnificent tracks like Shelly, Audrey's Prayer, Harold's Theme, Josie and Truman, Hook Rug Dance, and Half Heart, I'm left with the sense of an intangible absence, one I suspect will never be filled after living ever so briefly in the staggeringly multidimensional world of Twin Peaks.

Mailer Made

Truth may indeed prove to be stranger than fiction, but why is it that truth and fiction always seem to be the only two choices in the running? It's like only having Democrat or Republican to choose from-- very limiting and tends to shove a lot of gray area into the black.

Truth is stranger than fiction is, I think, a widely held belief by most people of a certain age. I wonder what the margin between them is from person to person? Perhaps I'll start keeping a tab on how many moments from reality jump out as being stranger than any fiction vs those fictional moments that strike me as stranger than reality usually offers.

I wonder if... nahh.

Perhaps not.

A dozen or so days ago I was emailing with a relative of mine, and I half-jokingly replied to something he said with:

As you are almost certainly aware, real life is wildly overrated. I’ve been fictionalizing myself for years and have never been happier.

Actually, I was more than half-joking: just trying to say something cheeky without too much thought about how true it was. But the more I thought of it (and for some reason, I did) the more I felt I'd hit on something relatively unconscious and similarly close to hitting... something.

Perhaps not, but it came to the surface again this morning when I was reading the front page obit of Norman Mailer in the NY Times. Mailer joins a long list of iconic artists of whose output I'm still only fleetingly aware... I've read more about him than read him. Anyone interested in getting an excellent look at Mailer the raconteur (and boxing fanatic) should immediately rent Leon Gast's truly excellent 1996 documentary chronicling Ali and Foreman's "Rumble in the Jungle" WHEN WE WERE KINGS. He comes as close as I've ever experienced to transforming boxing into poetry.

Ali Boma Ye! Ali Boma Ye!

Anyway, some pullquotes from Mailer's obit (excellently written by Charles McGrath) really struck me, especially these two:

The beginning of "Armies" is both a good summary of Mr. Mailer's life to that point and an example of how he had begun to turn himself into a character in which literary style and selfhood were virtually indistinguishable.

and this, taken from much later in Mailer's life:

His editor, Jason Epstein, said of this period, "There are two sides to Norman Mailer, and the good side has won."

How much do we actively, consciously pursue a heroic third act in life?

Mailer, it appears, had not only fictionalized his life to a recognizable degree, but also managed to pull off a third act denouement to his personal hero's journey that would have done Joseph Campbell proud: his transformation was not only difficult to predict, but also somehow inevitable.

The real question is...
was it man-writing-with-his-own-life-as-paper-and-typewriter, or did it just happen to turn out that way as most lives unfold... blithely hoping for the best?

Down Peripatetiscope

Mrs. Word Player and I are on the move.

Again.

For reasons too tedious to include here, we are about to move into our sixth place together spanning our seven years of marriage. With yet another new home looming, I've been pondering just what "home" means anymore.

There's no place like home? Well, not 'til one falls on your sister's head.

Some personal statistics:

From age 0-17, I lived in six different homes, including three interstate moves. The math is pretty easy here, averaging about one home every three years.

From age 18-27, I lived in ten different homes, including three more interstate moves. That's an average of one new home every year for a decade.

From age 28-36, as mentioned above, Mrs. Word Player and I lived/will live in six different homes, including two more interstate moves. That works out to a new home every 1.5 years.

My grand totals fo' life are 22 different homes in 36 years, or one move every 1.63 years and one interstate move every 4.5 years.

Exhausting I tells ya!

Frankly I'm not ready to be on the road again... but whattaya gonna do?

It's gotten to the point that when someone asks me where I'm from, I have to stop and think about it for a second. Let's see what state takes home the title (rounding off to whole years):

Ohio: 10 years
North Carolina: 13 years
California: 9 years
New York: 4 years

ah, the Sunshine State!

I guess I'm from North Carolina!

In surfing around for this post, I learned that a fellow named John Howard Payne is the originator of the famous line "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home", taken from his song "Home Sweet Home". Payne, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, ironically died far from home in Tunis, Tunisia (where he was serving as U.S. ambassador!) in 1852, his lifelong crush on Frankenstein author Mary Shelley forever unrequited.

I wonder where on Earth I'll die... I hope it's not New Jersey.