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Love Is A Wonderful Thing

It was one of those parties no one really wanted to see end, the one where you don't notice that your feet hurt, or your bra is digging in, or you're running on exhaustion... at least until you get back to your room.

I don't think I've seen Red quite so glowing, floating through the scene armed with the widest smile ever. There's nothing like my redheaded pal when she's happy, but this was waves of happiness emanating outward in all directions, eliminating everything in its path. And that, I realized, was a room filled with love.

Even the usual wedding stresses seemed to vanish - in part because Red, as she does, found a bunch of professionals and simply expected everyone to be on their game - and there was nothing, no cross moment, no moment of high stress, no fainting in the middle of the vows. Planning, clearly is key... as is a vision of what one has in mind.

It was a wedding in the best sense - a real reflection of the couple getting married, all the things they wanted, and pretty much nothing they didn't. It was a big sprawling blended family, traditional in some respects, and completely unbound by tradition in others. I'm not sure I've seen a wedding where the bride dirty danced to Usher one moment, or used Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for a chaste, romantic slow dance. But that's my Red... and she's unstoppable. And undeniable.

In the end, for me, the whole experience will always be slightly bittersweet; there was too much personal drama in my own life for me to really relax until the festivities began, and the world of bridesmaids - a chance to see the theater of wedding from behind the curtain - wasn't as seamless and fun as I would have liked. Expectations, of course, are everything, and I probably started from a position of dreaming too big. But nothing, really, can overcome the force of a love so strong, the moment when love is all around... and I'm happy to let love rule. Love is a wonderful thing, indeed. Here's to the happy couple, and may they keep spreading joy.

Saturday Singalong: I Can't Wait, I Gotta Celebrate

Like I said a while back... some of these things just write themselves; this one has been with me since I was a kid.

For my pal Red, in whom I found an old soul who lives for... old soul. None of these were played at her wedding... but they could have been (and should have, probably, if we'd stayed past midnight). And of course, for Betty, who made me feel like I'd never been alone, and who knows more than I ever did.

And with that... you too should be dancing... yeah.

• France Joli, Come To Me. Disco warhorses are a hard subject, because you have to separate the overplayed from the atrocious, without losing songs which are, indeed, timeless. Disco's 1978-1980 moment may have been too much, in some ways, but we got there for a reason, and musically, it did grow out of pop and dance elements that had been there all along. The slow build, the swooping strings, the pulsing bassline... all of these are on display here, plus Joli, at the time a teenager newly discovered and shot to instant success. Though we tend to lump all disco into an obvious sexual come on, Come To Me is really more traditionally romantic, a declaration of love for just one person that will always be there, just for you. I still try to sing along - even the soaring high note.
• Cher, Take Me Home. Of all the seventies stars, Cher was probably the best natural fit to disco's showy, sexy aesthetic - she'd already been vamping around in Bob Mackie's showgirl costumes, embodying the dawning feminist awakening that a woman shouldn't have to depend on a man for her own worth or success, and do it on her own terms. She only did one real disco album, but that's all it took: Take Me Home is a near perfect single, and perfect disco (and, lashed into a gold and chains teeny bikini and Valkyrie winged headdress, even Mackie managed to outdo himself). And yes, it does speak to the direct, one night stand, why bother with old conventions approach to sex in the seventies with refreshing directness. Sexy, playful without being tawdry or cheap, the song reminds you that we do like sex (and dancing) because it's fun and brings us joy. I'm in heaven, feels like heaven... so much heaven...
• Donna Summer, The MacArthur Park Suite. In some ways this is a cheat, because it avoids picking one song of Summer's, which is hard... but also unfair: of all the artists of the period, Summer shouldn't be represented by just one song, since the wonder of her output at the time was its variety - with the help of Giorgio Moroder, Summer was rarely the same thing twice. And while she helped define the idea of a disco song, she never seemed bound to "the rules." That seemed especially true with this 17 minute(!) remix of One of a Kind, Heaven Knows and MacArthur Park, the latter a remake of an old jazz standard that rarely worked, but Summer somehow made into an emotional tour-de-force. Unlike many disco hits - even hers - she doesn't belt out the crucial final verse, but builds the emotional intesnity gradually, a reminder that she is, really, an incredible vocalist who can do nearly anything. Still.
• Barbra Streisand, The Main Event. Streisand, too, had a voice made for disco's soaring highs; when she finally gave into the trend, her vocals were some of the best, and not just in the obvious super-pairing on No More Tears with Summer. I always liked The Main Event, a fairly simplistic lyric which Streisand makes her own. And Streisand's usual tendencies to over-emote and go big (always big), actually work better for her on disco than her usual standards, where she can seem shrill and lacking in subtlety. Here, against a big wall of sound, she's got the room she needs to show how versatile her big voice actually is.
• Diana Ross, The Boss. Ross could be just as well represented by Love Hangover, but that song belongs on a different list, one that's more attuned to disco's early relationship to R&B. The Boss is more representative of the strong, independent female singer of 78-80, partly because after some pretty rough years (pretty much from the making of Mahogany until The Boss) personally and professionally, until Ross asserted a more direct role in shaping her own career. Working with Ashford and Simpson, Ross put together one of her best albums, a real statement of personal strength (which is why "I Ain't Been Licked" or "It's My House" also make the point quite forcefully). The Boss soars from its first notes, never looks back, and makes real virtues of Ross' unique vocal abilities, a lighter voice less suited to belting, but which conveys a real yearning, and is well matched with a near gospel intensity in her backup singers. And who can argue with letting love rule the day?

Look, Muffy, An Editorial About Us!

One of my favorite things in the New Yorkers I read as a child growing up in Maryland were the little squibs at the end of long articles. They would feature misprints, examples of interesting malapropisms, typos that made a sentence completely unitintentiionally hilarious, things that newspapers miss in the rush to get the paper out the door.

That doesn't happen so much now - I blame Tina Brown - but my own sense of subversive humor gets re-kindled, now and again, while perusing the paper and tripping over an unintentionally hilarious or revealing moment. Like, for instance, yesterday's bizarre editorial on 3-D movies in the New York Times, which ends:

The actual world doesn’t have to create the illusion of its three-dimensionality. Its depth is so pervasive that we forget to notice it. We register it with a kind of 3-D equanimity, taking in everything as part of the natural field of view. There’s an unexpected serenity, a calmness, in how we see.

That was the pleasure of walking up Broadway from the theater. When a man looking for spare change said “Hey, bub!” his face didn’t leap into the foreground, nor did we suddenly see ourselves walking toward him from his point of view. The light mist that was falling didn’t hang like the northern lights between us.

It was a pleasure to take 3-D for granted and marvel, for a few blocks at least, at the subtlety of the special effects inherent in ordinary perception.

... missing from that last sentence? "Then we told the bum to stop bothering us, got in a cab, and headed back to the Upper East Side." Isn't New York glorious?

If I'm Not The One...

A couple weeks back, I got stopped by the police in one of those all-encompassing drunk driving sweeps - this never happens to me, so I was really very bewildered - and being not drunk, it all went very smoothly, though I nearly blew it because I thought the officer was just waving me through when he wanted me to stop.

There's this moment, I think most people get, when stopped by police and asked some question out of the blue - like "have you been drinking?" - where the combination of confusion and defensiveness sends up the wrong signals. And I was reminded of something that I think is still worth keeping in mind, in this post-terrorist age... that the balance of having security and giving up some of our freedom is a dance many people don't want to do.

And the reason, primarily is "not me."

Saturday Singalong: I Know I've Heard That Song Before...

Today, to the songs that come in many different versions:

• George Lamond, Don't Stop Believing. Lamond's version showed up a few months after the pivotal final episode of The Sopranos, which singlehandedly revived this classic rock staple. Lamond's version earns every bit of its outer borough, B&T cred, a jumpy amped up dance version of the original, and to Lamond's credit (and the staying power of his voice, which is in great shape), his vocal matches Steve Perry's. Freestyle, a Nuyorican dance music style, has been pretty much stagnant since its heyday in the late eighties and early nineties (when Lamond got started), but with KTU still flogging it, it's never entirely vanished from New York radio. A fine update of a classic.
• Journey, Don't Stop Believing. Which is not to say the original doesn't hold up: Perry's interpretation always struck me for how it evoked the seedy scene between the two random strangers on a "midnight train going anywhere." At the time, it was so world weary and jaded, it was a revelation to a kid in junior high on the bus in the suburbs. And, like so many things at the time (like realizing Brooke Shields was maybe 2 years older than you were), it spoke of an innocence kids my age already lost and were unlikely to get back. Which is why, on The Sopranos, I found myself admitting - much the way Jessie's Girl astonished me, again, when it turned up in Boogie Nights - that I didn't see all there was in the song; seeing it through Tony Soprano's eyes, I realized how it spoke to his aspirations and his reality ("paying anything to roll the dice, just one more time" and that "the movie never ends... it goes on and on and on and on")... things a kid in suburban Baltimore could not, really, have ever known. Not then, anyway.
• The Cast of Glee, Don't Stop Believing. But the version I have on my main iPod playlist just now is from the pilot episode of Glee, itself a revelation. In a sparkling new choral arrangement (where a capella vocals replace the keyboards), I was yet again caught short by the song, realizing that what it also speaks to our faith that we can be whatever we want to be - Don't stop believing. Hold on to that feeling. And in the context of the pilot episode, that final moment - when you realize a song can speak to your dreams and aspirations, was when I realized that Glee was onto something. Big.

And for today... I think I'll leave it at that.

Saturday Singalong: Seven The Hard Way

Keeping with the musically themed elements of my anniversary week (whoo!! It's like being on a cruise!), I thought this week's songs should come from a place of personal satisfaction - songs from the top 25 of my iTunes.

One of the reasons I love my iPod and iTunes is that it tracks, obsessively, just what I play most. And, like American Top 40, I like the idea that my top 25 stays fluid, and different things rise to the top. Partly, I've managed that because first my computer died and then my iPod died, and both times I lost the count that had built up. But the distance between by top song (30 plays) and my lowest (14), is small enough that a few extra listens will change everything.And my tastes, as I like to point out... are pretty eclectic.

These 7 are not the first seven... but they are in my top 25.

• Wendy Phillips, Stay. I found this track on a random dance collection I purchased (for the remix of Let Me Love You, which I also love), and it has stuck in my head ever since. I carry on my iPod a playlist called "Walking" which is my general walkaround music, and this song is always included (which is why it remains at #1). As far as I know, there;'s nothing else by Phillips that's ever caught my attention.
• Sara Bareilles, Love Song. This too, I just decided to like when I first heard it - the choppy piano arrangement, the uncomprmising lyric ("I won't write you a love song, cause you asked for it, cause you need one... you see?"), and Bareilles, no nonsense delivery. Unfortunately, most radio stations play a horribly chopped up condensed version... so I have to go back and play the real thing.
• Tavares, Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel. So here's a story: I'm walking through Central Park one day, and there's these puppeteers working, four African American guys with bird puppets. And they launch into a perfect lip-synch of "heaven Must Be Missing An Angel" where the lead bird fins audience members to sing it to, with three backup birds. The guys are dead serious. The birds are amazingly cool. And the song,,, is Heaven Must Be missing An Angel. You can't really mess that up.
• New Found Glory, It's Not Your Fault. I found this one via MTV, with a well done, but somewhat exploitative (see how long it takes the girl to get dressed compared to the guy) video. Later, when I listened to the lyric, I realized it was a bit darker than the video... but mostly, I like this sort of New Teen Rock - MTV and the labels have been turning them out like clockwork (see below, or see several others, like All American Rejects), and it's nice to see pop and rock find a coexistence that doesn't require heavy metal or excessive eyeliner. Just four dudes in t-shirts who should be in college, going to class. What can I say... I like dudes. :) Especially ones who can play.
• Boys Like Girls, The Great Escape, and Boys Like Girls, Love Drunk. Another pop/rock band of similar MTV ready form, distinguished by especially tuneful arrangements and well sung leads. The Great Escape is especially full of teen escapism ("cause we are finally free... tonight.") which is how it wound up appealing to my still rebellious ears. But the new album is pretty swell too, and Love Drunk ("I used to be love drunk, but now I'm hung over... I loved you forever, but now it's over") lives up to the promise, and makes for a fun kiss off song to boot - kind of what AAR's "Gives You Hell" wants to be, but misses.
• Kylie Minogue, Better the Devil You Know (The Mad March Hare Radio Mix). If you're still saying "isn't she the one who did the Locomotion back in the nineties"... boy are you late. Kylie is huge... everywhere but here, first as bubblegummy pop star (with Brit superproducers Stock Aitken Waterman) then on her own as a still evolving versatile dance artist - who, as I keep saying, is the one pushing folks like Britney and Madonna to keep up with her hold on international dancefloors. Better the Devil You Know is one of her last hits with SAW, from the early nineties, when they were desperate to keep her, and they really put their all into it, and so did Kylie. I've loved it ever since I first danced to it. Still do.
• James, Sit Down. This is an example of one of those more recent discoveries that just leapt up my pop chart - I was listening to Virgin Radio via the web, and this damned catchy britpop tune came on... and I had to e-mail the deejay to find out what it was. This was it. This was a hit for James - a fairly well known British band - back in the nineties, and the line I think that stuck it for me was "if I'd never seen such riches... I could live with being poor" which has found deeper resonance, for me, in these harder exconomic times. Sit down next to me... sit down in sympathy. Very nice.

I Am Seriously Getting Too Old For This...

As I wander around the intertubes, looking for something, anything to distract me and change my mood, I find this - and when I find myself nodding in vague agreement with Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO, and find myself shaking my head at the "Ask Professor Foxy" segment at Feministing... I'm either getting too old... or too conservative. But seriously... is it just me?

Update: In addition to confirming it's not just me (Thanks, Mom!), I also found that Lopez posted the link to Feministing as a follow up to this post, which is more in line with K-Lo's usual embrace of macho nonsense and traditional male/female gendered expectations (she was one of those "9/11 reminded us that manly men are firefighters and policemen" types, which even she now admits pretty much didn't take)... all of which makes rejecting her gendered expectations pretty easy; I'm all for revising the notion of being a man to include the actual expression of emotion and uncertainty. It's called being human, K-Lo, which seems like something to value, not ridicule... even in bisexual boy hustlers with queers cis girlfriends.

Worst Song Ever: Bringing Me To My Knees

Sometimes these things just write themselves, like, say, when you start thinking about 80s music... this one's a gimme:

• Rick Springfield, Don't Talk To Strangers. ...and then General Hospital made him a star, and what had seemed merely amusing became stifling. This vaguely stalker-ish, obsessive midtempo number is tuneful enough... but it's a good indication of the late seventies, early eighties dismal, dark aspect of pop music at that moment. Love hurts when only one's in love... or perhaps, that's because it isn't.
• Aerosmith, Don't Wanna Miss A Thing. ... there's just this fine line between "comeback" and "sellout" that's best indicated by recording a power ballad for an overwrought oversold summer film (cf "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship... which I have a soft spot for, but admit is dreck). You can't really walk away from this Aerosmith ballad - which, it should be noted, refers in the film to Liv Tyler - and not shake your head at the unfortunate shamelessness of Steve Tyler's vocal.  Then there's the soppy, sweeping strings...and the music video.
• Wang Chung, Everybody Have Fun Tonight. Look, this is about more than "everybody wang chung tonight." You could, seriously, get away with that lame lyric (remember, we're talking about the era when Talk Talk released the single "Talk Talk" from their album... Talk Talk), but you can't escape the cheerless, forced frivolity implicit in the title. You shouldn't have to tell everyone to have fun (or like Kool and the Gnag, so relentlessly insist on "celebrate good times, c'mon"), it should, really, be ocurring organically. It's not... and those poor fellas in Wang Chung have been paying for it ever since.
• Def Leppard, Love Bites. ...and bleeds, and brings me to my knees... just atrocious. Just to be clear on the guidelines... I don't hate all power ballads. Just this one. And maybe a few others (which is a separate issue from "girls name" ballads like Boston's "Amanda")
• Cascada, Evacuate The Dancefloor. I didn't say everything was going to be eighties, did I? This brings up an amusing moment from J in B, who always points out to me that Michael Jackson's Blood on the Dance Floor is a terrible song because it links dancing - a peaceful activity, really - to violence and mayhem. I like the song, myself... but his point makes sense to me when I think about why "Billie Jean" bugs me so much. And, in any case, Cascada's current single, equating love of a dance song with a painful disease, seems an even worse, far more inappropriate metaphor ("stop, this beat is killing me"???). This is why we love Madonna for "Spotlight" and "Into The Groove" and now "Celebration" - if the groove is infectious... it should be in a good way, not a scary one.

The Day I Want To Cut Off All My Hair

So yesterday was rough.

When nothing - from my finances ("destitute" applies) to basic chores (our lawn is frightening, like the place is abandoned) - seems to go right or get done... I get myself further and further down til everything seems futile.

And then, naturally, I decide I hate my hair and I should cut it all off... also, I am destitute. And cutting off my hair is cheaper than keeping it. Plus feeling fat and bald and awful will be easier when I am fat and bald.

I've been so very up and down lately... and I don't really know why. It's not like things change enomously one day to the next... but one day the world looks  all right and I can make it, after all.... and the next day, it's all awful and hellish and I hate everyone and everything.

Last night, fortunately, I ran into an old friend, who has far more to bitch about than I probably ever will... and he reminded me that neither his problems, nor mine, or the end of the world. And when he suggested 27 Dresses, The Women and Auntie Mame as a way to cope with my bridesmaid dilemmas... well, I knew why this guy has always managed to brighten my world (and that's not even mentioning the awesome chance I got, thanks to him, to see Bette Midler at Radio City. In the 8th row).

And you know what he said when he saw me - hairdresser that he is?

"Wow, your hair is amazing. It's really grown out!"

Okay... I guess I'll keep it. :)

Saturday Singalong: I Wanna Rock!

I lost a key file that had notes for several singalongs - and I just discovered the fact this morning. It took me all day to solve it, but on the way home tonight, I heard PLJ's Saturday Night at the Eighties, and it just jumped out at me.  I wanted to write a singalong that reflected that gay boys like boy music and rock music too... maybe not quite the same way the straight boys do... but valid nonetheless. Anyway, these just came together for me:

• Aerosmith, Dude (Looks Like A Lady). PLJ actually played "Love in an Elevator", but for my money, the "comeback" single off of their first Geffen album still surpasses it. Though they get lumped in with the late eighties high point of metal and hair bands, Aerosmith was never really that - their roots go back to the Arena Rock bands of the seventies, and their influences, especially the Roplling Stones, reflect their interest in blues and r&b as well. "Dude" is a remarkable single for bringing it all together - the shouting horns, the hard rock vibe, and the slightly confused "anything goes" nature of the lyric, which are just shy of Lola.
• Rick Springfield, Love Somebody. Springfield's a better musician than he usually gets credit for - thanks to General Hospital, his music will usually carry that eighties stain of soap actor turned rocker that's not really fair; just watch  to see how "Jesse's Girl" has way more tension than you might think (and you know, I feel so dirty when they start talking cute). Love Somebody is just a straight ahread pop/rock cut, but Springfield's delivery always had an urgency that lifted it above the ordinary.
• Wang Chung, Let's Go. It's a shame that Mosaic, the album this comes from, kicked off with the hugely successful - and painfully lame (we'll get to that shortly, I promise) - Everybody Have Fun Tonight. When we got this album at my college radio station, the cut that really impressed me was this one, which was the followup single and did nicely... but the damage was done. And no, it's not necessarily the most rockin' single, but a number of pop/rock hybrid stations played it back then, and well... the eighties were like that.
• Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Do You Wanna Touch. It'd be easy to pick nearly a half dozen others (I debated "I Love Rock and Roll" longest), but this hard driving, intense track is Jett at her early eighties crossover best - tough, sexy, and still entirely accessible. And she still is.
• Def Leppard, Photograph. Sure there was the weird, Marilyn Monroe thing of the video, but MTV only provided the exposure that the music delivered; Photograph  helped put hard rock back into the pop radio mix - for better and worse - and still holds up as tuneful music with a hard edge.