Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Weekend Poetry/Music Break: The Complications of “My Sharona”

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[Video: The Knack, in a 1979 live performance of “My Sharona.” It’s not the performance described in the poem cited below, but it’s probably pretty close. Embedding YouTube videos can be a crapshoot, as they often end up getting taken down for copyright violation. But this video was uploaded to the account of The Knack’s lead singer, shortly after his death in 2010, so I’m counting on its being deemed legit for awhile yet.]

Let’s get this post’s inspiration out of the way right up-front: it wasn’t The Knack per se — or “power pop” generally — and it wasn’t that song. No, it was prepping for a recent whiskey river Fridays post here. It’s not uncommon for me to seek inspiration for those posts at The Poetry Foundation site, and that’s how I came across this poem: “…But the Little Girls Understand,” by Steve Kistulentz. It’s a mashup of relevant musical references:

  • The poem’s title quotes “Back Door Man,” written by Willie Dixon for Howlin’ Wolf…
  • …and is also the title of The Knack’s second album (following on the heels of Get the Knack).
  • The Knack’s “My Sharona” is the central focus…
  • …but Ray Manzarek of The Doors (who also had a hit with “Back Door Man”) shows up, too.
  • Not uncommonly in writing about The Knack, The Beatles make a glancing appearance.
  • The Troubadour — an L.A. club instrumental in the careers of a lot of musicians in its 60-plus-years history — features as the venue for The Knack’s live performance of “Back Door Man.” (Aside: Ray Manzarek of The Doors joined the Knack onstage in 1978 at the Troubadour.)
  • Leonard Cohen wanders in unexpectedly, sort of nods at the proceedings, and wanders back out again.

Well, as one does, I began trying to piece it all together. I never found a copy of the 1979 bootleg recording which inspired the poem itself. I did read a heck of a lot about The Knack (more on which, in just a moment). I read that without “My Sharona,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” might never have come about. I read about Phase II of “My Sharona’s” popularity, with the release of 1994’s Reality Bites (in which the young cast — Winona Ryder, Steve Zahn, Janeane Garofalo — dance happily and spontaneously to the song, while sad-sack Ethan Hawke watches)… although I’ve never (yet) seen that film.

Bottom line: I never could piece together a coherent single writeup of what it all says. For now, I’ll just offer you this playlist of (some of) the great music I came across while working on this post.

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Microfiction Practice #11: Surprise Party

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Assignment:

  • Genre: ghost story
  • Word: appointment
  • Action/Subject: baking a cake

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

Marcella lays out the ingredients she thinks Bobby’s cake requires. It’ll be tricky: she’s “measuring” from memory, because Bobby — bless his jump-the-gun soul — has already discarded her recipe files, and the only remaining cookbook requires a Foreman grill. Luckily, she knows Bobby will be late (a podiatrist appointment on his way home).

Bobby’s astonished when he comes in, changes out of his black suit, enters the kitchen. The big word on top reads BIRTHDY, and the countertop’s a mess. But what the— who made the damned cake? Who the hell was cremated this morning, if not Marcella?

Grasping Sanctuary

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[Image: “Three Worlds” (1955), by M.C. Escher. As you can read in this essay at the website of the Escher in Het Palais museum, this was actually Escher’s third attempt to capture the effect, starting in 1950. The print served as the front-cover illustration for Beaver & Krause‘s influential electronica album, In a Wild Sanctuary (1970).]

From whiskey river:

The American Sublime

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens [source])

…and:

A normal existence—what could be more irrational? It’s fantastic the number of things you’re forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

(Simone de Beauvoir [source])

…and (last stanza):

There is a dream going on while I am awake.
Because I must pay attention to what
is happening around me, I am unconscious
of the dream. When I sleep, the daylight
things fade out and the perpetual dream
surfaces fully and is memorable.
When I die, the dream is the only
thing left. It balloons and fills the world.

As a writer, I coax partly into action
that internally coherent, silent story.
I let my conscious life yield a little,
and a little more, and occasionally a great way,
to my best needs and hopes: whatever
I mean by my best, whatever I mean
by my judgments on the happenings around me,
that center and guide is invited to have its way.

For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

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Potpourri, June 18 (2020 edition)

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[The latest installment in my not-quite-annual series of whatever-the-hell-I-want posts on this month and day.]

[The author, circa 1952]

Like probably 90% of the (rational) US population, The Missus and I have recently spent most of our free time together watching television. Among our guilty pleasures: the complete run of the old Perry Mason series, with Raymond Burr in the title role. I may write more about this later, but for now I wanted to mention that the theme song — all those classic late-1950s dramatic, jazz-infused horns — heavily reminded me of some other show’s theme song… but I couldn’t remember which other show that was.

Well, as things happened, I didn’t have to wonder about that for long. While scrolling through Amazon Prime’s back catalog, I came across the entire run of the Peter Gunn show. That series lasted only three seasons, vs. Mason’s nine. But its noir-drenched look-and-feel stamped itself much more indelibly in my mind.

Anyhow, finally recalling the show with the Perry Mason-like theme song, I felt compelled to track its theme down, too. And that — plus a rewatch of the show’s first episode — reminded me of how much the sound of Peter Gunn, as well as its look, profoundly affected my mind. Accordingly, here’s the album of selected music from its first season… an album which, as it happens, won the very first Grammy for “album of the year.” (Having listened to both quite a bit lately, the Gunn theme song itself is — I think — a head or two taller than Perry Mason’s.)

(Aside: I see now that I actually posted about the Gunn theme before, regarding TV crime-series music in general. Some minds think alike, even when they’re really just the same mind in two different time frames!)

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Microfiction Practice #10: The Follow-Through

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt:

  • Genre: suspense/thriller
  • Word: promise
  • Action/Subject: walking upstairs

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

No elevator: naturally. From the bottom of the stairwell, he looked up the six-floor stairwell, sighed. Hand on the railing. His right foot on the first step. His left foot on the second…

Too late, he knew. She’d probably been dead for weeks; such victims seldom lived more than a couple days. Yet he had to check. He’d promised, after all…

At the fifth-floor landing, he briefly lost his nerve. Who knew what he’d find inside? He should’ve called the cops—

There, finally. The doorknob, beneath his hand. Then his last irrational act: placing his face to the peephole.

Backing Away from #everyday

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[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

  • The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
  • I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
  • …which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

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Microfiction Practice #10: Assignment

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

I kinda slacked off on this over the last week; my intention — granted, a vague one — had been to knock out at least three practice microfictions in that time. As things developed, though… (Even if you’ve just retired, even during a pandemic, there’s almost too much possibility with which to occupy your time!) So I’ve just drawn a new assignment out of the random-assignment-generator hat… and a result should appear here sometime between now and tomorrow noon(ish).

in the meantime, as you should definitely seen soon, other things are percolating away…

Assignment:

  • Genre: suspense/thriller
  • Word: promise
  • Action/Subject: walking upstairs

(Yum. The act of walking upstairs almost by definition has suspense built-in; if I muff this one, I’ll be very disappointed!)

Disorder: A Fragmentary Catalogue

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[Image: poster for magic act performed by one Harry Kellar (1849-1922) — click for a full view. Later in his life, Kellar mentored Harry Houdini; you can read an admiring account of one of his shows, in a letter from Theodore Roosevelt, at the blog of the TR Center at Dickinson State University. One source I consulted said Kellar also inspired the bald-headed Wizard of Oz in an early edition of the book. (This poster, among others for Kellar’s various illusions, is shown at a number of sites; I found it here.)]

From whiskey river:

Money-Madness

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course, if the multitude is mad
the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note without a pang;
and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.

We quail, money makes us quail.
It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.

But it is not money we are so terrified of,
it is the collective money-madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold.

And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread
so I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt with it.
I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money.

It is that that I am frightened of.
And that fear can become a delirium.
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-men.

We must have some money
to save us from eating dirt.
And this is all wrong.

Bread should be free,
shelter should be free,
fire should be free
to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it.
It’s one thing or the other.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and:

Many of us are using our spirituality as a way to avoid life, to avoid seeing things we really need to see, to avoid being confronted with our own misunderstandings and illusions. It is very important to know that life itself is often our greatest teacher. Life is full of grace—sometimes it’s wonderful grace, beautiful grace, moments of bliss and happiness and joy, and sometimes it’s fierce grace, like illness, losing a job, losing someone we love, or a divorce. Some people make the greatest leaps in their consciousness when addiction has them on their knees, for example, and they find themselves reaching out for a different way of being. Life itself has a tremendous capacity to show us truth, to wake us up. And yet, many of us avoid this thing called life, even as it is attempting to wake us up.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and:

Loves
(excerpt)

Who isn’t selfish enough
to love zoos? Flamingos, baboons,
iguanas, newts.
Surely evolution has a sense of humor.
Surely the world would be something to love
if it weren’t for us, insatiate,
our history of harm.
How hard even to love oneself,
all those things I’ve done
or dreamed of. Those vengeances.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

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Microfiction Practice #9: The Old Ball and Chain

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[Don’t know what this is? See this post for the most recent background.]

Prompt #570:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

Story (87 words, per Microsoft Word):

Lucille could always get my goat. “Don’t do it that way,” she’d say. “Do it this way” — the it, that, and this always changed, of course. Sometimes my wardrobe, or the way I drove, or what I ate. But what never changed: really, she was just yanking my chain. Trying, hell — she did yank my chain. Until the day she stopped, abruptly.

Still, a hell of a woman Lucille. I’ll miss her until I get out of stir, which by my count will be sometime this century.

(Okay, I know: it’s dark comedy. I don’t think that breaks any rules.)

Revisiting the Tiny

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A simple placeholder announcement for now… You may recall that last month, I entered a “100-word Microfiction Challenge.” (If you have no idea what this refers to, I first posted about it here; the, er, post-mortem post — as of the first round’s completion — is here.) That contest’s organizers will announce the results of the first-round judging process on Wednesday, June 24. The top 20 (of no more than 100) participants in each group* will advance to the second round; this runs from 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 26, to 11:59 the next night.

…all of which is to say: I hope to occasionally post a new practice story here at Running After My Hat over the next three weeks. Sadly, I can’t promise that this will be to your benefit; odds are, after all, you won’t even get to experience vicariously the thrill (such as it is) of my advancing to Round 2. And as you already know from last month’s eight practice samples, the quality of the stories themselves will be uneven. No, these practice sessions are mostly for me: to force me into something like the mindset required to “write short,” on random assignments of no more than 100 words each.

I drew my first one of these practice assignments last night:

  • Genre: comedy
  • Word: stir
  • Action: yanking my chain

…and so I’ll post a micro-story sometime today.

Thank you for continuing to indulge me!

_____

* For the record, I was in group 66, consisting of 95 participants. (All but eight groups included 95 entrants; those eight had 96.) My group’s assignment was to write a 100-word (or shorter) story in the romance genre, featuring some form of the word forget, and involving the act of roller skating. I’ll post I’ve posted the story in an entry here after the first-round results are announced, regardless of whether or not I’ll be going onto Round 2.

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