Words and image are my own.
©2017
Month: August 2017
Ancient like the Greeks
Words and image are my own.
©2017
Filigree & Shadow
Words and image are my own.
©2017
Worlds apart
Synonyms on a string (ending on a contronym)
Worlds apart
Yet bound so tightly
To ravel
Is to
Unravel
Tied together in flames
Of our own making
Inflammable
Means flammable
I Press upon your skin and
You depress mine
Just to watch the blood moving beneath
I’ve become your mind’s caretaker
You, my body’s caregiver
We recognize the value in
The invaluable so
I make a home in your habitable heart
You, in my inhabitable soul
And we face the privation
Of deprivation
Together
I’ll cleave to you
My dearest love and
No other hand shall cleave our
Worlds apart.
Words and image are my own.
©2017
Love is a battlefield
1983 was a strange and unsettling year in my life. I was 20, living in Canberra (the capital of Australia, where I’d grown up), and working in my first adult job as a visual merchandising manager in an upscale department store. I’d not long before returned from the UK and I was feeling rudderless, to say the least.
I was also putting myself back together after the implosion of my first serious relationship. I was pretty much a basket case in 1983.
One of the things that kept me at least partly grounded was music. I wouldn’t say my musical tastes were particularly refined at that time but I was passionate about the music I liked and was an avid watcher of MTV and the like.
For at least a period of that year, one song and video dominated the airwaves. Pat Benatar’s, Love is a Battlefield seemed to be playing every time you turned on the TV, switched on the radio, or walked out your door. It wasn’t quite my sort of thing but the title and theme of the track resonated with my still broken heart and so I paid it more attention than I might have ordinarily.
I remember being struck by the way the video interrupted the song with dialogue (something that had never been done before). The angry father yelling after his fleeing daughter, “if you leave this house now, you can just forget about coming back,” may have been a tad corny but it stuck in the head and came to define the song. So much so that, listening to the actual track on the radio sans the dialogue, felt – odd.
As I said, the song itself wasn’t quite my cup of tea but it got lodged and in some weird way came to represent that very unsettling time for me. In all the years since, whenever I’ve heard that track played, my ears prick up and a strange flood of conflicting emotions resurface.
Now, here I am living in New Jersey. Canberra is a long way away and 1983 a long time ago. Both time and place could not be more different to my current life and circumstances.
I’ve witten several times on this blog about Clinton, a small town I love one over from my new home. It’s a gorgeous place with a very American every-town feel.
That’s probably why, in 1983, Pat Benatar traveled there to film those crucial domestic scenes for her video.
Imagine my surprise when I saw a small piece in our local press where people were reminiscing about the day Ms Benatar filmed Love is a Battlefield in their little town. Really? Of course, I needed to check this out for myself.
So, yesterday, Jersey girl and I went over to Clinton and wandered around a part of the town we’d thus far neglected. It was as picturesque as most of the rest of the place and it didn’t take us long to identify the house from the video.
I have no idea how it was selected but this house was chosen to be the family home from which Benatar’s rebellious character flees (an amusing scenario considering she was 30 years old at the time of shooting*). It has changed very little in the succeeding 34 years.
It was a very strange feeling looking on from the street – almost like stepping into the video. I half expected to see Benatar standing by the tree waving up at her kid brother in the window (the tree’s still there but no Benatar).
It was also a little like stepping into my own past. Those mixed emotions began to reemerge as soon as I caught sight of the house and grew as it drew closer. It’s amazing how music and its associated symbols can tap into those strong emotions and pull us backwards through time.
I never could have imagined, all those years ago, that I’d one day be living just a few miles from such an iconic locale.
*Equally amusing, the song and video were used in the movie 13 going on 30 – you can’t make this stuff up.
State Trooper
The stop
The cycling colours of the
Predator – flashing
Red then blue
Red then blue
Washing the glistening roadside
In confusion and light
An unwary member
Of the migratory herd
Cut out and brought
To a cold
Dead
Stop
We all bear witness
Through the slash of wipers
Through curtained deluge
A thousand glinting fractures in the night
Red then blue
Red then blue
No sympathy for the unfortunate fallen
Simply relief that we will see our beds
Soon.
©2017
Lift Me Up
Climb
Unlike most paths we walk
This trail of tears begins
In the middle
No matter how far you travel
In either direction
You move deeper into the insane lands
And further from reason
Those who cling to common sense
Go neither left nor right
But build tall ladders
And ascend.
Words and image are my own.
©2017
Everyday people
Two old ducks on a bench in Princeton
“I have to speak louder
To both of my brothers now.”
“Pardon?”
“I say, I have to speak up with
both my brothers.”
“Oh, are they hard of hearing too?
— Like me” (laughing)
“Well, Bert is.
Wally just keeps a lot of
very noisy birds.”
©2017
As we know it
The day the world ended
On that day
Everything stopped
All silence
All emptiness
All pain
Everything he’d known
Just ceased to be
That was when his
Life began.
Words and image are my own.
©2017
Local Heroes 2
So I asked the salesgirl “Who was that man
Between the doberman and Bruce Lee?”
She said “Just a local hero”
“Local hero” she said with a smile
“Yeah a local hero he used to live here for a while”
Bruce Springsteen, Local Hero
Jersey girl and I found ourselves in Red Bank yesterday where we stumbled, quite unexpectedly, across a couple of culturally iconic locales.
Red Bank is a small New Jersey town on the Navesink River, North West of Asbury Park and North East of Freehold, which in 1904 was the birthplace of one of the greats of American music, Count Basie.
Born William James Basie, the man that would come to be known the world over as the Count was taught to play piano by his mother and, by his early teens, was already performing around the local area (including Asbury Park).
Eventually, he moved to Harlem and began playing with the Bennie Moten Orchestra with whom he continued until 1935 when he formed his own jazz outfit, The Count Basie Orchestra.
The Count would become a legend in Jazz and Big Band circles and achieve world fame as a musician, band leader, and composer. This was perhaps in small part due to the attentions of one John Hammond (a familiar name to all Springsteen and Dylan fans) who had heard Basie’s band over the radio and travelled from New York to Kansas City in 1936 to check out Basie and his Orchestra.
Hammond was impressed enough to record the band, a recording he later described as, “the only perfect, completely perfect recording session I’ve ever had anything to do with”. This was the beginning of Basie’s rise to national prominence.
Over his long career, Basie worked with some of the very greatest vocalists of all times; Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bing Crosby, and Sarah Vaughan.
While wondering around the town cente, we came upon Red Bank’s lasting monument to perhaps its greatest son. In 1984 (the year the Count died) the Carlton Theatre on Broad Street was renamed the Count Basie Theatre in his honour. Many acts have played there, including Tony Bennett, Al Green, the great George Carlin, Boz Scaggs, Counting Crows, Brian Wilson, The Asbury Dukes, and Jon Stewart. It was the last venue James Brown ever played and has been the location of several of Springsteen’s surprise guest appearances over the years.
We hope to catch a show there in the not too distant future.
The second Red Bank icon (and the only other that I know of) is filmmaker and comic book geek, Kevin Smith. My wife and I are both huge fans of his indy movie Clerks which was shot in the area. And I personally am also very fond of Chasing Amy, a large portion of which was filmed right on Broad Street in Red Bank.
All of this came into focus for me when we stumbled across Kevin’s Comic book Store, ‘Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash’ (also on Broad Street).
For those who are not aware, Smith plays the character Silent Bob in many of the movies he has directed or written (Clerks I & II, Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Mall Rats, and Dogma to name, well most of them actually). He also wrote the movie Jersey Girl (which, surprisingly considering the title, I have not seen).
The Secret Stash store also doubles as the set for a show about (you guessed it) comics and geek culture called ‘Comic Book Men‘. Smith and his geek friends talk all things geek for half an hour and as we arrived outside the store, we discovered that the show was taping right then.
Two minders stationed outside told us we could go in during taping but we’d have to fill out and sign waivers and cover up our T-shirts (which featured other peoples’ artworks that could not be shown on TV without their permission). We decided that all sounded like a bit too much trouble so we opted to come back after taping and wandered off down the street for some dinner.
When we returned an hour later, the minders were gone and we had a quick look around Kev’s Kingdom (pretty standard comic book store with a lot of Jay and Silent Bob merch and memorabilia as one would expect).
As we were leaving, I also snapped a quick pic of the building across the street which was used as Ben Affleck and Jason Lee’s artist studio in Chasing Amy (weird that Affleck, who played a comic book writer and artist in that film, is now Batman).
Here’s a scene from the movie showing not much has changed since 1997.
And that was our strange little day in Red Bank. I found a lot of weird connecting threads which led me to write this somewhat amorphous piece. NJ never seems to let me down on that score and I do love the little adventures Jersey girl and I always seem to have together.
Words and images (except where otherwise credited) are my own.
©2017
Runaway American Dream 