Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Seals and Crofts, "Summer Breeze"

This time of year I always get a jones for this song, and I must sheepishly admit that it's the first that I ever bought on iTunes.  (It's the perfect iTunes purchase, since I didn't want a full Seals and Croft album, and buying it at the store would have hurt my street cred.)  Back when I lived in Michigan, the local oldies station used to play it a lot, and I always felt it was the perfect accompaniment to the long, golden summer evenings of Grand Rapids.

Its mellow feel and images also remind me of early summer nights when I was a child, the times growing up when I was by far the happiest.  At school I had few friends and experienced constant teasing and bullying.  It didn't help that my two best friends went to a different school after the second grade (our parents pulled us out of the draconian Catholic school we attended, but my friends lived in another public school district.)  During the summer I could spend more time with them, and many an evening was spent at my buddy Dan's place, shooting hoops until the sun went down and I had to go home.  I will never know such a purely care-free existence ever again in my life, which must be what my Dad meant when he told me to appreciate my childhood.

This song reminds me especially of early summer, which I think of as the period between Memorial Day and the summer solstice.  Out in my rural Nebraska homeland, the prairie exploded into life and the corn stalks suddenly shot out of the ground, their leaves green beyond green.  During this blessed four week period the days seemed to last forever, and the oppressive heat of summer in the Great Plains had yet to burn up the outdoors.  In these precious late May and early June days, you really could still feel a cool summer breeze.  Not so in July and August, when the Nebraska air gets so hot that it feels like the wind is blasting out of some kind of massive hair dryer.

In the early summer, I could still taste my freedom from school, and savor it without any thoughts of having to go back, which pretty much dominated my mind from late-July forward.  (Yes, I was an anxious child.)  It seemed like the summer movies that I cared about the most always seemed to come out during this particular part of summer.  On the evening after my last day of school in the first grade, my family went to see The Return of the Jedi at the newly finished mall multiplex, and being the exact right age to appreciate Ewoks, I went home exhilarated.  Six years later, after my last day of school in seventh grade, a friend and I saw the end of another epic trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  I still remember visiting my aunt and uncle's house after the movie was over, jabbering away at all the amazing stuff I'd seen, from rats in catacombs to the scene when one of the characters chooses the wrong grail.  That night, with school over and a joyous cinematic experience fresh in my head and the summer stretched out before me like the milk and honey-giving valleys of a promised land of easeful leisure, may have been among the happiest that I ever knew as a child.  When I listen to "Summer Breeze," I get to feel a small fraction of that care-free satisfaction.

The Forgotten Disco Music of the High 80s

In the film Adventureland, which is set in 1987, there's a great scene when the characters go to a club, the kind of cheap, unpretentious place playing percussive, yet non-techno dance music that seems to have died off since then.  I was too young to ever have frequented such establishments at the time, although I did go to something like it in my hometown years later.  Since the city of my birth is rather behind the times, it still has a skeevy dance club playing pop music of the likes once common in the Reagan Era (the club, not the music.)  The place is called "The Slammer" because it has bars on the outside, for maximum skeevy charm.  I danced to some R. Kelly there once in the early 2000s, rather than Sheena Easton.

Back around 1986, the start of a period I call the High 80s because it seems to embody most of our stereotypes about that decade, I really dug the kind of dance music played in these kind of clubs, even if I was way too young and had I been of age too squeamish to set foot in one of them.  This music was literally "disco" music, in that it was made to be played by DJs in discotheques where people danced.  Of course, disco was a dirty word at the time, reminiscent of the lameness of the preceding polyester decade.  (This dislike of all things seventies was rather strong in the eighties.)  Nevertheless, this music had the combination of catchy melodies and funky rhythms that made disco so popular.  A lot of these stuff seems to have disappeared into the memory hole, so I think it's high time to give it its due.  Below are some of my favorite High 80s club tracks.

Shannon, "Let the Music Play"

This song appears in the aforementioned scene in Adventureland, and for good reason, since it's dance a song from the 80s about looking for love at an 80s dance club.  (How meta!)  Unlike a lot of other pop music of its day, it's got some musical chops, and Shannon sings with real heart.

Nu Shooz, "I Can't Wait"

This to me is the sound of the summer of 1986, and it forever will be, for better or worse.  ("Walk Like an Egyptian" by The Bangles is a close second.)

Level 42, "Something About You"

If Simple Minds ever wanted to get funky and slap some bass, this is what they'd sound like.  God help me, but I can't seem to stop humming this tune of late.  Perhaps it's the distinctive falsetto background vocals.

Eddie Murphy, "Party All the Time"

I just loved skating to this jam at the roller rink back in the day. It's one of the best celebrity vanity singles ever, mostly because super-funky Rick James is laying down the tracks. (I wonder how much blow was snorted at this recording session, perhaps enough to rival Fleetwood Mac.)

The Graduation Speech That I Would Give

Editor's note:  We are once again in graduation season, and with it there will be an ocean of mediocre speeches and lame platitudes, along with a precious few insightful oratories.  If I had the chance, here's the speech that I would give.
*****

Today is an important milestone celebration, and like other such occasions in your life, you are going to have to listen to some person who don't know all that well give a speech.  I am well aware that what I have to say might be seen by you as something to be gotten over and endured before the real fun of handing out diplomas takes place.  I certainly have no reason to argue with your feelings, but I promise not to give you a bunch of empty words, but a message that comes from the bottom of my heart.

At graduations one often hears of following one's dream, or at least about the doors to the future being open.  Very rarely do we talk about the nasty things that the future might hold in store for us, or the fact that our dreams can be dangerous traps.  That might sound cynical or scary, but my life's experience has shown it to be true.

I dreamed of becoming a history professor for a long time, perhaps even before I went to college.  In the service of that dream, I put forth great effort and made many sacrifices.  I completed a master's program, then spent six years studying for my PhD.  Along the way, I lived hand to mouth in genteel squalor, letting major medical issues like a broken tooth go unfixed due to lack of funds.  I spent one year living in Germany, almost completely alone in a foreign country with barely enough money to survive, just so I could complete the research for my dissertation.

After climbing the dissertation mountain, I spent two years as a untenured "visiting professor" at a large university in Michigan where I was paid more than I was as a graduate student, but below the median salary for workers in this country.  I made about as much money as a friend from back home who had just started a plumbing career.  Being a contingent faculty member, I had to contend with being treated as a nobody by my employer.  No matter how well I did my job, nobody seemed to really notice or care; other contingent colleagues got away with showing films in all of their classes because the powers that be only noticed us when students lodged a complaint.  This was a long way from how I had imagined the life of a professor.  In the meantime, my life had been transformed by meeting the love of my life.  Unfortunately, she lived 800 miles away in New Jersey.

I endured a less than ideal employment situation with the hope that it would be a stepping-stone to a permanent position.  That turned out to be the case, but it meant moving to a small town in an isolated part of Texas, and teaching in a department where I was not even allowed to teach classes in my area of speciality most of the time.  My then fiancé and I knew that we did not want to settle down there permanently, so we endured three years of living in a long-distance relationship, most of which time we were married.  The whole time I busted my back to publish research and present at conferences in a desperate attempt to build my CV for the job market, so that I could get a job closer to my wife.

In reality, I was trying to do the impossible, because I had chosen a dream that brooks no compromises.  Finding work as a tenure track professor is incredibly difficult, and those that want to do so basically have to live their lives according to the random fates of job openings, which are few and far between.  In normal circumstances finding a job in a specific part of the country would be next to impossible; after the financial meltdown of 2008, it became completely futile.  During my third useless attempt to move on from my increasingly intolerable job, I had built up quite a few accomplishments, including three journal articles in top publications and a book contract.  These things did not seem to get me anywhere; I couldn't even get an preliminary interview for an academic job.

In the winter of 2011, I could not have been a more miserable person.  I lived 1,500 miles away from my wife in a one-horse town where I constantly felt like an outsider, I worked in a job that was full of personal affronts and attacks (I'll spare you the details), and I was faced with the prospect of giving up on my life's greatest dream.  It's hard to believe now, but the idea of giving up on my old dream made me completely distraught, as if I was admitting defeat after over a decade of my youthful years of hard work and sacrifice.

Despite the nagging doubts and painful realization that I had indeed failed to accomplish my dream, I decided that I would leave the job I had fought so hard to get, and no matter what happened, that I would move to New Jersey to be with my wife.  This decision did not fit with the usual narrative we hear about our dreams, that after a great deal of work and perseverance, we can overcome great obstacles to make that dream come true.  For a lack of a better word, that narrative is bullshit.  Life is not about the pursuit of dreams, as much as it about choices and compromises.  That's the advice that a dear and wise friend gave to me when I anguished over my future.  He knew of what he spoke, since his wife of less than a year (who he'd been romantically involved with for almost a decade) abruptly divorced him after carrying on an affair.  Our consumer society gives us the illusion that we can have it all.  For most of us, we can't, and must face really difficult decisions about what really matters in life.  In your adult lives, you will face your own dilemmas and be forced to make your own choices and compromises, whether you like it or not.

In my case, by pursuing my dream, I was destroying my life. I was beginning to realize that sticking with my dream at all costs was making me completely miserable, and I didn't have to be.  Nothing I did was ever good enough for the academic profession, while all my wife ever gave me was love and acceptance.  I had been living in a place with a bare minimum of the things that interest me and a dominant culture that was reactionary, anti-intellectual, and hostile to outsiders such as myself, just so I could keep after my "dream."  Instead I could be living next to one of the world's greatest cities and all that it had to offer.

What really made my decision stick was the voice in my head reminding me of my own mortality.  This might sound rather morbid for such a hope-filled day such as this, but we lose control of our lives when we forget about our own eventual deaths.  We only have a short amount of time on this earth, and without that consciousness, it's easy to let oneself stay in the same miserable rut, unaware that each day spent there is one day closer to the grave.  I urge you to go forth in life conscious of your own mortality, that each day you live and and breathe is a fantastic gift not to be squandered.  Deep down in my own heart I knew that I could not take my CV with me after I died, and that living my life as if I could would be a disaster.

With that realization I made a leap and went for broke in my applications to private high schools in the New York City area, one of whom was nice enough to hire me.  I had always been terrible at job interviews, scared to death of failure.  Now that I had already failed in what I thought was my life's dream, I felt liberated from the fear of not succeeding and performed much better in my interview visit to the school than I ever had with any other prospective job.

I emphasize this because we live in such a failure-averse society, a place where the easy victory is valued over a hard-fought loss.  For the most part, we desire lives of ease and leisure where all that is unpleasant gets excised.  I can tell you that my failures have made me a much better person, mostly because they showed me what matters and what doesn't matter in life.  What matters to me, I found out, is being with the woman I love, in a place where I actually want to live, doing work that is meaningful.  Some days I get a little blue when I miss life on a university campus, but I can say without a doubt that I am much happier person now than I was then.

Of course, many of you will be more successful in achieving your dreams than I was.  Hopefully you have chosen less cruel career paths than academia.  Even so, we are living in an age of diminished expectations.  Unemployment is high for young graduates, job opportunities are drying up, and many of you who will get work will be laboring for free as unpaid interns, with little hope of advancement.  When you face these frustrations, remember that it's okay to fail, to keep your eyes on what really matters, and that you might even find yourself finding a dream that you were never looking for in the first place.  That's what happened to me, and even if my job title is more humble than the one I wanted, in my home and in my work I feel the love and acceptance that I've spent a lifetime trying to find.  On the paths that you will walk, I hope you can be as lucky as I have been.

Why I Don't Like Graduations

Graduation season is upon us yet again, and I couldn't be less excited about it.  I don't like graduations, I never have, and I doubt I ever will. I didn't bother to go to my own doctoral graduation because it would have been absolutely unbearable, but will continue to be stuck with the task of going to these ceremonies due to my chosen profession.  (At least, unlike at the university level, I will no longer have to sit through over a thousand names being called.)

In the first place, graduations are dreadfully boring. There is just no getting around this fact, no matter how hard you try. Most of their running time consists of names being read off from a list, something that's about as stimulating as watching paint dry. The rest of the usual graduation ceremony is filled by speeches typically of the most boring, sanctimonious, and vapid quality.

For instance, many valedictorians are completely uninteresting by their very nature. They are not especially creative or insightful, but good at getting top grades, and for this skill are allowed to speak banalities to a captive audience. Their tiresome addresses drone on with the usual platitudes that fall into two categories "isn't it great that we made it" and "this is just the beginning of the future." My high school graduating class had three (!) valedictorians, only one of whom could give a speech without mumbling, and his was one of the worst speeches I've ever heard in my life. A friend in my sister's class gave the only good valedictorian speech I've ever heard, mostly because it eschewed the traditional bullshit and attacked the petty clique-ishness and intelligence-insulting nature of my high school. It was the speech I would have given had I could.

If it's not grindy, teacher's pet students talking interminably, it's some lame-ass dignitary or politician puffed up on his or her self-importance. They purport to give students the wisdom of their years, but usually end up sounding barely more insightful than the high school students three decades younger than them.

What annoys me most about graduations, however, is their pervasive self-congratulatory aura, especially at the high school level. Let's be honest here, it is hardly a great accomplishment to graduate from high school nowadays, considering the lowered standards and pressure for teachers not to fail students. I would even be so bold to say that it hardly counts as any kind of accomplishment at all.  As far as higher education goes, I didn't really consider getting my degrees worthy of celebration. When I went into my doctoral program, I did it with the intent of getting my PhD. By graduating, I was merely doing what I had set out to do! Going to graduation seemed ridiculous to me, like expecting a parade for paying my taxes, or having a party to celebrate my lack of reckless driving citations.

(Of course, there are plenty of people out there who have had to overcome great personal obstacles in order to go to college and graduate, and I am fine with them getting excited about graduation. These students, however, are a decided minority.)

What bugs me almost as much is the fact that so many graduates don't even respect the ceremony that they think is so damn important. Until my senior year, the graduation ceremonies at my high school were a complete joke. The graduates talked the whole time, bounced beach balls, and shot silly string at each other. When the administrators cracked down, my mouth-breather classmates complained, saying it was "their day" and they should be able to do whatever they wanted to, as if their graduation from high school was some kind of great accomplishment demanding respect. At that point I wished attending graduation wasn't mandatory to recieve my diploma, because I had no desire to be "honored" along with a bunch of lazy, self-entitled dopes.

As many of you know, I am on a personal crusade against mediocrity, and no ritual in this country exudes mediocrity more than the typical graduation, from the speeches on down to taking pride in that which you were supposed to do in the first place.

When I Hear the Word Innovation, That's When I Start Running for Cover

If you look over at the right-hand column of this blog, you'll notice that my most popular post is an analysis of buzzwords and jargon used by educational administrators.  My ears are very sensitive to these words, because when I hear them, I know something bad is about to go down.

Case in point, Mitt Romney has been flogging the education issue recently with the usual bullshit language of "failed schools," "choice," "accountability," and, you guessed it, "innovation."  That last word has now been so misused that I can barely believe that politicians are still invoking it.  When Mitt says "innovation" he means government-sponsored giveaways to the growing for-profit education industry and its fat cat corporate underwriters.  Hence his desire to get banks back into student lending, reduce regulations on for-profit colleges, and give federal dollars to K-12 for-profit schools under the guise of uplifting poor students.  (I find it ironic that Romney calls education the "civil rights issue" of our day, but does nothing in his proposals to address our segregated schools, which are more racially divided than they were at the time of the Brown decision in 1954.)

"Innovation" is our modern day "right to work," a disingenuous slogan by the capitalist elite to get the public to behind something that they would not support if they understood what it was really all about.  After all, the banking protections of Glass-Steagall were repealed in the name of "innovation," and Chase Manhattan guru Jamie Dimon has fought against greater regulation of our financial industry with claims that such rules would stifle innovation.

Well, we all know how that's turned out.  Our economy has found innovative ways to commit hair-kari, and Dimon's bank has recently developed completely novel and innovative paths to losing billions of dollars.  Turning our education system over to for-profit entities and letting our bankers run riot do not constitute innovations, but naked power grabs by amoral greed-heads who'd throw their own grandmothers down the stairs if it meant they'd be able to make a buck from it.  That's why when I hear the word "innovation," I hold onto my wallet and run for cover.

Sheepish Musical Pleasures: Billy Idol, "Eyes Without a Face"

There's a certain kind of mid-1980s pop music that I think of as "Y music" because I used to hear it when I went to the YMCA to go swimming or play basketball.  They played the local hits station over the PA, and since the complex was completed in 1981 with a light brown and powder blue color scheme, it was totally 80s-tastic to begin with, and reached new levels of awesomeness when "Abracadabra" by Steve Miller filled the air.  (There's one summer where I swear I heard that song in the locker room after my swimming lessons each and every day.)

Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" always brings me back to the summer of 1984 at the Y.  It's a song tailor made for the YMCA experience: the shimmery synths fit well with the play of light on the water in the pool, and the relaxed vibe with a place that always seemed to exist outside of time for me.

The effects laden guitar reminiscent of Robert Fripp that comes stomping in halfway through was also one of the first things I ever heard approximating punk rock.  Idol had fallen far from his days as a punker in Generation X, losing the DIY ethos but retaining the sneer, spiky hairdo, and other surface accouterments of a once great musical genre.  Back in the height of the Reagan-era, the surface tokens of the former counterculture were as close as a kid in a rural town could get to the real thing.

There's nothing like those summers before I had to start working during my months off in junior high.  Childhood summer floated by with the kind of leisurely ease that I only get to experience today for an hour or two at a time, rather than for three months straight.  As lame as this song might sound today, committing the mortal 80s sin of overproduction, I get a warm feeling remembering those wide-open days of pure delight.

Classic Albums: Tenacious D

Many might look askance at me for naming a record put out just eleven years ago by a comedy duo in the classic category, but I think it belongs, for both artistic and sentimental reasons.  On the sentimental side, it brings me happy memories of graduate school, when my friends would play this album, and we would all repeat the jokes.  Some of us even saw Weezer in concert in Bloomington-Normal mostly to catch the D's opening performance.  (JB and KG were pleasantly surprised by the crowd's enthusiasm; little did they know that the local college radio station had been playing "Wonderboy" to death.)  This album saw its official release on September 18, 2001, a time when myself and others really needed a laugh-filled distraction from the world.

Artistically, the D are a throwback to the hard rock of the 1970s and 80s, which they masterfully satire with the kind of depth that only love can understand.  The riffs are killer but obvious, the lyrics profane and overblown, but the songs stick with you long after they're over.  Their first album, like those of yore, really has to be played in its original sequence; the shuffle option on the iPod turns it into incomprehensible hash.  This isn't just because of the comedy sketches that properly introduce may of the songs; it's an album that starts with catchier tunes, dips into more profane territory, and ends with a cannabis-induced epic about JB and KG (Jack Black and Kyle Gass, for the unitiated) leading some kind of global revolution and setting themselves up as monarchs, complete with interecine poisonings.  It's all so wonderfully dirty, strange, and goddamned funny that you're amazed that the powers that be let them make it.

Take the aforementioned "Wonderboy," for example.  It's catchy, it rocks, it works as an homage to the "dragons and kings" lyrical stylings of Ronnie James Dio, but ends with the immortal lines "There, the crevice!  Fill it, with your might juice!"  It's as if they were stoned at 2AM watching The Song Remains the Same one night and decided to take up Robert Plant's rhetorical question "does anyone remember laughter?" while simultaneously admiring Jimmy Page's monster riffs.  Speaking of Dio, they rock hardest on a song of that name where they vow to take his throne and don his "cape and scepter."  Their satire has a rare and admirable sincerity to it, since it's grounded in love and affection, not derision.  Even if they are making fun of classic rock conventions, like the road song on "The Road," Tenacious D so obviously enjoy playing the role of arena rock gods.

Independent rock music has become so serious and lacking in humor that Tenacious D's debut still sounds like a fresh antidote to the rest of the scene even today.  Sometimes you have to drop the pretenses and just rock out with the type of tunes made for ripping through some asphalt in a Camaro.  Tenacious D still interests me as an album because it manages to combine such fun with real sincerity.  Take the song "Tribute," for example, which KG and JB sing with earnest conviction, despite the presence of a snorting demon so hilarious that I have a hard time getting through the song without my own snorting with laughter.

After "Tribute," though, the rest of the album gets less reverential and more ridiculously, dirtily funny.  There's a plea for gentle sex wrapped in language that would make a sailor blush and a song about a threesome that includes the rather evocative imagery of "Me and KG come naked out of the side hatch."  Something about the term "side hatch" just cracks me up, I can't explain it.  The same goes for the final number, the multi-suite mini-opera "City Hall," which reminds me of the Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" filtered through "Holy Diver" and several bong hits.  It's a fitting end to an album that has always brought a smile to my face in the hardest of times, an ability that very few have the capacity to do.