SamuraiFrog reminds us that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson’s sad and far-too-early death. Twenty years since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much about Jim is that he did it with nothing more than whimsy and sly humor, and the imagination to turn feathers and foam and random bits of stuff into characters that still seem to live and breathe in our collective consciousness.
Still… twenty years? I’m really having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one!
Incidentally, the photo above is one I ran across quite a while ago; I’ve been waiting for a good reason to post it, and this seems as good a time as any. I’m sorry to say I don’t know who the man on Jim’s left is; the gentleman to his right is, of course, Frank Oz, Jim’s friend and co-conspirator during what I would call the “golden age” of The Muppets: the pre-Elmo Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Movie. It seems to me that Frank, like Dan Ackroyd after Belushi, lost some minuscule but crucial animating spark after Jim’s death. Perhaps that’s presumptuous of me, considering I don’t know the man, but that is nevertheless the sense I get when he talks about the old days.
Just about one hour ago, space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center for the final time.
It was a textbook launch into a beautiful cerulean sky, and the shuttle is now safely on orbit and chasing after the International Space Station for a rendezvous two days from now. Mission STS-132 is scheduled to last 12 days; in its payload bay, Atlantis carries a Russian laboratory module — the first time a Russian-built ISS component has flown on an American spacecraft — as well as an assortment of replacement parts and batteries for the station.
Atlantis, the second youngest of the shuttles, flew for the first time in October 1985, and has racked up an impressive list of “firsts” in the 25 years since. Here’s a fairly nifty video produced by NASA to commemorate her life:
***VIDEO MISSING***
(And yes, I know I was just bitching about not having any time to blog, let alone watch space shuttle videos. So I’m rebelling a little, give me a break…)
I’m having one of those grinding, despair-inducing weeks that consist of little more than proofreading, restless and unsatisfying sleep, and numbly shoveling food into my mouth without tasting it. Late nights, impossible deadlines, not enough hands around the agency to manage the volume of work, neglected chores and personal projects at home, and the bleak feeling that I’ve somehow lost sight of whatever my “real” life was supposed to be… you get the idea.
At times like this, when daydreams of walking away from everything and hitting the open road with nothing but a dufflebag at my side like Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk are occurring more and more frequently — like, every 45 seconds or so — I can’t help but wonder how in the hell people with families can tolerate the demands of the modern workplace. I know many of my coworkers have spouses and kids. If I’m feeling antsy about missing out on the life part of the work-life balance, what sort of torment are they enduring?
In any event, my agenda is crowded enough that I may not manage to get a Friday Evening Video up today, and I really doubt that I’ll be managing anything of actual substance for awhile, either. And yes, I am deeply frustrated by that, thanks for asking.
In the meantime, let’s all take a moment to enjoy a vintage photo of the lovely Bettie Page, shall we?
Jaquandor pointed me last night at a nifty tool that helps you visualize the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by overlaying a satellite image of the oil slick on top of the landscape of your choosing. This is what resulted when I entered Salt Lake City as ground zero:
For my non-local readers who don’t know the geography of this area, the big blue splotch in the upper left is the Great Salt Lake; the smaller blue splotch to the south, the one that’s mostly covered by the oil slick, is Utah Lake. In between those two lakes is the most densely populated area in the state, what we locals refer to as the Wasatch Front. As you can see, the oil would cover most of that area — two valleys, two counties, two major cities and all the ‘burbs in between. It looks like the city of Ogden to the north might be spared, but it’d have oil lapping at its borders. And the slick has intruded into the Tooele Valley to the west, and that long eastward-bound pseudopod has taken out Park City, home of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and crossed the border into Wyoming. In other words, this damn thing is big. Mind-boggingly big.
Keep in mind that the image of the oil spill was taken May 6, four days ago; it has surely grown since then. How can we possibly fix something like that?
I’ll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week’s Friday Evening Videos, didn’t you? Smart little Loyal Readers.
You’re quite correct: I was planning to post what I thought was Roy’s final hit, “You Got It,” from the 1989 album Mystery Girl, which was a favorite cassette of mine during my sophomore year of college and the following summer. But as I started poking around looking for the video clip and any interesting background information I could find, I discovered that this was not, in fact, Roy’s last charting single, and Mystery Girl was not his last album. Remember that he’d been working a lot with producer Jeff Lynne in the year or two prior to his death in 1988; it turns out he recorded more material than what ended up on Mystery Girl, enough to fill out one more album, which Lynne compiled and released four years later. Somehow, I completely missed King of Hearts in 1992, and I also missed the two final, posthumous hits it generated, a duet of Roy’s classic “Crying,” sung with k.d. lang, and this song:
“I Drove All Night” reveals a fairly tangled history when you delve into it. The song was written specifically for Roy, and he recorded it in 1987, a full year before his death, but for some reason it wasn’t selected for Mystery Girl, and of course it wouldn’t appear until King of Hearts came out in ’92. In the meantime, Cyndi Lauper, of all people, scored a top-10 hit with it in 1989, and I’m willing to bet a lot of people probably think the song was hers, and Roy’s version was the cover. It has since been covered again by a band I’ve never heard of, Pinmonkey, and most recently by — shudder — Celine Dion in 2003.
Since I was unfamiliar with the song, I obviously had never seen the video either, until this afternoon. I think it’s absolutely magnificent. The imagery is a perfect match for the audio, it’s very clever how the director covers for the fact that Roy had been dead for four years, and the young stars are simply beautiful to gaze upon. (If you can’t place them, you’re looking at Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, seen here at the peak of her Rocketeer-era detectability, and Jason Priestley, who was then riding high on the success of Beverly Hills, 90210.) Everything about this evokes a particular time in my life, a time I often miss, to be honest. I was old enough in ’92 to know something, but still young enough to believe in a lot of things. I acted tougher than I really was, and I was in love with the idea of love itself. In other words, I was a lot like the character that Priestley is playing here. Or at least, that’s how I used to imagine myself, and how I like to remember myself.
Hell, I could just reacting to the car, I guess. Priestley is driving a 1964 Galaxie, a little bit different than my older ’63, but close enough for this video to stir up a lot of sense memories.
For our second feature this evening, I wanted to post “End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys, another fabulous song that combines a catchy hook with some truly authentic and wise lyrics; unfortunately, the foul Copyright Lords have forbidden anyone from embedding it, so if you’d like to see it, you’ll have to click through. If nothing else, it’s worth a look to see how this one handled Roy’s absence.
Finally, here’s a little something by request, a B-52s song for my friend Keith. To be honest, I really don’t care for The B-52s — I find the majority of their stuff obnoxious, what with the herky-jerky delivery and a sound that generally rubs me the wrong way — but their 1989 hit “Roam” isn’t too bad, and it’s kind of in the same thematic ballpark as “I Drove All Night,” at least in the sense that it’s about traveling and love. Enjoy, Keith!
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Yeah, I know, but it’s Friday, and I’m punchy after a very busy week and several nights of lousy sleep. Hopefully I’ll make it back later with a couple things…
You’d never guess from the songs I’ve been waxing nostalgic over in my Friday Evening Video segments, but sometime around my junior or senior year of high school, I developed a serious affection for the music of the 1950s and ’60s, better known as the oldies. I don’t remember what, precisely, triggered my interest in the stuff my parents used to listen to, but I suppose you could probably blame my car, my ’63 Ford Galaxie, as much as anything. You see, my old Cruising Vessel had only a stock AM radio, and there wasn’t much music on the AM band by the late ’80s. When I was bombing around the valley with the top down, pondering the unfathomable mysteries of growing up — i.e., girls — I had a choice of either the oldies station or the country station, and at that point in my life, there wasn’t any question of which I was going to prefer. I ended up building a lot of my identity as a young adult around that car, and by extension, around that music.
One of my favorites artists from that period was Roy Orbison, a strange-looking man who had an even stranger voice. Everyone knows him for “Oh, Pretty Woman,” of course, but the larger percentage of his work tended to comprise haunting, melancholy tunes about loneliness, heartbreak, insecurity, and longing — in other words, the perfect soundtrack for your teens and early twenties, when nobody understands you and every perceived slight is a tragic thing that hits you like a baseball bat in the gut. I recall many evenings when I was driving along the dark roads on the south end of the valley — there wasn’t much traffic then, and not a lot of street lights either, so it often felt like my big old car was gliding through deep space — with the air temperature turning brisk against my face and arms as I passed irrigated fields then warming again as I left them behind. The dashboard lights bathed the car’s interior in a greenish light, and Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” or “Only the Lonely” was fading in and out of the static-y background noise like messages from another dimension. Eerie… and, as I noted, perfect.
As fate would have it, Roy was experiencing something of a comeback right around then. In 1987, he recorded, along with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, and Bob Dylan, the astounding Traveling Wilburys, Volume I — there’s not a bad cut on that album — and his older music was starting to turn up in movies. In November of 1988, he releasedrecorded a solo album called Mystery Girl, which spawned his first all-new hit in years, “You Got It.” His star was definitely rising again. And then, right at the end of 1988, when I was a sophomore in college, Roy Orbison died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I remember being really depressed that I’d lost him just as I’d discovered him. It didn’t seem fair, somehow.
I also remember thinking that he was quite old.
Well, I’ve just been reading a retrospective on Roy — NPR has named him one of its 50 Great Voices — and it turns out that his age upon his death was all of 53 years old. Fifty-three. I don’t mind telling you, I’m a little freaked out by this realization, both because 53 no longer seems old to me, and also because I was such a dunce back in ’88 as to think that it was. I’m going to have to ponder this whole thing for a while, I think.
In the meantime, go check out that article. It’s an interesting read, especially if all you know about Roy is that he did the theme song for some Julia Roberts movie…
So what the heck is going on down there in the Gulf of Mexico, anyhow? How can a fire on a big steel platform that’s standing above the water lead to an oil leak of apocalyptic proportions under the water?
If you, too, have been asking these timely questions, check out this handy video that explains such mysteries in only about one minute:
Well, I thought that was pretty interesting. I guess I imagined the oil was leaking directly from the wellhead, and never considered the associated piping, which of course makes for a much bigger problem.
One interesting sidenote: that video came from Al Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news network. It seems they have an English-language division, which I did not know. I’m learning all sorts of things today. My thanks to Sullivan for posting the video and sending me down that particular rabbit hole.
Getting back to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, if you’re interested in some numbers, check out this chart at Information is Beautiful. Among other fascinating — if deeply sobering — factoids: The spill already covers an area roughly the size of Jamaica, and we may have less than 30 years of easily obtainable oil remaining to us. I don’t know about you, but I don’t relish the idea of adopting a Mad Max-style existence for my 70th birthday.
One final link: For a peek into the bowels of hell itself, here’s a gallery of incredible photos showing the final hours of the Deepwater Horizon’s fight for existence. I have to confess a perverse attraction to disasters like this. I imagine watching that thing heel over and fall into the sea would’ve been an awesome — in the original, non-1980s sense of the word — spectacle…
I think this speaks for itself (click on the image if you can’t read the fine print and need to enlarge it):
My man Rick has actually had a pretty colorful — and sometimes difficult — life: He became a teen idol at the improbably advanced age of 32 (when “Jessie’s Girl” hit number one) after years of struggling to find an American audience, and he’s struggled ever since to find respect as a genuine musician instead of a one-bubblegum-hit wonder; he lived for several years with Linda Blair of Exorcist fame — she was all of 15 when they moved in together, and he was a decade older (I imagine that raised a few eyebrows, even in the anything-goes 1970s); he collapsed into a deep depression in the late ’80s, when it seemed his moment had come and gone in such a brief span of time, and he actually contemplated suicide; and now at the age of 60, he’s rebuilt both his musical and acting career, and consistently puts on one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen, even if it’s only his hardcore fans who ever actually see it.
Assuming that he can write prose at all (or has found himself a good ghost writer), I expect all this ought to make for a hell of a read…
At least, that’s my hope. I still remember all too well my excitement at the news that Jimmy Buffett was writing a memoir, and the crushing disappointment when I finally got around to reading it. All those wild experiences and people that surely inspired his songs about swashbucklers and vagabonds, the rumors that he’d made ends meet for a while by smuggling weed from Cuba to Key West, the beer-drinking-and-hell-raising early days of his career… that’s what I expected from A Pirate Looks at Fifty. Instead, I got a fairly boring travelogue written by a middle-aged capitalist who thinks he’s more clever with a turn of phrase than he often is. Rick, old buddy, don’t let me down the way Jimmy did…
Before I could fix a nice brunch for The Girlfriend yesterday morning, I had to make a quick run to the store for a couple of items. Grocery shopping early Sunday morning is always an interesting experience. There’s not much life yet — most people are home cooking breakfast for their own loved ones, or else in church, I guess — but the life you do encounter seems to embody so much despair, longing, resignation, and, sometimes, outright agony. It’s a peek into the torments of the suburban damned, I tell you. In just eight short minutes, I saw:
A young single father with a four- or five-year-old child in his cart, probably on a weekend visitation, standing in the cereal aisle as if paralyzed by the vast range of possibilities, torn between visions of being the cool dad who gets the kid the cereal that turns the milk purple and contains a nifty prize, and the responsible dad who makes the child eat something that’s good for him. Or at least something that won’t cause the boy’s mother to throw another hissy fit and emasculate him in front of her parents yet again, as she’s done nearly every week since that disastrous prom night when she promised him everything would be all right because you can’t get pregnant on the first time.
A visibly hungover guy, ashen-skinned behind very large, very dark sunglasses, pondering the selection of refrigerated fruit juices, wondering which would be least likely to make want to vomit again. Or would at least provide the least offensive visual effect when he inevitably went down on his knees before the Porcelain God for the sixth time in the past eight hours.
A Latina woman with a cart completely filled with family-size bags of tortilla chips, on sale this week for the incredible price of $1.29 a bag. She knows she’s surrendering another little piece of her heritage to the behemoth consumerism that defines modern America, and she feels a minor pang of guilt at the way so many of her family’s traditions have already been cast onto the rubbish heap, but damn, that’s such a bargain! And anyway, who wants to spend all day bent over a hot oven, making tortillas and cutting them into quarters for baking?
And finally, the grim-faced woman with the too-orange tan, the too-pale hair that comes from a bottle, the fine lines around her eyes that no amount of Oil of Olay seems to fill in, and last night’s sweat-stained blouse and nylons with a run in them, doing the Walk of Shame after waking up in a dilapidated single-wide with a paunchy guy who’d looked much better the night before. A fresh pack of smokes won’t make her 19 again, but she hopes it’ll at least take the stale tequila taste out of her mouth.
And just so you get the full effect, all this human drama was set to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara,” as wistful and mournful as adult contempo shopping music has to offer.
Of course, my interpretation of things may have had something to do with being hungry and not having had any coffee yet. I tend to see things through a glass darkly in my pre-caffeinated state. But you have to admit that that state tends to produce better stories…
