My friend Karen posted this the other day:
Trust the Germans to put a (lengthy) name to a nearly ineffable emotional concept. I need to remember this the next time somebody gives me static about how many times I’ve seen the old shows I like instead of constantly seeking out the new…
Elvis Presley would have been 80 years old today.
While the automatic sentiment on posthumous birthdays seems to be “it’s hard to imagine him at age X,” I actually find it harder to keep in mind he was only 42 — three years younger than I am now — when he died. Considering that Willie Nelson is still going strong at 80, B.B. King is doing the same at 89, and Tony Bennett is up for a Grammy this year at 88, I find it quite easy to imagine The King at 80, still actively recording, performing, collaborating with younger artists, and exploring the music that energized him. The great tragedy of his death isn’t that it came too soon — although of course it did — but that it came while he was at his lowest point. If he’d died truly young, like so many other rock-n-roll legends, from Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran to Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, or if he’d lived long enough to clean himself up and become an elder statesman like his contemporaries Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash, then I think he’d be far more respected than he is today. Unfortunately, far too many people remember him only for his later excesses, the pathetic “Fat Elvis,” than for his talent or his absolutely seminal contribution to early rock and the development of modern youth culture… which of course has become popular culture in general, even for those of us who are, ahem, not so young anymore.
I have a running debate with a couple of friends over which Elvis — Presley or Costello — is the more significant, which one made the greatest contribution, was the better musician, was the greater icon of cool. Now, to a large degree, this is subjective, just another one of those pointless pissing matches that hinge on individual taste, about as irrational a thing as there is. But in my mind, it isn’t even a question, and it doesn’t matter what arguments these college-radio “alternative” loving music snobs — and that really is what they’re being when they start in on this subject — deploy in support of Costello. The simple fact is that his career, and those of practically every other musical idol of the past 60 years, wouldn’t have happened without Elvis Presley blazing the trail in the first place. At least, Costello and the others wouldn’t have happened in the idiom we all call “rock and roll.” Because Elvis Presley was the first. No, he didn’t invent the form, but he defined it and brought it to the mass consciousness. He was the first true rock star, in every sense of that word: as a top-selling performer, as a totem of youthful sexuality and vitality, as a catalyst for fusing existing genres into something new and exciting. And everyone else that’s now held up by somebody as being better than him — The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Elvis Freaking Costello, Bruce Springsteen, even the almighty Bono — has only built on the foundations that were laid by the boy from Tupelo in the brief span of time before he was drafted. (He made a lot of good music later in his career, after his stint in the Army, but I concede his most important work, his moment of greatest influence, was in the years 1954-58.)
But hey, as Levar Burton used to say, you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s an article that lists five reasons why Elvis still matters. Even better, check out this chart created by the gurus at Spotify showing all the artists who were influenced by The King, and how that influence has propagated, and continues to propagate even today. Keep your eyes open for Elvis Costello; he’s on there.
And now, assuming I can figure out how to make it work, here’s a playlist of some of my favorite Elvis tracks… the ones my mother played over and over when I was a little boy, the ones that showcase the energy and charisma that have sadly been displaced over time by the image of the bloated, unhappy, unhealthy man he became…
Happy birthday, old son.
The sunshine streaming in through my Mustang’s windshield is almost spring-like, a welcome relief from the oppressive cold of last week. I want to stretch like a cat as my face and arms absorb the warmth. The snow banks alongside the road are melting, casting thin silver streams out onto the asphalt where they shine and flash and shush beneath the car. I happily sing along with the song on the radio, remembering all the times I sang this one as a young man with a cool car and no particular place to be: “Some people call me the Space Cowboy… some call me the Gangster of Love… ”
And then suddenly I remember Homer Simpson singing the same song, under the same circumstances, and the words catch in my throat, and I look around self-consciously, because… Homer Simpson, man.
D’oh.
If I have any recurring themes at all in my blog writing — aside from babbling about Star Wars, of course — they must surely be the intertwined issues of aging and memory. I make no secret of the fact that I loathe the first and wallow in the second, and would dearly love to find solutions to both, i.e., to stop, slow, or otherwise improve my physical aging while also making certain my memories endure somehow. No doubt this is why some recent ruminations by the Scottish sci-fi writer Charles Stross caught my eye, and have continued to rumble around in my head since I first ran across them a couple weeks ago.
I apologize in advance for quoting so much of Charlie’s post — I might be pushing the limits of “fair use” here — but I’m frankly not sure of where I could insert ellipses and still retain the impact of his ideas. And for what it’s worth, his original entry — which you absolutely must read in its entirety if this subject interests you at all — is long enough that I’m still only quoting a comparatively small part of it. At least that’s how I’m rationalizing it.
Anyhow, here’s Charlie’s speculation on what might happen to the problem of physical deterioration in the near future:
Let us suppose that in the next couple of decades we develop a cure for the worst problems associated with senescence. We figure out how to reverse the cumulative damage to mitochondrial DNA, to reset the telomere end caps of stem cells without issuing carte blanche to every hopeful cancer in our bodies, to unravel the cumulative damage of prion proteins, to tame the cumulative inflammation that causes atherosclerosis, to fix the underlying mechanism behind metabolic syndrome (the cause of hypertension and type II diabetes).
We now have a generation of 70 year olds who in 20 years time will be physiologically in their 40s, not their 90s. At worst, they’re no longer in the steep decline of late old age: at best, they’re ageing backwards to their first flush of adult fitness.
You’re one of them. You’re 25-60 years old now. You’re going to be 55-90 years old by then. Unlike today’s senior citizens, you don’t ache whenever you get out of bed, you’re physically fit, you don’t have cancer or heart disease or diabetes or Alzheimer’s, you aren’t deaf or blind or suffering from anosmia or peripheral neuropathy or other sensory impairments, and you’re physically able to enjoy your sex life. Big win all round.
Dear lord, I like the sound of that… especially the bits about curing diabetes and still being, ahem, up for a lusty romp at 90. But wait! There’s apparently a catch (isn’t there always?):
But your cognitive functioning is burdened by decades of memories to integrate, canalized by prior experiences, dominated by the complexity of long-term planning at the expense of real-time responsiveness. Every time you look around you are struck by intricate, esoteric cross-references to that which has gone before. Every politician, celebrity, actor, blogger, pop star, author … you’ve seen someone like them previously, you know what they’re going to say before they open their mouth. Every new policy or strategy has failure modes you recognize: “that won’t work” is your usual response to change, not because you’re a curmudgeonly pessimist but because you’ve been there before.
Maybe you’re going to make extensive use of lifeloggers or external prosthetic memory assistance devices—think of your own personal google, refreshing your memory whenever you ask the right question—or maybe you’re going to float forward in time through a haze of forgetting, deliberately shedding old context to make room for fresh. Some folks try for rolling amnesia with a 40-70 year horizon behind them. You gradually lose contact with such people because they just don’t want to know you any more. Others try to hang on to every experience, wallowing in the lush, intricate texture of an extended lifespan until their ability to respond is so impaired that they appear catatonic.
Which are you going to be? And how will you cope with a century of memories contained in the undecaying flesh of indefinitely protracted adulthood?
Now there’s a wrinkle I confess has never occurred to me in all my fantasizing about immortality: being weighed down by memories and associations to the point of becoming non-functional… a pretty horrifying concept, really. In fact, I’ve always assumed the opposite would be the problem for someone with an extremely long lifespan, i.e., not being able to remember things. During the ’90s, I became a tremendous fan of the Highlander movie-and-TV-series franchise, especially the television series starring Adrian Paul, and while I learned to overlook such improbabilities as people being able to hide broadswords under short jackets, the one thing that always bothered me was the way our heroes always remembered fellow immortals they’d encountered for five minutes several centuries earlier. Personally, I can’t remember some of the people I worked with every day only a few years ago, let alone someone from the 1700s. Just once, I would’ve loved it if some black-clad hulking bad-ass had said, “At last… vengeance is mine!,” only to have Duncan MacLeod respond, “Have we met? Who are you again?” (I suppose you could rationalize that The Quickening, the mystical force that makes Highlander‘s immortals, well, immortal could also somehow augment their memories — there is some suggestion that The Quickening is, in part, an accumulation of the knowledge and experience of the immortals who’ve been killed in battle — but of course it’s never explicitly stated that way.) If Stross is right, though, then Duncan and the others ought to be drooling idiots incapable of doing much of anything, let alone fighting and loving and selling antiques and such.
Which reminds me of another franchise entirely, the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice. Specifically the characters known as “Those Who Must Be Kept,” Akasha and Enkil, the very first vampires, who never move, never speak, never show any signs of awareness, and who are watched over and protected from harm by younger immortals. It’s always something of a mystery to the other vampires as to why, exactly, they have withdrawn and become essentially statues… perhaps the cause is something like what Stross is proposing… the weight of memory has finally overwhelmed them.
Or perhaps it’s another problem entirely that’s suffered by Rice’s immortals: the fact that the world moves on and evolves, while they themselves, and specifically their paradigm for viewing the world, does not, at least not without them making a real effort to keep up. One of the recurring ideas in the Vampire Chronicles is that the older vampires create younger proteges, in part, to help them get along in the modern world that they do not understand. In the recently published Prince Lestat, the title character, our brash, irrepressible, unstoppable hero of the whole series, admits he has a weakness when it comes to modern technology. He is, in fact, quite hopeless with computers and cellphones… he’s learned to use them several times, but if he neglects them for any stretch of time without using them, he loses his skills with them and has to begin all over. This is highly plausible to me… and in fact, I feel that way quite often myself and I’m only four and a half decades on this earth. Could anyone raised in a particular time and place realistically expect to function after a century or two of change, even if you make an effort to remain up to date? Wouldn’t the world eventually become so strange, so alien to your original starting point, that you may as well be another world altogether?
Maybe that’s where Stross’ idea of abandoning earlier memories becomes necessary. But I have to admit, that notion is just as horrifying to me as becoming completely dysfunctional. The line “you gradually lose contact with such people because they just don’t want to know you any more…” is terrifying to me in that it seems almost inhuman in its emotional coldness.
Interesting food for thought, isn’t it? And yet… even with the memory-related downsides, the idea of conquering the ‘betes and being physically much the same as I am now in another 50 years… that’s pretty irresistible even with the costs involved…
Time for our annual tradition here on Simple Tricks of recounting all the films, recorded TV content, books, and live performances I’ve experienced in the last year. As I’ve noted before, I have no idea if anybody else cares in the least about this, or if it’s just an exercise in tedious self-indulgence, but I like to remind myself where I’ve been over the past twelve months. I missed doing it last year due to this blog being out of commission, and the 2012 version was unfortunately one of the entries that evaporated when the blog failed, so I can’t really do much comparison with the previous couple years as I’ve done in the past, but I can at least list the titles and get the numbers.
FYI before we begin: An asterisk [*] before the title indicates something I’ve seen or read before. Bolded items in the home video sections are titles I own on either DVD or BluRay, or in a few cases, VHS tape.
Movies Seen in a Theater
Note: Much of my cinema-going this year was to special engagements of classics. What can I say, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see these films on the big screen, either again or, in many cases, for the first time. And besides, there just weren’t that many new releases that grabbed my attention. I’ll indicate where these screenings took place in brackets [ ] following the titles.
Movies Seen on Home Video
Note: I used to grit my teeth and suffer through any movie I started, especially if I’d heard a lot of positive word of mouth or critical praise, on the logic that if everyone else thought it was good, then I needed to see it. But I’m getting much less shy in my grumpy middle age about shutting off the things that don’t engage me — life is too damn short, you know? I still don’t do it often, but there were a couple of titles this year I just couldn’t hack; I’ve indicated those with [ABANDONED].
TV Content Seen on Home Video
Books Completed (Fiction)
Note: You’ll notice that I read a whole mess of novels by Clive Cussler this year. I realized at some point that, despite my frequent mentions of his Dirk Pitt adventures, and strong opinions about that character, it had been years, decades even, since I’d read them, and I wondered how well they actually matched my memories of them. So I developed ambitions of doing a novel-by-novel survey of the series, much as Michael May has been doing with Ian Fleming’s Bond series over on his Adventureblog. Well, I read the books (half of them anyway), but didn’t get around to writing the entries. Typical of how the year went with regard to blogging…
Books Completed (Non-Fiction)
Concerts and Live Theater Events
And there we are for another misspent year…
I don’t know about you guys, but 2014 was a mixed bag for me. I guess all years are, really, but this year… I simply cannot recall another when I have so often found myself at a loss for words, so often felt utterly exhausted by current events. Not outraged — although there seemed to be plenty of that to go around — but just… tired. Worn down and fed up with the never-slackening torrent of disheartening awfulness… everything from the right’s inexhaustible fear and loathing of President Obama to a steady undertow of hysteria about the Ebola outbreak (which suspiciously dissipated immediately after election day…), the rise of ISIS (or ISIL, or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves this week), Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Israel, Vladimir Putin, and god knows what else. Then there was Gamergate, Ferguson, and the torture report. Missing airliners. Stephen Collins and Bill Cosby. Robin Williams… Jesus, Robin Williams, man.
Closer to home, I’ve watched helplessly as friends have lost loved ones this year, and confronted their own life-altering chronic illnesses. I myself lost a couple of beloved pets — first, my little buddy Hannibal-cat to the heavy traffic in front of my house, and then my mom’s horse Sonny, who had been a fixture of the Bennion Compound since I was a teenager — and I’ve seen my father deteriorate into a little old man, complete with stooped shoulders and shuffling walk, seemingly overnight due to a bad back.
In the past twelve months, I’ve become aware of — and increasingly resigned to — the reality that certain things I used to take for granted, things I’ve always said I’d get around to “someday,” are no longer options for me. I can feel myself letting go of dreams I’ve always had, and that scares the shit out of me. And I’ve felt increasingly alienated from the pop culture that has always been central to my identity, but no longer seems to speak to me, by and large. When I overhear people talking about the popular and acclaimed movies and TV shows these days, I feel… left behind. Obsolete. And I’ve found myself thinking often of a line from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, one of the moments of that flawed movie that rang true for me, when Indy is looking at a photo of Henry Sr. and his colleague remarks, “We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.” I’m not quite to that point yet… but I can see it in the headlights up ahead.
And yet, for all that, I’ve also felt surprisingly contented during 2014. I don’t think I’ve ever been as comfortable with loving the things I love as I have over the past 18 months, during which I’ve attended four separate media conventions — two iterations of Salt Lake Comic Con, the spin-off Salt Lake Comic Con Fan eXperience (FanX), and FantasyCon — and met a lot of the personalities who populated my imagination during my geeky youth. I marked my unprecedented ninth year in my job as a proofreader at a major ad agency, I (mostly) stopped arguing politics with people whose minds I know I will never change, and I’ve maintained (more or less) my health and weight loss for the second year running (it’ll be three years in March). I’ve been confident enough in myself to take genuine pleasure in the accomplishments of my friends — notably our colleague Kelly Sedinger becoming a published author, and my lovely Anne finally extricating herself from a soul-crushing job and landing in one that promises to open up a whole new world for her… seriously, no hyperbole! And there have even been some positive things in the news, too. I was absolutely captivated by the Philae probe’s adventures on Comet 67P, and then just in the last couple of weeks, the unexpected thawing of relations with Cuba, something I’ve favored for years. And there was the pure joy of Guardians of the Galaxy, the most unambiguously good time I’ve had at the movies — and the first geeky thing I’ve found myself obsessing over to any degree — in several years.
So as I said, a mixed bag. Looking ahead to 2015, I see more of the same, basically. I hope to do better with this blog, and to get on top of some long-simmering projects. There’s a new Avengers movie to look forward to, and Episode VII of course. And Anne and I are finally making serious plans to travel to Scotland, something we’ve been dreaming about for over a decade, so there’s that, at least…
An eerie echo of what I was getting at in the previous entry… I always did identify too much with ol’ Blockhead:
