A Shift

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're going through

~~ "Changes" by David Bowie

Since the shooting in Parkland on Friday, I have been very emotional. Ken would say, "How is that different from every day?" Fair enough. I've been more emotional than I usually am. 

The shooting itself was obviously horrific and worthy of tears. But you know what is really getting to me?

Seeing these kids speak up and speak out. Their words are powerful. Their resolve is powerful. 

THEY are powerful. 

I honestly don't know what will happen. The Florida state legislature refused to take up a ban on assault weapons today. But I don't think these remarkable young people are done yet. 

And doesn't something feel different this time? I think it does. 

After Sandy Hook, it felt different, too. I submitted a petition to the White House site (this is back when the White House cared about people) to ban assault rifles and high-capacity clips. I got some support but not enough to generate a response from the White House. I thought for sure that after 20 kids were gunned down, our Congress would act. 

I was wrong. 

This feels different. This feels like a seismic shift in this debate, much like the MeToo movement felt like a seismic shift in our culture about how we treat women. 

It was dismaying today to see the attacks on these kids, often from Russian bots and trolls, but also from the "president's" idiot son, Junior. Accusing them of being deep state shills and other such nonsense. How utterly disgusting, and utterly unsurprising, to see these people dismiss and discount these kids' genuine horror, rage, and sorrow at seeing their friends and classmates gunned down in cold blood. 

The "president" blamed the FBI for devoting too much time on the Russian investigation. Sure, because the FBI has only one investigation and only a handful of employees. Over 12,000 agents and over 35,000 employees can multitask, asshole. A pox on you and your horrible family.

On April 20th, the twentieth anniversary of the Columbine shooting, kids are planning a nationwide walk-out. On March 24th, they are planning a march on Washington, D.C., and I am hopeful that there will be marches all across the country, including in my own city. I will be proud to join them. 

Again, I have no idea what will happen. But this really does feel different. I think people have had it with the NRA, which used to be an organization that taught gun safety for hunters and advocated for responsible gun ownership. They've turned into shills for the gun manufacturers and the gun lobby and as far as I'm concerned, they are a terrorist organization. Fuck you, NRA, and fuck you, Wayne LaPierre. There is so much blood on your hands that you will never erase the stain. 

A ch-ch-ch-change is coming. 

Just For One Day

And the shame was on the other side

Oh we can beat them, forever and ever

Then we could be Heroes, just for one day

~~ “Heroes” by David Bowie

I promise that this isn’t going to turn into a “Today in James Comey News” blog. Although this is a wee bit about him, there is a broader subject here: our collective need for heroes.

I thought of this because as I’ve followed his Twitter feed and watched his number of followers continue to climb (so much so that his pal Benjamin Wittes jokingly complained about how Comey already has a lot more followers than he does), I’ve seen a common theme in what people tweet to him. Basically, it’s thank you for your service and courage in speaking out and standing up to the “president.” He also seems to have a devoted female following, so it’s not just me! But overall, I get the impression that people see him as a person of integrity who is trying to do what is right.

I know, I know...there are still those who think he is a partisan hack. He’s also attracting an increasing contingent of trolls who think he should be locked up. That’s not going to happen but nothing good comes from arguing with those people. I’m also not going to argue with my friends who are still mad at him about the email thing and don’t see him—or the FBI, for that matter—as any sort of hero. I’ve laid out my reasons for why I changed my mind about him and came to believe that he made the decisions he felt he had to as Director of the FBI. I’m not going to relitigate that.

But I’m seeing a genuine desire for justice. People talk about their “Justice Crushes,” including Comey, Mueller, and other lawyers and legal types who are either working on the investigation or providing commentary on complex legal matters. We are experiencing what many of us consider to be a truly dangerous attack on our republic and on its checks and balances. It seems that the judicial branch is what is keeping our heads above water right now and stopping the “president” from going full-on dictator.

So it is no wonder that we see people like Comey and Mueller, stolid, stoic, and implacable, as heroes of sorts. The mental image (whether true or not) of Comey being appalled by the new “president,” disgusted by his requests for a pledge of loyalty as well as overstepping the boundaries of the necessary separation of the president and the Department of Justice resonates with all of us who have ever had a boss we found to be acting unfairly or unethically. The mental image of Robert Mueller, working diligently to ferret out any whiff of corruption in this White House or the campaign, is important to those of us who want justice to be served. We’re not talking about blowjobs here...this is about possible interference by a hostile foreign power trying to do us harm and possibly enlisting members of a campaign to help them (even if they may have been useful idiots). As Comey said, “This is a big deal.” And as Joe Biden said about something different, “This is a big fucking deal.” (Still applicable to this, though.)

We want the bad guys to be caught and we want to see them brought to justice for their crimes. That is engraved in our collective consciousness. When we see cops chasing down and tackling someone who committed a crime, when we see the FBI working doggedly to track down terrorists, when we see prosecutors building a case to convict, when we see justice prevail, it is something that makes us feel that things are working the way they are supposed to and it makes us feel safer.

Is the system perfect? Far from it. Guilty people go free. Innocent people are jailed and sometimes even executed (that’s why I can no longer support capital punishment). We see miscarriages of justice (I’m talking to you, O.J.) followed by the meting out of justice (I’m talking to you, O.J.). We see mistreatment of people and wrongful deaths. No, it is not a perfect system, and we need to keep having the conversations in order to make it better and better. Those conversations should never stop.

Heroes take many forms. I have friends who are heroes to me because they have turned their own personal tragedies into advocacy for various causes. We encounter everyday heroes who stand up to bullies or stop on a highway to help someone change a tire or push someone out of a snowy ditch. These are little actions that help make the world a better place.

We all have that potential; it’s just a matter of doing what is right and helping others when we can. I think we all feel that deep down, so seeing people like Comey (talk about standing up to a bully!) or Mueller seeking justice is something that speaks to us all.

I don’t know what will happen. I can only hope that justice will be served. Served like the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.

I can hear the nation cry

I’ve heard a rumor from Ground Control

Oh no, don’t say it’s true

~~ David Bowie, “Ashes to Ashes”

It was a bad start to the week. A horrible, no-good, rotten start. The first thing I saw Monday morning when I got online was that David Bowie had died. “Another stupid death hoax,” I thought.

I was wrong.

I couldn’t bring myself to write about it until a few days had passed. Hell, I couldn’t even hear one of his songs without crying...hearing that beautiful voice and knowing that it would never sing again. When a musician I’m particularly fond of dies, I usually do a music marathon as a tribute to them. It’s a wonderful reminder of what they have contributed to the world at large and to me, personally. I couldn’t do that with Bowie. I couldn’t even read all the tributes posted in his honor. I read a few, but they all made me cry, and I knew that I had to step away and distance myself if I didn’t want to just cry my stupid eyes out. Which I did anyway.

Some might wonder how or why I would cry so hard over someone I’ve never met. One of the best explanations I’ve read about that came from a Twitter user named Juliette: “We don't cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves.” Well said, Juliette. That is definitely part of it.

For me, it was also that it came as such a shock. It was a total sucker punch for me. I stay fairly current on news about my favorite musicians, and I hadn’t heard one peep about how ill he was. I’d seen a rumor about a possible heart attack and then never heard anything more about it, so I assumed that if he really did have one, he recovered fully. To learn that he’d been diagnosed with liver cancer 18 months ago was absolutely a complete surprise. When it came to someone like Johnny Cash, I knew he’d been having a lot of health problems and was seriously ill. While his death hit me hard, it wasn’t the stunner that Bowie’s death was to me. When you aren’t expecting a hit deep to left field, it’s easy to get beaned.

I don’t claim to be the biggest Bowie fan out there. Many are much more familiar with his work and the more obscure tracks. But I have been a fan for many years, probably starting in the early to mid-’70s and continuing to his most recent stuff. I missed a couple of his more recent albums, the ones before his triumphant return with “The Next Day” in 2013, and those are on their way. I got his most recent one, “Blackstar,” on its release day, which also happened to be his 69th birthday. I listened to it that morning and loved its trippiness. I commented to a friend that if I smoked opium, I’d want to listen to the album as I lounged about on my opium couch! I look forward to listening to it in depth.

As I’ve pondered his death over the week, I’ve thought about how fortunate I am to have seen him twice in concert. Once back in the late ‘80s on the Glass Spider tour, and once in the ‘90s on the Sound + Vision tour. Ken and I had talked about going to see him if he toured again, and I’m sorry that Ken will not have that chance.

I’ve also thought about the profound influence he had upon music, culture, and fashion. My beloved Duran Duran claims him as one of their biggest influences and have said that they wouldn’t exist without Bowie. There are so many others who can make the same claim, and you can see them in the excellent graphic included in this post (click to embiggenate). Not every artist can be said to have changed the course of music history, but Bowie is one of them. The potent mix of musical talent, showmanship, art, rebelliousness, style sense...he had it all, and he changed the world. He certainly changed my world.

It is also a reminder of how our time here is limited. I think it’s fair to say that Bowie smoked most of us in terms of accomplishments and significance, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t do the best with what talent and time we have. It’s easy to grow complacent and imbue someone like Bowie with almost immortal status. He’s David Bowie! He can’t die! But he can, and he did. And so can we all. The loss of someone so influential, both to the world and to me personally, is hard.

Farewell Ziggy, Aladdin, Thin White Duke, Major Tom. Whatever you called yourself, however you reinvented yourself...you were one of a kind and you were a bright star in our skies, one that will shine forever.

Golden Years

Beth’s Music Moment: “(You Will) Set the World on Fire” - David Bowie

About a week after it came out, I wrote about the amazing new Bowie album, “The Next Day.”

I listened to it nonstop for two weeks, and although I’ve been on a Stones kick for a while for obvious reasons, I’ve been listening to this album again for the past week.

The entire thing is just fantastic, and the more I listen to it, the more I love it. My favorite track is the one in the title of this entry. It reminds me a little of “(Cat People) Putting Out Fire” in its rock anthem-ness. It is an absolute scorcher of a song, and I cannot get enough of it. Props to the person who did the fan video posted here. Very cool visuals!

1. Bowie’s voice. Holy shit, that ethereal voice!! As someone once described Jim Morrison’s voice, it is “a fist in a velvet glove.” It’s all cognac and cigarette smoke and a caress on the cheek and a finger up the ass. It is nasty goodness, and his voice on this track just SOARS.

2. At around the 1:25 mark in this video, he absolutely chews through the lyrics. When he says, “We are in the wat-uh,” it just makes me feel crazy. CRAZY.

3. The guitar solo around 2:10 is smokin’ hot. That sustained note is just INCREDIBLE.

4. Things really start building around 2:40, and when he yells “You will set it on fi-yaaah!” at 2:50, it’s like a freakin’ climax. After listening to it a couple of times today when working out, I actually said, “Ohhh, David!” haha

This whole song is one big aural orgasm. It unleashes my Inner Lizard. As Rolling Stone said, “Holy shit, David Bowie.”

If I still smoked, I’d have a cigarette right now.

Catch-up time!

Whoops, time got away from me again, but that seems to happen frequently now. We had a funeral to go to in there, but I’m going to focus on happier things. I’ll just say that I am very grateful for a loving family.

I tweeted my previous entry, about Parental Alienation Syndrome, to Alec Baldwin, as well as a tweet thanking him for writing his book. I guess I just wanted him to know that it helped me...it helped to realize that others have experienced the same thing. It’s kind of amazing to me that someone like him, with millions of dollars at his disposal, and people like us, who don’t have those kinds of resources, could go through almost the exact same thing. His ordeal was much more public, and was fought more in the courts, but it was still amazingly similar. He actually tweeted back to me! He said thank you, and also said that if you spend millions, you can usually get rulings in your favor...but that there is no enforcement of the rulings.

Anyway, it was pretty cool that he tweeted me back. I hope that hearing that his book helped us also helped him a bit, knowing that he did a good service to all those people who have had to deal with vindictive exes who can’t set aside their anger and bitterness for the sake of their own children’s emotional well-being.

The next two things are music-related, so not so heavy! If you are interested in rock music at all, you’ll know that David Bowie recently released his first album in ten years, “The Next Day.” I liked Bowie a lot back in the day, and got to see him twice, once in Winnipeg and once in Indianapolis. I still enjoy listening to his stuff once in a while, so I was pretty excited about this new album. I pre-ordered it and got it the day it came out...and proceeded to listen to almost nothing else for the next couple of weeks.

It is FANTASTIC. Critics are saying it is his best album in thirty years. I can’t really speak to that, but I can tell you that I love it. There are pensive tracks like “Where Are We Now?” and “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die.” There are danceable tracks like “Dancing Out In Space” and “I’ll Take You There” (which is a bonus track on the deeeeluxe version). I love these lines in the title track: “Here I am, not quite dying, a body left to rot in a hollow tree.” Not quite dying, indeed, Mr. Bowie! I love the song “I’d Rather Be High,” which seems to be about young people fighting stupid wars:

I’d rather be high

I’d rather be flying

I’d rather be dead

Or out of my head

Than training these guns on those men in the sand

I’m seventeen my looks can prove it

I’m so afraid that I will lose it

I’d rather smoke and phone my ex

Pleading for some teenage sex

Yeah

But my absolute favorite is “(You Will) Set the World on Fire,” a rock anthem that showcases Bowie’s still-impressive voice. When he belts out,

You will set the world babe

You will set the world on fi-yah

I can work the scene babe

I can see the magazines

I can hear the nation

I can hear the nation cry

You will set the world babe

You will set the world on fire

You will set it on fire

...his voice just soars on the high notes, and no matter how many times I hear it, he has me punching my fists in the air at the chorus. This song gives me chills! You can hear the entire album on this video (and I recommend it highly), but I’ve tried to embed it so that it starts at the song I just mentioned. If the video starts at the beginning, the song starts at around 40:30. Turn it up!

Finally, the big announcement came today, one that was considered to be the worst-kept secret in the music world: the Rolling Stones are touring! I had originally heard that they were going to do 18 US dates, and I was hoping for a Cleveland show so we could make three days of it and see the new Stones exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they aren’t doing that many (so far) and our closest show is, of course, Chicago. After their limited five-show tour in 2012, word was that they are still sounding great and playing tight, and they made it pretty obvious that they were having fun (not to mention making some big bucks!).

We’re going, but the question is whether I’ll be able to get tickets when they go on sale, and if not, how much will we have to pay through a broker? It looks like tickets are going to range from $185 to upwards of $600, and I’m guessing they’ll go incredibly fast. I’ll do my best to get them when they go on sale Monday morning! I’ve said for some time that I want to see the Stones one more time before I die (I saw them in ‘89 in Indianapolis), and this will probably be my last chance. I’m not getting any younger, and Mick and Keith and the boys sure as hell aren’t!

It’s looking to be a fun summer...if it ever gets here!