A confession: my boy-band loving days ended with the collapse of N’Sync at the early turn of the Millennium (Backstreet Boys reference!) and have never really returned, despite Harry Styles. To be fair, I don’t know if it’s accurate to call the Jonas Brothers a boy band anyway – they played instruments at least, and seemed a tad more authentic. Nick Jonas has gone on to make some solid music, as has Joe as part of DNCE.
I love a good ‘Sucker’ – and their new single is something to be seen and heard. With its gloriously whimsical video (influenced by ‘The Favourite’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’) the new song is actually enjoyable, and up until now I’ve never been a big fan of their music. (Further proof that a good video can make a decent song into something spectacular.)
It’s been another long stretch since out last Madonna Timeline, but that’s about to come to an end. Nothing coy about this post, and no insufferable guessing game: ‘American Life’ is the next song up, and as one of the most interesting (and maligned) musical moments in her career, I want to get it right. The album of the same name marked Madonna’s most controversial work in several years, having gone through a softer period marked by highlights such as ‘Evita‘ and ‘Ray of Light‘ – and though she still knew how to make waves, I’m not sure she knew the capsizing about to occur when you messed with the crazy forces that followed the early years of the new millennium.
‘American Life’ was her electronic pastoral, and though it somewhat heavy-handedly shoe-horned its way into being a treatise on America, it was actually more of one woman’s journey through the simple landscape of living, with all the requisite insecurities, anger, romance, wonder and grief that surviving in this country – and this world – mandated. Songs like ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Nobody Knows Me’ may have been a pointed statement on the elusive and hollow American dream, but much of the other material deals with more personal issues. The resplendent choir-backed ‘Nothing Fails‘ starts quietly and builds into a nuanced variation on ‘Like A Prayer‘ while ‘Mother and Father‘ continues the parental complexities of ‘Promise to Try‘ and ‘Oh Father‘. Love, in all its many splendored forms, finds expression in ‘X-static Process‘, ‘Intervention‘ and ‘Love Profusion’. There’s even the classic clunker (because it wouldn’t be a proper Madonna album without a ‘Jimmy Jimmy’ or ‘Act of Contrition‘ or ‘I’m Going Bananas‘) in the form of ‘I’m So Stupid’. (Though by this point even her clunkers had some merit.)
Musically, the album picked up right where ‘Music‘ left off, with the blips and beeps and stuttering electronic flourishes of Mirwais bumping up against warm folksy guitar work, staccato strings and orchestral grandiosity in tracks like ‘Die Another Day‘ and ‘Easy Ride’.
For better or worse, the sonic stylings honed here may have been lost amid the war imagery and that dark period of American history, which is a shame, because several songs have withstood the test of time, and the ‘American Life’ album itself, despite the lack of any overtly-celebratory tracks, is a thing of deep beauty.
The next Madonna Timeline will honor the title track, one of the most polarizing Madonna songs among fans up until ‘Bitch I’m Madonna‘ – and it’s a doozy. Coming this month…
The year was 1995. I wasn’t even 20 years old. A colorful silk scarf waved from the antenna of my car, blowing wildly in the winter wind and heralding the kick-off of my very first ‘tour’. I pulled into the driveway of my friend Ann’s house and hurried in to get out of the cold. Her Mom Juji and her dog Butter greeted me in the kitchen, and we took a bunch of silly pictures to mark the occasion. Ann was always accommodating in that way. She took me under her wing and humored my mad flights of fancy, somehow knowing it was so much more than pretend, healing something in both our wounded souls. We made a good pair. She would join me on this first leg, wherein we traveled to Potsdam to see our friend Missy, and then to Rochester (by way of Bath before there was GPS). We loaded the car, I bundled a vintage fur coat in the back, and we were off.
Belinda Carlisle, in a semi-hit that was marginally retro even then, sang over the stereo system on a cassette mix I’d made for the journey. Yes, cassette, with the sensitive shiny filament (avoid magnetic force), and Side One/Side Two options (flip it and rewind it). It was the olden days and we were young then.
I FEEL THE MAGIC
LIKE I NEVER FELT BEFORE
I IMAGINE THAT IT’S ALWAYS BEEN THERE
I FEEL THE MAGIC
THERE’S AN ANGEL LOOKING AFTER ME
ANGEL BABY GIVE ME MORE AND MORE
I’d made the mistake of planning the trip for early March, somehow not realizing that it wouldn’t quite be spring by that point and winter had a few more weeks to reign. As we drove through the backroads of upstate New York, high banks of snow surrounded us, brilliant and bright in the winter sunlight. The roads were dirty with mud and salt, and we sped along as that silk scarf fluttered the entire way. After about an hour, we made our first stop – at a P&C (though not the same store from which I had stolen a Wine Cooler in even younger and more foolish days – so young and foolish that I didn’t even drink it, I only wanted the thrill of the theft). We picked up snacks and soda, and were back on the road. The sun was as high as it would get in the winter sky, and the sky was a stunning shade of blue. I remember it so well… somehow I knew that one day I would look back at the moment and realize it marked the start of something wonderful. That something wasn’t a relationship or love affair or million-dollar-lottery-win. It was the start of my young adulthood – those precious years that most of us squander away without realizing it. I wanted to realize it. I wanted to remember. Two and a half decades later, I still do.
TODAY I WOKE UP BY MYSELF
I HIT THE STREETS I WONDERED WHAT SHOULD I DO
I NEVER NOTICED FROM THE START
THAT I COULD FEEL ALIVE AGAIN
THAT I COULD FEEL A PART OF…
We passed through town after little town, places that time seemed to have forgotten, or simply left paused as it marched on to more exciting spaces. Quaint streets that were nice enough to visit (but looked like they would stifle anyone, even in the spring or summer), were covered in snow, and winter held out a conciliatory hand of beauty and charm. We stopped one last time, near an ice-covered pond. Across its clean expanse, the bank on the opposite side was lined with pine trees. Crossing my arms and pulling a ridiculous fur coat tightly around me, I asked Ann to take a photograph while I stood in front of the pretty tableau.
Back in the car, we sped along, further north until we finally reached Potsdam. At the time, I was always waiting for when we reached the destination, consistently hoping to find some happy ending or sense of completion. I wanted to be safely ensconced in my future adulthood, and I wanted it yesterday. I despised uncertainty. I abhorred the muddled ambiguity that marked the world of the twentysomething. And yet I forced myself to remember it all because I hoped one day this would be the time I’d look back and realize when it was all starting to happen. The journey had begun. And yes, it was magical.
So, leap years… are they like a Daylight Savings thing? Do we need them to make up some weird little discrepancy in the calendar? I forgot my grade school lessons on this topic. We’re not having one right now anyone, but my heart goes out to those who were born on a February 29, because it’s not happy for you this year.
{This should probably be one of the #TinyThreads, but we’ve already done that today.}
It’s the first day of March, and proverb has it marching in like a lion. I happen to love lions so that’s not a bad thing, and for many of us the roar of them is nothing but an indicator that a classic movie is about to begin. March is the month when spring officially begins, even if it won’t feel like it for a while. I’ll take it on a technicality, so let the fanfare and roar be grand and bold. Oh, I realize there are still a few more pesky weeks of winter, but now is the time to plan and begin the earliest motions of spring cleaning. (We have so much to do inside that it must begin soon or we won’t finish before summer.)
A new project is in the works too, which means things are extra busy around here, so let me go work on it a bit while you peruse how we do March around here:
I was very young when I first felt one with my fingers.
I’d stepped into the open crotch and raised myself up into arms that reached skyward.
It must have been a warm spring day because my memory tells me it was summer when it happened but the bloom calendar has this in dispute. Pussy willows bloom in early spring, so when I climbed into a large specimen as a child it was probably only April. Near the bottom of a slight slope in our neighbor’s yard, a magnificent pussy willow shrub had grown into a substantial tree, making use of the water that would occasionally dampen that section of yard.
Like forsythia and witch hazel, pussy willows marked the early spring blooms that signaled the happy demise of another winter. I bent a few twigs, breaking them off, and quickly climbed down, the little fuzzy prize procured. I don’t know why I would have been so high in a tree so early in the season, but kids are weird that way. Whenever the fruit trees bloomed I seemed to find myself up in their boughs, gleefully avoiding the buzzing bees making their pollinating rounds.
There is no more narrative on that pussy-grabbing day – I only remember being in the pussy willow and taking a few small stems with me. I think it remains in my memory bank because I have always thrilled at famous flowers or fruits being found in their native habitat, growing happily outside. Having seen the pussy willow in bouquets on various teachers’ desks, and learning about them in class, I was enrapt by their existence outside in a neighbor’s yard. It’s the same spell that was cast as I passed a tree fern and a stand of blooming agapanthus just casually thriving in a San Francisco courtyard. I was an adult then, but I remember it distinctly because we don’t see such things in the wilderness of upstate New York.
The renowned furry buds of the pussy willow are actually the catkins of the male flower. That’s right – the trademark kitten-like blooms that give the pussy willow its name are guys. The actual flowers that later appear are like tiny little clouds that dance about the fuzzy catkins. It’s all rather charming and mysterious, not unlike the shift from winter to spring, where things seem to happen in the mystical night, and life begins again as ice melts into water and the sounds of peepers fill the darkness.
This Japanese hot pot hodge-podge dish was my first encounter with kabocha squash and daikon, and it was glorious. Having previously avoided the Japanese hot pot craze, this also marked my first foray into that vaunted territory, so this initial trial was amateurishly executed, but the results tasted so good I must have done something right.
My favorite part was easily the kabocha squash, whose nutrient-rich skin is also edible once cooked a bit. I microwaved it for about four minutes before it went in the stew, which made for a more pliable gourd. After cutting it in half and scooping out the seeds, I chopped it into chunks, keeping the skin intact. (Have faith and go with it.)
This was also my virgin brush with daikon, which I peeled, cut in half, and sliced into little half moons. Tasting one, I relished the distinctive radish bite – the perfect contrast to the mellow, buttery nuttiness of the squash. Based on these two ingredients alone, we were well on the way to something good, but more flavor was coming.
The base of this is a decent sprinkling of toasted sesame oil, a thinly-sliced yellow onion, some freshly-grated ginger, a hefty helping of miso paste (see if you can find a low-sodium version) and an ample dash of mirin for deglazing. There is a big bunch of kale in the version I made (the original recipe says collard or mizuna greens can also be used) and a cup or two of super-firm tofu chopped into little cubes. It doesn’t get much healthier than that. For additional earthy flavor, there’s a heaping pile of shiitake mushrooms. Taken together, the ingredients turn about six cups of water into a golden stew. The kabocha skin softens into something firm but yielding – a most interesting texture that never veers into anything tough or crunchy. Try it out – if you really don’t like it, leave it off (along with all those extra vitamins ensconced within the green skin).
My next meet-up with miso may be the miso chocolate chip cookies that Ms. Kumai raved about in her book. It’s a winter of miso madness, but I’m not mad about it in an angry way. Miso makes me happy.
I don’t usually get to embrace the morning. It passes in a rush of waking and showering and doing my best impression of a man who can dress himself for work. As it likely it for many others, my mornings are on auto-pilot, and the older I get the more mundane and drudge-like they sometimes feel. Every once in a while a blip will occur, some minor snag that reminds me I’m still imperfectly human no matter how many times I’ve done this: a squirt of lotion instead of toothpaste on the toothbrush that is just about to go in my mouth, a drawstring that gets right in the way of the stream of urine, or putting one contact lens into the eye that already had one in already. Fun, fun, fun.
Once upon a time I practiced meditative mornings over the weekends – when sun was out, either reflecting brilliantly on the snow, or mingling softly among the blades of grass – and there was no music, no television, and no washer/dryer duet. Silence and stillness. It grounds the heart, setting a bedrock of peace for the day no matter where it might take us. I miss those meditative mornings. Perhaps I’ll set my alarm a bit earlier so I have time to start the day in peace. It may make a difference.
Meditation need not be anything complicated or lengthy. Actually, it’s better in my case if it’s neither, and simplicity is integral to the experience. Even just five to ten minutes of sitting in uninterrupted silence each day can work wonders. If you can stretch it to fifteen, that’s even better, but something is better than nothing. I find it takes a few minutes to clear my brain of worries and plans and concerns and daily stuff. That’s why it’s sometimes easier to do it first thing in the morning.It’s quieter then, too.
So here’s to those contemplative mornings. May they greet the day in peace, and carry the mindset through the rest of the hours.
It finally dawned on me that I’ve been channeling Tina Turner in ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’ for all my adult life. Bust a deal, face the wheel. #RaggedyMan
The golden luster of all those little dickless statuettes has hopefully not yet worn off for all the Oscar-winners from last night, but we are definitely moving forward into the next week, as it’s the last one in February. The sooner it’s over, the better. On with one quick look back…
