Discovering New Music From the 1980s – Prefab Sprout

by James Wallace Harris, 10/6/23

I get very few hits when I write about music, but I’m hoping to find a few old music addicts like me who didn’t discover Prefab Sprout back in the 1980s. Over the decades, I occasionally discover a band I’ll play obsessively for weeks. Well, I discovered Prefab Sprout on John Darko’s YouTube channel a few weeks ago and I’ve been playing them ever since. I started playing them on Spotify and Apple Music, but I loved them so much I’ve been ordering the CDs. I have a feeling I won’t get tired of this band for several more weeks.

It’s hard to put a love of music into words, so just listen below. At first, only a few songs grabbed me, especially the first two on Jordan the Comeback. But as I continued to play the albums more songs became great. This is why streaming music is so great. I can keep trawling the past until I find another band that pushes all my buttons.

JWH

Remembering the Sixties in Two Bad Movies

by James Wallace Harris, 10/4/23

I’m always shocked by how much American society has changed since the 1960s when watching movies and television shows from that decade. I graduated high school in 1969.

I’m curious how people born after the 1960s picture it in their mind’s eye. I grew up in the 1960s and remember two versions of that decade. I mostly recall the pop culture 1960s that everyone learns about in history and from the media, but if I think about it, I remember another 1960s, one far more mundane, and quieter. The difference you might say between The Beach Boys in 1963, and The Beatles in 1969.

Over the last two nights, Susan and I watched two movies from the 1960s that reminded me of the less famous version of that decade: Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number (1966) and Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding (1967). Neither film was particularly good, but I found them both to be fascinating time capsules of that other 1960s.

Someone growing up in the 21st century would probably find both films stupid and even offensive. They would probably wonder where the smartphones, tablets, computers, and social media were, and why no one used certain now universal four-letter words routinely as adjectives, adverbs, and nouns. I’m sure they would think the acting stilted and why people fit into roles, especially gender roles. Those thinking a little deeper would wonder why all the famous 1960s pop culture was missing. But I think the thing that would standout the most, was the attitude both movies presented regarding sex. You’d think people living in the 1960s were Victorians.

Both Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number and Doctor, You’ve Got to Be Kidding were about sex, but neither showed actual nudity or anyone having sex. Doctor is about Sandra Dee getting pregnant and three boyfriends wanting to marry her. None of the three had had sex with her. And the only reason we know Sandra Dee had sex with her boss, George Hamilton, was because the movie showed fireworks.

Boy is about Bob Hope, a late middle-aged real estate agent getting accidently involved with sexy movie star Elke Sommer, but not really. Elke Sommer plays a French actress famous for making movies where she takes bubble baths. She really wants to do dramatic roles and free herself from tub casting. Ironically, we see her taking several foamed covered baths in this film. 1966 is before they started having nudity in films, but it tries hard to show as much of Elke Sommer as possible. Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number advocates good old fashion puritanical values while promoting itself with the allusion of sex.

I thought both films were accurate with the clothes, houses, furniture, and cars. The look of the other sixties does come across in these films. Even the lame jokes and goofy dialog gave off the right vibes for the times.

Both films were aimed at the silent majority but tried to appeal to the emerging youth culture. It’s strange how we see counterculture slowly take over Hollywood by watching old movies and television shows from the late 1960s and 1970s. Very few movies in the middle 1960s showed what was happening in the rock world, or counterculture. If they had rock music, it was generic instrumental shit. Hollywood lagged for several years recognizing the social impact of rock.

I remember seeing The Graduate in late 1967 and thinking how radical it was. The soundtrack used Simon and Garfunkel. That was tremendously exciting at the time because it felt like my generation was finally being recognized. However, seeing it recently was another shock. It wasn’t that radical at all, not how I remembered feeling it in December 1967. The Graduate was still much closer to that quiet version of the sixties than the infamous loud sixties. I see it now as a transitional film.

It wasn’t until 1969, with Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider, that we began to see that notorious version of the 1960s. I remember how shocking both films were when I saw them at the theater. But by then, my personal sixties were closer to those films. But in 1966 and 1967, my life was still like the Bob Hope and Sandra Dee flicks.

Another way to look at it was Hollywood was censored for showing real life for many decades, and finally in the late 1960s changes in the laws allowed it to portray a more real America.

I’m not sure any film captures the times in which they were made. They all create a mythic view. But I need to think about that. Are there any films from the 1960s that come close to how I lived in that decade? Do you have a film, from any decade, that you feel represents something close to how you grew up? I was too young, but I do remember people like the characters in America Graffiti. Actually, I remember people like the Bob Hope and Sandra Dee characters too. Maybe it’s the characters and settings that feel more historical than plots.

JWH

On Rereading

by James Wallace Harris, 10/2/23

This week I started rereading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, a novel first published in 1961. I was shocked by how much I disliked it. In my memory it was a terrific book. Back in 1970 I went to see Catch-22 the movie when it came out. I was so impressed I went to a bookstore, bought the book, went home, read it, and then went back to see the film again. For over fifty years I’ve thought of Catch-22 as a classic.

This week I listened to two hours of the novel before giving up. I can’t believe I ever loved that book. It’s sort of like how I feel when I catch Gilligan’s Island on TV, I can’t believe that in the eighth grade it was my favorite television show. Whenever I see a clip of Gilligan’s Island now, I assume I must have been brain damaged as a kid. I wondered the same thing when listening to Catch-22.

Maybe I’ve just lost my sense of humor. I loved Saturday Night Live when it came out back in 1975, but I’ve found it painful to watch for decades now. I’ve come to realize that I truly dislike lame satire. Heller appeared to take one absurdist point-of-view and stretched it out over a 21-hour audiobook. It felt like hearing a Who’s on First routine that never ended.

I came to the book expecting to find philosophical insight into WWII, and it just wasn’t there. Catch-22 is considered an anti-war classic, but I didn’t feel that in 2023. The film version of M.A.S.H. also came out in 1970. That was the height of the Vietnam War. Both stories felt like anti-war brilliance in 1970, but insane in 2023. Fifty-three years later, and after many other wars, such silliness no longer seems appropriate.

Obviously, I’ve changed over the decades, but I think there’s something else that’s changed. Postmodernism has crashed and burned. Postmodernism took us down a wrong path, and it’s time to retrace our steps.

I still reread my childhood favorite book, Have Space Suit-Will Travel which came out in 1958. It continues to work. It seems to be a genuine touchstone to my past. I find great insight into who I was as a kid and who I wanted to be when I grew up. To me, it was a science fiction version of Great Expectations — including the cynicism I give it in retrospect.

I also read an abridged version of Great Expectations in high school and have reread the full novel since. It seems to grow in maturity, especially as I read more about Charles Dickens. As a teenage boy I identified with Pip and his frustration with Estella. But as an old man, I figure Pip was a stand-in for the older 1858 Dickens, and Estella and Miss Havisham were stand-ins for Ellen Turan and her mother. The depth of Great Expectations grows with every rereading.

This morning I watched a video about rereading books by Anthony Vicino called “You Should Read These 12 Books Every Year.” Vicino is one of those people who want to get ahead in life quickly by reading self-help books. Because he wanted to succeed quickly, and many successful CEOs read fifty-two books a year, Vicino decided to read one hundred books in a year and get ahead twice as fast. What Vicino learned was to read fewer books. And rereading was the secret to success.

I’ve been thinking I need to do more rereading. This video made me wonder what twelve books I would reread every year. Would they be fiction or nonfiction? And would they be modern or postmodern? I’m starting to think we all took a wrong turn around 1960, at least in fiction. The trouble is since 1960 nonfiction has been overwhelming us with expanding knowledge that we need. Art and philosophy couldn’t handle that explosion of information and we got postmodernism.

I need to do a lot of rereading, and rethinking. What books will be ruined by my maturity and what books will reveal their own deeper maturity?

JWH

Have You Ever Wanted to Paint?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/27/23

I spend my days grazing on ideas. I listen to music, watch television or movies, read books, articles, or short stories, look at art books, browse the internet, read history, study popular science, and consume a lot of YouTube videos. All of it is about idea processing.

For breakfast, this morning I read “Painting of Hannah” by Lan Samantha Chang in the September 2023 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Follow the link if you want to read the story too.

“Painting of Hannah” is a short story about a young American, Jacob, studying art in France. Jacob stays at an atelier, apprentice to Thomas Gaugnot, a master painter who is trained in the naturalist technique, a student of Rennes, who was a student of Renoir, with a lineage all the back to Leonardo.

Gaugnot comes across like a Zen master, not saying much but tricking Jacob into seeing. Jacob must sacrifice both his ego and his desire for the beautiful artist’s model, Hannah, who he paints every day. Hannah, a young woman, lives with the older Gaugnot, and is Gaugnot’s muse. Gaugnot tells Jacob:

“They say my technique is obsolete,” Gaugnot said. “That is true. It is secret. It became a secret because no one cared. The attention of the world turned away from this kind of painting, what you call naturalism. You—­” His gaze pushed Jacob back; the chair creaked. “You are here to learn the techniques of this secret.” He smiled a small, triumphant smile. “You think it is romantic.”

We watch as Jacob learns to see. I’ve made a few lame attempts to learn to draw, but I’ve never stuck with it. I’ve even had some classes. I’ve learned with a few hours of work I can show some improvement, but I know becoming an artist takes years. That’s why I gave up, but that was lame of me.

I have several friends who are currently studying various kinds of painting. I admire them for not giving up. You don’t have to compete with John Singer Sargent to enjoy learning to draw and paint. You don’t have to move to France and study with a master for years. Ten thousand hours might make you a master, but thirty hours is enough to produce amazing results. Yet knowing that doesn’t allow me to apply myself at learning to draw. I hate that.

I wish I had that discipline because what I really want is to learn to see like an artist. That’s what the story hints at. That us ordinary folk are blind to most of the visual world. Gaugnot pushes Jacob into seeing what’s in front of the rest of us that we ignore.

The human eye can only see a tiny portion of the visual spectrum or hear a sliver of the audio spectrum. and there are other wavelengths of electromagnetic spectrum that are even beyond our senses. So, it’s a shame we don’t even make the most of what we can perceive.

Evidently, learning to paint means learning to see what we’ve never bothered to look at. I like that. I like that because that’s what I do all day long with my information grazing.

I feel reading and watching helps me discern finer shades of ideas, and learning to write is learning to paint with words. Writing these blogs is learning to see more into the spectrum of language.

But I wonder about Gaugnot and Jacob. They learn to put what they see on a canvas, but do we see what they saw when looking at their paintings? We might see beauty but without understanding the insight. And if I read something written by someone discerning something specific in the reality of ideas, can I discern it too by reading their writing? Or is it only telling me that I need to go look for myself?

There was something in this story, “Painting of Hannah” about Nietzsche that intrigued me. It was the concept of “Eternal return.” It hints at a Groundhog Day existence. That’s the thing about learning to discern all there is from the firehose of information we live with daily; it would take several lifetimes to learn how to perceive everything. Are we Bill Murray living the same life over and over? Are the Hindus right about reincarnation?

I don’t think I’m coming back, so I want to distinguish details as I can before I die, both visually and cognitively. I wonder if I shouldn’t study drawing again. Would the discipline I got from learning about light also apply to studying the perception of ideas?

All my life I’ve wished I had more self-discipline, but if a genie from a magic lamp offered me three wishes, what would be the downside if I asked for more discipline? There’s always a downside in those tales. Maybe I’ve already been granted that wish and I’m living the existence of eternal return.

Tonight, I might snack on “Painting of Hannah” again and reread the story before I go to bed. Reading short stories is like learning to paint, you must keep looking to see everything.

Tomorrow I will wake up and find something else to inspire me for the day. Jacob worked on the same painting daily for months. Is that the key? Maybe I should stay with one concept for months. Maybe the secret is not accumulating more information but studying the same information repeatedly.

JWH

Hitting a Cognitive Barrier

by James W. Harris, 9/24/23

I crashed into a cognitive barrier trying to write my reactions to The Trouble with Harry and To Catch a Thief, two Alfred Hitchcock movies from 1955. After two drafts I realized I wasn’t getting where I wanted to go. I know I don’t want to write movie reviews — the perfect place to find them is Rotten Tomatoes. Nor did I want to describe a film — just go to Wikipedia or IMDB. I wanted to write an essay that captured what I got out of watching those films at age 71.

Time is running out, so I need to make the most of every experience. That involves understanding myself at a deeper cognitive level. One I’m finding harder to reach as I age. On the other hand, aging is giving me more wisdom. The cognitive barrier is being able to express what I’m learning by getting older. But aging is also wearing down my brain. What one hand giveth, another takes away.

Writing is thinking outside of the head. Thoughts are generated inside the head from emotional reactions. Thoughts are fleeting. Thoughts are like cream stirred into coffee, creating little patterns that quickly dissipate. Writing is about capturing that initial pattern and making sense of it by showing how it relates to the memories of millions of past patterns.

Very few people can describe exactly how they feel, and few of those people can explain why they feel the way they do. There are rare individuals that can compose their thoughts inside their heads and eloquently convey the results in speech. Most of us need to think outside our minds via writing and editing.

Even when we feel our written words are clear, readers seldom find clarity. Communicating with words is difficult at best and often impossible. What we think we’re expressing can often take a different path to each reader like those spaghetti strings we see in hurricane reports. I might believe I’m writing about Jacksonville, while some readers think I’m writing about Bermuda while others Miami and Charleston.

I enjoyed The Trouble with Harry better than all the other Hitchcock films we’ve watched this month, including Rebecca, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and Strangers on a Train, films most critics admire a great deal more. However, I thought The Trouble with Harry had many flaws, but then Hitchcock is a flawed filmmaker.

How can I admire a movie that doesn’t measure well against the best movies I’ve seen over a lifetime? This gets into complexity and even multiplexity. I need to relate several reactions that contradict each other. The three films I admired and enjoyed the most this month have been The Trouble with Harry, Twelve O’Clock High, and Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell. All three were feel-good movies to me, but they each made me feel good in a unique way. Is the word “feel-good” even useful? Many moviegoers might interpret the term “feel-good” so differently that these three movies would not fit their definition.

Should I even use the term? Shouldn’t I just describe exactly what I felt? Will that be clearer?

In my second draft I had a breakthrough. I realized to understand how I react to films I’d need to understand what I expected from them. But my expectations have changed widely over the years. And will my readers have the same expectations? It was then I realized that what I’m expecting from movies at 71 is different from my younger self. Even describing my own emotional experiences is a moving target. But explaining why that’s so hits another cognitive barrier.

I need to think about that.

Putting everything into words precisely is so difficult. Should I even try? I believe most people don’t because all they value is personal experience. Why tell anyone about our perceptions when they have their own?

Do you see why writing that essay became such a black hole?

JWH