On Friday morning after Thanksgiving, I woke up early and went downstairs and wrote. What I wrote was no good, but at least I tried and it was early and I thought about trying to wake up early and write every morning. I’m still thinking about that. I just seem to need a certain amount of daylight to think. Or maybe I’ve programmed myself to think that the sun and my brain are linked.It’s gotten pretty dark just now. If this seems stupid, now you know why.
One of the good things that came out of my bad writing was the realization that I had to listen to music. It was the beginning of the SOTD panic period–when I started to worry about missing SOTD’s and whether I was somehow failing in this exercise that I set myself. More rules, more battering, more self-doubt, but at least it got me to plug in the extremely bright CD player/radio on the side of the bed. I’d unplugged it because it was something of a beacon in a room that was already overwhelmingly light for me.
I turned on KCRW, and it was OK, but Chris, always ready for a technolgical intervention, asked if I wanted to listen to KUT on the computer. The infamous webcast. It wasn’t John–day after Thanksgiving–turns out it was Angela Miller. And she was playing great music.
The time change made listening a little strange, because when she’d say the time, it was really two hours earlier for us, but since all I was doing was unpacking my clothes (including the five pairs of jeans I brought–more later on the jeans obsession in L.A.–not a SOTD topic–need a catchy title like 41 Years Old and Still Obsessed with My Ass), so it didn’t matter. No one was going to be late to school, but it was disconcerting.
The other disconcerting thing is the notion that radio is in no way local anymore. I know everyone seems to find this wonderful, but I find it more than a bit troubling. My life story could be traced as a series of radio stations, and when I go back to those places, I go back to those stations. WBAB (”BabyLON”) and KC101 are the hallmarks of Long Island. Mountain Air is Asheville, KFOG Berkeley (”I’m Don Pardo and it’s time for 10 at 10″), the incredible station in Vermont, KCRW and the birth of Warren Ulney’s “Which Way, L.A.” in the wake of the riots that opened with “A Love Supreme.” There was classic rock to keep me sober in Minneapolis, WPRB and WMMR to get me through the mornings at Princeton (already a weather freak, and where would any of us have been without the Hooters? But there was another local Princeton station I listened to religiously my freshman year–WPST!–the internet is the wave of the future.) And then we go back to WNEW (Scott Muni–the Professor–and Dave Herman) and WPLJ (Pete Fornatelle) and the brief brilliant year of 99X and new wave radio and back all the way to my mom listening to Imus in the Morning on WNBC. There’s my timeline, kind of mixed up, but that’ll do (but we can’t forget all the rock and roll A to Z weekends on KROC and KLOS–the basis of my marriage–semi-competitive rock and roll alphabetization).
I’m not sure how I’ll adapt to being able to hear John Aielli wherever I go. I may, I may not. But the Friday after Thanksgiving, David Bowie came to my rescue. I felt like I was in a Wes Anderson movie, the one where the sons go to their parents house, but their parents have moved to a smaller house, and everyone has to figure out how to share a bathroom again. A chihuahua runs around in a pink sweater and no one makes the kids stop watching TV while they walk on a treadmill. The wife of the oldest son can think of nothing but songs, writing, and finding jeans that make her look cool while not trying to look cool. Ultimately, she is forced to ask her brother-in-law (the grown up one who would be played by Luke Wilson in this film because he is very wistful at this time in his life) to look at her jeans and tell her which ones to wear (the mother-in-law, the younger brother-in-law–NOT Jake Gyllenhall, somebody I’ve never heard of would play him, and his girlfriend have already weighed in on the butt-uation). This clearly goes beyond the role that brothers-in-law are supposed to play, but in her desperation, she has no choice.
In the movie, “Oh! You Pretty Things” plays as she walks out of the house with the brother-in-law, wearing the pair that emerged triumphant from the family scrutiny. Slo-mo close up on the back pockets.
This family has never had a daughter or a sister before. At 41, she has initiated them into the drama of the girl who can’t leave the house on Friday night because she can’t figure out which pants to wear. They’ve all experienced it one on one, with girlfriends or husband. They just never knew it could be a family sport until this night.
And remember, “Oh! You Pretty Things” became the SOTD the second I heard it eight hours earlier. It’s not like I make this stuff up.
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