The Scheider Way

Lately, I keep coming across Roy Scheider in my recent movie-watching.  A few weeks ago, I picked up a cheap DVD copy of All That Jazz, wherein he burns down the house in Bob Fosse’s loosely autobiographical take on his crazy, sordid and sometimes brilliant life as choreographer and film director.  Jaws is right around the bend as I watch it every May to grasp onto that summer beach town vibe the movie imparts so well.

And I’m sitting here watching the long out-of-print 70s flick, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York on Vudu.  I wasn’t signed on for Vudu, but caught wind that they were showing this.  It’s one of those crazy, faded “HBO in the 70s” touchstones, a mediocre movie the channel showed about 15 times a day back then that got burned into my mind, but never made the jump from VHS to DVD.  (I suspect it may not even have jumped from Betamax to VHS, otherwise I would have found it in the shit bins of all those cheap CD/DVD warehouses that liberally dotted Manhattan in the 90s.)

I love 70s movies set in New York.  Something about that time and place, the extremely rough-edged vibe the city bore as it nearly went bankrupt mid-decade then went through nonsense like the Son of Sam murders and street gangs … but underneath the negative hype, that sort of endearing gruffness and no-frills way of seeing the world.  I think that’s what I’ve always loved about New York, and didn’t really understand this is what beckoned to me years ago, because I felt the same way, too.  A lot of people in small towns do, but they just can’t make the logical connection with cities.  It’s the only real thing I respect about living here, as a lot of the other shit (crime, gentrification, bad manners) drives me crazy.

Roy Scheider may not have ruled the 70s as an actor, but he was a solid leading man who could convey a vast range of emotions in whatever role he played.  His best acting trait was how he brought out his characters’ self-awareness; he somehow demonstrated that the people he played could step back in any given situation and laugh at themselves, or acknowledge they were full of shit, or just admit that they were afraid.  “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat,” he mutters to Captain Quint the first time he sees how big the shark is in Jaws.  In a normal situation, a snappy one liner.  In the reality of the movie, a guy who can’t swim, on a small boat with two maniacs, who sees a massive shark rise up out of the waters he’s chumming, and his real thought is, “We’re fucked!”

I often use that phrase about the bigger boat when faced with a rough situation, knowing that a bigger boat is not in the offing, and it’s just going to take whatever I can muster to get through.  “Bigger boat” could mean anything from faith to untapped reserves of sheer will power.  That’s what I think when I think Roy Scheider.  Not an average man, but a slightly above average man willing to face the unknown.  That’s pretty much how I feel about my life.

Scheider at his best conveys that sense of having made it halfway through life and feeling bewildered.  Smart enough to hold down his fort, but smarter in that he knows many things in the world are far beyond his understanding, and always will be.  Kurt Vonnegut did much the same with his books around the same time, save he completely dropped his guard and let his readers know, I don’t have a fucking clue as to what’s going on, but allow me to let you laugh with and at me, and all this other stuff.

That’s what strikes me most about making it through my 40s: understanding how small you are, and that understanding setting you free, if you let it.  Some people go in the exact opposite direction, cementing themselves into whatever image they’ve constructed through their adulthood, and trying to use it to hold power over others.  I gather that mentality feeds on itself when someone gets placed in a position of authority, and I wouldn’t call it a lie so much as a trick of the mind.  A trick of the mind that very well might land you in a mansion or corner office, but also bearing the heavy load those ways of life entail.  Yours if you want it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not like winning the lottery – it’s more like being chased by wolves.

It’s always good to relate to age-specific role models throughout your life, whether they’re literally in your life, or screen archetypes like Roy Scheider presented in his 70s movies.  That’s what I’ve found over the years, the sense of change in yourself, constant, but nearly impossible to see in real time.  What made sense to me in my 20s doesn’t make as much sense to me now.  Or my 30s.  I imagine I’ll ease into another set of values in my 50s, and onwards hopefully.  I’d say if you find yourself constantly relating to people decades younger than you, you’re either making a mistake or bullshitting yourself.  The same for much older, too: a lot of people are nowhere near as wise as they think they are.

Lately, I’ve also caught the minor bug to watch these “portable camera” horror movies that have come into vogue over the past few years: The Paranormal Activity series and V/H/S.  There’s a rank stupidity to these movies that I find endearing, quaint in the context of the real fears you will feel as you get on in life and watch death and destruction take various people you know.  I guess kids see themselves as so fearless that they need to create these bullshit fears to bear some sense of gravitas they know they don’t have.  Or they’re positioned so far from the real, every-day proposition of death that they create these grisly scenarios to underline the horror of life ending that they understand virtually nothing about.  In a way, it might be grasping onto childhood, an odd nostalgia for that fear of the dark so many kids have, and creating these violent/high-octane horror movies to make those irrational fears lurking in the dark seem that much more grotesque and frightening.

Oddly enough, Jaws was just as guilty of this, but the way that movie was made, the extra attention to character development, setting a tone, capturing a season, imbuing the characters with real depth … it just leaves modern-day horror movies in the dust.  And this is because of actors like Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss, taking control of their roles in ways that a bunch of cardboard cutouts in their 20s screwing around with video-cams just can’t approach on any level.  I don’t know if this is a generational thing, or indicative of how much things have changed since the 70s?  All I know is I could feel and relate to characters in horror movies from that time, while I can’t take a bunch of kids seriously waiting to be victimized by some goofball villain or invisible force.  Why is this?  Why can’t horror movies be made now with characters this real and human? 

(I write this knowing that two 70s horror movies, Halloween and Friday the 13^th, birthed this whole horrible genre.  Technically, Friday the 13th was 1980, but surely felt of the 70s.  It’s only the way of the world that these movies, which were considered overly violent, somewhat goofy and exploitative at the time, would be harbingers of the future.  Halloween is obviously the better movie with techniques any horror fan will go on all day about … but I remember thinking it was cheap at the time.  It just felt cheap.  And I like John Carpenter movies!)

But I digress.  I watch movies mostly to be entertained, and I gather it’s just different strokes for different folks these days.  But I always find it more gratifying when a character in a movie shows me something about myself, even in a summer blockbuster like Jaws.  I’m now watching the bonus material with the Jaws DVD, and I think Steven Spielberg (who was in his 20s while making the movie), nails it all: “When I first hear the word Jaws, I just think of a period in my life when I was much younger than I am right now, and I think because I was younger I was more courageous.  Or I was more stupid.  I’m not sure which.  So when I think of Jaws I think about courage and stupidity.  And I think of both of those things existing underwater.”

Roy Scheider in Jaws was the embodiment of those senses of courage and stupidity, and not knowing the difference.  The sort of hero who smacks of reality: a guy doing his job, who gets thrown into an impossible situation, and survives it more out of shit luck and rolling with whatever comes his way.  That may not sound like a good guide on how to live your life, but I can see that’s how it often works.

Nostalgia in Sheep’s Clothing

Listening to music as an adult is not the same as listening as a teenager.  I mean as a dedicated fan, someone who never loses the passion to have good new music in his life.  It becomes easier in some senses as your knowledge as a longstanding fan helps you spot influences and appreciate that a musician has his head on straight.  You gather that there’s really not much out there that is new, but there’s a lot out there that can sound new based on how a musician interprets his own talent through his influences.

It becomes harder in that you tend to hear the same things, over and over.  The so-so powerpop that fans rave about as the second coming of The Beatles, but you know it’s average pop music.  The electro/dance music that sounds just as boring and halfway there as the electro/dance music from the 90s and 80s.  But we’re supposed to pretend it’s good because it’s new, and uninformed writers are carrying on about what is essentially the same rave scene that has existed for decades.  The flavor-of-the-month indie rock band that is a shallow derivative of indie rock music from the 80s.

But to point this out is often regarded as sacrilegious.  It’s hearsay at the altar of eternal youth.  It makes you old.  Bitter.  Out of touch.

And I can live with that.  I’d rather be honest and use my experience to judge music accordingly.  Frankly, I’d rather just listen to music,  not judge it – this is a large reason why I don’t review it so much anymore.  If I don’t like it, I’d rather not listen to it, or be forced to listen to it for money then give an honest negative opinion.  I hardly have enough time for good music that I want to listen to … it seems like a bad proposition to listen to mediocre-to-bad music for money.  An even worse proposition to pretend I like it so I can keep a job!

That’s where I draw the line, and notice an affectation with fans and music writers that I call nostalgia in sheep’s clothing.  It makes sense for younger fans to defend their music against criticism.  It’s “their” music in some highly identifiable sense tied into their physical age.  And they don’t know any better.  They’re tasteless.  I mean that literally, not as an insult.  Their sense of taste is under-developed.  They have very little listening experience, very little to compare and contrast.  Sometimes you stumble onto brilliant things in that state – think Elvis or The Beatles and how much flak they caught from older fans when they first came along.  But most of the times, you listen to shit and claim it as your own.  Not knowing any better.  Not caring.

How do I know this?  Because I surely still have the Bo Donaldsen & the Heywoods, PaperLace and Terry Jacks songs on my iPod to prove it.  This music came out in my childhood in the mid-70s.  I love it, despite recognizing it’s utter shite.  It’s so intrinsically tied into my childhood that hearing it connects me directly to that time period, which wasn’t a bad time to be a kid.  My weird brand of nostalgia guarantees that I don’t look back with rose-colored glasses; those times surely were not better for me in any sense.  The simple act of remembering, I recognize, is a good and healthy thing.

That’s a glaring example of nostalgia.  Flash forward as little as two years, and you have punk, mostly in the form of The Sex Pistols and that whole English scene (that would not have existed without key American influences like The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The Ramones and the entire downtown NYC punk scene).  Punk was a different beast in the U.K. – it was much more popular and socially relevant than it was here.  Very few people in America saw The Sex Pistols play – most who did were there because of the “freak show” factor created by the media blowing this thing up to be much more intimidating than it was.  It was just a bunch of snotty British kids doing their best New York Dolls riffs, with a smart guy like Johnny Rotten coming up with some genuinely striking lyrics and concepts. Comparatively few people bought their albums at the time, too.  That was true of all these punk/new wave acts, save for eventual break-out stars like Blondie and The Talking Heads.

I single out punk because that’s where nostalgia in sheep’s clothing was birthed.  Nostalgia in sheep’s clothing is essentially older and/or more experienced music fans and writers priding themselves on still being cutting edge and hip, when the reality is they’re only presenting themselves as such due to their nostalgia for that time in their lives when they were age-specific to what was cutting edge and hip.

They would deny this vehemently.  Nostalgia, man, is for guys sitting around listening to Steve Miller and BTO albums, man.  Not people like me who have the new Alabama Shakes album and just went to that Mumford & Sons show the other night!

Right.  First time I heard Mumford & Sons, I thought, these guys sound like Dave Matthews Band roadies.  Really?  This is what all the fuss is about?  These guys are rustic, and authentic and the real thing?  I’ve spent the past two decades listening to a vast sea of alt country music that is far more rustic, and authentic, and real.  But I’m supposed to be falling all over myself because, I don’t know, there’s a hipster twinge thrown in because these guys are British and in their 20s?  Fuck’s sake, in the 90s they were pulling the exact same hype with Gomez, who were another similarly average band that I was supposed to be going crazy over.

The nostalgist in sheep’s clothing will present himself as someone who is pure of heart, who never “lost the fire” of discovery, who really understands “the kids” because he’s always been a champion of the underdog, the oppressed, the misunderstood.  If you could take Superman’s super-human abilities, but give them to Clark Kent, so he could walk around in his nerdy horn rims, still getting shot down by Lois Lane, but quietly possessing these awesome powers, that would be your perfect nostalgist in sheep’s clothing (save these days he’d have that standard-issue hipster beard).  He’s really a great guy – and he’s got dozens of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter who will confirm this.

Coming across people like this, when you listen to music for decades, becomes just as commonplace and repetitive as so much of the mediocre new music they espouse.  It gets tiresome.  The effect for me is like seeing Will Ferrell in the movie Step Brothers, wearing a t-shirt featuring the cover of Leo Sayer’s Endless Flight album … despite the fact that his character is in his 30s.  (Granted, there’s a reverse sort of hipness in anyone wearing a Leo Sayer t-shirt decades after the fact.)

They’re incapable of criticizing any new music because doing so might insinuate that they’ve “grown old” in some sense and thus are on the cusp of being hopelessly out of touch.  As most adults who don’t give a shit about this utterly childish nonsense are.  My Dad wore his disdain for rock and roll like a badge, and I loved him for it.  It didn’t mean I had to hate him or think he was small-minded … he just didn’t like the music and had no urge to do so.  I don’t have enough time to listen to music I love.  Most adults don’t have or make the time to listen to any music.  And they’re not losing any sleep over this!

So I’ve learned to treat the nostalgists in sheep’s clothing with a grain of salt.  They mean well.  I see what they’re doing.  I appreciate what they’re doing.  Sometimes they’re doing this, as noted, simply to keep working in a field that is built on exploiting the young and their unformed senses of taste.  I do mind the open-faced lying and kid gloves these guys (I rarely see women with this condition) will use when discussing new music that they and I know is sort of OK … but not the four- or five-star breakthrough it’s being hyped as.  It’s disingenuous, at best.

It’s the difference between good and great music.  The nostalgist in sheep’s clothing will tell you that great music is still being made … yadda yadda yadda … you just have to look for it … you just have to engage yourself in social media and keep up with the local live scene.  It’s on you to be the sort of overly responsible fan you never really were, save in whatever small scene you were in during your teens and 20s that you followed religiously, while ignoring everything else.

I don’t hear any great music being made these days.  I don’t hear any great bands.  I’ve heard bands and artists lean in that direction.  Wilco was on that path for awhile, until they dumped Jay Bennett, who clearly had a strong hand in the songwriting and production of the band.  Wilco’s sort of OK now.  And sort of OK isn’t a bad thing to be.  The Flaming Lips were on the path, too, for awhile.  But their last few albums, including the one they put out this past Tuesday, is amelodic garbage.  I don’t know what twisted path Steven Drodz is wandering down (I’m assuming he’s responsible for more of the music while Wayne Coyne does more of the lyrics), but it’s been pretty awful the past few years.

And you have singers like the late Amy Winehouse and Adele showing real promise, who are good, but I wouldn’t classify them as great.  That’s the thing.  I would argue with anyone that there is plenty of good music being made now.  A lot of it.  More than when I was a kid or a teenager.  Much more.  And I enjoy finding this stuff and listening to it, even now.

But there is no great music, and there are no great artists.  I’m talking giants from the 60s like The Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Doors, The Who, Motown, Stax Volt.  In the 70s, Bowie, Elton John, Springsteen, Seger, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, Van Morrison, any number of new wave bands, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield.  Even the 80s, people like Prince, U2, Cougar Mellencamp.  These people knew how to be inspired recording artists, write hits that would transcend their genre, appeal to the masses and have staying power.  They were superstars, and for good reason.

Nearly all of what I hear today is derivative, which is why I feel completely comfortable commenting on it, because I know the music.  I’m not a Glenn Miller fan putting down Black Sabbath because I understand Big Band music but don’t understand heavy metal.  I tend to know the music I have an underwhelming opinion on, and my opinion tends to be such because I’m aware of artists from the past making the same kind of music … only better.  There has been no massive paradigm shift in pop music over the past few decades.  Various production styles might have changed … but it’s still essentially melodic pop music.  Hiphop?  I tend to ignore it because, much as I recognized at some point in the late 80s, it bores me musically and receives far too much attention.  It should have been a trend that came and went by the mid-90s. 

(Acknowledging as much would be a death kiss for most music critics.  Of course, they can turn a blind eye on country music and no one will care.  But they’re somehow expected to play the game with this genre, which no one has ever quite justified to me.  In the 70s and 80s, critics took great pride in belittling the most popular music of the time, bands like Styx, Boston, Journey, REO Speedwagon, Eddie Money, etc.  Something happened in our culture in the past few decades that critics refuse to find fault with the most popular music of the time, especially if it crosses color lines.  You should go back and read the scathing reviews Barry White often suffered; Barry White had more talent in his little finger than everyone in hiphop has ever had.)

Being derivative isn’t bad.  The Black Crowes are completely derivative of early 70s rock bands like The Faces and Humble Pie.  Yet … there’s real talent there.  Chris and Rich Robinson know how to write good songs in that genre.  And they have the vibe of the music down to a T.

I don’t hold being derivative against the band – they’re musicians making music, the best they can.  It’s often the fan base, and the older fan base, the nostalgists in sheep’s clothing, waving the flag a little too high for my tastes.  It wouldn’t make me feel any younger, or any more in touch, raving about The Alabama Shakes as if they were operating on the same level as The Talking Heads or The Replacements.  I’d just feel like a liar.  And I’d have to wonder why I was lying.  (For the record, I downloaded the whole Alabama Shakes album for $5.00 on Amazon the day it came out, and I like it.  They’re a good band.  Not great.)

For the past few years, I routinely check in on this woman’swebsite.  I like her attitude and how much she obviously loves the bands she writes about.  I gather she’s around 30.  Some of the bands she writes about, I do like, but some just strike me as the usual suspects, hipster music that just doesn’t do much of anything for me.  It isn’t bad.  It isn’t good.  It’s very tasteful, acoustic-based artists making music that, again, sounds like folk rock from the 60s and 70s, sometimes the 80s, that I simply grasp was better then.  Not out of any senses of nostalgia or humiliating hipsters.  There were just better artists writing better songs.  How many times have I clicked on a link for new bands like this and wished, “Christ, I hope this is the one that actually lives up the hype.”

It’s not even this aspect that gets on me at times with bands like this.  It’s the overly earnest tone, the gawky self seriousness of so many of these artists.  Wispy guys with receding hairlines and beards who think they’re communicating some deeply felt human emotion, when they sound more like drunks spouting fractured self-help aphorisms at AA meetings.  These are people with musical talent – I’ll never deny that – but there is something so patently self reverential about these folks that I feel put off.  A generational thing?  Probably.  But again, these people are not reinventing the wheel.  They’re making music in a genre I’m entirely familiar with, and it’s not grabbing me.  Compared to artists like Joni Mitchell?  Jackson Browne? Loudon Wainwright?  Before them, Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger?

I’d love to give an enthusiastic thumbs up, but I just can’t.  Because I know better.  We all reach a point in our lives where we know better.  Is this a curse?  No.  It’s a sign to branch out, to move away from what we know and embrace other things.  And I’ve surely done that with so many other kinds of music.  I can appreciate that a lot of these musicians are willing to strip down their sound to just voice and acoustic instruments.  To me, that’s a sign of real musical talent, or at least people who want to stand or fall on that bare talent.  I can respect that on a very deep, abiding level.  And it’s a level I’d rather not bullshit people on when I’m not hearing anything substantial.  Doesn’t mean they can’t aspire to a higher level of creativity.  But chances are they won’t if the deeply average music they make now is heralded as “great” (the most over-used word in music).  There's the rub.

Little Lump

I can tell you now, the little things that happen in life, that you barely notice, far more often than not, turn out to be the biggest things.  John Lennon noted this as life happening while you’re busy making other plans.  There’s how you think your life is going to be, and how it is.  And hopefully the difference is, as you get older, how it is turns out to be all right.

Last weekend while grocery shopping, I leaned over to bag some onions and brushed my stomach against the rail of my cart.  In doing so, I felt a small lump just above my belly button.  I felt it with my finger.  What the hell is that, I thought.  A bruise?  I didn’t recall bumping into anything.  Some type of muscle strain?  It didn’t hurt.  It was just sort of there for no reason.  Made note of it.  Weekend went right on rolling, lifting weights that afternoon, boxing on Sunday.

But I noticed by Monday, that lump hadn’t changed, gotten any better or worse.  Long story short, I went to the doctor later in the week and learned that I had a small umbilical hernia that could be repaired through very straightforward out-patient surgery that takes less than an hour.

That’s the Readers Digest version.

The real version?  Christ, what a pile of shit I went through mentally and emotionally this week leading up to that relatively positive prognosis.  The worst thing you can do is what I did … immediately hit the web typing in stuff like “lump over belly button” and such … and coming up with all sorts of bullshit, some sensible, some demented, all geared to make my imagination run wild with dark thoughts of impending doom.  And I can guarantee you, your mind dwells on this shit leading up to actually finding out about whatever’s really going on.

In my mind, I had already homed in on the hernia explanation as it matched my symptoms: no pain, strange lump appears for no apparent reason in that exact location, disappears when the body is in a reclining position.  Or at least I was hoping it was that, given the other options would be cancerous or non-cancerous tumor or some type of contusion.

But this song pretty much describes how I felt: all alone in the center ring.  I have never felt so alone as in those two or three days when I dwelled on every possible negative outcome of this.  Self pity.  Self loathing.  Fucking up.  I spend a lot of time alone – once I got out of a small house filled with seven people, I guess the novelty of being on my own never wore off.  I’m one of those people who really don’t mind being alone.

But, man, there’s a massive difference between that sort of comfortable solitude and the truly desolate mind-fuck that you go through when faced with the prospect of something going very wrong with your body.  Next to Dad's passing, it's the bleakest emotion I've ever felt.

You have to understand, last time I required medical attention was in summer 1977 or so when a farm dog bit me on the ass while riding my bicycle on the back roads around my hometown.  I’ve pretty much gone through my adult life with the concept that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  (And I still subscribe to that.)  Your body will tell you when something is wrong.  Well, earlier this week, my body told me something was wrong, and I didn’t screw around trying to second guess or self prescribe.  I got it looked at, and thankfully it’s something that can be dealt with directly (and I’m hoping decisively).

And I’ve gone through my adult life with the attitude that you need to work out routinely, at least a few times a week, to keep your system running well.  It seems to me like not exercising is a bad idea, that people run into all sorts of shit, physically and mentally, when they become more sedentary.  Well, as I’m also figuring, this thing could have happened from working out too hard, or carrying too much body weight while routinely working out hard.  Another guy in my gym, in his late 50s, is going to need hip replacement surgery, based mainly on cartilage in his hip wearing down from years of running and biking.  (This guy worked out like a fiend leading up to this … running 4-6 miles a day, biking 3-4 times a week and taking my boxing class same number of times.)

And who knows, could just be in my genes that one day a tendon in my abdominal wall would give in just a little and give me this little lump to ponder.  Some things in your life were put into play long before you were born, and they simply open up like light and dark flowers when the time is right.

As I’ve noted before, life is blissfully unaware of whether you’re happy or sad, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy.  It will give you good things when you least expect it, and bad things without warning.  It doesn’t care … it just happens.  Good things happen to bad people?  Bad things happen to good people?  No.  Things, good and bad, happen to all of us.  And it’s our lot in life to take the good and bad in stride and go on living.

Good’s already happening for me from this thing, although you might want to ask me about this again when I’m high as a kite and cursing God for the stitches in my abdomen.  I needed an excuse to drop weight … boy, do I have one now, it’s already happening.  I was hardly eating earlier this week with my nerves on edge, and I’ve since realized when I do get back to working out, less weight will mean less strain on my tendons.  So all that fear and darkness I felt earlier in the week has served as profound incentive to truly get my ass in shape when the time comes.  Because I don’t ever want to feel that sort of darkness again.

But I will.  That’s the downside of something like this: a glimpse into the future in terms of my body betraying me.  Because that’s old age and eventually death: your body betraying you.  That simple.  I got to gaze into the crystal ball and see this for myself.  Everyone who goes through some type of unforeseen physical shit does … and usually in situations far worse than mine.  I can also see into the light in the darkness, that the best you can do is be strong, handle whatever’s been put in front of you with grace.  I wouldn’t call this optimism.  I’d call it reality for a sane person, sizing up options and making the best possible choices.  Knowing that somewhere down the road, we’re all going to get a knockout punch that we will not get up from.

Aside from that, pretty quiet week.  Got my Roku box working again, watching the first season of Justified, enjoying the end of winter.  This stuff may sound trivial, but it feels good to think trivial thoughts, and write trivial things, the comfort level that implies, because I know life is at its best when you’re just quietly doing things like this that make you happy in some small sense, that keep you sane, that keep your mind occupied and your sense of self engaged.  It’s been 35 years between doctor visits for unforeseen bullshit, and I’m hoping it’s 35 more.

The Back-Up Plan

Van Morrison recently put out an album called Born to Sing: No Plan B.  I found that title particularly odd.  At this point, in his later 60s, he’s got no financial worries.  What he chose to do with his life has paid off handsomely, surely beyond his wildest dreams.  Even if someone stole every penny he had, he’s of an age where the government would support him free of charge.  He’s reached a time in his life when Plan B is death.

But I’ll often hear of people discussing “the back-up plan” in regards to any artistic inclinations.  They’re usually idiots.  And they’re usually trying to impart their idiocy on someone much younger, and presumably more impressionable, that they should have a back-up plan just in case this rock and roll thing/acting/writing/artistic thing doesn’t pan out.  I would never tell someone starting out that, unless I was assuming their talents were so mediocre that they didn’t stand a chance of making it in any sense.

No one creates worthwhile art with a mindset that dwells on a Plan B.  It just doesn’t work that way.  Even if the art he’s creating occurs while he makes money doing something else.  We tend to forget people like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens had day jobs.  Poets, in particular, understand the bullshit of the “Plan B” mentality.  They lived “Plan B” lives and managed to create great poetry that many of us still read today.  Most novelists are on Plan B, most likely teaching at universities to judge by their bios.  Many writers you’re assuming are making a living at their craft more than likely aren’t.  A minute fraction of actors make a living at their craft.  We’re now entering an age where most musicians either now have or will have Plan B in effect, as it will be virtually impossible for them to make livings through writing, recording and performing music alone.  (And most are smart enough not to discuss the real Plan B: working spouse.)

Oddly, I’ll often hear musicians saying the best advice they’d give to young musicians would be to have a Plan B.  These are generally talented musicians who’ve had some level of success, playing in bands, recording, sometimes for years, but never quite locking into that higher level of success where their creative and financial futures were cemented.  They don’t seem to realize none of what they’ve created in their lives, none of the songs, none of the hours of great experiences playing live music, would have existed had they been rational enough to really bear down on that Masters in teaching instead of going on the road in the van in 1988.

At some point, they gave themselves completely over to the music, and did so for a long time … probably still do in some form.  Music is different from other artistic endeavors (save for movie making) in that it costs a small fortune to pursue: instruments alone costs hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, and then there are amps, microphones, effects, vans, buses, the need to travel and play, recording costs.  (Some might say Pro Tools has changed all that … but anyone recording with Pro Tools who doesn’t have studio-level experience is pissing in the wind production wise.  I’ve heard it.  If you don’t spend a few years learning how to mike instruments and use proper recording techniques, it sounds bland.  Of course, Pro Tools does allow musicians to forego massively expensive studio costs, provided they find a good recording space.)

At some point, they realized they were going to be destitute were they to depend on music alone to make a living.  Or writing.  Or acting.  Or painting.  I crossed that bridge at various points in my 20s and 30s where I found myself unemployed for weeks or a few months at a time and thinking, now’s my big chance, all day long, all week long, to hone my craft.

Mostly what I did was fret over my shrinking banking account and feel an odd sort of creative stasis set in.  I didn’t seize the day – it was more like seizing my dick.  I just shut down, each time.  I found I couldn’t create anything when I had to dwell on losing money and potentially going broke.  It made me realize I need a financial comfort zone to create anything.  Hardly the need to be rich.  But the need to know I could afford to go out and eat every now and then, buy music, see a movie, and not get that constricted feeling of the world closing down on me as I inched closer to financial demise.

Of course, trying to balance any sort of time or urge to write while working a 9-to-5 was, is and will be a huge pain in the ass.  But it’s the only way I’ve ever known, aside from writing while at college, and if you haven’t heard the news, I consider most of that writing dogshit.  I know there will be some people reading this who fondly recall those halcyon days, but I’m telling you now, if you go back and read the archives from the campus paper, the proof is not in the pudding.  Most of it was bad, or at least reads that way to me now.  Real bad.  Sure, there was a spark there, but that’s it.  I’m forever having old college chums ask, “Why don’t you write like that anymore?”  And the answer is because we were all shitheads back then, only you haven’t gone back and actually read what I wrote to verify this like I have!

Which isn’t to discount those days.  Those were good times, and that experience invaluable.  I still remember hanging out on the steps of Carnegie, talking with a girl who worked on the paper, her dying to know what I was going to do when I graduated, surely publications were pounding down my door to have me write for them.

No one was pounding down my door.  I was writing idiosyncratic humor columns (mixed with some truly awful “serious minded liberal arts student contemplates the cruel world” think pieces) on the editorial page.  Very few humorists make it onto editorial page, and the ones who do … Dave Barry?  I’ve always found Dave Barry unfunny.  That’s the pain of humor columnists for me.  It’s hard to be full-on funny all the time.  When you’re seeing a comedian on stage, that act usually represents weeks or months of writing, often with other comedy writers, to stumble onto the funniest lines and routines to shape into a solid one-hour show.

What I wanted to do back then … I’m doing now.  Just letting it loose as much as I can and seeing where it goes.  I gather as you grow up and then age, again, it’s hard to be funny all the time.  When things like parents passing on, houses catching fire, old friends getting weird, jobs grinding down sanity, occur routinely, it often feels just as good for me to write more contemplative pieces.  I’ve been through some desperately unfunny shit in my times; we all have.  While it would be great to say, let’s just laugh all our problems away, after awhile you realize you’d be better off staring them down and gathering you can make sense of all this.  Which is to say you need to develop the capacity to interpret really dark shit in whatever way allows you to stay sane.

And this, among other things, keeps me sane.  A lot of things do, and I pursue all of them knowing this.  This is the context that I put writing in, not whether or not I make a fortune at it, or even a living.  Plan B?  Van Morrison, give me a fucking break.  Hell, it might have been better for Van if he hit a really tough spot financially and had to go back to Belfast to, I don’t know, tend bar or something, to get an idea of how real people live, as opposed to cantankerous old dudes who sit around luxury homes thinking there’s such a thing as “Plan B” when death with his cloak and scythe is spooning with you in bed every night.

But to return to that original thought, if I had a Plan B mentality, I surely wouldn’t be doing this.  I’d be doing Plan B all the time and would have tossed aside any childish thoughts of creating something like this for any reason.  I never would have written anything in my adult life.  I’d have gotten out of college, tried to make it as a writer, and I can assure you at that point, would have failed.  Not succeeded enough to realize that this whole “making a living” ruse was something I’d see with too many mediocre hacks, albeit highly-motivated self marketers, who would keep hounding on this when asked at parties and bars.  These days that implies a blitzkrieg of self promotion that would make even the most shallow narcissist want to vomit after spending all day hyping one’s self all over Twitter, Facebook and whatever else is the new hot thing to exploit for personal gain.  I’m not good at that.  Most writers aren’t.

So, I apologize for having no Plan B, other than the desire to live my life however I choose.  Probably makes me look like a horse’s ass to very responsible adults.  But I’ve always recognized very responsible adults as the ultimate horse’s asses, not people I’ve ever wanted to emulate.  Of course, that’s unavoidable – if I had kids, it would be extremely unavoidable.  But you’ll have to excuse me for recognizing the spark all those years ago and blowing on that small flame every now and then to keep things going.  It’s not all I got, but it makes life a lot more tolerable.

15 Minutes

Lately I’ve been pondering the state of the internet and wondering what the hell I’m doing here.  “Here” meaning the act of presenting myself anywhere on it, given the massive growth of entities like Facebook and Youtube that encourage anyone to get on the web for any reason.  Anything from simple pages or videos noting who you are in some small way … to videos of beatings and killings, or anonymous minions openly despising and attacking everything in sight.

In the past few days while putzing around the web, I’ve come across sites that feature full-on video porn as ads on a web page (i.e., if I was a 10-year-old boy wasting time on the web, these sites would be just as easy to stumble across while googling), the usual “faces of death” sites that gather home-made videos of extreme violence, kids on youtube purposely smashing gallons of milk in stores to get reaction shots of innocent bystanders trying to help after they pretend to slip on the spilled milk … in addition to the usual mistake of reading the “Comments” section of popular linked stories and realizing that there are a lot of sad, angry people out there whose main function seems to be showing the world how sad and angry they are (behind the veil of a screen name, of course).

Youtube, in particular, for all the good it does in terms of collecting so much cultural minutiae and artifacts, seems to also serve as a giant asshole magnet.  I just saw the Drudge-linked story about a guy who plows snow in Lowell, MA getting fired for posting a video noting the impish joy he takes by plowing in cars after a blizzard.  The last line of the article seemed to an imply a “so there” slant with him noting that he’s been receiving offers from Hollywood production companies to star in his own reality show.

This is the sort of vomit-inducing stupidity I’m talking about.  The “reality” is that he’ll more than likely stay fired from his job, those offers will fizzle once the producers realize they can’t manage any sort of long-term interest in what he has to offer, this “got the world by tail” rush of confidence that he feels now for being a complete asshole and having other assholes acknowledge this will dissipate, and he’ll go through a very dark period … until he gets another comparable job to snow-plowing in Lowell, MA, maybe in Worcester?

Or the flip side, he gets his reality show, it’s a massive hit for two seasons that catapults him to D-level celebrity, the show’s ratings fade, but he’s used to that level of income and fame, the Wolf’s Head Motor Oil and Slim Jim spokesperson offers fizzle out, he becomes despondent, turns to crystal meth, realizes the show didn’t last long enough for him to leverage his minor fame into a celebrity rehab show, and he finds himself worse off than when he was simply canned by the borough manager in Lowell for being an asshole on youtube.

Of course, the real culprits here are the Hollywood producers, who are sitting in their high-end homes in Beverly Hills, thinking, “Ah … another piece of white trash for us to exploit … beefy fortyish white guy with bad facial hair, a nose ring and an attitude … he’ll fit right in with all the other beefy fortyish white guys with bad facial hair, a nose ring and an attitude that we’re already making a fortune from, as we present assholes to the world that people can either look down or, unfortunately for all of us, deeply relate to.  If he doesn’t already have his head shaved and a healthy series of forearm and neck tattoos, we’ll have to expense it.”

The only thing more godforsaken than shit like this on youtube is shit like this on cable TV in the form of reality shows that take perverse pleasure in reducing American life to the lowest common denominator and rubbing our noses in it.  I cut off my cable TV a few months ago (switched to a Roku box and a Hulu Plus/Amazon Prime set-up that cut my monthly cable bill in half) mainly because I recognized that these depressing “in your face” reality shows have overtaken nearly every cable channel.  I don’t want to watch trashy people yelling at each other on TV … I see enough of it in my every-day life.

There’s never been a better time to disassociate yourself form popular American culture.  Because if it gets worse than this, we might want to break out A Clockwork Orange to get a glimpse into how the world is going to be in another decade or two.  This is devolution.  And it’s all related to this sickly desire so many people have to be famous, for essentially nothing.

One thing I’ve learned from my extremely minor brushes with fame: it’s an empty experience without money.  And I mean enough money to live well permanently.  Because if you do find yourself famous in any larger sense, one of the first things that will occur to you will be the need to isolate yourself from society in general, as your privacy will be reduced to next to nothing.  And the only ways to isolate yourself will be to disappear into the wilderness, thus removing yourself from your fame, or to have enough money to buy property in exclusive, high-income communities that most people will not be able to access.  I’m sure the average celebrity can tell you what a drag his life becomes when this sense of privacy we all take for granted is completely annihilated, and the simple act of walking down the street without drawing attention to yourself becomes impossible.

I’d suggest any of us engaged in any sort of artistic activity, at some point, probably very early on, wanted to do this for the attention, for that feeling of fame.  Some of us obviously still do.  I remember having a conversation with a fellow writer at the NYPress, just after our editor had been unceremoniously canned on Christmas Eve, about what it all meant.  At that point I was in my mid-30s and starting to lose the desire to have my name in lights; the other writer was in his early 20s, having a pretty good run with the paper and parlaying that into a book deal. 

His take was that he wanted to do this so his name would live on after he died.  My take was even if your name lived on, what would you care, you’d be dead.  Shakespeare?  He’s dead.  Would he be glad to know there are people centuries later reading an enjoying his work?  And a thousand times that number who felt tortured trying in vain to understand his writing in English classes they were forced to take for liberal arts credits?  And a million times that number who are so fucking stupid they don’t know or care who William Shakespeare is?

For me, it came down to recognizing my self worth, a long slow process.  It took years, and a lot of those years were tied up in writing and a burning need to succeed at some level in that world.  It was probably around that time in my mid-30s when I was taking a good look around at my fellow writers and realizing we were doing it for the wrong reasons.  That we recognized we had some innate talent to do this thing, but we were far more driven by our egos, to be dominant and visible in this sense to the world, to be writers, who understood so much that we needed to impart our wisdom, then hopefully receiving wealth and status for being so enlightened.

Well, it was also around that time that Dad passed on, and I think that drawn-out experience, while harsh, underlined a lot of the questions I had about fame and self worth.  In short, whatever he had taught me about the world, mostly through example, started to sink in with him no longer there to guide me.  I stopped writing much of anything for a good year or two, emulating his quiet “just go to work and stop complaining” attitude.  And then I realized, no, this is what I’m good at, forget about being famous, or rich, I know how to do this, it’s the one thing I have that makes sense in the world.  I can work in offices and make money, like any other cog in the machine, but writing is the one thing I can do to distinguish myself from everyone else in the world.

Of course, now I find myself as an infinitesimal distraction in a world of Facebook and Youtube!  Everyone sees their voice as being just as valid as anyone else’s, which is the main mistake of this culture.  We’re not all equal in that sense.  But what can you do.  I could uncover the secret to the universe, right here and now for you, gentle readers … but ultimately only get a few dozen pages views … while a video of a baby biting his slightly older brother’s fingers get hundreds of millions of views.

I guess that’s some kind of warped frontier justice.  The path of least resistance or work.  People are looking for truth in moments they can have spoon-fed to them, not in taking time to reason through questions they have, or make sense of all the crazy shit they’ve gone through in their lives.  It’s much easier to step outside yourself and acknowledge the intimate idiocy of kids or family pets doing stupid shit, which we all have filed in the memory banks of our own lives.  And I hate to say it, but that’s on the plus side of the internet, never mind all the genuinely dark and disturbing garbage floating around out there.

All this isn’t some new paradigm that we must take an “adopt or die” attitude towards.  We’d be better off leaving it behind, and I’m surely going to make a point out of wasting less time on the web.  It’s nothingness on a scale so large it makes something like Johnny Rotten in 1977 spewing out predictions of “no future” seem as sentimental as Bob Hope and Shirley Ross sweetly crooning “Thanks for the Memory.”  So much of the internet really is no future.  It’s mass stasis, constantly looking back at these moments that aren’t ours, or pretending we have friends that we really don’t, but magically do because a website encourages us to be lazy enough to wish it so, while the site exists solely to gather marketing data on everyone who uses it.  I guess it's better off to remain innocent of that latter truth.  Just stroking a neurosis, the same way you’d stroke a cat.  Johnny Rotten had a pretty good future.

Blue Moves

It’s easy to write about great or awful albums.  Some albums have struck me like lightning bolts, while others, particularly those by artists I respect, have let me down so severely that I vowed never to buy the artist’s albums again on sight.  That was a big deal for me when I was growing up.  There were certain artists that if I saw a new album, I bought it, no questions asked.

But what about those albums that weren’t really bad, but never quite achieved what they set out to do?  At the time, they received luke-warm reviews by critics, but over the years have been reconsidered, sometimes to the point of being placed as one of the artist’s finer albums (which I rarely agree with).  I’m always amazed at music message boards with a broad spectrum of fans, the way you can pick the most obtuse, troubling songs or albums by an artist, and some nutcase from Minnesota will chime in, hey, that’s my favorite album!  Someone out there, I assure you, his favorite Beatles song is “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Elton John’s Blue Moves album is one of those problematic albums that, for some odd reason, resonates emotionally with me to this day, but I can still recognize, as I did when I broke open the wrapper on the night of Christmas Eve, 1976, that the album is desperately uneven.  Even sitting here now, years and miles removed from my old bedroom, I still vividly recall my bedroom light shining on the cellophane, as I had just taken my Christmas album booty (a 70s ritual for me once I was old enough to get into albums) upstairs for a listen though my Radio Shack Nova 40s while I sat intently on my bed, reading the lyrics and musician line-up on each track, and thinking, after an hour or so, “Man, this is the strangest Elton John album I’ve ever heard.”

The album was very much a product of the 70s, adults in the 70s, which was a huge switch for Elton John as his music didn’t feel so age-specific before this.  This album felt like a mildly depressed man feeling his way around a world on the verge of collapsing.  It felt weird to a kid like me, like Woody Allen’s first attempts at making dramas instead of comedies.  I didn’t quite get it and felt out of my depth.  Now that I do get it, I still feel weird listening to the album.  I’ve since grown to love adult musicians making music for adults – think any Loudon Wainwright album – but back then, one of his albums would have made absolutely no sense to me.  (I now consider Wainwright one of the most honest, least-affected songwriters of the last 50 years.)

Even that odd cover, a blue-themed painting of people relaxing in a park, looks disjointed.  The lead single from the album, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” was a mouthful, and sad ballad which set the mood for an album.  It wasn’t unusual for Elton to make an album’s lead-off single a ballad (“Someone Saved My Life Tonight” being the best example), but the concept with lead-off singles in the 70s was to introduce a blockbuster pop song that would alert the world to this vibrant new collection of songs.  “Sorry” was more like walking in on someone crying in a darkened room after a bad break-up.

I used to work with a Russian woman who had that song pegged on her MP3 collection on her hard drive.  Every few days, I’d hear that wistful melody, and it’s not hard to understand how someone from Eastern Europe would take to a song like this, that sort of ornate, jewelry-box melody, especially when the vibraphone comes in on the instrumental passage.  A fucking vibraphone solo!

The album itself kicked off with an inconsequential instrumental, “You Started For.”  I’m listening to it now … a forgettable  track that should not be leading off an album.  You have to wonder what these guys were thinking, as so much thought goes into track listing in the studio, and the lead-off track should make a definitive statement on how the album sounds and feels.

But after that comes “Tonight,” a sweeping orchestral ballad that underscores the album’s theme of personal disintegration.  The lyrics are a man complaining to his significant other that he’s tired of fighting before they go to bed at night.  This was the world’s introduction to James Newton Howard, who did the orchestral arrangement, but has gone on to compose the scores for dozens of Hollywood blockbusters.

I heard this song, and thought, “That’s more like it.”  This was getting into “Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me” territory.  But these two opening songs demonstrate the wildly uneven quality the rest of the album has.  What we tend to forget about Elton John is that up through that album, his work schedule was unbelievable.  Forget about putting out albums ever few years.  He was often putting out two albums a year and touring extensively.  If not two albums, then double albums like this and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.  And nothing against him, Bernie Taupin or his band, but you put out that much material, unless you’re The Beatles, there’s bound to be a lot of filler (not to mention the Beatles insane album-release schedule didn't involve lengthy, exhausting tours after 1966). 

The next track, “One Horse Town” is another example of the album’s confusion.  What is it?  A rocker?  A moody, mid-tempo number?  The lyrics are about being raised in a small town in Alabama where nothing ever happens … yet the music has a full orchestra in “rock” mode, synthesizers, howling guitar solos, insistent percussion.  It’s a mess of a song that can’t decide what it wants to be.  The crucial element of the Elton John/Bernie Taupin songwriting duo was that Taupin would first write the lyrics and then with very little editing, John would craft a melody to fit the lyrics, and more often than not hit on the exact feel Taupin had in mind for the song.  A song this clearly disconnected from the lyrics was a sign that things were drifting off between them.

But then there are the ballads.  I’m sure he’s written some bad ones along the way (particularly after this time period), but back then you couldn’t go wrong with an Elton John ballad, a creative format he clearly loved.  “Chameleon” is one of those many album tracks of his that was never a single, never attained legend of any sort, but is just a good, solid ballad.  I didn’t see the connection at the time, but Elton would later go on to say how much he was influenced by “Surf’s Up” era Brian Wilson.  It’s all over the background vocals on this and so many other songs.  He would even use the same background vocalists as the Beach Boys, including (Captain and) Toni Tennille.

That’s side one, but each side presents the same hit-or-miss mix of mediocre album tracks and the occasional gem.  Side two has “Cage the Songbird” which, much like the title track from Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, features acoustic guitar as the lead instrument, and in this case has David Crosby and Graham Nash providing background vocals.  It was released a single and tanked, probably because it was so unusual sounding for an Elton John single.  It should have been a hit, a corollary to “Candle in the Wind.”  But for every “Tonight” and “Cage the Songbird” there are tracks like “Boogie Pilgrim” and “Crazy Water” that are b-side material at best and only weighed down the album with their mediocrity. 

The only up-tempo track that fully works is the last one, “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance),” and even that one feels strange.  The age of disco was just starting to take off in 1976 but hadn’t become the suffocating, dominant trend it would be in 1977.  He’d already had hit singles with “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” as a duet with Kiki Dee and “Philadelphia Freedom,” both non-album tracks.  We like to think of disco as this sprightly, light form of music, but many disco tracks featured full orchestras, horn sections, and backgrounds vocalists (sometimes even a choir), a trend that started with artists like Isaac Hayes and Barry White building these huge productions in the early 70’s.

“Bite Your Lip” was not a hit, barely scraping the Top 30 in the U.S., despite being one of his better funk-leaning songs.  The song represented the end of an era, as he and Bernie Taupin would split up after this for a few years, leaving Elton to struggle through a few mediocre albums before starting another string of hit singles in the 80s.  That next album, A Single Man, marked the end of my “buy artist’s material on sight” phase for me and Elton John.  The album felt so bland and half-hearted after that steady run of good-to-great albums he had up to that point.

Blues Moves wasn’t much better, but for some reason maintains that “Elton John in his prime” aura, even if it’s the twilight of his first run.  Maybe I feel so strongly about it because the first album I ever bought was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, probably no more than a year earlier (despite the album being released in 1974 … I wasn’t old enough to buy albums!).

I’d wager both albums are presented as bookends of Elton John at his best and worst, but that’s not really true.  There’s a lot of down time on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but the high points are that much higher that the album in general feels that much stronger.  As with most double albums, legendary or not, GYBR would have made one hell of a single album, probably his best, but for whatever reason, the artist and record company decided a double album would work.  It was a huge commitment for a record company to do this, adding that much more basic costs to the production and shipping of the album, running on the healthy wager that the artist was popular enough for fans to spend the extra money on two records (and they surely did in both cases).

I’ve described one situation with that album here.  And it wasn’t like “Jamaica Jerk Off” was the only clunker on the album.  Side 1 is legendary (“Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle in the Wind” and “Bennie and the Jets”).  But most of Sides 2, 3 and 4 are filler, but do have songs like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Sweet Painted Lady,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” and “Harmony” to raise the level.  Again, the problem was Elton John was flooding the market with so much material that a recognizable chunk of it was bound to be 70s album-track fodder: half-hearted stabs at funk, rock songs that didn’t rock and the occasional foray into reggae and country that lacked sincerity.  (But sound like backwoods country now compared to what country music has become.)

Blue Moves was the same formula, save with diminishing returns, and the general vibe among the creative team being a dismal sense of a long-term relationship fading apart.  It was too much for a 12-year-old kid to handle!  What in the hell did I know about dissolving friendships and extended gloom at that age?  Thankfully, very little.  I didn’t know what “complicated” meant.  I still don’t.  People tend to use this word when they want to hide the fact that they’re self-absorbed assholes.  No.  They’re “complicated.”  Elton John and Bernie Taupin were feeling complicated towards each other.  Was it drugs?  Fame and that separating sense of who was responsible for what in terms of their success?

Whatever it was, these guys weren’t kicking and screaming.  They were much more English than that and simply clocked in with this mannered, mildly depressed album to demonstrate that the gears were no longer clicking.  The idea of people breaking up crushed me as a kid, starting with The Beatles, of course, but any time a band member died (Who, Led Zep), or bands came apart (which really didn’t happen all that much in the 70s, no matter how much band members hated each other), it felt like a personal affront, how could they, don’t they know how much we fans care about them?  I’ve since realized that all bands go forth with some level of dysfunction, some band members openly despising each other, but more often than not, people who have simply spent so much time around each other, over the course of decades that, well, they’re just tired of each other’s company.

It even happens to wealthy rock stars!  Before I’d become an adult and enter into a few fading relationships, personal or romantic, where things just went quietly wrong and faded apart, Elton John, most likely inadvertently, did a nice job of outlining how that felt, not like the world was going to end, but that it was just going to get a little dark for awhile, and things weren’t going to go my way for the near future.  That was some heavy shit for a 12-year-old kid to assimilate … and I’m glad I didn’t, as this album made no sense to me at the time.  I’d have plenty of time to figure it out.