June 2024: Cool Down, Stop Acting Crazy
I feel summer creepin' in and I'm tired of this town again.
1984 is one of those years.
Besides being the title (and setting) for Owell’s dystopian novel1, it was also the title and release year for Van Halen’s album of the same name. In June of 1984, The Boss released “Born In The USA”. Miami Vice, Night Court and Murder She Wrote were broadcast hits. As far as movies, that year gave us three absolute classics: Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
1984 was forty years ago. It was an election year. It was a leap year. Richard Burton, Truman Capote, Francois Truffaut, Andy Kauffman and Marvin Gay all died that year. They were replaced on this earthly plane by Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson and T-Pain, all born in 1984 and all still going strong in their contributions to society and culture.
As far as real contributions to society and culture, there were three other films released in 1984 that are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year; three films that were and are profoundly important to who I am, was and could be, and I saw all three over the course of one week in June 2024.
The first, which I saw on the first Sunday in June, was Wolfgang Peterson’s The NeverEnding Story.
I was two years old when The NeverEnding Story was released, and there’s almost zero chance my parents took me to see it in the theaters2. But I do have very strong, very vivid memories of the movie, because they undoubtably showed it to me later on VHS (either new or it was taped off of cable / HBO.) I know this because I had nightmares related to the Gmork when I was a kid. Intense nightmares. Nightly nightmares. For months.
I was around 4 years old, so, 1986-ish; that’s what I remember anyways. Why did they show a four year old The NeverEnding Story? Probably for the same reason why as a kid I watched The Dark Crystal or Die Hard or Predator or Alien or Star Wars or Little Shop of Horrors or Ghostbusters or Gremlins or Temple of Doom: the 80’s were a wild time but, perhaps not coincidentally, it wasn’t until 1984 that the Motion Picture Association of America created the PG-13 rating.
In any event, I watched it, and the Gmork, the large talking wolf creature hired by The Nothing to kill Atreyu and prevent existence from being saved, haunted my sleep for months after. I would have trouble sleeping and wake up, convinced the Gmork was sitting in my closet, watching me; or it was in the bathroom across the hall, also just sitting and watching me. That’s what the Gmork does. It sits and watches.
But it also runs, so I would wake up screaming, bolt from my bed and run terrified to my parents room down the hall, convinced that the large talking scary wolf puppet was hot on my heels.
For months.
I have forgotten so much of my childhood but those memories of terror and fear have stayed with me, to the extent that I will catch my green-eyed dark grey cat sitting under the bed or in the closet and I will have ‘Nam-like flashbacks.
And yet I love the movie. Its creature effects, puppets and fantasy world were and are extremely fascinating and interesting. Whenever I watch it as an adult, I am continually blown away by the beginning of the film, which I don’t think I paid any attention to as a kid.3
As a kid, though, it would be another few years after the nightmares before I would relate to it in even worse (albeit practical) ways, and those experiences stuck with me just as much as the Gmork nightmares.
In the film, our hero is Bastion, a young kid who is bullied on the way to and at school. Bullied to the point that he hides in an old bookstore to escape his tormentors, and then spends the rest of his day(s) reading books to escape reality.
And that’s more or less exactly what happened to me and more or less exactly what I did.
When I was in first grade, the bus stop was about four houses down the street from my parents house, and I’d walk there in the mornings. There were a handful of kids on our street, but the ones my age and in my grade were all girls. This meant my “friends” growing up were mostly all girls. Most of them had younger siblings my brothers ages, so it just all worked out that my earliest friends were girls. This, and the fact that I was small for my age, quiet and shy, well-behaved and smarter than other kids, not really into sports or cars but really into books and dinosaurs, didn’t sit well with the older boys at the bus stop, or at school in general. It was the late 80’s and kids were assholes.
Two of those assholes were two of the older kids on my street, who would beat me up when I showed up at the bus stop. If they didn’t do it at the bus stop, they did it on the bus. And if they didn’t do it in the morning, they did it after school. Sometimes both. Over time, I would try to get to the bus stop just as the bus got there in the morning, any earlier and I risked being bullied. And in the afternoon, I would leap from the bus and try to run home before they got me. It was the Gmork all over again, except real and worse.
The bullying was so severe and omnipresent that halfway through the school year, my parents started taking me to another bus stop to ride a different bus to school. I would be dropped off early in the morning at a family friends house, early enough their own girl my age wasn’t up yet. I would sit in the dark waiting for them to wake up, and we’d all have breakfast and I’d then walk to their bus stop and ride to school with them.
That was my life as a first grader, and second grader, and third grader.4 I was dropped off across the neighborhood at someone else’s house so I could ride a different bus to school so I wouldn’t be beaten up in the mornings. And in the afternoon, I’d end up back at their house waiting for my parents to pick me up, until I was old enough to walk home across the neighborhood, as somehow that was safer than getting off at my own bus stop.
All because some fifth or sixth graders saw me as different, as an easy target, or whatever. I don’t know, really. These were real bullies of the 80’s, not cyber bullies, trolls on message boards or twitter. There was no motive, no online agenda. They were just assholes.
When I was old enough to not be scared of The NeverEnding Story, I realized Bastion and I had a lot in common. Because my defense mechanism, which I learned from the bullying and would then extend to every other facet of my life, was to escape. As a kid it was books, and then comic books, and as a teen and young adult I’d escape into tv and film as well as books and comics. As a full adult, that escapism extends to things like tiki bars and concerts, Disneyland and theme parks, vacations and bad relationships.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1e4e4942-f17e-408b-9374-dfb8dc416811_600x261.webp)
But as a kid, I would always have a book. On the bench in the dugout during a baseball game, there was me reading a book. At dinner at a restaurant with family, nose in a book. In math class, when I should have been learning math, I instead had a book hidden inside that math book5. Books were not just how I escaped, they were how I survived.
Just like Bastion.
The NeverEnding Story gave me not just the imagined nightmares of my youth in the form of a wolf creature, but it also gave me someone I could relate to who showed me how to escape the very real nightmares I dealt with every day.
Whereas The NeverEnding Story was a movie I related to a lot in my childhood and early years, the film I saw next was one I first watched in college and absolutely shaped who I am today.
Two days after watching The NeverEnding Story at The New Beverly Cinema, I saw Jonathan Demme’s 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, and I saw it at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, the exact location where it was shot over three nights in 1983.
I’ve written before about Stop Making Sense and how it’s been a pivotal film and experience in and to my life in previous substacks, so I won’t retread too much, but the gist of it is this:
In 2001, between my brother dying in May and the events of September 11th in, well, September, my world was in a bit of an upheaval. As a sophomore in college, that fall I decided I was going to change majors; I went from seeking a degree in paleontology, which I’d wanted to do my entire life, the only career path I’d ever really considered, to pursuing a degree in Film and Television Studies.6
Spring semester of 2002 I took an Intro To Film class, and the very first movie our professor screened for us was Demme’s Stop Making Sense, a movie I’d never seen nor heard of before.
And it fucking knocked me out. Except maybe that’s not correct. It’s more like that scene in Dr Strange when the Ancient One hits Stephen Strange and his soul/astral self leaves his body and he’s left floating looking at the world and his life from outside of himself. That’s what watching Stop Making Sense was like. I was knocked out of my body by the music and movement and artistry of Talking Heads.
There’s life before you see Stop Making Sense, and then life after.
It took me a long time to realize that, how the movie changed me, and how my life changed after it. I wasn’t in the best mental headspace already, what with the family grief and post-9/11 jingoistic worldview that was forced upon us, but maybe that was helpful; maybe that allowed Talking Heads and their music and Jonathan Demme’s film to warp and shape my head and heart in the best ways.
I got into music, more than I had been. I got into film, both as a fan and as a student. I got into live music and going to concerts and making movies and, in another example of perfect timing, thanks to the explosion of the DVD, I got into how movies were made, audio commentaries and behind the scenes featurettes and all those LOTR extended edition appendices that teach you how to make movies from the comfort of your couch. All of this was happening because of Stop Making Sense, a movie that unmoored and untethered me to such a degree that it would be years before I settled back down into my self.7
I had to leave Oklahoma, move across the country, and change my entire life, all because my life didn’t make sense there anymore. And I mean that in the very real ways that come with grief and change, both post-collegiate and post-family trauma. I couldn’t go home anymore, the home I grew up in was a prison of memories I didn’t want to live in. And as a graduate with a film degree, what work was there to be found in Oklahoma in 2004?8 My options were Blockbuster or the media section of Borders Books & Music.9
I had nothing keeping me in Oklahoma10, and even though I knew nobody in and nothing about Los Angeles, I knew that if I wanted to work in film and TV, I had to go to there.
It made sense, then, to move, and it still makes sense to be here now (sometimes, until it doesn’t. But that’s just because as we get older and stop making sense….)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7b0d3baf-b915-45f8-9a0f-1eb1f155e419_780x438.webp)
Realizing it or not, I was chasing that Stop Making Sense knockout feeling when I moved out here, and have been ever since. Going to see bands and shows and concerts, working in live music television, working music festivals and working with bands, working on concert specials for various networks and channels, I was chasing the Talking Heads high that I felt the first time I saw it in film school, a high that can never exactly be replicated, but boy did I try, and I keep trying to this day.
Which was why, when A24 announced that they were hosting a screening and live performance and Q&A with the band at the actual Pantages Theater for its 40th Anniversary, I had to go. It’s been a bit of a rough year for almost everyone in Los Angeles who works in and around the industry (re: the whole city) and I’ve had to scale back on my concert going this year, but I knew I would regret not going to see the movie that made me move across the country to chase a dream I wasn’t ever sure I really had or believed in.
So I went, and it was spectacular. I’ve seen the movie in theaters, when it was rereleased last fall and on other occasions, but seeing it that large in the actual fucking Pantages? It was breathtaking. It was a holy experience. Theaters and concert venues have long been my church, and there was something absolutely biblical and downright messianic about seeing David Byrne and the band projected large on screen on the stage where they shot it all those forty years ago.
Stop Making Sense (re)made me into who I am today, or who I have been for the past twenty years. Just seeing it in the theater it was filmed in would’ve been epic enough, but after the screening David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth all came out together for a Q&A, something they’ve only done a handful of times in the past 40 years after the band fell apart. It was as close as I’ll ever come to actually being in the audience forty one years ago when they performed their show for Jonathan Demme’s cameras, and as close as I’ll ever come to seeing the band as a band in any real capacity.11 It was a once in a lifetime experience, to be sure.
It was a full circle moment, and if this is the year I leave Los Angeles and this industry, then what a way to go out.12 Over the past few years where so much has stopped making sense, that night with that movie and that band was a defining moment in my life that made absolute sense, and I’ll always think about what a day that was.
The third and final 1984 film of that week was a Friday matinee, back at the New Beverly, for a movie I had never seen in a theater before. A movie maybe I’d never really seen before, but a movie that means a great deal to me in ways I don’t know if I can articulate yet.
It was the theatrical debut of the greatest artist I’ve ever seen perform live, the 1984 musical masterpiece Purple Rain starring Prince, and I saw it on what would have been his birthday.
I saw Prince only once, when he played the Forum in Los Angeles in 2011, which he played for 21 nights.
I didn’t grow up listening to Prince. I mean, I heard his music on the radio, just as I would’ve heard Talking Heads, but as a kid or teen I didn’t listen to him the way I probably should’ve, as I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s when it was peak Prince. I wish I had been into Prince, or allowed to be into Prince when I was a kid.13 But that wasn’t an option. Oklahoma in the 80’s and 90’s, an artist like Prince, the suburbs I lived in…
I wish I had been able to grow up with Prince. I think my life would be a lot better, for me, if I had been allowed to grow up watching and listening and living with him and his music, his looks, his style and character. He was who he was, anyone else be damned, and that was something I longed for. Acceptance for who you are, no matter what.
I got into Prince more in college, and I remember the exact moment I fell for him, the exact moment where the purple one left an indelible mark on my soul: March 15th, 2004, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Concert, specifically the part of the ceremony for George Harrison.
It was my senior year of college, and the ceremony was on TV in various rooms in the house I lived in with friends, everyone watching it passively. This was pre-youtube, and pre-DVR; you watched TV live or you taped it. One of my roommates was really into music, more so than me, and he was watching in one room, and I had it on in another.
Jeff Lyne and Tom Petty, two of George’s bandmates from the Traveling Wilburys, were joined by Harrison’s son Dhani and longtime friend Steve Winwood, to play Harrison’s classic “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” arguably one of the better songs any Beatle ever wrote with or without the rest of the band. And they were joined that night by Prince.
There’s a lot of apocryphal stories about that night, from everyone there, about Prince, and why wouldn’t there be? He has always inspired stories and tall tales, the more unbelievable ones being the most true. One from that night is that he had never heard the song before, and listened to it once and only once before playing it live on camera for the show. Insane. There’s also the fact that at the end he throws his guitar up and it never comes down, and to this day nobody knows where the fuck in the sky that guitar is.
But what is true about that performance is Prince fucking slays it. He definitively gives the best performance I’ve ever seen a human being give with just a guitar, and he does so effortlessly. He does so coyly and shyly, at first, before he falls backwards onto the crowd so someone can hold him up as he continues playing. And then he grins like a motherfucker. And Dhani Harrison and Tom Petty can be seen grinning wildly watching him. Everyone there and everyone watching was struck with intense joy just watching Prince play guitar to a song he never heard before that night.
It all starts about 3:30 into the performance. It’s a great performance throughout, and everyone involved understood the assignment, and everyone involved knew what it meant to play that song for George’s induction.
And for the first three minutes Prince lets everyone else have their moments. He just plays. It’s not his show, it’s not his song. Even in shadow on the side of the stage, you can still hear him playing it better than anyone had a right to play it.
But when he steps forward into the spotlight at 3:30, it was over for anyone and everyone else. Because Prince owned that performance. His guitar fucking wept.
Watching it back then, I remember the gasps from the other rooms as people watched, I remember people rushing to AIM to IM14 friends to say “are you fucking watching this right now? Watch this right now!”
It was a moment. It was the moment.
And it wasn’t the last. Three years later, Prince headlined the Super Bowl Halftime show and he played “Purple Rain” in the goddamn rain.
My late-in-life Prince fandom was born over those years, due to those performances and others. In point of fact, on the very first Mixtape I ever made for this long-form project waaaay back when, in January of 2008, the very first song on the very first mix was “Let’s Go Crazy.”15
He kicked off this whole thing, and when I saw him in 2011 he kicked off a lot more.
I’d already been going to shows and concerts and getting into music heavily, but seeing Prince live was an experience that cannot ever be duplicated. I wish I had seen him more than once, but I’m glad I saw him when I did.
When he died on April 21st, 2016, I was devastated. To this day it’s one of the only celebrity deaths that has affected me in such an intense and emotional way. I was driving to work when Jason Bentley broke the news on Morning Becomes Eclectic, and I remember crying and then pulling into work and parking and just sobbing in my car as Jason played Prince song after Prince song.16
I can’t really explain it. I hadn’t grown up with Prince or his music, and I came to both later than most. But somehow Prince, even before he died, became one of the two cardinal directions of my musical tastes and identity, the other being David Bowie.
That said, I’d never seen Purple Rain in theaters, and I really don’t think, outside of a musicals class in film school and once or twice over the years since, that I had ever sat down and watched the film as it should be watched.
So when the opportunity came to see it, on film, on his birthday? I leapt at the chance.
And it was perfect. It was a sold out screening in the middle of the day, a theater full of fans, and we all just sat rapt. Purple Rain is a masterpiece, singular as it is in its vision and depiction of Prince and his music and mythology, which makes it all the more astonishing he didn’t write or direct it. But he owns the movie as much as he owns that performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
There’s a lot in it that I found myself relating to, and again, wishing I had seen it as a kid. Prince’s character of The Kid is not altogether dissimilar from Bastion in The NeverEnding Story, in that he deals with a bully (Morris Day) and uses his music to escape from the trauma of his home life. The domestic violence and treatment of women in the film remains hard to watch, particularly when The Kid himself engages in it. But there’s also so much in it that is fun to watch and to experience. Because thats what it is, a musical experience where Prince as The Kid gives a tour-de-force performance of following a dream, no matter what it takes and no matter who tries to keep you from achieving it. His (fake) performance as The Kid singing Prince music is somehow more real than David Byrne’s (real) performance as himself in Stop Making Sense, which is entirely way more theatrical even if it’s as real as it gets.
Purple Rain is 180 degrees from Stop Making Sense, an actual concert documentary film showcasing an artist and band at the absolute zenith of their career, and it’s another 180 degrees from The NeverEnding Story, a fantasy film about overcoming obstacles and learning to let go in order to move forward, but its also exactly both of those films combined and filtered through the purple lens of Prince and his music.
The fact all three came out the same year is astonishing. And the fact all three are not the three biggest movies of 1984 says wonders about the state and quality of film 40 years ago.
But all three meant and mean something to me, and to watch all three in theaters in a one week period was something I didn’t plan on or plan for, and yet it ended up being a week of wondrous synchronicity.
I’ll have more to say about 1984 as the year goes on, more fortieth anniversaries and retrospectives and remembrances, but for now, here’s what I listened to in June of 2024, when I wasn’t thinking about how great it would be to fly on a luck dragon after my bullies or take the stage in a big suit.
“cut!,” Maren Morris feat Julia Michaels - The first brilliant track from Maren Morris’ upcoming EP, Intermission, her first album post-divorce and post-country. “Honestly, fuck!” is right.
“Please Please Please,” Sabrina Carpenter - Her follow-up to “Espresso” is also perfect.
Heartbreak is one thing, my ego's another
I beg you: don't embarrass me, motherfucker“IOU,” Gavin Turek - There’s a lot of reasons to love this song, which I heard on KCRW one morning or afternoon; it’s another banger from Gavin Turek for sure.
“Slippery People - Live from BBC,” Say She She - A Talking Heads cover NOT from Everybody’s Getting Involved, this track from Say She She is maybe better than almost anything else on that covers album. Say She She remembered that this song needs to be funky and they brought it.
“So Lo,” Pond - The first time I heard this, I thought it was a Prince song I’d never heard before, which is maybe the highest praise anyone can give a song?
“I Would Die 4 U,” Prince - Speaking of his purple majesty, I (obviously) listened to a lot of Purple Rain in June, and went back and forth what to include here. Almost went with some of the remixes and extended club versions from the anniversary release a few years ago, but settled on this standard album version instead. Also, related to this, is the fact there’s a LOT of music from the film that is unreleased, including the other bands performances. Even the 3 disc anniversary release from a few years ago doesn’t have the other non-Revolution bands music on any of the discs.
“Baby I’m Burnin’ - Disco Mix” Dolly Parton- The regular version of this Dolly Parton track was used on this latest season go HBO’s HACKS, but I’ve always been partial to this disco mix.
“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” Eurythmics - This track opens Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Kinds of Kindness, and as soon as this beat started I maybe too audibly went “yes!” and was on-board the rest of the film. It’s maybe my favorite of his, so far; if you haven’t seen it, treat yourself.
“Midnight Ride,” Orville Peck, Kylie Minogue & Diplo - The first track from Stampede Vol. 2, Orville’s second collection of duets. A barnburner if ever there was one.
“Music is Better,” RUFUS DU SOL - I swear this is a song I’ve been listening to for years, but it’s brand new so… whatever. It’s lyrics are still true: “Music is better when we’re together, listening to music…”
“We Were Never Alive,” Brigitte Calls Me Baby - The first single from BCMB’s forthcoming LP, which also will feature tracks from their EP. I still think about their show last year and how unexpectedly fantastic it was. Really looking forward to their full debut.
“Making It Right,” Woolfy feat Love Athletics - I think I heard this on Travis Holcombe’s “Freaks Only” show on KCRW, if not once then several times? It’s a good one.
“People Never Change,” Peter Cat Recording Company - New fantastic single from PCRC, who are hitting SoCal this fall with dates at The Wiltern and Pappy & Harriets in Pioneertown.
“Heaven Knows,” 54 Ultra - “Cause you're all I need, but I know you're gone…” love that throwback sound.
“Don’t Call It Love,” Swim Surreal & Zero 7- Speaking of songs you think you’ve listened to for years, this one is a re-release (in a new edit/remix) of an older Zero 7 song. Still great!
“Thank You For Sending Me An Angel,” Blondshell - Got to see Blondshell perform this Talking Heads cover live prior to that screening of Stop Making Sense at the Pantages at the beginning of June. What a day that was.
“No One Noticed,” The Marias - These next four I heard and am cribbing from Raul Campos’s weekend sets on KCRW, tbh, but they’re all great. Starting with another stellar track by The Marias.
“Left My Keys,” Cults - Always been a big fan of songs featuring lyrics about driving all night (thank you, Springsteen!) and this one rocks:
And we can drive all night
We can go anywhere
And we can ride all night
We can go anywhere from here“Oyster Cuts,” Quivers - “Just when I was giving up on love, I had a strange suspicion I might have dreamt you up.”
“Sexy to Someone,” Clairo - Don’t we all just want to be sexy to someone?
“Dirty Work,” King Princess - This Steely Dan cover was featured in HACKS’ latest season as well, and it’s perfect.
“Stop Dragging’ My Heart Around,” Lady A - “Baby, you come knocking on my front door, same old line you used to use before…” Okay, so: There is a album of Tom Petty covers that just came out called ‘Petty Country’ and it features various country artists (and “country” artists) covering his and the Heartbreakers hits, as well as other Tom Petty collabs. This Stevie Nicks & Tom Petty duet gets covered by Lady A, a band I was a HUGE fan of when they first debuted waaaay back in 2008 as Lady Antebellum. Music from their first few albums were all over the original incarnation of this mix tape project, as they were a band that was featured in work I did (a live concert and dvd special.) I kind of fell off the Lady A train before they nixed their name, but I like this cover. They previously covered Petty’s “Learning to Fly” for their iTunes session in 2010. “This doesn't have to be anything at all…”
“Glass & Gold,” Clover County - Clover County opened for Lord Huron when I saw them in May, and I found myself listening to her in June quite a bit. “How could you pretend like all that had happened wasn't just a summer ago…”
“Just A Bird,” Blind Pilot - The first single from Blind Pilot’s upcoming fourth album, their first since 2016! I’ve seen Blind Pilot almost more than I’ve seen any other band (ranking up there with Sea Wolf, Lord Huron and Okkervil River, I think) and I caught them at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in June, capping off an unexpectedly wild day with a great show in a great venue.
“Sanctuary,” The Wild Feathers - The Wild Feathers are back with a new album this fall, and this is the first single off that.
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” Midland - Another track from Petty Country, one which I think is one of Tom Petty’s best written songs (probably one of the greatest songs ever written? It’s got to be on the list.)
Well, I don't know but I've been told
You never slow down, you never grow old
I'm tired of screwing up, tired of goin' down
Tired of myself, tired of this town
Oh, my, my, oh, hell yes
Honey, put on that party dress
Buy me a drink, sing me a song
Take me as I come 'cause I can't stay long“Me In Honey,” R.E.M. - Listened to R.E.M. a lot the past few months, and lot of talk about the band on the inter webs as well. (They performed together live for the first time in 16 years (!!!) last month.) The weekend after that happened, I was listening to Dan Wilcox’s set on KCRW and he, also excited by this development, played this track, and it became an unexpected great summer song.
“Declaration of Independence,” Count Five - This was featured in The Bikeriders, a new film that I absolutely loved and did not expect to like at all, aha. Great soundtrack. Great accents. Great locations.
“Bells and Whistles,” Bright Eyes - This is the first single from Bright Eyes new album, and it’s also maybe the first and only song that I know of to sing about Edendale and it’s Photo Booth, a staple of my life for almost my entire existence in LA. I have dozens of Photo Booth strips from there, friends and exes and strangers all in glorious faded black and white strips that adorn my fridge. (Well, most are in a box somewhere. The ones with some of you are on my fridge, the ones with some of you are in a box.)
At a table down at Edendale
Didn't feel good, wasn't eating well
In the photo booth, made me hate myself“Save It For Later,” Eddie Vedder - Eddie Vedder covers this The Beat track in the newest season of The Bear (there’s a few versions of the song throughout the season, mostly as score.) Over the course of the 60-70 odd mixes and playlists I’ve made over the past few decades, this is maybe only the second or third time Eddie Vedder or Pearl Jam have been featured because *whispers* I can’t ever get into them.
“Out In The Streets,” The Shangri-Las - Another great track from The Bikeriders. Seriously, great soundtrack.
“Outlaw,” Clover County - Another from Clover County:
Lord, he's really been through it
He's got the scars to prove it
And it should be a crime to love him this much
I'm an outlaw inside my own dreams“Be Gentle,” Danielle Ponder - We all need to be gentle with ourselves, and others. This song also goes perfectly with the next.
“Mercy,” Devon Gilfillian - Heard this on KCRW and fell for it, and again, this and the previous one are a great one-two punch to end this months mix.
June Media:
Concerts:
Blondshell at The Pantages
Jason Bentley (DJ Set) at KCRW Chinatown Summer Nights
Travis Holcombe (DJ Set) at KCRW Chinatown Summer Nights
Angela Autumn at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
Blind Pilot at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
In Theaters:
The NeverEnding Story (1984) (The New Beverly)
Stop Making Sense (1984) (The Pantages)
The Hateful Eight: 70mm Roadshow Version (2015) (The Vista)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) (AMC)
Purple Rain (1984) (The New Beverly)
Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) (AMC)
The Watchers (2024) (AMC)
Inside Out 2 (2024) (AMC)
Aladdin (1992) (The New Beverly)
Tuesday (2024) (AMC)
Kinds of Kindness (2024) (AMC)
The Bikeriders (2024) (AMC)
A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) (AMC)
Streaming/Physical Media:
Turning Red (2022)
The Social Network (2010)
Inside Out (2015)
Hacks, Season 3: 9 episodes (2024)
The Mask (1994)
The Acolyte, episodes 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 (2024)
Rango (2011)
Lake Placid (1999)
Ghosts, Season 3: 10 episodes (2024)
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
Saludos Amigos (1943)
The Three Caballeros (1944)
Mars Attacks! (1996)
The Bear, Season 3: 10 episodes (2024)
Comic Books:
X-Men #35, Amazing Spider-Man #51, Lilo & Stitch #4, Space Ghost #2, TMNT Alpha #1, Spider-Boy #8, Amazing Spider-Man #52, Ultimate Spider-Man #6, She-Hulk #9, Justice Ducks #4, Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime #1, TMNT Black, White & Green #2, Nega Duck #6, Spectacular Spider-Men #4, Superior Spider-Man #8,
One of my favorite jokes/lines in The Bear Season 3 is delivered by Oliver Platt when he and Carmy are discussing how much they’re spending on pricey ingredients for the restaurant, and Carmy is defending spending $11k for butter. “It’s Orwellian,” Carmy says to Platt’s Uncle Jimmy, to which Platt responds “It’s dystopian?”
I have been told my first movie in theaters was Walt Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarves (1937), which I cried in so much my parents left. According to this, that was in July of 1983, so I was just one year old and screaming my head off… but my parents said I started crying when the witch fell off the cliff at the end, so not only did I make it through almost the entirety of the movie, but I guess that’s where my sympathy for Disney villains began! 🤣
Bastion’s mom has just died and his dad is a total prick about it. That’s all we know: mom’s dead and it’s time for Bastion to stop being mopey about it. And if you think that his dead mom ever comes up again, well, it does, albeit in a way that still doesn’t make sense: at the end of the film, Bastion saves all of existence by naming the Childlike Empress after his mom, when he shouts a name that is absolutely unintelligible.
I have memories of sitting in the Principals office, or outside it, time and again while my parents would complain to the Principal on my behalf, or I’d be called in to tell my version of events about the bullying, and nothing was ever done by the school administrators. “Kids will be kids” or whatever the rhetoric was at the time. “It’s all part of growing up,” “it puts hair on your chest,” “it builds character,” etc etc. But the constant principal visits also made me a bigger target (“tattletale”) so there was no winning.
I got in trouble for this in seventh grade. I was already not great at math; I had dyscalculia, though this wouldn’t be fully diagnosed until later. Throughout elementary school I kept being tested so that I could get into PEAK, the program for advanced learning, and though I’d pass every written or verbal test by a wide margin, I’d fail the math tests. Nobody could explain, except to say that I just wasn’t applying myself to math the way I did books and reading and science. In middle school, I was in all of the honors courses, including math, where I most assuredly did not belong. It wasn’t until high school, where I kept being put in honors math classes against my will, that it was discovered that I quite literally did not have the head for math, as dyscalculia is a disorder that affects how I am able to do math. So in seventh grade, when I was hiding novels in my math book, I was escaping math but also escaping my own inability to do math.
Something else that absolutely played a huge part in changing majors was the aforementioned dyscalculia, because, and this surprised me at the time, but there’s a lot of math in paleontology and because my track was through the school of geology, there’s a LOT of math in geology. Advanced calculus, advanced chemistry, mineralogy, I was in all three courses at the same time and it absolutely drove my paleontological dreams into extinction. All I wanted was to dig up dinosaur bones and or be invited to an island off the coast of Costa Rica to inspect genetically engineered organisms for a wealthy philanthropist turned theme park developer. And math took that all away from me.
There’s another aspect and component to Stop Making Sense and how it affected me watching it when I did, which is that when I was in college I weighed a lot more than I do now, or ever have. I was around 275-290 pounds at one point, overweight and unhealthy, and showed no signs of reining it in. And there’s something to be said about David Byrne’s performance when he comes out in the Big Suit for the later half of the film that I probably related to on a subconscious level, esp when he sheds the jacket later and is back to his slim self. I was always a scrawny, underweight and small kid, until high school and college when I started to blow up. And when I moved to California, I started shedding weight and getting to a healthier place with my weight and body. It’s still something I struggle with but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least try to connect those dots here.
The film and television production scene in Oklahoma at the time was limited to commercial work, and everyone was still on a high from Twister having shot there a decade earlier. “Why do you need to move to California? They make movies here too. Twister was shot in Guthrie!” was a refrain I heard about 37 times a day after I told people I was moving. The film production scene boomed after I left, though it was years and years after, and it’s been mostly consistent for those who work in film and tv there ever since. And good for them! I wish circumstances had been different, but for me, living and working in the industry in 2004 in Oklahoma wasn’t an option.
Neither of these companies exist anymore.
I had and have family and friends there, but I absolutely would have a lesser life and be entirely way more depressed as a human being if I stayed in Oklahoma, and if you know how depressed I am, you know what that means to say that.
I have seen David Byrne perform twice, once at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles and once in Oklahoma City, on my actual birthday. Both were incredible shows, with the Oklahoma City taking place during his acclaimed American Utopia tour.
This industry is toast.
I’ve mentioned it on other posts, but it remains a wild aspect of my parents raising us that we were allowed to watch all manner of Rated R movies (Robocop, Die Hard, the Alien and Predator series) but were forbidden from ever watching MTV or listening to certain music and radio stations, as well as watching shows like The Simpsons. Violence was fine, popular music was not.
AIM aka AOL Instant Messenger also no longer exists, and we are a worse society because of its loss.
“Mix Tape 1: From Everyone To You (January 2008)” remains, imho, a great little mix. If one were to really get into the weeds about all of these, and the history and format, one would say that “From Everyone To You” set the standard for every (good to great) mix to come. It has the requisite covers (Nouvelle Vague, Chris Isaak, Cat Power), classic hits (besides Prince, there’s Springsteen and The Flaming Lips,) new releases (Sons & Daughters, Rico Kiley, Black Mountain,) Los Angeles music scene bands (The Parson Red Heads,) older artists I was discovering (Supergrass, The Dylans,) soundtrack songs (music from Once,) and artists that I have stopped listening to entirely (Ryan Adams.) It captures a time period of my life in 20 songs, and listening to it now I am transported back across space and time to a life I can barely remember (2007-2008.) Even the title is something of the perfect title that I always strive for, a lyric from one of the songs, and in this case it doubles as the mission statement for the entire “sharing playlists and mailing mix cd’s through the mail to friends across the country” project.
I can’t find that show on KCRW’s archive, just the playlist, but here’s Travis Holcombe’s Prince tribute show from that night.