Incredibly Stupid Bliss

Dan died a few weeks ago.  Hopefully in his sleep.         He was a strange combination of phantom figure and happy-go-lucky sidekick.  Working-class tennis player, elegant and handsome, but a little rough around the edges, gay but also running away from whatever "gay" means, while running toward self-destruction and loneliness.  A laugh riot, but he could also turn the meanest nastiest gaze on you, and his fury could get so concentrated and petty you would have to block him out just to stay on this side of sane.  Big personality, like gameshow-host big, stand-up-comedian big, but also someone always on the outskirts of where he was, and where he wanted to be.  I don't think he ever found a place where he wanted to be actually, hell, where he could be.  Existence for him was fraught with dangers and connections he never spoke about.  Just acted from.  There was a personal mystery he was involved in, on the other side of what he could show people, and I think sometimes he

Our Friend is a 2019 true-life drama that came out to little fanfare, and so when I stumbled onto it on Prime I thought this might be Gen-Z campy and soapy and self-involved.  Why not?  The stars kind of indicate that:  Jason Segal, Casey Affleck, and Dakota Johnson.  But truth be told I also have a deep deep love for Dakota, so there's that.  Something about her face and demeanor reminds me of really nice girls in high school who got all the jokes and stood up for the people nobody stood up for.   So Bill and I watched it, and we lost our shit.  From the get-go it was ravishingly emotional and somehow not over-the-top.  The story is about a reporter whose beautiful wife has ovarian cancer, and they both share a really great best friend. The husband and wife are Affleck and Dakota, the best friend Segal, and the whole movie is blissfully orchestrated around the wife's diagnosis and how the three of them meet, fight, find solace, find a way to go on together and also without ea

I started this blog over a year ago to chart and define my love of things in the world (art, books, music, TV, whatever else), and my approach to loving these things:  incredibly, stupidly, blissfully.  But this has been a year or so of a lot of bad shit:  my mom died, then a friend from long ago committed suicide the next month, and just yesterday I found out one of my best friends has cancer.  What do you do with all of this? Write a blog about a TV show I guess.  One of the standouts on TV this year has been a show called The Last of Us .  Big hit based on a video game about the end of the world caused by an evil fungus. One episode stands out, although all of them offer a wildly precise fusion of arthouse and house of horrors.  This episode focused on a gay survivalist who stumbles across the love of his life after ambushing him in his post-apocalyptic front-yard pit/trap.  From that connect through twenty years of being together, the two men come across as understanding the situai

  Fruit Bats is a one-man band overseen by Eric D. Johnson.  I've loved everything he/they have done since 2003 or so (including his side-band Bonnie Light Horseman), when I first discovered Echolocation , the debut album.   All the way through those 20+ years, Fruit Bats has been a touchstone for me, but Pet Parade , an album that came out a couple years back, is what I go to just about anytime I need music now.   It's lush country-drag pop, delicate but also full of denim-flavored 70s Fleetwood Mac greatness.  His voice is Supertramp merged with Glen Campbell, and the music has a synthesized ominousness and sense of fun, a hominess too. It's singer-song-writery but also contemplative beyond that, moving into this weird poetic direct-connect to my soul.  Every dang song on this thing is blissful and halfway awkwardly stupid in the way it needs to be, feelings bleeding out of every chorus and every note, with melodies laced with losses and happinesses you remember because t

Twice in a Lifetime is an unassuming anonymous movie from 1985 I remember seeing when it first came out and I was completely enraptured by its ability to be exactly what it was:  a realistic and sad but somehow optimistic drama about a working-class guy celebrating his 50th birthday by leaving his wife and family for a red-headed barmaid.   Upon first viewing I was floored.  It wasn't necessarily the novelty of the concept:  it was soap-opera territory of course.  It was the way the concept was delivered, not the content.  Every actor in this thing works it; you feel like you are inside somebody's family album, claustrophobically connected to their whims, wishes and hurts.  Amy Madigan as the outraged daughter got most of the applause (even an Academy Award nom for Best Supporting Actress), but it is the whole gang that delivers the goods. An ensemble masterpiece.  Gene Hackman is the lead:  his sorry-eyed take on a working-class nobody finally getting his chance to love somebo

  It's a photo of a photo, so kind of blurry, but there she is.  Vera Ruth, senior in high school, 1963.  She died 12/30/2022, 3:55 pm.  All this week I was in Elizabethton, Tennessee, taking care of things.  Funeral home, burial site, all of that, but also when I first got there on Monday I was by myself for a day and got so lonely I had to go to the Mall of Johnson City.  Johnson City is a big city compared to Elizabethton, and when we lived there back in the mid-80s I used to go to the mall to buy records, get an Orange Julius, etc.  Hung out there with some friends from where I worked, Bonanza Steakhouse.   So I went to the mall, and it was beautiful.  Somehow the Mall of Johnson City has survived and even flourished when most other malls have died.  Hardly any empty storefronts, a big food-court, anchor stores with escalators inside them, all of it.  I walked and walked around that place, just to be around the life inside there. I could hear East Tennessee accents as I passed,