Incredibly Stupid Bliss

A lot of people are talking about what they learned from the pandemic.  That's what you do, I guess, after a historical nightmare and collapse of just about every institution and truism you counted on:  you start telling yourself you learned stuff from it all.  It's the way you get through, figuring out how meaning can be made from a situation that really is pretty upfront and conventionally horrifying.  I mean we've lived through Stephen King's biggest book, right?  And here we all are still standing.  Hopefully washing our hands more.   What I learned from the pandemic:  how to love where I live.  Which is Forest Park, Ohio.  Population 18,583, according to the 2019 census, a decline of .07% from 2010.  There are a lot of "used-to-be's" here in the FP.  A huge vacant mall, a recently shuttered Aldi's, an about-to-close Walmart on Smiley Avenue, a Walgreens transmorgrified into a dialysis center.  A giant vacant Super K-Mart.  A few abandoned houses. 

Netflix creators sometimes manufacture a lot of bloat for the sake of having something to binge, so usually I end up watching half of a docuseries or whatever, feeling like the makers of content could have done the job in an hour or so, not ten.  But with The Andy Warhol Diaries , a new 6-episode arc concerning the life and loves of the ultimate genius/weirdo, the opposite happens:  twelve or so hours of content feels like a dream you want to enter, and at the end I wanted even more.  There's a feeling in every episode of beautiful sadness, carried through to a penultimate sense of strangeness by recreating Andy's voice through an artificial-intelligence program, conjuring the voice and spirit of Andy so that throughout the whole thing his persona and identity swirl into a sort of deadpan, distant Godliness.  It's breathtaking.     Andrew Rossi is credited as writer/director, and you truly feel an auteur at work.  The series is sort of a grand 60s/70s/80s Pop-Art collage me

  I get into a habit of putting things on repeat until it becomes the background of every thought I have, and this album, Electric Light Orchestra's Discovery , their eighth studio album that was released in May 1979, is now the soundtrack of every idea, dream, misnomer, etc. I have in my skull.  Every song on this thing is pure delight:  caveman-electronica, disco for cornfields, sad but happy synth-pop.  It presages the early 80s of Human League and Icehouse and OMD and Ultravox and so many other English postpunk New Wave aesthetes. But ELO was and is for losers.  They never fit into a category that would have them, and this album is so blissfully unhinged and perfectly recorded I feel totally aligned with my 14-year-old nothing self pushing it into the 8-track in an old Chevy Malibu.  It is everything, it is nothing.  Here's the thing:  I shoplifted the 8-track version back in the day.  No kidding.  Fr om Ayr-Way, the store that would eventually become Target, and it was a t