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A love song for Howard Jones: Why pop lyrics matter to the teens we are and the adults we become

The world teaches us to think that life is full of limitations
The world tries to make us think that there are loads of limits
— “Conditioning,” Howard Jones

 

Two things happened in the world of music during the week of March 23, neither of which had anything to do with one another – unless you happen to live in my head.

Zayn Malik left One Direction, a band I do not listen to. And I went to see Howard Jones, a musician I fervently listened to when I was the median age of most of 1D’s fans.

In this column, I generally address great (and poor) writing on TV and in movies. But when I was a teenager, all the words in the world that mattered to me came not from TV or movies – or even books. I was voracious in my consumption of of music and spent hours flipped on my stomach in our living room parsing the lyric sheets of albums by my favorite artists, explicating every line for deeper meaning.

Music lyrics do that to us. The music is the bird that pokes holes in our conscious; the lyrics are the seeds it leaves behind, and they flower all the rest of our lives. My mentors never spoke to me directly, but left behind legacies of words put to a good beat you could sometimes dance to that still conjure up adolescent memories even today. When I was 14 and 15 and 16, I wanted someone to give me guidance about what the hell was going on in the grown-up world, and pop tunes did that for me.

 

Here I come now got no time to frown
Nothing in my way now nothing can bring me down
Feel that surge open the doors around
Higher and higher the world is my hunting ground
— “Hunt the Self,” Howard Jones

 

So 1D fans, I know none of your band’s lyrics and can hum none of their tunes, but I feel your pain: Your bedrock is crumbling and everyone around you who isn’t a fan is laughing. I’m way, way old and I’m not. Because I remember that whether the words are deep and meaningful or shallow and simply-rhymed doesn’t matter; as long as you’re listening to them, they are the scaffolding on which you are hoisting yourself to the next stage of life.

I listened to a lot of bands and took in a lot of words in those formative years. Howard Jones was never No. 1 on my top list of bands but I put him quite high up in a rarefied position, thanks in part to the words he wrote – he was a guru to me. Legendary rock critic Robert Christgau may have vilified Jones’ first album Human’s Lib for being self-help twaddle, but I wasn’t listening to it as a grown up; I heard it as a kid.

So when I listened to some of those songs all over again some 30 years after hearing them for the first time in New York City the other night I confess: I took a little side trip in my head and remembered all the things I had learned from my guru, and the places those lessons took me.

Places like these:

Veganism and Taoism.

Howard Jones was the first person I ever heard of who was full-on vegan. He did it hard-core in the days before the world ever heard of a Boca Burger and even wrote songs about the cruelty done to animals in the name of feeding humans (“Assault and Battery”). So I went vegetarian. And had some eggs. And fish. OK, I was terrible at being vegetarian, but it was a blow for independence at a young age.

In addition to being a vegan, Jones referred both directly (with a B-side song title) and indirectly to the Tao Te Ching, a religion/philosophy/book/way of thinking I’d never heard of before. I still don’t know if I fully understand what “the way” really means, but it has a lot to do with letting go and understanding that you are just a speck in the river that carries you along.

Professionalism.

I’ve never met Jones (other than waiting hours in line outside Tower Records in 1985 only to have him sign my “Things Can Only Get Better” 45 record sleeve “To Mandee”), and it’s not important that I do. But early on in my journalism career, I interviewed him over the phone – in the most irritating way possible. I peppered him with dozens of nerdy fangirl questions until he finally asked, “Do you think we’ll talk about the new album soon?” which was of course why we were here in the first place. I went scarlet. I scrambled, recovered, did the job I was supposed to do and learned a hugely valuable lesson. You really do often learn best from your mistakes.

Acceptance.

When I went out to visit a friend of mine I’d been pen-pals with since she moved away after we were in kindergarten together, I was 16 and crushing hard on a guy in school who was still two years from coming out of the closet. He gave us ladies some hope by, well, dating us – but we knew the truth even if we (and he) didn’t want to admit it.

Meanwhile, my pen-pal had begun a deep dive into evangelical Christianity, and when I told her about my hopeless devotion to my uncertain friend she became first sincerely concerned for my soul. Then, when she couldn’t convince me to abandon my friend, she wrote me a letter quoting the Bible extensively and explaining that she could no longer associate with me.

It begged for a response. So I went to a different bible for my recourse: I shot her back the last letter we ever exchanged, covered with my own favorite lyrics about equality, tolerance, what is natural and what is not – Jones’ lyrics.

I have always felt good about that.

 

You don’t know
I don’t know
Nobody knows
This is an answer to every question
This is a place to begin
— “Always Asking Questions,” Howard Jones

 

It’s easy to mock pop lyrics. Easy to say Taylor Swift’s words are all about the same thing, or that the guys in One Direction don’t even write their own lyrics. But teenagers don’t care – they’re still listening hard, still using those lyrics to ascend into adulthood. Pop singers, rock singers, rap singers – those are the grown-ups kids listen to; they are their teachers as much as, if not more than, the ones paid to instruct them in school.

Awards strictly for lyrics don’t exist, so far as I know. Songwriters get prizes for the combination of words and music, but that’s a significant difference. And lyric writers, the good ones, really should get some recognition for a clever rhyme, the hidden pun, the evocative image. A well-turned lyric, aimed at the right person at just the right time, gets under the skin of even the hardest-to-reach young people. That’s a rare power that deserves respect – and love.

So thanks, Howard Jones. You weren’t the only musician who raised me into adulthood, but you were a significant player in the group. Long may you – and the beautiful simplicity of your words – reign.

This column originally appeared at Curiosity Quills.

“Last Man on Earth”: Laughing, or not, at the end of the world

Can the end of the world be funny?

It sure can be serious: One of TV’s most popular shows has been showing just how un-funny the end of the world can be for five seasons now. In fact, The Walking Dead has pretty much rubbed our faces in not only how bad it is when the world ends, but how it continues to go on ending every day as the survivors lose their humanity inch by inch. There are zero laughs (except when Carl stuffs himself with pudding). It is well-written, a question I have to ask before praising anything in this column - most of the time.

But can it be something that’s not jut bleak and bloody? Can laughs be wrung out of the most divine joke of them all; namely that the machine of civilization has seized up and perished?

Answer: Yes. If you’re willing to squint.

Squinting is crucial when it comes to Fox’s new series The Last Man on Earth. The premise is, thus far, as stated: Will Forte appears to be the only survivor of a virus that has wiped everyone else out. The squinting begins when you have to set the hyperbole of the title aside - no network show is going to permit 22 minutes per week to be a one-man operation. So, there’s a woman. Also, while Forte is shown scouring the U.S. and parts of Canada in a big RV, he’s not exactly done due diligence on the entire planet.

The fact that Forte is an interesting actor helps. He does sad and thoughtful and absurd all at once, most nimbly shown off in the movie Nebraska. All three are needed to enjoy Last Man, but by the time the show gets moving, squinting’s not enough. We’ve all seen too much of this kind of thing not to have some crucial questions that invariably invade any attempt at funny. Like:

• Where are all the bodies?
• Where are all of the car pileups on the highways?
• Why would anyone choose to live in the inhospitable, arid desert of Tucson following civilization’s collapse?
• Why (other than for purported comic reasons) would a man who can appreciate fine paintings decide it was OK to use a fountain as a toilet, rather than dig a trench?

A well-written series can get away with anything, even when it does veer off course. Set the tone, set the mood, set the tension between the conflict and the characters in just the right way and you’re free to experiment. Last Man Standing, however, isn’t all that well written and so it doesn’t fly. Whether you like Forte’s character or just find him sexist almost is beside the point - the fact that I’m left with questions rather than chuckles as the show goes on means they haven’t set this world up very carefully. I’m constantly aware that this is going to be a sitcom and it will follow sitcom rules, like never leaving the immediate vicinity or considering things in a practical manner.

That leaves me sad, and a little bored. What could have been!

Yet the end of the world can be funny, if you do set it up right; this is why I have hopes that Comedy Central will let Matt Porter and Charlie Hankin make more episodes of New Timers, a web series whose heroes don’t seem to fully grok the challenges they’re facing now that the end has arrived. We first meet them 281 days after “the event,” just two guys hanging out and making condiment dip in a tool box to take to a gathering.

The party they’re expecting to attend turns out to be an escape from the hellhole the city around them has become - a handsome hero has fixed a car so they can flee with a handful of others who have been invited. But the gathering turns into a “who is more equipped to survive the apocalypse” bicker-fest (one of them suggests his narrow wrists come in handy more than you might expect), and the hero drives off alone. The cluelessness, the vague nature of the disaster, and the general reflective, mundane complaining that goes on is what makes this funny. It’s sly, and it’s subtle: You totally know guys who would be like this when the world ends.

It may also help that each episode is less than 10 minutes long; funny and the end of the world may work a lot better as a sketch than a thought-through narrative series.

The problem in the end is this: If Last Man insists on being what it has so far set itself up to be - yet another half hour of men and women clashing over their various differences - then who cares if it’s set in the apocalypse or not? If the only point of having to grow their own food is so they can be at odds over fresh vegetables - why should we bother? It’s plug-and-play battle of the sexes, with two members of the sexes who really do have much bigger battles to wage. The most interesting thing that series could do right now is to have both characters remember that it’s a big - and now empty - world out there, and start chasing down some actual plot.

This article originally appeared at Curiosity Quills.

Arisia 2015: My schedule, and how I'll defy both time and space while there

It's almost time for Arisia again! And that means ... panels! Reading! Parties! Boston in January!

Come join me!

Arisia is New England's largest sci-fi/fantasy con, and is held at the Westin in Boston early every year. I'm going for what I think is the sixth time, and again I'm honored to have been invited to participate on panels. I'll also be running directly from one panel into the tail-end of the awesome Broad Universe "Rapid Fire Reading" in order to share a new story of mine, which makes it even more exciting.

So for those of you who are thinking about attending, here's what you need to know about the con ... and here are the panels/readings in which I'll personally have a hand. Or voice. See you there!

Saturday 1/17, 7 p.m. / Alcott
"Fan Etiquette: How Not to Be That Fan"
You're a fan of something, I'm a fan of something. But nobody really wants to be the scary, creepy or downright embarrassing fan ... at least, hopefully that's not a goal. During this panel (I'm moderating) we'll talk about how to come across as a devotee, not a stalker.

Sunday 1/18, 11:30 a.m. / Alcott
"TV Year in Review"
Man, there have been so many great TV shows in the genre field this year, who can keep track? Five of your fellow esteemed panelists will try running through our favorites (and ones that aren't quite so favored) while soliciting comments from the audience. See how many we can get through an hour and fifteen minutes!

Sunday 1/18, 11:30 a.m. / Douglas
Broad Universe "Rapid Fire Reading"
Yeah, I've got access to the TARDIS but even I can't be in two panels at once. While other great Broads do short readings of their new work, I'll be over in the TV Year in Review panel, then heading into the RFR in the last few minutes to gasp out my own work. Let's see if I can violate both space and time in the process.

Sunday 1/18, 1:00 p.m. / Alcott
"TV Writing: Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror/Genre"
As anyone who reads my Curiosity Quills column "Between the Lines" knows, there's a lot of great ways to tell story on TV ... and a lot of ways to mess it up. With former Syfy Network excecutive Thomas Vitale moderating, we'll be discussing what makes for great writing on TV, and what the challenges of telling supernatural stories on the small screen are.

Come on by and say hello at the panels, and if you miss me there, check out the Broad Universe table, where we'll be selling copies of our latest work. Have a great con!

When fantasy writers turn on TV, what turns fantasy writers on? (Hint: Breaking Bad)

On my way to the World Fantasy Convention in Crystal City, Virginia last weekend, I had a chat with an editor, who sighed with dismay that she’d initially packed only four or five books to bring with her for the long weekend. She wondered if that was enough.

I began to wonder if I just wasn’t serious about this reading thing – I’d only brought one, plus the new issue of New York Magazine.

Turns out, both of us over-packed: On arrival, everyone got a lovely canvas tote bag packed with … you guessed it, books. Why did I ever think I’d need reading material at a convention devoted to writers?

Then again, I’m new to all this and the WFC is just-turned 40. There was a lot of expertise in that hotel. In just a few brief days it packs in live readings, panels, a dealer’s room (filled with booksellers, natch), an awards ceremony, a tribute to WWI (complete with faux poppy pins) and an ice cream social. It is enough to make a word nerd’s head ‘splode with joy and overscheduling. What it tends to have almost nothing to do with is television.

Which is why I made it my mission to track down several of the more fascinating authors in attendance and quiz them all about the one thing they probably weren’t thinking about for approximately 72 hours – the small screen, and the writing that goes on there. It was a simple mission, and the answers were surprising: What’s the best writing you know of on TV today?

Here’s what I learned:

Sarah Pinsker
Author and musician Pinsker won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short fiction of 2013 with her short story, “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind.”
Show of Choice: Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black
“The way they set about using this Trojan horse of a white middle class character to tell these stories about the other women in the jail on the show – they’re all given weight, and thought, and backstory in a way I’ve never seen on a TV show. The women all have reasons [for their plight] and are sympathetic – or not – but there’s lots of gray.”

 

Danielle Ackley-McPhail
McPhail’s most recent book (co-written with Day Al-Mohamed) is Baba Ali and the Clockwork Djinn.
Show of Choice: ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
“It’s not jut an action show; there’s depth to the characters and the situations. I’m not sure how much of that is lent from the comics and how much is the actual show, but it’s handled very well whether you care about the deeper characterizations or you like the action, there’s enough of both integrated so it carries you through the episode. You’re not left confused even if you just came in, having missed a few episodes.”

 

James Chambers
Speculative fiction and horror author Chambers’ latest book is Three Chords of Chaos, a Bad-Ass Faerie Tale.
Show of Choice: AMC’s Breaking Bad
“Breaking Bad is the closest thing I’ve seen to a novel played out on television. It was one of the first shows I’ve seen in a long time that gave the audience credit for having an attention span that lasted more than two weeks. Character development, subplots, plotlines that played out over the entire course of the show – and some very in-depth and well-observed characterizations that made it the peak of television writing in the last decade or so.”

Heather McDougal

Steampunk writer McDougal so far has one cracking book: Songs for a Machine Age.
Show of Choice: Also Breaking Bad
“There are shows you enjoy, and ones you think are well-written. This was a show I didn’t enjoy, but it was so well-written that it actually made me watch it for a few episodes because I was so fascinated by the writing. The way the characters interact, the way they’re pulled into weird situations – not that you haven’t seen it all before, but the way it’s put together is different. They’re not afraid of silence, of filling every scene up with emotions. They leave gaps where the emotions should be and you fill it in. Which might be part of why I didn’t keep watching. Ultimately, I couldn’t stand what was happening, so I had to stop.”

And for the contrary view – the most disappointing writing on television right now:

Lawrence M. Schoen
The creator of the ongoing Amazing Conroy series has a new novella published as a standalone book, Calendrical Regression, which is part of the Conroy universe.
Show of Choice: ABC’s Forever
“The saving grace of this show is the supporting character, played by Judd Hirsch. Otherwise, the show is trying to be many other shows all at the same time. You’re seeing all these tropes of other shows, and it’s doing them all together badly. It’s not going to survive and it’s frustrating because the writing is so transparent and superficial. The writing is not helping the actors. You can tell everything that’s going to happen from the very first moment – that’s my greatest disappointment in genre shows this season. It could be done better!”

This column originally appeared in Curiosity Quills.

Fall previews suck -- so here's how, not what, to watch this coming season

It’s an old, beloved story known well by “Mad Men” fans: How their show got to air. Creator Matthew Weiner had an idea to tell the story about New York ad guys in the 1960s for years before it became a reality. He honed his skills at “The Sopranos” while “Men” sat on a shelf in his closet, and doggedly insisted he was going to be the one to get it made.

“There was a personal compulsion to get it done,” he told me a few years ago. “Every time I had an opportunity to talk about it, I would say, ‘I have a show I think people would really, really love.’ Then you start seeing things being made that are so simple and imitative, it’s like - they really don’t want to take a shot on this thing?”

Weiner’s perseverance was rewarded; he’s been in charge of the multiple Emmy-winning series for seven years, and rules with an iron fist. But he’s not the only success story to emerge from that vision: the show helped transform AMC from a channel known largely for dicing up old movies into a legit scripted programming hub. They needed each other, and the gamble paid off.

“Breaking Bad” is over. “Mad Men” is coming to a close next year. “Sons of Anarchy” is ending after this season. So what do we have out there to replace them? Not “The Leftovers.” Not “Tyrant.” Maybe “Fargo” and “Masters of Sex.” But the excitement over what next great thing was coming out of cable seems to have shifted recently - and it’s enough to make a TV fan despair: Where’s the next great cable show we’re supposed to be getting now?

Industry watchers shouldn’t be surprised that cable is a calmer, duller universe these days. The so-called cable revolution was legitimate, but it spawned out of things that were more about new networks wanting to stick a pin in the map and get their names associated with something other than reruns of other people’s material. But it’s less about ego than dollars - successful original shows draw bigger ad revenue; getting more ad revenue means you can fuel more special projects, higher-quality programs … and of course hire more employees. In the name of rebranding, new networks are balls-to-the-wall risk takers: A dud hardly changes their fortunes, while a screaming success makes them geniuses.

Alas, success breeds contentment, and contentment breeds a need for safety. This is, in large part (along with FCC regs) has hamstrung broadcast for years now. Broadcast networks are lousy with bureaucracy, mired in their own safe zones and top-heavy with people who are programmed to avoid risk at all costs. Money wants to be safe, and safe is not how any network - cable or otherwise - got where it was in the first place. I do think AMC would want “Mad Men” today if it was a fresh concept; I don’t think Matthew Weiner would sign with them - he’d want control they no longer seem willing to concede.

(A side note: There are exceptions on broadcast TV - NBC’s “Hannibal” and CBS’s “The Good Wife” air high-quality series in greater quantity than cable networks, and are consistently worth watching. I’ll get back to those in another column.)

And from what I can tell, non-premium cable networks have begun heading down the dark path broadcast networks have been lost in for years. Sorry, but while they’re well-made, FX’s “The Strain” and “Tyrant” and AMC’s “Halt and Catch Fire” are just almost good enough.

This probably explains why eyeballs are so eager for streaming service programming these days. Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are where cable was in the late 1990s - hungry and willing to do whatever it takes to capture attention. But the very fact that Netflix can score with series like “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black” makes you wonder - how come cable networks didn’t see those coming? How much of it is the medium, and how much is it the message?

Where does writing come into all of this? On the surface, it doesn’t - but strip away the business of making TV and what you always need is a good story, well told. And if cable has taught us anything, it’s that letting a writer and creator of a show actually runs the thing is absolutely worth doing. The shows cable once gambled on were heavily writer-driven, with a single auteur at the helm. Agreed, not every writer has it in him to be the captain of a ship - but in recent years the shows that do gangbuster business (I’m looking at you, Shonda Rhimes) are the ones with writers who regularly inject attitude, charm and a sense of direction into their passion projects. As with Weiner, it’s personal.

So where’s your fall TV preview? This is it, in disguise. Come this new TV season - and consider this advice for all TV seasons to come - when you settle down to watch a new series that shows promise and has caught your attention, consider the writer input. What’s the creator’s name? Is he or she writing the thing? If so, it’s a good bet that it’s worth space on your DVR.

If not … consider changing the channel.

This column originally appeared at Curiosity Quills.

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Whiteboard company proves it: Weird Al was drawn that way

The array of "Weird Al" Yankovic videos that recently took over the Internet was an eight-day Al-palooza for fans of the parodist — and their devotion was rewarded when his 14th album, "Mandatory Fun," hit the top of the charts. But fans don't yet have to go into withdrawal — there's one unique video left to watch.

 

Created by TruScribe, the whiteboard animators behind Yankovic's Crosby, Stills & Nash-inspired satire on corporate speak, "Mission Statement," the new video's an audio medley of some of Yankovic's greatest parodies set to images of artists hand-drawing each of his albums, starting with his self-titled debut from 1983.

It's the perfect primer for the deprived folks in anyone's life who aren't familiar with Yankovic's oeuvre; viewers get an earful of tunes like "Fat" (parody of Michael Jackson's "Bad"), "Living With a Hernia" (parody of James Brown's "Living in America") and "White and Nerdy" (parody of "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire and Crazyie Bone), among others. 

"Weird Al" tells TODAY about making "Mandatory Fun," and why it may be his last album ever

According to TruScribe's YouTube page, the animation took two days to put together, and all of the music was used with Yankovic's permission. And for doubters who may wonder if there was some CGI sleight-of-hand used in the drawings, forget it: As the company notes in its website discussion of the making of "Mission Statement," "TruScribe videos are 100% hand-drawn, but a few cheats aren't bad."

Not seeing the forest for the trees: 'Into the Woods' and other ways Hollywood gaffes in retelling classic fairy tales

“Into the Woods” fans, brace yourself: The Disney adaptation of the award-winning, long-running, grown-up thinking fairy tale musical by Stephen Sondheim – one of the stage’s pre-eminent writers – is getting neutered.

As the New Yorker reported recently, during a master class in New York City Sondheim told the audience of high school drama teachers that characters that are killed in the musical are not in fact dead and that sexual liaisons that occur are either not happening or probably not happening. C’mon folks, it’s Disney, right? What do you expect?

Somewhere along the line – and it was probably starting as far back as 1937, when Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” was released – Disney became the de facto, go-to home for anything that even whiffed of childhood. In the ensuing years, the company has refashioned, retold and co-opted just about every fairy tale known to Western civilization, and some (hello, “Aladdin”) from other cultures entirely. The stories are their stories, the way they want to tell them, and that means the way the most adults and children want to consume them. And if that means smoothing out the rough parts and neutering anything that whiffs of controversy, supplanting all of it with sentimentality and tired moralistic and gender tropes, then so be it. The people don’t know better, do they?

The thing is they could. Fairy tales have been having a good run on TV and in the movies in recent years, even with Disney backing. From ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” series to NBC’s “Grimm” and even Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow” (a blend of folk and fairy tale), these stories are not just for children any more – not that they ever really were in the first place. Original, undiluted fairy tales are dark, scary beasts big on retribution and less big on telling a big moral story or dispensing justice. They were warnings, not advisories.

Check out the rest of my new "Between the Lines" column over at Curiosity Quills!

Going 'Through the Years' with Casey Kasem and an imaginary 'Weekly Top Million'

Dear Casey,

You were the voice of music for me as a kid. Not literally: You didn’t sing, you didn’t play an instrument. But in my preadolescent days, there wasn’t a single Sunday that went by where I wasn’t glued to the radio for the four hours it took you to work through the Billboard list of American Top 40 tunes.

Four hours! What could take so long? And yet it didn’t feel long, more like an adventure we were on together. You’d start out at the bottom of the list Billboard had determined were the top hits of the day, based on airplay and sales, and work your way up to the very tip top, where things got increasingly more exciting. I was 9, 10, 11, 12 – early in the days of getting how this whole music business thing worked, early in understanding how awesome music would make me feel, and the organization of the whole thing was appealing. Kids like black and white answers: Telling us who was No. 1 each week meant we knew what was good, and what was bad. Music, which had no boundaries, could be corralled and quantified. That was comforting, then.

Interspersed in all of that music playing you ran through trivia, factoids, history and those wonderful long-distance dedications. I took it all in like a sponge; I still can recall details I learned only through you in those pre-Internet days. I wanted to be Casey Kasem when I grew up, a person whose whole job was to know everything about popular music and tell it to the world. (This was before I made the connection to your voice-over artistry, of course.)

 

It was exciting, listening as the familiar list of tunes raced up the charts – this week, would Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” trump a far worse tune? Would Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” finally give them the No. 1 hit they’d never had but so clearly deserved? And why, oh, why was Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” still at the top of the charts after what felt like months? What was so great about that song any more?

Casey was there to explain.

You weren’t just someone I tuned into every week. If my family was in the car driving somewhere, we’d put your show on. Your rich, mellifluous tones were delightfully cheerful without being saccharine, thoughtful and informative without being overly intense. You had a classic DJ’s voice, in the days when radio DJs were allowed to have a voice, and it washed over all of us in the car as we traveled to my grandmothers, or to the pool, or on errands. It was like you had a place in the family.

And of course once you were a member of the family you were naturally a source of amusement – when we can poke fun of you, that’s how you know you’re loved. My brother and I decided there should be a “Weekly Top Million,” a version of your radio show that never ended (and mathematically could never happen). Once we had that idea, the question was: What song would be so terrible that it would sit at the very bottom of the Weekly Top Million?

“Song number one million,” we’d intone, trying to get your theatrical sound into our squeaky kiddie voices. Then we’d pick a topic that was near and dear and a little terrifying to both of our hearts at the time, since we were in braces and retainers and all kind of orthodontry – a song that had to be terrible yet chart worthy at the same time. That faux tune: “I Love My Orthodontist.” We’d collapse in giggles at a song that was that silly being sung, and never got around to song number 999,999.

It probably didn’t hurt that our orthodontist looked quite a bit like you, a thought that never occurred to me until now.

The fun-poking got a little more meta as we got older, though. We started making up imaginary long-distance dedications, those heart-wrenching letters written (theoretically) by listeners who just wanted to hear one tune that reminded them of a lost loved one, or which could get them over a difficult period, and they wanted to make sure it was shared with the nation. But we started noticing in the late 1980s that nearly every time there was a long-distance dedication that the song was always one particular song, by Kenny Rogers: “Through The Years.” It was sweet and bland and covered pretty much any imagined or real hurt a human being could have.

 

So we responded: During our “Weekly Top Million” giggle-fests, we’d make up fake long-distance dedications that could be read on the air: “Dear Casey,” we’d begin, “My car went over a cliff and landed on my dog, and I was climbing up a mountain to get help when my leg broke and I hallucinated the image of a chicken wing. So would you please play, ‘Through the Years’ by Kenny Rogers for me? It would mean the world.”

As I got older and started listening to music that either didn’t chart in the U.S. or didn’t chart at all, American Top 40 held less relevance. I didn’t really care about Aerosmith’s ascent or Bon Jovi’s dominance; why wasn’t R.E.M. everywhere in the Top 10? Or anywhere?

But you didn’t mind. You kept listing those hits, plugging forward, insisting even as the music industry began to change and charts fragmented into genres and subcategories to the point where being No. 1 just meant a song or an album was in a rarefied class, not literally the top of any particular heap.

And when you stepped down – not hiring me to do the job, I might add – and the position of American Top 40 host first to Shadoe Stevens, then later to Ryan Seacrest in 2004, I barely noticed. The closest I came to enjoying AT40 any more was on a rare car trip with the radio on late at night where a retro show from back in the day would run down the hits. That was fun, finding out the top 10 from the week of September 1, 1978. But it wasn’t the same. It was just a way to pass the time, hear some classic hits. I’d moved on.

Yet I knew you were out there, even if I didn’t know where. I didn’t know who was hearing your voice or what categories your top 10s were in your later life. And in reading how you spent your last few years, I was sad for you –illness and old age are not something on anyone’s top list of how to end your days.

And now you’re gone; poignantly on this father’s day your children are now mourning your loss, and my sympathies go out to them. But in my head, when I think about how music came into my life I’ll always hear your voice alongside all of the singers and the musicians. You were an artist, just of a different kind, and you’re at the top of our weekly top million this week, and all weeks.

So Casey, will you play “Through the Years” for me? It’s a heartfelt dedication from me, to you. Rest well, and thanks for all the music.

Love,

Randee

'Revolution' will no longer be televised, and it comes down to guns, and hair

Ugh, the guns. The guns and the hair. The guns, the hair and the complete lack of forward motion.

Hello all, and welcome to the ongoing shiva service I’m holding for the death of NBC’s Revolution, a show for whom the end of the world came twice: Once when the series started – the premise was that something had turned off all the electricity in one fell swoop and here we are 15 years later and how you like me now, civilization?  — and on May 21, when the second season aired its final episode and the lights went out for real.

There were 42 episodes of Revolution, and I watched ‘em all. That’s the equivalent of 21 movies worth of Post-Apocalyptic Scooby Gang adventures of Miles, Charlie, Tom, Aaron and Rachel going nowhere and not making very good time. They slogged through the weediest looking version of the ex-U.S.A. ever portrayed on network television week after week, in which nothing much ever seemed to happen except the same things that happened the week before.

Read the rest of this "Between the Lines" column over at Curiosity Quills right here.

Why I will not be killing my treadmill desk

It happened today. I sat down in my elevated desk chair, in front of my elevated desk (probably about four, four and a half feet off the floor) and pulled out my retractable keyboard rest and began working at my computer. And I thought, "Now this is what I wanted."

Getting here has taken time. Years, really. I always said, while stuck at my stationary desk in my old apartment that my next desk would be a treadmill. So when we moved, I got rid of the big hutch desk and plunked down a fair amount of money for a desk that would rise and lower to be either seated or standing. It arrived in November, and I've used it most every day since.

A treadmill desk is, without question, a conversation piece. Tell folks you have one and there's a lift of the eyebrow, a "really?" that's a terrific blend of "that sounds like fun I'd like to try it for a day" and "that is probably not for me no matter how neat it sounds."

In my case, I am the convert I expected to be. That doesn't mean it's a perfect mechanism. And to me, alternating between walking (I average 3-4 hours a day, 2 miles an hour), standing and sitting is crucial. You can't really get away with just doing one: Sitting gets really tough after a while, and standing is no good for long periods -- I tried just standing with my laptop resting on my dresser for a time in the old apartment, and while the height was good, after an hour or so it's tough on the body to stand more or less in one place. And walking, walking is good for a lot of things but not for actual concentrated writing -- so I sit for that. It's about variety, and with my one desk, I'm getting it.

Which is why an article like "Why I Killed My Standing Desk" is irritating. It does provide good options for people who can't stand/walk at their desks to keep moving, so that's useful. But the author posits it as an all-or-nothing proposition: I couldn't stand at my desk forever, ergo standing desks are a bad idea. Dumb.All that said, getting to this point with my treadmill desk has been a bit of a learning curve. A dynamic desk, full of items that are not necessarily meant to move or shift, means you need to adjust. Wires? They'll have to stretch. I have my computer tower under the desk, next to the modem, next to the treadmill, so that helps but then you need to make sure you don't kick the computer accidentally. (The other day my computer kicked back; I gouged the side of my foot on a sharp bit.) And when the desk rises or sinks, at least in my case, you have to compensate for the descending legs, which are a shell over the inner, narrower ones -- you don't want to lower the desk onto equipment, slippers, toes, etc.But I'm learning. We're learning, the desk and me. And for now, I can't imagine having it any other way. Well, maybe I can: I could use a larger office. This thing is a monster!