Muchness and Light

Well I know you will remember, 'cause the music is forever.

It's been a really busy year for me. 

• I finished losing 115 pounds.
• I had three surgeries to removed 120+ square inches of skin.
• I went to South by Southwest for the first time.
• I got to see both my beloved The Gracious Few and LIVE with their new lead singer on the same night.  (Plus some other band.  I forget.)
• I fell in love with the Mynabirds.  (Missing Patsy Cline song – "We Made a Mountain")
• I finally got to see the Afghan Whigs live and to meet Greg Dulli in a dark alley behind the Masquerade.  (And Ric McCollum and John Curley.)
• I filed for divorce.
• I released my first novel. 

Even with all of that, there's still something missing.

Wednesday night, I will finally get to see Concrete Blonde live. 

"What's the big deal?" you ask. 

Well, let me tell you. 

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, I went one weekend afternoon to the Southside Festival, which was a great little outdoor music and arts thing that used to take place in Five Points South in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.  Five Points is a funky little area, artsy and eclectic—and it was much less dirty then than it is now.  (At least it seemed that way.)  My friends and I hung out there on weekends and sometimes after school, sitting around the fountain, bullshitting and getting into far less trouble than we probably deserved. 

So this specific day when I was 14, some record label promo people were passing out albums to the crowd.  Yes, vinyl, in the 12x12 sleeve, and for free.  They handed me two: Pleased To Meet Me by the Replacements—who I saw play at Sloss Furnaces a couple of years later—and Concrete Blonde's self-titled debut.  I tromped up the rickety stairs to Charlemagne Records and also bought a Billie Holiday best-of collection, as well as Metal Circus by Hüsker Dü. 

(It was a very eclectic day.  For those in the know, I ran into Broderick Brakefield and Bryan Simmons, who'd missed their ride the night before and had been running around down there, barefoot, for a couple of days.)

I went home and locked myself away in my bedroom, planting myself on the floor in front my stereo.  I might even have stacked the records on the turntable.  I loved them all, each in their own way, but I adored Concrete Blonde. 

It was the first day of a now-26-year love affair from afar with the incomparable Johnette Napolitano. 

As I've discussed before, I'm an alto.  (Really, a contralto.)  I don't have a lot of patience for wimpy soprano voices.  And Johnette's voice was the farthest from wimpy I'd ever heard.  It was deeply female with the most amazing breath control ever.  Ever.  (Those booming notes aren't higher; they're simply bigger.) 

I was blown away.

So this goes on for years, but somehow I miss them live, over and over and over.  I was too young for the clubs they played.  My ex-boyfriend was an asshole who beat me up the night before we were supposed to go to Atlanta to see them.  I lived in Huntsville where they never played anymore.  They broke up. 

I was supposed to see them two summers ago during their Bloodletting anniversary tour.  I had ruptured two discs in my back and was in so much pain that I had to give the tickets away.  (I cried.  A lot.)

So when I went to Variety Playhouse with Growler and Mandypants a few weeks ago (for the Psychedelic Furs, thank you very much), I was thrilled to see that Concrete Blonde would be playing on December 19^th.  Finally, finally!, I get to do this shit after twenty-six years. 

It's the voice and the lyrics and the fact that she plays bass.  She does the most wonderful covers of Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, in part because her voice lends itself to that.  But my favorites, undoubtedly, are the ones with the complicated harmonies, where Johnette seems to wrap her own voice around itself. 

And, ultimately, I owe Johnette Napolitano my life. 

There are a couple of people who know this story.  If you're one of them and you're hearing (reading) it for the dozenth time, I apologize.  This anecdote was in the first draft of what would become Persona Non Grata: A Story of Junkture.  It was cut entirely when I fictionalized the book, though Concrete Blonde still made mention.  (page 81, at the end of chapter 6—you can search inside the book on Amazon, btw) 

NOTE:  This is still incredibly difficult for me to go back to, to put myself in the place where I felt the things I write about below.  I can deal with a lot of my shit, but this is one of the most personally-shameful moments of emotion in my forty years, and I'm not callous about this. 

The horrible ex-boyfriend (Damien) and I had broken up for what would be the last time.  After four tumultuous years with him, I was a mess.  I was devastated when we broke up.  For the third or fourth time since I'd known him, I decided that ending my life was the only way I would ever be able to deal with the pain. 

I had a plan.  I had the implements.  I was crying vicious tears while driving on I-65 north in Birmingham, determined to do it as soon as possible.  My little car had a cassette deck, and my very favorite tape was a home-recorded, 90-minute thing that had Concrete Blonde on one side and Bloodletting on the other—my two favorite Concrete Blonde records.  Bawling my head off, I intended to listen to "Bloodletting" and all of the subsequent tracks from that records, all so dark and somber.  It's an amazing record, but all I wanted was to let my own heart find its reprieve in that sadness. 

Instead, what I got was "True", the first track from the other side of the tape. 

Well when I've had enough

I'll get a pick-up truck and I'll drive away,

I'll take my last ten bucks just as far as it will go.

 

Well sometimes I'm easily fooled,

Take a painful step and I get knocked back two.

I do all I can and it's all I can do to be true.

And if I had the choice I'd take the voice I got

Cause it was hard to find.

You know I've come too far to wind up right back where I started.

And they tell me who I should be,

I'll never let those monkeys make a mess of me.

I am who I am and it's all I can do,

But I'm true.

One more sunrise

Open my eyes up – true

One more sunset

Lay my head down – true

They talk you up and then they talk you down

And you begin to doubt.

Sometimes the reasons seem so very far away.

But I'd stop breathing today,

Cause if I can't walk proud, I'd rather walk away.

I do all I am and it's all I can do,

But I'm true.

I'd give all I am and I'd give it to you.

So true.

That was what I heard, instead of a song of a crack in the mirror and a bloodstain on the bed, about being turned into the walking dead. 

"What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed into the otherwise-empty car tearfully. 

I went home instead.

So every time I get really down, feel really lost and can't find my inner compass, that's where I go back, to that piece of time (still so fresh inside my mind) and remember that moment of pause that saved my life. 

Was it really Johnette Napolitano that saved my life?  Not directly.  But I don't know that I would've been listening to anything else, or that I could've heard anyone else quite so clearly that late afternoon.  But I did hear it, thankfully.

So now, twenty-six years into this love affair, her music is still so often the soundtrack of my life.  And of Tierney's.  Six Concrete Blonde songs were included in my playlists.  All of my friends know how much I love her.  Half of them love her, too, because I introduced them. 

Tickets for Concrete Blonde at Variety Playhouse are still available.  Wednesday, December 19^th, at 8:00 p.m.  I'll be the first show for me and Growler, as well as for Tierney.  Come say hi.  I'll be the glittery Amazon belting out every last song. 

They felt the heat of the night and it hit 'em like a freight train, moving with a simple twist of fate.

I'm a firm believer in Fate. 

For ease of understanding (both yours and mine), I'll go with the idea that fate is the inevitable and unavoidable ordered events of an individual's destiny.  Destiny refers to the finality of events as they've worked themselves out. 

Some things are fated in the sense that there's only viable choice, based on all of the previous choices you've made.  This doesn't mean that destiny is predetermined from the get-go; it's not independent of free will.  They can, and should, co-exist.  There's a concept of Micaic Destiny, in which those seemingly-dichotomous notions are harmonious.  The idea is that we make only one unchangeable choice each moment and that inevitable outcomes are possibly foreseeable, though never entirely predictable, because of those choices.  There's nowhere else to go—no other destination—but here because you've come from there.  There's a feeling of significance to these outcomes, though maybe that's trumped by destinies that seem to have nothing to do with your own previous choices at all.

I believe in Fate as an outside, blinding force.  Maybe it's because of other people's choices, maybe it's sheer dumb luck, but it feels like divine intervention, twisting and turning you wildly or slightly.  Either way, you can't help but look at what it wants you to see.  

One of my favorite books is Fool on the Hill by Matt Ruff.  It's this genre of fantasy in modern times, which I totally love.  There's something endearing and relatable about magic in the world I know, rather than some distant, mildly-recognizable land and time.  One of the great characters of Fool on the Hill is Mr. Sunshine.  He's this old dude, a Greek Original, with an infinite number of monkeys, typing away and crafting the story of what's happening to the protagonists.  Sometimes what the monkeys write makes chronological sense, but sometimes, well, it's just Mr. Sunshine sticking his finger into the stillness and stirring, ever so slightly, to make the waters ripple in the way he knows is best for everyone's outcomes.  Fate.

Certainly, especially if I'm bored or distractible, I've been the one to stir my own waters with my freshly-manicured finger.  Every so often, though, these things happen—inevitable, unavoidable, and blinding—that completely alter my path and reroute my journey.  I try not to see them as anything but good, Amor fati, and accept these events, to learn the monumental lessons they inexorably bring.  They are, after all, edging me forward to my own destiny, to Destination Me. 

But the Fates are vicious and they're cruel.  (Monkeys can be a nasty bunch.)  Sometimes it feels as though the thing they're forcing me to turn and see is nothing more than reflections in my own pools.  And when the stirring brings the ripples, the reflection is imperfected, so I stay at the muddy bank, waiting for the stillness to bring its insights once again. 

Maybe Narcissus was onto something.  Maybe he was looking deeper than ancient storytellers and mythology writers gave him credit.  Either way, I guess the cautionary tale of staying too long at the water's edge is still valid.   

And what if we fight Fate?  What if we choose not to look at what it's showing us?  If it's strong enough, important enough, that it's supposed to alter our course, we will feel the slings and arrows of that battle until we concede and let the pain of it all wash over us and through us, surrendering to the inevitability of what we were always supposed to do.  Or else we die.  Unfulfilled, unhappy, uncontent. 

Sometimes it's hard to accept what Fate has to offer; it's hard to be gracious in the face of incomprehensible upheaval.  But I find, inevitably, that what it's offering me is profound and completely worth the initial confusion and discord.  So I may spend a lot of time analyzing what I see, cautiously examining and re-examining—is it tangible or just a bunch of smoke in front of my mirrors?  Even if it turns out to be a watery guise, the inescapable truths—often acute and exhaustive—learned through that time and effort are almost always the most sublime.

 

I do all I am, and it's all I can do, but I'm true.

This is my 100^th blog post on Muchness and Light.  I felt like it should be something retrospective.  The blog, and the writing that came over the last year, were all triggered by a line from Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), when he tells Alice, "You used to be much more... muchier.  You've lost your muchness."  That quote sent me on a search for my own lost muchness.  While it's been an amazing year, I've already written about regaining some of my muchness, and I didn't want to be too repetitive.

The search for my self has led me down an incomparably twisted and tumultuous path.  Time and again, I've gone back to the idea of my life being about the journey and not the destination.  DH pointedly asked me a few months ago, "How can you get anywhere when you have no destination in mind?"

I've often set out with a goal in mind, it's hard (and sometimes counterproductive) not to.  But I like to be flexible enough to allow for a change of course when necessary, whether for literal or figurative reasons.  I'm still moving forward, but to what end?

Finally, a few weeks ago, it hit me: the ultimate destination is ME.

The end result of all of this trekking is the truest, most absolute version of Stephanie Quinn Jackson.  One of these days, my heart will stop and play its final beat.  When that day comes, I'll know I've had my heart broken and my pride stolen, but the only person I'll truly have to answer to is me.  I'm the only one who can make the final judgment call as to whether or not I did everything I could to be true—to myself, to my loves, to my life. 

There are days and times when my choices fly in the face of everything and everyone around me.  It's not always easy, and it doesn't always make me or anyone else happy, but sometimes being true, and being Truly Me, is hard.  The easy path from Point A to Point Me isn't always the true path, and I've absolutely been known to take the easiest way possible.  I've had to backtrack from that a bazillion times and go on the way I should've gone to begin with.  What I found, each and every time, is that I would've been much happier, more fulfilled, and gotten just as far, if I'd just gone the right damn way to begin with. 

So I'm not a finished product yet, and I'm glad about that.  If I were done, if I were all Stephanie could be, there would be no point to journeying onward; I could finally sit my not-as-large ass down and just see what passes by me.  Instead, I'm continuing forward and see what I pass by. 

I'll be sure to send a postcard (or a blog post) or two along the way.

 

 

I'm high as a cloud, I'm soft and gray and lazy.

Today's my birthday.  I'm 39.  No, I don't feel any older than I did yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that.  But I suppose it's time for some obligatory self-reflection.

It's been a big, boisterous, tumultuous year.  Lots of ups and down, though that means lots of opportunities to learn and grow and expand.  And expand, I have. 

This was the year to find my voice again.  Even though it's been sometimes shaky and screechy and almost always loud, it's mine, and I'm trying my best to raise it in song or poem or protest or praise, as necessary and as needed.  Some of you hear me, and some of you don't.  But I will continue to use this supremely fluid contralto to express myself, no matter what anyone else thinks.  Maybe because of what someone else thinks. 

So I'm going forward, looking forward, headed ever closer toward 40, and I'm okay with that.  There's a hell of a lot less of me (physically) than there was a year ago, and there will be less of me in another year.  With each passing day, I grow stronger and bolder and a little more me, like it or not. 

I have a lot to offer and a lot to give, and I hope you'll stay with me as I continue down ths path, along this journey from Point A to Point Me.  I'm sure the upcoming year will lead me through twists and turns, with an occasional bump in my road.  But this life is all about that journey, not that destination, so I'm excited to see what's in store for me.  I'll do my best to share it with you, wherever you are, and I hope you'll share a little of yourself, too, because even I get tired of my own voice.  But as I've learned this last year, it's mine--no matter what--and sometimes it's worth a listen. 

 

 

There is no prince, Aunt Imogene.

In the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film, Tim Burton introduces a small but wonderful character, Aunt Imogene, played by the incomparable Frances de la Tour, best known for her role as Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.  Imogene is Alice and Margaret Kingsleigh's aunt, an old maid whose manner of dress is both inappropriately young and far too dated.  We see Imogene early in the film (and its novelization), just after Alice has seen the White Rabbit and is trying desperately to flee Hamish's public proposal in the gazebo.  Alice bumps into Imogene, quite literally, and complains of seeing a rabbit in a waistcoat.

             "I can't be bothered with your fancy rabbit now," Imogene said, patting her ridiculous curls.  "I'm waiting for my fiancé."

            This was strange enough to distract Alice from the rabbit for a moment.  "You have a fiancé?"

            A sudden flash of white darted past her and she whirled around.  "There!  Did you see it?" she cried.  Her gaze searched the tangled shrubbery frantically, but everything was still again.

            "He's a prince," Imogene simpered, ignoring Alice's last question to go back to the story of her fiancé.  "But, alas, he cannot marry me unless he renounces the throne.  It's tragic, isn't it?"

            Alice gave her a skeptical look.  "Very."  Perhaps Imogene had lost her mind.  She certainly sounded madder than Alice right now.  Alice smiled and nodded politely, backing away from her aunt.  Imogene had her hands clasped under her chin and was gazing off into the distance, waiting for her imaginary fiancé to appear.

It's interesting to me that Aunt Imogene can take on such a grand role in such a short amount of time.  She is the embodiment of the decaying dream, a recurring theme throughout this version of the story; Alice's father's dreams of eastward expansion of trade routes, her sister's ideal marriage that's really not, and Victorian society's expectations that Alice marry up to be successful in life, are all crumbling at the onset of the story. 

We don't know if Imogene ever really loved a prince, and it's ultimately irrelevant.  Her prince is the last remaining hope she has for fulfilling the expectations of others.  She is trying desperately to hang on to the lucid dreams of her youth, now yellowed and faded but dressed up in garish blush. 

Alice, of course, escapes her own potential fiancé by falling down the rabbit hole on her return visit to Underland.  She has her adventure with the Mad Hatter, her strange and sexually-charged encounters with Stayne the Knave of Hearts, and the battles of ego with both the Red Queen and the White Queen.  After Alice slays the Jabberwocky on Frabjous Day and bids her farewells to her friends, she returns to the garden party at the Ascot estate. 

One by one, she gives her youthful, unabashed truths to the party-goers of note.  She declines Hamish's proposal, she tells her sister to butt out of her life, and she warns her brother-in-law against infidelitous behavior.  She rids herself of Lady Ascot's judgments of her, she establishes herself as an adult (and as her father's daughter) to her own mother, and she engages Lord Ascot in a continuation of her late father's business dealings, defining herself as confident, competent, and capable. 

In the midst of her parade of proclamations, Alice pauses to address her aunt a final time:

            "There is no prince, Aunt Imogene.  You need to talk to someone about these delusions."

The irony, of course, is that Alice has just come back again from a world of delusions that have shaped her since her childhood.  Alice is able to let the delusory events happen and wash over her and pass away without being caught up in them day after day.  Aunt Imogene, however, has been mired in her dream for so long that she can't see how her life has become stuck in her own psychic muck. 

One of my favorite songs ever is "The Side of the Road" by Concrete Blonde.  Johnette Napolitano sings over her banjo, "It's hard recognizing a dream that's gone dead."  That's exactly what's happened to poor Imogene.  She has never been able to wake from her dream and either carry it forward to fruition, or to let it fade into the twilight. 

I'm not one to advocate giving up on a dream, certainly; sometimes your dreams just have to be delayed until a more appropriate time.  But then there are the dreams that you have to look at in the harshest of lights, to see that they will never come to pass, no matter how much you doll yourself up for them.  When that time comes, you just have to put your party dress away, take down your pin curls, and wash the bright pink muck off your face, ready to face a new day and grab a new dream. 

 

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder where you're at!

I love music.  I always have.  All kinds of music.  I remember spending long hours locked away in my bedroom, flipping albums over and reading along with the lyrics and liner notes in time to the music.  Looking back, I'm sure my dad's downstairs neighbors had to have loved INXS's Listen Like Thieves as much as I did, right?  And no one has ever sounded better singing along with Michael Hutchence.  (I so totally should've won Rock Star:INXS.)

Music was a big deal in my house from a very early age.  I was raised on daily doses of the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, Elton John (before he sucked), Billy Joel (before he was an ass) and Linda Rondstadt.  I loved nothing more than choosing the albums for the day at home with my mom, stacking them on the turntable, and singing my little strawberry blonde heart out.  The first song I remember singing is "Bennie and the Jets", though all I knew was the "B-b-b-bennie and the Jetssssss!"  I knew all the words to "Hotel California" long before I ever knew what a colita was.  And my grandmother famously tells of how I spent hours one summer on her front porch--my concrete stage--serenading her suburban Atlanta neighborhood with the repetitive strains of "Delta Dawn".  (I'm so sorry, Kennesaw!)

I did my first performance at an All-County music festival in the 6th grade, moved on to choir in junior high where I performed with the grade level choirs, the girls' choir, and the smaller 16-person chamber choir.  I did a short stint in choir in high school but found that singing melancholy songs of teenage angst in my bedroom was much more fulfilling to my tortured psyche than any six-part Latin piece would ever be.  I did a couple of homegrown musical theatre performances and even toyed with the idea of taking opera lessons.  But I can tell you from experience that it's really hard to sing scales for hours on end when you're hung-over.  And nothing will make your tongue trip over 1-3-5-3-1-5-1 interval patterns like cotton mouth. 

I still spend hours listening to music, picking apart the bass line, or comparing how the countermelody of the guitar syncs with the singer's voice.   For me it's always about the lyrics and the vocals, so intimately tied together.  But good lyrics can overcome a less-than-perfected vocal talent, a là Leonard Cohen or Greg Dulli, both of whom I adore unconditionally. 

And then there are the harmonies.

I'm firmly planted, vocally, in the alto camp.  I can remember many times of having to lip sync lyrics in group performances because my line would traipse into first soprano territory.  I have been moved into the tenor section on more than one occasion, when they were lacking boys whose voices had settled yet, or just because it was a better vocal fit.  So I have spent a lot of time singing harmony.  I like to pick the harmony line out of my favorite songs, or sometimes I will make up my own.  As Adam Taylor expressed to me recently, you feel like you're helping the singer and the music, making it richer and more complicated. 

So imagine my surprise when I lost my voice.  Oh, yeah.  After my second son was born in 2004, I never felt quite right.  At my one-year check-up, my OB/GYN found a growth on my thyroid.  Two months later I was having a partial thyroidectomy, to remove the right lobe.  Apparently my thyroid sat very, very close to the laryngeal nerve, and the only way for the surgeon to make sure the nerve was intact was to move it.  It was moved a lot.  The nerve went into shock and didn't work for three months. 

There I was with 5-year-old and 1-year-old boys, each raising their own kind of hell, and no way to yell at them.  I didn't just need to yell at them to stop torturing the cat or to keep their voices down.  I needed to be able to get their attention in a parking lot or on the playground.  I needed to call for help across the house when a diaper had unexpectedly ruptured. 

And I needed to sing.  By that point in time, early 2006, those years of singing and practice had reduced me to singing "The Wheels on the Bus" 342 times a day, almost exclusively in the car.  When my elder son was 18-months-old, we took our first family vacation to Gulf Shores.  He was so agitated from the onset of toddlerdom and the Benadryl we foolishly slipped into his apple juice, he screamed from Greenville, Alabama, to Birmingham.  I had to sit in the back seat with him and sing every word of the Dragon Tales soundtrack CD to keep him quiet.   When my throat was too parched to continue, I resorted to singing to my husband, "Ple-ase, we neeeed to get some w-a-a-a-teeerrr...."

For three months I did my best to not lose control when I could only stage whisper.  I could barely talk, let alone sing.  Eventually the nerve started to work again.  The surgeon warned me that sometimes the voice was not the same, though not everyone would be able to hear the difference.  He was right, of course, which is why he was the most sought-after thyroid surgeon in Birmingham. 

I was reluctant to even attempt to sing, afraid of what I would find.  The range had dropped, both on the top and bottom, by a couple of notes.  The timbre was a little different, though perhaps a bit richer.  I stuck with the easy melodies I knew best, the ones that were least taxing on my stagnated vocal chords.  Eventually I did move back to the harmonies I love: Johnette Napolitano on "(You're the Only One) Can Make Me Cry", Elaine Summers on Pete Droge's "Straylin Street", and anything else I could find to wrap my voice around.

Recently I had the distinct and wonderful chance to sing my current favorite song, "Silly Thing" by the Gracious Few, at the Double Door in Chicago, with the ever-delightful Kevin Martin.  He'd been sweet and sung with me at a show a few weeks before in Atlanta.  He knew how much I loved the song, the entire album, and pulled me into the song from the edge of the stage.  I started fine, we had great fun; he left me to do his regular show but then came back before the song was over.  I was nervous and excited and drunk.  I decided to go for the harmony on the full chorus.  Apparently so did Kevin.  I knew at the time it was off, but not until I saw the video a few days later did I know how awful it was.  I was so caught up in the interval of the harmony that I stayed on it, moving from wherever the heck Kevin's voice was.  I can laugh about it, because it's really funny and I'm that kind of self-deprecating girl.   But it was also a little heart-wrenching, that I had this moment to shine and barely glittered. 

Since I had the boys, it seems there's been a constant search for my voice.  I can hear it now, though it doesn't always sound to others the same way it does to me.  Ultimately, though, it's my voice.  I can't rely on anyone else to define it for me, to lead me to use it in any certain way.  Sometimes I may be forced to sing for the Red Queen, but I will sing it in my own style, even if it costs me my head.