Nows and Forevers

Also 40 years old this year is “Beat’s So Lonely.” I’ve never understood why Charlie Sexton wasn’t a big rock star. “Beat’s So Lonely” is his debut from 1985 and it rocks. Sexton cowrote this song, played lead guitar and sang it like a rocker twice his age.

Oh yeah, Charlie was 16.

He was a little less than a year younger than me in 1985. His lyrics were more vivid than mine then, tell you that.

Forty years ago this week, Thompson Twins proved they weren’t a one-hit wonder with their No. 6 Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Lay Your Hands on Me.” Take out the pure ‘80s-ness of the video — and yes, there’s a lot of it — it’s also a soulful song that steps ever so close the faith ‘80s pop music mostly avoided.

Tom Bailey, he’s singing about grace.

That’s pretty rare for a pop song. And like some good pop songs, it can be about two things at the same time. But Nile Rodgers inclusion of a gospel choir on one of the versions kinda says it all.

Contrast this with what topped the charts the same week: Starship’s “We Built This City.”

I’ve always felt Thompson Twins were underrated, even if “Hold Me Now” was a monster hit in ’84. I’m glad there was a moment when Tom Bailey, Alannah Currie and Joe Leeway were on top.

NaNoWriMo will soon be no more.

For many people who love to write, whether they want to write a book or not, National Novel Writing Month had been a cultural touchstone and a fun sprint of 50,000 words every November. But the site announced this past week that it would be shutting down after 26 years.

I’m sad about this, even though financial pressures and other challenges that have faced the site have made it impossible for the nonprofit to go on. I’ve been an on-again/off-again participant since 2009 and I “won” a handful of times. A few friends of mine have written and published books out of those 50,000-word sprints in November.

I’m told there are other alternatives. I’ll have to look into it. I love writing fast, and this was a fun way to challenge myself every fall.

But until then, RIP, NaNoWriMo.

I’m not one for mysteries and true crime, maybe because I used to cover and write about it for a living and I got a bellyful years ago. But I have always liked Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and Ross McDonald in print and pretty much everything I’ve seen of film noir. “The Maltese Falcon” is the defining celluloid (and one of the best of its kind of all time) and it’s a great flick: Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre … all directed by John Huston in his first time.

Bogart, he’s a legend for this and for “Casablanca” (my mom’s favorite film and one of mine, too). A real life movie star at a time when there were a lot of them. But he’s not alone: Sidney Greenstreet (his first role, too, I think), Lorre and especially Mary Astor are at the top of their craft. This is only a small part of the film but I think you can see why with Bogart, Lorre and Astor and an assist from character actors Ward Bond and Barton MacLane, too. Mary Astor, wow, was she great in this.

To turn a phrase, “The Maltese Falcon” movie is the stuff dreams are made of.

Maybe it’s something that, the older you get, the harder it seems to understand how someone who was so vital and so himself could ever pass away. I see Val Kilmer as Iceman and Jim Morrison, in the ’80s and early ’90s, and, thanks to this article, I see him as Val Kilmer.

This profile is from 2020 but it’s just a good an obit as you’ll find.

Haven’t seen “The Studio” but can it come close to “The Player”? There’s not one wasted moment, starting with this iconic 8-minute opening.

And that’s 25 words or less.

Gen X, the ever-squeezed. It was like that when we were born, growing up, now and til the day we’re all gone. We oughta be used to it by now.

Five years.

It’s hard to believe it’s been that long since Covid-19 swept across the United States. This was the last normal day before everything went awry, at least in my state. Even though I knew it was coming, it was still disturbing and unsettling and it looked like nothing so much as a tidal wave of fatality and suffering coming straight at us.

And it was.

But with measles on the upswing and the threat of bird flu and whatever else, I wonder if we’ve learned anything.

I don’t think we have.

Hard to overestimate how influential Robert A. Caro is in writing and journalism, “The Power Broker” and then his multivolume biographies of LBJ. I was fascinated too by his slim volume, “Working,” which contained a fair amount about how he reported and wrote.

My favorite piece of advice: “Turn every page.” It’s similar to a piece of advice my journalist father had for me, about how important it is to read all the way to the end in a document. It’s harder now given how little time journalists have — Dad and Robert A. Caro and frankly me began our careers in a different, Internet-less time — but I ignore that advice to my peril.

Great article about Caro in Smithsonian Magazine.

I’ll be in New York City in a few weeks and I’ll be going to that exhibit on Caro at the New York Historical Society, that’s for sure.