Jobs, Taylor and Spooks

I had a strong desire to listen to Carolina in My Mind by James Taylor this morning. It must be the time of year. November makes me nostalgically wistful and fills me with a sense of longing. Because I don't actually own the song, I went to Youtube to have a listen and whilst there made another discovery. James Taylor reminds me of Steve Jobs.

Sure there's the superficial similarity of a glossy round head, but its more than that. I see deeper resemblance in the chin, eyebrows, nose and sharp, brilliant eyes. Both were visionaries with soft voices and deeply moving intelligence and they may share a lot more than just physical similarities . . .  if I were to stop and think about it I could let you know.  But this post wasn't really supposed to be about them.

Instead, and in addition to the Jobs/Taylor connection, I was thinking about my connections related to that song. Carolina in My Mind is meaningful--a sad and longing song with a positive message about finding what you need inside of you. Taylor said he wrote it while feeling homesick though he didn't really have a home at the time. That's an unsettling sentiment that I totally understand.

I don't know when I first became aware of this song, but sometime, while I was still very young (far too young to really know what it felt to be lonely, removed, and homesick) I first loved it. The ideas in the song touched me. And then later, as an adult, the larger force of the deep longing settled upon me while spending Christmas alone in California far from home. And still later, a few years ago, a good dear friend (who I now miss) drew the song and its message to my attention yet again.

While listening to it today, tears streamed down my cheeks thinking about that friend and I wondered: why did I feel drawn to listen to something I knew would make me sad?

And that, friends, is how I finally get around to the British tv connection and how this post has anything to do with this blog.

This week I've been getting a number of comments and e-mails from those who have felt disappointed and saddened by the Spooks ending (like so many of us were). Someone wrote to me today about being a glutton for punishment by continuing to listen to music from that series though it brought up the sad ending all over again. We all do things like this. But why?

I have to think that making ourselves sad, reveling in our grief, must somehow be a healing act. By taking the time to really feel a loss, we can start to mend at a cellular level. Dredge up the muck, before just paving over the surface. Maybe for me, the call to hear sad songs at Christmastime and have a good cry over friends and family who are gone and places we aren't able to be is a way to prepare for joy. And maybe for those who confront, head-on, their grief over how Spooks ended, will ultimately enjoy that same healing and state of calm.

Me, on the other hand. Well, I'm still not ready to do that with Spooks. I'd rather pretend that the whole last series/season didn't exist. Denial, you see ;)  Just an earlier stage of grief.

The Muppets, The Movie . . . And Me

British TV may be fabulous, but it's not the only thing worth doing. Right in line with that theme, I just came from the new Muppets movie and I'll tell you this: it was great. There were as many "unaccompanied" grown ups in the audience as there were kids and most of them were laughing hard.

The movie was unusual for its continual breaking of that "4th wall" with characters referring to the earlier song numbers or making little jokes about the plot and length of the movie. The whole thing was charming, funny and self aware with lots of great cracks directed at the washed up Muppets of the olden days.

Somehow all the silliness managed to inspire real moments of wistfulness and remembrance and I was surprised to find a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes when Miss Piggy and Kermit finally reunited on stage for a rendition of The Rainbow Connection. There were lots of new songs too and many were quite excellent -- especially Man or Muppet which now plays continually in my mind (owing to the fact that we immediately bought the soundtrack) and in which Jason Segel gets to sing lines like "Am I a man or am I a Muppet?! If I'm a Muppet. .  . then I'm a very manly Muppet." He is brilliant in this role, managing to really make us believe in the strange set up.

Amy Adams too, is simply made for movies like this. She's become a Carole Burnett-like figure -- in that blatantly talented, beautiful, singing, dancing, poised and funny sort of way.

And whatever musical genius arranged Smells Like Teen Spirit for Muppet barbershop quartet needs, seriously, to win some awards. Stunningly funny.

A great many stars have cameos in the movie, including Neil Patrick Harris -- which caused me to have a major breakthrough -- I realized I get him confused with Justin Timberlake. This has happened to me before, but I never put my finger on the phenomenon until now.  I don't know if anyone else has this same Harris/Timberlake problem  -- so I am posting the following just to prove I am not crazy. (Although, maybe the following just proves that I am.)

Mark Knopfler on British Television : )

I was telling my kids today how in the olden days, most pop and rock songs were about 3-4 minutes long. The expectation was that artists would record songs of that length if they wanted radio play.

. . . Oh, by the way, this post has nothing to do with British TV. The beauty of having your own blog is that you get to write about whatever the heck you want. So today that's Mark Knopfler. At least he's British. . .

Anyway, starting in the 1970s artists were really pushing those "limits" and creating much longer songs - 5, 6, 7 minutes, whatever. The conventional wisdom was that this was just too long for radio play, so either those longer songs didn't get released as singles, or separate radio-friendly singles were cut, or, as happened to Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing, the stations (in America anyway) just truncated the tail end of the song.

Doing that to Sultans of Swing is a crime against nature.  Because the best guitar solo ever recorded plays in the last 45 seconds of that piece. Sultans, at 5:43 in length, usually got butchered by stations right at the 5 minute mark. They would just fade it out as Knopfler was launching into guitar heaven.

The thing is, the good quality radio stations were smart enough to realize there was a true gem at the end of Sultans and played the whole dang song. But I still remember hearing the song on the radio and wondering what kind of a station I was on -- the kind that would cut? or the kind that would play? (Kinda like Clint Eastwood, "do you feel lucky today?")

Of course nowadays I can listen to the full track anytime I want -- especially the ending (and loudly) --  but the funny part is, I realized when I played it for the kids today, that I am so conditioned to worry about what will happen at the end of Sultans of Swing, I still get nervous listening to it. Its an amazing tune and if you haven't done it lately, pop the song into your iPod and listen -- to the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.

I can't find a video that really shows what I want, but I like this one the best for a couple of reasons. First, it came from a BBC program! Ha, that converts this post into one about British Television after all! And second, its one of the few videos I could find that shows him playing a riff pretty much like the one on the record. Enjoy.