The New Normal

This is the new normal:  Wake up at 5, or 6, or 7, and take the medicine out of the refrigerator. Depending on the time and where I have to be that day, maybe go back to bed for an hour. Or maybe get ready for work while Bud sleeps. After an hour, we’re both up. We sleepily assemble what I call “the works”: two syringes of saline, one of Heparin, the IV tube, the bag of Vancomycin, some alcohol swabs. We make sure the syringes and the IV line are clear of bubbles. The tube from the port in Bud’s arm goes straight into his heart and, as the home health-care professional pointed out when she taught us how to do this, we don’t want to pump air into his heart. I don’t really want to pump anything into his heart, but nonetheless, this is what I now do, twice a day, at regular 12-hour intervals: send 1.25 mg of high-octane antibiotics straight into my husband’s blood.

Zocalo Pop Music Panel

I’ll be discussing the effects of pop music on cultural change May 29, at the Downtown Independent, along with KCRW’s Jason Bentley and Occidental historian Thaddeus Russell, as part of the excellent Zocalo Public Square events.

Letter to the BDN Editor

My letter to the Beloit Daily News regarding the Hall of Fame came out last week. Follow the link.

Lita’s Mother’s Day Video

 

Photo: Mark Weiss

Lita Ford premiered a video for her song “Mother” off Living Like a Runaway at USA Today today. Edgeplay director Victory Tischler-Blue, aka ex Runaways bassist Vicki Blue, shot the dramatic footage of the guitarist in the desert. In an accompanying interview, the Runaways shredder talks about “parental alienation,” a subject she knows well, as she is estranged from her two sons. It’s no Hallmark card for Mother’s Day, but it’s a real issue that many women are living. Frustrating as my child can be, I also can’t imagine not being able to see him every day, let alone at all. It’s a heartbreaking situation for the tatted-up ax-slinger who was always the tuffest girl in the band. Happy Mother’s Day, Lita.

Hall of Famous

Talk about an embarrassment of riches: The past month has been so hectic, mostly with great stuff, that I completely neglected to write about how moving and amazing my induction into the Beloit Memorial High School Hall of Fame was. It was really one of the most gratifying and deep moments in my life. Raymond Schoenfeld, who first taught me to be a journalist, was there, and had apparently nominated me. My alma mater looked beautiful. And The Increscent, the oddly named and historic newspaper I edited, had a lead story about LGBT students, in which named and pictured students talked openly about their experiences at Memorial. Progress happens.

The next day, there I was on the cover of the Beloit Daily News, next to Fran Fruzen, the man who facilitates the hall of fame — and who, as vice-principal, once sent me home for wearing a mini skirt. Below is the draft of the speech I gave to students who really listened, and even thanked me afterwards. My actual speech veered quite a bit from my prepared remarks. I’ll post my letter to the BDN shortly.

Song and Dance

In the last month I’ve seen two shows that remind me why I love musicals. Both featured amazing scores, songs I’m still singing, days and weeks later. Both had complex, progressive political and social texts that exposed Broadway (and LA) audiences to musical cultures foreign to the Great White Way. One featured a jaw-dropping, career-defining performance; one, a star turn better than that by the famous actress in the film. But in both Fela! and West Side Story, it was the dance that really made me bow down in humble homage to the skills of two of America’s greatest choreographers – then get on my feet and want to snap my fingers, shake my ass, and leap across the stage.

“California Paradise” Critical Karaoke

The final event of EMPLA was Critical Karaoke, a clever exercise invented by Joshua Clover where participants have the length of a song to talk about a song, while the song plays. The dozen participants had very different styles and subjects, from the Mamas and the Papas to Lupe Fiasco. And it was a blast. I chose “California Paradise” by the Runaways. Below is what I said; you can see a picture of me saying it here:

 

The Runaways used to open their shows with “California Paradise.” The midtempo rocker established the mythology, the particular 1970s American dream of hedonistic freedom that the band of teenage girls repped and peddled: fast cars, fast women, salty winds. Kim Fowley calls the song the female response to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls.” “It’s a great album cut for rock critics and masturbating youth,” their ever quotable producer, etc., says.

The Runaways at once were those California girls, and they were not. The members all hailed from various pockets of the Los Angeles basin – the Valley, the OC, Long Beach. But they weren’t exactly the “cutest” objects of the brothers Wilson throbbing fantasy. By the time the Runaways recorded “California Paradise,” in the Beach Boys’ studio, Brothers, for their second album, Queens of Noise, they were firmly their own subjects, writing their own fantasies – or ironies. After all, by the mid ‘70s, beach blanket bingo had turned into Babylon bacchanal, more dystopic than utopian.  Cherie Currie missed a few days of the Queens sessions in order to abort the child with which she had been impregnated by the Runaways’ manager, Scott Anderson. Listen to the way she hisses “you’re so nice… paradise.” Those are the sibilants of a snake; they’re vaudevillian boos.

I spent the last few years immersed in the sometimes inspiring, sometimes horrific history of the Runaways. It was an intense personal journey in some ways: I was returning to my own California girl roots. I’m a relatively rare species, a third-generation Californian, though my parents fled the smog and Reagan when I was 4. Around the same time the Runaways were traveling the world, singing about busting out of jail, I was becoming a teenager trapped in the heartland. The Golden State represented my own romanticized roots and exotic other. We’d go back to visit, and at night, my cousin Cathy – two earth years and 100 light years ahead of me – and I would sneak out and walk the streets of Van Nuys, looking for adventure. Maybe I’m glad I never found the Sugar Shack, the infamous teen disco where the Runaways allegedly found Currie. Or maybe I’m jealous.

It took me four decades to come home — Back to the garden.  And I have to admit, in our beachside villa, we live a Californian paradisaical existence.  The sunshine never ends – except for the daily fog. Paradises are always fantasies. The Runaways were smart enough to know that at sweet 16 – and sing about it anyways.