Where Are We Now?

I am looking for some direction and comfort like I think most of us are, and on days when it becomes very, very hard to keep track of how best to continue being human and not give in to anger, despair, and doom, it's good to remember music. 

I've spoken before of what David Bowie's music meant for me growing up and how it influenced my outlook on life. I don't play his music as often as I did when he was alive, although I don't there's anything wrong with doing that--did anyone only play Beethoven when he was alive? But on reflection today I realized one song that gives me hope.

It's probably fitting that, as important as his early work was for me when I was a pup, his final works hold some resonance for me as I age. I recall that Bowie had sort of disappeared from the public when "Where Are We Now?" dropped into rotation. Here is a history of that period, mostly per Tony Visconti. I heard about the song before I heard it, and I had to look for it online. 

There's much I can say about the song and its haunting refrain, but others have said it better. I want to focus for a moment on why it gives me hope. 

This is from Bowie's penultimate album, when he knew he had cancer and he only had so much time left. He looked back to when he was, he said, probably happiest up to then, during his Berlin period when he produced Low, Heroes, and Lodger. In doing so he also notes in the song the incredible image of "twenty thousand people cross[ing] Bosebrucke."  What makes this an indelible image is that it is the moment in history when an error in communication between authorities and the boots on the ground allowed for the crossing of so many from East to West Berlin, leading to the destruction of the Wall itself. Why it resonates with me? The following lyric: "[their] fingers are crossed just in case." They were afraid they would be cut down (and perhaps any other day they might have) but they bundled their dignity and crossed not only their fingers but the bridge too. We should have as much courage.

Another reason? The hope suggested in the lines "As long as there's sun.../As long as there's rain.../As long as there's fire.../As long as there's me/As long as there's you." As long as there's a world and an us there's life. And as long as there's life there's hope. 

See How We Are

SEE HOW WE ARE

A Sermon Delivered to Pathways Unitarian 

Universalist Church in Hurst, TX, June 4, 2023

Some of you can do this and some of you will have to imagine it, but I want to take you back a moment to 1987, when the band X released its penultimate album See How We Are. We’re in the final dying throes of what Mark Green would call Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error, whose cultivated meanness of spirit and deeds we thought we’d never experience again.

          Into this miasma waded songwriters John Doe and ex-wife Exene Cervenka, whose punk group X had achieved some success with their 83 release, Los Angeles, eventually one of Rolling Stones’ Top 100 albums, The title song swiftly became an anthem for the disaffected punk of the times. What was punk? If you watched American TV at that time, programs like Phil Donahue and Quincy and even CPO Sharkey convinced you punk music was music about nihilism and what you hate. On CHiPs its lead punk was portrayed by Donny Most, an actor better known for Ralph Malph on Happy Days. It may have been an accurate portrayal of Donny Most but not of punk.

Punk, rather than being rooted in hate, is rooted in love. You don’t bother singing about what you don’t like. Just for fun I typed “punk rock wedding songs” and received at least one list with nearly 100 options. Admittedly, many of them were about wedding-type love rather than agape. But while Chuck D famously called hip hop and rap “the CNN of the ghetto” and rock historian Greil Marcus wrote “the goal of every rock n roll band is to make everyone listen;” I would argue the goal of every punk song is to make everyone aware what needs to change. Natalie, a young woman in Manchester, England, has said, “’punk’ isn’t just a mohawk and leather jacket, it's about being true to yourself and not being afraid of who you are, being brave and bold and strong.” You can’t change what you don’t love.

        *I cut this section in the sermon for time but it does explain why I call this what I do.  [By the way, what I’ve identified as Punk Spirituality I’ve named that because when I was beginning to articulate my beliefs I was listening to a lot of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, numbered by Marcus among the “cult prophets” of the late 60s and early 70s like Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the New York Dolls and made up early punk playlists. At a different time and in a different mind I would identify my spirituality, as Donald Miller does, with jazz, or like Moya Harris with the hip hop of Lauryn Hill. And while both of them root their revelations in Christianity, my life has had greater spiritual experiences with non-Christians, so my spirirtuality is, I think, faster and noisier.] 

What needed to change in 1987? According to John Doe and Exene Cervenka, crowded jails, women “knowing their place”, dividing ourselves physically and emotionally, the capitalist emphasis on commodification of wants while ignoring kids going without basic needs. An emphasis too on “what can I get out of you, what can you do for me while I give nothing in return?” What little you have is what someone else wants so we’ll push you another rung down, addict you, poison you, literally displace you if necessary to take it. In the ensuing 35 years, how much has changed? A major element of punk is Do-it-yourself, exemplified by the probably apocryphal comment by Brian Eno that the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records but everyone who bought one started their own band. You’re responsible to change what you don’t like, even in music. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, If you can’t find the life you want to live, make it yourself.

There is something in us that wants to be better than we were. A part of our makeup that tries to improve, even if briefly, that gets us up in the morning and puts us to sleep at night. Leaving us unfulfilled if, throughout the day, we haven’t moved otherwise. I’m not talking about ambition. I mean an urge to do, even if it’s “just” thinking or eating, so that we ruminate, if nothing else.

Maybe that’s what theists mean when they say we’re made in the image of God. Taking them at their word, God made everything in God’s image. It might be for this reason they also say, and I agree, that you can’t meet anyone or anything God doesn’t love. Yes, even mosquitoes. Yes, even Donald Trump.

We laugh but let me give you a literary example. Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, in his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June, includes a character who was a Nazi in life. He describes heaven to us. No one in heaven is singled out for punishment or exhortation. Everyone, even Jesus, even Hitler, spends eternity basking in the sun. Hitler, he tells us, is just another guy playing shuffleboard.

I’m going to leave you with another video. I’m not going to read the lyrics to you, because the lyrics, by Iggy Pop and David Bowie, won’t make much sense to you unless you’re familiar with William Burroughs’ novel The Ticket that Exploded. The song, “Lust for Life”, was released in 1979, somewhat at the height of US punk music but this video is from a concert this past April. Despite its esoteric lyrics, the song quickly became an anthem of punk for its energy. “Got a lust for life”. To add a little extra oomph, the guitarist and percussionist on his recording, who later went on with David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels to form the group Tin Machine, were Hunt and Tony Sales, sons of Soupy Sales. Iggy has famously performed shirtless since at least 1980. You might be familiar with the song if you saw the movie Trainspotting, based on the Irvine Welsch novel about Glasgow heroin addicts. If you saw the trailer for that film you’d have seen a couple dozen men and boys “dressed” like Iggy, all of them flaunting their huge bellies or their chicken wings or their sunken chests. 

In the absence of the lyrics what do I want you to notice? This is a cut-down version of an 8 minute video [the video played during service was necessarily short] and what I want you to pay attention to at first is Iggy. Notice that he’s limping and not trying to hide that he’s tired. The man is 74 years old. His belly is sagging, he’s developing moobs, and his scraggly beard is gray. He rests against a stool before he starts singing. But he has no trouble demanding of his audience that they come up there and dance with him. And they do.

And look at those kids! Fewer than a third of the people who jump up there with him were even alive when the song was released, and certainly not the age to have attended one of his shows. The vast majority of his companion dancers are celebrating and singing along to music released 45 years ago. At best, it’s their parents or their grandparent’s music.

This is what it means to be at one with God or the universe or reality. To  see ourselves as we really are, warts, moobs, and all, the way the universe or God sees us and nonetheless to celebrate our own and God’s lust for life. You’ve heard the phrase “dance like nobody can see you”. My friend’s daughter improved on it: “Dance like everyone wants to see you dance.”

Flashy queer stuff

 

A new patient this morning, a retired funeral home director, said to me something along the lines of, When you're older you start reminiscing more often. He thought it was funny that, some 20+ years younger than him, I was already doing that. But it's true that much of my time while driving or doing crosswords is spent with the equivalent of 16mm film clacking in the back of my head. 

In 1973, I was a fat, ungainly, probably acned tween, although the term wasn't used then, on the way from middle school to high school. In the next year I'd start acting in school productions, reading pulp novels, and lose my virginity. But at 13 I was just a schlub who, on Friday nights, stayed up late to watch The Midnight Special. 

Most of the artists they played were pretty good, if not terribly innovative. I mean, I was just starting to listen to groups like the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan and appreciate the comedy of Monty Python. But Mac Davis and Anne Murray were more the stuff I'd see, and they were all right, although I could hear them in regular rotation on local radio. But in November they played the David Bowie 1980 Floor Show. 

I can't say if I knew Bowie was appearing on that show or not. I'd heard "Space Oddity" of course. It had penetrated even the stodgy AM wasteland of rural upstate New York. There had been something to the sound that appealed to me, so it's possible I was paying attention that he was headlining. 

But the first minutes of the show, a videoed version of the two night farewell to Ziggy Stardust Bowie performed at London's Marquee Club that previous October, did not prepare me adequately for the moment as he began the title song "1984" and two of his backup singers stepped forward to rip the gaudy gauzy costume he was wearing from him to show he was actually wearing a spangled bustier with fishnets and garters and high heels. That moment smacked me across the forehead with a force it would take me decades and my first experiences with LSD to identify as pleasure in the unexpected and unexplainable. 

I would go to bed that night having sat on the edge of my dad's padded rocker for an hour and a half hearing sounds and seeing things I couldn't articulate to anyone. On Monday, no one I knew or asked had remained with the show much beyond the first minutes. "You kidding, that flashy queer stuff? What was that, anyway?"

It was flashy queer stuff, no mistaking. And while my response was not equal to the imagined reaction of Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, it was a solid, rock hard love that's lasted my life since. Bowie's sexually charged pas de deux with strutting Mick Ronson awakened feelings in me I couldn't articulate and certainly couldn't act on for years. My first Bowie was the Changes One album bought that week at Barker's, the local department store that everyone knew had the better selection, and played deep grooves into the nylon. 

Decades later, teaching the Orwell novel, I tried to introduce it and make its messages relatable to classes by playing cuts from Diamond Dogs for them, trying to explain what seeing the songs acted out was like. But it left them staring at me like I was showing them nude photos of their mothers. I suppose some things, like the life-altering media experience one goes through at that certain age, are  untranslatable.