A 1972 Bowie single; 2024 medication; and an 1851 French novel.
I’m All Lost in…
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week.
#36
1) Shortly after David Bowie released his 1972 glitter rock masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, he recorded and released the devastating, barely three-minute retro rockabilly single, “John, I’m Only Dancing.”
With flip, bisexual rock god swagger backed by a triplet shuffle on Eddie Cochran acoustic guitar, and heavily distorted, snarling melodies from his spaceman cohort Mick Ronson’s electric guitar, Bowie recites his come-on lyrics in Lou Reed cant:
“I saw you watching from the stairs/you’re everyone that ever cared/oh lordy/oh lordy/ you know I/ need some loving/I’m moving/touch me.”
As summer starts this week, I’ve set out to replicate this sweltering jam on piano.
The trick lies in nailing both the long-short swing of the opening 1950s rock figure in the left hand and the corresponding, precise, yet coy sing-song melody in the right. If I can get that groove down, the rest of the song, loaded with lyrical melodies, flows from there.
The last of these melodic lines hints at the pop avant-garde by first hitting the 7th in the top of the phrase, an F# here in the key of G major, and then, playfully, a flat 7th, a plain F, in the second half of the phrase. This provides a sly set up (and noteworthy juxtaposition) as the song comes back around to the traditional rock and roll shuffle intro again.
The combo of 1970s art glam and 1950s rock and roll innocence captures the sardonic and ambivalent futurism of the waning youth counterculture of the time. It also echoes the exuberant dualities of Bowie’s lyrics.
We’ll see what I can do on solo piano.
2) After living through a batch of panic attacks—a lovely new phenomenon in my life, including waking up to paramedics one Saturday afternoon last November because I fainted in a Capitol Hill restaurant—my doctor prescribed Propranolol. “Just take one whenever you need to,” he said, writing out a prescription for automatic refills. I swallow the light green pills whenever I feel the weight of my heart welling up in my throat.
Propranolol is a beta blocker, a miracle class of meds that address the physical symptoms of panic, like a pounding heart and speeding blood pressure.
By calming your system, beta blockers simultaneously perform a magic trick on the mind: as the physical symptoms subside, your brain takes note, and your mental state of panic subsides as well. As opposed to literal anti-anxiety medications such as Alprazolam (Xanax), and Lorazepam (Ativan, the subject of an earlier I’m All Lost in… obsession), beta blockers don’t affect your mood by regulating neurotransmitters, but rather, by slowing your heart rate.
Propranolol’s irrefutable physiologic logic talked me down once again this week. I was feeling that familiar high pitch in my chest—a foreboding that turned my heart both alarm-red and depressed-blue all at once. Unable to get any work done, I took the medication and less than 15 minutes later, the miraculous effect was tangible. The beach ball in my throat was gone, and the existential blues had disappeared.
Don’t let my devoted five-star drug review scare you. I’m not turning into a fiend. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last six months I’ve turned to my scrip; in fact, at my most recent checkup last month, my doctor told me I didn’t have to be so “precious” with the prescription. (In addition to telling him how effective the drug had been, I had also reported that I use them judiciously because I don’t want the effects to diminish with frequent use; he assured me I wasn’t making any sense.)
Propranolol, however, makes perfect sense.
3) My own private city studies seminar (which last year, focused on mid-19th Century Industrial Revolution Manchester novels such as Elizbeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and this year seems to be focusing on 21st Century Lagos novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad), has suddenly returned to the 1850s, though not to Manchester.
It’s Paris this time.
I’m reading Henri Murger’s 1851 Scenes of Bohemian Life. Murger’s novel (more a collection of short stories starring a recurring crew of Latin Quarter young souls in their charming, starving-artist garrets) was the source material for Puccini’s famous 1896 opera La bohème.
I’m only 10 stories in, there are 23 in the collection, and to my surprise, as opposed to more bittersweet urchin chic literature like Bertol Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, or my favorite urbanist novel, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners, this seems to be an all-out madcap comedy.
It’s as if the Marx Brothers were the main characters in 1001 Arabian Nights. The Marx Brothers in this instance being Rodolphe the poet, Marcel the painter, Schaunard the musician, and Colline the philosopher, gallivanting and stumbling their way through offhanded urban parables, constantly in need of rent (or date) money while pursuing their Quixotic masterworks, such as Marcel’s grand painting “The Passage of the Red Sea.”
A perfect example of Murger’s sit-com chaos plays out in the story “The Billows of Pactolus.” In this installment of Rodolphe, Marcel, Schaunard, and Colline’s merry poverty, named after a river from Greek mythology laced with gold ore sediment (presumably making its riches hard to grasp), Rodolphe suddenly comes into some money (500 francs!) and sets out to “practice economy” with the convoluted logic of a dreamer: the first thing he buys with his windfall is “a Turkish pipe which he had long coveted.”
""This is my design. No longer embarrassed about the material wants of life, I am going seriously to work. First of all, I renounce my vagabond existence: I shall dress like other people, set up a black coat, and go to evening parties. If you are willing to follow in my footsteps, we will continue to live together but you must adopt my program. The strictest economy will preside over our life. By proper management we have before us three months' work without any preoccupation. But we must be economical."
"My dear fellow," said Marcel, "economy is a science only practicable for rich people. You and I, therefore, are ignorant of its first elements. However, by making an outlay of six francs we can have the works of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Say, a very distinguished economist, who will perhaps teach us how to practice the art. Hallo! You have a Turkish pipe there!"
"Yes, I bought it for twenty-five francs."
"How is that! You talk of economy, and give twenty-five francs for a pipe!"
"And this is an economy. I used to break a two-sous pipe every day, and at the end of the year that came to a great deal more."
"True, I should never have thought of that."
They heard a neighboring clock strike six.
"Let us have dinner at once," said Rodolphe. "I mean to begin from tonight. Talking of dinner, it occurs to me that we lose much valuable time every day in cooking ours; now time is money, so we must economize it. From this day we will dine out."
"Yes," said Marcel, "there is a capital restaurant twenty steps off. It's rather dear, but not far to go, so we shall gain in time what we lose in money."
"We will go there today," said Rodolphe, "but tomorrow or next day we will adopt a still more economical plan. Instead of going to the restaurant, we will hire a cook."
"No, no," put in Marcel, "we will hire a servant to be cook and everything. Just see the immense advantages which will result from it. First of all, our rooms will be always in order; he will clean our boots, go on errands, wash my brushes; I will even try and give him a taste of the fine arts, and make him grind colors. In this way, we shall save at least six hours a day."
Five minutes after, the two friends were installed in one of the little rooms of the restaurant, and continuing their schemes of economy.
"We must get an intelligent lad," said Rodolphe, "if he has a sprinkling of spelling, I will teach him to write articles, and make an editor of him."
"That will be his resource for his old age," said Marcel, adding up the bill. "Well, this is dear, rather! Fifteen francs! We used both to dine for a franc and a half."
"Yes," replied Rodolphe, "but then we dined so badly that we were obliged to sup at night. So, on the whole, it is an economy."
Needless to say, abiding by their delusional budgeting scheme, they promptly go broke. As the story concludes (and after firing their costly servant), Rodolphe muses: “Where shall we dine today?'“ and Marcel replies, “We shall know tomorrow.”
On a related note, I’m also reading (Blondie guitarist) Chris Stein’s memoir. With his glitter makeup and long hair tales of living off welfare in abandoned lofts, playing bit parts in art film flops, and doing drugs with his band scene pal, precursor punk faerie rocker Eric Emerson, Stein’s stories from early 1970s Lower East Side Manhattan overlap with Murger’s 1840s fables from the Left Bank.
With his first person account of the endlessly fascinating era when hippies were transforming into punks in NYC’s downtown art scene, Stein, who has a charming, humble and earnest online presence today, by the way, is working with rich source material (like the day in 1973 when his girlfriend Debbie Harry comes back to her Little Italy apartment from her job at a New Jersey salon with her hair dyed blond.)
Unfortunately, despite the perfect bohemian trappings, Stein writes with zero craft or reflection and the book reads as if he simply hit record and proceeded to reminisce without purpose. I have no idea, for example, why Stein loves, or even plays music in the first place. Or, for that matter, how his high school band ended up opening for the Velvet Underground.
Alas, I’m reading every word.
From 1975: “We went to some guy’s basement recording studio in Queens. Nobody had a clue where we were… It was miserably hot in the basement but we managed to get five tracks done, including a version of what would later evolve into ‘Heart of Glass.’”