Bluebird Blvd.

The Passports of Dreamers, Filled, Page by Page

Courtenay Bluebird — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:00:44 +0000

Two weeks ago, a stunning dream visited me in a deep sleep.

In this dream, I get a call from one of my editors at the major newspaper where I freelanced for many years.

The editor says, “Yeah, so we were wondering if you could kill this dragon that’s been terrorizing everyone and file a story by five o’clock. Can you do that?”

(When you’re a freelancer, “no” is not a word in your vocabulary, unless there is a potential conflict of interest. A dragon is not a conflict of interest, apparently, to my subconscious.)

Cut to: Me standing outside as this dragon flaps its heavy leather wings through a street lined in brownstones I’ve never seen before in a city I do not know.

The air is the color of late afternoon. I know, and do not know, where I am at the same time. Only in dreams is this doubling of what is known and not known, possible.

People are running and yelling and ducking and dodging— which is exactly the thing you do when a dragon the size of a commercial aircraft dives down and stirs up the asphalt dust with the force of its wings, the way this one did in my dream.

And then this thing screams this banshee scream, a noise so loud I jump in surprise, but I do not run. I stare at this leathery, terrible thing from my vantage point on the sidewalk of this urban street in the city of my mind.

How do you kill a dragon? I think to myself. A crossbow?

The dragon curves around and swings back to make another pass over the people who are running in circles, such is their panic.

How do you kill a dragon? Still, I do not move. I am watching this lizard flip a parked car with an arced tip of its wing. A surface-to-air missile?

The dragon turns its head and considers me, whole. It knows what I’m thinking. Or does it? I stare back at this mythical creature. I gaze, unblinking, into its golden eye, round as a moon, ominous.

Boy, that thing is going to be angry when I kill it. It turns it’s head from me, focuses considerable energy into kicking over a VW Bug with a neat smash.

A woman shrieks, her terror snapping in the air like a curtain in an open window tossed by a wet wind.

The last thing I thought before waking is: I wonder if the Army Navy Surplus Store carries rocket launchers? Damn, I gotta hurry— my deadline is five o’clock.

I woke up.

I had knocked over my water glass in my sleep again, the second time in two weeks. The light of that particular morning stood still, diffused by clouds pregnant with rain.

I know exactly when my hand intersected with the glass. It was the moment when the dragon screamed the first time, ripping the air with sound, making my ears ring and ring.

I looked around the room. Everything but the water glass was exactly as I left it when I drifted into the nighttime world.

Oh, that golden rain-promising light illuminated everything in the room. The dogs considered me from the end of the bed. I sat forward. And I laughed. Their tails thumped the covers in tandem.

What in the world? Rocket launchers? Five o’clock deadlines? Dragons?

My laugh ratcheted into a howl. I couldn’t grab at my breath. The dogs swarmed up the bed licking me and slapping their tails every which way.

What is it that makes a dream, a dream, and a nightmare, a nightmare?

Is it anxiety that divides the two?

A sense of helplessness?

Remember that my dream did not feature any helplessness at all. It drew from my recent past of daily deadlines and fair-minded editors with straightforward questions: Kill the dragon. Five o’clock deadline. Yes?

Note also that I watched the dragon destroy objects, unnecessary objects, but it did not kill any people.

And remember I said the dragon was neither woman nor man— that indicates to me it is an idea. And like any strong idea, it wants to have its way and it will be loud about it.

Also, consider the following: I don’t know much about weapons. What I do know is specific to either an historical moment or thinly filtered through the news I read.

The last time I remember considering rocket launchers was when I watched Charlie Wilson’s War. Five years ago. (The brain’s filing system does interesting things when you dream. I wonder whether dreams are the re-categorization of your memories in their entirety?)

The rest, I do not know. I meet daily deadlines for my blog. A deadline is a known and familiar thing to me, as potent as an idea— and I have no problem imposing creative deadlines on myself either.

Give me a deadline, me, and I will have no fear.

As for the dreaming itself as an act, I am aficionada of those nighttime cinematic moments, the fabric of self unfurling into a three-part structure of a story— beginning, middle, end.

They are Technicolor, these dreams of mine, richer in tone than real life, more saturated in physical hues and texture than what I notice on most addlepated days.

Even with my childhood insomnia, I was a dreamer, a real dreamer, and my nighttime self went many places even my well-nourished imagination could not. I was not always myself— that was interesting. I woke to a story most mornings, which is not a bad way to find your way back into the sunlit world.

Dreaming proved the clearest way to try on new concepts and discard them as a writer, the way you might ill-fitting clothes in a dressing room. (In real life, I hang up what I try on and return it, but with dreams, I already own the things, so I toss what I do not need on the dreaming floor.)

And, as a child, I woke amazed daily to find myself in this world, and not the one I left so abruptly on the slow opening of my eyelids. I did this so often, that this, too, became part of the framework of myself as a person and a writer.

Here I am, an adult who dreams nightly. Here I am, an adult who laughs when she wakes in the morning. The dream surprises me. The day surprises me. How fine. How marvelous.

And, if you are a dreamer like me, you know that the passport of your nocturnal world is full of stamps and signs.

I never could put stock by those dream dictionaries and their list of interpretations. Cloud equals a new idea! Bird equals desire for freedom! Man in green trench coat holding grapefruit equals a quest for brotherly love!

Those dream tomes were too cheaply printed and too easy on the hard ideas. These gimme books by the cash register at the big box bookstores wanted to be as prolific as a tarot pack with its opaque but sincere matrices of symbolism.

Yet these things didn’t have the centuries, nor the stories, nor the cultural memory to back up their notions. (Dragon equals a fiery friend!)

All dream dictionaries invite a watered down imitation of the Jungian archetypal world.

The dreamers I know with fat nocturnal passports pass over dream dictionaries with a secret inward-facing smile. They know there is nothing good there, nothing as fine as the dream and the dreamer.

And you don’t want clumsy hands fumbling with your symbolism at the border between dreaming and waking.

The border guard that mans the post between waking and sleeping wears many uniforms, but you hope the one who will handle your night passport is a poet or a Jungian at heart.

One who knows the stamps. One who knows the signs. One who knows whether you will pass through into the waking world today with clear eyes and the pressed garments of a settled conscious mind.

Let whomever stands at the border between dreams and their interpretation not turn you away, nor confuse you.

Choose your interpreters carefully is what I suggest, or allow the dream to remain a dream, just as song sometimes is merely a song and not a representation of all that is.

Weeks slide between me and the dream of the deadline and the dragon the way a shoji screen will alter the dimensions of a room— and its purpose.

I remember this dream through the filter of the now and not the morning that I had the dream.

Time changes perception and perception changes the perceiver, the way the dream changes the dreamer and the dreamer alters the dream.

And in my dreams there are dragons—

Dragons that cut the atmosphere like sharp shears to silk fabric.

And in my dreams there are deadlines—

I know how to meet my deadlines.

*I accidentally took down Bluebird Blvd. tonight as I was trying to post a new story. Please forgive this one. last. reposted. story from March 8, 2012. Thank you so much for your patience— Courtenay Bluebird.

5-Minute Dance Party [Part of the Glory]

Courtenay Bluebird — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:54 +0000

So, my computer broke this week, partly due to my own attempts to fix it, partly due to some seriously not-good Apple software.

I pulled a few *more** 14 hour days this week trying to fix my computer, and finally, after a lot of study and many mistakes, I was successful in restoring it to factory condition.

Because of all these long hours, I’ve been harboring some rather delicious-but-rotten thoughts about building a Yard-A-Pult, putting my laptop into the payload, pulling back the counterweight as far as it will go, and releasing my damaged computer 100 feet in the air into some unsuspecting neighbor’s yard.

But these somewhat violent thoughts led to some interesting places: I got to thinking about arcane militaristic terms like “la gloire” and apocryphal sayings like “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton.”

Today I have a story I’ve written for you that will run quite late this afternoon on “la gloire” and broken computers.

Meanwhile, I hope we can enjoy another kind of glory— given freely by one of my favorite bands Balkan Beat Box, who were featured two other Bluebird Blvd. 5-Minute Dance Parties: Move It (so fantastic) and The Last Wish of the Bride (with Gogol Bordello, another one of my favorite-favorites.)

*Remember last week when I finally cried Uncle when I broke the new Bluebird Blvd. for the eighth time?

Mash Note Dept. : Jacques Tati

Courtenay Bluebird — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:52 +0000

The universe holds a special place in its starry heart for comedians.

And at the core of its deepest heart, you will find Jacques Tati.

Jacques Tati was a filmmaker and a comedic actor— at least that’s how his biography is phrased.

His real vocation was pointing a stylized lens at the baffling post-World War II world, then inserting his own stork-tall, childlike visage at the center of it.

His magic knows no boundaries of date or age or time.

I first saw Jacquest Tati in M. Hulot’s debut film, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de M. Hulot — 1953), which I watched with my husband. (He saw the film as a child in a revival movie theater and loved it.)

Tati is most famous for his silent character, Mr. Hulot.

What amazed me then, and now, is the clean cut of Tati’s movie, combined with the frivolous gestures that moves the action along.

Nothing in particular happens during Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, but there’s no fat, no self-indulgent noodling around by Tati as Hulot.

Considering he also directed this film, it stuns me how tightly wrought the movie was, and is.

The undergarments of comedy are built of daily tragedies.

Hidden details of Jacques Tati’s life invoked new speculation in the last two years, due to the posthumous animated film The Illusionist (L’Illusionniste).

The recent film is based on a buried script penned by Tati, but made by animator/cinematographer, Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville).

The release of The Illusionist brought up a lot of unsavory questions about Tati and his first romance— which resulted in a child he never saw.

Those old, resurfaced rumors intimate that this script was Tati’s apology to his first daughter, but it is, as many things are, utterly unverifiable.

I watched twenty minutes of The Illusionist and had to stop.

While Tati’s original films put a baffled man at the center of a baffling world, The Illusionist takes a darker turn. The Illusionist puts an unnamed performer in a world that does not need him anymore.

These days, I am not interested in the story of someone who no longer belongs to this world.

And if I am going to read, watch, or listen to the story of a man displaced by modernity, please show me the comedic moment— take me deeper into the truth inside the truth.

Laughter is keyed to open those hard locks. Give me laughter.

Give me Tati’s Mr. Hulot, trying and failing to understand the nuances of the fresh and unfamiliar.

Let me see his wide eyes once more, blinking wonderfully at a future filled with the bright gadgetry of distraction, and then, I will laugh.

And I think you will laugh too.

Mr. Hulot is familiar. Mr. Hulot? He is us.

BLUEBIRD LOVE NOTE: *This is driving me nuts, but I am going to need one more day to get things squared away. I really, really, really bombed out my computer. I mean, I screwed up root user permissions and everything. This is the stuff my worst writing nightmares are made of.

I am going to the Apple Genius Bar sometime on Tuesday, and meanwhile, I will be scrubbing every last bit of code out of my Mac today, as well as getting some writing done, and hopefully, talking to you. Thanks for your patience. I know this is ridiculous, so I do appreciate your levity and your kindness. — Courtenay Bluebird.

This story was originally published on April 25, 2012. I adore Jacques Tati. I hope after reading this you’ve found a little space for him in your heart too.

5-Minute Dance Party [I Can Only Give You Everything— Very Different Version]

Courtenay Bluebird — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:29 +0000

This song, especially its great hook— “I can only give you everything.”— is kinda the official anthem of Bluebird Blvd.

But this version of this great rock standard is new. The song itself has been around since the mid-1960s, but you knew that, right?

Wait. You say you didn’t know “I Can Only Give You Everything” has been around for a dog’s age?

Here are the deets, my friends: Van Morrison (of Them, at the time) wrote it; the proto-punk band the MC5 made it famous.

Now Nick Waterhouse is giving one of my favorite rock singles of all time a laid-back early rhythm and blues makeover with a Les Paul guitar-driven sound.

Yum. Enjoy!

And it’s really, really true: I can only give you everything.*

No worries. For the longest time, I thought David Bowie wrote “God Only Knows.” I also thought (and don’t shoot me a dirty look) Frank Black wrote “Hang On To Your Ego.”

While The Husband and I were starting our California Route 1 honeymoon, I bought the amazing* Brain Wilson classic Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Oh… my… stars. What a revelation that was. You can read about the whole experience in The Bluebird Sessions: Pet Sounds.

The Marriage Interpreter (No. 1)

Courtenay Bluebird — Mon, 20 May 2013 02:00:51 +0000

This is The Husband after he attempted to Crump.

The Husband: Look! I can do the sprinkler! (Starts groping head and neck to do a dance move he saw on TV.)

Bluebird: You’re going to hurt yourself.

The Husband: Uh. (Hurts himself.)

Bluebird: Are you okay?

The Husband: Are you recording our conversation on your blog? Tell them I’m attempting to crunk. Crump. Cramp. Whatever. Tell them I am dropping it like it is very hot.

OH, THERE ARE SO MANY MORE MARRIAGE INTERPRETERS. AND THEY GET REALLY FUNNY, FAST.

READ THEM ALL RIGHT HERE: THE MARRIAGE INTERPRETER

*Sorry for the repost, but as I mentioned earlier, I thrashed my computer. I thought I was done with it, but oh my stars, it wasn’t done with me by half. I scrambled the root user. If you don’t know what that is, I can tell you it’s the hardest thing to fix once you’ve done it. Even erasing my original operating system and all of my contents did not fix my worst snafu of the lot. I’ll be seeing some sort of fruit genius on Tuesday. DAMN YOU ROOT USER PERMISSION ISSUES! DAMN YOU TO HECK!

ONE MORE NOTE: This right here is the very first Marriage Interpreter, published originally on November 8, 2011, the day after Bluebird Blvd. went live.

5-Minute Dance Party [City's Full (LIVE)]

Courtenay Bluebird — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:04:36 +0000

WHOA. How did I end up in 1986 all of a sudden?

The Savages’ sound reminds me of that moment in the mid-1980s where musicians began to re-strip down that post-punk sound. Yum, right?

Sorry things have been so cattywompus this week on Bluebird Blvd. My computer finally died the big death yesterday evening while I was wrapping up my last pass at salvaging everything I couldn’t replace.

To that end, I will be posting a story later today after I finish reinstalling all of my computer software.

Do me one favor before we talk later, will you? Back up your hard drive today, okay? I was lazy about it and I just paid the price: I spent three days trying to save every photograph I shot in 2013. (And I’m still not sure I was successful.)

Hope you enjoy this great song by the Savages. Please know that I am thinking of you on this fine Sunday afternoon.

Super Secret Friday Night 5-Minute Dance Party [Max Fischer, The Man]

Courtenay Bluebird — Sat, 18 May 2013 07:24:09 +0000

Over a year ago, I mentioned a couple of times how much I identify with the character Max Fischer from the Wes Anderson film Rushmore.

I was a lot like Max in my teens— I overdid everything; I always had some project going, some plan, some grift in play. Like Max, I never saw myself as I was—like most teenagers (and most people, really)— only as I wished I could be.

Much like Max, I spent a lot of time in my youth trying to rock-climb my way out of a working class life. Unlike Max, I did so not because I was embarrassed of my working class roots (which Max was), but because I wanted more than what was on offer. I was an arrow en route to a target.

Yet I would like to thing that a real life Max Fischer would have discovered down the road— as an adult,an artist— that there are distinct advantages to having seen more of the world in its unpainted state the way the working class can, and do in the right place and time and circumstance.

And I can’t help but consider Max tonight as I sit here, bleary-faced and drifting after two intense days with Mec, my Mac. I wasn’t writing. Oh my, no.

What I was doing, see, is breaking my laptop in every way I could devise— in another one of my horrifying attempts to “fix” a computer.

As you remember, last week my goal was to break my website. This week, my goal has been to destroy my darling Mec.

Because of me, Mec’s on his last weary legs, poor darling, so I’m doing my best to salvage everything he’s carried for me. Now the lights are blinking off and the walls groan as the floor shifts, crooked and swollen,on its pier and beam foundation.

Tomorrow, I will have to wipe and rebuild Mec. But tonight, I will sleep.

If you’ve never seen Rushmore or a Wes Anderson film, check the links in the first paragraph to get a feel for his films. I would link out to IMDB or some other website where you could read a synopsis about Rushmore, but my operating system has decided that it doesn’t want to highlight text anymore. Grins Everything will be better tomorrow.

What She Thinks, I’ll Never Know

Courtenay Bluebird — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:15:32 +0000

5-Minute Dance Party [Puttin' On The Ritz —Club Des Belugas Video Remix)]

Courtenay Bluebird — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:40:19 +0000

Now, if you’re blue

and you don’t know

where to go to why don’t you go to

where fashion sits—

Putting on the Ritz.

Doop-doop-doobedy-do!

To see more of brilliant VJDJ Doc Terry’s remix work, click any the following link to take you to Atomic Broadcasting.

Stripped for Parts

Courtenay Bluebird — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:05:05 +0000

I lived next to a boy, years ago, who did time for stealing cars. When he got out, he worked at a restaurant downtown.

He wasn’t the first person I ever met who had a story to tell, but he was the first boy I ever met who bought his girlfriend flowers every Friday afternoon on his way home from work.

His kitchen whites were splattered with an astonishing amount of raw ingredients. He smelled like pie crusts and warm milk.

Like many people I meet, this boy’s life was bifurcated by a singular event— with a before and an after made up of two different sets of choices, two different lives. He stole cars. Then he went to prison for three, four years. Afterwards, he got out and he did not steal cars. He made pastries.

He didn’t even like cars. He liked his job in the kitchen of a small upscale bakery. He liked his girlfriend. He liked to sun himself like a house cat on the steps of the turn-of-the century porch attached to the ancient duplex.

What this boy did as a teenager was not a secret— otherwise, I would not be telling you this story now— neither the stealing, nor the part afterward, where the boy that smelled like pie would sit in the sun and wait for his girl to get home.

You see, writers tend to steal little things off of people— a complete set of figured naval buttons on a man’s patched pea coat; a certain way a woman pushes back her bobbed silver hair; a child that can whistle with two fingers like a man.

Writers pocket these moments and pull them out to look at later under a lamp with a notebook. This is fine with me— it’s magpie stealing. It is general and gestural and often sweet.

There’s another kind of stealing that happens, though, where a writer will pick the lock on your life story, touch a couple of wires together, and roll your life down the driveway before you even know your story is gone.

One day, your life may turn up in a book— it may have a new paint job and four white wall tires, but you’ll know it’s your story. You’ll know. Trust me. And you’ll feel mugged.

Joan Didion once said that you’re not a writer unless you’re selling somebody out. In theory, that makes sense. Writers tell stories about people. When Didion says this statement in her dry, lean style, it sounds even more tough and souped up and justified. Like they had it coming to them. Those people. For talking and telling her their stories.

She was young, or youngish, when she made this pronouncement in the prologue of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and I was young when I read it.

I believed, and believe many things Didion said, and says, but I never bought this one part, not really.

And I wonder, sometimes, I really wonder what it cost Didion to sell out so many people’s stories with a practiced flick.

People tell me stories all the time.

In fact, one of the strangest components of my life is that I am the person to whom the story will be told. I don’t know why, exactly, but I’ve been told that I am a good listener. I think that is enough.

But, I am also a writer. I tell stories. All kinds of stories. What you’ll notice if you look around at the stories that I tell, is that I’m careful in the way I tell a story if it is not mine. (More often than not, I get permission ahead of time. And I am thankful that people trust me to tell their story, our story.)

Otherwise, I will study the way you wear a scarf wound around your head and your expression of nonchalance as you lean against the table before you begin to talk, preparing the words in your mouth, working the idea of them, like a sweet morsel.

But that’s where the recitation stops. If it is fiction, I can make the rest up. If it’s not, I can tell my own story about meeting you. Because you and everybody I meet have taught me how to tell the story.

This boy from all those years ago did not keep this little side jaunt of his own story a secret from anyone.

And I’ve met people before, and since, who have done more astonishing things than stealing a car with a team of teenagers in the middle of the night for a living.

What I like to remember about that boy is a moment every Friday when we would have the same conversation.

I lived behind the old house, in the servant’s quarters above the garage. I would get in my car, and back down the driveway with the windows down. And I would stop because he would wave at me to stop.

He would pop his chin in my direction.

Hey girl! What’s up? A— ‘s gonna be home soon.

—Lotta nada! You tell A— I said ‘Hi!’ I’m going to E—’s for coffee and dinner. Gotta work.

Girl, you’re always working. You need to get more sleep.

—Don’t you know it! You need me to bring you guys anything?

He would smile. No, girl. I got dinner for A— and I got her some zinnias this week. Gonna sit here in the sun ’til she gets home. Nice day, right?

—Yeah, nice. Bueno bye! Don’t you forget to give A— a hug for me, okay?

He would wave me off. His eyes would close; his chin would turn back to the sun.

I once lived next to a boy who stole cars and went to jail.

But, this? This is not the remarkable part of the story.

What is remarkable is that he bought his girlfriend flowers every Friday afternoon, without fail. Zinnias. Orchids. Gerber daisies. Tulips.

He never bought her roses. Not once.

He said that roses lacked imagination, and he loved his girl too much to be lazy.

And besides, she liked to be surprised.

So, he bought her Calla lilies— blooms that smelled as rich as a warm Friday afternoon spent daydreaming, daydreaming in the sun.

—
*This true story was originally posted on May 4, 2012. Please excuse the repost— you know this isn’t something I make a habit of doing. I have finally (knock wood) finished breaking in our new website, but, today, I got stuck fixing and breaking and fixing my computer again. The aforementioned promised story will run on Friday. Things are starting to really get back to normal, I think.

*Bluebird knocks on wood, throws pinch of salt over shoulder, and grins.*

5-Minute Dance Party [Let There Be Rock (With Pastor Bon Scott!) ]

Courtenay Bluebird — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:00:48 +0000

I can’t think of a band more delicious to hear (and watch!), than the hard rock outfit AC/DC.

No matter what era or which lineup or who the lead singer happens to be, AC/DC is one of those groups who are so exuberant and so true to their rhythm and blues roots, you can’t help but go a little bit nuts when you hear the opening chords to any of their songs.

Any of them. Honest.

The reason I posted this today is that I was listening to my favorite AC/DC album Back in Black with my headphones on tonight, and I started to realize that I had never actually seen an AC/DC video. Not a one! How about you? Have you seen much of AC/DC? (Yes, I know I miss out on the weirdest things sometimes.)

So, it turns out that any of the early stuff is hard to find in good condition online, but when you do find one, WOO!, is it ever so lovely!

Speaking of Woooo!-ing, I got through one whole day without crashing Bluebird Blvd.! A number of things are broken, but look! I am still up and running! Well, limping, but I am cool with that. For instance, I have no idea how this post looks because every time I step around to the front page, it logs me out. (I know you’d let me know if something was broken because you’re kind like that. All of you. I feel so lucky to know you.)

Enough about me— how are you?

PSST! HEY, YOU! If you haven’t looked at the lyrics of Let There Be Rock in awhile, you should check them out on the official AC/DC site. They are really poetically written— Let There Be Rock. My goodness, how delicious! How absolutely divine!

“Uncle!” She Cried. (Yes, I Broke Bluebird Blvd. Again.)

Courtenay Bluebird — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:15:22 +0000

I broke Bluebird Blvd. again and nearly lost my mind. Does my hair look okay?

Well, y’all, I broke Bluebird Blvd. for the 8th time in 7 days. I’ve never heard so many technicians say: “I’ve never seen that happen before!”— without a stitch of irony and a little bit of fear.

Not only did I break Bluebird Blvd.— yes, again—but I broke every version of Bluebird Blvd. this time, which resulted in two separate technicians having to reinstall the framework for this site from scratch at midnight and again at two in the morning, respectively.

It’s better now. But, as I said, almost everything was gone this time.Anything you and I added to the new site is essentially a memory. Your new comments, my new posts— everything.*

At three, four, five this morning, I’m sitting here gloss-eyed, trying to rebuild Bluebird Blvd.’s whole system from scratch— yes, again— the upside being that I now know how to break my blog, which means, I hope, that soon I will also know how to fix it.

We’ll be back on track in no time at all, right? Yes! Again!

Here’s some good news— I’ve got something fun to post on Wednesday morning that I’ve been working on since last week.

*Here’s another bit of good news— I was able to find yesterday’s Bluebird Blvd. Five-Minute Dance Party on the mobile version of the site today, just before the site realized that it shouldn’t exist. Woo!

And here’s to hoping your Tuesday the Fourteenth is the exact opposite of my Monday the Thirteenth!

Best wishes—

Courtenay Bluebird.

5-Minute Dance Party [I Like To Move In The Night]

Courtenay Bluebird — Tue, 14 May 2013 17:00:38 +0000

Well, it’s true. I do like to move in the night. At least, I think I do.

Recently, I don’t think I’ve had much of a choice, to tell the truth.

Why? I think it’s ‘cuz I’ve discovered 5… fif.. fifty-teen kajillion ways to break a website. Right in half. Like a boss.

The whole time I was breaking things and making things and trying to get the Bluebird Blvd. “house” all ready for y’all— I kept singing this great Eagles of Death Metal song… and giggling like an idiot.

Please believe me when I say this to you with my straightest face: I broke everything on Bluebird Blvd. twice, and came back round a third time for good measure to snap a few things off that had to be glued back on with Elmer’s school glue ten minutes ago with my shaky little fingers.

But I haven’t had this much fun in a dog’s age.

Hit me up on the chorus! You go high, I’ll go low!

Because it’s true— I do like to move in the night. Don’t y’all?

Sing me out, somebody! Woo!

A NOTE: This is the post I managed to salvage from the old site this morning on WordPress mobile after I accidentally erased all of the new Bluebird Blvd. site last night, never to be retrieved again. But here’s yesterday’s dance party. I can’t believe it. What luck!

Go here for the Eagles of Death Metal official site.

It’s Official! Bluebird Blvd. has moved!

Courtenay Bluebird — Thu, 09 May 2013 18:36:57 +0000

Olly-olly-oxen free! The move is complete! Come on over to Bluebird Blvd.’s new home and take a look around, tell me what you think.

I still have some things to tinker with— some fonts to change out, some CSS to to adjust, some cool new features— but I would love to hear what you think of the new place.

Bluebird Blvd.— http://bluebirdblvd.net

(Oh, hey! If you visit Bluebird Blvd., you can either grab the RSS/Atom feed and put it back in your WordPress reader, or you can follow by email.)

Any which way, I’d love to see you!

—Courtenay Bluebird.

Bluebird Blvd. is moving! Also, I am taking a brain vacation. I have the tired.

Courtenay Bluebird — Sun, 05 May 2013 07:51:50 +0000

I will be taking the next week off to complete the move of Bluebird Blvd. from its .com home to its .org framework (with Bluehost hosting!)

Next week will be the first time in 17 months that I’ve taken any sort of break since starting Bluebird Blvd.

Well, it’s sort of a break.

The fact is, I’ll be building our new home. And to make sure I don’t boop a button and delete everything we’ve built together, I’m gonna focus on getting everything nice and settled.

So! Take a breath and Gettttt rrrrrrrreaaaaaaaddddy to ruuuuuuuuuumble!

On Monday, May 13, 2013— we are ALL SYSTEMS GO on some serious silliness.

YAAAAAY! Let’s MOVE to our NEW house…? Wait— nest? No, too crowded. Website? Eh, too cold. Oh! I know! HOME.

Yes? Yes.

YES, YOU HAVE SEEN THIS PICTURE BEFORE!

I originally posted that Barney Fife picture for a famous clip from The Andy Griffith Show, “5-Minute Dance Party [Barney Fife and the Preamble to the Constitution].”

It was paired with a story about my inability to… what was I saying? Oh yeah! Read this story about my forgetfulness and my need to take a week off will make more sense. A Moment of Silence for the Perpetually Muddled

The Bluebird Sessions: Lester Bangs, Where the Hell Have You Been, Man?

Courtenay Bluebird — Sat, 04 May 2013 02:30:18 +0000

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To hell with Ziggy Stardust, which amounted to starring Judy Garland in The Reluctant Astronaut.

Lester Bangs

You never know what you’re getting into when you decide to write about a major subject in rock history.

Deciding is one thing and doing is yet another folderol all together.

The next thing you know, you’re in the thick of it and the scrap is flying and the verbs stop working and every song you’re looking for on Grooveshark is grossly mislabeled. (Who the hell puts Van Morrison under the mysterious label VA? Who the hell is VA?)

And that’s when you really start cursing, but good.

Tonight is a perfect example of fine intentions gone terribly, hideously awful.

I’m trying to write about rock critic Lester Bangs. (Yes, please do focus on the trying part.)

Before I even considered this particular Bluebird Sessions, I had to ‘fess up to myself that I don’t know Bangs as well as I should, and that I am really near crazy for trying to write about him in the first place.

Well.

Here we are.

It’s impossible to give an overview of Bangs or his work as a critic without sliding sideways on greased wheels right into the flippant over-the-counter drug fueled patois of El Bangs himself.

So, to that end, I’ve given up and given in to the impulse to just be Bangs for the day. I’m going to use a lot of irony-free italicized statements and a WHOLE bunch of overexcited capitalized ones. And soupçon of rhetorical questions. Why not? If we’re going to go there, let’s go there, right?

Yeah, I thought so.

Lester Bangs, in brief: Rock critic extraordinaire. Wrote briefly for Rolling Stone and was fired, according to legend, for writing a bad review of Canned Heat.

Big man at Creem, but shared mental space with his protégé, fellow rock writer and musician, Peter Laughner— who died in 1977, five years before Bangs himself would overdose in New York City on a combination of pills. (Bangs had recently quit drinking.)

Portrayed quite reverentially in Almost Famous by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who captured the weird combination of coolness, clarity and hyper-chaotic excitement that Bangs exuded in person and on the page.

Whew! How’m I doing folks? Am I holding it together?

In truth, when I started writing The Bluebird Sessions and doing 5-Minute Dance Parties on my page, I have to be honest— I was quite terrified. Music is not my area of expertise. I am a fan of music. Not an expert. Never have been an expert.

Yeah, I studied piano for eight years, but to tell you the tricky little truth— my gifted piano teacher didn’t want to fool with someone who picked up everything by ear and appeared to refuse to learn how to sight-read music properly.

(Personally? I think my inability to read music was another form of my dyscalculia.)

ANYWAY. Let me stop listening to The Clash here for a second in order to get down ‘n’ dirty serious with you. The thing that kept me thinking and writing and talking about music was LESTER BANGS.

Yeah, I know that he’s was an encyclopedic genius with the ability to toss out these long, funny and strange reviews and covers of new music.

(And kids? Know that he had a host of editors, copy editors and fact-checkers to catch his errors. Bangs also revised like a madman. He was a professional writer after all. Tossing out is a turn of phrase, not a big reveal on the way the man wrote.)

Yeah, I know that he got in on the ground floor of not one, but two different music magazines— Rolling Stone and Creem— penning a type of music writing we take for granted today as literary institutions of the contemporary cultural world.

But, daaaaaamn, do you know what I love about Bangs? Do you?

The man was a fan. Down to his most-assuredly unwashed socks. He LOVED music— new music. Old music. Big music. Small music. Stupid music. Smart music.

Bangs went and heard everything. If he hated it, he listened to it two or more times. He hated albums that later, he loved enough to throw a counter-argument against his own previous emphatic opinions down on the metaphorical table in front of us, his readers.

A few words about reading Bangs. It’s kind of like taking medication. Use only as directed. Too much of Lester Bangs’s writing and you will see a freaky fifth-dimension and start yearning for plasticized Beatle boots.

Sometimes reading his work is like reading a bunch of hyperactive middle-of-the-night emphatic verbs running around sweat-nasty on the page tripping over proper nouns and BIG CAPITALIZED PRONOUNCEMENTS and weird constructions of whatnots that may cause nosebleeds if you try to examine them any closer.

His obsession with Lou Reed drives me to guzzling mixed nuts at the kitchen counter while glowering at the turquoise clock tocking away behind the stove.

Bangs could be cruel and funny and terrible.

James Taylor Marked for Death came up recently in one of those PBS specials that seems to repeat on the worst possible nights when The Husband wants to watch Downton Abbey and he finds Peter, Paul and Mary warbling through another one of their Special Concerts to Support the Making of Concerts that Are Affiliated With Important Charities That Build Windmills. End stop.

In the PBS special I suffered through that night, James Taylor himself brought up Bangs in that laconic drawl of his, a voice that involuntarily causes my eyes to roll back in a squamous flutter.

At that exact moment, I realized that Taylor would bring Bangs back from the dead, if he could, by any means at his laconic disposal, for the sole purpose of killing Lester Bangs for writing not only James Taylor Marked for Death, but also the meanest album review 800 words or fewer— James Taylor: One Man Dog.

Having never been a big James Taylor fan myownself, I found Taylor’s response fascinating.

Was Taylor expressing a human emotion besides that chickory-tainted folksy earnestness?

Is it possible?

I dog-eared that moment in my head and got on with my work in another room.

I was thinking about writing a Lester Bangs tribute back then, but I couldn’t get up the nerve. I can’t say I have the nerve now. What I have is the deadline.

I know I set out today to write about Lester Bangs, and I ended up writing about him in a way that barely touches the tip of the Bangs experience, but I don’t know how to get you any closer. He was such a white-hot star of blazing music-fueled originality that it is still hard to grasp the gut-soul of the man, ya dig?

When I write about music on The Bluebird Sessions every other week or when I put together my daily 5-Minute Dance Parties, I am thinking about Lester Bangs. More than I can explain.

The man had heart is all I’m saying. A big heart.

And he believed that rock and roll and jazz and soul and country and all that new music changed how we thought about ourselves. About each other.

Bangs wrote a lot about that a lot, too, tucked between his hyperbolic and encyclopedic discussion of music and his raving and scathing sharp-shooter reviews.

But, the big thing here is that he had heart to spare. It’s Lester Bangs that’s on my mind tonight as I think about music. (Well, Lester Bangs and that terrifying James Taylor with bloodlust in his drawl.)

*A couple of quick notes— The musical selection above was pulled from reviews I read in Lester Bangs’ amazing collection of works Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by the fab-o Greil Marcus. A sidebar of Lester Bangs-related links will be coming later today— so stay tuned!

A NOTE: THIS IS A RE-POSTED STORY from April 04, 2012 about one of my favorite figures in writing and music— Lester Bangs. In the upcoming weeks as we move to the new self-hosted Bluebird Blvd.—(same address, same Bluebird! Just self-hosted!)— I think it would be a lot of fun to do some new Bluebird Sessions.

What do you think? Any figure in music you think I should write about next? Any musician or writer or fan who has remained elusive to you for years? What about a new music movement that you think everyone should know about? Let me know!

Super-Secret Friday Night 5-Minute Dance Party [Whose Line Is It Anyway? The Best of Wayne Brady]

Courtenay Bluebird — Sat, 04 May 2013 01:40:49 +0000

The sound quality isn’t perfect. The video is a little shaky.

Still, I’m pretty sure you’re going to love this compilation of Wayne Brady clips from the original American version “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”!

I am officially geeking out because “Whose Line” is officially returning to television.

EEEEEEE! Aren’t you excited? Yes, you heard correctly!

Check out Variety’s April 1st story (no joke) about one of my favorite show-of-all-time’s return with an all new host, AISHA TYLER!: Variety: CW Sets Late-Summer Lineup, Including ‘Whose Line’ Return in July.

Oh my gosh, I don’t think they couldn’t have found someone more fitting to host this show. Aisha Tyler is an amazing stand-up comedian and voice actress. Love her work. If you can’t remember who she is, go to the official Aisha Tyler website.

(Lots of thanks to 12MedBe on YouTube for making this compilation. It’s exactly what y’all needed tonight, don’t you think?)

5-Minute Dance Party [I Don't Believe You— The Thermals]

Courtenay Bluebird — Fri, 03 May 2013 11:00:11 +0000

OH! There’s nothing we can do!

(If I don’t believe you!)

YEAH! Our history is incomplete.

(I don’t believe you!)

Please enjoy this poppy song and do excuse the mess around here— Bluebird Blvd. is moving to a self-hosted WordPress platform! (No worries! Our name isn’t changing! Same address, same Bluebird Blvd.— different host!)

For my friends on WordPress.com, I hope you do follow me as I make this transition. I should be more present as well for reasons that I will explain in the next paragraph.

For the recent spate of splog-followers that have been attempting to turn Bluebird Blvd. into some sort greasy squat— I’ve researched your sources and hunted down every single site you use for cover. I’ve turned off likes to minimize your appearance on my site. I’ve reported all of your affiliate sites to the various authorities throughout the web.

But it’s not nearly enough to satisfy me.

Before this weekend is over, you splogs will be on my turf. I won’t be reporting you to WordPress, honey— I’ll be reporting you to Google. They love to mess up some spammers, that Google. And so do I.

As for the other reasons why I’m moving to a self-hosted site… Hey, aren’t you enjoying this song?

I can’t wait. I’ve been planning to make this jump ever since that six-month period in early 2011 when I filled a notebook with research trying to dream Bluebird Blvd. into being.

Look how far we’ve come since BB’s first post on November 7, 2011: I was a dreamy child!

I think it’s time we began our next big adventure together, don’t you?

O, Death. If You See Me Coming, You Better Run.

Courtenay Bluebird — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:30:05 +0000

But yield who will to their separation,

—Robert Frost,

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Today would have been my grandmother’s 100th birthday. She told me long ago that she didn’t want a party. But what if, say, I invited one hundred people over to supper? I asked. She winced. “Well, I guess that would be alright,” she said, finally. But it wasn’t all right, and it would not be all right. My grandmother was covetous of her life. She had no intention of attracting the attention of Death, nor the book of accounts he carries around, a book filled with impartial numbers in that meticulous handwriting of his. And anyway, she thought I was joking. But I wasn’t. I never joke about love.

Well, it’s two-thirty in the morning on the day of her 100th birthday and I’ve been crying for an hour. No one is awake in the house, and I am glad for these small favors. I prefer my tears in private. They’re mine after all, mine to release to whom and what I please. I am quite animal this way, prone to crawling under the porch to work out my injuries. Out of courtesy to both of us, I haven’t talked much about my grandmother’s death since her funeral because I don’t know what to say about pain that you don’t already know, nor do I expect you to listen to a litany of pain like the one you’re about to read in the next few paragraphs.

The pain of her absence runs through me like a widening mean crack in an old vase, a swollen river breaking its dark banks after a long rain, a curtain ripped from a dingy window to reveal the creeper vines that have choked the garden this year. What could you say, what could I answer, where could we go with a subject as common as death, as puerile as pain? Hence, I’ve worked to spare you and to spare me from sharing the part that comes next in this story of my grandmother’s death. The long, dull wheeze of sorrow works itself through it’s own paces, and I canter after it in my way.

Due to strange machinations in my life, I know a thing or three about the nature of grief. I also know its recent history. That five stages of grief crap that so many sidewalk statisticians would like to foist on you came from a single study done by a single doctor of psychiatry to help people experiencing terminal illness and it’s absolute death ending, as well as all of us who will experience the heft and hue of end-of-life emotions— if we are given the luxury of knowing our approaching death. The study was not designed for those left behind, who, someday, would be those who would too experience these theoretical stages of grief for the loss of one’s life. But it’s been used for a purpose inappropriate to its original design ever since its introduction.

The study in question is a singular one, with a single, highly criticized follow-up of its type published fewer than ten years ago. Most recent studies are focused on neuroanatomical responses to grief and its potential variations. And I do have a deep and abiding respect for both psychiatry and psychology— that’s not the issue here. And to say that the five stages of grief doesn’t have its uses would be incorrect. But my experience of grief and my experience of helping others birth their grief has proved grief to be in no way linear. It’s not a timetable. It refuses the rude cartography of the impatient, the clock-watching of the nervous.

Grief is not a checklist one can tick off neatly. And who would want that anyway? Grief spreads out in an unseen threads that make an interlocking diagram, threads which go back and forth in three-dimensional space, knotting a pattern, snapping others. Until you, yourself are rewoven.

Grief has to be experienced, not endured. One must absolutely go through grief, plunge through its undergrowth, get slapped by its branches, then end up at the center of a forest you do not know— where you will howl and howl and howl and eventually, slowly, start to fight your way out into the too-bright clearing of another unnamed day or time. You cannot imagine who you will be afterward. No one can. Absence will have carved new depths to you.

There are things that the five stages of grief cannot possibly untangle in me— that I am having to take deeper and deeper breaths because sadness is ringing through me in great fever tonight. That I would punch Death pulpless with no hesitation right now, not because she’s gone, but because the great sad joke of it all is that she died so close to her grandest birthday. That there is something struggling up to be said on the page as I write this to you and to me and to everyone.

This something threatening to be born of my grief, struggling to surface, is a meaningful gesture about respect for the dead and respect for the living and the branching bronchial shape of grief. That grief itself is deepening my breathing. That I need time. That grief is about time. That I haven’t cried in months because the pain was too heavy for crying, and tonight I cannot stop crying and I don’t know what to say about that except that it hurts to imagine her face on a rainy afternoon seven years ago when we sat at the table together one afternoon in April before her birthday.

On that afternoon, I made her ginger chicken soup and asked her about that future birthday, the big one. Should we have a party? No. Her cool dry hand rested on mine from time to time; we had both reached an age of silences— mine from some health issues that wouldn’t shake off and hers from the dense accumulation of having lived through so very much, so very much, that she could talk or not talk and not feel bothered either way.

She was one who preferred privacy for her tears. My grandmother, who died in January, whose hands were always cool, whose fingers were long and restless and craved occupation. My grandmother with the dark brown eyes. Who never got over the death of her mother, whom she adored. Who never quite believed just how much I adored her. Who is not here tonight. Who is here tonight. Who belongs to the stars now and to these last sentences that I share with you in a hoarse whisper:

Today is my grandmother’s 100th birthday. This is the day that we would have gathered around my table, my grandmother, my family, me— for a humble dinner, planned a year in advance. Instead, I sit alone in a wingback chair that has held me all these sad months, and I cry and I write. Simply because she is gone.

NOTES

A very basic but honest discussion of the Kübler-Ross model (“the five stages of grief”) and its critics on Wikipedia.

A brief (but elegant, I think) argument against a stage-based model of grief on Psychology Today: Stages of Grief: Time for a New Model, Worth Kilcrease.

ALL OF THE WORDS ARE NONE OF THE WORDS I’D LIKE TO SAY RIGHT NOW.

*Faint Song from a Distant Station

*Succor and Ogden Nash

* Nothing’s Ever Quite as Wordless as You’d Wish It Would Be

*Last Rites on a Sunny Afternoon

*The Little Black Dress That Never Was

*In the Dream Kingdom

(And here is every tagged story about my grandmother on Bluebird Blvd. Not just the ones about her death. Thank you.)

My grandmother would have been one hundred today.

5-Minute Dance Party [No One Will Know— Fort Atlantic]

Courtenay Bluebird — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:30:49 +0000

Today is my grandmother’s birthday.