Reminder: New Blog! (Including Five-Part Intro Essay Synopses)

This sort of feels like the end credits of Ferris Bueller's Day Off: "You're still here? It's over. Go home. Go!"

I understand. Old habits die hard. I often wake up in the middle of the night, sheets soaking wet, wondering how I'm ever going to be able to compose a blog post sufficiently brilliant enough to do justice to INXS's "Need You Tonight" or Johnny Hates Jazz's "Shattered Dreams." And then ... I wipe my face, take a sip of water, and go back to sleep.

Not that I don't miss it, necessarily. Nor could I help breathing an affectionate sigh as I momentarily returned to Blogspot's rudimentary web design (seriously, posting here after dealing with the Rubik's Cube that is WordPress is like putting on a comfy pair of old slippers).

But ... in case you didn't catch my last post, and in case you're wondering what Little Earl might have been up to for the last six months or so, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try a bit of cross-blog marketing - in other words, to dust off the old blog from the garage and take it for a spin around the block. I believe someone in the comments suggested that I was "taking a break." Break? Sure, if by "break," you mean "generating three times as much content as I used to," then yeah, I'm taking a break. 

Maybe you were in it for the '80s pop all the way, and you're convinced Little Earl has lost his mind. But maybe you're still wondering what this whole new business is all about. You took a quick glance back in March, thinking, "Eh, I'll check this out later, you know, when he's filled it out a bit," and then never bothered to do so. (I suspect I'm getting more views on the blog I haven't touched in half a year than the one I've been tinkering with more or less every day.) Then let this post serve, not merely as a reminder, perhaps, but also as a guide.

Basically, before I dive headlong into writing about my favorite albums and films from the '60s and '70s, I've decided to post an amusingly lengthy and potentially superfluous five-part introductory essay, in which I explain what exactly part-time Buddhism is and what the goals of a part-time Buddhist blogger should be. It’s the kind of intro essay that people who stumble upon one of my future blog posts would circle their way back toward later – but I had to post it first. Does that make sense?

Intro Essay (Part 1)

In which, after clarifying how it can be distinguished from full-time Buddhism, I summarize the core tenets of part-time Buddhism (to the best of my ability).

Intro Essay (Part 2)

In which I discuss, among other topics, why I decided not to become an English professor, the broader fate of university English departments, and my own idiosyncratic theories on the purpose of an education in the arts.

Intro Essay (Part 3a)

In which I discuss two examples of prominent and respected film writers who I'm pretty sure weren't part-time Buddhists: 1) Pauline Kael and 2) Robin Wood (the latter's uniquely unfavorable and politically-charged opinion of the original Star Wars trilogy may strike certain readers as particularly amusing.)

Intro Essay (Part 3b)

In which I turn my attention toward three examples of prominent music writers who I would not consider part-time Buddhists: Rob Sheffield (of Rolling Stone), Robert Christgau (of the Village Voice), and Pitchfork Media (of ... Pitchfork Media).

[Given that Part 3 was turning out to be twice as long as the other entries (which were already fairly long to begin with), I decided to split the essay up into Part 3a and Part 3b. "Wait, couldn't you have just called this Part 4 then?" you ask. But Part 4 is really its own separate thing, with its own separate flavor, whereas Part 3b is essentially a continuation of Part 3a. In other words, this is still a five-part intro essay; there are simply two parts to Part 3. Just for the record.]

Intro Essay (Part 4)

In which I turn the tables and highlight certain writers and pop culture commentators who I would like to declare "Honorary Part-Time Buddhists": film critic Roger Ebert, music website the All Music Guide, obscure meditation teacher Dean Sluyter, and random YouTubers I've come across over the last few years. Plus: a hodgepodge bonus section of part-time Buddhist writing "don'ts."

Intro Essay (Part 5)

In which I announce the unprecedented format my blog is actually going to take (top 10 lists), the decade I plan to focus on first and why (the '60s), the variety of (and purpose of) other "greatest" album and movie lists out there, potential objections to my lists from various quarters that I've attempted to anticipate, Woody Allen's weird taste in music, etc.

Announcing A New Blog!: The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru

Attention dear readers:

If you're one of the many anonymous blobs of matter who has, over the years, sporadically enjoyed perusing this ragtag collection of deranged musings known as Cosmic American Blog, well, the cold hard truth is, you may not be able to enjoy it, or at least any new content from Little Earl, for much longer.

But slow down that accelerating heart rate of yours, take a nice breath of fresh air (or whatever gaseous substance you're fond of inhaling), and don't dial that suicide hotline just yet.

Quit blogging? Who, me?

Fear not, as Little Earl is merely embarking upon a new phase of his dastardly mayhem. Prepare yourself, if you can, for a sleeker, more modern, more groundbreaking, more experimental work of unparalleled blogging brilliance, the likes of which the internet may have never seen before, and may never see again. One adventure ends, as they say, and another begins. 

Allow me the pleasure of introducing to you: a great humanitarian, a brilliant entertainer, a fellow blogger, and my dear, dear friend of 41 years:

The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru.

The Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru means business, and you know how I can tell? Because he's on WordPress.

Initially, I was skeptical, but after the Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru (PTBPCG?) approached me in good faith, pitched me the general concept behind the blog (discussing his favorite albums and films of the '60s and '70s, but with the unique twist of discussing them from a part-time Buddhist point of view), and asked for my input, I have to say, I found the project simply too good to pass up. And so, I've agreed to help out behind the scenes, under terms that I am legally and contractually forbidden to disclose here, but suffice to say, I will most likely need to devote my full energies to the enterprise.

The truth is, Cosmic American Blog was never meant to be my "forever blog."

A little history. In January 2007, my good friend from college suggested that I start a blog. He said it was a laughably easy thing to do. It was so easy, in fact, that, one night, he created a blog on blogspot, and added a couple of posts as a joke. Soon I began adding a few posts of my own. We were essentially "instant messaging" each other that night, through the guise of a blog. There was no grand agenda, no central objective. We were just dicking around.

That said, I was a young man with plenty on my mind, and so was he, and after about a week of dicking around between the two of us, we shared the link with friends and family, and began to take the notion of blogging a wee bit more seriously (and I mean a wee bit). That college friend went by the blogger name of Yoggoth. Because we had initially met as DJs at our campus radio station, where my DJ name was Little Earl and where one of my many radio shows was named, I believe, "Cosmic American Music" (another show title: "Nuke the Whales"), he dubbed the blog "Cosmic American Blog" and chose Little Earl as my blogger alter-ego.

I feel a slight amount of pity for anyone on Google over the last 15 years who might have been searching for a blog that they were hoping would discuss, in great detail and tremendous affection, late '60s and early '70s country rock, happened to stumble upon something called "Cosmic American Blog," assumed that their prayers were answered, and instead found themselves face-to-face with endless posts about Debbie Gibson, Starship, and Stock Aitken Waterman. I'm sorry. I'm really, truly sorry. Blame Yoggoth.

So, for the first five years of the blog's existence (let's call this "Phase One"), it was essentially a "blog about nothing" (a la Seinfeld), without any specific raison d'etre, although we flirted with two large series ("Best Movies of the '80s" and "Best Albums of the '90s"), suggesting both the potential for something more substantial, and the format I partially hope to follow with my upcoming blog. During that very first year, one of my friends from high school (with whom I shared the enterprise) began to follow the blog more closely than almost anyone else, constantly leaving his thoughtful comments on practically every post and expressing great enthusiasm for our magnificent nonsense. Yoggoth and I huddled, and, after much deliberation, decided to grant our biggest fan co-blogging access. That fan ... dubbed himself Herr Zrbo.

Phase One continued on into 2010. Yoggoth gradually began posting less and less frequently, claiming to be attending something called "law school" (whatever that was), but I didn't mind that so much as long as he continued to read my posts and Zrbo's posts and add his peerless commentary at the bottom. But soon Yoggoth ceased even reading the damn thing - he stopped reading the blog he had co-founded! Losing a bit of the fire myself, I began to wonder where this beast was headed, even posting an amusingly frank entry titled "The Blog Is Dying." If I'd been in a more financially and professionally stable period of my life, I might have done then what I've decided to do now: start a brand new blog, with a more clearly defined thematic focus, more legitimate marketing presence, and more modern web design. Imagine if I'd spent the last 10 years writing about the subjects that had truly meant the most to me.

But nope! Not what I did.

Instead, in the fall of 2010, I found myself becoming absurdly and irrationally obsessed with '80s music. I knew that Zrbo loved '80s music. I knew that Yoggoth didn't care for it so much (at least not the "Top 40/MTV" side of '80s music), but Yoggoth had stopped reading the blog anyway, so screw him, and Zrbo was still into it. Hence, I made a fateful decision. I decided to blog about my newfound love of '80s music, essentially aiming my writing at Zrbo (to paraphrase a Vonnegut quote, "Try to write with one person in mind; if you open the window and attempt to make love to the world, you will only catch pneumonia."). Did I have any idea of how long I would be blogging about '80s music? Pfft. I just thought I would dive into the deep end and see where the topic took me. Thus began Phase Two.

Well, eleven years later, I woke up in a dumpster covered in George Michael's leather jacket, Madonna's cone bra, Kate Pierson's beehive hairdo, and Al B. Sure!'s unibrow, wondering what the hell had become of my life.

The thing is, although I made it all the way up to 1990, in a sense, I didn't actually "finish." As outlined in my introductory post (now - Jesus Christ - 11 years old?), my original intention was to cover "both" sides of the '80s AKA spend some time on the aforementioned "Top 40/MTV" side of '80s music, and then eventually transition over to the more "alternative" side of '80s music, which I enjoy almost as much as I do the mainstream side. Picture, if you will, lengthy, in-depth series on alternative acts both American (Husker Du, the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, R.E.M., the Replacements, the Butthole Surfers, the Pixies, Beat Happening, Bongwater) and British (the Cure, New Order, the Smiths, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, the Cocteau Twins, Bauhaus, the Associates, Felt).

Well, since it took me 11 years to blog about the "Top 40/MTV" side of the '80s ... your mental picture of those blog posts might just have to do. 'Twas a beautiful vision, but I think we're going to have to let the second half of that plan slide a bit. I do recall feeling a sting of deep uncertainty as to whether or not I should have included the Pet Shop Boys in my "Summer of '88" series, or R.E.M., the Cure, Depeche Mode, and Tears for Fears in my "Herbert Walker Memories" series, given that the official "plan" was always to include those acts in separate, future blog series, until I realized, "Fuck it, I'm never going to get around to it at this point." But at least I managed to lightly brush those acts' catalogs.

Oh, I could keep going! Is there some secret rule, agreed upon by Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Jeff Bezos in a vast underground lair, that a blogger is required to maintain only one blog at a time? The thing is, I have, like, a day job. Sure, I could keep going ... if I were independently wealthy, or possibly retired (give me about ... 20 more years?). The truth is, at the moment, I think I can only handle one blog at a time. And wrapping up the "Top 40/MTV" side seemed like a suitable place to stop the madness. But if I unexpectedly find myself with more time on my hands, then who knows?

While the last 11 years' worth of blogging may have suggested otherwise, I should probably mention that the '80s isn't actually my favorite decade of music (!). Which, in a sense, made it easier to write on, given that I didn't have nearly as much to say about it as I had to say about the '60s and '70s. But I always felt a bit uneasy with the notion that my ultimate writing legacy might consist of excerpts from a fake Phil Collins autobiography and microscopically granular analysis of every facet of Belinda Carlisle's entire recording career. Look, it just ... happened. Even less apparent over the course of Cosmic American Blog's run, perhaps, is my deep passion for 20th century cinema.

I knew I would have to make the transition someday, but, as a friend of mine recently pointed out, addiction was certainly a pervasive theme of '80s life, and so perhaps it was fitting that I found myself addicted to continuously posting about '80s music and being terrifyingly unable to quit. But I now announce to you, with pride, that I've finally emerged from '80s blogger rehab clean and sober.

That said, although I have little intention of adding new posts to Cosmic American Blog going forward, it'll still ... you know ... be here, in all its low-tech, 2007-era glory. Welcome to the magic of the internet. Keeping an old blog online costs me absolutely jack squat. I see no reason to "close" it somehow, or alter the posts as they already exist. It's not like it takes up space on my hard drive.

I also suspect that Zrbo may still plan to publish his usual "Favorite Songs of the Year" posts every once in a while, which I imagine might appeal to a slightly different audience, but how he decides to approach that is honestly up to him.

So, if you're that rare music and culture aficionado who adores reading about '80s music but has absolutely zero interest in '60s and '70s music, or '60s and '70s film, then perhaps I'm breaking your heart. Otherwise, the Part-Time Buddhist Pop Culture Guru beckons.

"Sowing The Seeds" Of The '60s Nostalgia That Would Eat '90s Rock Alive?

Question: What happens when two depressed British synth-pop sourpusses cheer up just a teeny tiny bit?

Answer: They put away their Joy Division 12-inches and pull out their imported copy of Magical Mystery Tour.

Given that their very band name was a term originated by psychologist Arthur Janov, the creator of Primal Scream therapy whose brief stint treating John Lennon greatly inspired John's first post-Beatles album (John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band), it shouldn't be a surprise that Tears for Fears were gargantuan Beatle freaks, but when "Sowing the Seeds of Love" came out in 1989, I think it was viewed as, shall we say, a departure.

"Sowing the Seeds of Love" wins my vote for greatest Beatles homage of the '80s. It's like the "Beatles" of '80s Beatles homages, if you will. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith stole an entire jar of Beatles moonshine from the country market and they chugged the whole gallon. A touch of "Rain" here, a smattering of "All You Need is Love" there ... you name it, they nicked it. A dash of McCartney's toenail clippings, a splinter of Ringo's drumstick, a lock of George Martin's hair, a drop of Yoko's urine ... they took it all and went to town.

What Tears for Fears did with their Beatles homage that, in my opinion, even ELO or Oasis never quite managed to do, was turn it into its own little six-minute Abbey Road medley. "Sowing the Seeds of Love" has enough mini-sections and unexpected digressions to sow the seeds of eight separate Beatles rip-offs. Let's start at the top:

0:13 - The verse melody, which lifts its lyrical rhythm, and siren-like organ riff, from "I am the Walrus" (?)
0:40 - I'm fairly certain they simply flipped over the "Walrus" single, played "Hello Goodbye," looked at each other knowingly and declared, "There's our chorus!"
1:48 - Dreamy Interlude #1, complete with faint choral singing right out of the Let It Be version of "Across the Universe," topped off by what I'm fairly certain are R2D2 farts
2:22 - Roland and his vocoder take center stage ("Feel the pain/Talk about it") in a section that, in a typical '80s pop song, would essentially be the bridge that immediately precedes the final chorus, but whoa-ho-ho my friends, this song isn't even halfway over yet.
3:12 - Dreamy Interlude #2, set to the chorus melody, sporting trumpets flown in from the "Penny Lane" Express
3:28 - Someone shouts "OK!" in his raunchiest James Brown voice and the track takes a quick detour to Memphis (or perhaps that's Billy Preston on keys?)
3:55 - With a hard-panned guitar lick straight out of Harrison's worst meditation-induced nightmares, and a drum fill doctored to the teeth with what sounds like backward masking (?), the adventure swiftly returns to where it all began - the "Walrus"-like verse melody.
4:48 - Finally, at nearly the five-minute mark, the last chorus, and the "Hey Jude"-style fade-out. Rejoice, for Odysseus has been reunited with his Penelope.

But if the music of "Sowing the Seeds of Love" could be described as delightfully '67, I would describe the lyrics as intensely '89. Seriously, no one could create hummable radio hits that somehow sported stealthily barbed political overtones quite like those '80s British synth-pop groups, I tell ya:

High time we made a stand

And shook up the views of the common man

And the love train rides from coast to coast

DJ is the man we love the most

Could you be, could you be squeaky clean

And smash any hope of democracy?

As the headline says you're free to choose

There's an egg on your face and mud on your shoes

One of these days they're gonna call it the blues, yeah

Sowing the seeds of love

(Anything is possible)

Seeds of love

(When you're sowing the seeds of love)

Sowing the seeds

I spy tears in their eyes

They look to the skies for some kind of divine

Intervention, food goes to waste

So nice to eat, so nice to taste

Politician grannie with your high ideals

Have you no idea how the majority feels?

So without love and a promised land

We're fools to the rules of a government plan

Kick out the style, bring back the jam

The bitter phrases Orzabal peppers the song with are so oblique that I doubt anyone out in Main Street USA would even understand which aspects of world affairs, precisely, he was genuinely objecting to, but at least he sounds like he's got stuff on his mind. "As the headline says you're free to choose/There's egg on your face and mud on your shoes"? "So without love and a promised land/We're fools to the rules of a government plan"? He's talking about somebody else's country, right? "An end to need/And the politics of greed"? I mean hey, who's against that? I'm pretty sure the "Politician grannie with your high ideals" would have been a reference to a certain Iron Lady, who ... my God, was she still in office in 1989? What the hell was wrong with those people? And finally, what's with the implied diss of Paul Weller's Style Council ("Kick out the style, bring back the Jam")? Guess Roland wasn't digging the non-threatening Yuppie affectations of sophisti-pop? Or perhaps Weller forgot to call him on his birthday, I don't know.

Although he occasionally inches toward dopiness ("I love a sunflower"?), what I admire about Orzabal's outlook here is that, in the face of relentlessly gloomy news, he is a man who nevertheless advocates positivity. While not suggesting indifference, I wouldn't say he suggests anger either. Could it really be possible to tackle injustice without succumbing to snotty self-righteousness (AKA becoming Jello Biafra)? Perhaps many on the political left today might want to give this 33-year-old chestnut another spin.

And they should give the video another spin while they're at it, only after ingesting the substance of their choice. You know what the video for "Sowing the Seeds of Love" makes me think of? You know the end of Yellow Submarine, where the Blue Meanies suddenly find themselves covered in flowers, and they finally release all the love they'd been repressing inside themselves for thousands upon thousands of years, and they hold hands with Jeremy the Boob and "It's All Too Much" starts blaring out of the speakers and the movie virtually explodes with drug-induced pheromones of peace and sunshine? This video is like that. These two sad sack wallflowers who hardly even seemed capable of getting up in the morning without a healthy dose of antidepressants (see: "World, Mad" and "Shelter, Pale") had finally busted out of their funk and were letting the whole human race know it. The word this song and video bring to mind is "opulent." Tears for Fears didn't worry about going too colorful, too dreamy, too silly on this one. They let their imagination run rampant. It's what the moment called for.

Also: I've heard it said that, once upon a time, effects in videos weren't made with computers. This means that they look like effects, but that also means those effects still have a tactile weight and movement to them that later effects arguably would not. I can feel that box spinning in the sky. I can feel that stalk shooting up out of the ground. I can feel that giant stone face opening its doors (which are placed on its forehead?). I can feel that golden orb smashing into the eye of the illuminati. Then there's the part where a flaming ring opens up a portal inside a newspaper, and we find ourselves being sucked into a vortex of spinning fish, Buddha statues, doves, and ... Egyptian ankhs? Then, once an abalone shell gets the hell out of the way, Roland and Curt start marching through a field of ... those see-sawing bird paperweights? Look out for flying violins, umbrellas, and a gravity-defying Brunhilde! Suddenly Roland tosses a book our way, and the video quickly transforms into the video for Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love." Then Roland finds himself literally sowing seeds in what appears to be ... Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World? The final blossoming of the sunflower in outer space (how would it survive in space?) feels appropriately orgiastic. In hindsight, perhaps these two should have saved up at least a couple of drops of all that positive energy for the follow-up album.

A Final Note From Professor Horton J. Higglediggle

Unnerved and alarmed by my shocking failure to recognize the grossly forged nature of the Phil Collins "memoir" which I so eagerly devoured and so frequently quoted over the course of several years, I began to wonder (and fear): could it be at all possible that I'd ... made the same mistake twice?

Loyal readers may recall that, only a short while after "discovering" the fraudulent (if highly amusing) Collins work, I came across an equally strange text, Father Figure: The Socio-Political Implications of George Michael in the Post-Modern Landscape, which, unlike the bogus autobiography, was purportedly written not by the artist himself, but by an academic scholar of significant international renown: Professor Horton J. Higglediggle.

But now I began to wonder. Allegedly an instructor at the University of New South-Southwest Wales, perhaps there was something amiss with this imposing-sounding credential. Let us not forget, of course, that Professor Harold Hill never did in fact attend Gary Conservatory and was not, despite his many claims, a member of the Gold Medal class of 1905. Alas, after a quick Google search, a cold sweat enveloped my palms once again.

There is no Australian state known as New South-Southwest Wales.

What had I done?

Come on, like I know the names of Australian states? Hell, I thought they were called provinces, you know, like in Canada. Give this Yank a break. But mainly, I felt that a scholarly groundbreaking text such as Higglediggle's was too masterful to fake, too insightful to fabricate - as if some random blogger who'd spent a year in grad school could have imitated language so complex, theories so heady. Preposterous!

Then it dawned on me: at various times, hadn't I been personally corresponding with Professor Higglediggle - or if not Professor Higglediggle, then at least someone claiming to be Professor Higglediggle?  And so, it was time to compose yet another letter. One evening last month, at approximately 2:00am, bottle of Absolut Vodka on my desk (presumably from Russia, but perhaps even that was a lie?), I wrote to this reclusive pseudo-Aussie once more, in a tone arguably a touch too nasty and accusatory for the occasion, but emotions were running high. A week later, I received the following reply:

Your inquiries as to the nature of my identity, though possibly not intended as such, do raise salient points about the issue of authorial authenticity in the post-textual media landscape. For if the means of publication are, for lack of a better term, democratized, and if identities can be formed and dissolved without any sense of finite legitimacy, then would there be, in any experientially or ontologically valid meaning of the term, a concrete categorical difference between the work of Professor Higglediggle and, say, an online imposter purporting to be Professor Higglediggle? In other words, if the difference between the "imposter" Higglediggle and the "real" Higglediggle cannot be established, then wouldn't the "imposter" Higglediggle become just as real as the "real" Higglediggle, in the same sense that "misquoted" classic film lines (ex: "Play it again, Sam"; "We don't need no stinking badges") have eventually, if unintentionally, risen to the status of the "real" quotation? In merely asking the question, "Who is Professor Higglediggle?" aren't we elevating the primacy of the "original" Higglediggle to an arbitrary status it may not ultimately merit?