Pursuing Happiness

The pursuit of happiness. Nice idea, but it’s a phrase that’s fraught with pitfalls, and all the more in our age of advertising and social media.

What exactly is happiness, and should it even be a goal? I spoke with a friend of mine a few months back who questioned whether people’s desire to be “happy” hasn’t blocked the perhaps more important pursuit to live life “meaningfully.” Are we basically trading in difficult, long-range pursuits for short-term pleasures? What about working hard at something? Of struggling? Of accomplishing something you didn’t think you could do? Of being resilient under difficult conditions? For those types of challenges, at any given moment you aren’t likely to say that you’re “happy,” but it may be those types of experiences that lead to the greatest feelings of achievement and satisfaction.

In today’s world of social media and advertising, it’s hard not to fall in the trap of constantly comparing one’s life to others. Case in point: I have numerous friends who travel extensively around the world, and when we get together it’s natural for our discussions to include some details about their experiences. I often leave these conversations questioning why I don’t travel more.

But the answer is, because I don’t really want to. I have other stuff I want to do. So why then do I still have that nagging feeling? It probably has something to do with the way humans are wired. There’s a good reason why The Ten Commandments include the edict: “Thou shall not covet.” This isn’t a new thing.

I read an interview with comedian/writer Samantha Irby in The New York Times a while back, and she said something very affirming for me:

The thing where whatever you aspire to is a thing we all should aspire to — I hate it. That kind of messaging just exists to make people feel bad. When you flatten everything into “be happy,” it’s like, what does that mean? It means a different thing for you than it does for me.

Her message really hit home. We don’t all have to be doing the same thing. And we don’t have to take other people’s experiences as models to subscribe to.

But this can be easier said than done. I’ve had numerous discussions with friends and family members who’ve distanced themselves from social media due to its ability to make users feel inadequate and unhappy, and I think this should be STEP ONE in the FEAR OF MISSING OUT RECOVERY PROGRAM. When you’re not constantly being bombarded with photos of what a wonderful time other people are having, it’s easier to pursue the stuff that you want to do without the nagging sense that you should be doing something else.

(An aside: it’s also important to note that what you see on social media isn’t the full story. No one is taking photos of family quarrels, delayed flights or child tantrums.)

The 1980’s version of social media was advertising. I think of the old Carnival Cruise commercial with Kathie Lee Gifford singing, “If they could see me now.” (Talk about selling FOMO!)

I remember watching this commercial wondering why my family didn’t get to go on cruises. (Answer: because it would have been a disaster!). For decades, advertising kept telling me how amazing cruises were, and several friends said the same thing. Then, one day, I actually went on a cruise. It was okay. It met the needs of my particular circumstances, but I won’t be going on another one.

Sometimes what’s being sold to you isn’t actually what’s best for you. Go figure.

So go do what’s best for you, what’s meaningful to you, and try do so with a sense of confidence.

So Long, Paul Auster

One of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, died last month, and it was one of those deaths that had me glum for a few days. No more new books from this brilliant man. He published his last, Baumgartner, just six months ago, and I devoured it in a few days. It may not have been his best work, but each of his books had something to offer, and I regret that I’ll no longer be able to experience the pleasure of reading a book of his for the first time.

I first learned of Auster by happenstance. His wonderful novel, The Brooklyn Follies (and a good place to start for the uninitiated), was displayed on the “New Fiction” section of my local library, and I found its cover compelling. A man stands at the corner of a crosswalk peering into a plastic grocery bag. Is he lamenting having forgotten to purchase something? Did a carton of eggs break? I don’t know, but I was drawn to it. Chalk one up to the lost art of browsing (it just isn’t possible to do so on-line with any efficacy).

And so began a love affair.  In fact, I took a line from Brooklyn Follies for my 2016 song, “You.”

I think of Nathan Glass and his Book of Human Folly
All the blunders and pratfalls, embarrassments, the foibles, oh good golly
But you.  I wouldn’t change you.

The first and second lines are all Auster (except for the “oh good golly”) and I thank him for the inspiration.

As much as I loved Auster’s fiction, I found his memoirs positively fascinating. In 2012 I blogged about his book, Winter Journal, a one-of-a-kind memoir that defies convention. 

“(It)describes a nonlinear history of Auster’s physical body: the injuries it sustained, the physical pleasures, the scars – both mental and physical – it endured.  At various points, Auster describes the different sensations and actions that his body (and all of our bodies) have experienced:

‘Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields...’

He spends 52 pages identifying the twenty-one permanent addresses his body has lived in, ten pages describing the plot of a movie he identifies with (and he does it so well that I feel I’ve already seen the 1950 film, D.O.A.), and a page and a half listing the countless activities of his hands (“brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries...”).

Unconventional?  You bet.  But so much more interesting than a play-by-play of his life.”

The start of Auster’s published career was also a memoir, The Invention of Solitude, a haunting recounting of the aftermath of his father’s death, and in 2013 he published Report from the Interior, a companion peace to Winter Journal, in that the latter is a history of Auster’s physical body while the former recounts his psychological development through adolescence.

These are the books I will likely keep going back to. His fiction is fascinating (besides Brooklyn Follies, my favorites are The Book of Illusions and Man in the Dark), and – admittedly – sometimes over my head, but his memoirs speak to a shared humanity and mortality that we all reckon with, and one that I find endlessly compelling.

Thank you, Paul, for your significant contribution to defining the human condition. Peace.

The Pros and Cons of Solitude

“All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.”

-        Dr. Suess, from Oh, The Places You’ll Go

I just took an on-line quiz to determine once and for all if I’m an introvert, an extrovert or somewhere in between (what’s sometimes called an ambivert). For people who know me, I can appear to be an extrovert, but I recall taking the Myers-Briggs personality test in grad school as part of a broader class discussion, and my classmates responding with shock when my test results labeled me as an introvert. To them, I was an active and willing participant in the social life of our close-knit group: I even co-chaired our social committee that led to activities like baseball games, scavenger hunts, and other escapades. To them, that didn’t jibe with the label introvert at all.

But I knew better. I knew that while I indeed craved a social outlet every day – even today, I get anxious if my calendar is lacking pre-planned activities – I also needed alone time, and that without it I’d be one unhappy camper. This is why big gatherings for weekend getaways fill me with anxiety, even if I’m the one who planned the activity! By contrast, sometimes all the interaction I need in a day is a quick conversation with a neighbor and a hello from a cashier.

So, while I think of myself as an ambivert, the test I just took says quite unequivocally that I’m an introvert. Fair enough. I’ll embrace the label.

Which leads me to solitude, from which all my creativity flows.

I think back to being a child in the 70s with two older siblings who went to school while I was left to fill my day with my mother whose parenting style was fairly hands-off. Sure, I played with friends from time to time, but a good chunk of my day was spent as a solo act: I dug up ant hills in the back yard, copied maps, built houses with Lincoln Logs, created abstract pictures with a Spirograph, and collected shotgun shells in the field behind our house (I shit you not – my parents let me wander around a field by myself with a paper grocery bag, collecting yellow, red, orange and green shotgun shells. What could possibly go wrong?).

And I wrote songs. Even before my family inherited my maternal grandparents’ piano, I was composing songs in my head, sometimes sharing them with my classmates in the back of the bus – funny songs about smoking cigarettes (quite edgy for a 6 year-old!) and one about Ohio that sounded oddly like George Baker Selection’s “Paloma Blanca,” one of those AM radio hits that shaped my early ear.

The songwriting never stopped. Shortly after the spinet was delivered to our door and placed in our living room, I was composing tunes, including two that my father painstakingly wrote out on manuscript paper for me. I still have them. One really isn’t a tune at all, but just an organized discovery of triads, but the other is, I must say, kind of impressive. I was no Mozart, that’s for sure, but the song has a good melody and cleverly transitions from a major key to its relative minor – not bad for an 8-year-old.

But all of this was happening because I was alone. Because there was nothing good to watch on TV. Because my older siblings had better things to do than entertain their baby brother. Because my parents weren’t ones to fill up my time. Because my next-door neighbor traveled to Florida for weeks at a time and there was no one to hang with. And because there was no such thing as the internet, smart phones and home computers.

Solitude. I’ve often stated that the two ingredients required for creativity are boredom and silence. This isn’t entirely true – musicians, actors and writers can be extremely creative in group settings – but it rings true for me. As a teenager I worked in retail, and it drove me crazy when my inner songwriting jukebox was unusable because of the Muzak pumping through the speakers overhead. My Orwellian nightmare would undoubtedly include my being exposed to continuous streams of music. Even good music for long periods of time exhausts me the same way conversing at a party for three or four hours can.

I wrote about my need for solitude in my song, “Falling by Degrees.”

I need silence
I need space around me
And it’s okay
It’s got nothing in the world to do with you

And this lyric alludes to the downside of solitude. My need for solitude has probably been misconstrued by some as being standoffish, and I know it’s kept me from exploring fun activities at times because they seemed like too big of a hassle. I’ve said no to outings – especially ones for multiple nights – because I feared I wouldn’t have a way to escape and recharge my batteries. And saying no to activities can snowball; when invitations are rejected, they eventually stop coming. Over the years, I’ve learned to be more careful to say yes to the right things and no to the wrong things, but it’s a tricky balancing act.

These days, as an empty nester whose wife travels quite a lot for work, I am careful to try to plan something social every day. Not ALL day, but a lunch, a phone call or two, a hang with the neighbors…something, just enough to get me out of my head.

And that’s probably the biggest con of being an introvert – being unable to get out of one’s own head. I’ve been there, and it’s not always a pretty place.

Ideal Album Lengths

We knew we were in trouble when Aerosmith started putting out 60-minute records.

I recently purchased two Van Halen albums on vinyl and noticed how quickly I had to flip the record. VH wasn’t prone to long-winded releases. Check out the times of their first several records:

Van Halen, 35:34
Van Halen II, 31:36
Women and Children First, 33:35
Fair Warning, 31:11
Diver Down, 31:04
1984, 33:22

Not until you get into the CD era do their albums go over 40 minutes.

It’s not as if the LP format was limited to 35 minutes’ worth of music. I remember back in the day dubbing LPs onto a side of a Maxwell 90-minute cassette tape and having to cut songs when copying Genesis records. My first two purchases from Genesis were …And Then There Were Three and Selling England by the Pound, which both came in at over 53 minutes, more than an entire album side of material than your typical Van Halen record. Talk about getting more bang for your buck.

You could argue that the fidelity of those old Genesis albums wasn’t very good due to the physical constraints of the LP format and the compromises that had to be made to pack in that much music, but there were very good-sounding records with more content than your standard hard rock album:

Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon: 42:50
Stevie Wonder, Innervisions: 43:52
Supertramp, Breakfast in America: 46:06
Toto IV: 42:17
Michael Jackson, Thriller: 42:16

Clearly, even during the vinyl era, bands could put out records that were over 40 minutes that still sounded amazing (which is why engineer Ken Caillat’s argument that the wonderful song ”Silver Springs” had to be dropped from the 38-minute Rumours doesn’t really hold water).

But then came the CD, and things started to get out of hand. Aerosmith’s 1993 release Get a Grip clocked in at a whopping 62 minutes! Who on Earth needed to hear over 60 minutes of Aerosmith in 1993? Van Halen’s 1998 release Van Halen III was 63 minutes. Rush got into the act too, with Vapor Trails and Snakes and Arrows both well over an hour long.

I’m a big Rush fan. But that’s too damn long.

Listening to records from the CD era, it’s hard not to conclude that if artists had had some self-discipline, they could have ended up with a perfect 40-minute record. I recently listened to the Genesis album We Can’t Dance from 1991, and it’s generally regarded as a subpar album, but it’s over 71 minutes! If you cut out five of the weakest tracks (and there are definitely five weak tracks), I think you’d end up with a very good 45-minute album.

For a more recent example, Peter Gabriel’s I/O from 2023 may contain some good songs, but once again, it runs at almost 70 minutes long. It’s just too much, with too many tracks that aren’t distinctive enough to hold a listener’s attention for over an hour.

One could rightly point out that some of the greatest records ever released have been double-LPs with a lot of material. Consider the following:

The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album): 93:33
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main St.: 67:07
The Who, Quadrophenia: 81:42
Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti: 85:59
Fleetwood Mac, Tusk: 74:02
Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life: if you include the extra EP included with the double album, a whopping 104:29
The Clash, London Calling: 65:07
Pink Floyd, The Wall: 80:42
Prince, 1999: 70:29

That’s a pretty amazing list, so why was it okay for those bands to put out lengthy records but not Aerosmith, Van Halen and Rush?

Well, it would have been okay for those bands to put out a double album when they were at their creative peaks. You want to combine Toys in the Attic and Rocks into one double album? Sold! It would be among the all-time best. The same for Van Halen’s first two records or Rush’s Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures.

But by the 1990s, these bands were not producing their best stuff. Yes, some of it was good. Maybe a lot of it was good. But an awful lot was filler, fluff, overwrought, drawn out and tedious. Long albums should be reserved for artists at their peaks, creating so much material that they can hardly stop themselves from composing great track after great track, struggling to find a way to get it all out on record. That’s why in the CD era it made sense for artists like Smashing Pumpkins, 2Pac, Drive-By Truckers, Beyonce, Christina Aguilera and Arcade Fire to put out really long albums. It was their time.

In the 1990s, it was not Rush’s time, nor Genesis’s nor Van Halen’s.

And let’s face it: sometimes less is more. I’ll take a perfect half-an hour record by Van Halen any day over a bloated album that has me constantly reaching for the skip button.

After writing the above, I wondered if I’d ever committed the sin of producing an album that was way too long. I did a quick check, and the longest one I’ve ever completed was The Palisades from 2016, clocking in at 47:53. And you know what? It would probably have been better at 40 minutes.

So there you are.

Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!