Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Gee My Life's A Funny Thing: Plastic Soul

Hi friends.

I just came back from a brief trip to Scotland.

Scotland is a great and very beautiful country and it was hard to want to leave it. In the days since returning, I have been trying to fall back in love with America (since this is where I live). Generally I do love America, albeit at times in that peeking-through-my-fingers way that is actually pretty typical of love now that I come to think of it. But, as I said, Scotland is a great and very beautiful country and it was hard to want to leave it.

My preferred method of traveling is two-fold: a) pretend I live there and b) get productively lost. If I had my way, I would spend most of time in foreign countries walking down the street and peering into the lighted windows of grocery stores. I am glad that I usually travel with other people who make me do things like go to museums and hike. It's not that I don't enjoy doing those things; I do. It's that left to my own devices, I would wander around and have exquisitely melancholy thoughts for the length of my entire vacation. I need to learn to limit my tendency in that direction, I think.

In any case, I did a tiny bit of this when I was in Scotland, and I walked down the street at night, and I peered into the lighted window of this pub that had not real bookshelves but bookshelves painted on the walls, and I found that really charming, and I put down my exquisite melancholy and I went in.

As I was sitting in an armchair in this pub, reading a book about the young Queen Elizabeth II and gazing at the painted books on the wall and thinking the moment could not get any more perfect, this song came on softly in the background.

There are many music-y things to say about this song. One music-y thing I didn't know is that it was Luther Vandross who suggested the arrangement for the backing vocals (which I think is very cool). I'm not sure I really want to say music-y things about it though.

I want to play you this song, because it came on at the exact right time for me. It's a bridge back to that moment, but also a bridge back to real life.


The song: David Bowie, "Young Americans"; 1975

(It's also just a great song, which is what this is all about. Plz enjoy. And maybe, turn it up.)

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com

Friday, October 11, 2013

I Just Want You To Feel Fine: Another Time Around

Continuing the theme of songs that have been featured here before. . .

This song was featured, again in sort of glib making-a-point kind of way, in the third entry posted here on In Bed with Amy Wilson.

That entry was about Fleetwood Mac's seminal album Rumours, and I still mostly agree with what I said although it is more than a little bit agonizing to revisit something I wrote a year and a half ago. Just because that is the nature of writing things, I think.

When I wrote that entry about Rumours, my blog was very new (less than a week old) and I was obsessively in love with it. My blog, I mean. I hope that doesn't sound hopelessly self-absorbed to say. I wasn't in love with what I was writing in the blog, but with having a blog in the first place. It's so simple, a very small thing, but powerful.

As I have mentioned here, when I started this blog I was just coming off a breakup. Although it was painful, like all breakups, it wasn't so bad all things considered (much like the one I mentioned the other day). What it gave me, mostly, was an insane drive for self-determination -- as in, the desire to have a deliberate hand in what I thought and presented to the world. Hence this blog, and the radio show, and the leopard-print dress I happen to be wearing today, and all the other trappings of independent womanhood I have acquired in the last eighteen months.

When I started In Bed with Amy Wilson I called it that because at the time, I lived in a very small apartment with two other people and we didn't really have a living room so I spent nearly 100% of my time when I was at home in my bed. Just sitting on it. Listening to music. Having thoughts. Hanging out with friends. The name of the blog was supposed to have sort of a, "hey, welcome to my world!" sort of feeling to it.

Now I have my own apartment and a purple squishy couch that I love, and that's where I spend the vast majority of my time when I am at home. If I started my blog today it would be called On the Couch with Amy Wilson. I kind of like that name better, partially because of its allusion to mental health which is becoming something I write about more, but In Bed with Amy Wilson it will stay.

I often wonder why I have this blog, and in dark moments I really do berate myself for having it. As anybody with an obsessive-leaning mind will most likely understand, I have a drumbeat of negative adjectives that strikes up when I least expect it and then becomes so constant as to be almost unheard. "Self-involved" is one of them, I won't mention the others because I try not to encourage them. In any case, I do sometimes wonder what right I have to present what I think to the world and then I remember, oh yes, the same right anybody else does.

*

In Bed with Amy Wilson is nominally about pop music, but I think that means it can be about everything else as well. One of the other things it is about is relationships, although I very rarely mention anything or anyone specific. I don't do that because I want to be vague or dramatic, and even if I did it probably wouldn't work very well. . .for instance I have been writing about break-ups and such recently, so if you were inclined to look beyond the surface you might think "Hey, she's going through a break-up!". Nope. I am not. Just living. And sometimes, in the course of living, things come back to you in less than chronological order.

When I was in high school I went through a HUGE Joan Didion phase, and something Joan said that stuck with me was this: writers are always selling somebody out. I felt then, and feel even more strongly now, that that doesn't necessarily have to be true, at least not in the way that she means it. As I get older I become much more aware of the value of other people's stories, and the arrogance I would display in thinking I have any right to tell them without express permission. This is why I keep things general on my blog, and also why I talk about myself.

Because I don't think Joan is wrong, exactly. I do think writers are selling somebody out. My goal is for the only person I sell out to be me. For the only stories I tell to be mine. And for this, somehow, to contribute to the general pool of stories and experiences that I firmly believe enriches all of our lives. That's the only thing I'm comfortable with -- the only way I can justify writing and speaking in public the way I have done -- it's how I define independence.

*

This blog is about relationships, for everything that means. One of the most special ways it is about relationships is when something I write here feels true to somebody else. (And they tell me about it. Otherwise I can't know. And that's okay too.)

Somebody once said to me about In Bed with Amy Wilson that when she read it, she felt that she was reading something that truly Got what it is like to be a mid-twenty-something woman. That comment meant more to me than almost any other I have received, about anything. At the time I didn't think of this blog as being a particular reflection of mid-twenties-ness, or womanhood, but I've since realized that I don't have to try to make it a reflection of those things. It just is.

That is one of the most important and most difficult lessons I have learned as a writer, and I guess you could say as a person too. The lesson is that the more you try to make something a certain way, the less likely it is to turn out that way. And the way things turn out to be is so often impossible to understand in the moment.

When I read that old entry about Rumours I feel very acutely what I felt when I wrote it -- which was a burning compulsion just to write SOMETHING in this blog, to maintain the momentum needed to actually make this a thing that exists and not just another addition to the graveyard of forgotten projects that is the Internet. Like all relationships, my relationship with my blog was most intense at the beginning and has since (not faded, but) deepened into something slower, and more real, and more indicative of the value of commitment.

And so I feel I understand this song so much better than I did when I wrote about it the first time, when I thought of it as merely snide. I now see it as something much more profound. As Stevie and Lindsey sing, "I don't want to know". . .because I don't HAVE to know. Not right now, at least.


The song: Fleetwood Mac, "I Don't Want To Know"; 1977

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Sometimes I Told You You Was Beautiful: *~*~Memories~*~*

In the summer of 2007 I ran to this song.

I had taken up running and knitting in the wake of what seemed at the time to be the worst possible break-up in the world. In hindsight, it was not the worst possible break-up in the world. Actually, it was a pretty nice break-up all things considered -- I wept copiously, watched a lot of Bridget Jones' Diary, gained the habit for using expensive scented soap that I still have today, got a transformative haircut, and read a bunch of books that I otherwise would probably not have read, such as Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I worked at a science museum that was hosting the Body Worlds exhibit, so I spent many of my days sitting at the top of a long set of stairs gazing over the Willamette River and telling people the rules for entering a giant hall full of dead, mutilated bodies. (Without ever saying the words "dead", "mutilated", or "bodies", as that was against the rules.)

In short it was exquisite melancholy, a feeling I have inhabited many times since that summer. I figure, if you have to be melancholy (and it seems that sometimes I do), why not make it beautiful?

And THAT is one of the many things I love about pop music.

*

The other songs on this post-breakup running mix were more typically post-breakup: "Love to Hate You" and "Victim of Love" by Erasure, "Back to Black" by Amy Winehouse, "Sexx Laws" by Beck, and a few more.

With its swoony strings and medium tempo, this song was a good fit for my (plodding, contemplative) style of running. I am not a natural runner by any stretch of the imagination, but at the end of a long summer I had a steady jog that I was proud of. And this song always came at the end of my run, after I had worked out my various feelings of discomfort and unpleasantness both emotionally and physically.

"Resiliency amazes me" is the phrase that stuck out to me, as it probably will to you when you hear it. It was not something I had ever heard put in that way. It was not a concept I was familiar with, "resiliency", although I was living it. To me what it means is -- why not make it beautiful?


The song: DeVotchKa, "I Cried Like A Silly Boy"; 2006

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com