Bewitching chanteuse Florence Welch, of Florence and the Machine, easily earns her first Dazzler of the Day crowning, thanks to her incandescent performances and whimsical style. The world needs more of such magic these days. She was also part of the ‘Here Lies Love’ concept album that would go on to become a sensational musical. Recently she’s been talking about being sober for seven years, further proof that some artists are much more than their art.
Ahh, la dolce vita… and at the height of summer no less. It’s all happening… it’s all happening. July is here, and with it the very best parts of summer come to miraculous head. Some months are like that. They just fully explode into what they are, without hinting or teasing, and July is usually true to form.
Making a daily jaunt in the pool to keep cool, as much as to keep calm, is a happy ritual. Like my daily meditation, it literally grounds me, binding me to the physical world, physically holding me in its liquid arms, and forcing an instant inhabitation of the present moment. Ignoring the power and might of water invites a peril I just won’t entertain.
Gliding peaceably through the water, taking languid and lazy strokes beneath the surface, the body is at once lightened of its usual gravitational pull. This may be the closest we can get to flying, and there is magic and majesty in such a state. So we fly, on the wings of water…
A summer bop is the best kind of bop.
Effervescent and easy, light and bright,
This is ‘Summer in July’ – about as simple and succinct as one can get, and just as sonically unchallenging. You can dive deeper into the lyrics if you like, or stay close to the surface and the sunlight. It’s your call.
Carefree and clothing-free, it’s time to let go of the swimsuit and let God’s natural attire slip through the pool water unfettered. Water, air, and light ~ primal and elemental and brilliant ~ breaking summer down into the most basic of basics.
Every day after the first of summer loses a little light. We don’t feel it yet, but it’s happening. Summer can be insidious that way, summer knows how to sneak in and out at night. When I was a teenager, I’d slip out of the house on hot summer nights and walk around the neighborhood, feeling some sort of restlessness and wonder, something that wouldn’t be quelled or cooled by the air conditioner or the pool, or the glasses of iced tea that would sweat and drip before I could ever finish them.
On those walks, with the light of the street lamps shaded by the heavy canopy of maple trees and oaks – shadows beneath shadows – I found safety and security in the warm darkness, sure of myself and my solitude in a way that would comfort me on much colder days in the near and far future.
There is perhaps no one who more fabulously encompasses the Dazzler of the Day crown than Adam Lambert. He’s been celebrated on this blog numerous times before today, because he’s been impressing audiences since he burst onto the world scene during his ‘American Idol’ run. Bold and brilliant and unabashedly himself at a time when the world wants to shun such visionary bravery, Lambert holds his head rightfully high, soaring on his insanely-talented vocal prowess and show-stopping theatrics. No one knows how to entertain and enthrall quite so electrifyingly. Check out his website here for further evidence of his brilliance, and where you might see him perform next.
There is a small sliver of irony in this summer song, given the fact that I no longer drink wine, but others do, and summer is definitely a time for enjoying liquid nourishment, even if mine doesn’t include alcohol. Mocktails work just as well, and are better for keeping hydrated anyway. Drama arrives in a song, and has no need for hard drinks to aid in its pesky, if occasionally exciting, madness.
The pool glows differently when viewed through the lens of darkness and night, not unlike the different glow one gets from summer wine. While that view has shifted for me, the thrill of a summer night remains the same. Beauty and heat and moths drawn by the light, and the possibility of a midnight dip to quell the sweat.
It was during the summer of 2000 when ‘How We Used to Live’ by Saint Etienne came pouring out of the speakers of my stereo in the Boston condo, and I was packing for a week in Provincetown. To this day, the song signifies summer days, happiness, friendship, and now a nostalgic look back at how things used to be. For the first day of summer, I usually like to look forward and see what new song might inspire the season – this year we’ve been through so much already that revisiting a sound of comfort seems best.
‘How We Used to Live’ is a nine-minute rollercoaster of summer calm and excitement, from a magnificently languid beginning to a little lite dance party that begins to build and kick in at about the halfway mark. Summer ebbs and flows in similar fashion, never entirely one thing or another, constantly changing and winking and evolving. This year it feels especially variable, with hints and shadows of projects possibly to come, and the upcoming 20th anniversary of this website, for which preparations must be made.
Summer, oh summer, how we have waited for you, how much hope and faith we have put in you, and how unfair it all is, for who could ever deliver all that we have wanted and asked? Summer is cruel too, and often unintentionally brutal, but we still love it so. And when have we ever needed an escape more than now? Summer allows for that, and we shall make it happen. Whether it’s a lunch by the pool, with some sweet and fizzy mocktail, or a night in the attic loft, lulled to sleep by the hum of the air conditioner and the pitter-patter of rain upon the roof, summer carries its secret delights.
Such secrets go back over two decades, when this song formed the soundtrack to that friend-filled trip to Provincetown. Kristen and I took the ferry from Boston to Provincetown, beginning a week’s vacation in that magical place at the end of the world. While I don’t revisit the past as a rule, I often go back to this trip. We were in our early twenties, the world unfurled before us filled with all the hope and possibility that youth and luck and privilege affords, and we didn’t even know or exert our power. Summer left us happily in flux, not quite entering our career years, though the more ambitious among us had their eyes on a plan (that most certainly did not include me, who was back in Boston after an ill-fated move to Chicago, and just finding my footing again). This little excursion was a break I needed, to simply have fun, maybe enjoy a summer fling, and return to the city satiated and ready to get serious about something. It was a summer to let go, and we did.
Those carefree days come back to me in pieces now – snippets of a sun-drenched brunch, sipping a cocktail before the choreographed precision of afternoon tea, and lazily laughing with friends on the porch of an inn as the clocks struck midnight and we debated rallying for pizza or heading back to crash. We had no way of knowing that the memories we were making then would prove, for me at least, to be some of the happiest and most carefree I would ever make. Most people don’t realize that sort of thing in their twenties. I felt hints of it, little tugs at the heart that something special was afoot, but back then my heart attributed it to the possibility of romance and love – it never dawned on me that those friendships, those in-between moments, were the real stuff of life.
And so another summer begins, as summers from the past flash across the mind. Summer in a song, summer in a glass, summer in the splash of water falling from a tip of grass as the morning dew jumps away for the day…
After a surprisingly intense therapy session, one needs a moment to process and simply breathe in the moment. There is always relief after talking about things, even if there is no simple solution. Sometimes it is enough to let it all out, and to be ok with not everything being neatly resolved, not every problem of the past put to bed for good. Most importantly, to be ok with putting certain problems to bed just for the night, just to make it through another day.
Summer starts off in such happy fashion, it’s good to appreciate these moments, even when they are tinged with slivers of sorrow, memories of melancholy. Such days need a proper soundtrack, and summer songs run the gamut from the happiest, boppiest bops to the slowest, saddest dirges. Some manage to create a sonic vibe and atmosphere that mirrors the suspended haze and heat of the season, functioning as both balm and barometer, a calming way to measure the minutes. This is one of those songs.
Summer begs forgiveness. Summer begs silence. Summer begs… and summer begs. Like its sting, its want can be paralyzing, stunning the world into focus or fracture.When that happens, you just have to chill, and slip into a song that embodies the days that can be languid and lazy and lovely.
Floating in the water, and surrounded by liquid that dispels the typical pull and drag of gravity, the body is more at ease. The mind is better-equipped to focus when the body is at ease. Sometimes summer grants a clarity that no other season allows; creating the space for contemplation can diminish a place for blame.
There is a conundrum to every season. For summer, it is often finding reconciliation of such tranquil beauty with the inevitable thunderstorms that pop up along the way. Memories can be like storms, lying in wait until the conditions are right for rain and release and, if we are lucky, relief.
Once upon a time I was anal and adamant about definitive dates when it came to things like the start of summer. Over the past few years, I’ve softened and become much more flexible, and the ease of summer has taught me that. This song kicks off our unofficial summer season here at ALANILAGAN.com, and I absolutely love its easy-going vibe.
Along with the easing of strict delineation comes an easing of the posting schedule, as well as the content of the posts themselves. I just don’t want to stay behind a computer screen when the outside calls. These are the better days.
The brilliant and wondrous Janelle Monáe planted the seed of Les Baxter in my ear as the soundtrack for the coming summer, and whatever Janelle says is what we are bound to do. Being that Andy just opened the pool and I had my first dip just a couple of days ago, this intro seems fitting for the summer to come, and these first pool days of the season.
There’s a dramatic and cinematic moodiness to this music that sets the scene for the mad world in which we live – and that madness only seems to intensify with the heat and sun and storms weather that can come with the approach of summer.
For the moment, I’m content to watch from a distance, to lean into the drama only when watching a movie or reading a book – all fiction and fun and frivolous mental meanderings. Life is serious enough these days – I don’t indulge in the self-conjured drama and fabricated travails when there are so many real things over which to worry and fret. And so I take a warm and sunny day as the gift it is, embracing its beauty, inhaling its sweet perfume, and leaving this online world behind. Back in a bit…
A person with such insouciant charm and magnetism deserves to have their names in all caps, and today we honor JORDY as Dazzler of the Day thanks to his creative talent and transfixing personality. His website offers more enchantment for those seeking to solve his mysteries, and he was recently announced as one of the headliners for this year’s Capital Pride Festival in Albany. His music, filled with catchy hooks and pop melodies, focuses on love and loneliness, giving listeners just a little bit more to chew on than your average pop song.
It was Easter week 1993, and somehow Suzie and I found ourselves on a train from New York to Florida for a questionable visit to Disneyworld. That two teenagers at the height of their cynicism and moodiness should be taking an overnight train ride to Florida, and the purported happiest place on earth, is the height of improbability, if not downright foolishness, but there we were.
Suzie is the ideal traveling companion for me, as she and I know each other very well. Most importantly, we know when to leave the other alone, which is really the key to any successful relationship or friendship. Thankfully there would be just one or two moments when we needed that alone time – the rest of the time we were helping each other though such a trip at that particular point in our teenage lives. Nowhere was that more evident than on the long-ass train ride, which forms the memory of this post. The aural backdrop playing on my headphones was Annie Lennox’s brilliant ‘Diva’ album (which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, so that’s how far back we are going here). The track ‘Primitive’ soothed the gentle rumble of the train as the middle of the night arrived and our car flickered with only an occasional night-light. Outside, the amber lights of the tracks whizzed by overhead. It was a moment in time stilled by this song.
Two days and thirty two years ago, one of the most influential songs in my life was released: ‘Vogue’ by Madonna. The deep dive of that Madonna timeline goes into how it played out in the decades of my life, so I won’t bore you with such details. Instead, let’s go back to basics and recall the first few times I heard it playing on the radio.
Spring had just begun, and as ‘Hold On’ began a similar chart trajectory, ‘Vogue’ spoke more intently to me. Back then a new song crept slowly into the public realm. There was no immediate downloading of a song, no leaks of snippets or early versions, no Tik Tok or Instagram story proving previews for weeks beforehand – and the patience and surprise that were culled from such slow-moving musical motion resulted in a more resonant and meaningful experience. ‘Vogue’ became my dance bible. More than that, ‘Vogue’ became the portal into a future that I sensed but couldn’t yet hold in my hands, no matter how many times I could strike a pose.
Thirty two years later, I still feel the thrill of its power.
While Friday nights are my quiet favorites, the fully-fleshed-out sprawl of an entire Saturday carries a fortitude of rejuvenation that no single night can conquer. Kira and I awoke to a sunny start, but we stayed in bed for a bit as Cafe Madeleine was closed until March. Looking back, that moment of morning passed quickly, too quickly, and so a melancholy song, sent to me by the universe later on in the day, will back our remaining little adventures. It’s entitled ‘Evergreen’ and is by Alexander Walk.
A wind-ravaged landscape required an early bowl of pho to warm our bellies, so we made our way to Chinatown, and a table for two at Pho Pasteur. Sipping soup with Kira is one of winter’s best past-times, a tradition which has seen us through the darkest seasons. It felt like we were putting another winter to slumber soon. I wanted to slow the day and still the moment, but I couldn’t. Not by putting it into words, not by freezing it in a photograph. Not even by making a song into a memory.
The relentless passing of time, and the way it only builds and builds in speed and forgetfulness… these were the rough facts of our age and our present predicament. Where once we carried purses of pretty bracelets, we now place daily allotments of pills and prescriptions. For hypertension, for vitamin-deficiencies, for immunity – as much for our mental ease as for our physical comfort. What a strange new world, this getting older…
Before we headed back to the condo for our blessed afternoon siesta, I saw this little sticker with a QR Code, and a dancing trio of bears, and it brought me to this song. The universe whispers its music to you if you slow down and wait for its quiet clues.
This ‘Evergreen’ is a fitting little song that closes out a winter weekend in Boston with bear and flair and a very good friend whom I now miss. Just a few more weeks until the clock ticks into spring, when we shall return to this special city for a whole new season of adventures and fun.
{Note: The Madonna Timeline is an ongoing feature, where I put the iPod on shuffle and write a little anecdote on whatever was going on in my life when that Madonna song was released and/or came to prominence in my mind.}
Summer in upstate New York is a sticky and uncomfortable affair much of the time. Nights, especially, drone on longer than necessary when the heat and humidity combine to make for difficult sleeping and restless nights. The summer of 1990 – which was the summer of Madonna’s Blond Ambition reign – found me hurtling from Amsterdam, New York to Washington, DC and Russia – then back again. It was, indeed, ‘Something to Remember’, and I do… I still very much do.
When last we left the ‘I’m Breathless’ entries of the Madonna Timeline, the question was ‘What Can You Lose?’ With ‘Something to Remember’, we return to that magical summer – a summer that could quite feasibly be one of my favorite summers of all time, as they don’t seem to be getting any better. There’s something profoundly sad in that, and yet inevitable, so I embrace the one from 1990 all the more warmly.
That was the summer we went to the Soviet Union – my first plane ride anywhere – initiation by Aeroflot fire. That was the summer we returned to the corn already high again. That was the summer we almost grew up. One day I’ll try to more fully capture the trip to the then-Soviet-Union that we made then – for now there are only these hints of it.
At the not-so-ripe age of fourteen, I was just starting to awaken to the madness of adolescence and all the confusing thrills that were just around the corner. There were stirrings of attraction, but at that point I couldn’t tell friendship from romance, and honestly I was always looking for someone – anyone – to stave off the loneliness.
Madonna was there with her blonde-tressed ambition in full-effect, but on the ‘I’m Breathless’ album there was this jazzy slow-burn song of lost love, and somehow I already felt I understand her pain in my own longing. Visions of a dimly-lit bar, smoke adrift in the air back when it could be, the way it was everywhere in Russia, crossed my mind when I listened to this, rushing toward adulthood as much as it struck a little bit of terror in me.
The song would haunt me when we returned home, when we went back to being stuck in a small town, back to when we were alone again. I would wake to the bright sun of summer and feel pangs of emptiness, having been on an exciting adventure and tasting what life could be, then suddenly plunged back into the summer before another year of high school, and another year of being trapped. And hunted.
At night – those awful, restless, unending summer nights that somehow seemed darker than any night in winter – I would play this song, and dream of a glamorous existence which consisted mostly of whispered images, a sparkling tableaux parading fantastically across my mind, based in bits of movies, passages of novels, stories of decadence. It was my fledgling crafting of the life I would one day eventually lead, only when the time came I would not realize it. Only looking back can I see and almost feel its frisson. And mostly I’m glad for that – glad that I had that, and glad that I’m no longer in it.
As the summer of 1990 came to its inevitable close, we returned to school. Things felt different again, the way they would for the next few years. Adolescence would shift the world in such irrevocable ways. We hung on as best as we could, but there were stumbles and falls. Madonna finished her Dick Tracy chapter, bid adieu to Breathless Mahoney, and by the end of the year she was onto ‘Justify My Love‘. It was a darkly beautiful road of more adult concerns, a daring and edgy period that wouldn’t let up until the turn of ‘Bedtime Stories’.
‘Something to Remember’ was also the name of Madonna’s first and thus far only collection of ballads, released in the fall of 1995 and primed to set the stage for her first glorious comeback in ‘Evita’. Much happened in the ensuing years since its release on ‘I’m Breathless’, and by the fall of 1995, summer – in all its forms and incantations – felt very far away.
Post-Valentine’s blues got you down?
Pre-Valentine’s blues got you down?
General Valentine’s blues got you down?
Come ride with this giddy bit of musical villainy by Billie Eilish. If it’s good enough to be used in a figure skating routine, it’s good enough to use here. And it is by all accounts and measures good enough.
Boy versus girl in the World Series of love, and boy versus boy in the Super Bowl of Glory.
We were all these things, we were all these people, we were all the devil in disguise.
And at the end of every day, we washed all the dirty off.
Or did we?
Some songs are simply diabolical, bringing out the best of the beast inside of us. They make us lose our sense of… sense. When coupled with the madness of men, what chance did any vestige of innocence ever stand? A slinky baseline, more slinky than any dress you’ve worn, and tighter than any anatomically-contoured crotch-pouch that Andrew Christian could ever come up with… defying you not to move.
Ghosts appear in the dim night shower.
Ghosts of the men I used to be.
Ghosts that creep up behind me
…to thrill, to chill, to kill…
It’s what we used to do. Slaying before it was ever a thing on a Friday night drag show on VH-Fucking-1. Ghosting in a way more real and visceral than your sad cel habits could even approach. You don’t even know what it’s like to want, your little whines will only approximate and echo our feverish desperation. It was literally life or death then.
A blue-lit shower backed by Billie Eilish, music both mysterious and monstrous, perfect for bending over and getting fucked by memories of nights so dark no starlight could reach them. Not then, not now, not ever. So impenetrably black you cannot see, and what you think your eyes detect is but a tease, a bubble on the tongue.
And haunting.
Don’t think we cannot thrill anymore, don’t even.
I will take your pop anthems and turn them into trifling playthings, like this post.
Captured. Entranced. Held all the way down, all the way to the end.
The End.
