Category Archives: Music

Cuchi, cuchi and ooh la la and everything sexy Frenchie…

This is Poussez and I’m having a 70’s summer disco moment!

It is not my habit to employ many exclamation points because they are too often misconstrued, departing from what I originally intended to convey – and since that changes from point to point, with varying degrees of exclamation, it’s as much my fault as the reader’s. You are exonerated, assuming you’re still with me and reading these words. That will hopefully get harder if/when you press play on the song below. Go on, click it – you know you want to… spin us back to the disco and the dance-floor.

We need some sort of release right about now. It’s Friday – we have arrived at the front door of the weekend – and ooh, la, la let’s just get down and dirty from the very damn beginning. Since I was but a baby as the 70’s were ending their storied tacky fabulousness, I hold no memories of dancing in some ‘Saturday Night Fever’ disco ball hall, but I did my fair share of imagining, and these days that’s the safest way to participate.  

By the way, ‘Poussez’ loosely translates as ‘push’, and if you don’t know what the bussy is, well, you can look it up on your own computer. I won’t sully these pages with such gorgeous atrocities. Besides, my bussy is already all over these parts. See my Insta. See my Threads. Wait, don’t… 

Are you old enough to remember when Calvin Klein got into all that heat and controversy for those 70’s-inspired porn/heroin chic ads featuring super-young almost-models? Troye Sivan‘s latest video for ‘Rush’ is like one of those brilliant ads brought to magnificent life – a slice of glorious abandon and divine debauchery to match the spirit of summer. Just when you think the gays had already found their summer anthem (‘Padam, Padam’ by you-know-who) Sivan comes out with this scorcher which has an even hotter video and sound, absolutely resounding with summer vibes and sweaty nights. 

‘Rush’ unabashedly takes its name and inspiration from the well-known brand of poppers (you know – the one with the lightning bolt on it). For the bad-gay record, I’ve never tried poppers. In some ways, I’m as square as they come. For those who have, and for anyone who wants to approximate that fabled euphoria, this song and video are a way to access the high without the risk. You do you. 

{See more of Troye Sivan in this Dazzling post.}

Burning the candle at both ends, rather than running the risk of using the midnight oil, I sit in the attic and write these words, knowing you won’t read them until the next morning, and slightly hesitant because of that. Night-writing usually results in something moodier than what we typically want during the day, and I try to keep an ear open to what this will sound like when the light is in the sky again. 

My schedule has been edging toward less and less sleep, which tends to run me into the ground, and I’ve found myself dozing off around 6 PM, whether I’m in a chair, or couch, or bed. The damn Wordle streak I’m on (122 and counting!) has me slightly obsessed and half-hoping it ends soon so I can let go of the stress and pressure, and start missing days again. Oh the silly things we put ourselves through, the silly things we humans do. All to pass a day, or a night. Why can’t we simply sit and be?

A song then, for such a sentiment.

A song for putting me to bed for the night, and for greeting you first thing in the day. 

Maybe it’s a little sad for one or the other, but even summer has its tinges of sadness, and sometimes they are worse than the winter because the world now feels at odds with the heart. 

A meditation followed by a night swim – this is how I get my kicks, and it’s more glorious than any of those wild nights of my 20’s. Fine for their time and place, and completely repellant and disagreeable to me in thought and deed now. Our capacity to grow and change and keep doing it year after year is one of my favorite parts of being human. It almost makes up for all of our failings and falterings. 

I wish a meditation and a night swim solved the pain and the problems that plague any average adult living in this world. I wish I knew better how to handle the sorrows that creep across our paths on any given day. I wish there was more to do than offer a hug or a word of encouragement. I wish…

It isn’t that I don’t want to be forgotten. 

That’s the big fear, isn’t it? Being forgotten. Being here for as long as you have been here and not being remembered for any of it. As if being here, then, were entirely meaningless. As if being is meaningless.

The artists who acknowledge and own up to their egos will admit to this being part of their art. 

It isn’t that I don’t want to be forgotten. 

Having loved, and having been loved, is, I think, the purpose of any purity in our lives. We can pretend there are loftier aims and goals, maybe some greater meaning and altruistic impetus to get us into heaven, but I really think it’s smaller and more finite than that. Such a little thing – love – a four-letter word to rival all the other four-letter words. 

Artists want to think the work is what will remain, the work is what will endure, and then only if it’s good and true and authentic. 

I am not a good artist.

All I will ever have to leave is a little bit of love – but if I leave a little each day then I will be happy with my life, and none of it will have been wasted or wanting. 

Sometimes I get too wrapped up in the day to remember this. 

Sometimes I fall into the trappings of just getting through the damn drama of the day.

Sometimes I simply refuse. Defiant to the noble cause, impossible to the very end, and insisting upon hurting my own heart and taking the rest of the world down with me. 

And I, sometimes, Aspire Instead. 

When we were young I thought I needed the bombast.

Maybe I did.

Maybe I needed the driving guitars, the wall of sound, the driving noise, and the rush and wail of the original version of this song. Back then it carried the power to pull me away from the ledge, and perhaps that’s precisely the drastic and bombastic shove which saved me, something to jolt and shock and force myself into any other state than the one in which I simply wanted to cease existing. That sort of mindset requires a bigger bang than the orchestral song you are about to hear here. Necessary for its time and purpose in life, and long fallen by the wayside in favor of something more sustainable and reasonable. 

These days, I am finding more meaning and resonance in a quieter mode of living. When you’ve had a proper thrashing when you’re young, and lived a few crazy years of fun and wildness, you can have your mid-life crisis, embrace it, and hopefully come out on the other side a bit better for all of it. 

“Such men believe in luck, they watch for signs, and they conduct private rituals that structure their despair and mark their waiting. They are relatively easy to recognize but hard to know, especially during the years when a man is most dangerous to himself, which begins at about age thirty-five, when he starts to tally his losses as well as his wins, and ends at about fifty, when, if he has not destroyed himself, he has learned that the force of time is better caught softly, and in small pieces. Between those points, however, he’d better watch out, better guard against the dangerous journey that beckons to him –the siege, the quest, the grandiosity, the dream.” ~ Colin Harrison

Every time I feel that I might be moving beyond this pocket of danger, and that others in my orbit are safe too, something happens that reminds me we are not quite fifty, not quite to the shore yet. Even the most seemingly-innocuous storm could be the one to take us out – to sea, to loss, to regret, to worse… And I wonder if there will ever be a safe day, a day or time when we can simply relax, let down our guards, and be. I wonder and I hope… and I listen to this song called ‘Tomorrow‘. 

Today in the garden the very last Japanese iris bloomed – through the afternoon storm, and unexpectedly, as I had thought their blooms were already done. This one must have hidden itself in the fading remnants of its predecessors, tricking me into thinking the display was over when really there was one day more of beauty. That’s the magic of a tomorrow – you never know what might show up and bloom for you. 

The rain came down the rain came down
The rain came down on me
The wind blew strong and summer’s song
Fades to memory

I knew you when i loved you then
In summer’s yawn now helpless
You laid me bare you marked me there
The promises we made…

The first time I ever watched the George Cukor classic ‘The Women’ was on a lazy summer day, when it was too hot to stay outside, so I flipped through the channels of the television and this black and white movie came on TCM. Knowing it had inspired various fashion designers over the years, I settled in for the afternoon and watched the travails of Mary Haines and her female cohorts (with one of my favorites, Rosalind Russell, battling Joan Crawford for a meal of scenery). The bottle of perfume that forms a pivotal plot point for discovery was named ‘Summer Rain’, a name that has gone largely forgotten in favor of the more pointedly named ‘Jungle Red’ nail polish. 

Tonight we are being deluged by rain, and so I was put in mind of the movie, and this song, which has nothing to do with the movie, but is from a summer-themed album ‘Reveal’ by R.E.M. That collection contained the more-overtly-related ‘Summer Turns to High‘ and the glorious ‘Imitation of Life‘. 

I used to think as birds take wing
They sing through life so why can’t we?
We cling to this and claim the best
If this is what you’re offering
I’ll take the rain i’ll take the rain

The nighttime creases summer schemes
And stretches out to stay
The sun shines down you came around
You loved the easy days but now the sun
The winter’s come i wanted just to say
That if I hold i’d hoped you’d fold
Open up inside, inside of me

Most of the favored songs for summer are upbeat and effervescent and hopeful. That’s what summer is supposed to be – sunny and light and airy. That leaves out the darker underside, and somehow the more beautiful and somber shades of summer. It’s here in this song, here on this rainy evening, in which I take my own version of ‘Summer Rain’ down from the shelf, ‘Un Jardin Apres la Mousson’ by Hermes – which translates to a garden after the Monsoon – and spray a little on before bed. 

Far from waking from thunder, I’ve always slept better during the rain, in or out of Hermes. 

Summer is the best season for making musical memories – and when you align a certain period of time with a specific summer song, the memory is usually as salient as anything injured by lilac or peony. Fragrance gets all the glory when it comes to invoking memories, but a certain piece of music can be just as resonant. For this post, I’m recreating a playlist of the past, from some of my favorite summer songs. Not all of these came out in the sunny season, but that’s when I find myself playing them the most, so they have become my own set of summer songs. There is also no artistically-intentional sequence, for the most part, so if you’re looking for a deeper narrative you’ve got the wrong season. It’s summer; the living, and the listening, is supposed to be easy. I’ll only embed the first tune, and leave the rest for you to find and peruse on your own. I’m told Spotify is a great way to discover new music, so do what the cool kids do and go forth along that avenue (then teach me how to use it so I can follow). 

My classic summer playlist begins with one of the very few upbeat and happy Enya songs ever written, and it was part of a Crystal Light commercial that aired during my childhood. A very strong memory of sipping their iced tea while sucking on hard raspberry candies (the ones that came in a round little tin with pretty pictures of pink fruit on top) all while watching the NBC daytime line-up is what this song conjures for me – a stagnant but cool moment that would inform a lifetime of drama thanks to the inspirational mayhem found on ‘Days of Our Lives’, ‘Another World’ and ‘Santa Barbara’. 

Alan’s Classic Summer Playlist 

1. Orinoco Flow – Enya
2. Cherish – Madonna
3. Love Will Never Do – Janet Jackson
4. Rush, Rush – Paula Abdul
5. Miss Chatelaine – k.d. lang
6. Sanssouci – Rufus Wainwright
7. It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over – Lenny Kravitz
8. How We Used to Live – Saint Etienne
9. Stars Are Blind – Paris Hilton
10. I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) – Whitney Houston
11. Alone – Heart
12. Doesn’t Really Matter – Janet Jackson
13. Turn Up the Radio – Madonna
14. Human Nature – Michael Jackson
15. Holding Back the Years – Simply Red
16. Don’t Dream It’s Over – Crowded House
17. Your Wildest Dreams – The Moody Blues
18. Liquid Love – Madonna
19. Don’t Say Your Love Is Killing Me – Erasure
20. No One Is To Blame – Howard Jones
21. This Used To Be My Playground – Madonna
22. Playground Love – Air
23. Wicked Game – Chris Isaak
24. Summer Turns to High – R.E.M.
25. Delta Dawn – Helen Reddy
26. Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered – Ella Fitzgerald version
27. The Glory of Love – Peter Cetera
28. Ray of Light – Madonna
29. Something New – Axwell & Ingrosso
30. It Must Have Been Love – Roxette
31. Where the Boys Are – Connie Francis
32. Poses – Rufus Wainwright

Some of these songs go way back, and are only summer-like thanks to my own singular machinations of when I played them the most. You probably have your own summer songs – the ones that mean something only to you, and have come to embody the summers of your youth. That’s when music seems to matter most.

And so I play the music of my own summer youth, rekindling old memories and burning a few new ones. I’ve purposely left out more recent songs in service of future blog posts, and perhaps another summer playlist before the season is out. Maybe by then I’ll figure out this Spotify thing and enter the current decade…

Taking the pressure off is a summer habit we learn from our very first summers free from school. Somehow, even with jobs that run year-round, some of us manage to maintain that idea of releasing the pressure in the summer months – the living being easy and everything. Even if it doesn’t involve vacations or beach-trips or even time off, there is a mood and atmosphere to summer that slows everything down. This season, I’m jumping on board and taking things a little easier here too – and that begins with a bohemian theme that is really just an excuse to be lazy and messy and unfocused – the best possible attitude to hold for summer. 

Doffing the swim trunks and skinny dipping is a bohemian rite of passage, and a fitting entry into the summer season. When you’ve been bound by pants and belts and shirts and ties since last summer, there is a fundamental freedom in gliding through the water completely unfettered. Summer unfurls in liberating fashion, recalling the heady glory of that last day of school. I remember walking home from a last day of fifth or sixth grade and throwing my pencils up in the air like some graduation commercial. 

Summer in these parts has always been coupled with music – and every first day of the season comes with a musical accompaniment. Here are a few of those songs and related posts:

Last summer it was ‘How We Used to Live‘ – a song that went back decades to a summer in Boston. Later that night, it was all about the ‘Summer Wine‘.

A virtual visit to ‘San Remo’ was the musical theme for the summer of 2021, along with an early salvo of  ‘Where the Boys Are‘. (The latter also closed out the summer in a slower format.)

In case anyone has forgotten the summer of 2020 (and my how we have all tried) it’s here in a song ~ ‘Vincent: Starry, Starry Night‘ – but it was the ‘Second Night Of Summer‘ that touched me more. 

June 2019 feels like a lifetime ago, and in many ways it was one of the last moments of innocence before we all understood what a deadly worldwide pandemic was really like – even if we didn’t want to know. The music was lighter, as were the blog posts, and I’m still looking for the way back there. 

‘Don’t Dream It’s Over‘ was the languid shuffler that kicked off the summer of 2018. When this music plays, summer memories are conjured – the certain cadence of musical notes as much a trigger of memory as scent and fragrance. Water hyacinths named by a poet, and the unnamed pain that summer sometimes wrought. 

Music and summer are a combustible pairing. Each feeds into the other, and it’s never ‘Too Much’ despite what the Spice Girls might say. The best way to save a summer day is to put it into a song. 

As for this summer and its bohemian spirit, I’m going to do my best to keep things relaxed and easy, taking the moments as they come, inhabiting each day whether it’s sunny or rainy or something infuriatingly in-between. Summer should be the least-serious season, and I’m just starting to celebrate that. Swimsuits off! 

Norma Desmond may not be the ideal image of a human being aging gracefully, considering she ended up murdering a bloke when confronted with her own age and reality, but the woman who portrayed her so magnificently, Gloria Swanson, had quite a different story. Swanson turned her life after ‘Sunset Boulevard’ into one glorious adventure after another, and while she never matched the once-in-a-lifetime frisson of her portrayal of Ms. Desmond, she went on to live quite a happily-ever-after, and so we take a page out of her 1972 book to revisit these wonderful photographs by Allan Warren (a fuller set of which may be found on Trey Speegle’s exquisite website here). They form the inspirational kick-off for my summer wardrobe, and since caftans forgive the most devilish of middle-age paunches I’m running with it. Aside from the free-flowing form, however, I’m transfixed by the colors – both of her outfit and the surrounding green of her Fifth Avenue apartment. 

The idea of summer in New York City has fascinated me, and as much as I attempted to avoid it, there would invariably come a moment when I had to be in the city for something in the middle of summer, and I always wondered how the locals did it for the entire season. When the heat got into absolutely every stationary thing – sidewalk, street, cement, building, subway station, stairwell, and entryway – I wondered how anyone kept their cool. For someone like Ms. Swanson, it appears she stayed chill by keeping her wardrobe vibrant and alive. That brings us to a song from the 1970 musical ‘Applause’ which was a loose musical adaptation of ‘All About Eve’. Flashes of brilliance from the black-and-white past lend a summer sparkle to this last post of spring. 

Like Lauren Bacall, who starred in ‘Applause’, Swanson was a show-business survivor. These photos were reportedly taken in her apartment at 4 AM after she finished a performance in one of her shows. I’ve seen an interview where she recalls getting her second wind at 11 PM. As someone who’s typically in bed at that time after sleeping through his first wind, I’m struck by the drive it takes to make one a star, and how that drive never really goes away for some people. 

I’m also struck by the idea of a New York City apartment in the 1970’s – this one looks like a quieter cousin of the one held by Diana Vreeland, so boldly soaked in red, red, RED. It conjures the notion of creating little floating hubs of beauty in the midst of a city besieged by heat and humidity and the general stickiness of summer. 

Such colorful fabulousness is a much-appreciated jolt in a season that hasn’t given us many hints of warmth in the last few weeks. Perhaps this post will change that as we turn the page to summer proper.