Month: February 2014

The Lights are Calling Me

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In the two years of restaurant work following senior year, and extending in my life far before that, music has been such an important source of strength for me. It has sustained me and awakened me, and it has piqued my intellectual curiosity and comforted my pain. It has been my guardian angel.

Throughout four years of college, I never my quit my shift as a rotation DJ at the local radio station. This entailed extremely late hours, little recognition, and long walks in the snowy Kansas winter to reach the Shack, a ramshackle building at an obscure corner of campus. I would delve myself deeply into a nearly endless library of music, playing them over the studio speakers at as high volume as I could muster without shattering my eardrums.

 As a rotation DJ, I had access to the entirety of KJHK’s stacks and stacks of music, both CDs and vinyl, not to mention our own music or the nearly-unlimited selection we could stream through the station’s computer. I would watch my view of the sunrise from the tiny window of the DJ booth overlooking downtown Lawrence, down the western side of Mt. Oread. I would toil through late nights between the hours of 2 and 6 am, spending hours weaving songs into and out of each other, one after the other, and keeping my eye out for the flashing white light that meant I was receiving a listener’s call. It was overwhelming at times, and I am sure that my tracks sometimes did not flow as well as I would have liked. But it was a necessary and enriching escape for me from the intensity of college life, and I occasionally would receive a call from listeners who appreciated my music selection. It felt good to accompany the occasional early-morning runner, or late-night lonely soul, with good beats and a voice on the other line.

 I delved into endless catalogues of various and indescribable music, plunging into the depths of the shelf devoted to electronica, and even occasionally flirted with the stacks of metal. Always, I was aided by the words of DJs who had come before me. They used to write reviews of every album the station would receive, and tape them to the front of the CD’s jewel case, accompanied by star ratings and personal opinions. Someone, at some point in the station’s history, had listened to and reviewed every album there, and they could provide hints and clues as to which songs would rock the hardest or jam out the most.

And when things in my life became challenging, as they often did, I found it was the music that inevitably pulled me through.

But after the Shack was replaced by a modern, state-of-the-art studio towards the end of my senior year, and I DJ’ed my final rotation show, I said farewell to my beloved KJHK and returned to the real world. As a dishwasher in a restaurant, music kept me company while working 8-hour shifts, and my fellow restaurant workers had a great collection. You can always expect to hear the best music from the speakers of a bustling restaurant kitchen, where the energy and tempo of the music is the best company you keep while chopping vegetables, picking basil, or manning the industrial dishwasher. It was songs like these, and songs like Lights, by Ellie Goulding, that spoke to me most deeply, and kept me sane during that time.

Lights is shimmering, pulsing, and sensual. It is about the call of city lights, the itch to be alive, and the urge to dance, laugh and cry. Ellie expresses the sensitivity and fear that it takes to move to a new place, and to build for yourself something brand new, with people you have just met, and to seek love and joy, while embracing your flaws. Her lyrics of “turning to stone” speak of a vibrant soul calming her firing nerves, picking up the pieces of her shattered self, and mustering the courage to fight on.

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In my two years at the restaurant, it became clear to me that I couldn’t stay there forever. I knew that this wasn’t the work for me. I knew that this wasn’t my dream. I knew that there was so much more to see and to do in the world. I felt, in the depth of my soul, the passion and call to follow my dream and reach out for what the world has to offer. And it was Ellie Goulding that became the soundtrack of the months leading up to my eventual move to Atlanta. Just as the lights were calling her, in the song, the lights of Atlanta were calling to me.

If it is music is that kept me going through my darkest moments, both before and after college, it is music that will carry me into the future.

Now here I am, working in Midtown, across the street from the historic Fox theater. I am going to see Ellie Goulding perform there in exactly one month. Her light show, her reverberating sound, the texture and depth of her voice, and the cheering crowds await me.

Artists like Ms. Goulding, who inspire and guide us young people, deserve to be celebrated. We owe them our lives. Keep doing what you’re doing. Keep tinkering in the lab at night, keep writing your raps and sonnets, and keep weaving melody and harmony and instrumentation and beats and effects. Do it for us. We love you.

Reflections on “Capote”, after Philip Seymour Hoffman’s passing

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The day that Philip Seymour Hoffman died, I was browsing devices in a Verizon Wireless store. I picked up a random tablet and the first thing that popped into my view was the headline on a news app. Hoffman’s face stared out at me from the glowing screen of the device. “PHILLIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN HAS PASSED,” it read. Something snapped inside me. I nearly dropped the tablet.

He was found in his hotel room, surrounded by little bags of heroin with the images of playing cards printed on the outside of them. I never even knew that he had been struggling with drug addiction, and it destroys me inside that someone so accomplished, by all outward appearances, could be tortured in this way. It is horrible to see such a talented performer pass at the hands of the hovering specter that is drug addiction.

It is always a shock when one of your idols dies. But when they die alone in their hotel room, a needle in their arm, surrounded by little envelopes labeled  with images of the Ace of Spades, it becomes so much worse. And I could barely make myself read more deeply into what happened.

I know he relapsed. And I know that he overdosed. And that is all I want to know.

The man was well-respected by nearly everyone I spoke to, and to serious movie fans he was a household name. He took on the difficult roles;  the understated, supporting roles that others wouldn’t.  Seeing him in The Big Lebowski, of course, made me smile, because that has always been among my favorite films. And his appearance in the new Hunger Games movie was a good break for him into the mainstream (I have no idea how they could hope to replace him.) But his real genius lay in lesser-known, more challenging films, such as Doubt and The Master. Here, I am going to focus in one in particular… the classic for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2005, Capote.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman starred in the movie, "Capote", for which he won Best Actor in 2005.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman starred in the movie “Capote”, for which he won Best Actor in 2005.

Capote was the story of the accomplished novelist Truman Capote, who decides to write a true-to-life biography/true crime novel about a pair of grisly murders in rural Kansas. In the process of writing it, Capote struggled with the line between author and subject, and the difficult ethical questions presented by an artist’s attempt to mix reality with fiction techniques in his writing. Hoffman’s portrayal cast a vivid impression of a man of ambition, a gifted writer, and a flamboyant socialite, who became obsessed and deeply involved in the lives of a pair of troubled murderers, and in particular, with the kindred spirit of Perry Smith.

As much as Hoffman was a hero of mine in the world of film, so was Capote a hero of mine in the world of writing. He could draw you in, shock you, fill you with wonder, and transport you with the depth and poignancy of his writing. But when the techniques of fiction blur with the outcomes experienced by real people as a result of a piece of writing, and suddenly lives are on the line, quality fiction just doesn’t cut it. Trenchant reporting, and world-changing writing, must be grounded in a solid understanding of ethics, intentionality, responsibility, and dare I say, consequences. In deepening his relationship with Perry Smith and providing the doomed man and his partner in crime with hope that he could not ultimately fulfill, Capote overstepped the bounds of a responsible writer.

Hoffman’s portrayal of Capote was flourishing, nuanced, and ultimately brilliant. He showed a man losing himself to the struggle of what good gonzo writing really is and should be: significant and reflective of reality, while at the same time fascinating, mind-bending and addictive. Capote knew all along that In Cold Blood would be a classic in the canon of modern literature. But the book nearly killed him, and while it is acknowledged as a masterpiece of its genre, it would turn out to be his last book published in full.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman embraced the roles that dismiss the simplicity and shallowness of black-and-white ethics. The great performances of his career reflect a reality that is beyond good and evil, right and wrong, happy and sad. He tussled with the fullness of reality, the world where things are not what they seem and stories don’t always end with the heroes living happily ever after. He tussled with complexity. And he lived the life of an artist, giving us the gift of consistently stellar performances throughout his life.

But his true legacy, which will certainly be colored by the ignominious circumstance of his death, will be the face and voice of the strange and challenging minority. He was not like the others. If there was one thing that Phillip Seymour Hoffman wasn’t, it was one-dimensional. And perhaps that is part of what tortured him so, and repeatedly led him to the false comfort of hard drugs. He was an outlier, an idiosyncratic face and voice that would be impossible to pin down, and a consistently brilliant actor.

He will be sorely missed.