Love Is a Mix Tape

Back in 2009, I came across a website edited by Jason Bittner called CassetteFromMyEx.com.  It seems to be gone now, but on the site, people shared their stories of lost (or everlasting) love that centered around a mix tape they made for the object of their love.

Bittner took the website idea and used it to put together a book, Cassette from My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves which is a collection of stories, essays, art, and other contributions by various artists, musicians, and writers.  It’s the story of the role of the mixtape that was especially big in the late 1970s and 80s when cassette tape reigned as the way to share music.

I don’t know if anyone still makes mixtapes or mixCDs. I guess shared playlists might be the latest version, but that doesn’t seem like the same thing to me. I made lots of mixtapes and a bunch of CD mixes. I made ones for my wife to listen to in her commuting. I made ones for friends, especially to accompany them on a long drives across country or to their summer place. Before I was married, I made them for girlfriends. I carefully selected songs and sequences to convey messages. Sometimes I even added my own voice so that they sounded more like a radio program. I spent a lot of time on them. I even made artwork for the cases.

The compact audio cassette came to us in 1963 and into the 1970s after the car 8-track tape died. These inexpensive and portable tapes were part of the “downloadable” music culture long before the Internet, Napster, iTunes, and Spotify. In my no-money-for-records high school days, I would record songs off the radio on my cassette deck with the built-in radio.

Mix tapes let the DJ in you loose to create thematic mixes. Mixtapes probably fit into some categories, like the Romantic Tape, the Break-up Tape, the Road Trip Tape, even the Indoctrination Tape you made to turn someone on to a band, or to you via “your music.”

One extended story of mixtape romance is by rock critic Rob Sheffield. He wrote a memoir using 22 “mix tapes” to describe his life with his wife, Renee, from their meeting in 1989 to her untimely death in 1997. Each of the chapters in Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time begins with song titles from their mixes.

I made (and still have) a lot of mix CDs made for my own listening pleasure, so that in the car I am listening to my own radio station. I made driving ones – hard rock for highways, folk-rock for byways – late-night radio sets, an hour of quieter music.

I made a series for friends of summer songs. They included the obvious ones – Beach Boys’ tracks like “All Summer Long,” and “In the Summertime,” and “Summer Breeze” as well as songs we associated with summer because they were summer hits or we just associated with summer (“Time of the Season,” “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” “Take It Easy”).  Then I did the sequencing after gathering them from our collected CDs and with a few iTunes downloads. I listened to all of them trying to pick out references to a month or part of summer and created June, July, and August sets.  “See You In September,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “School’s Out” are part of the June set.  For July, “Up on the Roof,” “Summer in the City,” “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” Kodachrome,” Hot Fun in the Summertime.”  The August CD included “Summer, Highland Falls,” Boys of Summer,” “Groovin'” “Summertime Blues,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” Summer Wind.”

My friend Pat was a big fan of the summer set, so she (a teacher) also got back-to-school and end-of-school mixes. And I had done winter, spring, and winter into spring CDs.

I still have most of them in a plastic crate. I look back at those first mixtapes (pre-marriage) that were actual tapes I made for car rides to the beach or vacations.  Have you seen the movie As Good As It Gets? Jack Nicholson’s character makes careful mixes for a car trip in the hope of seducing the character played by Helen Hunt. If not to seduce, then at least made to reveal who he really is via the songs – something he can’t seem to do in person. Been there; mixed that.

I love making lists anyway, so making song lists is something I like doing – like the people in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity and the great film version (and even the soundtrack CD).

Did you ever make or receive mixtapes in any form?
Post a comment. I’d love to hear your story.

The Paradelle

A paradelle is a modern poetic form that was invented by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins as a parody.

Billy Collins claimed in his book, Picnic, Lighting, that the paradelle was invented in eleventh-century France.  His own paradelle, “Paradelle for Susan”, was intentionally terrible, completing the final stanza with the line “Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it was with to to”.

When Collins first published the paradelle, it was with this elaborate footnote:

“The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d’oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.”

The form took on a life of its own. Not all reviewers of Collins’ book recognized that the paradelle was a parody of formal poetry and of those poets who adhere to formalism at the expense of sense. I think of paradelle’s etymology as paradise or parody + villanelle. I used it in the title of this site because it suggested to me an imaginary weekend paradise of my own invention where I could share things that interest me.

Some readers criticized “Paradelle for Susan” as an amateurish attempt at a difficult form without understanding that this was exactly the point. Some poets also missed the parody and took the form seriously, writing their own paradelles. Others, knowing of the hoax, nevertheless decided to see what they could do with the strict form.

Here’s my own serious attempt at the form. A paradelle that is a kind of elegy for someone I lost.

TWO YEARS

The heart softens with winter,
the heart softens with winter.
Time strengthens your thin body,
time strengthens your thin body.
Your thin body strengthens.
Winter time softens the heart.

Oak and sage edges the river,
oak and sage edges the river.
Rock breaks the water, its rings survive,
rock breaks the water, its rings survive.
Sage, oak and rock survive the breaks.
The river water rings its edges.

From a year without you beside me with the pain,
from a year without you beside me with the pain.
These selected moments surface,
these selected moments surface.
You beside me without the pain,
surface from a year with these selected moments.

The river rock softens its edges with time.
Oak at the heart strengthens as the rings thin.
Sage survives the winter pain.
Your body breaks the water surface beside me.
These moments selected from a year with
and without you.

Kenneth Ronkowitz

This poem and other paradelles were collected and published in 2005 in the anthology, The Paradelle, from Red Hen Press.

I Want A Do-Over

When I was a kid, we had “do-overs” as part of most games we played. The football hit a wire from the telephone poll – do-over.   The bike jump ramp falls over before you hit it – do-over.

On a Windows computer, you gotta love Ctrl-Z – undo.  Wouldn’t we love an UNDO button for life? The do-over is a part of many time travel stories. Go back and change things, fix mistakes, and change your fate.

I came across the book, Do-Over! by Robin Hemley, who seems pretty haunted by memories of failure and embarrassment from his childhood days.  So, he tries to go back for a second chance. He wants some do-overs.

He’s 48 and he revisits kindergarten, summer camp, sixth grade, and the high school prom in attempts to set right what had gone wrong.

He had a kindergarten teacher who (he recalls) stepped on his back during nap time. (According to him, she was “committed”  the year after he had her as a teacher.)  She told his parents he was going to grow up to be a “thug. “

I remember staying after school on the first day of kindergarten because I hadn’t finished my work. My mom had to come in to get me. The teacher, who I really liked, asked us to pick two colors of crayons and then color in the boxes on a sheet of graph paper. Right off, she didn’t like my color selection – purple and orange. Most of the kids just scribbled the sheets and were done with it. I was outlining boxes and then coloring them in.  This was an early sign of what my school personality would be, and a pretty good indicator of who I am to this day, for better and for worse.

Hemley actually gets permission to go into a kindergarten where he says “the kids immediately accepted me, not as a 5-year-old, but as a fellow kindergartner.”

I can’t identify with his summer camp experiences. We were way too poor for any camps. I actually have very fond memories of my Huck Finn summers for the first 10 years of my life.  Lots of freedom in the early 1960s.  There was very little  “organized play” other than some recreation programs at the local park where we played kickball and knock hockey, ate ice pops, and made lanyards.  (see bottom of post for more about that).

I know people who went off to summer camp and I taught for many years in a town where it seemed like every kid was gone for the summer. Many of them seemed to have stronger memories of camp life than of their home and family experiences. I always found it rather sad. They definitely did not find it sad.

Hemley seems to have had a bad summer camp experience mostly because he couldn’t do sports. When he returns to camp for his do-over, he learns about what he calls “regressive pull.” He says that means that when you are around a group of people who are appreciably younger than you, you actually start acting that age.  At the camp, he was around a bunch of 10-year-olds, so…

Hemley also went back to a high school prom.  He missed the real one because he was too shy to ask out the girl he had a crush on.

I missed mine for a number of reasons. First off, I had no real solid girlfriend and I didn’t want to just go with someone who was just a “date.” Second, I would never have had the money to pay for it. As a northeastern New Jersey kid, there were two post-prom traditions: into New York City to a nightclub and then down the Jersey shore for a beach weekend. Also, none of my closest friends were going. It was that just-past-hippie-but-still-Vietnam-War-time (1971) and a prom was not considered to be very cool. That’s what we told ourselves.

I did only the weekend at the shore. Seaside Heights, NJ.  Boardwalks, illegal alcohol, and the summer rent-a-cops busting kids.

Hemley contacted his high school to explain his idea for a do-over.  Fate stepped in and his former crush is now the school’s alumni liaison. Married with three kids, he was allowed to ask his high school crush to the prom.

Did he fix everything when he went back to try it again? What do you think? He definitely got to put things in perspective and through the distance of time, they don’t look like the failures they did at the time. We do sometimes get second chances and that is a good thing. Going back doesn’t work out in most of those time travel tales either. Still, I suspect that, like me, you wouldn’t mind a few life do-overs.

There is an excerpt from the book online – here’s the start:

Most likely, you don’t remember your nemesis in kindergarten, but I remember mine, probably because I had two. Virginia Adams was the teacher’s pet, and our teacher, Mrs. Collins, hated me. She told my mother I was going to grow up to be “a thug.” Those were her exact words. But she loved Virginia, and Virginia took every opportunity to flaunt her superiority. Often Virginia would sing to me: “I’m named after a state, and you’re only named after a bird.”

Mrs. Collins hated me because of an unfortunate encounter with a small rubber lobster. When we received our first report cards — full of Es and Ps and other letters hardly ever used beyond kindergarten — Mrs. Collins told us to bring them home to our parents, who had to sign them. In 1963, parents meant “Mom,” and maybe that’s even how Mrs. Collins phrased it: “Bring this report card home, and make sure your mother signs it before you come to class tomorrow.” Most fathers, mine included, left the signatures and just about everything else to moms.

---

Listen to Billy Collins read “The Lanyard”
about the thing he made for his mom at camp.

Writing the Day

I started a new daily writing practice for 2014 that I call WRITING THE DAY.

The idea is simple – and not totally original – to write a poem each day.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I decided to create my own form for this project.  I wanted to do shorter poems and I thought about the many Japanese forms that I enjoy reading and writing. The haiku is the form most people are familiar with, and it is a form that gets far too little respect in the Western world,

People know that form as three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. But that’s an English interpretation, since Japanese doesn’t have syllables.

The main inspiration for me is the tanka form which consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Even in that short form, the tanka has two parts. The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (“upper phrase”) and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (“lower phrase”).

For my invented form, ronka, there are 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Like the tanka there is no rhyme.

My own ronka will focus on observations of the day as seen in the outside world and the inside worlds of dwellings and the mind.

From the haiku form I will try to use techniques like having seasonal words to show rather than tell – cherry blossoms, rather than “spring” or April.  Haiku also don’t include the poet or people as frequently as we do in Western poetry.

I am calling the form ronka – obviously a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

William Stafford is the poet who inspired this daily practice the most for me. Stafford wrote every morning from 1950 to 1993. He left us 20,000 pages of daily writings that include early morning meditations, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.” He used sheets of yellow or white paper and sometimes spiral-bound reporters’ steno pads.

I already write every day. I teach and writing is part of the job. I do social media as a job and for myself. I work on my poetry. I have other blogs. But none of them is a daily practice or devoted to writing poems.

When Stafford was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, “I lower my standards.”  I like that answer, but I know that phrase “lowering standards” has a real negative connotation. I think Stafford meant that he allows himself some bad poems and some non-poems, knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

Read the poem, “Mindful,” by Mary Oliver and you’ll get a nice explanation of at least part of the motivation for doing this daily poetry practice – the joy I find every day in some thing, perhaps rather small, that I feel some need to record so that I will remember it in times when things seem less joyful. The poem comes her collection, Why I Wake Early, whose title fits right into the William Stafford writing practice that also inspired my project. She writes about the outdoors – crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears and deer – and that is at least a third of what I expect my poems to have as inspiration. But I will be less disciplined about waking up early.

Now, I have been Writing the Day for 19 days and I don’t know if I can sustain the practice every day for an entire year. But, I know it is more pleasurable than resolving to lose weight, exercise more, spend less time online or any other of the common New Year’s boxes that so many people put themselves into in January.

Super Hero

Have you thought about what super power you would want to have? Doesn’t everyone do that at some point?

I read a lot of comic books as a kid. As a superhero, all I would have wanted was to be able to fly. Batman plus flying would have been even better. No “super powers” required.

In my teen years, I would have gone with invisibility for all the psychological and male hormonal reasons you would imagine.

As an adult, I have often wished that I had the ability to speak and understand all languages and be able to know what language someone spoke just by looking at them. I’m not sure what that superhero might be called – Captain Negotiator or Babel?

There was a website called The Hero Factory (it seems to be gone now) that had a slick superhero-creator where you could build a superhero (male or female) choosing body parts, clothing, weapons and some special abilities. Then you could put it on a comic book cover.

I built my superself. Standard boots, tights, underwear on the outside, belt and cape, muscles, but no weapon but a branch-like wand.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t name the comic or character. I really wouldn’t want to be Sgt. Splintery Splinter. I chose the R emblem to just be Ronk or SuperRonk.

John Lennon Is Not 70 Today

John Lennon is not 70 today. He would have been 70 today and so many people are talking about what he might have been and what he might have done in the past 30 years.

Lennon was born 9 October 1940 and was killed 8 December 1980. He’s famous enough that I don’t need to say that he was an English singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, and together with Paul McCartney formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century – but there it is.

He was born and raised in Liverpool. He had a skiffle band called The Quarrymen which evolved into The Beatles in 1960.

It was only a decade before The Beatles self-destructed.

When The Beatles hit America, I was 10 years old. All my friends were divided about who was the best Beatle. I was on Paul’s side at first. In my teen years, I gravitated towards John’s rebellious side, the acerbic wit, and his writing.

After the breakup, I returned to Paul briefly, but when I went to college, George’s music and spirituality took hold.

I was never a fan of John’s solo work. You’re not supposed to say that. Just like when I talk to my poetry friends, I’m not supposed to say that I don’t really like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

John’s Plastic Ono Band, the art for art’s sake, his lousy fathering of Julian (who was only 10 years my junior) and his bad mouthing of The Beatles never went over well with me.

I graduated college and John disconnected from the music business in 1975. He seemed to become a family man. He reemerged in 1980 with a “comeback” album, Double Fantasy.

He was murdered three weeks after its release.

Was Lennon a genius? Was McCartney a genius? I would argue that if there was any genius it was Lennon/McCartney. Despite all of John’s negative comments about Paul, John wrote his best songs with him or in competition with him.

I remember a comment from Linda McCartney about Paul needing better musicians in Wings who would challenge Paul to do his best.

Genius is always collaborative to some degree.

I think that John would have continued to make some music. I think he would have also tried to let his creativity go in other directions, especially writing and film. I don’t think he would have ever topped his work with The Beatles. I think he knew that and knew that it was foolish to make it a goal to even try to top the earlier work.

I still remember that December 8th night that I heard he had died. It hit me hard. Harder than the death of some relatives.  I stayed up all night watching the news.

In the morning, I went to work. My good friend Bob Shannon and I mourned together. A co-worker made a crude joke about not caring if Lennon was dead, and he immediately saw that he had made a bad mistake in saying it.

I wish John was still with us. He had more to share.

He’s not 70 today. He will never be 70. He will be frozen at 40. And for me, he will probably always be about 23.