Posts Tagged ‘nostalgia’

Me and Michael J. Fox

Saturday, August 31st, 2024

What kid growing up in the 1980s didn’t want to be (or be with) Michael J. Fox?

I thought he had a pretty cool thing going on, and I’ll be the first to admit that it pains me to see his ongoing suffering with Parkinson’s disease. I can’t say that I’ve ever followed the news about him (or any other celebrity) especially closely, but I’ve always had a passing interest in Michael J. Fox because of two of his early projects that inspired me.

Just two: Teen Wolf will not be addressed here.

I grew up watching Family Ties, and I think it’s a show that maybe I need to go back and take a look at again. It was there, right after The Cosby Show on Thursday nights, but also in syndication in that sweet slot in the afternoon after I had finished my homework but before my dad arrived home for dinner and the TV got turned off.

I was also lucky enough to see all three Back to the Future movies in the theatre on their first release. The first movie came out when I was in the fourth grade, and I remember one Saturday my brother and my mom were up to something else, so my dad took me to the multiplex and let me pick. I don’t know whether I knew what Back to the Future was about, but I was into sci-fi, we went to see it, the first of many times my dad let me pick the movie (and probably one of the few when my choice didn’t disappoint him; years later, I suggested Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which kicked off a totally separate “celebrity” interest).

I know people like Back to the Future–no, they adore Back to the Future, and they aren’t wrong. I watched it with my son for the first time recently, and it absolutely holds up. It is one of those something-for-everyone kind of films: teen rom-com, action, science fiction, buddy film, nostalgia piece; it has a fantastic score, a great screenplay, very good continuity, and really just the best of what 1980s cinema could offer. It’s up there with two of the first three Indiana Jones movies and the even-numbered Star Treks on my list of “will watch at any time with anyone” movies.

And at the core is Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox in his stammering, disbelieving, ski-vest-wearing self. Seeing the world through Marty’s eyes really makes the movie pop, and drives home the strangeness and foreignness of the entire situation. Of course, there’s great writing here, but unless writing is performed by a great actor, there’s nothing for it. Fox is cool when he needs to be cool, smart when he needs to be smart, and clever when he needs to be clever: Achilles, Patroclus, and Odysseus in one teenage heartthrob.

Sure, his day-to-day life has its problems, but who wouldn’t want to be (or be with) Marty McFly?

I never owned a ski vest (and why is a kid from Southern California wearing a ski vest all the time, or even for just the one day?), and I don’t think I ever consciously imitated Michael J. Fox’s Marty, but it was–and probably is–a touchstone for me of what it means to be cool. When the sequels appeared, I bought the novelization and was first in line at the movies (well, not literally first in line, but my brother and I were definitely there opening weekend; speaking of opening weekend, my daughter and I have a date coming up for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and I can’t wait). The second movie primed me for the complexities of time travel plots (Yesterday’s Enterprise, anyone?), and I’m still a sucker for a good story involving time travel (I’m currently reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley–great story, with some really pithy one-liners, too: p. 82: “Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.”)

And then there is Alex P. Keaton, scion of the Keaton family on Family Ties. Alex is driven, and intelligent, and although his ambitions never lined up with my own (he wanted to be Gordon Gecko; I wanted to be Gordon Fullerton). He sees following the rules and being a part of the system as the way to success, or at least happiness, and I’ve spent a good chunk of my life playing that game–and I certainly spent my school years that way. It works for him: there are honors, accolades, and even girlfriends. And, of course, this is a sitcom, so most of it is reasonably light-hearted, although in the post-M*A*S*H sitcom world, there are strong doses of sentimentality and maudlin themes as well.

And Alex is basically a good guy–a good friend, a good son, a good brother. There is a fair amount in him to admire, and I took that. There’s that scene where Mallory’s boy problems intrude on Alex’s college interview, and he’s angry, but forgives her. It’s not just the sitcom imperative to wrap things up after twenty-two minutes: it’s a demonstration the need for family to be patient and understanding with each other, to help each other when times are tough, and it’s how I hope my own kids would treat each other.

I liked Alex, as portrayed by Michael J. Fox.

And yet, in eighth grade, our class voted on joke awards for each other, and at a party on the last night of our class trip to Washington, D.C., I received the Alex P. Keaton Award.

By that point, I understood that my classmates saw me as a “nerd,” and that Alex was a pretty straitlaced, nerdy kind of guy. I didn’t wear a shirt and tie to school every day, and my ambitions weren’t about success in business, but I didn’t play it cool about my perception of my own intelligence and ability, which was pretty inflated. Ticking down the list of Breakfast Club social groups, I was definitely more Anthony Michael Hall than Emilio Estevez or Judd Nelson, and while the Ally Sheedys may (may) have thought that was OK, they would never have admitted it to the Molly Ringwalds.

So the Alex P. Keaton Award stung. It was supposed to be fun and funny, but for whom? I wasn’t completely clueless: I knew what my social status had been through three years of middle school, and I didn’t like having it confirmed with a piece of paper (which I’m pretty sure I got rid of as soon as I could). I didn’t really think about what the real meaning of the Alex P. Keaton Award was, or what my classmates–some of whom were my friends–meant by conferring it on me.

Was it meant to be a compliment? It sort of lined up with “Most Likely to Succeed,” from one perspective: on Family Ties, there’s never any doubt for Alex, unlike for his big sister Mallory, that success in whatever he chooses–business, school, chess–is a given. (Also… in the 1980s, a teen heartthrob is shown having a serious interest in chess in a sitcom that aired on Thursday nights on a major network: how are we not talking about this?!?)

Was it a recognition that Alex P. Keaton is a pretty good guy, and the other kids thought I was a pretty good guy, too? I don’t know. I think–I hope–that I’m a better person than I was at age fourteen, but by middle school standards, I don’t think I was as rotten as might have been possible, even if I sometimes gave as good as I got.

Whatever.

Michael J. Fox played Alex P. Keaton brilliantly throughout the run of Family Ties, at least in my memory (again, I will admit to not having watched a single episode in a very long time).

As much as Family Ties was supposed to be about Boomer parents (former hippies) raising Gen X kids in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, the kids took over the show, and not in a “those darn kids” kind of way–in a way that showed them as fully-formed humans with problems that were no less important than adult problems–and those problems often were adult problems.

We have to talk about “A, My Name is Alex.”

In the 1980s, half-hour sitcoms would sometimes do this thing where they turned into hour dramas for an episode, syndication be darned. Again, they were in the post-M*A*S*H universe and had aspirations to be Important, and people sat there and watched them, because that was their dose of their favorite characters for the week. Individual episodes would be hyped in the lead-up to the broadcast, so you would know that a Very Special Episode of Blossom would be happening on Tuesday night (or whatever… I never watched Blossom, I swear).

In “A, My Name is Alex,” Alex P. Keaton seeks mental health counseling in the aftermath of a friend’s sudden death in a car crash. I had forgotten about this episode mostly, like much of Family Ties, but a recent reminder of it brought it all back. There is humor here, but it is mostly a serious episode, mostly set in the therapist’s office and in flashbacks that Alex experiences.

Even as a kid, I knew that Michael J. Fox is brilliant in this episode–taped before a live audience–in his ability to turn corners from joy to grief, from skepticism about counseling to vulnerability and honesty. It shows teenagers–it showed me–that even the heartthrob has to be sad sometimes, and even the highest high-achiever needs help when things get difficult: through most of Family Ties, Alex P. Keaton tries to be John Galt: overly competent, self-reliant, enlightened-self-interested, but part of the arc of his character is learning, as I think I had to learn as well, that “no man is an island.”

I don’t know that I always remembered the lessons from “A, My Name is Alex,” but I think the normalization of Alex seeking and accepting help from his family and a mental health professional probably helped me to do the same thing in my adult life when it was time.

And, apparently, it was Michael J. Fox who pushed for “A, My Name is Alex” to be made in the first place.

I’m not much for celebrity hero-worship or parasocial relationships, as any reader on this blog knows (do I even have any readers?), but I am thankful for those creators who have brought meaningful performances into being. Perhaps this is because I am a performer myself–conductor, trombonist, public speaker and teacher, and even sometime-actor; and as a composer, I certainly enjoy working with my fellow performers. I know what it takes to put yourself into preparing and presenting a work for someone else’s entertainment or edification, so there is a fundamental respect there.

Any actor who has brought two very memorable characters and personal touchstones for me personally into being deserves my gratitude, heartthrob or not. An actor who pointed to ways of being and modelled a course that would influence my own needs to be acknowledged. I know he’ll probably never read this, and it really isn’t about that, but if I could say two words to the great Michael J. Fox:

Thank you.

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School Days

Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

They are tearing down my high school–Upper Arlington High School–over the summer, so I went back last month, and I took Noah, one day shy of turning 11, with me, to a walk-through day sponsored by the alumni association. It was the first time I had been back to most of the facility since I graduated, although I had been to the music area and the auditorium a couple times, mostly associated with the 2008 premiere of the piece I wrote for the band to commemorate the career of my high school band director, John Blevins.

I was surprised how much was the same. The building had not undergone any major renovations since before my time there, and even some of the fixtures were memorable. The light was the same—too little. The halls were surprisingly at once bigger or smaller than I remembered, and some doors seemed to be labelled with their original markings from the 1950s. It was a good day to be there, as the building was still very much in use, the final packing up for the summer still to come. In fact, there were signs asking us to stay out of classrooms. When I came to the band room, though, I couldn’t help myself, and Noah was shocked when I stepped over the caution tape to walk through the rehearsal space one last time, peeking at the locker that I had shared with Jay Moore during our junior and senior years, and snapping a couple of photos. Crossing lines put in place by authority is not something my son is accustomed to seeing me do, but I assured him that it would be alright, even while also telling him not to get any ideas.

Overall, I had a good four years in high school, from 1990 to 1994. I excelled academically, found my place in several groups of my classmates (band, mostly, but also the honors students, the gifted program, briefly the drama club, and too late the quiz team), and discovered the passion that would lead to my career. I wasn’t bullied, and I don’t think I was a bully, but neither was I a standout in the social world of my high school. My family lived a comfortable life, but I was surrounded by people whose parents were wealthier than us: lots of my friends were given a car when they turned sixteen, but I was given a set of keys to the family car.

What I am amazed by, these years later, is the quality of my teachers, especially after spending more than twenty years trying to be a teacher myself. I wrote once of the importance of every teenager having a role model who isn’t their parents—an uncle, spiritual guide, or teacher—and Upper Arlington High School had an embarrassment of riches among its faculty. If I hadn’t found that person in Mr. Blevins, there were easily three or four other teachers each year who could have been that person, and frequently were for my classmates. Even students who didn’t seem to fit could—and did—find these people. The huge number of clubs and sports coached by teachers meant that there were plenty of chances to interact with them in less-formal ways than in the classroom.

Upper Arlington High School was—and is—a well-funded school, attended by students who had all the advantages that wealth brings, and I’ve truthfully struggled my entire life to reconcile that experience with what I have seen and heard elsewhere, as a teacher, as a college professor, and as I’ve listened to the experiences of others in high school. In a negative sense, I have come to see what I often felt as entitlement, and white privilege, and I am frustrated that we can’t find a way to give what I had—and took for granted—to all kids.

Some things I would have done differently. Coming into high school, I had a pretty good network of friends, and leaving it, I had at least one close friend, but I don’t think I engaged in building relationships as much as I could have, and I didn’t manage to maintain those relationships in any kind of real way after graduation. On graduation day, I went home with my parents, and didn’t have any plans with the people I had just spent four years with. My father told me to go seemy friends, but I didn’t have anywhere to go: all my friendships but one were essentially situational, and when high school ended, they basically did, too. This was in part what I wanted—I was very ready to go on to the next thing and start living my life, and I viewed going away to college and leaving everything I knew mostly behind as a big part of that. It wasn’t until I got onto social media (nearly 15 years later) that I found out what happened to most people. Mistakenly, I had thought that the only important part of high school was high school.

I have also come to realize that for many of my classmates and peers at high schools of all types, the high school experience was not a good one. For a place that should be dedicated to learning and knowledge, too often there is very little of either. There are those who placed their trust one or another teacher, only to have that trust betrayed in often horrifying ways. There are people who were bullied, or ostracized, and they carry the damage with them into their adult lives—adulthood is high school with money, as the saying goes. There were people who simply had to wait and endure that four years in order to be able to go and pursue their visions, goals, and dreams in a way that didn’t fit in with a bell schedule, semesters, homework, and hall passes, and resented it. There were people who injured themselves in lifelong ways, either on the athletic field or otherwise, trying to come up to what was expected of them. As Hesse suggests, education is a way of placing us beneath the wheel; the Bildungsroman is almost always written while wearing rose-colored glasses.

As my children approach this world—Noah is headed into the minefield of middle school in the fall—I try to see what I want for them. The high school they will attend is most certainly not Upper Arlington in 1994, and I would like to see them aim higher than most of that school’s students who I seem to meet. I realize now that I am a very different person because of the people I was around in high school—the artists, musicians, and honors students. It was nothing in the water—it was constantly being around people whose parents shared the same goals as me. I want my children to be able to assume that they can use their minds to earn a living, to be able to provide a good life for their children, to not be afraid of books or art or people who are different (although there was plenty of that at Upper Arlington, too). I want them to know success, and to know a world where they believe success is possible, and where people are willing to at least give them a chance to succeed.

Twenty-seven years out of high school, I am still thinking about high school. As the physical evidence of the school is being torn down and replaced with something new, what happened to me in those four years—good, bad, indifferent—carries on, more than a look through old yearbooks (I am shocked at how many strangers stare back at me from those pages), or posts on social media, or the reunions that I’ve never been to.

I never wanted to be a nostalgic person, and I detest the kind of nostalgia that sees the past as better. I refuse to engage in golden age thinking (or gold-and-black age thinking, in this case). But the Greek roots of nostalgia refer to pain—pain for one’s home. There is a part of me that does ache for that time—to put on the band uniform, or learn fresh some way that the world works, or for once feel like I am meeting the world’s expectations. I shouldn’t, because that was all an illusion, and it was all designed for someone else. I wouldn’t go back—most days—but walking through that doomed building reminded me of what a time it was, and how it continues to make me who I am today.

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A View of Twenty Views, part 4

Thursday, February 9th, 2017

In February, I will be travelling to Atlanta, where I will give the premiere performance of the complete Twenty Views of the Trombone at Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery, at the invitation of Olivia Kieffer.  This is the third in a series of posts about that piece and how it has come to be what it is.

Read the first post, on the history of this piece’s composition so far, here.

Read the second post, specific comments on the first seven movements, here.

Read the third post, specific comments on the eighth through the fourteenth movements, here.

I performed Twenty Views of the Trombone in October 2013 on a concert of the Cleveland Composers Guild.  At that time, it was still a work in progress, with only eight or nine pieces complete, but you can listen to that performance here.

The premiere performance will be Friday, February 17 at 8pm at Eyedrum.  Admission is $7 at the door.

I will be tweeting using the handle @MattSComposer before, during, and after this process.  Join the conversation with #twentyviews–the final post in this series will be a Q&A, so send me your questions about the piece, or composing, or life in general, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Twenty short pieces is a lot to keep track of, even for the person who is writing and performing them.  I’m not completely sure how to keep the audience on track–perhaps they should open their phones to this blog during the performance!

At any rate, here are my thoughts on the last six pieces, in the order in which I am currently planning to play them at the premiere.

15. What They Might Think It’s Like

Another of the group of pieces written in 2016 to bring Twenty Views of the Trombone to completion.  This is the only political piece in the group, and I have generally not been a political composer.  The revelations of warrantless wire-tapping and domestic surveillance by the United States government, however, are concerning and troubling to me, and this piece imagines snips of phone conversation that might be misconstrued or misunderstood as they are picked up by massively parallel copies of speech recognition software in a government computing center.

16. What It Might Have Been Like (II)

Another of the 2016 crop of pieces–a bumper crop, if there is one, since completing the piece for the upcoming premiere required writing as many pieces as I had already composed.  In 2007, after applying to full-time college teaching jobs across the United States and in Canada, I accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands at Oklahoma Panhandle State University.  It was as far off as it sounds, but my wife and I learned to love the people there, if not always the place itself, and we look back on it as a wonderful adventure in our lives.  It was also where we found our family, since both of our children were born there (although, not to us–adoption is a wonderful thing).  In 2012, we moved back to Ohio, again after an intense job search on my part.

In Oklahoma, the wind never stops, and in the Panhandle, it seems particularly strong all the time.  The first really windy night, Becky and I lay in bed in our apartment wondering if the roof of the building would be torn off, but we soon came to realize that it was nothing special.  We could have stayed in the Panhandle–our chief unhappiness was the distance from our families (a two-day drive).  “What It Might Have Been Like (II)” imagines a counterfactual in which we stayed there.

17.  What It Could Be Like (III)

This piece, also from 2016, wraps up the “life after death” group of pieces, which considered first oblivion, and then Heaven.  This final piece imagines Hell.  Gary Larson’s The Far Side gave two images of musical hell:  Charlie Parker trapped in a soundproof room with easy listening music, and a conductor being led by the Devil to his room, filled with banjo players.  I truthfully find it harder to imagine Hell than it is to imagine Heaven.  I can imagine unpleasantness and pain, but to imagine them going on for eternity is another thing.  All of our metaphors likely fail.  So, perhaps this: just as the music seems to get good, it is interrupted, and the interruption, becomes the final word.

18.  What It’s Like at the End

Another piece from 2016, in fact, the last piece to be composed.  In a way, this is a slower, more reluctant answer to the assignment that inspired “What It’s Like” in the first place–a one-minute composition that describes the experience of playing trombone.  Have I answered this question completely in Twenty Views of the Trombone?  I have left something crucial out, perhaps, and that is the resting.  Trombone players are great at counting rests, which is probably why we’re called upon to do it all the time.  As I’ve been preparing to play this entire piece, it is not lost on me that playing a forty-minute composition with no long rests is a very rare experience for a trombonist–I am pleasantly relieved that my chops seem to be up to the task.  Last night (February 5) I played through the complete piece for the first time, and it is a testament to the great teachers I have had over the years that I didn’t come out particularly fatigued at the end–not ready to do it all again, perhaps, but not completely exhausted, either.  I can thank Tony Chipurn and Joseph Duchi for their guidance in this area–I’ve been fortunate to have had two great teachers with different approaches.

19.  How I Remember What It Was Like

The other piece composed in the summer of 2013 for a first performance with the Cleveland Composers Guild in September of that year.  Over the last few years, I have been writing pieces that give into a sense of nostalgia that I have felt increasingly.  Both “How I Remember What It Was Like” and my 2015 orchestra composition …into the suggestive waters…  explore this aspect of my inner life–something I outwardly denied myself for a long time. Both pieces reflect on my childhood and teenaged years growing up in Columbus, Ohio, and both are centered on a motive derived from one of the Remington Warm-Up Studies for trombone.  “How I Remember What It Was Like” recalls my experiences in high school band, when playing the trombone slowly changed from something I did to something at the center of my college and career plans.  This piece also contains quotations from my high school fight song, “Stand Up and Cheer,” (borrowed from Ohio University) and “Simple Gifts,” a tune which kept appearing through high school, first in Copland’s Variations on a Shaker Melody (in both band and orchestra versions), then in John Zdechlik’s Chorale and Shaker Dance, then, in youth orchestra my senior year, in Copland’s full Appalachian Spring.

20.  What It’s Really Like

The last piece in the cycle is from 2009, and was first performed that year on a faculty recital at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, and then formally premiered at an Oklahoma Composers Association Salon Concert in Norman, Oklahoma.  Once I realized that there was going to be a Twenty Views of the Trombone, and that it would grow and develop over a period of years, adding pieces as they were needed, I decided that the best way to tie the entire group together would be with a closing piece that echoed the opening piece, “What It’s Like.”  So, every performance since 2009 has begun with “What It’s Like,” and ended with “What It’s Really Like,” and any partial performances should do the same.  In fact, all of “What It’s Like” is contained within “What It’s Really Like,” making the first movement a synecdoche of the last movement.  Both, in their ways, are synecdoches of the entire work, and of the experience of playing trombone, and perhaps, of the experience of listening to trombone music.  “What It’s Really Like,” then, amplifies “What It’s Like” by extending phrases, by repeating some ideas, and by inserting additional developmental material.  The piece ends where it began, and the composer ends where he began–a man who loves to play the trombone, and wants everyone to know What It’s Really Like.

 

This is the third of a short series of posts about Twenty Views of the Trombone.  The first post gave an overview of the history of the composition of the piece.  The second post describes the first seven movements in detail, the third describes the eighth through fourteenth pieces, and the last will answer questions about the piece, received from facebook and Twitter.

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February Thoughts

Wednesday, February 11th, 2015

The month of February and I have never gotten along well.

Some thoughts:

It really is just bad luck that every time I’ve turned on public radio in the last few days there has been a story about death.  Not just reporting the facts of one or more deaths, but actually about death.

There will not be this little daylight again until sometime in October.

I am now immune to the particular viruses that have given me stomach flu and laryngitis this month.  Their offspring may be mutated bastards, but I won’t be troubled by the originals.

Only a few more weeks of scraping before driving.  Which digs into the composition time I’ve tried to block out for myself in the mornings.

I can’t really be expected to try to write music under these circumstances anyway.  As Jennifer Jolley puts it, “why compose when you can blog?”

I’m halfway through this year’s installment of Best American Short Stories, and if they seem evenly split between love and death, that’s normal.  Literature is about love and death.

February is the shortest month, and there’s a good reason for that.

There’s no pleasing singers, especially in February.

The urge to go to bed at a reasonable time and not get up until March is completely acceptable.

I am a better person for refusing to go to the Wendy’s that smells like a sewer inside.  I’m not so sure about driving extra to get to the Wendy’s with the fancy Coke machine.

If I lose my voice and can’t talk in class, that might actually be an improvement.

At least I get to go to a Cleveland Orchestra concert this week.  Only some of the music they’re going to play is about the pointlessness and futility of trying to master one’s own destiny.  The rest is by a composer who couldn’t think of anything else to say and took the last thirty years of his life off.

Seventeen more days until March.

The idea of “nostalgia” doesn’t mix well with February.  It becomes too much -algia.

And what’s the point of being nostalgic anyway?  February was awful  in almost any year I can think of.

It may be February, bit it isn’t Simon Kenton Winter Camp in 1989-90 over New Years.  That was some horrific awfulness and a misguided idea if I ever heard one.  I still can’t believe my parents paid for me to do that, and that I thought it would be fun.

It also isn’t the winter of 1999-2000.  That was some Grade A awfulness, although I was at least busy that February.

And–OMEA Convention was in Cleveland this year, and I didn’t go, which is some February awfulness avoided.

Well, this is dismal, and it’s time for class.  Enough griping about my first-world problems.

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