Your song worked. I fell in love with this guy’s music long before he died today.

Playing pool near the Panhandle, in San Francisco, in fact.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star either. Assuming arguendo you still do.

Also, thanks for being awesome, mostly.

Sincerely,

Molly

Further reading:

The Box Tops

Big Star

If he was from Venus, would he feed us with a spoon?
If he was from Mars, wouldn’t that be cool?
Standing right on campus, would he stamp us in a file?
Hangin’ down in Memphis all the while.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

Cerebral rape and pillage in a village of his choice.
Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice.
Feeling like a hundred bucks, exchanging good lucks face to face.
Checkin’ his stash by the trash at St. Mark’s place.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star

Runnin’ ’round the house, Mickey Mouse and the Tarot cards.
Falling asleep with a flop pop video on.
If he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon?
If he died in Memphis, then that’d be cool, babe.

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism- it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Reclaiming hope in comedy, in the darkest part of your career, is a foreceful, defiant act. Which is of course why I like it; which is of course why it is inspiring.

Grove Xmas from Molly Peterson on Vimeo.

They call me the groove from Molly Peterson on Vimeo.

I’m reviewing the KindleDX for CyberFrequencies. Adrift in the sea of Amazon’s Kindle store, I Tweeted for help. The float John tossed me was Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Queena Kim (Off-Ramp and CF producer) tells me he re-reads it every year. (I approve wholeheartedly of re-reading things every year; mine is Harriet the Spy, Hamlet, The Odyssey, Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and Gatsby. Rereading helps me mark my own changes. You should try it, too.)

Anyway, I hadn’t read Dandelion Wine in a dozen years, a dozen and a half.

I *do*remember balefully looking out my suburban window and wishing it were a cupola, once I looked that word up, and wishing the world would do what I told it to, like Douglas Spaulding. I’ve never forgotten Mr. Sanderson and the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes. But it was Off-Ramp, and Rabe, who taught me to claim Ray Bradbury for Los Angeles. (I’m getting an education in the library here, like Bradbury did, though far less diligently, and probably with more late fees.) And it is in Los Angeles, this year, that I did a story about TreePeople’s demonstration cistern, and the idea that people should have rain barrels. So this passage struck a different chord this time ’round:

“Ready now, the rain barrel!”

Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.

Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. “Here we go!”

The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest.

I wondered, as I read it, what else would fall from the sky now in Los Angeles. Our rain picks up nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide before making its way into the barrels (and I’ll be visiting some barrels in Mar Vista later this month, I hope). Those nasty gases are in the atmosphere courtesy my car, and yours, and other polluters regulated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. I’m conscious of that now in a way I wasn’t last time. Does it wreck the book? Nope. Bradbury’s vivid writing lets me imagine my way into the skies, where the east wind and the west wind and the north and south give something to the blue-silk water that will be leavened in freshets (a wonderful word, freshets). And my imagination gives life to that water; makes it true, if only for an instant, if only in my mind. But something that feels that true, that way, might become true, for more than a minute, another way. Maybe that’s why Dandelion Wine seems less sad, this time. (And dandelion wine seems more drinkable.) Maybe this is how I’m different THIS rereading.

I’ve got no cream-sponge tennis shoes. But as I thought about rain barrels, and Los Angeles, and Bradbury, my feet rocked back and forth in my sandals.

“Tom…does everyone in the world…know he’s alive?” “Sure. Heck, yes!” The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. “I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh I sure hope they know.”

So: thanks Rabe. And, Ray B.

At all times, keep a constant check on your gear. Watch out for chafing. Chafing is generally worse in a calm than it is in a sea. Use your pump periodically whether you need to or not.

Have anchors and life preservers ready for any emergency. Nothing very serious happens to a skipper who is ready for anything.

H.A. Calahan, Yachtsman’s Omnibus

People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

Tom Stoppard

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded…

Learned Hand

Especially this part:

Simon also decried what he described as a move away from true investigative journalism and toward cheaper scandal stories that he said are more likely to win awards.

“It’s easy shit if you caught somebody with their hand in the till,” he explained. “To get all of the facts arrayed in a way that makes that apparent is easy compared to the ‘why.’ The ‘why’ is epic. The ‘why’ is where journalism becomes an adult game … I found that there were less and less ‘adults’ in charge of the industry and in charge of the newsroom.”

Now, as you were. Back to Season 2 for me. Ziggy and the duck is a little like Ross and Marcel, but I can’t wait for that Steve Earle montage at the end.