So sorry to hear about the loss of Dick Clark, He was sort of a huge influence on me. He was also a Delta Kappa Epsilon brother and along with Cole Porter one of the things that got me excited about the house. When we did “What.” he was a big touchstone (along with Ernie Kovacs).
He helped to change the way rock and roll was perceived in America how it wet from sub culture to culture and i turn helped along things like equal rights amongst the races and the sexes. I think that gets forgotten as he faded into the strange apparition that Ryan Seacrest would throw to at the end of the Rockin’ New Years Eve broadcasts. He was the kind of broadcaster that you just don’t see anymore. even as his obvious passion for the music faded he gave a platform for it to be heard-one that paved the way for the MTV era and ultimately the post MTV era. Which in turn gives rise to a million starts up blogs and podcasts. Sure the medium has changed but the message hasn’t” this is pretty cool and you ought to here it”
News tory about it from CBS
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I wanted to go a little bit more on the passing of Don Cornelius, he has always been a surprising inspiration to me. During “What.” he was a big touchstone, not directly in terms of taking style but as inspiration; that you could be smart have soul and still have amazing music.
When i was a kid for my 1st grade year we lived in Chatfield Mn, a really tiny town outside of Rochester. We lived in an 4plex apartment building in the middle of a corn field. The big amusement was hanging out in gulleys and trying to get truckers to blow their horn. We only got one tv channel and sadly it didn’t have cartoons this made Saturday mornings a lot less fun.
But it also was where I discovered Soul Train, every weekend they would run the previous weeks and the new weeks, which worked out to three or so hours of Soul Train followed by an hour of American Bandstand. So there in a cornfield in a half-a-horse town i first saw Bootsy, and P-Funk and all the cartoon characters of soul. along with Mr Cornelius they became the constant cast of characters in my subconscious. I am forever grateful for that, he changed the landscape, for pop music, for american tv, and of my dreams.
To this day he’s still a character in my dreaming, the offside narrator. It sucks that he’s gone, and it sucks the way he went. Wherever he is I hope he found love, peace and soul, and that we all can too. Because the world just got a little less funky.
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There are certain stories that I can’t be open with, mostly because they aren’t mine to tell,I am just a character in them, sometimes a big one but ultimately not the protagonist. They affect me sometimes on an almost soul crushing level, but still in all they aren’t mine to tell. This last year has been chock full of them, problems that I can’t fix, ones I really can’t even hope to help with. Or hell for us members of empathy anonymous. I spend a lot of time trying to understand motivations, reactions, the underlying reasons.
I feel most of my life as being some sort of spiritual quest for truth, happiness or whatever. its one of those Don Quiotixe things, you can never truly catch it but that doesn’t mean that you stop trying. So its been a diet of study and thought, mediation and deep thoughtful introspection. In an attempt to find that spiritual truth, my personal 42 if you will. I am by no means claiming I have it figured out, but I have seen a few things along the way, and today I sort of got it:just because you get to a point of figuring things out that doesn’t bring peace it brings more questions.
I think I just figured out a major secret of the universe, one that has eluded most of mankind, or at least me for centuries (most of the 00’s felt like a century at least). Enlightenment does not mean happiness, or for that matter that its going to make your life better, at least not in any physical way.
Think of it as wine a good knowledge of wine doesn’t give you a full wine cellar,sure it helps you to know what bottles to buy but its not giving you the money to pay for it. Now this probably seems obvious to a child but I am a little slower on the uptake. It does give you a better understanding of the wine you are drinking and a deeper appreciation for the flavors and subtleties- ultimately your still drinking the same wine as the guy next to you, that is assuming you are sharing the bottle.
This isn’t an inditement of enlightenment, to the contrary; it’s just shining a light on the cost of trade. Sometimes I concentrate more on what to learn from the situation, and I can take away quite a bit, but the knowledge doesn’t always bring the satisfaction that I hoped.I keep thinking of this story from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series about a guy who lives forever, and meets with the man who gave him this power every 100 years. He is still makes mistakes, he just makes new ones. Even though he has seen the story unfold a million different ways. Its the realization that just because you know how to make an engine, it’s not going to manifest in a car being built, or give you any insight as to how to pay for the gas.- Knowing this makes me feel better.
