I'm Alive!
February 24, 2024
Dog-1
In Xanadu
did Kubla Khan
a stately
pleasure-dome decree...
In order to perceive the Xanadu I wish to depict, which is mainly grounded in the culture of filmdom, it's helpful to acknowledge popularizations of the name, chiefly via Orson Welles' 1941 masterpiece "Citizen Kane" where Xanadu is depicted as Charles Foster Kane's unreachable pinnacle (as suggested in the Coleridge poem).
William Randolph Hearst's never-completed castle, San Simeon, above, was the stuff of Hollywood legend and the inspiration for Kane's decaying Xanadu in Orson Welles' thinly-veiled bio-pic about Hearst (as seen in the matte painting, below).
"Citizen Kane" is Welles' famously artful cinematic opus about hubris and decay at the highest levels of power in the United States, and it made Welles a Hollywood pariah and lifelong enemy of William Randolph Hearst.
Welles had grown ludicrous and hubris-filled in his own way by the time my generation started coming of age and he was a symbol of bloated excess.
Behold the legend (it's hysterical):
By the 1980s, we'd slowed down enough perhaps to regard things in the rearview mirror with a little more care, and I think we were collectively horrified at what we had failed to preserve. Styx famously musicalized an homage to cultural decay in their masterwork "Paradise Theatre".
THE PLACE WHERE NOBODY DARED TO GO
The love that we came to know
they call it Xanadu.
It was into this timeline and this culture, in 1980, that Xanadu found another kind of resurgence in the guise of the box-office dud, "Xanadu", starring Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly. It was a clumsy attempt to exploit Newton John's success in "Grease", and while the film under-performed in theaters, the musical score was thunderously successful with airplay. With some interesting numbers, a charming story, and a ton of heart, "Xanadu" quickly became a cult favorite which eventually found a second life on Broadway in a successful stage iteration starring Cheyenne Jackson.
These were my cultural references when, after eleven years of going to school in one little town, I was suddenly transported into a whole other, more cosmopolitan world. I was in a new state, at a new school, where I could be anyone I wanted to be, here at this citadel named in honor of the martyred astronaut, Gus Grissom. Free. And suddenly alive.
I had new friends...
...and my wheels were badass. 1977 Ford Thunderbird was classic.
I also had my first job (where I had an awesome collection of friends from all kinds of diverse backgrounds):
My friends and I held court under the back stairwell at Grissom every morning like the exemplary scholars we were, and by night we were superstars in our own minds up at our hilltop lair, the Plush Horse.
We were GenX-ers to the core. Snarling latch-key creatures ready to conquer the world. We developed pleasing patinas, most of us, but we were always feral children underneath. It's true. Everything this woman says is true.
Who Let Gen-X Off the Hook?
Were Sinks Not An Option?
I REMEMBER SOME TUNES VERY DISTINCTLY FROM THAT PERIOD.
"IT’S STILL ROCK AND ROLL TO ME" — Billy Joel
[It was very 80s and it had the pulse of this new cosmopolitan city to me.]
"I FOUND LOVE ON A TWO-WAY STREET" — Stacy Lattisaw
[Shout out to Connie, Sonya, and Mandy.]
KANSAS MONOLITH
"JESSIE’S GIRL" — Rick Springfield
[I was very into Rick.]
"TOO MUCH TME ON MY HANDS" — Styx
[With both Kevins, Steve and Dave behind the bowling alley singing with air mics on the hood of Kev’s car.]
"OUR LIPS ARE SEALED" — The Go-Gos
"GYPSY" — Fleetwood Mac
It was a glorious year. And I had fallen hopelessly in love with this girl I met in driver's ed. I thought she was the most beautiful creature God had ever imagined and I couldn't believe she even knew my name. And she was honestly breathtaking, inside and out. She lived one street over from us and — get this — her street's name was my name. Take about fate. I dated other girls, but I could feel it was all about her. It took me an entire year to convince her to go out with me. And it was everything and more than I could have imagined. It was the greatest summer of my life.
And so into this world did I truly awaken:
"I'M ALIVE"
[The gods awaken, and frolic again among the mortals.]
"MAGIC"
"SUSPENDED IN TIME"
"SUDDENLY"
"DON'T WALK AWAY"
"WHENEVER YOU'RE AWAY FROM ME"
"ALL OVER THE WORLD"
"CLASH OF THE TIMELINES"
["This is the eighties!" LMAO.]
"XANADU"
THE POINT?
When I think of "Xanadu" I think of this memory. This time and place. This group of people. This feeling. Me and my new friend Kevin going to see corny old "Xanadu" and loving it. And then me, Kevin and Linda going again to see it (there's Kevin and Linda, to the left), but something got screwed up with the tickets and there were only two, so I sat in that Thunderbird for 90 minutes in the scorching Alabama sun while they watched the movie in a nice air-conditioned theatre, and I spent the time sweating out my love and angst in poetry scribbled furiously from a pad in the car with each note released upon the winds of fate to be carried away. I was head-over-heels in love with this girl from driver's ed, you see, and I wanted her to know it — but it had to be done magically, like in "Xanadu". It was very corny and just pure heart medicine. Very innocent stuff. I remember it so fondly and so well, and I remember understanding that I should honor it because it was fragile and tender and ephemeral. And indeed it was. But it also worked, my poetic professions to the muses, because although it took me a year, I did get the girl in the end and we had a magical, glorious summer, she and I. It was so worth the investment and the wait.
~ Ciao Sharon!
ARCHIVE
- 1st Publication: October 23, 2017
- 2nd Publication: February 24, 2024 [with significant updates/additions]
