Self Titled Album

Light and dark. Soul and flesh. Spirit and the world. "Elton John" is an album of dualities. It's part Elton John the soulful bluesman, part Reginald Dwight the English lad. Later, John and lyricist Bernie Taupin will be able to meld these two sides of the coin into a brassy bronze whole, but on this second album, they're still flipping the coin back and forth.

It makes "Elton John" a strange listening experience. Later albums like "Tumbleweed Connection," "Madman Across the Water," and especially "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy," are practically concept albums (and "Captain Fantastic" actually is), a sign to today's generation that Elton John was as much a rock artist as other 70s greats like Zeppelin and Bowie. But Elton's reputation among the young and hep has steadily declined since the early 80s, partly owing to the break up with Bernie Taupin (meaning the music's gotten less Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting and more Saturday night's the night for drinking wine and listening to soft rock radio) and partly owing to Elton's continued transformation into the world's slightly daffy and rotund but still fun at parties middle aged gay uncle. A listen to his early and mid 70s output, however, quietly dispells the myth that Elton John's music is fit only for the dentist's office or Princess Di funerals.

Even a messy masterpiece like the self-titled second album shows that Elton and Bernie were caught up in a swirl of rock and blues and sad English strings, teetering between being the soundtrack for a road trip across a sun-soaked and Southern-fried U.S. heartland or the soundtrack for a European art film. Both are compelling musical identities in and of themselves, but when combined together they would become the signature sound that would define the originality and brilliance of the 70s Elton John era.

What makes "Elton John" such a compelling record is that we, the listeners, get to hear the struggle within Elton as he seeks to find his musical identity. The duality of the album tugs at the duality in our own souls, between the soulful uplift of the blues-influenced tunes and the plaintive greyness of the English harpsichord ballads. We hold these identities within ourselves too: the sunshine promise of a new day, the yearning for the sun that comes from Elton's brand of sunny blues, and then it's opposite, the rain-swept overcast that clouds our hearts as we face the heartaches and regrets of life. Only in "Your Song" does Elton harmonize the two natures. "Your Song" is a slight smile and a small sorrow; it's yellow-blue sunlight peaking through the grey clouds; it's an English love song by way of a New York rooftop. A 1970s New York rooftop, naturally.

Will the things I write today sound as good tomorrow?

I lost my mind. Over the past three months I've been student teaching, finishing my Masters in Teaching degree, and coming to the not-really-very-sudden-more-of-a-growing-knowingness-and-confirmation-of-all-I-knew-to-be-true realization that I did not, and more importantly, should not, be a teacher. And all the while, the student teaching thing was hard as shit, and I had literally no life whatsoever because teaching was my life and gods did it suck. Summers off? Necessary. Completely and utterly. Pay these people more.

So now I've been broken, and my mind is a little weary and miswired and this blog is the result. I didn't want to go back to the old blog with its lame attempts at intellectual insight and respectability -- a sad imitation of better blogs; a weak effort on my part to join the film blogosphere's ongoing conversation on cinema; a yappy younger sister all my life and that blog was just one more example in my growing portfolio. No more. This new blog is just another fine attempt at reinvention, which is my specialty, but I also wanted to experiment with voice (my writing "voice," for those of you not down with the English teacher lingo) so that my online writing could most closely approximate my own real voice, no more hiding behind imitations of other, better writers, no more trying to fit into the mold, to match the sound and rhythms of the master bloggers who are writing about film and culture, that I read every day, those writers whom I could never equal even if I tried (and I did). This blog is formless. Or, it's formal. It's about film. Or not. It's about what I did during breakfast today (more, stay tuned...) or it's about the etymology of the word "breakfast" itself. The only thing to recommend the blog is my writing -- I'm gonna live or die based on how much others want to read my writing (funeral at 11:00). The topics might come into play, but I'm mostly banking on my personality, that whole voice-thing I mentioned earlier. I'm going to try to write/post something everyday. We'll see how that works out, me with my big splashy plans that always sparkle in my eye for about a day and that always/never seem to come to fruition. Heh...

Final word: Watched Art School Confidential with my cereal this morning (the first thing I did on my first non-student-teaching Monday since August, and it. was. awesome. Not the movie. The whole not-having-to-get-up-at-5:45am and go-teach-ignorant-teenagers-for-seven-hours thing) and found it (the movie this time) relentlessly cynical. It just never stopped. And that final shot does not redeem a thing. I am, however, very encouraged by the lack of cynicism in some corners of the multiplex this winter (see here for more). Art School Confidential felt very 2006-ish. So, yay for that I guess. Welcome to December 2007.