You Have to Believe We Are Magic

You ever have an experience where an item you've had for a long time suddenly feels completely outdated and in need of a wholesale change?  Like a bed or a car or something you use every day and don't give it a second thought.  Then one day you walk into your room or garage and think,  "Wow, I really need to upgrade."

When I got back from China last week, one of the first things I did was stop in to look over the current state of this blog space. As you may have noticed, I experienced that outdated feeling when I looked at this site.  Has it really looked the same since 2009?  Shame on me.  

I've been busy since I got back, so I set out some time today to update the blog's look, right after I went to the gym.  On the way back from the gym, I heard some Electric Light Orchestra on the radio.  ELO tunes have a certain infectiousness.  As I sat down to work on the revamp, I couldn't get the song out of my head.  And for some reason, from the time I was probably eight years old, when I think of ELO, I always associate them with Xanadu, even their non-Xanadu stuff.  There's a reason for this.  

See, when I was eight, that was about seven years after Xanadu was released.  I must have been in about third grade and my brother Griswold was in high school.  Our family had this enormous piece of furniture that housed a record player, a sprawling monolith to melodious vinyl, entombed in 70's-shiek carved maple.  The thing must have weighed over 400 lbs, and was showcased in our main family room.  Most of our records, as far as I can remember, were classical or stuff my mother would listen to, like The Carpenters.  But us kids were rock and roll kids.  As the youngest, I was raised on the tastes of my older siblings, which meant Van Halen and AC/DC ruled, or even some classic rock bands like Boston.  I had never heard of Eurasure or Depeche Mode until I went on a mission and had to live with kids from Utah.  Listening to that synth-pop stuff might have gotten me an economy class trip down a flight of stairs, courtesy of Big Brother Airlines.  

One day I came home from school, and through the front door I heard the sweet harmony of Olivia Newton-John and ELO.  I curiously opened the door and walked into the living room to find Griswold sitting in front of the record player intently studying something in his hands, (what I later discovered was the vinyl jacket for the Xanadu soundtrack).  I piped up and asked what he was listening to.  He flinched and hurriedly turned the music off, as though I'd caught him looking at a dirty magazine in the living room.  "Nothing.  Just go away.  Forget about it.  Nothing."  He stuffed the jacket back into the stack of records and headed downstairs to his room.  I doubt Griswold even remembers this incident, but for some reason it has remained vivid in my mind for 25 years.  

Anyway, I'd never seen the movie until today.  With ELO jamming in my head, I decided to look up Xanadu on Netflix and watch it while I worked on the blog.  I'm about an one hour into the movie and one thing is becoming increasingly clear:  there is a drug imbalance here.  Either I need more of them, or this movie needs less. I guess this is about the time that Hollywood was experimenting with a lot of split-reel overlays and neon lighting.  I also never realized how big roller skating was around the start of the 80's.  Probably because I missed out on the phenomenon on account of I couldn't even walk back then.  

Am I blowing your mind yet?

The second half of this is developing into a cinematic stew, with chunks of Saturday Night Fever, Tron, and Superman 2, and just a dash of Clash of the Titans thrown in for seasoning.  Which is to say, totally mind-blowing.  Not sure if it's in a good way.  But man, Olivia Newton-John is spectacularly hot in this show.  I'd don some plum smugglers and pull on my roller skates if I could curl up with a woman like that on a couch like mine to watch shows like this.  

Unfortunately for me and my roller skates, if I dressed like Michael Beck does in this movie, I'd likely be drawing a whole different crowd (hello Miami, here I come!)