From WCRS Detroit and Public Snark International, this is Life, Death and Violence. Every week on our program we choose a theme and research a number of people and events that fit that theme. Today on Life, Death and Violence: Paradise. Imagine, for a moment, if you will, that paradise is exactly where you are right now, only much, much better. This is the land in which we will be traveling to today. Paradise though, is merely a dream, a hope, and, naturally we’ll be discussing the very nature of hopes and dreams today as well. I had a dream last night. I dreamt that I was about to be murdered in old Tiger Stadium, but, at the last minute, I was saved by this week’s Life, Death and Violence Crush Object™, Diana Rigg.
Diana entered from the visiting dugout, dressed, obviously, as Mrs. Emma Peel in a bright orange jumpsuit. She shot my attacker’s knife out of his hand and proceeded to dispatch him in a brief battle in hand to hand combat. Diana and I then rode out of Old Tiger Stadium on a beautiful white stallion which we rode across the pond and into Paris. 
It seemed like an instant, that ride, and I found myself transported from urban decay to a quiet little cafe in Montmarte drinking coffee delivered by our waiter, a centaur. The centaur began to tell a long story, which I will summarize in brief. His utopian home had been ravaged by humanoid goats and all the centaurs were forced into exile by the king of the goats, a potbellied pig named Phillip. Our waiter, Brian, then took my name and number when I asked if there was anything I could do to help and Diana and I each received a letter shortly after enlisting us as Generals in the Centaur Army. We went to Centauristan, kicked some goat butt, made delicious bacon out of Phillip and returned the land to the centaurs. Brian, for enlisting us who saved the nation, was named King and we all had a champagne toast in their golden palace. I woke up just as my gift from the centaurs, Joseph Gordon Levitt, leaned in to kiss me. I hate dreams. They always shatter.
Our show today, in four acts.
Act One: Trouble in Paradise: She was on top of the world, but found herself ready to snap.
Act Two: The Fulfillment of Dreams: The story of a writer who hit the big time and stayed there.
Act Three: The Death of Dreams: A disastrous failure shocks the nation.
Act Four: The Birth of Dreams: How one nation’s discovery changed the world, but was it for the worse?
Act One: Trouble in Paradise
The Carpenters: Top of the World
I remember, being a little kid in Metro Detroit, when I heard my first Carpenters song. I was, maybe, four, and having trouble going to sleep. I’d gone to sleep for a little bit, but had had a nightmare and was too afraid to try again. I called out for my mother around 1AM. She got me a glass of water and sang me “Close to You,” which calmed me down enough to fall back into the land of good dreams, where the impossible becomes possible and everything is made of rainbows. The next morning, I asked my mother to sing the song for me again, but, instead, she pulled out a vinyl copy of the Close to You album and played it for me while she got ready for work. At the time, she was working the afternoon shift at the local hospital, so my sister and I got to see her in the morning as our days were starting, which I really liked. I wasn’t in preschool at the time. I’d dropped out because the other kids were being mean to me and I had massive separation anxiety. Karen Carpenter’s voice reminded me of my mother, even though my mother didn’t sing nearly as well, so I played that record over and over and over again. We got rid of it a few years later when my parents switched from vinyl and tape over to compact disc, but it was fairly well worn anyways. Who knows how much longer it would have lasted.
The devastation felt when I found out Karen Carpenter had died before I was born was heartwrenching. I wasn’t blind. I understood from the copyright on the album that the record was released in 1970, but the girl on it looked so young. She couldn’t possibly be dead. People only die when they’re old. Such is the naivete of youth, I suppose. And when I found out she died because, as I understood it, her heart stopped, I was even more confused and all my mother would say was that Karen stopped eating. My mother doesn’t eat a lot, so I didn’t really understand that. Why had she stopped eating? Was she on a diet? Why would she be on a diet? She looked pretty. I was too young to understand media blitzkrieg, so I just sat there for years questioning what happened to Karen Carpenter.
Karen left my thoughts and my music collection for about a decade, until I found myself in New York City. It was big, scary, unknown. I felt alone. I didn’t know anybody. I was living with strangers I’d met on Craigslist and had planned to get an apartment with since they were moving out of theirs. After that plan fell through (which I find to be the worst thing to happen to me: a true 3br with a fireplace and a big kitchen, lots of light and in a pre-war building for 1400/month fully furnished was lost because one of the girls I was going to live with decided Bed Stuy was too dangerous for her and she’d find another apartment for 450/month elsewhere. As if, woman. I was too weak and insecure to find two other people to take the apartment with me and I ended up in a bedbug ridden hellhole in Sunset Park before moving into the dorms at Pratt Institute), Karen came back into my life. I was depressed and lonely, feeling the peak of my suicidal wishes. Rainy Days and Mondays, I decided, was what I’d kill myself to. It wasn’t a very happy time, until, I started re-listening to the happier music, going out and feeling better about myself. I can’t say that Karen Carpenter saved my life, but she did play a part in making me feel sane again, even if that sanity is still frequently challenged. I’m grateful for that, and I’m grateful that even though I didn’t get the chance to ever see her live since she died before my birth, that at least there’s a recording of her voice in every record store across America. The voice of an angel ready to change another person’s life, ready to make the world seem full of hopes, dreams and possibilities yet again, even in our darkest hour.
The Carpenters: Close to You
Act Two: The Fulfillment of Dreams
Today is the deathday of famed comic book artist Hergé. I first wanted to start writing watching the adventures of his famed Parisian journalist, Tin Tin and his dog, snowy. Let’s watch some of it together.
That Tin-Tin! Always getting into some sort of misadventure. This must be what it’s like to work for the New York Times! Right?
Act Three: The Death of Dreams
I wasn’t born during the Challenger Incident. It predated me by three years, but I did feel a closeness to the incident once I’d found out that our middle school principal, the only principal I’ve ever liked, whose name was, and if I’m lying about this may the Flying Spaghetti Monster strike me dead, Dr. Freeze, was one of the runner-ups for the Teacher in Space program. Someone I knew could have been killed in a massive space-oriented explosion, which horrified me as a space-obsessed tween who’d gone to Space Camp a few years earlier. This event was revisited shortly after the attacks on 9/11, which, naturally, my awful middle school neglected to tell us about causing me to come home all happy-go-lucky because soccer practice was cancelled and I really didn’t want to go to soccer practice that day. My sister, in response, snarled at me viciously and directed my attention to the television. It felt weird to watch an explosion over and over and over again and I got the sense that this is what my parents were doing in ’86, not knowing that someone they would soon know was almost on that shuttle. This week wasn’t the 25th Anniversary of the explosion, that was a few months ago. Instead it contains an even sadder bit of emotional violence: The discovery of the crew cabin in the Atlantic Ocean.
These “what if” fascinations haunted me for quite some time, especially once the Columbia shuttle exploded on reentry. I kept thinking to myself. What would I do if someone I knew died in an explosion that was plastered all over national television? How would I react? I never came up with an answer, simply because I understood that I couldn’t empathize with anyone involved in such an incident if it didn’t happen to me. I could sympathize. I could say “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m here if you need me,” but I couldn’t say “I understand. It’s going to be okay,” because I didn’t understand, I didn’t know if it would be okay. Months later, I experienced my first death, that of my grandfather/puzzle partner. Even then, I still felt I couldn’t empathize with a death so sudden. My grandfather had been ill for months from lung cancer and we weren’t surprised when he finally passed. I think that, as crushed as she was, it was a bit of a relief for my grandmother. That year was very stressful in my family because of my grandfather’s rapidly deteriorating health, but if he had died in, say, a car crash, things would have been a lot different. The mourning would have lasted much longer, just as I’m certain that Christa McAuliffe’s family is still morning her loss, after that fireball in the sky, and having a record of her exact moment of death on hand has to be a surefire way to make it impossible to move on. For that reason, as easy as it may be to post, I’m opting to not post a video of the Challenger Disaster. I’m not going to promote the fetishization of death. All those disasters and space misadventures though did nothing to halt my love of space and desire to be an astronaut. That’s the responsibility of my complete hatred of Algebra 2 which led to my complete hate of Chemistry which led me into the arts.
S Club 7: Reach For the Stars
Act Four: The Birth of Dreams
In 1938, Saudi Arabia discovered oil in its borders, launching the 20th Century Mideastern Oil Boom and creating a dependence on the region that, nearly a decade ago, led to war, yet again, over the black, golden syrup. I’m not an expert on Mideastern Affairs and I’m not going to pretend to be. We all know that our over-reliance on oil is bad for the future of the planet. I’m going to leave Act Four up for discussion in the comments. Would the world be any different if that level of oil was, say, discovered in Western Europe, or would we just be at war with the French instead (oh what an easy war that would be!?) Can tension ever be resolved so as to lighten the stress on our ever dwindling oil reserves? What is there to be done? Let’s talk oil.
Salt n Pepa: Let’s Talk About Oil Sex
