Blue Suede Shoes

When I was a younger man, back in the eighties when you could get away with that sort of thing, I owned a pair of blue suede shoes. I even have documentary evidence to prove it:



Man, I loved those shoes. I felt the same way about those shoes as Ray Bradbury felt about his sneakers in "Dandelion Wine."

But the funny thing about those shoes was this: They were dancing shoes. Literally. I am not making this up. You could not put on those shoes without wanting to dance, without being compelled to dance. The soles were wooden, so it was particularly fun to dance while wearing them on carpet.

Now, I've never told anyone this before, so bear with me.

So there I was, on the cusp of manhood, caught in that in-between time of going to school while working a full-time job, yet still living in my parents house and following their rules. Sleeping in my childhood bedroom had the wallpaper with sailing ships on it.

And in that place, I would close my bedroom door and put on those shoes. Tie them up real tight too. They liked that. Looking at them now, for the first time in maybe twenty years or so, I recall vividly that even the shoelaces were blue.

Then, I would reach into my record collection for one particular album had a good-looking black kid on the cover who, at the time, was also on the cusp of manhood and caught in an in-between time and place.

I would remove the album from its sleeve, sometimes bring it up to my face to take a big sniff of that not unpleasant chemical smell, and place it on my stereo.

And, though most all the songs on the album were danceable, the song I always danced to – the song the shoes themselves really seemed to like – was the first song on Side A. Made it real easy not to have to futz around with finding the groove.

And there, on the cusp of manhood, all alone in my childhood bedroom, I danced. And danced. And danced.

The force, you see . . . it had a lot of power . . .



I miss those shoes.

I miss my bedroom.

I miss childhood.

But mostly, I miss dancing.

And I wasn't gonna blog about this at all, but setting aside whatever else came later, thanks, Michael.

Thanks for making this awkward white kid dance.

RIP J. G. Ballard

I came late to J. G. Ballard. Like many, my first introduction to him came when Spielberg turned his semi-autobiographical memoir Empire of the Sun into a terrific film starring a young (and presumably less potty-mouthed) Christian Bale. I didn't go looking for it, but when I ran across a copy in a used bookshop, I didn't hesitate to pick it up.

The film itself pays remarkably fealty to the novel, with the exception I suppose that the book takes things just a bit further, with young Jamie saying farewell to China and moving to England (a country both he and the young J. G. Ballard had never been to.) I was delighted to learn there was a sequel. I found a paperback copy of The Kindness of Women in that very same used bookshop and it is to this day one of the best books I've ever read.

After that came the easy ones that can be found in most any bookstore: Rushing to Paradise, in which a group of idealistic environmentalists decide to create their own society on a tropical island with disastrous (and predictable) results, Crash (later made into a film by David Cronenberg) in which Ballard himself is the main character, who becomes strangely fixated on (and stimulated by) automobile crashes, and Concrete Jungle, a brilliant updating of Robinson Crusoe, in which a man's car veers off a heavily traveled highway and down into a ravine.

Some of his earlier works were more difficult to find. I bought High Rise on ebay, a horrific tale in which the somewhat laconic main character watches his condominium building turn into an adult and urban Lord of the Flies. Paperbacks of The Drowning World, The Burning World, and The Wind from Nowhere soon followed, and here I learned that Ballard's earliest work established him as one of the finest apocalyptic writers of his day.

I picked up book club editions of Chronopolis and The Crystal World, collections of short stories, from my trusty used bookshop. The Crystal World has a wonderful Max Ernst cover, enhancing the value of the first edition if you should be lucky enough to have one.

The last Ballard I picked up was his collection of essays A User's Guide to the Millennium, in which he opines on topics as varied as Andy Warhol and the Marquis de Sade.

At any rate, there are still some Ballard's I have yet to absorb, and for that I am grateful.

This reader will miss him.