Musings from Arizona
Notes from Elliott on Letterboxd, his grandmother's life in music, and listening to Nirvana's "On a Plain" for an entire flight
"Oh it should be Emma Stone!" my Aunt Kim exclaimed.
"She was great but she's already won!" I responded. "And Lily Gladstone gave the performance of the year."
I spent more time talking about movies than I ever thought I would with my extended family. It's largely thanks to Letterboxd.
After catching up with my cousin Elsa, we started chatting about movies. I asked if she was on Letterboxd and she said yep, remarking that it feels like the first step, the initiation, into becoming a bigger movie person. We talked about the Oscar nominees (her fave being Anatomy of a Fall) and how we both really wanted Lily Gladstone to win best actress (sad :( but congrats to Aunt Kim). Elsa mentioned begging her friends to see Killers of the Flower Moon, even bribing them by saying that she'd pay for their tickets. Probably the most proud I've ever been of one of my cousins.
Later, my dad, my uncle Steve, my brother-in-law/best pal Cody, my cousins Aidan and Mitchell and I all talked about movies in the living room, those with Letterboxd profiles reading out their current top fours. Conversation switched over to favorite baseball movies (the original Bad News Bears for Cody and I) and then making a Mt. Rushmore for Eddie Murphy joints; took us all of 10 seconds to land on 48 Hrs., Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, and Coming to America (sorry Daddy Day Care stans). Anticipation was also in the air for Dune 2 from most of the family — I’m not looking forward to defending my lukewarm take on it when we're all together next.
It's been wild to see the website that I've been using daily for over 10 years become part of the lexicon when half of my extended family is chatting about it. I felt a bit like Abe Simpson, talking about the original days of Letterboxd, thinking to myself about when I logged Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy back when it was in the triple digits of logs, now sitting at 36K (to be clear, this isn’t me trying to be like, I saw ___ band before they were huge! Nah, this is just me outing myself as a movie dork who has spent an ungodly amount of time on that website.)
My dad has been using Letterboxd for a few months now and he credits it with getting him back into watching movies big time. Hell yeah to that. Just the other day we watched one of his favorites, Stealing Home starring Mark Harmon and Jodie Foster. My dad’s wanted to show it to me for a decade+, and I don't know how long it would've taken us had it not been on his LB watchlist (I had no idea movies you've already seen can be in your watchlist.)
Those TikToks of the site asking famous actors/directors/film people their four favorites has more influence than I thought too. I took for granted how it immediately puts movies on people's radar they wouldn't have sought out/known about otherwise. The film that features maybe Jack Nicholson's greatest performance, Five Easy Pieces, is on now my dad's watchlist after seeing Adam Sandler mention it in a TikTok. What a world we live in.
I was with my family for my grandma's memorial service.
There's a lot of ways in which my grandma and I were/are similar. We love extended periods of being alone; relished being with people too, but need seclusion to truly recharge. We both hate cooking. And then there's music, an obsession we always connected over.
My grandma made her passion into her career, getting a masters degree in music and teaching music for decades to thousands of students (including former NBA player Steve Novak). She was a master piano player; recording albums and more formatively for me, filling the house with gorgeous music whenever I'd visit Arizona. Even in retirement my grandma didn't stop being a musical force; she led the Sun City Grand choir of over 100 members for 10 years. About 50 from her choir showed up at the memorial service, singing a song about how the best parts of her remain in those who knew her, how she lives on through all of us. It was profoundly special and moving.
The last time I saw my grandma we spent some time, fittingly, listening to music together. I showed her one of my favorites, Ryuichi Sakamoto's “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” It's a song that reminded me of her for years even though she’d never heard it. Sakamoto’s piece contains the same elegance and grace I'd hear and feel whenever she played. It will continue to always remind me of her.
Music even factored into the day that my grandma passed for my family and I. She died on February 2nd, the day when my parents, my sister and I, all venturing from different states, came into Las Vegas to see U2 at the Sphere. My grandma had been experiencing Parkinson’s for years, and entered hospice a week earlier and had been in a coma for several days, so we knew it would be any day. She was ready to go. And as much as we were going to dearly miss her, we wanted her to know peace; to finally be able to rest.
Look, it could be a random Tuesday with life feeling relatively slow, and seeing a U2 show that night could still be an overwhelming emotional experience. But when you see U2 with your family on the night when your grandma passes, and her spirit, her music-loving spirit that fostered our family's love for music is in the air — hoo boy.
There were so many different emotions throughout the night, but the primary and overarching feeling was one of total gratitude; beyond grateful to be with my family in this insane sphere, and grateful to have as many cherished memories with my grandma as I do, to have gotten to share in the abundantly rich, musical life that she lived. I felt her when they played “Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?” and of course, when they played the divine/best song ever, “Where The Streets Have No Name.”
It was an unforgettable night of remembering and celebrating an unforgettable woman.
Sometimes music is the best thing in the world as evidenced above. In other cases, it's torturous. We're getting the full spectrum here.
About 15 years ago, my buddy Tank (his real name is Spencer but we call him Tank) floated the idea that it would be funny to listen to Nirvana's "On a Plain" for the duration of an entire flight. The spelling is different, but the chorus says, over and over, "I'm on a plain. I can't complain", so it could sound like, "I'm on a plane. I can't complain." It's a silly challenge we joked about doing for a decade and a half.
Last month we saw on Instagram that Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter fka Lingua Ignota listened to Vengaboys for 4 hours straight on a drive. That resurfaced the idea. Later, we realized we were both going to be on 3 hour flights on the same day, despite being in different locations. It became clear that the time for joking was over. We had to finally du this.
Here are the rules we set:
Start listening as soon as the plane leaves the ground
Stop listening as soon as the plane touches the ground again
You can pause if you're talking to a flight attendant
You can only listen to the original Nevermind version. No MTV Unplugged, no other live versions/demos
So how as it?
I mean, it sucked!! Annoying as hell. There were many moments where I thought that I was going insane. "On a Plain" is unquestionably the most annoying Nevermind track and I would've made that claim before this excruciating exercise. You'd think that the longer it would go on, the worse it would get. That thankfully wasn’t the case though; the 10th through 20th listen was the low point. It was mostly white noise beyond that, my ears and brain started to tune it out as I played Retrobowl on my phone.
However, I played "On a Plain" the other day for a friend after talking about the challenge and I started to tighten up as soon as it began, my body feeling like I was back on a cramped flight, sitting in the back row right next to the bathrooms with minimal space. Sensory association is a powerful thing. My buddy and I (albeit a much lighter version), Clockwork Orange'd ourselves into never, ever wanting to hear that stupid song again.
The final tally was 58 listens. Maybe we'll do it again with a different tune (other brainstormed contenders — “Paper Planes,” “Learn to Fly,” “Airplanes,” the terrible RHCP's “Aeroplane.”) We can be like the Jackass guys who love afflicting ourselves for own amusement, but instead of having fans around the world delight in our hijinks, we'll tell our friends of our aerial escapades, only for them to go, "uh, why the hell did you do that?"
I don't know why. But cheers Tank. We survived the On a Plain/Plane challenge. Damn right I'll complain.
I’ll go to bat for “Aeroplane”