July, Connecticut: Tumbleweeds / Star Wars

I saw Michael Ian Black do stand-up in Arlington, Virginia about six months ago. He talked about moving from Connecticut to Savanna, Georgia. In this bit, he said something along the lines of: “Connecticut has so many great cities, such as…”

…and then could not name any. Someone in the audience shouted, “Hartford!”

He quipped back: “Hartford is a city in Connecticut, I’ll grant you that. Is it a great city? Who’s to say?”

A reductive look at the east coast would chalk up the major cities as: DC, Baltimore, Philly, New York, maybe Providence, and then Boston. What’s to know of Connecticut? They invented Lyme disease and sometimes they put clams on pizza. Oh, and some old money, country club buttholes were won over by Trump.

As far as stereotypes, I’ve seen worse. But I am here today to tell you that Niantic, Connecticut is a straight-up cultural mecca. I am speaking of the very specific culture of books and records.

If you’re a book person, you probably know of Powell’s in Portland, Oregon and The Strand in NYC. In terms of a book buying experience that will make you say: “Please bury me here” the Book Barn in Niantic is a place you should know about.

“Barn” suggests a single structure, but the place is actually a compound of barns, connected by weaving paths, with various wooden arrow signposts pointing this way and that. Powell’s and The Stand both feel recognizable: they are bookstores that happen to be massive. The Book Barn has a different impact: you gaze around wondering: How is this real?

In addition to having an amazing setup, I’m happy to report that the selection is excellent as well. I’m the sort of shopper who tends to glance at the selection of Nabokov books in any used bookstore. This is the first time I’ve spotted a hardback copy of his memoir, Speak Memory. 

And, yes, I bought it—along with an armful of assorted hard and paperbacks. The cashier rang it up, and the total price was shockingly low. “Welcome to the Book Barn,” she said. “We don’t charge.”

So, that’s awesome.

There’s a “downtown” location as well, which is also good, though the format is a bit more cognizable and hence less transformative.

A few blocks from the downtown store is a hippy shop called Tumbleweeds. The front part of Tumbleweeds features tie-dye, incense, dreamcatchers, and knickknacks of that ilk. 

In the back is a small record shop, pretty well tucked away from view. I am here today to tell you that, of the record stores that I’ve visited this year, Tumbleweeds has been my personal favorite.

Two employees, both very nice, were grading some newly acquired used records, holding the grooves up to the light, testing each record, front and back, on the shop’s turntable. The selection wasn’t huge, but everything on offer seemed interesting. The Beatles section was mostly comprised of rarities and imports. The walls were lined with the high-dollar items that seemed to be priced relatively low, and it took every ounce of willpower to not just hand over my life savings and buy the whole damned shop.

I shall return another day and do so. This particular time, I limited myself to a single purchase. I normally don’t flock to the soundtracks section, but for the love of god, look!

This was a painfully tough call, but the one that jumped out at me was the Star Wars soundtrack—issued in 1977, back when it was just called Star Wars (fellow nerds know that they tacked on “Episode IV: A New Hope” in the 1981). 

A sticker on the plastic cover indicated that the record contained an original poster. I got the attention of one of the friendly employees and asked to see it. He hadn’t seen the poster yet either, so he was happy to oblige. He carefully unpinned it from the wall, slid out the poster, and began to unfold it. At my first glimpse, I said, “Wow. Sold.”

I loved that this was a painting, rather than a movie-still, and that—having seen a bajillion Star Wars things in my lifetime—this particular image was new to me. 

The record insert included a thorough breakdown of the selections on the soundtrack and some explanatory writing from John Williams. 

I was struck by this passage in particular:

George felt that since the picture was so original and so different in all of its physical orientations—creatures unknown, places unseen, and noises unheard of—that the music should be on a fairly familiar emotional level. He didn’t want electronic or concrete music. Rather, he wanted a dichotomy to his visuals, an almost 19th Century romantic, symphonic score against these yet unseen sights.

Star Wars and its score are now so familiar it's difficult to imagine it having been handled any other way. In fact, if you watch the original trailer, which doesn't any of the music, it's surprisingly not stirring:

We all shat on George Lucas in the 1990s, but some due credit: another director might've looked at this spage-aged epic and concluded that the score should have been, well, space-aged. After all, this is the late 1970s, the heyday of Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Giorgio Moroder...all of whom were looking eagerly forward, not back. 

On that note, when we look at Star Wars, in what direction are we looking? The scrolling intro famously tells us that this happened A long time ago... I'm not an expert on the genre, but it seems to me that science fiction (robots, lasers) tends to imagine our future, whereas fantasy (wizards, unicorns) tends to offer a magical send-up of our past. Given how far, far away this all takes place, it strikes me as a wise move to ground it in music that feels like it was composed on the planet where the audience resides.

As for the score that John Williams created, it has since gone from pointing back to emotionally familiar themes to becoming one in its own right. For example, like pretty much everyone in my generation, I hated the 90s prequels. And among the key reasons we hated them was: This doesn’t even look like Star Wars! And then I loved The Force Awakens in large part because it looked like Star Wars again. But what the nine movies share is how they sound. Part of this is the pew pew of the lasers, the roar of the ships, the thrilling splash and hum of the light sabers...but it’s mostly the familiar score that creates a common thread throughout the highs and lows of the franchise.

At the top of the liner notes is a quote from George Lucas:

“instead of making ‘isn’t-it-terrible-what’s-happening-to-mankind’ movies, which is how I began, I decided that I’d…make a film so rooted in imagination that the grimness of everyday life would not follow the audience into the theater. In other words, for two hours, they could forget.”

It clearly worked, though I’d say it has since grown into something else. These “creatures unknown, places unseen” which thrilled audiences in 1977 now offer us aging fans the opposite: they are comfortingly familiar. I will geek out further and say that this has me recalling Han Solo’s entrance in The Force Awakens when Han and Chewbacca reclaim the Millennium Falcon: “Chewie…we’re home.”