Self Help Radio 020714: Hollow

The hollowness of human existence got you down?  Why not celebrate it instead?  Self Help Radio today celebrates hollow in all its forms.  Well, maybe not all its forms.  It's hollow, after all.  Just a lot of space.  Empty, you know.

The show is available for listening now! at the Self Help Radio website, or directly from here, by choosing either part one or part two.  The hollowest of songs are listed below.

As always, thanks for listening!

(part one)

"Hollow" House Of Love _Audience With The Mind_
"Hollow" Majestic _The Majestic 12 Years 1995-1996_

"Hollow Hills (live)" Bauhaus _Mask_
"Hollow Eyes (12" Version)" Red Lorry Yellow Lorry _Talk About The Weather_
"The Hollow Earth" Pere Ubu _The Tenement Year_
"Hollow Gut" Lowlife _From A Scream To A Whisper_

"All My Hollowness To You" Tall Dwarfs _Hello Cruel World_
"Pretty But Hollow" The Passmore Sisters _Violent Blue_
"Hollow Heart" Birdland _Hollow Heart 12"_
"Hollow Inside" The Hummingbirds _Love Buzz_

(part two)

"Jupiter Hollow" The Proctors _Pinstripes & Englishmen_
"Hollow Inside" The Cat's Miaow _Songs For Girls To Sing_

"Hollow Mind" The Fall _Are You Are Missing Winner_
"Another Hollow Line" Young Knives _Voices Of Animals & Men_
"Is Your Head Hollow" Tranzmitors _Tranzmitors_
"Hollow Hollow Eyes" Crocodiles _ Sleep Forever_
"Hollow Life" Frankie Rose & The Outs _Frankie Rose & The Outs_

"Hollow Inside" The Buzzcocks _A Different Kind Of Tension_
"In Hollow" Belltower _Popdropper_
"Hollow Time Of Night" The Barmitzvah Brothers _The Century Of Invention_
"Hollowed Out" Cut Off Your Hands _Hollow_

Whither Hollow?

The first time I read TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men," I had no familiarity with Guy Fawkes & only a vague understanding of the post-World-War-I world about which he was writing.  I just knew that at times I felt a little (or a lot) hollow.  I was a teenager, & looking for words that would either echo how I felt or attempt to fill that hollowness.  Eliot did both.

I am somewhat more solid in my middle age, but still occasionally fill that I'm not entirely filled by life. I watch movies, listen to music, read books, sometimes even talk to people.  But of course there's always a hollowness.  Old friends that I used to know on Usenet would tell me in one word what it is: angst.

I'm trying to remember if eighteen-year-old me thought that some day that hollow feeling would be gone.  The more-than-twice-that me thinks it might be a little boring if that were the case.  I would have to find another reason to listen to music, for example - which I suppose could be interesting, to only listen to music for something technical, like composition or artistry - but it wouldn't be me, & it might make me turn my back on music I have always loved.  Very little that I loved at one time seems strange or immature or "other" to me.  I am very rarely embarrassed, as some people are, at what I "used to listen to."

Some of my friends, in fact, are more embarrassed for me for what I listen to now.

It's my way of saying, I suppose, that there's always a part of me that's going to be hollow.

I just asked my wife, who's an anatomist, what parts of the human body are hollow.  There are a lot of them: the stomach, the intestines, the bladder, the nasal cavity, the maxillary sinuses, the lateral cervical triangle, among others.  She even said, "The cranium is hollow, until you stick a brain in it," as if she were a mad scientist.

Those are the physical parts of me that'll always be hollow.  But it turns out there's more.  & probably always will be.

Preface To Hollow: The Adventures Of Reverb & Echo!

"It doesn't make much sense, sir," said the young police cadet.

"No," grumbled the aged detective.  "It most assuredly does not."  He lit his cigar & motioned to the coroner's men to come get the body.  "How," he muttered to himself, "does a person get killed inside a hollowed-out tree?"

"NOT SO FAST!" a voice bounded out of the night sky.  Everyone recognized it - it belonged to the Redoubtable Resounder himself: Reverb!

"Oh fuck," sighed the grumpy detective.  "I bet he brought that underage kid with him, too…"

"Not so fast!" a pubescent voice came, as if in response.  It was everyone's favorite Child Comeback, Echo!

"I HAVE THIS COMMISSIONER!" said the hero.  "I have this!" echoed Echo.

"Look, fellows," the detective said, "this is not the time & place…"

"DOUBTLESS THE WORK OF THE NEFARIOUS NECRO-THIEF!" said Reverb.  "Nefarious thief!" said Echo.

"I know we're outdoors, fellows," said the detective, "but can you use your indoor voice?"

"Excuse me, detective!"  A woman was pushing her way through the police cordon.  "Mary Malone, Child Protective Services.  I need a word with the man in the leather outfit."

"ECHO!" said the champion of justice, "USE YOUR REVERB-RAYS TO SEE IF THERE ARE MAGGOTS OR OTHER CORPSE-EATING VERMIN AROUND THE BODY!"

"Maggots!" said Echo, pulling a device like a small flashlight out of his belt.

"You! You!" said Mary Malone.

"YES, MA'AM? HOW CAN I HELP?"

"How old is that child there?" she asked, pointing at Echo.

"ER.  OLD?  HE'S MY SIDEKICK, THE REPETITIVE PALADIN HIMSELF!"

"Himself!" said Echo.

"Don't you yell at me, mister," said Mary Malone, poking the improbably clad hero in the chest.

"Er," he said.

"Is this young man Ernie Jackson, son of Clarence & Wilma Jackson, who live on Glendale Lane?"

"Mom & Dad?" said Echo.

"Son," said Mary Malone, "your parents are very worried about you!"

"They're not dead?" asked Echo, looking at Reverb.

"ANOTHER EVIL PLOT BY THE CONFOUNDER!" said Reverb, bursting into action.  He grabbed Echo around the waist & took off running into the forest.

"What the?" said Mary Malone, turning to the grizzled detective.  "Why don't you stop him?"

"This is homicide, ma'am," he said.  He turned to the young police cadet.  "Where's the coroner?"

"For fuck's sake!" said Mary Malone, turning & storming back to her car.

The old detective, who really thought he had seen it all, leaned on the tree that was the crime scene & puffed on his stogie.  The body seemed to be cut in three as they pulled it out.

"Who the fuck does something like that?" he thought to himself.  He looked into the forest where he thought he heard a young boy crying.

Punch A Bee

I found this on a Tumblr site:

I have no idea what it means, but it made me laugh.

Things are odd that way.

People Die During Allegations Of The Super Bowl All The Time

I sure enjoyed the hell out of watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman act.  He seemed like a shy, sensitive fellow, & his co-worker's tweets seemed to bear that out.  Jim Carrey tweeted, "For the most sensitive among us the noise can be too much."

So many people I admire, who were artists & musicians, have been dashed on the rocks thanks to the siren song of heroin.  I am squeamish when it comes to people poking needles into me; I always make sure I am lying down & looking away when someone takes my blood at the doctor's.  As such, heroin addiction was not much of a threat.

Also, I've never know any dealers.  Or if I have, I didn't know they were dealers.  I am astonished that people get drugs at all.  I wouldn't know the first place to find them.

A few friends on the Face-type-Book are wringing their hands about Woody Allen, whose adopted daughter has written an open letter accusing him, as she has for twenty years now, of sexually molesting her when she was seven.  This comes after her mother Mia Farrow & half-brother Ronan Farrow tweeted the allegations when Woody Allen won an award at the Golden Globes, & also after documentarian Robert Weide wrote a defense of Allen.  After the Dylan Farrow article, Roger Friedman wrote this article which suggests that this is some kind of campaign by Farrow to keep these accusations out there.

I don't think this is as big an issue for many of my friends for a couple of reasons.  One, a lot of them don't watch or don't enjoy Woody Allen movies.  Two, there's a contingent of them who, whether they like Woody Allen's movies or not, always side with the victim & decided, twenty years ago, he was a pervert on the level of Roman Polanski (who pled guilty to child molestation) or Michael Jackson (who was acquitted of one count but earlier settled out of court to the tune of 25 million dollars for another).

A smaller contingent might be my own: I don't know what to believe.  I certainly don't want to find out that someone whose body of work I admire is actually a pedophile, but I don't think there's enough evidence to prove it conclusively.  However, I am deeply affected by Dylan Farrow's letter & my heart goes out to her.  I just find myself so full of doubt I don't think I can even begin to know what really happened.

I often find you can tell a lot about a person by their initial reactions to such allegations.  I do the same thing, have the same sorts of things that I will automatically jump in defense of without thinking it through first.  I check myself, however, & try not to jump on the Twitter or whatever & throw out accusations.  I wish most of us could install the same sort of filter.

But it's intriguing how experience & loyalty fuck with the filter.  I dated for a while a sweet woman who was a feminist, who would automatically take the side of any woman who claimed to be raped or sexually assaulted or sexually harassed.  She volunteered at a battered woman's shelter & she had seen first-hand the devastation that violence against women caused.

She also was part of a new-age-y self-help group whose leader was, during the time I was finding out what she was a part of, accused by many female members of the group of raping them during their quasi-religious therapy sessions.  The number at the time was growing.  When I mentioned this to my girlfriend, she automatically dismissed those women's claims outright.  She couldn't believe the founder of her therapy-ish religion could do such a thing.

Although if it had been a Christian, she would've sided with the women.

I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night, but I read tweets about it.  (I'm so meta.)  I understand it was a shut-out, & not enough of a contest to be entertaining.  Someone either there or Facebook said something funny, which I paraphrase: I didn't watch the Super Bowl, but as I was flipping channels, every time I came to the game, the Seahawks were scoring.