first round
(14) Talk Talk, “it’s my life”
BLEW OUT
(3) Patrick Swayze ft Wendy Fraser, “She’s Like the wind”
275-131
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SECOND ROUND
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/9/23.
erin vachon on “she’s like the wind”
Toward the end of the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, Johnny and Baby are parting at the summer resort. Johnny, fired for their relationship. Baby, sentenced to stay with her Sears-portrait family and play Parcheesi every afternoon. They laugh about their passionate adventure, Baby saying, "I guess we surprised everybody," and Johnny replying, "I guess we did." Baby headbutts Johnny's stomach in tender gesture, and he kisses her wild curls. Johnny says he'll, "Never be sorry," and Baby says, "Neither will I." They kiss, and he drives off in his black '57 Chevy, kicking up a dirt cloud behind him. She watches the car descend over the hill, ballet flats scuffing the ground. "She's Like the Wind" swells over the scene, Patrick Swayze singing, "Living without her / I'd go insane," as his character Johnny leaves, both of them solo, and then Baby is alone.
It's the late 90's, and I'm running away from my family's house to jump into a Jeep Cherokee, clumsy footed in flapping army navy jacket and torn Converse. My best friend drives stick shift in a buckled and chained leather jacket, and we cross state lines, down Route 95 to the late-night diner, where harried waitresses scoff at customers who choose to sit in the non-smoking section. His jacket is warm, and so is he. We are both running from religious restriction in our family and community, sanitization sold as love. In the footwell of the Jeep, I find a ripped black and white photograph of him standing in front of his last car, a slick black Cadillac. We stay partners for over twenty years, first as friends, then lovers, then spouses, watching Dirty Dancing for comfort on all of our couches, and a photo of him in his younger rebel days hangs on the wall of our house, spiked hooks in his ears and nose and lip, until, one day, I gently take it down.
My very first encounter with Dirty Dancing was in the late 80s, plastic VHS on a cheap wire rack at an indie rental store. A line of videos in fixed rows, one after another. Then, boom: ecstatic bodies grinding, not even hidden behind the velvet curtain at the back of the shop. I wasn't tall enough to reach the case, just a kid. Like a Baby holding a watermelon, following some wisecrack guy into a dance hall, I was enthralled by the way limbs smushed together and confused why anything so beautiful could be shameful.
In the film, Baby follows Billy as he pops open that dancehall door with his butt, juggling melons, and the bacchanalia beyond is delicious and sweaty and filthy. It's a stark contrast to the capitalist model enforced by the summer resort, which insists on the containment of desire. "They shouldn't be showing off with each other," the boss's nephew says. "That's not going to sell lessons."
I've rewatched Dirty Dancing countless times, but last year, I kept pausing the dancehall scenes. "Queer people," I yelled. "There are queer people dancing back there." Same-sex couples grinding, butch on femme, hands on curved hips. An open secret, that the film held gender swaps the whole time, and how odd, I hadn't noticed before then. Out as queer for decades, I started self-identifying as gender-fluid a few months before. So, when the boss's nephew expresses irritation with the staff's desire, I heard encoded speech: "Don't push your pronouns or your lifestyle in the customer's face."
In their backroom dancing, I saw flickers of queer love and pleasure, unmonitored and rebellious. I also saw mass shootings at gay clubs because queer joy was the highest threat to capitalism, to white nationalism, to right-wing religious fascism. Such desire has always needed containment, and shame was its oldest weapon, even at cinematic summer resorts.
When Johnny leaves the resort, the community has not put him under pressure to leave. His fellow dancers love him, revere him as a leader. The Big Boss Man is threatened by Johnny's sensuality: those hips and his lips hold sexual power. Baby privately flourishes at the resort, not under Johnny, but alongside him as partner, through what he gives her permission to be in her body: an adult, desiring and rebellious. Sexual, yes, but also an activist on the ground, more immediate than her Peace Corps dreams or "monks burning themselves in protest."
The initial spark that ignites Baby and Johnny's love story isn't dance, but an ethical call to action. His regular dance partner needs an abortion, and Baby steps into her high-heeled shoes. Love rises out of their rigorous daily practice, showing up day after day for a common cause. While Johnny teaches Baby how to dance in sultry, sweaty montages, Baby teaches Johnny how to care about the larger world. "I've never known anybody like you," he says to Baby, "You look at the world and you think you can make it better."
Johnny may be shameless as a rebel, but he still sings guilt-stricken over Baby: "Can't look in her eyes / She's out of my league." bell hooks writes, "We can only move from perfect passion to perfect love when the illusions pass and we are able to use the energy and intensity generated by intense, overwhelming, erotic bonding to heighten self-discovery." If dance and activism intertwine as intimate mambo partners in the film, desire is the shared language between the two, the reason why Swayze yearns: "She doesn't know what she's done." Johnny returns for the last dance, self-actualized, because Baby has made him truly shameless.
But in order to get from Point A to Point B, first, Swayze has to sing all his fears and insecurities out loud.
This month, on a rewatch, I looked for those same-sex couples in the dancehall scenes and could only find boys that looked like dykes. A mirage. I saw what I needed to see in the dancing, and just like that, their gorgeous movements slipped from my hands a little, like wind. Not mine to hold at all.
I want to claim Dirty Dancing as a queer narrative.
Of course, it's not.
At least, not explicitly.
Baby in her pink dress and Johnny in his black pants at the end, man and woman, fulfill the heteronormative romance narrative. Johnny takes Baby's hand from her father at the end, and ownership transfers, man to man. Maybe that's why I keep returning to "She's Like the Wind," just before the final dance, and Swayze's broody preoccupation with loss, his emo concern with not being good enough. I'm chewing on the last carrion call of transition: shaking off dysphoria inside suburban American life.
Like many semi-femme queer folx, I re-read bell hooks' All About Love this autumn. Every few pages, I flipped back to the table of contents, eyeing the oncoming chapter on romantic love. "Help," I whispered to bell. "I'm in a bit of a mess.”
I'm not sure that I'm the right person to write about a love song at this stage of life, approaching uncoupling with my life-partner of over twenty years. He's a cis dude, the very best of them, but I'm queer as fuck, gender-fluid, and getting goopier by the minute. The love between us remains, maybe even grows. Otherwise, I've fumbled through ethical nonmonogamy on two left feet, but mostly fallen flat on my face. My old standby Dirty Dancing doesn't offer the same comfort as it once did, at least not at first glance. If you loved and loved with your full beating heart ("Guh-Gung, Guh-Gung," as Johnny says), the big dance number is supposed to be inevitable at the end.
The cis-hets promised.
Blueprints don't exist for our love story in mainstream media, no big ending. No one taught my partner and I how to dance through the steps, so we improvised.
Something deflated in me when I found out that Swayze originally co-wrote "She's Like the Wind" with Stacy Widelitz in 1984 for Grandview, U.S.A., a bizarre, mostly out-of-print film where Jaime Lee Curtis and a high school student fall in love. Swayze plays her jilted lover. When they didn't use the song for the film, he pitched it to Dirty Dancing as a backup plan. "What about Baby?" I thought. I wanted to fix the song to the place it rightfully belonged, tack it down solid with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, bind them to each other in dancehall eternity. Except, it turns out, the two of them had no chemistry on set. Their love story was rumored to be flat offscreen.
Recently I found myself saying that the relationship between me and my partner is one of the huge achievements in my life. We've each undone unhealthy or abusive patterns lodged into the deep meat and muscles of our respective pasts, learned to communicate, and love each other well. I've learned to trust my own abilities with a dance partner, tighten my spaghetti arms and hold my frame, strengthening my solo dance. Still, I am fighting the traitorous feeling of failure, driving off before the big number at the end.
Jack Halberstam writes, "The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being." Cultural narratives teach us to feel shame around our failures and our desires, but queer logic urges us on: fuck, dance, and go down in flames. Shame is a voyeuristic wallflower outside of ourselves, a way of keeping us from moving as fluid creatures, from realizing that we are filled with as much power and energy as the wind.
Swayze co-wrote "She's Like the Wind" for his wife, Lisa Niemi, who he was with for 34 years, until his death in 2009 at 57 of pancreatic cancer. When Swayze's Point Break brother, Keanu Reeves, caught the cultural zeitgeist wave, lifted up in Netflix cameos and playing with puppies in interviews, I thought, "Swayze would rise like this too, if he were still alive." Maybe even higher, fully appreciated for To Wong Foo and his ballet training, vulnerabilities that ripened a smidge early. I deeply mourn Swayze's passing and wonder what synchronous gifts he would offer us to understand masculinity anew.
At the moment we lose sight of Johnny as he drives over the hill, Swayze's voice lingers like a ghost. He sings, "Feel her breath in my face / Her body close to me," over a montage of Baby pining, gazing off into the distance on a cabin porch, then leaning for comfort on her sister's shoulder. But as Johnny visually drives off, Swayze rises up in another form, in song. Johnny's musical yearning is as present as telepathy from the moment that the lovers go separate ways.
If the song is meant to signal loss, Swayze's ephemerality, like the energy exchanged in movement, or sex, or love, isn't ever truly lost so much as converted. Like the wind, you can't hold onto the experience and clutch it safe, only ride through it, like a dance.
Swayze wrote about his wife as wind in his song, fleeting and ungraspable, even though history tells us he held onto her for his entire life. Love understood this way is transformative because it insists upon action, loving as verb rather than noun. bell hooks writes, “How different things might be if...instead of saying 'I am in love" we said 'I am loving' or 'I will love.'"
When he passed away, Swayze's wife wrote in her memoir that his last words to her were, "I love you."
So in a moment that feels like true failure, (forgive me for exposing this ugly cis-het movie script) after a night of reading transphobic hate speech on social media, most of it by colleagues inside the writing community, feeling exhausted from trying to live shamelessly, unapologetically, I find myself standing in my kitchen, apologizing to my partner while pasta boils on the stove, saying, "I’m sorry I’m not just a woman," and my head butts his stomach, he puts his hand on my head and says, "Never be sorry," and I know that is another way of saying, "I am loving," but then, furious at confining myself to some self-hating corner, I raise my head to say, "Yeah, actually, I’m not sorry at all," and I kiss the top of his curls, because that is another way of saying, "I am loving as dancer now," and then I am truly lifted, because I am lifting: such wind takes us so much higher than arms alone.
Swayze sings "She's Like the Wind" in the penultimate scene of the movie, and like everyone with a broken heart, Johnny probably feels he's at the end. Sure, the viewer anticipates the big lift, Baby soaring with swan-winged arms, triumphant with his support. But Johnny can't see the resolution, not as a protagonist stuck on a linear timeline, his character arc plotted out on a fixed course. He's just driving away, broken-hearted.
Feeling at my own end, I pulled my tarot cards every morning for months, and the reversed Fool kept flipping out. Upright, the fool is a new beginning. I often read tarot card reversals as resistance. Over and over, my cards accused me of refusing to leap into the future. If Swayze croons about being "Just a fool to believe," my tarot asked me, "Why aren't you a fool to believe?" In order to get to the big number, you have to let go, Swayze counsels us. Love is not a single ending, but a series of wild steps that double back, again and again. So let the wind take what it will. Soon, there will be another dance party.
Erin Vachon lives in Rhode Island and their work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Brevity, among others. They are a multi-Pushcart, Best of Net, and Best Microfictions nominee, and an alum of the Tin House Summer workshop. You can find more of their writing at www.erinvachon.com or on Twitter @erinjvachon.
Mark Wallace on “It's My Life”
It’s my life, it never ends
I’m a teenager when Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life” is released, and I am all potential. It’s everywhere in my life, this potential, and has been for some time. Like all the other fuck-ups in the world, my report cards often read, not working up to potential, or some variation of the same idea. This potential has chased me to high school—to try to outpace it, I’ve managed to graduate at the end of my junior year. My seventeenth birthday falls halfway through my first semester at college, and already things aren’t going very well, but I know I can get them back on track. I have potential, after all. There are still so many doors to choose from in the game show of life.
But of course life isn’t a game, I know that already, and by January 1984, when “It’s My Life” drops, the first of these doors is already closing: I’m on academic probation because I’ve been too busy to show up more than a few times for any of my classes (too busy getting drunk and doing speed), and I am in danger of being kicked out of school. Life may not be a game, but I am still gripped by my youthful immortality: From some perspectives (mine), it looks like I have all the time in the world to set things straight. I just haven’t yet figured out how. Keep trying. As the song says, “It’s my life, it never ends.”
Caught in the crowd, it never ends
Things are never as uncertain as when you’re starting out, and “It’s My Life,” Talk Talk’s single hit, is no exception. The track crashes into motion with an indistinct tangle of sound, as though all its notes and beats and melodies had been silently gathering, building pressure somewhere on the unhearable side of a potential energy barrier, and now, suddenly released, rush through helter-skelter in a little explosive spasm of noise before relaxing into the song, gradually unspooling themselves over the course of the next three minutes and fifty-two seconds in a wash of synth pads, electronic drums, Paul Webb’s great bass lines, and Mark Hollis’s liquid vocals.
The band’s early sound was caught between decades. Hollis’s baritone echoed no one so much as The Jam’s Paul Weller, though Talk Talk were never so bristly. The first two albums were flavored with a range of styles: You could glimpse the smoothed-out pop horizons of Duran Duran, and hear the dying echoes of Roxy Music, whose final album had dropped in 1982, the same year Talk Talk’s first album came out (and The Jam broke up). But Bryan Ferry’s awkward glam fantasticness belonged to last night’s dance floor. Duran Duran, on the other hand, with their era-defining objectification not just of girls on film but of themselves, looked resolutely to the future from the prow of a Scottish yacht, getting the party started for the bands who would sail in their wake.
Somehow stuck in the middle of all this was Talk Talk, whose vinyl debut had come a year after Duran Duran’s, and who opened for the Fab Five on several dates of their late-1981 tour. But while Talk Talk were unquestionably an 80s band, they certainly didn’t intend to follow where Duran Duran led. In the video for “It’s My Life,” Hollis stares straight into the camera without lip-synching, as though declaring that the industry machine would never put words in his mouth—not even if those words were his own. Talk Talk would walk their own road. They just hadn’t found their way to it yet.
Funny how I blind myself
“It’s My Life” is a song impossible not to misinterpret. It’s lyrical structure is so skeletal that it could be about any number of things. Because the video for it consisted mostly of wildlife footage, it is often understood as a protest song for animal rights. One of the most common takes is that it’s a song about a difficult or unrequited romantic relationship. It might also be a song about finding one’s way—about life. Put the emphasis on the possessive: It’s my life. Leave me alone.
As interesting, to me, is how the song does its job. “It’s My Life” makes its meaning not by stating it, but by dancing around that blind spot at the center of language, that place in which the inexpressible resides, at the center of that which is expressed. Its meaning seems to be missing, always hovering just outside the light, as though it would always remain potential, never quite fulfilled.
At the root of the word ”potential” is the idea of power, something potent. Potency. But it is power not yet unleashed, it is possibility unrealized. It’s about what could be, not what is. In that sense, potential also represents something missing: it is that which has not arrived yet, something that has not yet—and may never—come to pass.
I've asked myself, how much do you / Commit yourself?
As it turned out, I did not get things back on track in school. The only class I passed in my first year at college was piano. The administration, apparently, felt this was not a sound basis for a higher education, and I was asked to leave. Over the following years, more or less the same thing would happen at no less than four other schools. I’d enroll in classes, then stop going to most of them once I’d found the right excuse: alcoholism, depression, social anxiety, plain pretentious angst. I might stick it out for one class I was interested in—photography, for instance, or macroeconomics. But I felt no connection to school, nor to the people around me. Untethered as I was, perhaps it’s no wonder I always drifted away. What never occurred to me was the idea of school as an exercise in exploring what one might become, and how to get there. I just couldn’t stick around long enough to find out.
It seems clear, looking back, that alongside the alcoholism and depression and anxiety and angst, part of what was going on was a resolute digging in of heels, a desperate attempt to put off “real life” in whatever way I could. It was not responsibility I feared, though. It was becoming. It wasn’t settling down that put me off, it was narrowing down. It was the casting off of possibility, the shedding of potential, with all its beautiful multiplicity, in favor of certainty, which seemed so dull and unipolar.
Instead, I wanted to live in that inexpressible place in which I knew the most interesting meaning was made. I wanted everything to be possible always, to continue to be potential. Potential was power, and I was in love with the power of the unrealized, of the not yet real. Whatever lay beyond each of those open doors, if it was still just a dream, I could dream anything. It felt like there was great power in being able to choose which door to walk through. It felt like, once that choice was made, that power would be gone.
It's my life, don't you forget
If Talk Talk were suspended between past and future, their trajectory was exactly opposite that of a band like Simple Minds, whose most interesting, exploratory work was arguably behind them by the time of their first chart success. That band’s “Promised You a Miracle” dropped in April 1982—the same week Talk Talk’s eponymous, pop-inflected single off its first album was released. If “Talk Talk” wouldn’t go on to be Talk Talk’s biggest hit, it was certainly their danciest tune, their most recognizably “pop” number.
But while bands like Duran Duran, Simple Minds, Pet Shop Boys, and others narrowed in on their sounds, opting for what seemed like increasing certainty, Hollis seemed to want to open things up. “It’s My Life,” from Talk Talk’s second album, already encompasses more, from the weird synth birdcalls of the opening bars to the plaintive vocal lines and the indirection of the lyrics. Even the song’s structure is more complex, building from a mid-tempo verse to a more urgent pre-chorus and then—with a rapid-fire flourish of Lee Harris’s hexagonal Simmons electronic drums—to a chorus that rings large with synth pads and Hollis’s cryptic yawp, at once sad and eternally hopeful: It’s my life, don’t you forget / Caught in the crowd, it never ends.
It’s My Life isn’t the greatest mid-80s New Wave synthpop album, though it did have its moments of brilliance. As an angsty teen, it was hard to argue with “Tomorrow Started,” for instance, which declared, With time you’ll endlessly arrive / Outside of use / With just tomorrow starting. (And with time, the words still occasionally ring true.) The album’s textures are sophisticated, its sounds standing out or even clashing, rather than smoothed over into a unified color field, like so much of the music of the era. The piano solo in “Call in the Night Boy” sidles up to David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” but ultimately slinks away too soon. The intro to “Such a Shame” was tantalizing, even titillating, and could have led to anything at all—leaving one slightly let down when the song, solid as it is, finally arrived, as though this force that felt about to explode suddenly changed its mind and reeled itself in.
There’s a lot of tension in It’s My Life. Hollis is still finding his way, but he’s hampered by his own understanding that the music industry would prefer simple hooks and scantily clad models mud-wrestling. Something’s missing, but it’s only the emptiness of great potential: There’s something that hasn’t yet arrived for Talk Talk, some looming transformation you can hear in the music but which has not yet—and may never—come to pass. The songs are decent, some even great, but the album is more a compilation of interesting musical moves than a bare and honest vision that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. That vision is clearly taking shape, though, and throughout the album, you can hear Hollis straining to reach some other music, unable to stay in New Wave’s increasingly guardrailed musical lane.
One half won’t do
It takes many people quite a long time to find their way. Some of us never really do. I tried, for many years, to fulfill my potential. I waited for that looming transformation to take place, and found myself, as I did, becoming many things.
One discovery: there is room for a lot of becoming in a life, whether in pursuit of one’s potential, or in flight from it.
Here are some things I became, or tried to become, or tried to avoid becoming, along the way, including, early on:
Paperboy, age eleven.
Raker of leaves and mower of lawns, and, later, Landscape Maintenance Engineer (i.e., gardener).
High school graduate.
College dropout.
Used bookstore clerk. I am a writer, after all.
Later, in this order:
Alcoholic.
Aspiring novelist.
Accidental financial journalist.
Globetrotting financial journalist.
Managing editor.
Sober alcoholic.
Globetrotting freelance magazine journalist, publishing in all the places I had always dreamed of publishing.
Unemployed magazine journalist, publishing nowhere.
Deliverer of paint.
Financial Services Marketing Engineer, a post that entailed standing behind a table all day in the hot sun at Coney Island, handing out brochures for a bank that was just opening its first branches in New York, where I was living at the time. Yes, the thing I dreaded happened: I tried to hand a brochure to a friend who happened to be passing. Achieved: The mortification of the flesh.
And at various times:
Blogger.
Columnist.
Co-author.
Talking head.
Husband.
Ex-husband.
Startup CEO.
Product guy.
Marketing guy.
Failed entrepreneur.
Husband again.
Stepfather.
Father.
Changer of diapers and singer of songs.
Business consultant. Whatever that means.
College graduate. I never did get that BA. But I managed to convince a top-shelf MFA program to admit me on the strength of my journalism experience, and, thirty-seven years after graduating from high school, I finally received a college degree.
Teacher of writing.
Nonprofit director.
Chicken farmer.
Essayist.
And other things besides.
Convince myself / It's my life
The thing about becoming is, it happens when you aren’t looking, and takes you places you never thought you’d go.
There’s a way in which Talk Talk started from the finish line and ran the race backward. If it took some time for Simple Minds to coalesce into the emo synthpop powerhouse they were destined to become, it took Talk Talk a few years to let go of their most polished sound and achieve a kind of reverse apotheosis, becoming not more focused but more diffuse.
Potential is like a vacuum; it seems to be our nature to try to fill it in, to seek something to take up all that blank space, so we can move along knowing we fit comfortably into this box or that, our shape held snuggly by whatever uniform we’ve donned: clerk, writer, musician, exec, punk, teacher, rebel, dad. But Mark Hollis led Talk Talk on a different route. Instead of filling in the emptiness of Talk Talk’s potential, Hollis embraced it. Talk Talk’s fourth album, Spirit of Eden, rejects the very project of becoming. Largely improvised, and recorded in near darkness with instruments and equipment manufactured mostly in the early 60s, Spirit of Eden is like nothing the band had recorded before, and in fact resembles little that any rock band had recorded in the past. The songs are ethereal, nearly ambient, and loose to the point of being almost unstructured, like little through-composed masterpieces that nonetheless continue to reverberate somewhere deep within you, long after the album has ended. Hollis’s big, gentle voice has become a kind of keening croon—it’s still round and liquid, filled with midrange EQ, but it’s more haunting now, and you can hear the improvisation, as though Hollis is channeling the spirit of eden itself, never quite sure when the next lyric will emerge, or what its words might be. Talk Talk’s potential, fulfilled or unfulfilled, is no longer a question. This is music that sheds all expectation and judgement, and is merely and eternally itself, always now. The album didn’t stake out new ground for pop music as much as it vacated the territory altogether—so much so that it has come to be regarded as a foundational work in the still sadly marginal genre known as “post-rock.”
Because there was no potential Spirit of Eden was trying to live up to, no external yardstick it judged itself against, the album accomplished another remarkable trick: it recognized its listeners for who and what they were. Just as Spirit of Eden was no more or less than itself, you had the feeling, listening to it, that there was no need to be more or less than whatever you were at the moment—a shattering revelation, especially if you found it difficult to navigate the mid-1980s, an era of Reaganite rebukes, tension over “political correctness,” the War on Drugs, so-called “family values,” AIDS and the country’s reaction to it, and incipient accomplishment culture. Hell, it’s a shattering revelation today: that there is no potential to fulfill, nothing you need to become, no one you need to be who you aren’t yet. The doors might be open or they might be closed, it doesn’t matter. It’s your life.
If I could buy my reasoning, I'd pay to lose
Talk Talk were one of those rare bands that produced a body of work, and, seemingly satisfied, simply stopped. After Spirit of Eden, the band recorded 1991’s Laughing Stock, which sounded notes of an ethereal, almost otherworldly torch song jazz. The songs gestured suggestively, but never quite made contact, and some of the album’s effects felt self-conscious—it struggled to match Eden’s improvisational apotheosis. Hollis released an eponymous solo album in 1998—very personal, very wandering clarinet—after which, Talk Talk was never heard from again, almost literally: very few interviews with Hollis or his bandmates exist; journalists, biographers, and documentary filmmakers (as well as essayists) have had to content themselves for the most part with speculation. Many people now know Talk Talk primarily through the baffling and uninspired cover of “It’s My Life” that No Doubt recorded for their 2003 singles album. That’s a shame.
Hollis’s few comments about his retirement seem to point to the fact that family life and fatherhood were more important to him than being part of a music industry he never really fit into. He lived in London for two decades after his solo album came out, and then for a couple of years in a small town near England’s south coast, where he died of cancer in 2019, age 64.
One wonders about the path from Top 40 to art music to solitude. Did Hollis feel he’d fulfilled his potential, and simply wanted to be left alone? Or was he still seeking something, in the silence he once said was so important to him? Perhaps he managed to find his way back to that place where all the doors are open, that place in which all things are possible. I am much older now than I was when I was trying to figure out which door was the right one for me. Back then, potential shouted over every transom, a cacophony I could neither untangle nor navigate by, so loud it echoed in my ears always, haunting me. “It’s My Life” was the sound of that potential, the sound of limitless possibility, both thrilling and terrifying at once. It was a song that said anything was possible, but especially: leave me alone to figure it out. It’s my life, don’t you forget.
Things are quieter now. Past a certain age, the voices stop calling; a lot of doors look closed—a lot of doors are closed. Besides, one doesn’t look beyond those thresholds much, anymore. Now the limitlessness is much closer to home. A different kind of threshold starts to draw into view. In certain lights, the room you’re in contains no less than everything—just as Talk Talk’s music did. On some days, though, you become aware there’s something missing. All it is is that thing you were trying to escape: the sound of potential, of power, of life. The struggle now is to grasp it. It’s enough to just hang on, stay where you are.
It’s my life, it never ends
Mark Wallace lives and writes on the rural California coast south of San Francisco, surrounded by family, chickens, and goats. His essays and journalism have appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places. He was the founding Executive Director of The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, where he teaches classes in writing and literature. Find him on Mastodon at zirk.us/@markwallace and Twittter at @MarkWallace