Issue #358: Significant Life Events
Erin and I got married last week.
Erin and I have been dating for nearly eight years and were engaged for about two. Erin has also copyedited about 75% of the newsletter issues. I’ll write about our wedding, somewhat obliquely, a little bit later, but I’ll give the headlines first. It was an elopement, long considered but only briefly planned as such. I didn’t tell anyone until Thursday that night, when I attended Armor’s Boston show at the Cantab Lounge. The ceremony was early the next morning.
All of this made for a very active week of haircuts, a little last minute planning, shopping, tintype photos. Not too much introspection before, but a little bit after — captured later in the letter. So far, I am happy to report that marital bliss is only a slight improvement over our normally blissful state of affairs.
There were also non-marriage activities over the past week. I watched Jamie Foxx’s new special, What Had Happened Was… and it was a little rough. You have to really love Jamie Foxx to get anything out of it. Yes, he has made some good songs. Yes, the Jamie Foxx Show (1996) was pretty funny for its time. I just wrote about how great he was in Mann’s Collateral (2004). Yes, there’s Django Unchained (2012), but I liked him better in Day Shift (2002).
A lot of the special was about him not being a clone. It’s evocative of the meme format about a shirt, “my ‘I’m not a clone’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.” I don’t really recall anyone claiming Foxx was a clone. But now I can’t help but wonder. I guess Foxx has never heard of the Streisand effect. My guess is discussion of Foxx as a clone will follow the trend of “Not Like Us” streams after Drake’s pre-suit filings against UMG.
I’ve also been enjoying watching Christmas episodes of sitcoms. I have my own list, but the Peacock streaming service has a pretty useful section of Christmas episodes this year. It’s probably the only reason to use Peacock outside of watching Law & Order.
The holiday letters, as is tradition, will probably be a little light. But I’m sure you’re all plenty busy, yourselves. If you’re not, there’s 357 other editions of the newsletter to read.
Sakaguchi’s Latest Fantasy
Fantasian released in 2021 on iPhones. I always thought its sequestration to mobile was an injustice. We are talking about a full-fledged turn-based RPG game from Hironobu Sakaguchi. It is a game so ambitious, Sakaguchi used real physical dioramas as the backgrounds. This choice is a fitting tribute to the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds of JRPGs of yesteryear. Though necessity was the mother of invention in those older games, Fantasian reminds players that these kinds of gaming backdrops are perhaps the best choice for the genre.
Now, with the re-released Fantasian: Neo Dimension, the game takes its proper place among console JRPGs. It is one among many this year, including ones I’ve mentioned like Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven, Dragon Quest III HD-2D, and Trails Through Daybreak. But Fantasian is the only one made by the father of JRPGs.
The iOS release for Fantasian wasn’t a total wash. The mechanics are creative, clearly made with a touch screen in mind. Targeting in the game uses a trajectory system, aiming using a line to attack different configurations of enemies. One can imagine how this lends itself to a touch screen, but it translates just fine to analogue stick.
Among all the Mistwalker games produced by Sakaguchi, Fantasian may end up having the most enduring legacy. Blue Dragon (2006) and Lost Odyssey (2007) are playable on modern Xbox consoles using backwards compatibility, but it’s not the most convenient play experience. The Last Story (2011) is perhaps the only remaining game stranded on the Nintendo Wii exclusively. And Terra Battle (2014) is another order of phone game compared to Fantasian, and is probably all the better forgotten.
Fantasian: Neo Dimension is a great way to close out a packed year for JRPGs. I know I’ll enjoy playing it over the next few weeks.
Jagged Edge — “Let’s Get Married”
When Erin and I started exploring the possible configurations for a wedding, ceremony, reception, small party, or any other combination of events, I had a few songs in mind that I imagined as playing some role. I never got as far as committing them to paper or a playlist. But the one always front of mind was “Love Is Here to Stay,” written by George and Ira Gershwin, specifically the Joe Williams version.
I’ve written about this song before, at the beginning of the year, actually. Kind of a nice bookend to end the year writing about it again.
I’m consistent — or predictable. Back then, I wrote:
I know this song is a standard, but the Joe Williams and Count Basie version has been my favorite ever since serendipitously hearing it on a CD out of a huge jazz collection I bought at an estate sale a few years ago. Williams’ voice is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. And the lyrics are really evocative. Like “Time Will Reveal,” this song is about a love that endures beyond even the natural wonders. It’s counterintuitive, but goes further than even “Ozymandias,” it’s not just the works of man but all matter that slowly transforms from its recognizable form.
This song has always felt like a companion to “Ozymandias,” read as either counterpoint or complement.
This theme of what lasts is very fascinating to me in all forms of art. It’s not uncommon in hardcore music to take the opposite tack to Shelley, such as in Demolition’s “Here to Stay.”
But the uncertainty of things we take for granted comes through in the Gershwin song and the Shelley poem. Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966), examines the contingency of social organization over an infinitely long period, considers the possibility of “man,” as in the category of human, being “erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea.” And in Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri (1962), Hanshirō Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) taunts the notion of bushido:
When all is said and done, our lives are like houses built on foundations of sand. One strong wind and all is gone.
Tsugumo is a testament to the something that can’t be erased, the remaining “sneer of cold command” that “[t]ell … its sculptor well those passions read.” So too, in Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay,” the marvels of man and nature are the ones imperiled, not the essence of love he describes whether romantic, as is the case in “Love Is Here to Stay,” or familial, as is the case in Harakiri. What I wouldn’t normally consider, but is obvious in this context, is that Tsugumo acts in accordance with a governing principle beyond bushido but also created from the love he has for his daughter and son-in-law.
“Love Is Here to Stay”’s title also points us to something bigger than a single example of romance. Though the song’s speaker is seemingly serenading his own love, “our love is here to stay,” the song’s title makes no such owner obvious, instead suggesting love at large is the thing that outlives Gibralter or the Rocky Mountains.
After our ceremony in Medford City Hall, Erin and I dutifully called our parents. Erin called their mom and dad, I called my mom, none of them knowing anything ahead of time. I felt a flash of sadness not being able to call my dad (for newer readers, he died in May 2023).
Later in the day, I wanted to queue up “Love Is Here to Stay” but ended up, through some unusual circumstances, discovering another version of the song — by Time Five and the Norio Maeda Trio.
It was fun for me and Erin to discover a new, great, version of the song serendipitously. I didn’t know anything about Time Five, but when I looked through the track list of Our Love Is Here To Stay (1976), a cover record, I found something surprising.
“The Way We Were” is a melancholy romantic song, but I have always associated it with death — specifically my dad’s. The song is originally by Barbra Streisand, but I hate the original. 21st Century, a relatively obscure 70s soul group, has the best version by far.
Cutting out some of Streisand’s lovelorn ad-libs, 21st Century’s cover makes it even more amenable to my re-interpretation. I started listening to Ahead of Our Time (1975) heavily at the end of 2022 into 2023 and showed the song to my dad before he died. He was a fan. I remember listening to it with him in his hospital room and talking with him about it on the phone later. Something in that last minute of the song, “Memories / May be beautiful and yet / What's too painful to remember / We simply choose to forget / So it's the laughter / We will remember / Whenever we remember / The way we were.”
Obviously my reading is heavily altered by the time period in which I first heard the song. But I couldn’t help find it to be a very unlikely coincidence when I discovered yet another cover of “The Way We Were” at the end of the Time Five record.
This is a nice, subdued rendition. It lacks the drama of the 21st Century version, but then, nothing will ever top theirs. At the risk of sounding crazy, finding “Love Is Here to Stay” and “The Way We Were” together, through relative happenstance, on the day I got married, felt like a message.
Fortunately, Erin and I didn’t really have any detractors because of our clandestine elopement. But the planning process up until that point wasn’t without its share of setbacks. Ultimately, the day was perfect. And it was more than just a single perfect day, but a perfect few days, with so much fun with friends leading up to our city hall wedding and so much fun with family after.
Erin didn’t take my last name and I didn’t want them to. My mom didn’t take my dad’s last name. It’s not customary in Puerto Rico for wives to take a husband’s last name. Puerto Rico uses dual-surnames, the first last name being the paternal one and the second last name being the maternal one. These names are not hyphenated and not changed after marriage. It’s why I have someone pretty far up my family tree with the surname Munoz Muñoz. If you move to the States and get a U.S. ID, your official documentation will only include your first last name with the second one only present on the paperwork back in PR.
Maintaining this relatively complicated naming convention is a testament to the endurance of the family legacy. A name is not important: see Shakespeare. It is also not necessarily permanent. But it stands in for what is permanent, the mark of our forbearers on us that will in turn always have a trace or remainder in the mark we leave. My body of writing will outlive me, probably. Love between people also lasts longer than the finite human life. It’s here to stay.
Weekly Reading List
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nlrb-love-blind-contestants-employees-114800914.html — The great reality TV unionization is coming.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/14/us-news/luigi-mangione-and-sean-diddy-combs-lawyers-are-married — The dream team is assembling.
Magic: the Gathering had a bunch of impactful bans and unbans today. Jim Davis has mostly correct opinions, but he is wrong about Splinter Twin. It’ll be a decent tier 1.5-2 deck in modern. The scourge of FNM. Quote me.
https://tofubeats.lnk.to/TBDJREMIXES — Tofubeats is dropping a new album on the 18th, it’s gonna be amazing.
Until next time.