Wanted: One Yellow Brick Road

A lot of people have a hobby to take their minds off the daily grind. What people do to escape from the everyday world can no longer be predicted or conveniently labeled these days, even though stereotypes still abound. Doctors still play golf. Barbers still go fishing. Grandmothers still play bingo. Those are nice, clean, safe, normal activities that I'd love to have as hobbies.

That's right, I'd rather play golf or go fishing or even play bingo than do what I do to stop the world and get off for a little break. For me, it's not so much a choice as an unavoidable temporary loss of all commonsense and dignity. It's like being caught up in a roving wormhole that seems to know that my number is almost up and then whisks me away to a temporary Neverland of my own making.

That's right, I'm a closet video maker. In fact, here's the entrance to the wormhole I use right now. At least you can see the entrance clearly marked. I, on the other hand, see what looks like the doorway to Paradise and I enter it thinking I've escaped all human bondage for the eternal good life that awaits us all...somewhere...out there. Invariably, I make and post online a two- or three-minute video that would embarrass a clown and then I return to the everyday world only to be confronted by my biggest vice, face-to-face. What I really need is a yellow brick road instead of a wormhole to Windows Movie Maker. Finding out that The Land of Oz is just make believe would be the lesser disappointment.

Go ahead, click on the swirling wormhole or the fleeting signpost. Don't worry, you won't get hooked on making stupid, embarrassing videos like I did. But you might get hooked on watching them and then expecting more of them from me in the future. Which will make you part of my problem. But that's OK. When you're an aging, relatively unknown independent author, having a following that ignores your books and only laughs at your videos is better than having no following at all.

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If I Had A Hammer

If I had a hammer, this is the warning I'd hammer out. If I had a good lawyer (or a million bucks), I'd require every website that offers my books to place this warning on that particular detail page. The closest I ever came to writing anything that could even remotely be construed as a paranormal romance is Little Green Man from Mars, the sixth full-length science fiction thriller I wrote back in 2006.

In Little Green Man from Mars, the protagonist falls in love with a woman who is from the afterlife. But — and this is a very big but — she's a human being. An "ascended" human being from another planet but a human being nonetheless. She's not a ghost or a ghoul or — gimme a break — a goddamn vampire. Plus, their brief romance is a minor element in that story, way down the list from the hard science fiction elements, the biblical "revelation prophecy", the sci-fi twist I gave that prophecy, the other religious, historical and philosophical themes, and the action sequences that play out in the eternal battle between good and evil. That's the real story.

Yeah, if I had a hammer.

A Sucker for Disco

Disco couldn't begin to touch the live elegance and class of big band music from the 1930s, 40s and 50s, but its debut in the 1970s gave me a welcome break from 1970's rock music, which I found impossible to dance to. My body felt nothing when I heard rock music. The few rock songs I did like were from the 1960s and they were "head food" for me. Not dance music.

Anyway, Baby Boomer Boy and I already posted our official slant on disco music back in August 2007 when "we" wrote Disco's Fifteen Minutes for another blog of mine. So, I won't go into too many details here except to reiterate that Disco, unlike a lot of rock music that came before it and after it, was a celebration of life, not an angry denunciation of it.

Additionally, disco music also put a lot of women back into dresses again and, damn, if they didn't look good on the dance floor. People dressed up instead of down. Women showed a little cleavage and a lot of leg. All the more reason to want to dance. And, speaking of dancing, I couldn't dance worth a damn even though I loved the music. I looked like somebody who had to go to the bathroom really bad but who had no clue which way the restroom was. But I had fun anyway and that was the whole point.

Finally, I think the most positive thing about Disco is that it reminded men and women that there were a lot of wonderful, exciting differences between men and women, instead of being brainwashed by movies and television sitcoms of that era that men and women were somehow, unimaginably, interchangeable.

Here, then, are 25 songs that I feel represent the true spirit of Disco. These songs are in no particular order. Your opinions may vary about what songs best represent the Disco era and that's your perfect right. But this my blog, not yours.

Red numbers indicate my top ten personal favorites for representing what Disco meant to me. That doesn't mean I don't like the other 15 songs. I personally picked all 25 out of over 100 other Disco songs. In my opinion, they're all great. Headphones recommended.

1. Get Down Tonight - K.C. and the Sunshine Band - 1975 1

2. Night Fever - Bee Gees - 1977 5
3. Do the Hustle - Van McCoy - 1975 4
4. Low Down - Boz Scags - 1977
5. Disco Inferno - The Trammps - 1976
6. Good Times - Chic - 1979 7
7. Contact - Edwin Starr - 1978
8. Ladies Night - Kool and the Gang - 1979
9. (Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty - K. C. and the Sunshine Band - 1976 2
10. Heart of Glass - Blondie - 1978
11. That's the Way (I Like It) - K. C. and the Sunshine Band - 1975
12. I Feel Love - Donna Summer - 1977
13. Don't Leave Me This Way - Thelma Houston - 1976
14. Born to Be Alive - Patrick Hernandez - 1979 10
15. More, More, More - Andrea True Connection - 1976
16. Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel - Tavares - 1976
17. Boogie Oogie Oogie - A Taste of Honey - 1978
18. You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) - Sylvester 1978
19. You Should Be Dancing - Bee Gees - 1977 3
20. TSOP - MFSB featuring The Three Degrees - 1974
21. Shame - Evelyn Champagne King - 1978 9
22. Don't Stop Till You Get Enough - Michael Jackson - 1979
23. Let's All Chant - Michael Zager Band - 1978
24. Bad Girls - Donna Summer - 1978
25. Turn the Beat Around - Vicki Sue Robinson - 1976

Thank you, YouTube and YouTube members, for keeping Disco alive.

Author's Note: I selected these YouTube links for sound quality and not for video quality. I may have missed the best presentation, here and there, but I was only willing to give this posting the two days it took me to research, write, link to and post it. And then to test the links. I'll try to monitor these links and relink any ones that go dead over time (links repaired on 9-29-11). As usual, I advise viewers to ignore the comments by YouTube users. A lot of them have no respect for others or for moral decency on a public forum. Thanks for reading and watching.