I'm being followed by a moon shadow

There's some kind of disturbance in the time-space continuum.  Great chunks of my past are erupting into my present.   It's happening because a playful god has decided to remind me of the musical soundtrack of my romantic history in increasingly curious ways.

First, Leonard Cohen turns an age I know he can't possibly really be, because that would mean I'm an age I can't possibly be and a whole generation's passed since his music caused pretty girls to start weeping at parties and throw themselves into my arms for comfort.

And now Cat Stevens shows up on our doorstep and, after a side trip to Bangor, Maine, is told to go back home.

What's next?  Seals and Crofts arrested for robbing banks?

Harry Chapin rising from the dead?

Linda Ronstadt headlining at a casino in Vegas?

Oh, wait.

Anyway.  My head is full of music and song lyrics I would have sworn I'd forgotten bringing backs times I wish I could forget.  It's as if I'm stuck inside a bar where some drunk has plugged the jukebox full of quarters forcing everyone in the joint to listen over and over to the soundtrack to his failed marriage, with the tunes the girl he should have married loved making the most frequent encores.

(Couple years ago I was in a restaurant where the Muzak was all 70s and 80s pop hits.  All of the wait staff was college age and younger.  I asked our waiter if he minded having to listen to his parents' music all night long.  He shrugged and said, good naturedly, that it was pretty much the music he and his friends listened to anyway.  "Classic rock"  dominated the play lists on the radio stations he listened to and the repertoires of the bands that he and his friends played in.  This was when Napster was just reaching its pinnacle and IPods were new.  Maybe now that kids have more alterative ways to find music they can take rock and roll away from their parents.

Have to say though that I like what I've heard of the soundtrack from Garden State, enough to think I might buy the CD.  But you can definitely tell that the Shins grew up listening to same music I did.  Maybe this explains why my friends with teenage children get along so well with them.)

Stevens' music never re-wired my brain the way Cohen's did.   But the first girl I ever loved truly, madly, deeply adored his stuff. 

She used to copy out his lyrics and give them to me to study, which I did, faithfully, because I loved her, truly, madly, deeply.  (Mine was an innocent, unrequited love.  She was an older woman.  A junior, while I was a mere slip of a sophomore.  She thought I was cute and fun to have around, like a puppy.)   As diligent as I was---Launcelot didn't sally forth to do battle for Guenevere's sake with much more devotion to his lady faire---I never worked up much enthusiasm.  My sister owned his albums.  She also owned a lot of John Denver and Elton John and so I tended to lump them all together.  They all might as well have been Bobby Sherman as far as I was concerned.  I was an ignorant lout when it came to music back then.

This girl who loved Cat Stevens was the same girl who was such an emotional train wreck from seeing Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers that she sat behind the wheel of her car in the parking lot afterwards and wept for two hours.  Neither my friend Hank nor I who were with her had our licenses yet, so we were all stuck there until she pulled herself together enough to drive home.  We'd gone to the late show and it was close to three in the morning when she dropped me off at my house.  My father was waiting up for me and he was furious.  No cell phones then and since the theater locked up right after we were out the door we couldn't get to a pay phone so I hadn't called to tell my folks why I'd be late.  He was going out of his mind with worry and, naturally, he expressed his concern by lighting into me with a vengeance.  My dad is not a yeller.  He usually let me know I'd screwed up with a short, quiet, "Oh,geez, Lance," that devastated me as if he'd delivered a rant of Shakespearean length and eloquence.  But that night he delivered for 15 minutes, at the pitch and volume of one of Howard Beal's outbursts in Network, doing inspired variations on the themes of my thoughtlessness and inconsiderateness and self-centeredness.  A normally quiet man, my dad, but he was always articulate and, boy, did he let go with some zingers.

Unfortunately for him, and I'm sure unfortunately for the improvement of my character, he got carried away with his own verbal dexterity.  At a crucial point in his sermon he said, "The man came on the television and said, 'It's eleven o'clock.  Do you know where your children are?'  And I didn't!"

Note to parents:  Never reach for a punchline in the middle of giving a scolding.

My brother, who had sneaked down to hear me get the verbal tanning I deserved and was hiding on the stairs, broke up.  So of course I broke up.  And my dad would have broken up but he had great self control.  He said, quietly, "We'll talk about this in the morning," and hurried up to bed, where he told my mother what had happened.

She broke up.

I told that story with Wild World playing in my head.

I haven't been able to find a news story to explain to me exactly what happend with the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens who is now Yusaf Islam.  (Win yourself a drink the next time you're at a bar.  Islam was born Steven Demetre Georgiou.)  So I don't know if it's ridiculous that he was sent packing, as Ken Layne thinks, or a kind of ironic just dessert, as Juan Cole suggests (scroll down), or plain stupid and scary, as Matt Yglesias implies.

The one question I had right off---If he's on a list of people not to let into the country, how come he was allowed on the plane to begin with?---doesn't seem to have a good answer.   Something to do with whether or not you spell it Yusef or Youssouf?  That doesn't cut it.  Islam isn't an American citizen.  Didn't he have to get a visa to come here?  If he did, then he went to the American embassy in London and asked somebody who's job it is to know who's allowed to come here and who isn't.

Which means that either the State Department needs to update its list or the list on the clipboard of some low level customs agent standing at the arrival gate is wrong.  And here is where it gets scary.  The first line of defense against terrorists sneaking into the country is exactly what it was on September 10, 2001.

Minimum wage earning security guards with clipboards.

I don't know if Islam belongs on both lists or neither.  I suspect that these lists are a lot like the lists of Un-American organizations from the checking-for-commies-under-the-bed era, drawn up by paranoiacs, xenophobes, ignoramouses, and vindictive people with political axes to grind.  Your name gets on the list, or is kept off it, according to who you know and who you've offended.

So we stop Cat Stevens from going to Nashville to make music but let in...?

Whatever happened, it is wrong that the person who stopped Islam from getting off the plane was a flunky with a clipboard.

We shouldn't be at the mercy of underpaid, underappreciated functionaries with only enough authority to enforce the rules but not enough to waive them, people with not much imagination, no real training, and a deathly fear of losing their jobs.

Those are the people Mussolini employed to get the trains running on time.

And that little rant was delivered with Peace Train wailing in my head.

Oh well.  At least it wasn't Morning Has Broken.

Nuts.

Shouldn't have said it.

You hear it now too, don't you?

Sorry.

Comments

[Nance]

I'm with Juan Cole. This guy thinks it was a good idea to put a novelist under a death threat? Let him go live among his brethren. And make THEM listen to his music.

BTW, from what I've seen of Muslim names, "Yusuf Islam" is like "George Smith," frequency-wise.

[Lance]

Nance, Did you follow the link or had you already seen Cole's page?

Have you read a good article on this story? I still haven't found one. There may be 256 Yusuf Islams on the list, and another 640 Youssefs, but as far as I can tell whoever stopped the Cat was looking to stop that particular Yusef and they wanted to stop him enough that somebody called the plane to let them know they would do it, so I'm wrong about his being the victim of a functionary with a clipboard. If I was a good blogger I'd update. But that makes me even more curious as to how he got a visa!

[Nance]

I read it before. And no, I have yet to find a comprehensive story about it -- I think editors hear, "Cat Stevens" and immediately throw the assignment to the arts/entertainment desk. As for the visa, I don't think British nationals need one to be U.S. tourists, do they? We don't need one for their country. Just show up, say, "I'm a tourist" and you're in for 90 days.

[Lance]

You mean I can just waltz over to see the Queen any time I want? Neato.

[Dick Walker]

And of course, Mussolini's flunkies never did get those vaunted Italian trains to run on time. Any more than the security patrols making everyone's airport visits even more off-pissing than before are making us appreciably safer.

Great piece and very amusin'.

[Lance]

Thanks, Dick, and welcome to the site.

I haven't been on a plane since 9/11 so I haven't had to deal with it. But the descriptions of the Kafka-esque horrors I've heard from friends and relations who've had to endure the airports, the next time I have to go somewhere far away, I'll walk before I'll fly.

Although I'll probably get stopped at the street corner by someone with a clipboard.