September 23 2018 – I keep saying I won’t do it again. I won’t just sit for hours and hours watching a TV show, but it’s just so tempting; the next episode follows the next, and the next follows the next. Plus, I needed the break after this week I had. I got some problems fixed, and if no more come around, things could really change, but I couldn’t rest, and I couldn’t sleep. Working out, yay for me for doing that, makes it so I don’t nap. That left TV as a means of resting.

Downton Abbey was my subject matter. It’s a smart show, with amazing character development, beautiful scenes. It’s predictable to me; perhaps I even want it that way. I think it was Friday, could have been Thursday, when someone I know asked why I was watching it. I had several logical reasons, the bottom line of which was that, other than it’s a visual masterpiece, I really like the historical references; I like the way the story took in the influences of that time. And I especially like the growth in the female characters as the world changed around them, one of the most pivotal times of change for women. Like a complete moron, as part of my answer to my friend about why I was watching Downton Abbey, I talked about how I used to enjoy studying the trends of those times. I enjoyed that so much, my high school papers, the ones I got to choose the subject of, were always on women’s roles in that period, the trends in literature, the trends in fashion, how they tied together with growing women’s rights.

I think it was Thursday as well, when my normal weekly searches for the news of the artists I like revealed a few new songs by the people I follow. Greta Van Fleet released another from their upcoming album. We’ve already talked about that one in the comments so I won’t go into that one. Lana Del Rey also released two songs, both done with her new producer, anticipated to be on an album she will release in early 2019. The producer is a Taylor Swift alum, so I didn’t know what to expect, but the songs are decidedly Lana. Not that my audience knows her catalog, but I think they emote her unreleased early material, done when she recorded under her actual name, Lizzy Grant, but combined with the lush sound of her second record Ultraviolence, even including the slightly faded guitar sound of the Ultaviolence era. If the advance song is any indication, Lana will continue to be Lana, not following the pop formula. Indeed, the song is nine minutes long. It makes me wonder if Lana isn’t listening to Kashmir. A Lana record along the lines of The Song Remains the Same, but done by a pop producer extraordonaire; makes for an interesting wait.

The Lana articles mentioned her activities as well. Compared to other artists, Lana really doesn’t sit still. She writes while she is touring. She releases records at 12-18 month intervals. And now, she claims she is going to self-release a book of poetry. Reportedly, in her latest writing process, her work was less lyrics, more poems. It’s an interesting notion to me for a couple of reasons. First, I think a lot of Lana’s songs are poem-like lyrically anyway. Second, in her lyrics to the spoken introduction of her 2012 song Ride she says, “Í once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken.” Sure, I’m looking forward to Lana’s new record, of course I am, but it’s poems I’m really looking forward to.

Today, I saw a trailer for a movie about the French writer Colette, and I stopped to read a poster at the exercise place, a poster featuring a male dancer stretching, with the words dance is work, a show from 1978, or so the poster states. Those two things aren’t related at all, except both hit memories of mine. There were two places on “the drag”, they called it, the main street that separated the campus of the University of Texas from the living areas to the west of campus. I walked there every day to my off-campus dorm my first year of college. There were two places I would go. One was a store that had trendy posters. I couldn’t afford them, but I looked. I looked often. One of my favorites was that one in the exercise studio, the one that featured a dancer doing a stretch, and said “dance is work”. The second of my places to go was a movie theatre that specialized in French films. I loved them; I loved the avant-garde, trendy time they showed. I’m not sure how much I understood, but I loved them. I would go whenever I could spare the dollar or two the place charged.

I’m not sure what to make of my influences this week, but there’s something to it. I have this picture in my mind, part 1920s, the time of Downton Abbey, which to me is the start of all things modern as far as women are concerned, the memories of things I saw when I was a young college student — the poster that for some reason is staring at me every time I go try to rebuild my body back, and now this trailer about a significant female French writer. Colette first wrote under her husband’s name, but then went on to become one of the most significant French writers, a participant in the twentieth century influence that was Paris, and the reason that Paris is the one place on the planet I’ve actually been. Oh, and Lana getting around to writing poems. I might just have to … I don’t know, read a book by Colette, see a French film; I’m already doing what I can to dance, the poster of my youth keeping me company. I am figuring out how to get rid of stress; I’m really concentrating. It might be possible to have less mental clutter, and I’m having influences of so many things I hold dear. But what does all of this mean? It might be once big cross-over hodgepodge. But it might be something more. What was it that Lana said once? Oh yes, I know. Í once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet, but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken. There has to be influence in this somewhere. There just has to be.