John Hughes wrote movies for eveyrone – but they focused through the lens of angsty upper-middle-class kids from the north burbs of Chicago. Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. even Home Alone (angsty tween!). And their soundtracks reflected those kids; Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Simple Minds – just sing the big singles from each of those movies, and you’ll get a pretty decent digest of new wave pop from the early to mid eighties.
If Hughes had written movies about rangy, restless kids with huge chips on their shoulder in the middle of nowhere, he’d have had a bunch of John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow on the soundtrack.
As I knocked around Jamestown during the weeks before I moved, it felt like my social circle was constricting around me. My haunts and stomping grounds were on short time. . My friends who hadn’t graduated and moved on were all busy with their lives – there, in Jamestown. My focus was moving.
And outside the occasional night knocking back beers at “The Club”, I felt isolated. Above and beyond the isolation of living in a place far, far from the center of action I craved being in.
So as this song plied its way up the charts in early October, it couldn’t have been timed much better:
And I hear it today, and I can still feel that hollow ache of ,as Paul Westerberg put it, “waiting to be”.
I don’t believe John Hughes was involved with Risky Business.
Speaking of music and consciousness, here is an interesting article that make you go “hmmm…” https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/the_vital_question_that_physical_science_can_never_answer_.html
I don’t believe John Hughes was involved with Risky Business.
He wasn’t, but it takes place in the same milieu. I went to college with dozens of people who could have been in a Hughes movie — we had tons of Evanston, New Trier and Glenbrook kids. Hughes had a great eye and ear.
“Fake but accurate.” lol…
Enh. Coulda sworn it was John Hughes.
JPA, I find the “problem of consciousness” to be fascinating. For decades it has been assumed that the problem would be solved incrementally, but this hasn’t happened. We are no closer to solving the problem than we were 50 years ago. We still cannot explain how the experience of, say, smelling a rose, is related to brain activity measured when a subject smells a rose.
Some of the brighter neuroscientists, IMHO, have noticed that the problem seems to be one of recursion. You are using a process of the human mind intended to examine the non-mind part of the universe to examine the human mind. So you get stuck in these weird loops where the reasoning intended to examine the non-mind content of the universe is used to examine the mind itself and so it can not resolve the problem.
So the question is, if science cannot explain conscious experience, what can?
From what I have read, if you scan a person’s brain to see which neural networks are activated when they are shown a picture of their mother, for example, it changes from day to day in ways that sometimes have the appearance of pattern, but can’t be reliably predicted. You can’t match “this is a subject being shown a picture of his mother” to “this is his brain state.” even with one subject.
Beg to differ: middle middle, not upper middle.
MP, it is a Schrödinger’s cat. We are no closer to knowing whether that darn cat is alive or not either. And yet, most scientists will never, ever, admit answer may lie beyond physical realm.
That’s my favorite JCM song. I’m a jangly guitar fan. Still wondering if this was recorded with a Rick and not a Telecaster.
FF,
I’ve been listening to this album and “Lonesome Jubilee” lately. I’m thinking of digging around and seeing if there are any production notes published anywhere (like for Who’s Next, Damn the Torpedoes or Born to Run). It’s one of my favorite productions of the era.