I’m not actually figuring this to be the end of these little retrospective pieces. They’re doing too much to help me get ahead of deadline. If I could write fewer than 2,500 words about some dopey Popeye clip cartoon from 1951 I wouldn’t have to do this sort of thing.
Also I have a lot of fun doing my own archive-binging. Sometimes it’s helped me notice that I have recurring motifs. Sometimes it lets me just watch how my odd little obsessions have developed. One of them is Ray Davies, of the Kinks. Who had among their many great songs “No More Looking Back” so you see why I have a correctly formed joke up in the subject line there.
So here’s an early example of my Ray Davies interest. It’s about some piece of biographical trivia that might even be true, regarding Ray Davies. Also about my interest in getting through life without being punched by Ray Davies. Almost exactly two years later I fused that interest with the way my brain sometimes latches onto a word it’s decided to read wrongly. In this case “unmade”, as in “an unmade movie”.
And earlier this year came this query: Is Ray Davis A Normal Person? This one started as conversation with my love in the car. I forget why we started on this particular topic. In any case it’s a piece I love. Thomas K Dye pointed out (on Twitter) a piece in favor of Ray Davies’s normal-ness that he apparently suffers from hay fever. This is another Kinks song title reference. Also the essay includes me making up a British mailing address, which I find over a hundred godzillion times funnier than everyone else in the whole world combined and I don’t care. In the darkest times of this year I have gone back to it and read the whole address out to myself and felt like things were a little less bleak. I’m sorry it’s not doing that for anyone else, but I like it.
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