living in the movies

(Really more about "Night & Day," but the greatest hits album will do)

Back in the eighties (oh, sweet eighties) I lived with my parents in a rented house outside a very small Oklahoma town, directly across the street from the local cemetery. They had a thing for cemeteries I never quite understood. Our next house sat caddy-corner from a much more gothic-looking graveyard, forgotten down a dirt road.

Anyway, we lived next to the highway. If you took a right at the end of our drive, you could be in Shawnee—the biggest city around those parts, and a later nexus of dyed-hair alterna-rockers—where a massive six-screen cinema stood in the shadows of one of the last great semi-urban drive-ins. Our little family took that right turn every Sunday afternoon for many of the Reagan years, if only to claw our way through the late-lunch crowds at Long John Silver’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken and struggle onward to the protective glare of the big screen.

We watched movies. That was our way of being a family.

This was the era of John Hughes, of Ghostbusters, of Indiana Jones. We watched them all, only occasionally splitting to different theaters to meet afterward, stuffed with soda and popcorn, and drag ourselves back home.

Other days of the week, there was the video store. Or rather, a combination miniature golf, electronic appliance, and video store owned by the gregarious white-haired fellow who rented the house to us. Our VCR seemed to run all the time, having no cable or satellite to feed it precious movies.

For me, always feeling like a bit of an outsider in that town, the movies became a place to escape to, and back in those days most every movie was set in a big city, and often New York.

What could all this have to do with a Joe Jackson album I never sat down and listened to until last year? Well, the record’s first side, which is really the only side I ever listen to, is a frantic celebration of the urban environment that moves about with a new-wave-meets-jazz sort of cinematography and perfectly captures the energy of big city life in general, but New York in particular. “Another World,” Jackson’s first track here, really gets at the heart of the sense of escape I personally identified with movies back in those days. “Chinatown” builds on this outsider-trying-to-fit-in sensation while letting the listener know that in the urban environment, everyone fits, even when they’re lost. And the record builds to a baffling crescendo, one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded, “Steppin’ Out,” for which Jackson will be remembered even when the rest of our eighties catalogs wither and recede to make room for another passing craze.

For me, “Night and Day” was recorded so that I can relive the same chilled excitement and urban wonder that plagued my small-town movie-watching, gosh, like twenty years ago or more.