E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I’ve been a lot of places. Some of them were wonderful, scintillating, beautiful, even stunning. Some of them less so. None of them, however, ever felt like home. And this chronic feeling of rootlessness is strange, given that I come from Colonial era families on both parents’ sides. I'm many generations removed from the push West, and myself have straddled the four corners of the continent, always searching, never finding. Where did I truly belong, and what would there be about such a place that would make me feel at home there? Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, clicked her ruby heels and whispered, “There’s no place like home.” For her, that black and white farm in Kansas was where she belonged. Good for her. But I never felt that way anywhere, from the very beginning. Maybe being a Jersey Boy had something to do with it. Jersey was always a place to leave, not go back to. But Springsteen did fine with that locale and identity. So did Malcolm Forbes, Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Frank S...

I believe there is such a thing as time travel. It is called 'Art.' It's music. It's film. It's paint. It's sculpture. It's what we do that makes us human. Art is timeless. You're there, at the moment of creation, every time. Have you ever wondered why it is that when you listen to an old song, one that got you viscerally that first time you heard it, it's that first time happening, at some level in your soul, all over again? Why is it that ten million people wanted to attend Michael Jackson's funeral? I was never a fan, but I always found him fascinating, and that Moon Walk was kinda cool. As a human being, he was a pretty spectacular flop. But at some level, he reached maybe a billion people worldwide, with those moves, those tunes, that beat. And even I, ever a non-fan, can summmon a moment in my past life when it got to me, and even I was sashaying across a floor in a club somewhere (I lived in L.A. back then) moving backwards, trying not to...