Keep Your Eye on the Donut...
And other words of wisdom from David Lynch, Ivor Cutler, Yip Harburg, Shugen Roshi and more. Plus: Vodka Sauce.
Welcome to a first “Midweek Update” of 2025. As someone who inebriates themselves on culture, it is not uncommon for me to want to share some of it with a wider audience. I enjoy having the opportunity to do so here and I hope you will follow up on those recommendations and links that interest you.
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This a difficult week for any of us who live in the USA and care about people and the planet over profit and power. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I mentally postponed most thoughts of the impending political apocalypse these last ten weeks, but it arrived on Monday in full force: all it needed was the Four Horseman carrying the Executive Orders and a sense of Biblical doomsday would have been complete…
…Which makes it all the more important to celebrate what we have so that we can renew ourselves to go forwards, and I’d like to start by honoring those who are willing to speak truth to power, from a Biblical pulpit. Gratitude to Marian Edgar Brude.
And although I never met him (unlike my pal Dusty Wright, who interviewed him several times, once as below and all as detailed here), I would like to thank David Lynch for leaving us not only with such great art and such a lasting influence on those who fell under his creative and meditational spell, but with this reminder of his outlook on life, per these beautiful words his family issued upon his death:
"There's a big hole in the world now that he's no longer with us. But, as he would say, 'Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.'… It's a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies all the way."
I have always tended to be one of those annoying ‘the glass is half full’ people, but since reading the above aphorism (which I believe may have originated with Margaret Atwood), I am going to stop focusing on the glass and concentrate on the picture of a donut instead. Because rather than it just being about a hole where you might otherwise want more donut, the expression signifies something more profound, namely that… There isn’t a donut without the hole. The absence makes the substance all the sweeter.
This is a metaphor that is applicable anywhere and everywhere you want to apply it. There isn’t a life without tragedy. There is no success without failure. There is no victory without defeat. There is no mastery without practice, and no one can be truly happy without knowing unhappiness. Right now, my adoptive country looks like it has a great big fucking hole where its heart should be, but there is still a donut around it, so for now, and without sugarcoating reality, let’s savor that donut.
My own heart goes out to those who lost their homes and/or possessions in the LA fires. I might hope that if such a tragedy befell me I would fall back in turn on my most primal callings and, after a run to clear my head (running being one of those personal primal callings), I would sit down to try and write something that could make sense of it. Whether I could write something as beautiful as S.W. Lauden of this parish’s power-pop-frenzy Remember The Lightning newsletter (and physical magazine!), I am not sure.
After packing a car full of possessions, along with his family, and evacuating from the Eaton fire to the family house where he grew up, Lauden – apparently his real name is Steve Coulter – then had to sit back and await the news that the house he and his wife had saved up for, “the most beat up little house on the block,” had gone up in flames. And that the item he most regretted not gathering up was a handwritten recipe for vodka sauce pinned to the fridge, because of how it connected to his family and his sobriety. It’s a lovely, tender, loving piece of prose:
Focusing further on the donut that is his writing ability, Coulter came back and decided to write about his Melted Wax - ten vinyl albums lost to the fire that contained within them not just hot grooves and retna-burning imagery, but personal stories. The vinyl may be gone, but thanks to his focus, the memories will now always be in writing. Cheers Steve, and I hope you get to rebuild your record collection alongside the rest of your life ASAP.
I have never practiced David Lynch’s favoured Transcendental Meditation, but I did practice Zazen at the Zen Mountain Monastery, spending many a Sunday morning on the cushion during the years I lived up the hill in Mount Tremper. Those meditations were followed by a dharma talk (or something similar), and every now and then, I listen to one on a Sunday morning as my ongoing connection to a place that felt like home. Specifically, I find the words of the Abbot, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi, encouraging and consoling, compassionate and earthly and, best of all, humorous just when they need to be.
The most recent talk of Shugen Roshi’s – “The Heart of Your Path” – is a perfectly poetic example, and kept me good company this past Sunday morning, especially his words about the mega-billionaires. You can listen along on your own walk or run from the podcast page here, but you may prefer to seat yourself cross-legged on your favorite cushion and allow 40 minutes of meditational talk transcend you.
Spoiler alert about the mega billionaires. Many of them are trying to cheat death by buying their way to an ever-extended life. Yet, “There are a whole range of activities that extend and enrich your life, and prominent among them is music and dancing,” says Professor John Tregoning of Imperial College, London, writing in The Quietus about new reports that demonstrate as much through scientific studies observing our cortisol levels and much more besides.
But let us not stop there, for “Music has other benefits,” writes Tregoning, which include “reducing the risk of dementia.” As I get closer and closer to the final goodbye to a mother I have already mainly lost to dementia, I selfishly aim to do everything possible to avoid any possible inheritance of this memory-stealing disease. And so, if I am equal parts happy and unsurprised to learn that my engagement with music is one positive prevention, so I am equally happy and equally unsurprised to discover that so too is a plant-based diet. And I am even more happy to share that good news.
“Words make you think. Music makes you feel. A song makes you feel a thought.”
Yip Harburg said that. Who was Yip Harburg? A songwriter, but of course. Specifically, a lyricist, yet one whose name I did not know until this past week - despite his authorship of “Over The Rainbow.” Did he ever put his above saying to music? Answers in a song, please.
“Something comes from my unconscious mind and goes to the reader or the listener’s unconscious mind. I don’t know what I’ve communicated. They don’t know what they’ve received, but they feel that they’ve been communicated with, and they feel the happier for that.”
Ivor Cutler said that. Who was Ivor Cutler? Oh come on now… Or, allowing that not all of us are of a certain age and of Scottish descent, just ask Alastair McKay, who happens to be both, and who spent some fine time with the man who would have been 102 this month, a number I suspect he would have appreciated for the sheer randomness of it.
A couple of updates on a couple of recent Substack posts.
It turns out that the drumkit used by Keith Moon in the movie Stardust (see link below) ended up with no one else but my buddy Buddy Ascott, once the drummer with the Chords and now gainfully employed (albeit without remuneration) by my own band The Dear Boys. Sadly, the kit is no longer with him (and he preferred to preserve rather than play it, the kit being “too fragile for my energetic fists of fury”) but he was good enough to send a couple of pictures for souvenirs. The pictures did not copy, so there is this instead…
…which came from Naked Eye editor and Who archivist Matt Kent. How cute, quaint and deliciously inappropriate that the crazy concert at the Belle Vue in Manchester merely billed “David Essex” and “Keith Moon” as if they were maybe going to croon together on a few duets for the evening. And even if The Stray Cats would have meant nothing on the ticket, it seems frankly bizarre that Dave Edmunds’ name was not included, given his own hit status at the time. Then again, it was a bizarre day all around, as Edmunds recounted for me in the 1996 /7 interview I reprinted below:
(Later down the line, when Dave Edmunds was hired to produce the American rockabilly trio Stray Cats’ debut album, the band claimed not to have known of Stardust’s previous use of the name, let alone Edmunds’ involvement. Bizarre? I should coco. Also: until now I never even knew Brinsley Schwarz, starring Edmunds’ ongoing musical co-conspirator Nick Lowe, was on the bill at the same show/not-show.)
As a continuation of sorts to my two recent features celebrating the Best of 2024, “Girls on Top” and “Why Chappell Roan is an Era-Defining Pop Star,” Thomas Morra opens his Substack article “Are We There Yet?” as follows:
“Take a look at any random new music playlist from your favorite source and there’s a good chance that a majority of it is written, performed and/or fronted by someone other than a cisgendered, straight, white male. And while this is completely my opinion, I’d bet that the real standouts on the list are also women and/or LGBTQ+ musicians.”
I second that bet and will certainly not take it on. Morra goes on to elaborate by digging back through some of the key musical moments that brought us to this momentous present day scenario, and winds up listing what would appear to be a round-number 50 musical examples… sadly without an accompanying playlist, but that’s what search engines and streaming platforms and Bandcamp are all for, right?
To that end, I have already “discovered” Devon Ross and her wonderful 2024 EP Oxford Gardens thanks to Morra’s piece, and am currently listening with equally impressed ears to Loma and their 2024 SubPop album How Will I Live Without A Body?, an apt title to leave this Midweek Update with given what came before.
And there you have it: These 50 artists are a/our present. There may be a hole in compassion, empathy, understanding and otherness and I am not about to belittle what it might mean in coming weeks, months, and years. But that great big donut of marvelous modern music made by historically marginalized communities? It’s hear to stay, I’m happy to say.
Thanks for sharing my webcast interview with David Lynch. I was blessed to have known him. Peace.