Past Masters - Joni Mitchell's Hejira

She recorded it in 1976 at the age of 33, long after the poplar success that came with Both Sides Now, Big Yellow Taxi and Free Man in Paris.  Hejira is a dreamscape of jazz sounds, her own guitar underpinned by Larry Carlton’s and the gently propulsive drumming of John Guerin.   But it’s the bass of Jaco Pastorius that gives this disk its droning power.  From deep in the analog era, the sound is crisp and clean.


Composed after a cross-country car trip from Maine to California, the songs are full of the imagery of the road and the mood is full of loss and longing. Listen to Refuge of the Roads, which epitomizes the restless, rootless feel:

In a highway service station

Over the month of June

Was a photograph of the earth

Taken coming back from the moon

And you couldn't see a city

On that marbled bowling ball

Or a forest or a highway

Or me here least of all

You couldn't see these cold water restrooms

Or this baggage overload

Westbound and rolling 
Taking refuge in the roads  

For me, the beautiful, beating heart of this masterpiece (I do not exaggerate) is her meditation on Amelia Earhart, then already a mythic figure of the female adventurer:

I was driving across the burning desert

When I spotted six jet planes

Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain

It was the hexagram of the heavens

it was the strings of my guitar

Amelia, it was just a false alarm

On a summer night, rain threatening or even coming down, fall under the spell of this one. 

Fresh Face – Lena Dunham

Okay, this is a stretch but stay with me for a minute:  Imagine if Sandra Dee, in addition to starring in, it had written and directed Gidget, the 1959 movie that ushered the surfing craze into popular culture.  And what if Sandy had then gone on to adapt it for television (too bad for you Sally Fields), with an unblinking focus on what exactly went on with Moon Doggy at the beach?  Nuh, uh.  No chance for the girls to win big in 1959.

But this is exactly the hat trick that 25 year-old Lena Dunham has pulled off.  Fresh out of Oberlin, she produced a smart, original 2010 film about coming home to NYC “in a post college delirium” – Tiny Furniture.  It’s a gem. 

Now under the watchful gaze of Judd Apatow, she’s got a breakout hit on HBO, Girls, recycling and expanding the characters and situations of Tiny Furniture.  The writing is sharp, the acting authentic and Dunham's character heroic.  

Watch it for its knowing, hilarious insights into how women are navigating the straits of young adulthood right now  Watch it for an early look at young comedic talent who could be this generation’s Elaine May (Wayback Machine alert – Google her).  

But whatever you do, do not watch it as the parent of a 25 year old daughter.  If that's you, go watch something else less unsettling, like Game of Thrones or something.