outlines of our loved ones in the dark

good morning ~

(click the link / opening credits to listen)

My Big Breakoutlines of our loved ones in the dark

today’s track came from a glitch - tried to clock the drum machine to the synth and something strange happened, usually good to follow something strange

sweet readers, heed this: I am looking for work!

I’m home from tour and done getting married and now my freelance books are quite open for the next three weeks, then open again for most of October. I have a wide set of skills in music, event production, arts administration, copy writing, design, etc plus I really enjoy working with people and crowds. I am open to gigs, remote recordings, freelance, part-time, full-time work, going on tour, really any kind of opportunity you might have up your sleeve - if you have something you think I just maybe might sorta be interested in, please do not hesitate to reach out, probably best to hit me via email: benjamin.seretan@gmail.com. Thank you in advance!

here’s a link to hear the theme song mentioned below, btw

Where we live is wonderful - abundant water, in the river and through the hills, frogs peeping in the spring, cicadas hissing in clumps of trees throughout the summer, a perfectly crisp day or two when the leaves have turned, weather like biting into a perfect, sweet apple, then a bleak, icy blackness that settles over the valley for a month or two like a blanket over a parakeet's cage. When the purple crocuses first start to pop - the avant garde of another winter lived through - the soft serve machines whirr back to life. We are blessed to live in close company with many other tender freaks (they come to our house for breakfast), the farmer's markets and backyard gardens bloom in hilarious abundance, and most nights we can see more stars than we can count from our driveway. There is quiet when we want it and with a little effort we can get to two of the greatest cities on earth before lunchtime. And just a few minutes from our house - just across from the gun store - there is a still-operating relic of the 20th century, something that for many is but a nostalgic signifier of a simpler time, something remembered but never actually seen. Right on route 9w there's a drive-in movie theater still going strong, four double features five nights a week.

There are a bunch of drive-ins still operating in this area, actually. The Hollywood Drive-In in Averill Park was the first I ever attended, summer 2020, a few weeks after Gracelee and I first moved in together, and the fact that it existed and was still in operation was a real comfort to me in that big moment of turmoil and change. It was still the height of COVID and most new movie releases had been postponed, so they played classics all summer long. We saw the Goonies, we saw Gremlins, we watched Dirty Dancing snuggled in the back of our pickup truck, heat lightning crackling. Later that week I sung "I've had the time of my life" to a herd of cows and they loped over to the fence (and Dirty Dancing, by the way, is set in the Catskills, if you didn't know!). There are other drive-ins scattered about, one in Saratoga Springs, another one in our county not too far away, and a particularly good one in Glenmont that serves ice cream - watching the new Top Gun and eating a waffle cone there made me feel almost patriotic.

When you do a big party and you have a lot of friends and family coming in from out of town, you can't really just organize the party itself. You gotta think about meals and arrivals and rides and places for people to crash. And then pretty soon you realize that you need to organize activities, too, because people can't necessarily travel in the same night of the party and they have whole days to fill before and after your wedding celebration. So we thought about the specific, upper Hudson Valley things that people might want to do while they're here - see our house, sure, we could all be hung over together on Sunday, then of course all of our friends from the city will want to go for a swim, but what about Friday night? What's an activity that people between the ages of 3 and 75 could all enjoy together equally? An obvious solution: we would all go to the drive-in.

It turned out to be remarkably easy to rent one of the screens - the owners of the theater responded to our email enthusiastically and almost immediately and quoted us a very reasonable fee. And we knew pretty quickly that we wanted to show at least one Jackie Chan movie (there was a period of time when we watched something like 30+ of his movies and we have a Thai-language poster for "Rumble in the Bronx" framed in our house). We thought about showing our other favorite filmmaker - Les Blank, what a saint - but how do you follow Police Story? We couldn't show something contemplative and sweet after watching 15 cars drive downhill through a shantytown on the outskirts of Hong Kong. There was only one option - Police Story 3, aka Supercop, a two-hander with Michelle Yeoh that features an original song by DEVO over the end credits (Police Story 2 is not as good imo).

I have been using the phrase "a kind of heaven" a lot lately, but I can't imagine something more appropriate to describe this scene: a beautiful deepening sunset on a perfect August evening, and every three minutes or so another car full of beautiful, beloved people pulls up and joins the picnic. Family from California, North Carolina, and Philadelphia, friends from Texas and Seattle and New York City, neighbors and collaborators, all pulled in to lawn before the farthest of the four screens. Trips to the ancient snack bar, folding chairs, people who just met sharing blankets and truck tailgates, and just as we hit civil twilight we cranked the radios and the trailers unfurled. Then the words that will delight any true lover of cinema: A GOLDEN HARVEST PRESENTATION. Is your movie really any good unless your lead actor also sings the theme song?

Outlines of our loved ones in the dark, their silhouettes highlighted electric blue in the bounce of the screen, the light from the projection booth making a clear and observable milky way above us as it hurtled over the grass. I was worried my cousin's tiny kid might have trouble with all the guns and blood but he kept hopping up and down saying "SO CRAZY!" and "Papa, I love this movie!" so I'm sure he had a good time. And during the credits of the first feature we snuck away to make the intermission announcement, our voices on the airwaves. Thank you for being here, we said, and meant it, the snack bar is now open and will close shortly after the second feature begins.

But what about you? Do you love where you live? If you had to plan some kind of pre-party gathering for sixty people near your house, what would you do? Have you had enough soft serve this summer?