Striking a Chord With the Other Side

 

Recently I had a the opportunity to interview the wonderful Amanda D. Paulson for my podcast, The AP Strange Show, wherein we discussed her theories about Paranormal Emotive Touchpoints. You can check it out here:

Part of the conversation involved one of the main "Odd Emotions" Paulson describes as being useful in contacting the Other Side- Nostalgia- and in particular how one might use media such as movies or music to provoke the feeling. Since recording, then editing and releasing the episode, I've been thinking in particular about how much music informs both the psychical and mundane aspects of our existence here on Earth. So, whether you've listened to the show or not (I humbly recommend that you do...) here's a few thoughts.

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Music and the industry around it is largely built upon happenstance. The music that resonates with you largely has to do with where and when you were born, your family or other early influences, and the culture surrounding you. In a broader sense, for songs and musical artists, there are many examples throughout history of songs that become surprise hits or seem to capture a moment in time outside of anyone planning for them to do so. Songs can have deeply personal meanings, as well as widely recognized importance. Sometimes a song can remain fairly obscure for decades, then suddenly become popular for its use in a movie soundtrack. Think of "Stuck in the Middle With You" by Stealer's Wheel, and how much of a boost that song got from being featured in an infamous scene in Reservoir Dogs. The strange path the song took into many psyches and into the collective unconscious, with additional grim meanings attached to it, is really pretty strange- and very similar to how synchronicity tends to work.

If you think too hard about synchronicity, you might come around to considering what causal mechanism exists behind it- if any. For the more puzzling and strong synchronicities, it boggles the mind to think about all of the events that had to take place in just the right order, at just the right time and place, so that they'd line up with where you are at that moment to appreciate it. Of course its easy to drive oneself crazy noting such things, but there are patterns out there. It's not always clear why and how, and as long as you have stable footing its enough to know that they're there.

When it comes to music and associated media, one is able to track possible meanings and moments in time in which a song, artist, or album would have been culturally significant. It's not always obvious, however, and examples that might fly under the radar can, perhaps, show how both mundane and psychical effects can be wrought from an unassuming song. In thinking about this, I came up with the example of a viral video from the dark ages of five or six years ago.

Given the disposable nature of online content these days, it's easy to forget some viral moments- and even easier to miss it entirely, especially if you avoid social media. But in fall of 2021, one man's selfie while skateboarding and sipping his juice captured a moment when so many people had their lives upturned by a worldwide pandemic. Something about this dude cruising along, in a short form video on a rapidly growing social media outlet, struck a chord with millions of people. It spawned imitators for months, and- pertinent to our subject here- drove up sales and streams of the featured song, Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams". 

No one could have foreseen that a hit songs from 1977 would suddenly become very relevant, least of all because of a context-free video of a man skating along swigging back cranberry juice, during a time of upheaval and anxiety for many. The song was already well known, of course, and held very personal meanings for people of all ages. For those who were around to hear it upon its initial release, it meant one thing, for others perhaps it was a song their parents loved. The album it comes from, Rumours, is considered a classic and seems to rise and fall in popularity with listeners around the world. Regardless of the personal attachments however, the song is seemingly imprinted now with a singular moment in time. A time of chaos and uncertainty, and an oasis of calm in the form of a carefree man "vibing" to it while skating along the edge of a highway.

Whether one believes in the psychical imprinting of the song and this moment, the mood it captured for millions left a mark- whether people remember why or not. It's entirely likely that this particular moment will be lost in the shuffle of online media to the point that no one will remember why they feel a certain somber wistfulness when they hear Stevie Nicks singing this song. Perhaps many of them were never aware of the viral video to begin with. I would contend that its irrelevant. The emotive imprint on the song is now mixed in, with the background vocals, like distant thunder in a rainstorm.

On a personal note, something I discovered about myself made me realize how sneaky music can be in how we respond to it. It connects various moments in time, and the order of those events becomes irrelevant because of music's ability to take one's consciousness outside of time itself. I'm reminded of the first time I listened to the album "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd, while up late at night sipping coffee and surreptitiously smoking cigarettes as a teenager in my friend's room. Hearing the synth-drenced main riff of "Have a Cigar" for the first time, while also experiencing the new-to-me chemical delight of caffeine and nicotine in tandem, felt revelatory. It felt like the coolest thing I had ever heard. 

Later on I began to learn guitar and write songs for myself, and noticed a pattern. Songs in E Minor, especially ones that relied on an E minor which adds the 9- the F#, to the chord. The dissonance from the added note with the minor third, the G, activated some part of my nervous system in ways I couldn't explain. "Have a Cigar" more or less outlines this chord in that main riff, and although as a teen it was a new song to me, it had a nostalgic feeling attached to it. In learning to play guitar, I would get pointers from my mother. She had played since her teenage years, mostly for her church, but one of her favorite songs to play was "Diamonds and Rust" by Joan Baez. It was her go-to song when she was warming up or just making sure her old twelve string guitar was in tune. When she showed me how to pick the intro to that song, and when I learned how to play the aforementioned Floyd tune, it clicked- it was the same chord. Something about that chord had stuck with me, possibly from the time I was in the womb. My mom had probably picked out those notes plenty of times while I was gestating, and the notes became a part of me. Even if this is too far fetched, I had heard the song as a small child and notably in the album version there is also synthesizer, which probably triggered the feeling as well.

 

"Diamonds and Rust" and "Have a Cigar" are very different songs. The connection isn't entirely obvious, and probably something I never would have figured out had I not decided to learn guitar for myself. Without any doubt, both songs and the chord in question hit tons of other people in their own unique ways, but somewhere between that F# and G note there exists a secret tone which unites a multitude of consciousnesses and moments in time. For me at least, the vibration of it connects distinct moments in my life in a bittersweet way- and I have little doubt that it connects me to other minds like the sympathetic strings on a harp. I'm sure that other music lovers and musicians could find their own examples, and hopefully this inspires you. 

*** Additional notes:

That last video is a song I wrote using the aforementioned EmAdd9 chord. 

I am not a big music theory guy. If I got anything wrong about how tones work, don't @ me as the kids used to say.

"Stuck in the Middle With You" has an additional weird story attached- for a period of a year or so I seemed to be living in an alternated dimension wherein that song was a little slower, sung in a different register, and lacking background vocals. It was unnerving, kind of a Mandela Effect moment, as I seemed to be the only one who noticed. Eventually it went back to normal. No idea what that was about.

Full of Hot Air- Ruminations on UFOs and those Numinous Balloons

 At the time I sat down to write this, news and social media had been all abuzz about a Chinese spy balloon seen floating across the country. It was, eventually, shot down. I was surprised to see just how many people on social media had become national security experts overnight, as it seemed everyone had ideas about what should be done. I'll admit that I don't know anything about spy balloons, or why on earth such low-tech espionage would be necessary in today's technological age- but the particular interest among the Disclosure set, and those on hashtag UFO Twitter, got me thinking about the symbolic nature of balloons and, more specifically, this symbolism in relation to the topic of UFOs. 

I was unable to finish writing this post the first time, and now, a week later, as I sit to complete it more objects have been shot down from both the U.S. and Canada...

My good friend, the right honorable Most Reverend StarDoG pointed out on Facebook:

You have to chortle at so many of those who are forever telling people that "People are losing their shit over a weather balloon and there's nothing strange here, please move on", currently, totally losing their shit over an actual weather balloon..

-Steve Mills, author of the blog post You're Just Like a Little Child Chasing a Balloon into the Sunset

The irony related to balloons runs deep in UFOlogy. "Weather balloon" is one of the classic hand-waving dismissals of UFO reports since the 1940s, alongside the planet Venus, misidentification of birds or known crafts, and Swamp Gas. Weather balloons and UFOs are inextricably linked, and as I intend to persuade you through my ramblings here, the symbol of all balloons hints at something existentially unsettling and as hard to capture through words as clouds are in one's hand. 

Back in 2020, a "leaked government photo" of a UFO, taken from inside a jet, was revealed to be remarkably similar in size and shape to that of a party balloon featuring DC Comics' Dark Knight, Batman. At the time, I found this profoundly amusing, and perhaps an indicator of the Cosmic Trickster at play. I had often felt that the extreme camps of those who engage with the Phenomenon, as it were, were exemplified by the Disclosure Set/TTSA mob, and fans of the documentary series Hellier. This dichotomy is often expressed as the "nuts and bolts" camp vs those open to a panoply of interpretations, bordering on the mystical and visionary. In cryptozoology, it might be the "flesh and blood" camp vs those open to supernatural answers for why we see Bigfoot and other beasties. In the interest of disclosure, although it's probably entirely obvious, I fall into the latter camp. The caveat is, I don't think either extreme at the exclusion of all evidence to contradict it is healthy. While I think chasing capital "D" Disclosure is a fool's errand, I also think there is a very real danger of missing the forest for the synchronici-trees.

A major part of Hellier, for those who haven't seen it, involves a blue star balloon that served as a synchronicity during the course of the investigation more than once. The balloon in question has become as emblematic of the Hellier goblin-hunt as the goblins themselves. In this sense, it seems amazingly on-brand for Trickster phenomena that the other extreme, who likely would not respond well to the language of high strangeness, to be taken in by a blue Batman balloon. 

In Tim Burton's 1989 movie Batman, balloons appear in the form of a dastardly plot perpetrated by the Joker. As he is throwing money out the people of Gotham, the floats above him are loaded with toxic gas that he hopes to unleash on the unsuspecting public. Of course he is foiled by the Caped Crusader, who flies in in his Batwing, towing the balloons to a safe distance from the city. This heroic act is mirrored later in the 2012 movie The Dark Knight Rises, in which Batman has to (we're led to believe) sacrifice himself in bringing a bomb out into the sea to save the city. 

The clown imagery and invitation to collect money in the scene, along with the hidden horror of the plot to poison Gotham, within a balloon, get at this odd symbolic quality of the unassuming and seemingly friendly object. A balloon might not be what it seems; is it a message from the cosmos, a whimsical decoration, a UFO, or a parade float filled with poison? Already, we can see that pinning down a straightforward meaning here is as evasive as the string of a free-floating balloon that has just left your grasp...Another relevant sinister clown / balloon connection is worth mentioning here- a single red balloon has also been a symbol of the character Pennywise in Stephen King's It.

The shape-shifting entity, most often portraying itself as a clown, is revealed to be (spoiler alert) a giant spider from either space or another dimension. The balloon sometimes acts as a harbinger of his appearances, or as a way to lure victims to their doom.

During World War II, balloons coming from Asia were a major concern for the United States, particularly along the Pacific Coast. Japan had released balloons loaded with incendiary devices, as a means of attacking the U.S. mainland. Balloons were also used during the war to distribute pamphlets of propaganda across enemy lines, or as a means of communication. All the while, phenomena such as "foo fighters" and ghost rockets were reported by airmen. After the war, the flying saucer age began with the publicity around the Kenneth Arnold sighting- but before the war, there were reports of mystery airships. Dirigibles, essentially piloted balloons, were reported throughout the country. 

These mysterious airships seemed to be just ahead of where commonly accepted technology would take us, but as zeppelins came into use they seemed less mystifying. They might have enjoyed greater use as a means of travel, had it not been for the widely publicized Hindenburg disaster in 1937. The words of the reporter covering the disaster - "Oh, the humanity!" have become ingrained and meme-ifed into public consciousness to this day. Public trust in airships dropped quickly following the crash.

The Hindenburg crash was featured as the cover art for Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut album, related to a joke spurred by the suggestion of a line-up of musicians in a band- that it would go over like "a lead balloon", or a "lead zeppelin". 

Years later, Pink Floyd would cause UFO reports of a sort with a botched album cover photo shoot. For their 1977 album Animals, the plan was to get a shot of a balloon shaped like an enormous pig floating above the Battersea Power Station. The pig balloon was custom made by a German company called Ballon Fabrik, who had previously constructed zeppelins. For the first attempt at getting a good photo, they had hired a marksman to shoot down the balloon if it became untethered. The second day, they failed to bring one, and it floated away...

The balloon eventually landed in a farmer's field, and he was reportedly furious that it had frightened his cows. Here we can see not only the UFO and balloon symbols merged together in one event, but also cows, which in popular media are often portrayed as victims of abduction. Beyond that, the likelihood of ever getting a straight answer with UFOs is so slight, it would seem that "when pigs fly" would be a reasonable expectation on when we'll have it figured out. On another, weirder level, Pink Floyd got their start playing at the UFO Club in London- which was managed by the co-founder of IT magazine Joe Boyd, who helped finance the recording of the band's first singles... right around the same time a newspaper article made the rounds in the U.S. about a police officer named Dale Spaur, who had taken to using the code name "Floyd" for a flying saucer he saw multiple times.

The imagery of a pig was part of the thematic lyrical structure of the Animals album- Roger Waters was drawing from Orwell's Animal Farm, a critique of Communism, but turning it on its head as a critique of capitalist, commercial society. He would later expand on the Orwellian themes in the later album The Wall, which was more inspired by the book 1984. 

In 1984, Nena's song 99 Luftballons was released in an English-language version to capitalize on the success of the original song in Europe. American audiences preferred the original German version over the translated 99 Red Balloons. Nena would express disapproval at the the translated version, as it seems the meaning gets lost in translation. The basic premise is that 99 balloons, tied together, are let go and float into a neighboring airspace and mistaken for UFOs. This leads to jets being scrambled, and using firepower, which builds up to a cataclysmic war that destroys the world. The anti-war song concludes with the discovery of a single balloon in the rubble, and the line "I think of you and let it go". 

The song was inspired in part by balloons let go during a concert in 1982, causing Nena's guitarist to wonder what would happen if they floated over the Berlin Wall. Also cited as inspiration for the lyrics was an apparent prank using balloons to hoax a UFO in Las Vegas, by students in 1973. It seems that there were several such hoaxes that year:

Balloons and hoaxing seem to go together well. In 2009, a flying saucer shaped balloon made the news when it was reported that there was a child trapped inside. The "Balloon Boy" hoax was characterized as a ploy for publicity and attention from the couple who launched the balloon, Richard and Mayumi Heene. To this day, they and their son who they originally claimed was in the balloon maintain that it was not a hoax, but a mistake. Another example of a balloon based saucer hoax occurred in 1989, when rich guy with too much time on his hands Richard Branson spooked motorists in the U.K.:

Sometimes, though, balloons are just a means of adventure, whimsy, and fantasy. Take for an example the sky journey of Kent Couch in 2008. The 48-year-old owner of a gas station rigged up a bunch of balloons to a lawn chair and spent 9 hours aloft, covering a distance of 235 miles from his starting point in Oregon. Using a BB gun to take out balloons and lower himself when necessary, he landed safely in Idaho. "I think most guys look up in the sky and wish they could ride on a cloud.", Couch said in an interview.

As I type this all out, it does seem eerily likely that tensions are mounting around balloons from across the Pacific. I certainly hope nothing like the 99 Luftballons scenario plays out, and I would hope that we can all move toward a more adventurous and whimsical view of balloons like that shown by Kent Couch, or as utilized in the Pixar movie Up. We do seem to be living in an increasingly crazy world, a place where alien craft making an undeniable appearance seems more likely; but on a scarier note, with a recent pandemic, climate and weather changes, and political tensions high all around, it's easy to feel like we're on the precipice of a great change. What that change is, and whether good or bad, is as hard to determine as the motives of a balloon drifting across the pacific ocean. This brings me to one final balloon image culled from pop culture- the balloon to take us home. And if you've made it this far through my ramblings, I really can't thank you enough.

At the end of The Wizard of Oz, the all-powerful Wizard has a solution for Dorothy. The plan to bring her and Toto back to Kansas involves getting into a hot-air balloon, but at the last moment, as the balloon is taking off, Toto jumps out. Dorothy has to go running after him, as her only hope for getting home appears to drift off above the Emerald City. It's then that she learns the power to bring her back was with her the whole time; and maybe that's the lesson with balloons. Maybe, perhaps, as Nena sang, we should think of each other and let it go. Maybe chasing balloons equates with madness, and certainly there's danger in it. Maybe I'm crazy for ruminating so long on the topic, and bringing up such far-flung images to illustrate the nebulousness that is UFOlogy. I'm sure it could be argued that I am, indeed, full of hot air, high on my own supply... but like many other guys, I just want to know what it's like to ride a cloud.