"Claudia Lewis" by M83, Tuesday, October 19, 2021
ALONE 20 MILLION YEARS FROM MY PLACE. Claudia Lewis died in 2001, ten years before this song was released, at the age of 94. In September, I talked about my great grandfather's life, born in 1903, imagining the world events happening around him. But as I read Lewis' somewhat "cheesy" space poem "Blue," I imagined what she must have been thinking about as the technology increased around her. I can look at a list of inventions of the 20th century, but this doesn't tell me at what point most U.S. families stopped using horse and buggies or at what point trans-Atlantic ships were less popular than flights. In a day and age we can't remember what life was like before the smartphone, Lewis would have lived through several technological revolutions: radio, black and white television, color television, dial-up internet, maybe the early days of high(er)-speed internet, early cellphones. Lewis devoted her life to her teaching. A graduate of Reed College in Oregon--the hippy school that Donald Miller writes about in Blue Like Jazz--, Lewis got her start in education helping to start a preschool. She eventually got her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1959 and worked at Bank Street College of Education in New York. As I read about her accomplishments, I have to pause and think about her age and what was happening during those times. She was 45 when she got her Ph.D. I think about Ruth Badder Ginsberg studying law in Columbia in 1959, which was not easy for women at the time. In fact, RBG was among one of the first classes to allow women into the program. I'd imagine that there weren't many women holding Ph.Ds in the '50s.
THE SPACE, OH IT'S MINE! What drew Gonzalez to Lewis' "cheesy poems" is their mutual love of childhood. Hurry Up is an album in which Gonzalez imagines being a kid, growing up in the '80s, listening to the pop music of the time, enjoying his favorite sci-fi movies. Many of these sci-fi movies were made by kids watching Neil Armstrong on television or remembering the cosmonauts in space. Lewis was the sci-fi nerds' school teacher. She, at 50 when the first person went to space and 62 when Armstrong stepped on the moon, became fascinated with the idea of watching the earth from above it. Much like Prince Philip in season 3 of The Crown, she writes with an earnest, childlike reverence for space and human achievement. She wrote two books about space, When I Go to the Moon (1961) and Poems for Earth and Space (1967). It takes a lot of digging to find Claudia Lewis online. M83 made it a little harder to find her, but in a way, a song inspired by her poetry is a nice tribute. One reviewer of Hurry Up, criticized the lyrics on the album, saying that 'Oh, oh's over climactic music is was overkill. "Claudia Lewis" has a chorus of just "Oh" several times. Sometimes music just needs to live in the emotion. Sometimes poetry for children isn't super deep. Sometimes we just need Nine Inch Nails' bassist to slap some bass to tighten up some nonsense lyrics and throw together a John Hughes-inspired music video--a teen drama about a blue-haired alien girl allergic to water who falls in love with a boy only to beam up to a ride a comet off to another world.
Official Music Video:
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