Fight This Generation

Hey everybody. My final for Professional Responsibility was last week. I may not have done too well, but it's only a two hour class, so it shouldn't effect my GPA too much one way or the other. Next week I start my Contacts drafting class.

Man, summer classes have been harder than I thought. I've really had to fight to go to class and stay interested. Inertia has set in. Boredom has overtaken me. Increasingly, my thoughts are turning more and more to music, movies, etc., which is why my posts have been so fluffy and inconsequential of late.

Land of the Dead opens tomorrow. I'm going to attend the earliest show possible to get my zombie fix on. This is my most highly anticipated film of the year so far. It's been 20 years since Day of the Dead (which a lot of people like to dismiss as the weakest of Romero's zombie flicks, even going so far as to prefer the abysmally stupid Revenge of the Living Dead, released the same year. Are you kidding me? Go back and watch the scene where Bub listens to Beethoven's Ninth. How can you not love that?) If you are not merely excited by a new Romero film, may I interest you in stars Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo? Hopper's line, "Zombies man...they creep me out" is destined to be one of the quotable classics in the years to come.

Blah Blah Blah (Slight Return)

Here's a little posting - a random list:

1. Last dvd I watched - Clerks: The Animated Series (with commentary track). Wasn't the greatest show ever, but shouldn't have been canceled so soon. Ah, cancelation - the mark of quality tv.

2. Last record I listened to - Horses by Patti Smith - pretty good. A little warbly in points, but very, very powerful. I downloaded it on Real Rhapsody (I gave in to temptation and downloaded the free 30-day trial). Other stuff I downloaded includes Beach Boys Love You, Wowee Zowee by Pavement, "Needle in the Camel's Eye" by Brian Eno, "Crying" by Roy Orbison.

3. Last bookI read - Lost in the Funhouse Bill Zehme's Andy Kaufman biography. A very interesting book. Much more illuminating than the disappointing Man on the Moon biopic that came out in '99. The movie postulated there was no "real" Andy Kaufman; the book shows that the real Andy Kaufman was a lonely little boy who disappeared into fantasy and decided to stay there.

"A Day in the Life"

It's weird how this blog has ended up not about me so much as about the stuff that I like. Am I boring? Do I have no life? Questions best left unanswered for now.

Even though I don't like the concept of picking favorites per se, I like to ask others what their favorites are. I don't think it really reveals anything deeply meaningful about someone, but makes for fun conversation nevertheless.

If I had to pick a favorite Beatles song at the moment, it would have to be "A Day in the Life." This is, perhaps, the greatest collaboration that Lennon and McCartney ever did. Lennon was responsible for the verses, McCartney for the "middle eight" ("Woke up, fell out of bed....") and all four Beatles collaborated with George Martin on its arrangement.

First off, if anyone ever doubts why Ringo Starr is the greatest drummer in rock and roll, listen to this song. Listen to the fills. How dramatic, how dynamic. A charming punter from Liverpool becomes a powerful orchestra unto himself on the drums. Every note is perfect and in its right place. Nothing wasted.

I don't really like the notion that art is particularly about things, or explains things, like an equation where x=0 or some such nonsense. Such analysis seems incomplete and misleading to me. Art is much more complex, about feelings we can't name, things we don't know. Feelings are the most important part for me.

For some reason, also, I am generally unable to decipher song lyrics in any analytical sense. I know what the words are, and can sing along, but they might as well be gibberish syllables to me. If forced to analyze them, I can come up with a decent little explanation, but it's insufficient really. Song lyrics are not experienced as words alone, in a vaccum, but are welded to the melody and production. Attempting to reduce a song's effect to a meaning or an explanation by a reading of the lyrics alone is a strange exercise. I tend to listen in a more or less abstract fashion. I think, though, that some meaning is there, waiting to be excavated. And though each person's meaning may be different from another's (and each may have several differing meanings that she keeps to herself), this is all right. That's why it's art.

If forced to take a stab at "A Day in the Life," though, I can muster something. The chords and lyrics, inseparable really, are like reading a diary of the common man. Lennon said that he got the inspiration for the verses from reading news articles in The Daily Mail. So we're talking about common life, ordinary life. And yet, it quickly becomes existential. Our singer's response to news of an noteworthy death is to laugh at the photograph accompanying the newsclipping. People are crowded at the scene of the accident, and they recognize the driver as someone they should know, someone important. We're left to wonder why this notable demise should be any more or less important than the myriad deaths occuring daily.

We move into a picture show, watching a movie about war. (I've always wondered if this was inspired by Lennon's role in Dick Lester's How I Won the War, which was filmed before the sessions for Sgt. Pepper. Lennon wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" while on location for the movie.) Though the English army is victorious, most people cannot bear to watch. Memories of the Second World War? Echoes of Vietnam perhaps? Our singer can watch. He's different from the rest, able to intellectualize the experience. His "having read the book" can mean both that he's read the novel from which the movie is adapted, and also that he's learned, or enlightened. He's "read the book." Perhaps he experiences things on a more detached, abstract level. Is this better than those who live from visceral reaction to visceral reaction?

And then, a daydream. A little flash, remembering high school. Perhaps this was before enlightenment. Deep down, despite a modern, detached attitude, isn't the singer still the same person he was before? Which is the better person, the purer person? The one who is intellectual and detached from death, life's great mystery, or the passionate youth who bummed cigarettes from his classmates? What will he remember when he dies? Which will feel more real?

And then, his younger self dreams. Is it a dream about the future, about where the singer is now?

Back to the newspaper - there are holes in our roads (A side note: that sentence is the actual headline of the newspaper article that inspired the verse.) Absurd whimsy. The problems of life, the little details, are as meaningless and myriad as holes in pavement. Is "now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall" Lennon's take on Bogart in Casablanca (Our problems don't amount to a hill of beans?) I don't know. I always appreciated it as a non-sequiter.

As good as the music is, the lyrics, chords, arrangement, what pushes this over the top for me, and makes it my favorite, is the orchestra. McCartney, I think, had the idea for the orchestra to be given one note to start on and one note to end on, and twenty-four bars to figure out how to get there. The maelstrom that ensues is a glorious, glorious noise. I can't describe what it does to me, it's indescribable. Tears have been shed listening to this. I don't know what it means, or why it's there, but it has a very, very profound effect on me. What especially gets me is, after the dischord, when the orchestra, in tune and in time, supports Lennon's wordless ah's before the last verse. There's one more maelstrom, and then, several hands on several pianos strike an E Major chord which sounds into eternity. Sometimes, in the back of my mind, in daydreams, I picture footage of The Bomb detonating at Bikini Island. (On a side note, please listen to Love's "Seven and Seven Is")

So, you'll notice I really didn't describe the actual song too much, just some impressions about it. Perhaps this was deliberate. You should go listen to it. Listen. Listen. Listen. And maybe tell me what your favorite Beatles song is. For the sake of conversation, of course.

OIL STORM!!!

You've got to hand it to the FX network and their propensity for generating really cheesy disaster movies out of the subconscious angst of the nascent post-9/11 America oughts. First, there was the subtly-titled SMALLPOX, a fictitious documentary chronicling a fictitious 2002 outbreak of smallpox, caused by a "politically correct" religious fanatic (if such a thing were to exist - read: not a Muslim) who infects himself with smallpox and mingles among the populace of NY, coughing, shaking hands, and rubbing on stuff. This sets off a global firestorm of infection, resulting in martial law and desperate overacting from the ordinary folks herded into "relief" camps. The mock talking-head format is pretty effective, when not undermined by aforementioned cheesy acting.

Now, premiering on June 5th we have Oil Storm, in which rising gasoline prices cripple the American/world economies, leading to (I presume) martial law and desperate overacting from the ordinary folks waiting in line for the precious, precious gasoline that will never come. I say "presume" because the trailer is all a quick-cut mess of scenes, the most memorable of which (and genuinely chilling, I might add) is a shot of a Conoco showing, in time lapse, rising gas prices, from the $2 range, to $3, to $4, all the way up to $5.

I don't know what the appeal is. Why do we want to watch scenarios in which our society collapses? Do we hope to stave off something that might actually happen by pre-empting it with fiction? Or do we feel guilty about our society's vast material wealth, and indulge in self-destructive daydreams to assuage our guilt? I don't know! Quit thinkin' so much and join me this Sunday at 8 to watch...Oil Storm!