Lyrics have always fascinated me. I am a person interested in the written word and its application more than I am someone who focuses on the musicality of music. I grew up obsessing about what certain songs were about. Then at a certain age I became aware, thanks to my relationships with musical people and interviews with musicians I idolized, that a lot of songs don’t really mean anything. I know this sounds basic to a lot of people that aren’t as focused on the words in songs, but to me it was nothing less than revelatory.
In retrospect the lack of meaning in some lyrics shouldn’t have been such a surprise to a guy who was more of a Paul McCartney guy than a John Lennon guy. Paul’s songs often sounded like they were about something but mostly fall apart upon closer inspection. Charles Manson may have thought “Helter Skelter” was about an impending war between the races but in reality it was simply an attempt to write a song that was louder and more violent than what the Rolling Stones were writing at the time. The lyrics are largely a description of what’s it like to play on a playground slide.
There is a benefit to focusing on the words of a song. Lyrics were the reason I think I was able to develop a very diverse taste in music. They Might Be Giants don’t have much in common with Del the Funky Homosapien musically, but they are both very adept at turning a phrase or coming up with a clever lyrical construct (full disclosure: I just used the phrase ‘clever lyrical construct’ without fully knowing what it even means or is supposed to mean). When you are more concerned with what a song is saying than how it sounds, it opens you up to a lot of music you may not have cared about otherwise. Of course what constitutes “good lyrics” is as subjective as anything else. When I was about 15 I thought Simon and Garfunkel were excellent lyricists, but at this point in my life I think a lot of their lyrics sound like a freshman poetry seminar (Simon did continue to mature as a lyric writer though and the lyrics on Graceland are suberb).
To many musicians a song is a chance to explore and experiment with a unique sound they haven’t yet tried out. Using “Helter Skelter” again as an example, Paul simply hadn’t written a song that rocked that hard before and so he threw together some lyrics around the melody. What the lyrics actually are saying is by far the least important part of that song. That lack of loaded meaning doesn’t take away from the visceral appeal of the song. The reverse can be true too, good lyrics aren’t enough to get you past something that (for you) is unlistenable. I think Tom Waits writes some really excellent lyrics and I love the atmosphere his words and music combine to make, but his voice is such that I can never listen to more than 2 Tom Waits songs in a row.
Right now I’ve come to a place where I still lyrics are one of the key aspects of a song, but I no longer expect those lyrics to contain a deeper meaning. Lyrics are another color the artist has on her palette to use as she wishes.
Simultaneous to this discovery I had a similar experience with film. Like a lot of guys in their 20’s I went through my David Lynch phase. I watched all of ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland Drive’, etc. And though I didn’t connect to some of the most esoteric Lynch (I turned ‘Eraserhead’ off in boredom after about 30 minutes) I did slowly learn to accept that sometimes there isn’t a big unifying “What This All Means” to be had in a movie. You can watch ‘Mulholland Drive’ and you can certainly tie together a lot of seemingly random and bizarre things into a very workable theory of what the movie is “about” but there are still a lot of loose ends and odd moments that don’t quite fit in the puzzle you’re constructing. But that’s Lynch’s intent, a lot of the images and words he chooses are meant to create a feeling or mood. There isn’t a hidden metaphor you’re missing out on, the purpose was to make you unsettled, or scared, etc.
So a song could be about being very loud and a movie could be about making you feel alienated. They may exist and be fantastic works of art with nary a literal “meaning” to be had. To a lot of people this information is met with a “Yeah…and?” but for a young man who grew up with his head in a book the freedom to take in art without searching for a meaning was one of the most freeing pop culture experiences I’ve ever had.
This American Life is one of those bizarre things in pop culture that is impossible to overrate. No matter how much I like it I always manage to forget about it for a few weeks and then stumble back into an episode in the car some Saturday or Sunday and get reminded of how amazing the show is. I think the only reason I forget occasionally about its existence is that unlike almost everything else awesome in the world it happens to be on the radio (or at least mostly on the radio, for the sake of focus I don’t plan on talking much about the tv show, although I do think it is fantastic).
For anyone who hasn’t listened much to TAL (which you can FOR FREE (sorry to get into a parenthetical inside another parenthetical but even though it is free you should donate to the cost of the podcast if you are a somewhat regular podcast listener) at www.thislife.org by the way) it is summed up by its amazing host Ira Glass at the beginning of each episode thusly “Each week we select a theme and thing bring you several stories on that theme.” Take for example one of my favorite episodes “The Cruelty of Children” which contains several acts. One is a fictional short story about a group of children that find a man in a well and don’t get help. Next is a reading by David Sedaris from one of his memoirs about a boy with whom he shared a homosexual encounter as a child who then turned on him at a summer camp. Then a straight documentary story about bullying amongst girls at a grade school. Each act is very different but each revolve around the central theme of the episode.
Some of the stories on the show are funny, some are tragic, but most are absolutely captivating. You know how there are certain songs you will sit and listen to in the car in your driveway rather than turn the car off and go inside? This American Life is like one of those songs, only it’s an hour long.
The best stories on TAL are usually small slice of life stories that take small personal incidents from regular people’s lives and show how absolutely fascinating we all are when you attempt to deconstruct our motives and experiences. One of my favorite stories from the show (first described to me by my friend Sylas) is from an episode called “The Super” which revolves around stories about landlords and building superintendants. A man describes a story in which his landlord, who was extremely sick with cancer, told him a story about how he bought into a business opportunity involving a worldwide tour of a snowman that was able to benchpress 300 pounds. Trust me, that sentence does not come close to doing the story justice. It is truly one of the funniest things I have heard in my entire life.
Sometimes the stories are more in a serious vein. One episode (memory eludes me but I believe it may be called “The Person that I Killed”) features a riveting story told by a man who struck a young woman on a bicycle with his car when they were both around high school age and how that girl died from the impact. Though it doesn’t seem like the accident was his fault you can feel the guilt and bewilderment in his voice even though it is now at least a decade since the event himself.
Chuck Klosterman’s excellent new book “Eating the Dinosaur” includes some quotes from Ira Glass that center around the act of interviewing and the amazing openness of most of the guests and subjects on TAL.
“Sometimes I will be talking to journalism students and they will ask how I get people to open up to me, and the answer is that I’m legitimately curious about what those people are saying. I honestly care about the stories they are telling. That’s a force that talks to the deepest part of us.”
And anyone who has listened to Glass’s engaged, cerebral interviews can attest to the fact that he does bring out incredible honesty from his subjects through his genuineness and curiosity. Some (notably The Onion) have accused TAL and Glass of a certain amount of ironic detachment, but I can’t think of anything that describes TAL less.
Anyone who goes to the TAL page and is looking for a good place to start would do well to listen to the aforementioned episodes “The Super” or “The Cruelty of Children.” Also incredible are two recent two part episodes. One looks into the near-collapse of the worldwide financial markets “The Big Pool of Money” and “The Return to the Big Pool of Money.” The other features two episodes that look at health care costs in America “More is Less” and the next which examines health insurance “Other People’s Money.”
I can’t say enough good things about this program and I hope (despite some worrying and fairly sad comments from Glass in Klosterman’s book about his level of exhaustion and creative dissatisfaction) it continues on for many years, continuing to chronicle the small yet amazing incidents of our lives.
Facebook (at Facebook.com) is a strange little annex of the physical world. On Facebook I am Facebook friends with people I haven’t even thought about in almost 10 years and didn’t like thinking about them when I was. In fact Facebook friends has become a category of friendship in the physical world. When someone talks about his or her Facebook friends you know that they aren’t really emotionally invested at all. On Facebook I can let people know about my “status” (“all systems go, ready for blast off”) and they can choose to comment on it or give me a thumbs up on it (“status is a greenlight, that’s a go for launch). When is the last time anyone has even seen a thumbs up in person? Suddenly comments are getting 8 thumbs ups. But one of the strangest updates you can give is your relationship status. When you enter a relationship Facebook shows all of your Facebook friends a little heart and when you end a relationship that heart is broken, no matter what, even if you are really happy that relationship ended. I have been in the strange position of finding out that a friend has broken up with someone from Facebook before I heard it from that friend. This situation worried me, do I call her and talk to her? What if something is just wrong with Facebook or she accidentally changed something on Facebook without meaning to? If someone tells you in person that she just broke up with her boyfriend you can be sure she broke up with him. Sure, they might get back together, but in the meantime they are broken up for sure.
There are a number of choices for your relationship, Single, In a Relationship, Engaged, Married, Its Complicated, In an Open Relationship, and Widowed. That’s the order you see them in on a drop down menu. It might be some kind of hierarchy or timeline from being single through relationship problems (Complicated and then Open), to the point where you kill your spouse.
The last one, Widowed, is strange and at least a little sick. See, when someone you are in a relationship with is on Facebook too there is a link to that person’s Facebook page. In fact, when that person isn’t on Facebook, and you just type in his or her name without the link it makes you look a little desperate, a little like the girl in grade school who had a boyfriend in another state who couldn’t ever come to visit because he was really busy being a body builder. So this is what I am envisioning, your husband or wife dies and you switch your status to Widowed to and people can click the link and see the Facebook page of someone who just recently died. Maybe it would be comforting, but it seems akin to the people who keep a deceased relative’s room exactly as it was when the person was alive. Maybe Facebook will slowly become a huge memorial to all the people we have lost. A civilian’s memorial wall. Where you can go to leave a comment upon the wall of those who have passed. Take a screen shot of their last comment and the profile photo that perfectly captured the deceased’s personality right before he or she died. Or maybe it is just a really stupid idea to have a widowed relationship status. Sure, it might be true, but do you want to flaunt that to your Facebook friends?
I was in New York a little while ago (nice little touch of pretension there, of course this conversation could ONLY have taken place in New York) talking to my friend Thomas about quotes that I consistently use that are unremarkable. Your average person quotes something to create a connection with another person or to be recognized as being able to quote. Sometimes two people even develop a quote language. Tim recently got married and he and his friend Robin were speaking in Simpsons quotes at least 50% of the time.
But what Thomas and I were talking about is different. These are quotes that no one would recognize as quotes and that others would think are just part of the on going conversation. The one example I had for Thomas at the time was “Yeah, well…”, which could be from any number of movies or books or TV shows, but when I say it it comes froma scene in the movie Wet Hot American Summer when the camp councilor Andy has to dispose of a kid who was going to rat him out for making out while a child drowned. Hilarious.
Once I made myself aware of this, I realized I do it all the time. Another quote I use is “What’s all the hubbub, bub?” When I say that I’m quoting a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs is stuck on a military plane with a gremlin. The plane is crashing because of the efforts of the gremlin and Bugs is trying everything he can do to stop the plane from crashing when the gremlin coolly asks him the question.
These are very private quotes and are used in ways that don’t obviously mark them as quotes. Sometimes you can tell when someone is using a quote, a voice change, a cadence change, a phrase that is obviously out of context, striking a pose, any number of signals might mark the use of a quote. But these unremarkable quotes are used purely for self entertainment. Little treats that you use just for yourself.
At the same time, it is a little disturbing that our lives are so enmeshed with media that we might always be quoting something. Not because that quote is interesting or expresses our feelings in an elegant way that we couldn’t, but because we’re lazy. Yeah, well…
There are dead characters all over fiction. Some die during the course of the story and some have already died by the time the story begins. There also cases where the story teller just can’t stop and needs an epilogue so that their character can die after the story is over. Usually this happens to a dog when the story teller decides he hasn’t made enough people cry yet and there might be a few tears rattling around at the back of some six year old’s eyeballs. Stories are full of dead people because life is full of dead people, but in fiction there is a particular death key. Characters die in different ways depending on what the author wants to tell you about that character. Here is that key:
Drug Over-dose: Tortured Artist or Poor person
Stroke: Old
Heart Attack: Fat/Lazy or Skinny/Works too Hard
Suicide: Tortured Artist
Poison: Idiot
Drunk Driving (he is driving): Poor Person
Drunk Driving (she is hit): She was Pregnant
General Murder: The surviving relative is destined for greatness.
Aneurysm: This person is a blank slate.
Each of these deaths carry a lot of baggage with it, baggage that I think tends to bleed into the real world. When is the last time you heard about someone being poisoned where you didn’t think “God damn idiots.” Poisoning is reserved for children, who are idiots, or those with the minds of children, who are also idiots. Unless that is you die by the one adult type of poisoning, drug overdose, but then you are probably a tortured artist so you’ve managed to keep your child like sense of wonder. Which makes you an idiot.
The one exception is dying of an aneurysm. Which seems to happen quite a lot in stories. This is because it is safe. Your an author who just wants your character to have a dead parent. That’s hard enough for your character. You don’t want that parent to have died in any way related to alcohol, because you don’t want your character to struggle with his genetic legacy of alcoholism. The parent can’t have been quietly murdered because you don’t want your character to have to realize what an asshole his dad was and that his mom killed him. The parent can’t have been murdered any other way because that would necessitate a revenge story. Your only recourse is aneurysm. It could happen to anyone! No moral baggage necessary! You’re born with that shit! Problem solved.
What I really wish is that all death could be this way. Why not have a dad who was poisoned, but not an idiot or maybe the dad died while drunk driving, but it actually was his very first time. So I want to issue a challenge. I want someone to write a story where a character, one that we actually meet in the story, dies somewhere between the first third to half of the story of auto-erotic asphyxiation. This character should not become a joke and should be treated with all the love and reverence of Gandalf. In fact if you wrote some fan fiction where Gandalf dies of auto-erotic asphyxiation without diminishing his gravitas I will come over to your house dressed as Galadriel and speaking in Elvish slowly bring you to orgasm, fulfilling all of your sick and twisted fanfic fantasies. You’ll finally get laid!
I’ve played a few different editions of Trivial Pursuit. Genus Edition, 80’s, Star Wars, and Genus IV, probably a few others. Genus Edition was the first one I ever experienced. I remember pulling it out of the game trunk and staring at the cards and having no idea what the answers were. I recently played Genus IV and that questions are just plain stupid. I have developed a formula for answering Genus IV questions.
1) If the question is about a certain type of person (e.g. a golfer) just name the most famous person in that category. Also, it seems that 90% of the sports questions are about golfers.
2) If the question asks “How many ________ ?” The answer is going to be zero. This works in pretty much every category.
3) If the question doesn’t involve numbers or a type of person use the obvious clue that is written into the question.
Honestly, the clues telegraph the answer. For example:
“What kind of squidy ocean animal has 8 arms and 2 tentacles?”
I just pulled a couple of cards out of a box to look for some stupid questions and I got something even better. Both of the sports questions on these two cards had the same answer, Sandy Koufax. Even if there are 2000 cards in a box why would you ever need to repeat an answer?
Maybe all of this is true of the original Trivial Pursuit and I know more of the answers to Genus IV questions because I have lived during the period from which the questions are cribbed. But I remember my parents having a lot of trouble with the original game as well.
So here’s the important question, is it supply or demand? Did we ask to be treated like idiots or do the people writing the questions think we’re idiots?
At this point I think it is just time to start wikitrivial pursuit. User generated questions and answers, with constantly updated leader boards. Each answer can only be used once. We’ll have these epic battles in the discussion forums about which question is the best. So which Koufax question would win, the one the lists his ERA or the one that ask who Nolan Ryan took the record from? Sharpen your trolling clauses.
At The Lion's Club Parade in Downtown Minneapolis 7-7-09.
Those in the know will realize that Shamrock’s only technically qualifies as a new stop on my Jucy Lucy tour. See, Shamrock’s is owned by the same folks that own Nook, which was covered in my last entry in this series. However, I was in Saint Paul with some friends after taking in the ‘Titanic’ exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota and we decided to stop at Shamrock’s for some Jucy Lucys.
Shamrock’s is much bigger than Nook, and has more of a sports bar feel as opposed to Nook’s cozy neighborhood bar feel. It was about 8:30 on a Wednesday, so we had no problem getting a booth. Right off the bat there were signs our waitress wasn’t going to be very good. She didn’t know the beer of the day (or week, or month or something) and though she offered to go look she didn’t actually go look, as if we were supposed to appreciate the offer itself but not bother her to go check.
In order to try something different from what I’d ordered at Nook I got the ‘Paul Molitor’ which is a Lucy with pepperjack in the middle. When the burger came I was dissappointed to find a lot of the cheese had already melted out. I wasn’t too miffed though, that happens pretty often in the Lucy game, and when I bit into it there was still plenty of hot cheese inside. I hadn’t had a straight pepperjack Lucy before, which is weird because I love pepperjack, and this one didn’t disappoint. The fries were the same awesome homestyle fries we had at Nook. The bad service continued though, as we waited forever to get the check.
So I don’t have much to say about this trip, since it was really just a variation on our last. Shamrock’s has the same good Jucy Lucy and the same excellent fries as its smaller sibling.
