You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘deep thoughts’ category.
All due respect, hopefully, but, seriously.
The Game is simple; it has only one rule:
You’re winning until you realize you’re playing, and then you lose.
Everybody just lost.
—
I spent just two days of one of humanity’s grandest oedipal moments with mother nature – June 26 & 27, 2010 – on Grand Isle, Louisiana, a little bit of land right on the Gulf of Mexico.
Grand Isle had gotten spit on with oil in dramatic fashion just shortly after the Deep Water Horizon blowout. President Obama showed up, said some things about it being hot in the Gulf, and made sure like one or two really smart guys stayed behind to make sure something got done.
Since my information about the catastrophe had been entirely mediated, I went with my super-8 camera in tow with a sense that, you know, I could shoot some footage that showed how BP fucked up by Orwellian proportions, and how the folks on the Coast were behest this malevolent force that they had no real control over. Oil on birds. Oil on fish. Oil on babies. Oil everywhere. I was looking for Oilfest 2010, and that would have been dramatic. Like Biblical Job, maybe, to whom God allowed the forces of evil to spit directly onto his life and then expected him to like it.
Easy narratives abound, of course. They hammer our cortextes with the bathos we crave: entire generations of fishermens’ hopes and dreams lost; black-ops goons from Halliburton descend on the Deepwater Horizon to sabotage the competition through massive catastrophe; Biblical eschatology being fulfilled as the oil rig, like “a mountain ablaze” fell into the ocean, turning our world’s waters to poison. We seek absolution for being implicated here in our own addiction to the oil that’s spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, the addiction that has us make increasingly risky and anti-social decisions to get the fix it demands. We seek absolution but are forced into abjection because we’ve done nothing, really, by any standard whatsoever, to deserve forgiveness.
And also, we really get off on being this batshit insane.
It’s the principle of the motorized vehicle. It’s only really safe until you realize that you’re strapping yourself into a metal tube and flying around on interstates, weaving complexly around other flying, weaving tubes, just mere inches from destruction. We keep driving, and we keep destroying as close to everything we can get our hands on.
On June 10, Newsweek blithely trivialized the spill as it recapped four disasters that were worse than the spill in the gulf, you know, just to put our minds at ease (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/10/four-environmental-disasters-worse-than-the-deepwater-horizon-spill.html).
—
Grand Isle itself is a one-road town existing in defiance of what should be, but clearly isn’t, God’s will. It’s a low-rent vacation spot with kitschy roadside Daiquiri stands and fried fish joints. The final twenty-five miles or so of highway onto the island are either raised on serpentine bridges above tremulous expanses of water, or sit on tentative strips of asphalt bordered closely on both sides by low shoulders that fall quickly into marsh. The entire area is surrounded by impassive waters that would have eventually consumed the island with impunity anyway. The location is unfriendly to life in the short term, and ultimately unsustainable for life, in the long term. The oil spill just makes that fact more obvious, just like hurricanes have in the past (photos here: http://hkatrina.shutterfly.com/683).
This is not to disparage these folks at all, or to downplay what they’re going through right now. Nobody should be forced from their home for any reason, but there is something about the town that a land-lover like myself admittedly finds hard to understand. In fairness to these peoples’ plight, nobody is really talking too much about what will happen when this year’s first hurricane hits the gulf, lifts all that oil into the air and spits it inland like feces on fans.
—
While on Grand Isle, my companions and I met a field reporter from Audobon Magazine. He was right when he said that it was nearly impossible to get anywhere close to the cleanup efforts without being connected to BP, the military, or one of a handful of State conservation agencies. I walked to within spitting distance of the Cheramie Road blockade on the tip of the island before I got The Stare from some sheriffs for rolling footage of BP’s idle golf carts on what amounts to a home movie camera. From the 1960s. From Russia.
The rest of the island’s beaches are ostensibly closed, and patrolmen roam the sand looking to remove people who get anywhere near the Gulf and the endless orange levee that has been buried into the sand just at the point of high tide. If you are accosted, as we were, and move too slowly off the beach, the national guard follows like so many Barneys Fife, circling in their totalitarian green and tan ATVs, making sure nothing happens to all the signs.
Official tours are given for the press, yes, but a tour is another constructed narrative that fortifies the Public Relations gulag BP has built up to contain what they really don’t want gushing into the Gulf: Their Corporate Image. There’s no way any part of the tour’s visual rhetoric would acknowledge the suggestion that maybe nobody knows what the fuck is going on. Or that everything about the recovery effort on Grand Isle reeks of being a Boondoggle instead of an actual solution, that the work seems of questionable exigency and efficacy. Or that maybe all the bluster and cock waggling is just being done to assuage public outrage until the oil spill just kills us all anyway.
—
Most of the houses on Grand Isle, held aloft by flood posts, sport twee names like “Camp No Problem”, “Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension”, and “Say Ahh” that seem blazingly ironic and suddenly self-abasing. My friend bought a postcard that boasted Grand Isle as “Seven Miles of Sand and Sin”. And, crassly enough, tiny signs posted all along Louisiana Route 1 into the island advertise Disaster Relief Catering.
Exxon Mobile has a sprawling facility that sits on the northeast tip of the Island. The facility, without irony, is located on Humble Lane. Nobody who lives on the island (or for that matter, America) was unaware of oil operations in the Gulf, and it really wasn’t a problem for any of us until the spill destroyed the fantasy that the drilling could be ignored.
The real story is not that there is an oil spill that has affected the lives of populations along the coast; that’s just surface. The real story is that Grand Isle, with the oil spill and recovery efforts, is now the apotheosis of Americana; it’s a simulacrum of an oasis built upon an ultimately untenable lifestyle. It’s a strip of humanity takin’ it easy out on the edge of oblivion.
—
The Game resonates in an absurdist axiom: Life is loss.
The only way to short circuit the game is to find solace or kernel of change somewhere in the mind-numbing sadness without intellectualizing, repressing, or withdrawing from The Truth that the oil spill just made manifest to us:
We were winning until we lost.
DustFilms has discovered that an obvious statement about pop culture is probably more useful and entertaining than pop culture is by itself. The repository Dust Films has built of Literal Videos began with the Ah-Ha gem below. It’s parody sans parody; joke upon joke without any jokes at all.
Now discuss.
I think we all know what sad bastard music is, but, for the sake of codification, we can trace the term to the film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity. And, for the sake of context (and those who haven’t seen the movie or read the book), H.F. follows record store owner and devoted sad bastard, Rob Fleming, through an unabashedly vulnerable and introspective quest to find the meaning of love and heartbreak. In the off moments, he too codifies, making highly suspect top-five lists and wearing Cosby Sweaters.
I’m not here to spend too much time on context or codification though. After all, this information can be found with Wikipedia and a keen sense of things few – if any – people truly care about. I think we all know what a Sad Bastard is too, simply because we all have a little bit of a Sad Bastard inside. Or maybe a lotta bit. We know it. It’s the little part of us that puzzles, as Rob does: Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
He’s talking about Love, of course, and the misery thereof, and that’s supposed to be thorny and profound…somehow. But, in short, the Sad Bastard is the quixotic emotional type, really, just morose about a bunch of mediocre bullshit. The S.B. is the part of your emotional state that really just needs to shut the fuck up for a minute, watch some Simpsons, and call it an early night because File Under Mediocre Bullshit Music doesn’t really have the same kind of ring to it.
Despite that, I still believe Sad Bastard music is a viable genre of it own. So, in honor of the Sad Bastard within, I present my own sketchy top-five list of sad bastard music.
1. Twothirtyeight – Modern Day Prayer
2. Benji Hughes – Waiting For An Invitation
3. Radiohead – House of Cards
4. Death Cab For Cutie – I Will Possess Your Heart
5. Tom Waits – Take It With Me
There are three definite classifications of the cover song genus:
1. Pretty Good Cover Songs. This group contains covers that stay faithful to already popular and decent songs. John Lennon has a whole host of them, metal band KSE have re-done Dio’s “Holy Diver“, Chimaira did The Cure’s “Fascination Street“; even covers like Sheryl Crow’s version of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” fit here. Good, but not great.
2. Mind-bendingly Horrible Cover Songs (or: songs whats makes you wants to saw your brains out). This horror is usually a function of sacrilege (e.g. Madonna’s cover of “American Pie“, Limp Bizkit’s “Behind Blue Eyes“, or Maroon 5’s wank on The Beatles’ “If I Fell“), but can also be a result of horrible taste in general or a perverse post-modernism, ala Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer“…lounge style. Look, I’m not a hater (in fact, LB shows up later) but godawful things need to be identified. Then blogged about.
3. Covers that – for better or worse – re-contextualize the source such that the cover has its own identity as a song. A cover song isn’t just a hollow doppelgänger, and far too often bands forget this fact. Sometimes though, sometimes, they make magic:
S: Fight For Your Right To Party
P: Andrew Paul Woodworth
OP: Beastie Boys
note: there is no note.
S: Drive
P: Deftones
OP: The Cars
note: as far as I’m concerned, these guys own this list. I had a hard time chosing which badass cover to include; they done everybody from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Cypress Hill to Sade to The Cure, and owned them all. Their B-Sides and Covers album is teriffic, I suggest going to your local tape distributor and give it a spin.
S: Teardrop
P: Newton Faulkner
OP: Massive Attack
note: a classical guitar-playin’ hippy re-does the trip-hop theme to FOX’s show House? Yes. Would House like this song? Eh…
S: No Quarter
P: Tool
OP: Led Zeppelin
note: they say every hard rock band either wants to be Zeppelin or Sabbath. Toll definitely wants to be both. I, on the other hand, can say I’ve always wanted to be a Tool.
S: The Ghost Of Tom Joad
P: Rage Against The Machine
OP: Bruce Springsteen
note: Dust to dust. Springsteen talked about the existential and political angst that Rage Against the Machine wielded with great vengeance and furious anger during the nihilistic 90’s. Ashes too.
S: Hungry Like The Wolf
P: Black Light Burns
OP: Duran Duran
note: Sounds like something I would’ve recorded onto cassette when I was fourteen, but it’s so strange it works.
S: Personal Jesus
P: Johnny Cash
OP: Depeche Mode
note: just listen.
S: Faith
P: Limp Bizkit
OP: George Michaels
note: Okay, hammerheads. You don’t like this band. They are, however, geniuses. Not Albert Einstein geniuses, granted, but more like McDonald’s geniuses. This cover is case in point; only a pack of mavericks could make G.M.’s already stupid song into a completely retarded fist of ham. This isn’t to say they’re any good for you; the opposite is probably true, but a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger whether you like it or not. Genius.
S: Wanna New Drug
P: Greenskeepers
OP: Huey Lewis & The News
note: This band wrote a song about Hannibal Lecter. Here, they turn good, clean fun into a sleazy electro sex nightmare.
S: War Pigs
P: Cake
OP: Black Sabbath
note: best for last. Yes, horns do work in hard rock.
Patton Oswalt is the man. His ability to find the twisted subtext of mundane things is pitch perfect, definitely up there with George Carlin.
I’m gonna re-share some stuff I’d posted to facebook here, just to keep a record of it somewhere. I like this site better than facebook anyway, but facebook is much easier to update when I’m feeling particularly lazy. Today’s the first of these prorated posts; more to come later. So anyway:
This song works on every level I can think of from tone, to groove, to intention. If you don’t get it, you’re either ignorant or a liar.
dnwilliams.wordpress.com 