The Walrus was Paul

Thanksgiving, that time to get together with family and share a delicious meal and fond memories. Or, in our house, it's known as the Comedy Central Roast of Trevor Seigler.

The less said about that the better, though I'll say that this year was particularly hard because I was (am) still recovering from the helacious summer which saw me lose my job, my finances, and my self-confidence. So thank you to all the relatives who took time to remind me that I'm the family screw-up. When I have kids, my family will all have perished in a tragic blimp accident at Super Bowl Whatever.

Speaking of Blimp Accidents
I'm reading a book right now called Listen to This, which has some essays about pop stars but mostly seems to be about classical music, a genre of which I know little. Or at least not as much as, say, classical music snobs. I'm a rock guy, I can tell you all about the Velvet Underground's line-up changes or Oasis songs that most obviously rip off the Beatles (John Cale replaced by Doug Yule on the first one, every song on the last one). Beethoven is the crazy-haired German guy, right? Trick question, they're all crazy-haired German guys.

Ah, composers...

For some reason I'm finding myself thinking about a friend of mine from high school, and when I say "friend" I mean "guy who I probably wouldn't associate with if not for academic team." We called him (mockingly, I'm sure, but with a little mixture of awe) "Will the Thrill." He knew the classical music world cold, as well as science and math. In fact, all the guys on the team apart from yours truly were into that stuff, but when it came to pop culture they were clueless. If you've ever seen that one King of the Hill where Bobby is the pop-culture guy for his school's team, that was me for Walhalla in 1995?-1997.

Like I said, I was a pop-culture guy, especially when it came to music. John Lennon and Paul McCartney begat Lou Reed, who begat David Bowie, who begat the Sex Pistols, who begat Run-DMC, who begat Wesley Willis...I had it down cold. But classical music escaped me, though (like science) I really wanted to know it better. My ignorance of it was comfortable in that it didn't make me stand out from the herd (everyone else knew about as much as I did, which isn't saying a lot) but I wanted to pursue some study of it because I thought I'd be smarter as a result.

Needless to say, if I'm complaining now about not getting classical music (apart from being used on soundtracks to movies or on elevators to lull us passengers into a false sense of "there's no way the cords will break"), I didn't pursue that education. Rock and pop musicians were always more interesting, and it was easier to see the meaning behind, say, "She Loves You" because the words were right there. Of course, I've seen Amadeus (which does Mozart-as-Johnny-Rotten quite well, even if the historical record doesn't seem to bear it out), so I know that, like most artists, composers weren't just staid, boring characters who never did anything. Their shit stunk as well, in their day.

The reason I bring up Will the Thrill is because he grew up in what can best be described as "a living hell" for someone like me, no TV or music from after 1950. Just anything fun that happened since the Eisenhower administration, basically. And he didn't know what he was missing, in a lot of our peers' eyes. I can remember on a bus trip to NYC with the drama club how he stayed up to watch Star Wars for presumably the first time while everyone else passed out asleep. I always wondered what it'd be like to be that culturally backward, at least from my perspective. Perhaps that's what attracts and irritates me about classical music, as much as I'd like to understand it and be able to pick out favorite composers or pieces, I know deep down that I'll never really "get it" or that my appreciation will always be tempered with a sense of "can they hurry up, I have a concert film of Joy Division that I'm dying to see!"

That might be the motivation (other than staving off boredom) behind my frequent reading this past summer, really before I got fired even (it helped that I was working at a library; to not read would be like working at an auto parts store and not knowing anything about cars). I've read a lot of books, some of them great, some of them terrible, but mostly good. The urge to educate yourself, however fleeting or incomplete, is a basic human necessity, and I wonder if I'm ever going to do much with it other than say to myself "hmm, didn't know that."

Just some random musings for the day, I guess...

Next year I'm spending Thanksgiving alone (well, with my smoking hot female supermodel girlfriend and her hot friends...a boy can dream)