I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy

I don't want to talk about the Colorado "movie massacre" because I wish it didn't even happen, but it did. Some nut with something to prove (namely, how violence can solve low-self-esteem issues, I gather) took it upon himself to ruin the lives of innocent people who were just trying to see the new Batman movie. And now, once again, we're left trying to figure out "what this means about" modern American society.

The easy thing to do would be to blame society, what with our violent video games (though I'm guessing a majority of the people who play them don't want to see what it would really be like to go on a rampage, with real people taking the place of flesh-munching zombies or Russian super-spies), violent movies (though again, most people who see movies don't feel the urge to act out what they see onscreen once they get past the age of seven), or rap music (hey, because, well...it's violent, right?). Like I said, it's the easy thing to do.

Another easy thing to do would say that it's somehow the fault of gun makers, though (as it turns out) the gunman (whose name I will not dignify here, because that's all he really wants, the attention) purchased them legally. So banning guns isn't the answer (though maybe doing a better job of vetting the people who buy them wouldn't be such a bad idea, as we seem to agree in the wake of every mass-shooting).

It's not the fault of art that this guy went nuts, though yes we do have violent movies and violent video games and they are easy enough to identify and paint as the villains in this debacle (while absolving the folks who maybe should've seen this coming). I have watched well over two thousand decapitations, gunshot wounds, axe-wielding lunatics, cannibalistic space aliens, and Michael Bay explosion-porn epics to well qualify as potentiallu under the influence of such images if I so chose to enact something on this level, yet I never have and never will (and it's not just because I don't like guns that much; in theory, when you're a kid, they're cool, but when you actually shoot one and it feels like a sledgehammer to your shoulder blade, you kinda lose interest). I was brought up to have respect for human life, a basic decency that transcends whatever religious or cultural imperatives that might argue otherwise. Do I like to play video games where bullets take apart the skulls of my opponents? Yes. Do I want to see that happen in real life? Not a chance.

Art can trigger someone's deep-seated notions of depravity, this is true. But let's not issue blanket statements that it is the sole cause of last Friday morning's bloodbath. This was someone with an axe to grind, a call for help that grew into something much worse when he couldn't find another way of making himself heard. The dude needs to go away for a very, very, very long time, and not even sniff a chance at life outside prison walls. But we also need to do a better job of recognizing those around us who could see such beauty in chaos, not on a movie screen but in real life. That's when we stop this crap from happening, not by taking away violent entertainment.

Scientology, Penn State, and the Olympic Uniforms

First: Katie Holmes got out from the grasp of/divorced Tom Cruise in rapid time this past couple of weeks, with one of the stipulations being that she couldn't allegedly badmouth Scientology (I'll admit, I'm not up to date on my celebrity gossip). My question is, what the hell is she going to reveal that's so damn bad? Who the hell knows what Scientologists believe (I doubt they know)? Scientology was started by a fourth-rate sci-fi writer as a way to make money off gullible people (as are all organized religions, when you come right down to it). Also, he may have diddled with little boys, but there's nothing official on that. When John Travolta is your religion's main spokesman, you're in trouble.

But Scientology is apparently big stuff in Hollywood, and if I know anything it's this: celebrities are idiots. That tells me everything I need to know about Scientology's belief systems, and yes I'm saying all this as a member of the Illuminati (which controls Scientology, the world's banking systems, the careers of Jay-Z and Beyonce, and Dunkin' Donuts).

Second: A report that came out about the Penn State cover-up says Joe Paterno knew in 1998 what Jerry Sandusky was doing in the showers (i.e., "rough-housing") and thought more about protecting his college win record than the victims of Sandusky's devious behavior. My thinking is, burn Penn State to the ground. Short of that, take down the statue to Joe-Pa that stands outside the stadium. No one should be that big that they can cover up something like that because they're more worried about themselves than what harm is being visited upon young children. Yes, it's human nature to not want to believe the worst about someone that you're close to, that you consider almost a son. But once the facts were in Paterno's face, unblinking and not going away, he should have cut Sandusky loose to the DA and saved his reputation that way. Penn State will never really live this down, and they shouldn't. Shame on Paterno and all the men in charge who did nothing for so long.

Finally: The Olympic uniforms...is this really an issue? They look ridiculous (that I would have expected) and they're made in China (like everything else). Why is this a problem for Congress to investigate? Because it means avoiding the real issues, I guess (god help me I sound like a conservative blowhard, but I don't know what their take on this is. Maybe Sean Hannity can take time out of his busy neck-expanding exercises to register an opinion, but I think not).

Not to get off on a rant here, but...:-p

The Songbook Strikes Back: "Under Pressure," David Bowie and Queen

(Note: This is a note. Also, this is the first of maybe four or five essays I wrote before my computer's untimely or timely end. I will publish them sparingly, and then return to poop jokes and worries about all those erectile dysfunction emails I get. How did they know?)

Sometimes you listen to songs on your iPod that no one else has ever heard of (or at least no one in your immediate social circle; maybe the people in far-off corners of the indie-alternative music world have heard the same song you’re listening to, but they’re too cool to admit it). But sometimes, for every Neutral Milk Hotel and Belle and Sebastian song that you claim as your own, your very own…you listen to an anthem beloved by millions. The kind of song that gets used in commercials, say, or blasted at stadiums when a team scores a touchdown or avoids getting embarrassed. Such songs are clichés, overplayed and devoid of any personal import you can bring to them as a fan, right?

“Under Pressure” is one of those songs that I’m sure anyone reading this has heard, and not just heard but over-heard (as in “heard over and over and over and over ad nauseum”). It’s so familiar because it’s got a distinctive bass line (just ask Vanilla Ice how distinctive it is sometime), it’s got two of the all-time greatest ambiguous-sexuality singers in duet form (well, there was nothing ambiguous about Freddie Mercury, even before the Village People-style moustache, but I think it’s safe to say that David Bowie was bisexual because it was trendy to be so in the early Seventies if you were in rock music), and it’s an advertiser’s dream: plenty of bombast and quotable lines that can be isolated for identification with your product. Even if, somehow, you’re a space alien just arrived on this planet from millions of galaxies to the west of Tucson, you’ve heard this song.

It would be easy to hate this song, really easy, and yet…

I think something that my fellow self-styled music “experts” and “critics” tend to ignore when they get “serious” about music is the fact that it’s supposed to be fun to listen to. Chuck Klosterman gets it (why else would he devote an entire book to heavy metal, the most maligned form of rock music outside of, say, dance music?), but try getting Greil Marcus to wax poetic about anything the Black-Eyed Peas have done and you’re barking up the wrong tree. Music doesn’t have to have a “message,” it can be big and dumb and loud and stupid and fun and about Fridays or telephone numbers or girls dating some guy named Jesse. Because a lot of the time, the songs that supposedly have a “message” just don’t work. When was the last time you voluntarily listened to “We Are the World?” Exactly.

In the Eighties, rock music suddenly became About Something. It didn’t matter if it was aid to starving Africans or AIDS awareness, so long as it was About Something. Not that music wasn’t About Something before; the Vietnam War did a toll on the young men able to avoid service in the armed forces but physically incapable of not forming a band during the peak period of 1966 to 1971. Message songs about the war (most against but some, like the bizarre “Ballad of the Green Berets,” pro-war) were serious (except when they were funny, like “Fixin’ To Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish), and that’s why when you hear them today, they seem silly and outdated. Sometimes when art tackles a serious subject head-on, it ends up looking ridiculous in retrospect.

So is “Under Pressure” a serious message song? If it is, the subject it’s addressing seems to be…I don’t know, be kind to people? It was the Eighties, and the bizarre confluence of Reagan-era “optimism” and conservative “get it your own damn self” made for a Up-With-People approach to social problems, like “we’d sure cure that pesky gay disease if we just made a song about how important it is to love Jesus, and turn it into a Broadway show.” Live Aid, noble as it was, was less about the cause than the chance for celebs to look like they Gave a Damn, that it was all About Something. You could say the current bumper crop of reality-TV shows, for which shame is not an emotion you could feel regarding your status as a font of ridicule by the public at large, got its start when Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie said “hey, people are dying in Africa. Wouldn’t it look good if we wrote a song and got Bob Dylan, Springsteen, *and* Dan Aykroyd to sing on this?” I remember a P.J. O’Rourke essay about the “We Are the World” video and how satisfied the people involved were with themselves, that they were showing that they cared. You could transpose that to any second of any broadcast of any episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and the words would still apply.

So after all that, do I like the song? Yes, of course: it’s awesome. Never mind the odd and frankly hard-to-decipher “message” of the song (I’m still leaning towards “random acts of kindness” or “pay attention to depressed people, they need love too”), the song itself actually seems to be About Something, but that’s more about what you bring to it (or, in keeping with the theme, What You Bring To It). Yes, it’s over-used by commercials (the one where the Muppets sang it was pretty funny, but still). Yes, it’s a relic of a time when superstar collaborations were a rarity, not a weekly occurrence (and when the word “superstar” actually meant something, Nicki Minaj. It meant something that you will never, ever qualify as). But it moves me, and I can’t say that about “Eve of Destruction” or “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or whatever the title was of that dumbass British Christmas-themed song. I like it, I guess, and I hope you don’t mind but I don’t give a damn if you do (now see, *that’s* Eighties).

America, Heck Yeah!

This past week, the nation celebrated the birthday of our founding, the Fourth of July. I celebrated it by riding around a few hours, doing something close to nothing because it was as hot as an oven...and everything was closed. Except the mall: the mall never closes.

Anyway, after all that, you'd think I'd be content to settle in for a quiet night of just reading (because both the lack of original programming and the ability to get in a majority of the channels has limited my TV viewing options since about at least late May. Thanks again, thunderstorm). You'd be wrong.

My uncle got a pool put in a while back, and I'd been meaning to get my toes wet in it for a while. But various things kept coming up, such as my lack of swimming trunks and ability to swim (lack thereof). But on Wednesday, in the midst of "maybe the Mayans were right" hot weather, I managed to scrounge up some trunks that might belong to my n'er-do-well younger brother and I set out for the pool.

I spent about an hour in the water, just chilling. When I got out, I was sure I'd have some additions to my farmer's tan, like maybe a little blistering but nothing too shabby. Nature was cruel to me: not that I got too pink, but that I didn't get pink at all. I still look like I'm wearing a tan, flesh-colored hairy shirt.

Gosh darn it.

Anyway, I had a genuinely good time Wednesday, and I even got a little into the patriotic spirit (because, as you know, I voted for Obama, and anyone who does that is a Godless commie liberal gay-loving French-food-eating tutu-wearing cut-the-military-budget pansy). America may not be the best country in the world, but we're not the worst. That honor belongs to Andorra.

Go look it up...