Velvet Underground, "Rock and Roll"

Today is my little brother's birthday, he's twenty-four years old. Makes me feel old already. My sis will be twenty-six in a couple of weeks. Makes me feel older. So shout out to my brother at the top.

Also, today is what would've been Lou Reed's seventy-second birthday. As you no doubt know, the man passed away last year (not too long ago, right around Halloween), and I miss him. No, I never met him personally nor do I claim any special kinship with him, having never done drugs, homosexual/transvestite sex acts, nor led a band that changed what popular music could address subject-wise or sonically. But I loved the man's art.

Tonight the Academy Awards air and, though I've not seen any of the films nominated (not much of anything new anyway, except for the new "Muppet Movie" when it came out on DVD two years ago), I do like to watch because anything that turns a celebration of the arts into a competition is compelling and watchable. Plus, I'm a fan of the "dead reel," the annual look back at who we've lost in the particular field that the awards show highlights. It's not morbid, just something that I think reflects well on our now-is-now culture, our self-obsession with the notion that anything worthwhile has been done in the past twenty years and that history is just a backdrop to our own navel-gazing, Twitter-obsessed present-day. One would hope that, had they had Twitter or other social media in their day, historic figures in the arts like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Homer wouldn't have wasted precious time that could be spent writing or drinking by getting into "tweet wars" with anonymous hacks.

One would hope, anyway.

We've lost some big ones this past year, including the most recent big loss of last week, Harold Ramis. They'll all get their due this night, in the form of a clip of them at work, with their name and what they were best known for. And some muted applause, though some will get more than others (I'm guessing Philip Seymour Hoffman will get some prolonged applause, as well he should). The dead reel is a great thing about the Oscars and other awards shows that I hope we don't lose in our me-first, this-is-now and the-past-is-just-our-prologue present. It's not the highlight of any Oscar broadcast, but a moment to remember what we've lost. It's a public memorial squeezed into the free minutes towards the end of a self-congratulatory excess, and I like it that way.