Posts Tagged: The Beatles

Writing — No Comments
23
Sep 11

I’m Trying Hard Not To Name This Post It’s The End Of Music As We Know It Or Something Else Equally Trite, Because R.E.M. Deserves Better

I remember when my friend–an older friend, already in college–gave me my first tape of R.E.M. That’s how we discovered new music back then, by trading cassette tapes. Sure, the quality sucked, but considering that we were listening to those tapes on boom boxes and Sony Walkmen, it didn’t matter much. You could have stuck an entire live band in there and it still would have sounded like crap.

R.E.M was never my favorite band, but they were the band that changed everything. They taught me to listen to good music, not the music that was on the radio. The more I listened to R.E.M. the less I worried about being like everyone else. R.E.M. was different from anything I had ever heard before, and for the first time in my life, different was a good thing.

A lot has been said in the last 48 hours about how R.E.M. created the model for Indie Music. In paying tribute, some people have gone so far as to say there wouldn’t be Indie Music without R.E.M. That’s not exactly true. Even the greatest innovators don’t operate inside a vacuum. If Darwin hadn’t postulated evolution, than it would have fallen to Mendel. If Edison hadn’t invented the light bulb, then Tesla would have*. If it wasn’t R.E.M. leading the way on college radio, someone else would have been at the forefront.

Progress is inevitable. But it matters who is driving that progress because they are the ones who shape our culture. If R.E.M. hadn’t made it big, we still would have been listening to Nirvana in the early nineties, but we might have been able to understand the lyrics. R.E.M. shaped an entire generation of musicians and transformed the industry model at the same time, a level of influence only a few musicians from the last 100 years can claim.

But I don’t listen to R.E.M. because they are important. I listen because of the music. It’s music that has shaped my life. I put in Green, and I can’t help remembering my first ever concert (that’s right!), with Michael Stipe banging the metal chair during World Leader Pretend. Just seeing the cover of Out Of Time puts me back in Mr. Konkle’s physics class, and listening to the album for the first time with Emily on our head phones. But the greatest R.E.M. albums don’t put me into a specific time. It’s because the music is timeless. Automatic For The People and New Adventures In Hi-Fi and Up are the essence of R.E.M. Not the college radio R.E.M. with southern rock undertones and political feedback. Nor the more recent R.E.M. either, the fading R.E.M., the R.E.M. that fails under the weight of comparison with itself. This is eternal R.E.M.

I know what people think. R.E.M. fans, the older ones, the ones who were there from the beginning, will mock me for daring to mention New Adventures and Up as classics. And I get it. I understand. There isn’t a single one of their first 10 albums that hasn’t at some point been my favorite. They are all classics in their way, and vastly different from their later stuff. But when you listen to Fables of the Reconstruction and Life’s Rich Pageant, you know that you are listening to 80′s college rock. When you’re listening to Automatic For The People, you’re just listening to great music.

I have a confession to make. Up isn’t just a classic to me, it will go down as my favorite R.E.M. album. Do me a favor. In the next week, listen to Up again at least three separate times. It deserves your appreciation, whether you are a hard core R.E.M. fan or not.

And so what’s next for R.E.M.? The cynical among us might point out that the band has probably made a load of cash in the last 48 hours, as interest as been generated unlike anything they’ve seen in the last decade. Break-ups (and deaths) have that affect. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of R.E.M. There will be reunion shows. There will be another tour. There will probably even be more music. But nothing will ever top what they’ve already given us, and that’s the curse of the best artists, and exactly why they made the announcement that they made. Changing the world takes a perfect storm.

In any case, R.E.M.’s music will live on. Discovering R.E.M. was a rite of passage for me and my friends, and it will continue to be a rite of passage. In the same way that I discovered the Beatles and Neil Young and Mozart, kids twenty years in the future will discover R.E.M.

So when you think about it, it’s not really the end of anything.

Please Note, This blog is officially at a loss for words

*Oh wait

Writing — 1 Comment
21
Sep 09

First There Was Nothing…Then There Was Calvin


#1 Calvin and Hobbes

See Introduction | #9|#8| #7|#6|#5|#4|#3|#2

Not fair, you cry. It’s not a webcomic. It was a newspaper comic strip, and its creator retired well before the rise of the Internet.

Perhaps, but thanks to UCLICK and Google Reader, I can still read it every day. And whether or not it truly belongs on a list of webcomics, its tremendous influence on the medium cannot be denied. An entire generation of Americans has been shaped by reading Calvin and Hobbes every morning.

As the folks at Progressive Boink expressed it:

I can confidently state that Calvin and Hobbes outclasses the rest of the comic strip world more than anything else has ever outclassed the rest of its medium. Sans this strip, the industry is characterized by guys sitting on rocks making stupid puns, a Family Circus kid misunderstanding the meaning of a word, or an overweight father playing golf while telling jokes such as I LIKE GOLF and GOLF IS HARD. It’s a medium that doesn’t really deserve something as good as Calvin and Hobbes, but it got it anyway, and the newspaper-reading world was made a better place by it.

Hyperbole, yes. But not by much. Calvin and Hobbes was much more than just entertaining. It made us think. Even as children, we recognized ourselves in the two protagonists, whether in their stringent refusal to yield to authority, their inability to escape their own nature, or the way in which they are so misunderstood by the adults around them. They are miniature philosophers, and we will forever owe Bill Watterson a debt for their creation.

Since his retirement, Watterson has become our generation’s Salinger. The longer he resists any kind of compromise or comeback, the more the legend of Calvin and Hobbes grows. He is the Beatles, minus the solo careers, Abraham Lincoln, absent a bullet in the head.

It is incredible to realize that Calvin and Hobbes only ran for a single decade. It is as much a part of my mornings as the New York Times, breakfast cereal, or oxygen.
Be thankful we lived to see it, and feel sad for those who passed their lives in the interminable dark ages that proceeded its advent.

Milan Kundera writes:

Once upon a time I too thought that the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgement on us, of course. And without any competence.

Who can say how the future will judge Calvin and Hobbes. In two hundred years, will our sons and daughters will be reading it alongside Faulkner, Beckett, and Fitzgerald? I can only assert that they should be.

Lyric Of The Day:

He’s a miniature philosopher
He takes notes on all he reads
But that doesn’t satisfy his needs
He’s a desk clerk at the bank and trust
There’s so many contracts and paperwork to do
He gets so busy at the bank and trust
There is no time for Nietzsche or Camus

He’s a miniature philosopher
He writes essays on Voltaire
But if he died no one would care

He doesn’t know why his life turned out this way
No one ever reads his dissertations or allegoric plays
So he comforts himself while searching a rhyme
That the public rarely recognize a genius in their time
(poor little guy)
He’s a miniature philosopher
Though he hasn’t got a friend
He’s sure he’ll be famous in the end

“The Miniature Philosopher”
-Of Montreal

Writing — 1 Comment
11
Sep 09

Sad Children Cannot Help But Be Awful

#4 pictures for sad children

See Introduction | #9 |#8 | #7|#6|#5

Everyone hates sad children. Pictures for sad children promises to make them stop crying. By helpfully pointing out the meaningless nature of their existence, the tears magically dry up. Because, really, what’s the point?

Pictures for sad children is funny in the same way a joke at a funeral is funny. It feels weird, perhaps even wrong, to be laughing, but it is the only legitimate response when coming face to face with your own mortality.

Paul who is a ghost and his coworker Gary, who is not a ghost, switch back and forth between maudlin and melancholic as they face a life–and a death–that has failed to meet their expectations. Their work life sucks and their home life sucks.

Other moments of bitter without sweet reality include when a boy gets stuck in a mattress. Or when Gary finds an ipod in the trash. Did I mention that Paul who is a ghost is asian?

This one is my favorite.

Pro Tip: Many webcomics use alt text, which shows up when you position your cursor over the image and wait a second. “Too Late.”

Drop whatever you are doing, and read the entire archive now.

Lyric Of The Day:

Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream,
It is not dying, it is not dying,
Lay down all thought surrender to the void,
It is shining, it is shining.

That you may see the meaning of within,
It is being, it is being,
That love is all and love is everyone,
It is knowing, it is knowing.

That ignorance and haste may mourn the dead,
It is believing, it is believing,
But listen to the color of your dreams,
It is not living, it is not living.

Or play the game “existence” to the end.

“Tomorrow Never Knows”
-The Beatles

Writing — No Comments
20
Aug 09

All Sorts Of Blue


Fifty years ago this week, the greatest jazz album of all time, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, was released. How do I know it was the greatest album of all time? Because everyone says it was. For an example, read this tribute from Slate, which should allay any nagging doubts.

As I celebrated in an earlier post, everything has been listified. What’s the best movie of all time? Citizen Kane. The Best Album? Sgt. Pepper’s. Who’s the sexiest man alive? Hugh Jackman.

These lists are great. They avoid us having to wonder about our favorites. They demystify the seemingly unknowable. They categorize the infinite choices we are faced with everyday, and fit them into easily digested summaries. Even God agrees.

Unfortunately, not everything has been organized into a list for us. Dance With Sunflowers pledges to do its best to rectify that problem. In a continuing series of things we like, organized in the order we like them, here are the greatest webcomics on the web today.

(How do you know they are the best? Because we have read every single webcomic. That’s how.)

Because of the awesomeness of these comics, to try and cram everything into one blog would fail to do them justice. So welcome to Webcomics Week at Dance With Sunflowers.

And happy anniversary Miles.

Novel / Writing — 2 Comments
19
Dec 08

Norwegian Wood came up on random play as I was writing this, suggesting that either life is not random, or I spent a long time to finish this review


I just finished reading Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami. It is not an easy book to encapsulate, nor to recommend. It is at times depressing, and at other times quite graphic.

The story revolves around Toru Watanabe, whose best friend committed suicide while they were both 17 years old. A deathly pallor hangs over everything, and each character seems to confront reality in his or her own unique way. Just like Kundera’s Immortality presents a group of characters struggling with their identity in the face of their own mortality, Norwegian Wood likewise delves into the meaning of self when faced with life in a meaningless void. The novel is gripping in the way it portrays these tortured individuals who are never entirely comfortable in their own realities, and is certainly thought provoking, but it is not an easy read.

Sanity is an issue for several of the characters. Two have been voluntarily admitted to a kind of psychiatric retreat, and they repeatedly say the only difference between the people inside and the people outside is that the people inside know that they are crazy. Indeed, Toru’s friends on the outside are just as peculiar and maladjusted to society as his friends inside, maybe even more so. Toru himself feels isolated, and has few companions at his university, and struggles with the direction his life should take. He battles deep bouts of depression, and often retreats into complete solitude. He finds no comfort in the people around him, who are continually exposed as hypocrites. The one friend he regularly spends time with has overcome hypocrisy by living live as selfishly as he can, a kind of Nietzschean superman who feels nothing but contempt for most of the people around him, and in the end is revealed to have a pointless, empty life.

The ending offers little in the way of hope either. Life is lived until death, and their is no magical plan for happiness. The only sanctuary may be to find love, but love is fleeting and tortuous and convuluted and our own need to be wanted and understood too often gets in the way of our ability to return that love.

Gripping the reciever, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

It is easy to get lost when we have no idea where we are or what direction we are headed, and when the road map presented to us directs us to keep moving forward but gives us no answer as to why we should go there or what to expect when we arrive. But for Toru, and all the characters in Norwegian Wood, that is the type of journey they are on. They can only hope they have a nice cold cucumber to enjoy along the way.

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