Time Is Tight.

The more I consider it, the less certain I am that humans are well-equipped to fully accept the passage of time. We love it when it fits our assumptions about advancement and the lineality of progress. But what if progress (personal, social, financial, professional, etc) stalls and time keeps going? Then, it stings. Too often it becomes easier to push looming eternity to the background and replace it with platitudes and illusion.

Do animals have concepts of time? Does a bear wake up every day and know that his life is finite? When an antelope gives birth, is she aware that she has a limited amount of time with her offspring, or that it is essentially her replacement? Or does their consciousness only include the imperative to survive, to survive at all costs and for as long as they can?

I think about time a lot. Probably more than a healthy amount. Our helplessness in the face of time's inexorable pressure is one of my favorites. For instance, I'm older than I used to be. And while I don't feel too different than I did, say, ten, or even five, years ago, there are little hints.

I don't sleep as well as I used to.

I've begun to snore consistently.

I can see parts of my forehead that haven't always been visible.

There are more, but this isn't a "pity me because I'm getting older" blog. I've accepted the fact of aging. When my mother wasn't thrilled to be turning fifty, I reminded her that the only alternative was to die, and forty-nine was much too young. We all get older, unless we stop, and you can't fight that, so why try?

In six months I'll turn thirty years old. My life is basically nothing like what I expected it would be when I was twenty-five. Twenty-five was basically nothing like I expected it would be when I was twenty. Oh well; it's not my style to freak out about that. Every choice I've made has led me here, and that's alright, because I learned a long time ago to take ownership of my life. Where I am may not be where I want to be, but that's alright; I'll get there.

The clock is ticking, and the fuse is burning. I'm not an animal whose only goals are to eat and to not be eaten. But I won't become time's slave, either. Time is pitiless, merciless, yet the only way we can experience true love is through its passage.

Time is tight.

There Ain't Much to Country Livin'...

In my late teens, I knew eight or nine people who listened to Warren Zevon, and they were all members of my extended family. That's more or less the same today, so it's nice to hear a couple of his songs featured in the new Judd Apatow film Funny People.

This is the kind of stuff I heard around the house while growing up. I'd like to think that my worldview developed accordingly:

The Interlocutor's Dilemma, -OR- The Politics of Chit-Chat

Everyone I've ever known has wished me well/At least that's how it seems, it's hard to tell/Maybe people only ask you how you're doing/'Cause that's easier than letting on how little they could care...

Jackson Browne, "The Late Show"

I took a class in college (in the sociology days) in which we talked a lot about the social expectations of behavior that we meet repeatedly, often without consciously thinking about them. In particular, I've always been fascinated with what constitutes "honesty" in social interactions, and how it is simultaneously valued and feared. Think about how many times you have truthfully answered the question we may be asked more than any other: "How are you?"

For another crazy thought experiment, think about how many insects you have killed in your lifetime. It's probably A LOT.

Anyway, people I barely know seem to ask me how I am doing frequently. Coworkers, casual acquaintances, store clerks, friends of friends: all seem to regularly inquire as to my personal well-being. And I say: "Good, how are you?"

Or, "Not bad, you?"

Or even, embarrassingly, "Can't complain."

What I find fascinating about this ritual is the understanding between parties that neither one is expected to behave completely honestly. I am not expected to ever, for instance, tell them that I feel like my life is leaking away through my fingers like water. They, in turn, are not expected to actually pay much attention to my response.

Imagine that you see your second best friend's sister, whom you only know casually, at the movie theater. You are close to her in line and a verbal encounter is essentially unavoidable. She turns around and recognizes you. Here is how the conversation is likely to occur, following the traditional rules of social interaction:

She: Hey, how's it going?
You: Pretty well, how about you?
She:Good ! I'm excited about this movie; it's supposed to be funny.
You: Yeah, me too. [First awkward social pause]
She: How's your sister?
You: She's fine. Hanging in there.
She: Cool. [Second awkward social pause. It's her turn in line and she moves toward the ticket booth] Talk to you later!
You: Bye!

Here's how this conversation might play out if both participants are being forthright and honest, without fearing the consequences of breaking societal folkways:

She: Hey, how's it going?
You: Not great. I didn't even get an interview for that job I applied for and my shin splints have been really bothering me. How about you?
She: Oh, that's too bad, but I'm not going to pretend to care too much because we barely know each other. I'm think I'm going to break up with my boyfriend after this movie, so I have mixed feelings about the entire night, anyway.
You: Well, he seemed like a total asshole at the one time I met him at Kevin's. [First awkward social pause]
She: We really don't have much to say to each other.
You: I know.
She: I'm not even sure if I remember your name. [It's her turn in line and she moves toward the ticket booth] Anyway, bye.
You: Bye.

Can you imagine a society in which everyone said exactly what they were feeling to just anyone? Although I sometimes get frustrated with the extreme superficiality of everyday life (yes, I am exactly like Holden Caulfied), it's important to remember that without these simple rules, our social interactions would quickly break down. The unbearable weight of everyone else's bad vibes would crush us. Likewise, those among us who are generally and unnaturally happy would easily become grating to our sour, acidic selves.

After all, social niceties, even when feigned, do mean something. I may not care about how the guy who rotates my tires' trip to the Binder Park Zoo with his nieces and nephews was cut short by a thunderstorm, just as he doesn't care about the hard-to-find Iron Man figure I bought at a comic convention and later regretted spending $50 on; but we can still show our respect for each other as humans with a simple act of conversational sleight of hand. Even lies can tell the truth.

Michael Jackson |MTV Music

We're A Happy Family

I wish I could hear The Ramones for the first time again.

When you love music, when you think about it and react to it in a context beyond a binary "I like this" or "I don't like this" dichotomy, several things can happen. First, you tend to listen to a lot of it. And, if you're like me, you start to think of the music you hear as a running soundtrack to your life; songs, albums, and artists assume meanings that they generally don't need to in a world of disposable mass culture.

For example, consider the song "Swallowed," by Bush. Saying that this is Bush's best song (which it is) still doesn't mean that it's very good (which it isn't). The production is muddy and lumbering in a disturbing mid-1990s style. It uses the quietLOUDquietLOUD dynamic that Bush, and everyone else, copied from Nirvana, who copied it from the Pixies in the first place. Finally, the lyrics don't make any sense.

Even so, I love "Swallowed." I love it because I listened to that song dozens of times when I was sixteen and seventeen years old, and I loved being sixteen and seventeen years old, driving around Delton in my dad's Plymouth Aries, pining over girls I never got the courage to ask out, and playing music with my friends using the same quietLOUDquietLOUD dynamic that we copied from Nirvana. I felt out of place, for sure, but was beginning to realize that out of place was a legitimate place to be, and maybe even a preferable one.

At the time, I thought my life was barely better than it would be if I was growing up in a Charles Dickens novel, and one of his lesser works, at that. Later, though, I got older and became, according to my sister, "maudlin and nostalgic." Like any good older brother, my initial instinct was to go repeatedly punch a stuffed animal in my room after telling her to shut up. I remembered, however, a night a couple of months prior when I began feeling particularly nostalgic while sitting in a bar with my cousin. Oasis's "Don't Look Back In Anger" started playing, and I became consumed with a strange feeling of contentment tinged with sadness. Any hope that my feelings were just a result of mixing alcohol and a good song played loudly in a bar were dashed when "One Headlight" by The Wallflowers came on next and I nearly began to weep. This was nostalgia.

Which is all to say that music means a lot to me; I interact with it on a distinctly personal level. It informs who I am, how I view myself, and how I see the world and my place in it. This is where The Ramones come in.

The Ramones were specifically engineered to mean something to their audience. The early punk bands were like that; a large part of their appeal was that they were reflections of the people who came to the shows, and vice versa. I once foolishly claimed in a public forum that The Sex Pistols were "completely manufactured," but that's not true of them anymore than it is of any band with some ambition and a manager. By any objective standard, The Ramones, who assumed names and dressed alike throughout their career, were as manufactured as The Sex Pistols, if not more so.

I can understand that a certain kind of person, upon hearing The Ramones, is liable to wonder what the big deal is. The music sounds simple, even primitive. Joey's voice sounds weird and alien; it's not surprising that this music didn't make Top 40 radio listeners salivate, even now that punk rock has broken through to the mainstream. I am the opposite kind of person. For me, hearing "Blitzkrieg Bop" for the first time at thirteen years old was something akin to being born again. It was music made for misfits by misfits, and liking it was a way of proudly acknowledging your misfit status. For me, being a Ramones fan meant that I didn't have to apologize for who I was or what music I liked. There's no logical reason for this; it's just what the music gave me, or brought out in me.

It was only years after that first romance with the music of the Ramones that I learned that despite their image as a bunch of leather jacketed brothers in arms, intrepidly marching on despite their lack of commercial success or mainstream recognition, Johnny and Joey hated each other and barely spoke for the last fifteen years of the band's existence. Instead of feeling like it was all a big farce, I had an enhanced respect for them. They knew what The Ramones meant, to their fans and to themselves. It couldn't have been easy to drive around the country, year after year, in a van with guys you don't like. But they did it, because everyone needs a place to belong, and people to belong with, even misfits.

Terminated.

I love time travel.

I also love robots.

The Terminator franchise combines both of these classic science fiction elements, yet it's never thrilled me that much. The Terminator is an enjoyable and original 1980s horror movie. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is an amazing film, one of the best action movies of all time; it has everything that's good about the first film, depicted with greater depth and resonance.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, unfortunately, adds nothing to the first two films and actually changes their mythology in some significant ways. We finally get to see Judgment Day, but first have to watch an entire film's worth of so-so action and silly quips and one-liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Terminator Salvation, the latest entry in the series, is pointless, dumb, and irrelevant. The only thing that happens in this movie that is important to the events of the other films is that John Connor meets Kyle Reese. Too bad that when it happens, it's boring. As much as I've tried to like these two films, their general carelessness and lack of respect for their audience has prevented me from doing so

One of the biggest problems is the character of John Connor. At the end of Terminator Salvation, I did not care if John Connor lived or died. That's not a good way to feel about the most central character in the entire franchise. In Terminator 2, there were actual emotional moments and feelings on display. John Connor went from being a wiseass punk who resented his mother's insane ramblings to experiencing the loss of the machine he'd formed an emotional bond with, the closest thing to a father he'd ever known. The film allowed you to feel for the characters as they changed and grew.

Not so in Terminator Salvation: this John Connor is completely one-dimensional. He yells nearly all the time, except when he's speaking in a gravelly monotone. A lot of people complained about Terminator 3's John Connor, who spent most of the film hiding from his "destiny" and generally acted ineffectual until the very end. However, is this new version of the character really an improvement? He's boring and he has no character arc. What about the period in between, where John Connor presumably becomes "John Connor," the incredible leader and resistance fighter we've been told about since the first film? They way the overseers of the Terminator franchise have dealt with their central character has been unsatisfying, to say the least.

Worse, however, is the simple fact that the Terminator timeline is essentially incomprehensible. If you think about it for more than two minutes, you will realize that even the filmmakers can't figure it out, and it shows. Each subsequent Terminator film has changed what the previous one told us about the future and its relationship with the present. The events of the future can't have happened without the events established in the films as having happened in the past, which in turn can't have happened without the events that occurred in the future. What?

Why are the machines looking for Kyle Reese in Terminator Salvation? How do they know that he is John Connor's father, since Reese won't be sent to the past for another eleven years? Why are they looking for John Connor this early in the first place? I don't know, and the movie doesn't seem to know, either. It's all just an excuse to have lots of robots, guns, and action set pieces (which are admittedly fantastic).

The terrifying appearance of the glowing red eyes and metal skeleton of a Terminator has earned this franchise a lot of goodwill from me. It's got time travel and scary killer robots, after all. Let's just hope that the future of the series includes some actual character and plot development alongside the relentless gunfire and bellowing paramilitary hogwash.

UPDATE: The movie's not doing very well in the U.S., so the planned sequel is probably up in the air until overseas grosses, DVD sales, etc. come in. There's a rumor that it will take place in modern-day London, for some reason, with John Connor traveling back in time to...blahblahblahblahblah. Sounds amazing!

SECOND UPDATE: Actually, I think I'm getting a little sick of robots, particularly ones that try to take over the world. The first trailer for the upcoming film 9 left me intrigued and interested. The second trailer, which delves deeper into the backstory, reveals that at some point in time, ROBOTS BECAME SELF-AWARE AND REVOLTED AGAINST HUMANITY. What a surprise.

The Kinks |MTV Music

Songwriting Master Class

When I was sixteen, I wrote a song cleverly satirizing the bigotry and hypocrisy I observed while growing up in small-town America. As befits such an incisive piece of original social commentary, this song was titled "The Lesbo Song." The unabridged lyrics:

America, America
America, America
America, America
I love your lesbians!

America, America
America, America
America, America
I love your lesbians!

[Refrain:]
I don't like straight chicks
I only like dykes
If you're not a lesbian,
You can take a hike
I'm lying about that,
I like all kinds
But one thing I can say is
It's great if you're bi

Sha la la la la la la
Sha la la la la
Sha la la la la la la
I love your lesbians!

Sha la la la la la la
Sha la la la la
Sha la la la la la la
I eat my vegetables!

Repeat refrain

Oh man, I was really on to something here! What is more, my band performed this song as a serious demonstration of our talent in front of an audience on more than one occasion! In another brilliant and timeless move, the guitars were played with clean tones during the opening and verse sections, and distorted tones during the choruses (a completely original technique that we developed, not to be confused with what was heard in 95% of all contemporary rock songs in the mid-nineties)!

All I have to offer in the way of an excuse for this is that I was sixteen and this was among the first five complete ("complete") songs that I ever wrote. In addition, it was meant as an ironic critique of the guys in my high school who would talk about how much they liked watching two naked women kiss, and then later call me "faggot" in the hallway because I had long hair. Well intentioned and cathartic, possibly, although I certainly could have spent a little more time finessing the concept. But who cares, it's rock and roll!

Bizzare Business

Early this morning I had a dream in which I (along with several others) was shot with a fully automatic nail gun by mysterious people attempting to foreclose on my parent's house during a graduation celebration. It hurt, but didn't bleed much. After picking dozens of nails out of my right forearm and left shoulder, I spent several minutes selecting the licensed graphic tee shirt that I was going to wear while tracking down the perpetrators of the attack.

The Great American Novel.

Why is it that so many writers in so many novels or screenplays about writing are trying to write "the Great American Novel?" Why bother? The Great Gatsby has already been written, as have Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick. If a character in a work of fiction references the fact that they are/have been/will be attempting to write "the Great American Novel," you can rest assured that they are not in it, and likely never will be.

ANYWAY, I can't remember any specific examples of this cloying device, obviously meant to indicate artistic and literary seriousness on the part of the character, but you know what I'm talking about.