I got the complete Calvin + Hobbes boxset for Christmas; I finished the 4th and final volume at 1:30 this morning. Excuse me while I gush.
I had just the slightest fear that this comic would be yet another artifact of youth that failed to quite live up to my most primordial memories, leaving me again feeling disconnected from my childhood. Utterly unfounded fears. If anything, I laughed with, appreciated, and adored this cartoon even more thoroughly than I did as a child (and that's saying something!). I quickly moved on from mere relief to awe at this comic's overwhelming brilliance.
The buzz I'm feeling right now is akin to the first time I read Catch-22 or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Tom Stoppard's Arcadia; or when I saw the Mona Lisa in person at the Louvre, or saw The Shawshank Redemption for the first time; or the first time I listened--really listened--to the Beatle's Abby Road, U2's Joshua Tree, or Arcade Fire or Animal Collective or Debussy; or when I saw the sun set on the Guajataca in Puerto Rico, or the fog rise off Yellow Mountain in China...
Yet Calvin + Hobbes predates all these experiences; and it's been both humbling and exhilarating to realize that everything I've ever thought, values, or known--everything I learned in college, grad school, and life in general--about materialism, art, philosophy, representation, semiotics, the Protestant work ethic, the innate worth of souls, goods of first and second intent, the sublimity of passion, Emersonian whims, the revolutionary potential of romance, the power of language, the wildness of words, the hugeness and incomprehensibility and grandeur of the universe, the uncharted possibilities of existence and imagination--I first encountered as a youth on these comic pages.
It's comforting, rejuvenating, and frankly incredible to consider that, in my own lifetime, there was a bona fide popular artist who refused to dumb down, who never sold out, who consciously went out on top on his own terms, who openly critiqued our destructive consumerism and pretentious posturing in the face of the terrible questions, and did so without condescension, without smug self-satisfaction, but rather with a complete and wondrous joie de vivre, the joy of life.
I loved Calvin + Hobbes as a child; but now I stand back in absolute wonder of Bill Watterson's achievement, at the utter rarity that is this jewel of a comic that both fulfilled and transcended its medium--and how profoundly blessed I was to encounter this strip in its first run, while still a child itself, when it could still enrapture my imagination in youth.
Maybe I'm overselling the comic right now, maybe my reflections are more tinged with nostalgia than I'm conscious of, maybe it's best to approach this cartoon on its own terms and not with any overhyped promises of grandeur from me--no matter. David Markson wrote in Wittgenstein's Mistress that he could imagine a world without people easier than he could a world without Mozart; I, too, can picture the world ending easier than I can a world without Calvin + Hobbes.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
2013 and the Fear of Joy
Well, we're all still here, aren't we? Though as more than one comedian noted, deep down some part of each of us was really hoping the Mayans were right, weren't we?
(Though don't count out 2013 just yet! Serious, 2013?! That's just asking for some hackneyed-sci-fi cataclysm! We should skip over these bad-luck years the way hotels skip the 13th floor.)
(No, wait, if it were 2014, we'd already be dealing with another election wouldn't we. Nevermind!)
But then, why this silly little doomsday fixation? Why this secret hope, even in jest, that the curtain would finally hit the cast at last? I have a gut-hunch that the sudden end of the world would have let us off the hook--but I don't mean from our bills, our debts, our so-called responsibilities, etc and etc. I'm mean we'd be let off the hook from living life.
Nibley once noted that what mankind fears most of all, more than death and pain and hell, is joy. He declares more articulately than I:
"What are we afraid of? What do men fear most? Believe it or not, it is joy. Against joy, society erects its most massive bulwarks...It is not hell that men fear most, but heaven...Everything in our society conspires to dampen and control joy. Our sordid little pleasures are carefully channeled and commercialized; our pitiful escapes to alcohol and drugs are a plain admission that we will not allow ourselves to have joy in our right senses. Only little children can face up to it. They have no hidden guilt to admonish cautious behavior or make joy appear unseemly...Why do we insist on taking ourselves so seriously? Because we're scared to death of being found out...
"...to lend dignity and authority to this pretentious fraud, we have invented the solemn business and drudgery of every day life. To avoid answering questions, we pretend to be very busy--my how busy!
"In every conservatory of music, there is the student who practices scales and exercises with dedicated zeal, for 8 or 10 hours a day; or works away for months or years, with terrifying persistence, at a single piece. This is the devoted grind that impresses others with his matchless industry, but don't be fooled! This drudge is not working at all! He is running away from work. His ferocious application to dull routine is but a dodge to avoid the novel and frightening effort of using his head. And never, never, for all his years of toil, does he become a real musician. (He usually becomes an executive.)
"In the manner of this poor dupe, the whole majestic world goes about its ostentatious enterprises, the important busy work of every day life... Sorrow is a negative thing...to live with it requires only resignation...humanity, in a thousand ways, declares it's almost unanimous preference for drab and depressing routine.
"If the world is a dark and dreary place, it is because we prefer it that way; for there is nothing in the world that can keep a man from joy if joy is what he wants...It's altogether too much for us to bear. We must learn by degrees to live with it. It isn't strange that we are afraid of so strange and overpowering a thing, that we are overawed by the feeling that it is all too good for us; the fact is that it is too good for us! Much too good!...We are not ready yet...we [must] come to support not the burden of great suffering, but the much greater impact of limitless joy..." ("The World and the Prophets," Complete Works Vol. 3) (please bear in mind that Nibley wrote the preceding before the '60s!)
It's just easier to be sad; but it's also more expensive, demanding, vicious, and fraught with mindless busy-work. Just as its easier for a mediocre teacher to photocopy fill-in-the-blank worksheets, or construct elaborate and byzantine on-line curriculum, or drone on in recited lectures, than to actually teach, so too is it easier to self-impose mind-numbing routines and asphyxiating decorum than actually go to the trouble of being enjoying ourselves! The yoke is easy, the burden is light.
But joy requires courage, humility, a native curiosity, and at least a dash of daring. That's apparently too much to ask of most people, so we've formalized an entire system composing endless hours of meetings, reports, paperwork, rote memorization, and regurgitation. We praise the "work ethic" of those languishing long hours at jobs they hate--and worse, don't matter (how many lawyers and salesmen does this world actually need?). Protest all we like how we detest the tedium, yet still we barely even try to do anything else.
The supremest irony of all then is that such a society will end the world faster than anything else. What's sadder, none of us are actually fooled--we all know deep down there are better ways we could be spending our time. If the world had ended the 21st, we wouldn't have had to deal with our creeping guilt; the ever-frightening joy would have been kept at bay. But the world didn't end, so we might as well face up to it--"men are that they might have joy," so we had better get along with it.
And what better time to start than New Years?
I'll finish by letting my nerd-flag fly high for this 2013, and quote Q from Star Trek TNG: "It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
(Though don't count out 2013 just yet! Serious, 2013?! That's just asking for some hackneyed-sci-fi cataclysm! We should skip over these bad-luck years the way hotels skip the 13th floor.)
(No, wait, if it were 2014, we'd already be dealing with another election wouldn't we. Nevermind!)
But then, why this silly little doomsday fixation? Why this secret hope, even in jest, that the curtain would finally hit the cast at last? I have a gut-hunch that the sudden end of the world would have let us off the hook--but I don't mean from our bills, our debts, our so-called responsibilities, etc and etc. I'm mean we'd be let off the hook from living life.
Nibley once noted that what mankind fears most of all, more than death and pain and hell, is joy. He declares more articulately than I:
"What are we afraid of? What do men fear most? Believe it or not, it is joy. Against joy, society erects its most massive bulwarks...It is not hell that men fear most, but heaven...Everything in our society conspires to dampen and control joy. Our sordid little pleasures are carefully channeled and commercialized; our pitiful escapes to alcohol and drugs are a plain admission that we will not allow ourselves to have joy in our right senses. Only little children can face up to it. They have no hidden guilt to admonish cautious behavior or make joy appear unseemly...Why do we insist on taking ourselves so seriously? Because we're scared to death of being found out...
"...to lend dignity and authority to this pretentious fraud, we have invented the solemn business and drudgery of every day life. To avoid answering questions, we pretend to be very busy--my how busy!
"In every conservatory of music, there is the student who practices scales and exercises with dedicated zeal, for 8 or 10 hours a day; or works away for months or years, with terrifying persistence, at a single piece. This is the devoted grind that impresses others with his matchless industry, but don't be fooled! This drudge is not working at all! He is running away from work. His ferocious application to dull routine is but a dodge to avoid the novel and frightening effort of using his head. And never, never, for all his years of toil, does he become a real musician. (He usually becomes an executive.)
"In the manner of this poor dupe, the whole majestic world goes about its ostentatious enterprises, the important busy work of every day life... Sorrow is a negative thing...to live with it requires only resignation...humanity, in a thousand ways, declares it's almost unanimous preference for drab and depressing routine.
"If the world is a dark and dreary place, it is because we prefer it that way; for there is nothing in the world that can keep a man from joy if joy is what he wants...It's altogether too much for us to bear. We must learn by degrees to live with it. It isn't strange that we are afraid of so strange and overpowering a thing, that we are overawed by the feeling that it is all too good for us; the fact is that it is too good for us! Much too good!...We are not ready yet...we [must] come to support not the burden of great suffering, but the much greater impact of limitless joy..." ("The World and the Prophets," Complete Works Vol. 3) (please bear in mind that Nibley wrote the preceding before the '60s!)
It's just easier to be sad; but it's also more expensive, demanding, vicious, and fraught with mindless busy-work. Just as its easier for a mediocre teacher to photocopy fill-in-the-blank worksheets, or construct elaborate and byzantine on-line curriculum, or drone on in recited lectures, than to actually teach, so too is it easier to self-impose mind-numbing routines and asphyxiating decorum than actually go to the trouble of being enjoying ourselves! The yoke is easy, the burden is light.
But joy requires courage, humility, a native curiosity, and at least a dash of daring. That's apparently too much to ask of most people, so we've formalized an entire system composing endless hours of meetings, reports, paperwork, rote memorization, and regurgitation. We praise the "work ethic" of those languishing long hours at jobs they hate--and worse, don't matter (how many lawyers and salesmen does this world actually need?). Protest all we like how we detest the tedium, yet still we barely even try to do anything else.
The supremest irony of all then is that such a society will end the world faster than anything else. What's sadder, none of us are actually fooled--we all know deep down there are better ways we could be spending our time. If the world had ended the 21st, we wouldn't have had to deal with our creeping guilt; the ever-frightening joy would have been kept at bay. But the world didn't end, so we might as well face up to it--"men are that they might have joy," so we had better get along with it.
And what better time to start than New Years?
I'll finish by letting my nerd-flag fly high for this 2013, and quote Q from Star Trek TNG: "It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Christmas: The Last Carnival
About a month ago I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy," in prep for a coming conference SLCC's hosting this Spring. In it, she details the ancient, widespread, and global phenomenon of the festival, wherein mankind gathers together to dance, party, get ecstatic, go wild, forgets their differences, and just all-around enjoy ourselves! This need for gathering, for release, for festival, is hard-wired into us genetically she argues--we need to come together, we need to cut loose, we need get outside ourselves, we need this communal catharsis, and that often and repeatedly.
And indeed, throughout the super-majority of human history, that is precisely what we did; every major and minor culture on earth has its regularly scheduled festivals dating back to pre-history. From the Spring and Autumn Festivals of China, to the Dionysian Cults of Greece, to the Years of Jubilee of the Jews and the ecstatic warrior-dances of African tribesmen and Native Americans and the Carnivals of Catholic Europe, these festivals provided rich and poor, male and female, young and old, with the release, the togetherness, the wildness, the sheer joy we needed for the sake of our own mental health.
(One of my favorite anecdotes of early LDS history is that in Nauvoo, with Joseph Smith shot dead and mobs burning down farms and as the Saints prepared for the punishing journey west, Brigham Young each night would clear the Temple to hold inside a party--dancing, music, the whole shebang. Each night. He even assigned a brass-band to each wagon company heading west. That was a man who understood the importance of the Festival impulse).
Of course, the powerful always had an uneasy relationship with Festival--any gathering that so regularly violated the oh-so-carefully-constructed hierarchies of the state, that leveled and erased the distinctions between rulers and ruled, was obviously a threat to their positions. Hence, the ancient Roman state, for example, would hold solemn and dignified processionals in honor of Emperors, in order to compete with the festivals; try as they might, though, they could never fully stamp Festival out, so just learned to co-exist with them.
The Catholic Church tried to just straight-up co-op the festivals as solemn religious holidays--hence the Spring Equinox became Easter, Winter Solstice was assigned Christmas, etc--but the festival impulse is not so easily squashed; the Catholic calender became filled with religious holidays, but as every one who's ever lived in Latin countries (as I have) knows, all those Saints' days are just excuses to party. Always have been.
Ironically, it was the Protestants, then, who succeeded where the Catholics failed--following the Reformation, the Festivals that occurred almost weekly were snuffed out across Europe. Even the Catholic countries suffered a noticeable drop-off in Festival; sure, Rome and Rio de Janeiro still have Carnival, and formally-French New Orleans still has Mardis Gras, but nothing to the level of what once was. The Protestants won. Festivals were crushed across Europe, and then the Europeans crushed 'em wherever they colonized, which was pretty much everywhere. In the West, all the old festivals were dead...
...all except Christmas. Tenacious, wonderful, stubborn Christmas. The Puritans and the Utilitarians would've cancelled Christmas if they could've (Dicken's Scrooge was really not all that strange of a character, frighteningly enough), but they couldn't. Oh to be sure, we no longer have the unrestrained Christmas parties of ancient yore like our fore-bearers did; but consider the unprofitable-excess, the costly-expenditure, the exhaustive-spending that by all rights should drive any "sane" economist mad, that is associated with our Christmas gift-giving, gaudy-decorating, and gleeful wrapper-destroying. Consider how this is the one time of year where the word "festive" (adj: like unto a festival) is applied un-ironically. Consider how in English we apply to this holiday the anachronistic-modifier "Merry," an adjective reminiscent of England's distant, pre-Protestant, joyous past, back when it earned the appellation of "Merry ol' England!"
Consider the multitude of set songs and carols, the approved colors, the sacrosanct traditions, the seasonal foods and drinks, the trees, lights, near-non-stop parties, gifts, and communal gatherings, the hardy insistence that we celebrate and be happy that is all associated with the Christmas season--all these are the classic props and tropes of Festival! The muted-yet-still-not-silenced Festival impulse dies hard in us, and throbs all the more powerfully during the Christmas season.
If some of us find the Christmas season so exhausting, maybe it's because we get so little practice with proper festivals the rest of the year--our carnival muscles atrophy with so little exercise--such that we have to cram in all our festive impulses into this one month, lest we never get the chance and we all go mad with melancholy.
And thank the Good Lord above that we were spared this one last Festival, that Christmas at least was left us, and that when we needed it most--just after the Winter Solstice, the darkest evening of the year, when we receive the least direct sunlight and Seasonal Affective Disorder is wrecking havoc on our moods and physiologies, when the whole land is barren and covered in silent and silencing snow frigid as death, and the haunting gloom closes in around us (consider what a depressing month January often is)--that this, this is the day we chose to throw up our brightest lights, embrace our most generous instincts, release our most joyous passions, give our biggest gifts, and hold out largest parties! The Earth is at last turning back closer to the sun, but we decide not to wait that long for our light--right when things are darkest, Christmas swoops in and saves us from slitting our wrists in despair!
It is a Festival of near-Bakhtinian proportions, an expenditure of near-Batailleian extremes. Christmas is a revelation of our best selves, of the wild potential we could've been, of what we still should be, of the celebration that United Order will look like.
Please don't mistake me, as though I'm suggesting a religious holiday be returned to its worldly roots--remember that Christ's first miracle was to deliver more wine to a wedding party, and I do mean party. The Savior understood the importance of the Festival impulse.
And on that first Christmas, the angels declared to the shepherds, "I bring you good tidings of great Joy!" Like every Festival, the first Christmas was a call to shake ourselves from our doldrums, to wake up, be glad, and partake of rejuvenating, redemptive joy!
And all to what end?
To have, "on earth peace, good will toward men." It's the true peace that comes of good will, earned from the erasure of the distinctions (as Festival strives for) that separate us and isolate us and depress and oppress us; a joyous reuniting of man with each other, and of each other with God; a supreme and joyous At-one-ment.
Have a Merry Christmas. And I mean it.
And indeed, throughout the super-majority of human history, that is precisely what we did; every major and minor culture on earth has its regularly scheduled festivals dating back to pre-history. From the Spring and Autumn Festivals of China, to the Dionysian Cults of Greece, to the Years of Jubilee of the Jews and the ecstatic warrior-dances of African tribesmen and Native Americans and the Carnivals of Catholic Europe, these festivals provided rich and poor, male and female, young and old, with the release, the togetherness, the wildness, the sheer joy we needed for the sake of our own mental health.
(One of my favorite anecdotes of early LDS history is that in Nauvoo, with Joseph Smith shot dead and mobs burning down farms and as the Saints prepared for the punishing journey west, Brigham Young each night would clear the Temple to hold inside a party--dancing, music, the whole shebang. Each night. He even assigned a brass-band to each wagon company heading west. That was a man who understood the importance of the Festival impulse).
Of course, the powerful always had an uneasy relationship with Festival--any gathering that so regularly violated the oh-so-carefully-constructed hierarchies of the state, that leveled and erased the distinctions between rulers and ruled, was obviously a threat to their positions. Hence, the ancient Roman state, for example, would hold solemn and dignified processionals in honor of Emperors, in order to compete with the festivals; try as they might, though, they could never fully stamp Festival out, so just learned to co-exist with them.
The Catholic Church tried to just straight-up co-op the festivals as solemn religious holidays--hence the Spring Equinox became Easter, Winter Solstice was assigned Christmas, etc--but the festival impulse is not so easily squashed; the Catholic calender became filled with religious holidays, but as every one who's ever lived in Latin countries (as I have) knows, all those Saints' days are just excuses to party. Always have been.
Ironically, it was the Protestants, then, who succeeded where the Catholics failed--following the Reformation, the Festivals that occurred almost weekly were snuffed out across Europe. Even the Catholic countries suffered a noticeable drop-off in Festival; sure, Rome and Rio de Janeiro still have Carnival, and formally-French New Orleans still has Mardis Gras, but nothing to the level of what once was. The Protestants won. Festivals were crushed across Europe, and then the Europeans crushed 'em wherever they colonized, which was pretty much everywhere. In the West, all the old festivals were dead...
...all except Christmas. Tenacious, wonderful, stubborn Christmas. The Puritans and the Utilitarians would've cancelled Christmas if they could've (Dicken's Scrooge was really not all that strange of a character, frighteningly enough), but they couldn't. Oh to be sure, we no longer have the unrestrained Christmas parties of ancient yore like our fore-bearers did; but consider the unprofitable-excess, the costly-expenditure, the exhaustive-spending that by all rights should drive any "sane" economist mad, that is associated with our Christmas gift-giving, gaudy-decorating, and gleeful wrapper-destroying. Consider how this is the one time of year where the word "festive" (adj: like unto a festival) is applied un-ironically. Consider how in English we apply to this holiday the anachronistic-modifier "Merry," an adjective reminiscent of England's distant, pre-Protestant, joyous past, back when it earned the appellation of "Merry ol' England!"
Consider the multitude of set songs and carols, the approved colors, the sacrosanct traditions, the seasonal foods and drinks, the trees, lights, near-non-stop parties, gifts, and communal gatherings, the hardy insistence that we celebrate and be happy that is all associated with the Christmas season--all these are the classic props and tropes of Festival! The muted-yet-still-not-silenced Festival impulse dies hard in us, and throbs all the more powerfully during the Christmas season.
If some of us find the Christmas season so exhausting, maybe it's because we get so little practice with proper festivals the rest of the year--our carnival muscles atrophy with so little exercise--such that we have to cram in all our festive impulses into this one month, lest we never get the chance and we all go mad with melancholy.
And thank the Good Lord above that we were spared this one last Festival, that Christmas at least was left us, and that when we needed it most--just after the Winter Solstice, the darkest evening of the year, when we receive the least direct sunlight and Seasonal Affective Disorder is wrecking havoc on our moods and physiologies, when the whole land is barren and covered in silent and silencing snow frigid as death, and the haunting gloom closes in around us (consider what a depressing month January often is)--that this, this is the day we chose to throw up our brightest lights, embrace our most generous instincts, release our most joyous passions, give our biggest gifts, and hold out largest parties! The Earth is at last turning back closer to the sun, but we decide not to wait that long for our light--right when things are darkest, Christmas swoops in and saves us from slitting our wrists in despair!
It is a Festival of near-Bakhtinian proportions, an expenditure of near-Batailleian extremes. Christmas is a revelation of our best selves, of the wild potential we could've been, of what we still should be, of the celebration that United Order will look like.
Please don't mistake me, as though I'm suggesting a religious holiday be returned to its worldly roots--remember that Christ's first miracle was to deliver more wine to a wedding party, and I do mean party. The Savior understood the importance of the Festival impulse.
And on that first Christmas, the angels declared to the shepherds, "I bring you good tidings of great Joy!" Like every Festival, the first Christmas was a call to shake ourselves from our doldrums, to wake up, be glad, and partake of rejuvenating, redemptive joy!
And all to what end?
To have, "on earth peace, good will toward men." It's the true peace that comes of good will, earned from the erasure of the distinctions (as Festival strives for) that separate us and isolate us and depress and oppress us; a joyous reuniting of man with each other, and of each other with God; a supreme and joyous At-one-ment.
Have a Merry Christmas. And I mean it.
Monday, December 3, 2012
The Englishness of The Kinks
I recently downloaded The Kink's "Father Christmas" (tis the season, after all), and I gotta say, what a wonderful, biting bit of social commentary wrapped in a joyous, holiday sing-along! I do believe it just edges out John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" for coherent social commentary and sheer fun, and of course blows Sir Paul McCartney's insipid "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" out of the water--and I say that as a die hard Beatles fan.
I am constantly surprised by the virtuosity of The Kinks, and lately I've been wondering why--why am I surprised by them? Why are they always just one of those other English bands? When we speak of British Invasion bands in hushed, reverent tones, we inevitably mean The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen. Why are the Kinks so recurrently relegated to also-ran status?
Don't get me wrong, it's not like they're unknown or anything--they're Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame inductees, had a massive and acknowledged influence on Punk and New Wave, "Lola" is surely playing on some classic rock station as we speak, "Tired of Waiting" in some commercial, and the twin hits of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of The Night" contain hands-down, no contest, the two most famous, awesome, and imitated guitar riffs in the history of rock, bar none. Van Halen got its start covering "You Really Got Me." The Doors ripped them off for "Hello, I Love You." The Kinks are not followers, not imitators, no, they are the pioneers, the trend-setters, the influential. Guaranteed one of their songs is one of your favorite songs.
And that's just my point--given all their accomplishments, why are they so rarely spoken of in the same hushed awe as, say, The Beatles or The Stones?
My theory is that The Kinks are just, well, so much more English than these other bands. They don't just happen to be English you see--no, they are thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English.
By way of comparison, yes, the Beatles make fleeting references to the Queen in "Penny Lane" and Side B of "Abbey Road," but for the most part their musical influences and ethos, from their early R&B covers to their psychedelic experiments, are firmly rooted in America. John Lennon was initially trying to be Elvis; the American Bob Dylan is who first introduced them to weed, Timothy Leary to LSD; "Rubber Soul" was their attempt to sound like The Byrds; "Back in the USSR" was their send-up of the Beach Boys; Tuscon, Arizona is name-checked in "Get Back;" John Lennon chose to live in New York over London. They came from Liverpool, but their goal was clearly America. Some pop-culture neophyte could be forgiven for assuming the Beatles were actually an American band.
Same deal with the Stones, the Who, Led Zep--all these bands got their starts covering American R&B standards. Their favorite acts were Elvis Presley, Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. The Rolling Stones are named for a Muddy Waters song, an American, not a Brit. From the start, they were all openly trying to sound like Americans--and by the end of their careers, had all functionally become adopted-Americans, no matter their nationalities. Robert Plant sings of "Going to California," not the Isle of Wight. Your most meat-headed, 'Murica-lovin', patriotic red-neck will proudly get the Led out to Jimmy Page, blissfully uncaring of his British citizenship.
Note that the least-revered parts of these bands' oeuvres here in the U.S. are typically the most British parts: David Bowie, for example, is best known state-side for such hits as the NASA-mimicking "Space Oddity" than his more recent "I'm Afraid of Americans." The Who are best known in the States for such concept albums as "Tommy" and "Who's Next," while the more explicitly British "Quadrophenia" (about warring Mods and Rockers in 1964 Brighton), remains a favorite only of dedicated Who fans--State-side, anyways.
In other words, the British bands we Americans revere the most are the ones that sound the most American.
But there is absolutely no confusion about where The Kinks come from. They make none such attempts to imitate American singers; their thick North London accents shine through at all times, you can almost hear their bad-teeth belting into the microphone. Note that their Christmas song is called "Father Christmas," not "Santa Claus." They composed an entire album entitled "Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire," which featured the hit-single "Victoria," about, yes, Queen Victoria and the height of British imperialism. "Waterloo Sunset" paints a romantic scene of Waterloo, London, not Kansas City or California. "Lola" takes place in "Old Soho," London. "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" references the "Boutiques" and "Discotheques" of some fashionable dandy the way only an Englishman could.
That is to say, the gaze and locus of The Kinks was always firmly in their native England, never on America. They are not adopted-Americans; they are, as I said, thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English. I'm sure they appreciated having hits state-side, but they were never writing for the U.S.; they were writing for themselves.
And I fear that may be why they are perpetually the also-rans of the British Invasion--no matter their undisputed accomplishments, no matter how awesome their songs, how fun their music, they are just too English for us Americans to fully embrace, deep down in our gut, like we have, say, the Stones. We are not nearly so cosmopolitan as we might hope; even someone who's just firmly English is too foreign, too alien, too incomprehensible to our mainstream sensibilities. Music written even in our native language must still be filtered through American lenses for our pop-culture to adopt it sub-consciously.
Which is a shame--the Kinks really are amazing. Our loss.
I am constantly surprised by the virtuosity of The Kinks, and lately I've been wondering why--why am I surprised by them? Why are they always just one of those other English bands? When we speak of British Invasion bands in hushed, reverent tones, we inevitably mean The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen. Why are the Kinks so recurrently relegated to also-ran status?
Don't get me wrong, it's not like they're unknown or anything--they're Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame inductees, had a massive and acknowledged influence on Punk and New Wave, "Lola" is surely playing on some classic rock station as we speak, "Tired of Waiting" in some commercial, and the twin hits of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of The Night" contain hands-down, no contest, the two most famous, awesome, and imitated guitar riffs in the history of rock, bar none. Van Halen got its start covering "You Really Got Me." The Doors ripped them off for "Hello, I Love You." The Kinks are not followers, not imitators, no, they are the pioneers, the trend-setters, the influential. Guaranteed one of their songs is one of your favorite songs.
And that's just my point--given all their accomplishments, why are they so rarely spoken of in the same hushed awe as, say, The Beatles or The Stones?
My theory is that The Kinks are just, well, so much more English than these other bands. They don't just happen to be English you see--no, they are thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English.
By way of comparison, yes, the Beatles make fleeting references to the Queen in "Penny Lane" and Side B of "Abbey Road," but for the most part their musical influences and ethos, from their early R&B covers to their psychedelic experiments, are firmly rooted in America. John Lennon was initially trying to be Elvis; the American Bob Dylan is who first introduced them to weed, Timothy Leary to LSD; "Rubber Soul" was their attempt to sound like The Byrds; "Back in the USSR" was their send-up of the Beach Boys; Tuscon, Arizona is name-checked in "Get Back;" John Lennon chose to live in New York over London. They came from Liverpool, but their goal was clearly America. Some pop-culture neophyte could be forgiven for assuming the Beatles were actually an American band.
Same deal with the Stones, the Who, Led Zep--all these bands got their starts covering American R&B standards. Their favorite acts were Elvis Presley, Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. The Rolling Stones are named for a Muddy Waters song, an American, not a Brit. From the start, they were all openly trying to sound like Americans--and by the end of their careers, had all functionally become adopted-Americans, no matter their nationalities. Robert Plant sings of "Going to California," not the Isle of Wight. Your most meat-headed, 'Murica-lovin', patriotic red-neck will proudly get the Led out to Jimmy Page, blissfully uncaring of his British citizenship.
Note that the least-revered parts of these bands' oeuvres here in the U.S. are typically the most British parts: David Bowie, for example, is best known state-side for such hits as the NASA-mimicking "Space Oddity" than his more recent "I'm Afraid of Americans." The Who are best known in the States for such concept albums as "Tommy" and "Who's Next," while the more explicitly British "Quadrophenia" (about warring Mods and Rockers in 1964 Brighton), remains a favorite only of dedicated Who fans--State-side, anyways.
In other words, the British bands we Americans revere the most are the ones that sound the most American.
But there is absolutely no confusion about where The Kinks come from. They make none such attempts to imitate American singers; their thick North London accents shine through at all times, you can almost hear their bad-teeth belting into the microphone. Note that their Christmas song is called "Father Christmas," not "Santa Claus." They composed an entire album entitled "Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire," which featured the hit-single "Victoria," about, yes, Queen Victoria and the height of British imperialism. "Waterloo Sunset" paints a romantic scene of Waterloo, London, not Kansas City or California. "Lola" takes place in "Old Soho," London. "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" references the "Boutiques" and "Discotheques" of some fashionable dandy the way only an Englishman could.
That is to say, the gaze and locus of The Kinks was always firmly in their native England, never on America. They are not adopted-Americans; they are, as I said, thoroughly, proudly, quintessentially English. I'm sure they appreciated having hits state-side, but they were never writing for the U.S.; they were writing for themselves.
And I fear that may be why they are perpetually the also-rans of the British Invasion--no matter their undisputed accomplishments, no matter how awesome their songs, how fun their music, they are just too English for us Americans to fully embrace, deep down in our gut, like we have, say, the Stones. We are not nearly so cosmopolitan as we might hope; even someone who's just firmly English is too foreign, too alien, too incomprehensible to our mainstream sensibilities. Music written even in our native language must still be filtered through American lenses for our pop-culture to adopt it sub-consciously.
Which is a shame--the Kinks really are amazing. Our loss.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Tibetan Book of the Dead
I wonder if some ancient Hindu mathematician (knowing what wonderful and advanced mathematicians India had back then) came to the same conclusion as Poincare and Nietzsche would millennia later, namely that if the Universe is finite, then there are ultimately only a finite number of repeatable combinations...and therefore we have done all this before...and will do all this again...repeatedly, ad infinitum, into eternity.
This is what's called the Unbearable Heaviness of Being, this burden that everything we've done, are doing, and will do--all of our mistakes, successes, joys, downfalls, pains, sufferings, births and deaths--has already happened before, and we are destined (some would say doomed) to do so again.
I wonder if this ancient mathematician's calculations is what resulted in the Hindu belief that we are trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnations and rebirths (a belief as distinctly Indian in origin as Ethical Monotheism is Middle-Eastern). For so certain is the Hindu belief in reincarnation you see, that the Buddhists are trying to escape the cycle of rebirths--that is, to escape the Unbearable Heaviness of Being.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or, "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State," as it apparently should most properly be translated), is concerned specifically with ending the cycle of rebirths, and contains poems, rituals, and guidance for the dying subject, in how to successfully navigate the moment of death so as to enter Nirvana, the great emptiness, the final death.
I found the book to be strangely...filling. Not for its esoteric theology per se (I am sure that my thorough ignorance of most Buddhist practice left me not grasping half of the references therein), but rather in its assumptions that we are able to leave the great weight of existential meaning that bears down on each of us. Modern man, of course, is afflicted with (as the Milan Kundera novel is entitled) the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the assumption that all that is happening is happening only once, and then never again, and what occurs once might as well never have happened at all. It is made manifest in the physicist's growing and sober suspicion that the Universe will not reshuffle a la Poincare, but will instead just peter out and fade away.
That is, in the East, the great quest is to attain Nirvana; in the West, it's to avoid it. It takes the Buddhist great energy of soul to reach the state the Westerner fears he will come upon inexorably.
So which is it? The Unbearable Heaviness or The Unbearable Lightness? Doubtless we've written ourselves into a false binary here, and there is something else, something further, that we are not considering. For both the the Heaviness and the Lightness begin with the presumption of a finite Universe. Have you played with the Hubble Deep Field on Google Sky? We still have not seen the edge thereof. Might both these categories prove insufficient if the Universe turns out to be...infinite?
This is what's called the Unbearable Heaviness of Being, this burden that everything we've done, are doing, and will do--all of our mistakes, successes, joys, downfalls, pains, sufferings, births and deaths--has already happened before, and we are destined (some would say doomed) to do so again.
I wonder if this ancient mathematician's calculations is what resulted in the Hindu belief that we are trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnations and rebirths (a belief as distinctly Indian in origin as Ethical Monotheism is Middle-Eastern). For so certain is the Hindu belief in reincarnation you see, that the Buddhists are trying to escape the cycle of rebirths--that is, to escape the Unbearable Heaviness of Being.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or, "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State," as it apparently should most properly be translated), is concerned specifically with ending the cycle of rebirths, and contains poems, rituals, and guidance for the dying subject, in how to successfully navigate the moment of death so as to enter Nirvana, the great emptiness, the final death.
I found the book to be strangely...filling. Not for its esoteric theology per se (I am sure that my thorough ignorance of most Buddhist practice left me not grasping half of the references therein), but rather in its assumptions that we are able to leave the great weight of existential meaning that bears down on each of us. Modern man, of course, is afflicted with (as the Milan Kundera novel is entitled) the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the assumption that all that is happening is happening only once, and then never again, and what occurs once might as well never have happened at all. It is made manifest in the physicist's growing and sober suspicion that the Universe will not reshuffle a la Poincare, but will instead just peter out and fade away.
That is, in the East, the great quest is to attain Nirvana; in the West, it's to avoid it. It takes the Buddhist great energy of soul to reach the state the Westerner fears he will come upon inexorably.
So which is it? The Unbearable Heaviness or The Unbearable Lightness? Doubtless we've written ourselves into a false binary here, and there is something else, something further, that we are not considering. For both the the Heaviness and the Lightness begin with the presumption of a finite Universe. Have you played with the Hubble Deep Field on Google Sky? We still have not seen the edge thereof. Might both these categories prove insufficient if the Universe turns out to be...infinite?
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