"It's cold..."
Everything is desolate. The splotchy sky is an endless line of dull putty that doesn’t change for days, even weeks at a time. Gripped by a Buffalo winter the hope of anything changing seems about as probable as finding a winning lottery ticket. Driving, I realize my hands look like the road; dry and cracking from the cold. I imagine the trees are lonely, their leaves a memory, limbs abused by ice and wind.
It’s December 22nd; winter is just beginning. As I drive I’m listening to The Bigger Lovers’ album This Affair Never Happened…And Here Are Eleven Songs About It (Yep Roc, 2004). It’s one of my favorite discs to come out in the past few years. It sounds fresh every time I go back to it, but it seems particularly poignant and fitting at this time of year.
“This time of year I barely see daylight with curtains drawn from dawn until midnight.” Those are lyrics from album closer “For Christ’s Sake.” I’ve listened to this record from beginning to end plenty of times, and while the general feeling and theme of it are pretty obvious, from the title right down to the close-up photo of the praying mantis on the cover, I can’t pinpoint what every song is about specifically. What I do know is that the record relates in some way to my hopelessness, the bitter eyes I view the world through, and the twisted mess my stomach spends most of the time in. And all of that is related to my failure to understand and form lasting relationships with other people, especially of the opposite sex.
“Same old shit different year, it’s great to fear the things you can’t control;” lyrics from “You (You, You),” the album’s opening track. There’s some comfort in the company of other sad bastards, even if it’s only a recording played back on CD. I try and concentrate on the buoyant pop melodies, vocal harmonies, and amazing layered choruses that The Bigger Lovers use like a Trojan horse to slip their laments into your head. I turn the volume knob clockwise, sing along, and try to remind myself that I’m better off than a lot of other people.
I need to forget the fabricated drama of my own inner turmoil. Stop the bleak, faux poetic rambling about the season. Even when I think I might be too susceptible to heartbreak conveyed in art, This Affair Never Happened…still succeeds on the very basic, but satisfying merits of its energetic catchiness. It’s one of those rare records I can connect with regardless of my mood. And I think, damn, The Bigger Lovers are good as “No Heroics” nearly brings me to tears.
Around the holidays, wading through the dregs of another year, many of us are especially prone to dramatizing the events of the past twelve months. It’s natural to try and come up with a summation of what this year has meant in our lives and in the grand scheme of things. Under the influence of nostalgia, this reflection can lead to embellishment. What if this year didn’t mean anything? And this kind of thinking can be dangerous.
I guess some people infuse their mundane day-to-day whatever with a sense of urgency and importance, even if it’s inflated or totally made-up, because otherwise they might drive themselves crazy trying to decipher what the point of all this seemingly pointless shit they have to do is. I mean, if life is just flossing your teeth, going to work, renting a DVD, going to bed, then repeating the process, it could be worse; but after a while it gets boring, and any intelligent person is bound to find themselves preoccupied with existential questions. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish I could just be content with my relatively easy life. But I have a problem living in the moment, not wondering what everything is leading up to, what my actions today will bring in the future, and how my past decisions got me where I am. This time of year can turn into a real quagmire for people like me.
A wise philosopher once chided his perspective student, “Never his mind on where he was, on what he was doing.” That sounds familiar. It’s difficult for me to accept simple pleasures for nothing more than exactly what they are; it’s always, “What does this mean?” What will it lead to? That’s probably why I can’t enjoy warm memories of past relationships without fixating on the end result. And why I think of 2005 as a year of unprecedented rejection.
A Year Of Unprecedented Rejection
In May, my girlfriend of two and a half years dumped me. She walked away from our accumulated mutual history with relative ease, probably even a sigh of relief. It’s true that our relationship hadn’t been good in quite some time, but when I asked her if she was prepared to just scrap two and a half years without even attempting to work out the problems we had, she replied that it was really only like two years because in her mind the past six months had been so bad they didn’t count. Aside from the fact that she completely sidestepped the question, it seemed to me that what she was saying was that six rough months negated all the good in the two years prior. I’m sure she would say, and maybe you would agree, that was not her point at all, but that’s what I got out of it, and those words went a long way to making me think maybe she was right.
Contrary to how it might often seem, I don’t want to be this bitter. I don’t enjoy the constant gnawing at my stomach walls or waking from fevered nightmares in a rumpled mess of sweaty sheets. Still, out of two and a half mostly happy years, the thing about my ex that lingers is the way she said at the end, “I Know what it’s like. I’ve been where you are right now,” a condescending little pat on my head. She dumped me; she had hand, and she used it.
Sure this is all from my scornful, rejected perspective, and anyone that goes on and on about getting dumped is more likely than not going to sound like a whining little bitch. My point is - assuming since you’ve read this far you’ve taken a massive leap of faith and figured I do in fact have one – anyone who regurgitates the tired old phrase “it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” is a blatant bullshit artist. I don’t want to reminisce about good times with my ex-girlfriend because all that does is remind me that those times are over…forever. I’ll likely never see her again, and I don’t know what I’d do if I did. She could very well be cuddling with someone else right now, and that thought fills me with a bottomless sadness I convert to hate.
Even though I don’t wish her any ill, and I don’t want her back, I have a really tough time dealing with the fact that the one person I was closer to than anyone else in my entire life could just cut me off like an unnecessary appendage. I recently saw the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and it really shook me up. I felt physically sick watching it, and I had to turn it off before it was over. The movie hit too close to home.
I thought maybe it would be a good idea to just erase all the memories I have of past romantic involvement; wipe the brain clean. It’s not a solution everyone would endorse, but for some people, like me, it might work. Because unfortunately I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a love so strong that the desperate need to hold onto one memory of it could snap me out of the drug-induced sleep subjects in the movie were put under as someone was being deleted from their brain. I don’t believe that one memory of a past lover could outweigh the pain of a break-up.
I have one memory of the first time my ex stayed over at my apartment. It meant a lot to me. It was the final night of the graduate class we’d met in, and we sat next to each other scribbling notes back and forth in the margin of her notebook while classmates gave presentations. On the way to my apartment we stopped at the store to get some snacks. That’s where she said that there was a difference between Smashing Pumpkins and The Smashing Pumpkins, at which point I asked her to marry me.
When we left the store it was frigidly cold, one of those still, serene winter nights where the moon casts everything in blue, and the fresh snow twinkles as if jewels were embedded in it. Shortly before our relationship ended, I related my recollection of that night to her, the way I preserved it in my mind. I told her that evening was magical, and she laughed at me like I was a fool. That memory is now ruined forever too, so it can be yanked out of my skull as well. Take it all; everything must go.
Even if all the bad things about a relationship could be erased from your brain, and you were left with one pristine, perfect image of the most special time you shared with another person, that alone would be even more maddening. I would be taunted by that thought, endlessly wondering, where did she go? If my recollection of this moment is so sweet, why isn’t she still here with me? The possibilities, both good and bad, would plague me all day.
I don’t have a long, storied history with a multitude of women, far from it. I have precious little experience when it comes to these matters. That being said, 2005 was a year of unusual disappointment and disillusion as far as the fairer sex is concerned. In the past eight months I’ve watched three lovely, intelligent ladies walk out of my life. And I feel none the wiser for it.
All Aboard...
Since I’m less than two months away from being 33, my irrational fear of dying old and alone has been heightened by the romantic failures of the past year. I used to think I was pretty easy to please in the context of a relationship, but this year three women made me reevaluate that opinion. I’m beginning to consider the possibility that the qualities I’m looking for in a potential mate are too contradictory to exist in one woman. When friends try to reassure me that that’s not the case it’s little comfort because then I think, well maybe I’m just too difficult to deal with, and that’s why I can’t make a relationship work.
I’m beginning to feel like a train station. Women come, but never stay. Some hang around longer than others, but always leave. They all have destinations – high paying jobs, other relationships, kids, the things most people my age are moving toward – to get to.
I just found out that my last romantic interest of 2005 is in a relationship. It shouldn’t make that much of a difference considering she and I never had any relationship together. It’s just weird to think that a little over a month ago I was kissing her in my car. I’m not being critical of her, life moves quickly, especially when you’re sitting still like I am.
We consciously halted our involvement with one another before it went too far. It was the only logical and responsible thing to do. See, there was a deal breaker. So much about us seemed to match perfectly on paper. And in person we had a good time. There was just one thing that made it impossible to believe we could have a lasting relationship with each other. She wants children.
It’s pretty ridiculous that I’ve spent so much time dwelling on this woman and our limited encounters. All we shared was a few marathon phone conversations and one date. In one of those phone conversations this girl told me that she still wanted to believe in storybook romance. True to my cynical form I told her there was no such thing. And even though I firmly believe that romance, at least the kind portrayed in most movies, is a farce, I’m probably a bigger sucker than all of the people that believe in fairy tales coming true because I was ready to adore this girl I hardly knew with relatively few questions asked.
To this day I still don’t know her last name, but trivial details like that seemed inconsequential next to her eyes, or the way she said, “what did you do?” every time we heard a siren outside. I thought it was charming that she called me a whore when I started beating her at darts. “I’m just going to start insulting you now,” she said. But of all of the insults she could have hurled at me, she called me a whore. I thought that was fantastic.
She’ll probably make a wonderful mother some day. She’s caring, intelligent, warm, witty, and beautiful, exactly the kind of person who should be propagating the species, instead of the majority of those who actually are. I’m not sure of much, and I hesitate to ever say never, but the fact that I want nothing to do with parenting is about as certain as anything I can think of. And my aversion to kids makes me about as popular as Hitler at a bar mitzvah. Many women would recommend I get used to being alone given this disclosure.
Baby Hater!
The second woman I was involved with in 2005 already had two sons. I vowed I would never date a woman who had kids, but I broke many promises I’d made to myself in the past because of the intensity of my attraction to this lady. Her children lived with their father, so I fooled myself into thinking somehow it might work out. The affair was ill advised from the beginning, and I guess I knew all along that it was destined to end in a horrific mess, but for once in my life I dove head first, consequences be damned, and just enjoyed the time we spent together. And my choice to ignore all of the warning flags came back to bite me in the ass.
When she told me that she didn’t want to see me anymore, her consolation was to say that now I was free to find some sweet young girl who “won’t have any babies you’ll have to hate.” It wasn’t the first time I’ve been vilified because I don’t particularly care for children. I generally keep those feelings to myself because in the past when I’ve said I don’t like kids people have reacted as though I just sprouted horns and have the blood of innocent victims trickling from the corner of my laughing lips. I honestly had someone tell me once that I was a bad person because I don’t like children. In her opinion, any redeeming qualities I might have, any good deed I have ever done is null and void due to the fact that kids don’t fill me with fuzzy feelings of unconditional love.
I admit it; I don’t melt into an oozing mess of goofy grins and stupid babble in the presence of babies. I get that way around my cat sometimes, but she’s exceptionally cute. I’ve never seen a child that comes even close to being as cute as my cat Goo. On top of that, Goo will never lie to me to get herself out of trouble; she will never take my car without asking and get into an accident with it, and she will never scream demonically like a spawn of Satan in the super market check out line because she wants some stupid toy or candy.
Many people have asked me why I don’t want to be a father. The short answer is that kids are smelly, loud, expensive, completely needy, draining, ungrateful, and generally will not listen to reason. I certainly don’t believe that all children are monstrous brats, just most of them. I have a niece and a nephew, and I love them both very much. I do okay when I’m around them, and they seem to like me, of course they’re not old enough to know better yet. But even when I’m spending time with them, I’m quite relieved when it’s time for Uncle Matt to go home.
I have absolutely nothing against people who are filled with joy in the presence of kids. To each their own. I just don’t get it. And I think it’s entirely unfair when people treat me as though I'm a fundamentally flawed human being just because I don’t go gaga every time a baby’s in the room, and I don’t feel the irresistible urge to sow my seed. I walk into a public place where a kid is screaming, and I become immediately annoyed; I don’t want to deal with it.
I’ll listen to some punk ass kid scream their fucking lungs out about injustice, real or perceived, on a CD all day long, but a spoiled brat shrieking for some trinket in a store I want nothing to do with. I don’t want to be deprived of my freedom by someone requiring all but constant attention. Hell, even dogs, as cute as they may be, are too dependent for me. I’ve been accused of being selfish, and that is definitely true. At least I acknowledge it.
"You're selfish, self-centered, and cold"
I happen to think it’s much more selfish to have kids if you’re not 100% certain that you are committed to the responsibility of raising them. Sure, a lot of people would contend that nothing in life is 100% certain, and the ability to adapt and deal with unexpected developments is a true measure of strength and character. I wouldn’t disagree with that, but the harsh truth is that sometimes the best a person can do is not good enough. I don’t think I would be a good parent. I can barely take care of myself, and there are too many ways to fuck up a child forever even if you have the best of intentions.
Once you have a child your bad decisions no longer personally impact you alone, they will have irrevocable affects on another human being that may never even know the extent of what you’ve sown deep in the recesses of their psyche. Don’t bother telling me I’m scared or that I’m negative, or selfish, because you wouldn’t be telling me anything I don’t already know. And a lot of the reasons that people choose to procreate are selfish too. I have absolutely no doubt that everything is totally different when you have a child that is your own flesh and blood, but bringing more human beings into a world that is so fucked up when there are already so many kids without homes and families, and the planet’s resources are so taxed by overpopulation is quite selfish.
Ghandi or Gacey?
Anyone who looks at children and sees the unspoiled innocence and love in life, or the endless potential for positive impact in each person must also acknowledge the very real possibility that any kid could grow up to be a serial killer, or maybe just the rotten asshole that tore into me on the phone at work the other day for no particular reason. Or they might just end up being a slack ass like me, which probably wouldn’t lead to any really devastating consequences for the world at large, but wouldn’t do much to enrich it either.
Far be it from me to challenge the beliefs of the screenwriters that brought you the universally beloved holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life, but I honestly don’t think the world would be that much different if I had never been born. I’m not saying that I hate myself and want to die, or that I’ve never done one good thing in all of my years here on earth, but looking at it objectively; my effect on the world has been negligible. What some would call a defeatist attitude I merely call keeping things in proper perspective. I’m okay with not being a mover and shaker on the world stage. I’d rather live a simple life than be responsible for the history-altering actions of a Mohammad Atta or George W. Bush.
I don’t possess enough of an ego to believe that it’s imperative for my bloodline to be carried on into future generations. A girl I work with once asked me, “If you don’t have any kids who’s going to take care of you when you get old?” It’s a valid and practical question. As I stated earlier I have this fear of being old and alone, but if that’s your main motivation for procreating, that’s about as selfish as you can get. And having offspring certainly doesn’t ensure that they’ll be around to ease your transition into the golden years.
I guess some people equate children with unconditional love. It’s been suggested that’s why many young girls want babies, they want someone to love them no matter what. But to me there is a big difference between unconditional love and dependence. I think of unconditional love as the decision to stay with someone even though you recognize his or her flaws.
Kids don’t have the capability to really understand defects in personality until they reach adolescence, and even when they can see their parents as plain old human beings, warts and all, they don’t have much of a choice. In most cases necessity ensures children will stay with their parents until a certain age because they have nowhere else to go. And often the lines between love, obligation, guilt, and complacency get pretty blurry for an adult child dealing with their parents. So, I’m not sold on the idea that having a child guarantees you unconditional love; it might just guarantee you insatiable need in the guise of unconditional love.
Then you have to ask yourself, even if unconditional love is part of the bargain, does that make up for all the negatives that come with kids? I mean I like the idea of unconditional love as much as the next guy, but I’d prefer to have it with someone who doesn’t crap in his or her pants. But I’m not naïve enough to think that any argument I make could change the mind of someone that wants a family. If the idea of cleaning up a baby’s toxic poo doesn’t deter people probably nothing will. The second woman I dated this year actually told me she liked the smell of babies’ vomit, which kind of drove home the point that there’s a fundamental gap in understanding between me and the kid people that will never be bridged.
Now, before I get a shit load of nasty, damning e-mails, don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not like I walk down the street kicking over strollers and swatting babies clean out of their mothers’ arms. I don’t hate children, and I’m not mean to them when I have to be around them, I just choose not to be around them that much. I’m not fooling myself; I know that this will seriously hinder my chances with women in my age range. So, I’m trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I’m most likely going to be alone. That’s not easy to do, especially when you can’t take solace or comfort in the memories of loves long gone.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Thursday, January 3, 2008
I want my armageddon!
I Want My Armageddon!
“Disappointed the threat is gone/ Get nostalgic for bombing runs/
But don’t you think it’s true/ We’ll be afraid again soon?”
(From “Atomic Kid” by Versus)
Wake Up Atomic Kid
Growing up in the ’80s was strange in many respects. The same could probably be said about any decade. What the hell were kids thinking during the Holocaust or the Black Plague? A special anxiety underscored everything in the ‘80s, borne out of regular reminders that our life expectancy was in question, and a few world leaders bent on control might decide its length. We were told that our very existence could be cut short at any time.
We lived with the very real fear that civilization, as we knew it, could easily be wiped out, and we might all die under mushroom clouds. As improbable as an all-out nuclear confrontation was, the looming prospect was scary enough. From cheesy, jingoistic pap like Red Dawn and Rocky IV, to hopeful, cautionary tales like War Games, and the television mini-series The Day After that attempted to incorporate some realism, conflict with the “evil Soviet empire” and nuclear doomsday scenarios were endlessly presented in movies. Cold War propaganda saturated every aspect of popular culture.
I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. My parents aren’t ridiculously religious, although the words ridiculous and religious are pretty much synonymous in my mind. My folks insisted me and my siblings go to church every weekend, but religion wasn’t a big part of our home life. Still, I was frightened enough by the idea of atomic annihilation to pray, yes pray, it didn’t happen. It’s all I ever prayed for.
Now I understand that I am predisposed to expect the worst, it’s an unflattering but real part of my personality. That being acknowledged, I don’t think I was the only kid terrified by the nuclear arms race with all of its sensational trappings. I’m no psychologist - in fact I could probably be a case study for one - but I wonder if the idea that our future was tenuous at best had more of a long term effect on my generation’s way of thinking than anyone ever imagined. Once the possibility that we stood on the brink of nuclear destruction burrowed deep within our subconscious, did it breed a nihilism that gave rise to the so-called “slacker generation?”
I hate it when people play hot potato with blame. It’s especially infuriating when they try to duck and dodge their own responsibility by spewing ludicrous mumbo-jumbo about deep seeded psychological trauma. Therefore I would never pin my lack of direction, initiative, and accomplishments on lingering fear planted by Cold War prognostications of imminent destruction. I’ll own up to my own lazy and indecisive nature, but I’m still at a loss to explain how I developed such a bleak view of the world and the future.
I once had a college professor who suggested to me that I had unresolved abandonment issues. She wasn’t a psychology or even a religion professor; she taught acting classes. But since Method Acting was the preferred approach of the faculty at my school, some professors assumed their years of study and experience with “The Method” afforded them special insight into the minds, hearts, and motives of others. She was a very nice lady, and I have no doubt that she was trying to coax me to a “breakthrough” for my own good. At the time I was still smarting over the betrayal of a high school sweetheart, and suggested that as the cause of this pervasive fear that everything would end, and end badly at that, but she said she believed it went much deeper and farther back.
I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Later, with the help of an actual therapist, I started to consider the possibility that the great uncertainty and fear I associated with the future might be due to the fear I had growing up that my parents would divorce, and I would have to choose between the two, or maybe even be abandoned by one of them. I don’t have many memories of my maternal grandmother. Before I was too old, the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease forced her into a nursing home. But, one of my earliest memories is of her asking me whether I would choose to go with my mother or father if they ever split up.
Maybe all of my childhood fears fed each other, creating an overwhelming snowball of doubt, defeatism, and futility that eventually swallowed me like The Blob. Maybe all these questions about the future predisposed me to think of it as a dark, forbidding place. What difference does it make anyway? Some would argue that the state of the world is enough of a reason to feel like giving up.
I Want Out
Teenage Nazis walking into gay bars with hatchets to chop up “them faggots,” Muslims holding aloft signs that read, “Butcher those who mock Islam,” then decrying those who associate their religion with violence, increasingly younger mothers spiking their babies’ skulls off the sidewalk, it’s fucked up times we live in. But it’s not just the Muslims or Nazis causing problems. There’s plenty of blame to spread around, even here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Scrapping the whole thing in favor of starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.
But that could start a whole other treatise I’m not going to get involved with right now. Besides, claiming that the world is an irredeemable cesspool because of what we see on the front page of the paper, or on cable news networks is a weak argument at best. It’s too easy to dismiss that sort of attitude as a lazy cop out. And the gray areas make it a slippery slope to stand on. For example, Christians would cite the movement to legalize gay marriage or to protect a woman’s right to an abortion as an example of society’s rapid deterioration, and I would sharply disagree.
We’ve been told that there is ample fire power in the world’s nuclear arsenal to blow the earth up many times over, but it’s hard to believe that it would ever come to that. I recently read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, written in 1946. That detailed chronicle of the only use of atomic weapons on a population presents a picture that is much more difficult to handle than the idea of the whole globe blowing up at once, a picture of a world that survives and has to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Which is worse, being blown to ashes in a split-second explosion, or dying slowly from atomic fallout, and watching skin slip off of people’s hands and arms as you try to help them up?
The Lessons of Hiroshima
The nuclear threat still exists, but in a form that is perhaps even more terrifying. Politicians leverage the fear we have of rogue states or individual terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons to push agendas that make no sense, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons, which was pure speculation, we knew for a fact that North Korea already developed missiles that could reach California. Still, we didn’t invade North Korea.
Iran has elected a president who is taking the role of Hitler of the 21st century. He’s already stated that he wants to wipe Israel off the map. So, if Iran gets its hands on nuclear weapons, it’s anybody’s guess what magnitude of devastation could be left in the wake of a chain reaction it sets off. Even in the improbable case that nuclear weapons were deployed, the earth wouldn’t explode in one massive, blinding blast. But it might be better if it did.
Imagine for a moment nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist. Not too long ago I read Perfect Soldiers, a book that profiled the 19 9/11 hijackers, but also examined in depth the rise of radical Islam and the cult of Bin Laden. One section details the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It paints the man in charge of that operation, Ramsi Youssef, as an inept, at times bumbling, character.
Youssef’s plan, if you can call it that, was so haphazard that he didn’t even pick someone to drive the rental van loaded with explosives into the Trade Center until the night before. The main reason he executed the bombing when he did was because he ran out of money. Lacking funds, it came down to do something now, or consider the time and money invested in the plot to that point a loss. So, he got someone to drive the van, and then he fled the country.
If someone like that can do the damage he did, what chance do we stand of winning “the war on terror? If somebody wants to do something badly enough, and losing their own life, as well as the lives of others, in the process is not a deterrent, it’s going to be pretty hard to stop them. They will find a way. The rise of terrorism puts a very real, very human, and unpredictable face on death and destruction that makes the cartoonish portrayal of the Soviets during the ‘80s seem oddly comforting.
At least with the Russians we knew where the threat was coming from. Now, the quiet, mild-mannered guy in khakis you see at the office every day could deliver Armageddon. Remember Sting singing; “Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too?” Well, terrorists love their children, but think they’d be much better off as martyrs than to live with Jews.
It’s questionable whether any of the hard lessons of Hiroshima have stuck, or if the right people learned them at all. Likewise it’s difficult to swallow the popular opinion that the West won the Cold War when an undetermined number of Russian nukes might be unaccounted for. Then there’s North Korea and Iran. Maybe it’s understandable that some people would consider a meteor colliding with the earth, and taking the whole damn thing out in one fell swoop, desirable when contrasted with the protracted war on terror.
“…maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”
We were promised Armageddon. But people regularly confuse Armageddon with the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse refers to a cataclysm that destroys evil forces, and raises the righteous, whoever they may be, into power. It implies a rebirth, a rebuilding, a fresh start. Armageddon is simply a decisive battle between good and evil forces, and correctly or not, is often associated with end game.
A rebirth doesn’t sound too bad, until you get into that sticky stuff about good and evil, and who or what makes the judgments. As you may have already gathered, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and my impressionable mind has been buzzing. I bought some books about Zen Buddhism. It has been brought to my attention by several people that I have a real problem living in the present moment, and my fixations on the past and fears about the future cause me a lot of distress.
I’ve been trying to read the material with an open mind, but so far it seems like hooey to me. Maybe it should worry me more than it does that I find it easier to identify with Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club than with Zen Buddhist texts. I won’t say that the book version of Fight Club is better than the movie adaptation. Both are excellent and just different enough to stand on their own merits. It might be too much for high school kids to handle, but I firmly believe Fight Club should be taught in college literature classes.
“What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
“I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone.”
That quotation, as well as the one that heads this section, are from Fight Club. Would it be better to bulldoze the whole damn world to rebuild it than to piss the planet’s resources away little by little over a long period of time? That depends on your perspective, whether you see the glass half empty or half full, whether you prefer a long, slow death or a quick snuff. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? At the very least it’s interesting to think about.
And anyone who thinks we aren’t trashing and crapping on this planet, killing it slowly, is either stupid or in denial. All of those who naysay the effects of Global Warming should come to Buffalo for a while. The seasons are clearly shifting; weather patterns are changing. A city that has been known for its snow and cold has had precious little of either this year. It’s snowing today, but we had our warmest January in 50 years.
The Buffalo area has had days in January 2006 when the mercury reached past 50 degrees. A few weeks ago I was out running around in jeans and a sweatshirt. I’m no historian or meteorologist, but it seems to me that Buffalo winters have been arriving later and with considerably less fury of late. That’s just the tip of the iceberg – which is melting by the way – as far as evidence that Global Warming is a very real phenomenon goes.
Does any of this, as frightening as the possible consequences are, mean that we should tear everything down and start from a clean slate? Do current events suggest that quick and decisive obliteration of the human race is preferable to any likely scenarios of the future? Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about where nihilistic views come from. Did the anxiety of the nuclear arms race in the ‘80s convince a generation they had no future, so there was no point in doing anything? How the hell do I know?
I probably just have too much time on my hands and a hyperactive imagination. But, that’s the beauty of a blog. I don’t have to provide any answers. I don’t have to back anything up with too many facts or research. I can just throw the ideas out there for you to think about, if you want to.
“Disappointed the threat is gone/ Get nostalgic for bombing runs/
But don’t you think it’s true/ We’ll be afraid again soon?”
(From “Atomic Kid” by Versus)
Wake Up Atomic Kid
Growing up in the ’80s was strange in many respects. The same could probably be said about any decade. What the hell were kids thinking during the Holocaust or the Black Plague? A special anxiety underscored everything in the ‘80s, borne out of regular reminders that our life expectancy was in question, and a few world leaders bent on control might decide its length. We were told that our very existence could be cut short at any time.
We lived with the very real fear that civilization, as we knew it, could easily be wiped out, and we might all die under mushroom clouds. As improbable as an all-out nuclear confrontation was, the looming prospect was scary enough. From cheesy, jingoistic pap like Red Dawn and Rocky IV, to hopeful, cautionary tales like War Games, and the television mini-series The Day After that attempted to incorporate some realism, conflict with the “evil Soviet empire” and nuclear doomsday scenarios were endlessly presented in movies. Cold War propaganda saturated every aspect of popular culture.
I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. My parents aren’t ridiculously religious, although the words ridiculous and religious are pretty much synonymous in my mind. My folks insisted me and my siblings go to church every weekend, but religion wasn’t a big part of our home life. Still, I was frightened enough by the idea of atomic annihilation to pray, yes pray, it didn’t happen. It’s all I ever prayed for.
Now I understand that I am predisposed to expect the worst, it’s an unflattering but real part of my personality. That being acknowledged, I don’t think I was the only kid terrified by the nuclear arms race with all of its sensational trappings. I’m no psychologist - in fact I could probably be a case study for one - but I wonder if the idea that our future was tenuous at best had more of a long term effect on my generation’s way of thinking than anyone ever imagined. Once the possibility that we stood on the brink of nuclear destruction burrowed deep within our subconscious, did it breed a nihilism that gave rise to the so-called “slacker generation?”
I hate it when people play hot potato with blame. It’s especially infuriating when they try to duck and dodge their own responsibility by spewing ludicrous mumbo-jumbo about deep seeded psychological trauma. Therefore I would never pin my lack of direction, initiative, and accomplishments on lingering fear planted by Cold War prognostications of imminent destruction. I’ll own up to my own lazy and indecisive nature, but I’m still at a loss to explain how I developed such a bleak view of the world and the future.
I once had a college professor who suggested to me that I had unresolved abandonment issues. She wasn’t a psychology or even a religion professor; she taught acting classes. But since Method Acting was the preferred approach of the faculty at my school, some professors assumed their years of study and experience with “The Method” afforded them special insight into the minds, hearts, and motives of others. She was a very nice lady, and I have no doubt that she was trying to coax me to a “breakthrough” for my own good. At the time I was still smarting over the betrayal of a high school sweetheart, and suggested that as the cause of this pervasive fear that everything would end, and end badly at that, but she said she believed it went much deeper and farther back.
I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Later, with the help of an actual therapist, I started to consider the possibility that the great uncertainty and fear I associated with the future might be due to the fear I had growing up that my parents would divorce, and I would have to choose between the two, or maybe even be abandoned by one of them. I don’t have many memories of my maternal grandmother. Before I was too old, the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease forced her into a nursing home. But, one of my earliest memories is of her asking me whether I would choose to go with my mother or father if they ever split up.
Maybe all of my childhood fears fed each other, creating an overwhelming snowball of doubt, defeatism, and futility that eventually swallowed me like The Blob. Maybe all these questions about the future predisposed me to think of it as a dark, forbidding place. What difference does it make anyway? Some would argue that the state of the world is enough of a reason to feel like giving up.
I Want Out
Teenage Nazis walking into gay bars with hatchets to chop up “them faggots,” Muslims holding aloft signs that read, “Butcher those who mock Islam,” then decrying those who associate their religion with violence, increasingly younger mothers spiking their babies’ skulls off the sidewalk, it’s fucked up times we live in. But it’s not just the Muslims or Nazis causing problems. There’s plenty of blame to spread around, even here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Scrapping the whole thing in favor of starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.
But that could start a whole other treatise I’m not going to get involved with right now. Besides, claiming that the world is an irredeemable cesspool because of what we see on the front page of the paper, or on cable news networks is a weak argument at best. It’s too easy to dismiss that sort of attitude as a lazy cop out. And the gray areas make it a slippery slope to stand on. For example, Christians would cite the movement to legalize gay marriage or to protect a woman’s right to an abortion as an example of society’s rapid deterioration, and I would sharply disagree.
We’ve been told that there is ample fire power in the world’s nuclear arsenal to blow the earth up many times over, but it’s hard to believe that it would ever come to that. I recently read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, written in 1946. That detailed chronicle of the only use of atomic weapons on a population presents a picture that is much more difficult to handle than the idea of the whole globe blowing up at once, a picture of a world that survives and has to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Which is worse, being blown to ashes in a split-second explosion, or dying slowly from atomic fallout, and watching skin slip off of people’s hands and arms as you try to help them up?
The Lessons of Hiroshima
The nuclear threat still exists, but in a form that is perhaps even more terrifying. Politicians leverage the fear we have of rogue states or individual terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons to push agendas that make no sense, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons, which was pure speculation, we knew for a fact that North Korea already developed missiles that could reach California. Still, we didn’t invade North Korea.
Iran has elected a president who is taking the role of Hitler of the 21st century. He’s already stated that he wants to wipe Israel off the map. So, if Iran gets its hands on nuclear weapons, it’s anybody’s guess what magnitude of devastation could be left in the wake of a chain reaction it sets off. Even in the improbable case that nuclear weapons were deployed, the earth wouldn’t explode in one massive, blinding blast. But it might be better if it did.
Imagine for a moment nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist. Not too long ago I read Perfect Soldiers, a book that profiled the 19 9/11 hijackers, but also examined in depth the rise of radical Islam and the cult of Bin Laden. One section details the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It paints the man in charge of that operation, Ramsi Youssef, as an inept, at times bumbling, character.
Youssef’s plan, if you can call it that, was so haphazard that he didn’t even pick someone to drive the rental van loaded with explosives into the Trade Center until the night before. The main reason he executed the bombing when he did was because he ran out of money. Lacking funds, it came down to do something now, or consider the time and money invested in the plot to that point a loss. So, he got someone to drive the van, and then he fled the country.
If someone like that can do the damage he did, what chance do we stand of winning “the war on terror? If somebody wants to do something badly enough, and losing their own life, as well as the lives of others, in the process is not a deterrent, it’s going to be pretty hard to stop them. They will find a way. The rise of terrorism puts a very real, very human, and unpredictable face on death and destruction that makes the cartoonish portrayal of the Soviets during the ‘80s seem oddly comforting.
At least with the Russians we knew where the threat was coming from. Now, the quiet, mild-mannered guy in khakis you see at the office every day could deliver Armageddon. Remember Sting singing; “Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too?” Well, terrorists love their children, but think they’d be much better off as martyrs than to live with Jews.
It’s questionable whether any of the hard lessons of Hiroshima have stuck, or if the right people learned them at all. Likewise it’s difficult to swallow the popular opinion that the West won the Cold War when an undetermined number of Russian nukes might be unaccounted for. Then there’s North Korea and Iran. Maybe it’s understandable that some people would consider a meteor colliding with the earth, and taking the whole damn thing out in one fell swoop, desirable when contrasted with the protracted war on terror.
“…maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”
We were promised Armageddon. But people regularly confuse Armageddon with the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse refers to a cataclysm that destroys evil forces, and raises the righteous, whoever they may be, into power. It implies a rebirth, a rebuilding, a fresh start. Armageddon is simply a decisive battle between good and evil forces, and correctly or not, is often associated with end game.
A rebirth doesn’t sound too bad, until you get into that sticky stuff about good and evil, and who or what makes the judgments. As you may have already gathered, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and my impressionable mind has been buzzing. I bought some books about Zen Buddhism. It has been brought to my attention by several people that I have a real problem living in the present moment, and my fixations on the past and fears about the future cause me a lot of distress.
I’ve been trying to read the material with an open mind, but so far it seems like hooey to me. Maybe it should worry me more than it does that I find it easier to identify with Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club than with Zen Buddhist texts. I won’t say that the book version of Fight Club is better than the movie adaptation. Both are excellent and just different enough to stand on their own merits. It might be too much for high school kids to handle, but I firmly believe Fight Club should be taught in college literature classes.
“What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
“I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone.”
That quotation, as well as the one that heads this section, are from Fight Club. Would it be better to bulldoze the whole damn world to rebuild it than to piss the planet’s resources away little by little over a long period of time? That depends on your perspective, whether you see the glass half empty or half full, whether you prefer a long, slow death or a quick snuff. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? At the very least it’s interesting to think about.
And anyone who thinks we aren’t trashing and crapping on this planet, killing it slowly, is either stupid or in denial. All of those who naysay the effects of Global Warming should come to Buffalo for a while. The seasons are clearly shifting; weather patterns are changing. A city that has been known for its snow and cold has had precious little of either this year. It’s snowing today, but we had our warmest January in 50 years.
The Buffalo area has had days in January 2006 when the mercury reached past 50 degrees. A few weeks ago I was out running around in jeans and a sweatshirt. I’m no historian or meteorologist, but it seems to me that Buffalo winters have been arriving later and with considerably less fury of late. That’s just the tip of the iceberg – which is melting by the way – as far as evidence that Global Warming is a very real phenomenon goes.
Does any of this, as frightening as the possible consequences are, mean that we should tear everything down and start from a clean slate? Do current events suggest that quick and decisive obliteration of the human race is preferable to any likely scenarios of the future? Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about where nihilistic views come from. Did the anxiety of the nuclear arms race in the ‘80s convince a generation they had no future, so there was no point in doing anything? How the hell do I know?
I probably just have too much time on my hands and a hyperactive imagination. But, that’s the beauty of a blog. I don’t have to provide any answers. I don’t have to back anything up with too many facts or research. I can just throw the ideas out there for you to think about, if you want to.
"You Wear That White Tuxedo How You Gonna Beat The Heat?"
“You wear that white tuxedo, how you gonna beat the heat?”
“What’s up with Steely Dan?”
“What’s up with Steely Dan, Matt?” A friend asked me this when I revealed I had been listening to a lot of The Dan’s 1974 album Katie Lied. It’s a question worthy of a book-length response, unfortunately I don’t have the drive or determination required to write a book. People assume I’m a staunch indie rock purist who only listens to bands that pass a battery of tests I’ve developed to assess their credibility, or lack thereof.
It would likely surprise, even shock, a lot of my friends and acquaintances to learn that over the past few years I have bought CDs by Steely Dan, Thin Lizzy, The Kinks, Neil Young, and a whole ass-load of Motorhead. For the sake of full disclosure I’ll also admit entertaining the notion, if only briefly, of delving into the catalogs of T. Rex, Elton John, Mountain, and early ZZ Top (but, that momentary lapse of reason was solely due to the fact that Motorhead covered ZZ Top’s “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” on an early recording). And then there are the current bands I’ve been enjoying that make no effort to hide the considerable influence of classic rock in their music, like White Whale, The Long Winters, Rhett Miller, Mary Lorson & Saint Low, The Minus 5, and The Broken West.
Maybe it’s the natural effects of aging. Maybe it’s inevitable that you’ll end up being that guy you swore up and down you never would. Or, maybe it was just boredom, the need for something outside of my sphere of routine experience that lead me to check out classic bands already enshrined in the rock pantheon. I was no stranger to Steely Dan when I bought the remastered CD of Countdown To Ecstasy, its second album, released in 1973, a few months ago. For many years I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with Steely Dan.
“Who Else Was Going To Do That?”
I’m not about to lay some ridiculous theory on you about Steely Dan embodying the core ethos and ideals of punk rock, or go on about how they have as much in common with Stiv Bators and Iggy Pop as they do with Pat Metheny and Winton Marsalis. Overzealous record nerds and critics have attempted that type of subterfuge way too often with way too many artists. You know, like when people say that Frank Sinatra is “rock n’ roll” because he embraced the same essential spirit of rebellion and exuded a similar up-yours attitude as early rockers? That’s just fucking bullshit, an absolute load of crap.
Frank Sinatra is, was, and always will be music for old people. And Sinatra was a sworn enemy of rock n’ roll. It’s well documented that he openly detested and disparaged it, basically called it garbage, an abomination. Fuck Frank Sinatra. Because of nonsense like that - people painting Sinatra as “rock n’ roll” - I’m not going to try and sell you any bill of goods about Steely Dan; they have no connection to indie rock whatsoever.
Some people might perceive the recent rekindling of my interest in Steely Dan as a flip, ironic gesture. A hipster championing some old band only because he’s confident nobody else in his circle of friends ever would. It might appear to be whimsical posturing; picking a band that most people would expect me to hate, and becoming its vocal proponent. That is not the case. Over the years, I’ve often realized that the song caught in my head at a given time is a Steely Dan song, mostly “My Old School,” “Bodhisattva,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Reeling In The Years.”
Now I’ll admit it would be a hoot to convince the style-conscious indie snobs that Steely Dan is the seminal, quintessentially overlooked band they have to have on their i-pod. Make them think that without Steely Dan there’d be no Death Cab For Cutie, Spoon, Camera Obscura, or Broken Social Scene, even though it’s not true. I thought about pulling this ruse with the Allman Brothers after I first heard The Black Keys. I don’t even like the Allmans, but there is absolutely no reason anyone who digs The Black Keys should ever scoff at Eat A Peach. Point being, oftentimes the chasm separating “credible” bands in the indie world from their ridiculed ancestors isn’t as wide as imagined.
But convincing indie rockers to embrace Steely Dan would probably be an extremely tough sell. I can’t think of any band, indie or otherwise, past or present, that sounds like Steely Dan. And maybe that’s why I like them. Like my friend James said, “Just the idea of the band is cool…I mean, who else was going to do that?”
He’s got a point. What other 1970s hit-makers and major label staples were writing lounge-jazz tunes about pedophiles, like “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies” from Steely Dan’s 1974 album Katy Lied? Now, I am by no means endorsing or condoning the practice of pedophilia, nor am I suggesting that every band should venture into such tricky, potentially sickening lyrical territory. But here’s the thing, a lot of seedy, creepy shit goes on in this depraved world, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. And to their credit, Dan songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen never let things get too graphic; a lot is implied.
And what’s up with that saxophone on “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”? It bores into your skull like a hallucinogenic drug. Much of the time it was just subtle skewing of pop music conventions that lent Steely Dan an aura of unsettling strangeness, like the trippy backward guitar tracks on Countdown To Ecstasy’s final song, “King Of The World.” As often as not Becker and Fagen’s songs didn’t assault you with their quirks or subject matter culled from society’s underbelly, their weirdness just hung in the air, like a haze of opium smoke.
“Any World That I’m Welcome To Is Better Than The One I Come From.”
My recollection of the 1970s is vague at best; I was born in 1973. But based on scraps of memory that sporadically surface from my subconscious, and impressions of the decade I’ve taken away from movies, books, and television shows, it seems the ‘70s were a time when many people used their personal freedom to experiment with sex and drugs, among other things, frequently to an extent that was self-abusive. Perhaps I’m totally misguided in my theorizing, but there seems to be ample historical precedent to explain why people would feel lost, adrift, and willing to throw caution to the wind during the ‘70s.
The hell that Viet Nam became, its graphic brutality brought into people’s living rooms by the news media, the enduring mental toll on Veterans, and the way that war tore America in two was enough to disillusion many who grew up in the peace and prosperity of the ‘50s, then subscribed to the hopefulness of the free-love hippies in the ‘60s. In addition, witnessing the Cuban Missile Crises, the Kennedy (John and Bobby) and King assassinations, Watergate, and the rise of international terrorism could certainly crush the idealism of an entire generation. All things considered, it would be easy to understand why some people believed the human race was on the brink of its demise. Many of them probably became fatalists and nihilists, or at least embraced hedonism, figuring there might not be a tomorrow, so do everything today, and enjoy it to the fullest.
Steely Dan’s music seems to capture the excess, experimentation, self-absorption, and darkness that underscored the ‘70s. The lyrical component was always slightly warped. Even one of the group’s first and biggest hits, “Do It Again,” has some of the bleakest words to ever be wed to a pop song. Certainly, not every one of the band’s songs was dismal and defeatist, but a lot of Steely Dan’s catalog has something unmistakably deviant and cynical lurking beneath its placid smooth jazz surface. Even relatively straightforward, nostalgic tunes like “My Old School” and “Reeling In The Years” pack a knowing resignation and bitter aftertaste.
This juxtaposition of dark, realistic lyrical content with some of the mellowest, most innocuous music imaginable, a lounge influenced jazz-pop hybrid, is one of the main reasons Steely Dan is so damn intriguing. Some would argue that I’m attracted to the gritty, subversive aspects of Steely Dan’s music because I am an eternal pessimist with a predisposition to be negative. They would have a point, but I have a different explanation.
I believe the most interesting music combines elements that are seemingly completely at odds with each other, things that aren’t expected to go together. A perfect example of this can be found on records by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Muffs. Inside their tight, concise, sing-along pop songs, modeled after ‘50s and ‘60s rock n’ roll pioneers as much as pop-punk bands that followed, singer/guitarist Kim Shattuck punctuates her vocals with lung-busting screams and primal growls. Long gone, and greatly missed, Buffalo group milf covered their hooky power pop tunes and soulful grooves with a thick layer of noisy, churning, swirling guitar that drove some casual listeners away from what were otherwise extremely accessible songs, but came out with intense, textured, infinitely interesting records.
“And Somebody Else’s Favorite Songs”
A simpler way of explaining Steely Dan’s appeal is Becker and Fagen’s knack for writing melodically centered, effortlessly memorable songs. I call this Abba’s Law. It explains why so many people I’ve known with otherwise impeccable musical taste and extensive knowledge love Abba…or The Spice Girls, or Madonna…you get the idea. They simply cannot resist the magnetic pull of the catchy, candy-sweet pop melodies designed with one purpose, to set up permanent residence in your head. Even at its most brazenly commercial moments, on its most grotesquely over-produced tracks, like “Peg,” “FM,” “Josie,” and “Babylon Sisters,” Steely Dan is maddeningly catchy, and several of Becker and Fagen’s tunes have haunted my memory for so long I doubt any exorcism could rid me of them.
Steely Dan will surely never replace Versus, Superchunk, Shudder To Think, Fugazi, or any number of other indie rock bands in my heart or CD collection, but I cannot deny I like them. I won’t stand behind them unconditionally however. The amount of wanking on any Steely Dan album is off the charts. These guys are trained and technically proficient musicians, and they were eager to show off their chops. Plus, their musical background, listening interests, philosophy, and approach to playing differ radically from my own.
Still, their form of expression is no less valid than any punk band. And in fact, I’m at a point in my life where I see very little difference between extended solos on a Steely Dan album and the noisy guitar experimentation of Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo; it’s all wanking to me. At least Steely Dan comes back to a chorus I can sing along with. I guess I really am losing my edge, huh?
In the liner notes of the 1998 reissue of Countdown To Ecstasy (MCA), Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote, “…There is a substantial body of opinion which holds that Countdown was the best Steely Dan album, bar none. Generally speaking, the type of person who typically holds this position is not the sort of individual you want sitting across the table from you at a dinner party, especially one where alcoholic beverages are being served.” I am one who holds the aforementioned opinion, so perhaps it’s not quite time to put me out to pasture. I can cling to that tiny remnant of rebellion, as derogatory as it may seem. We all do what we must to continue living with ourselves.
“What’s up with Steely Dan?”
“What’s up with Steely Dan, Matt?” A friend asked me this when I revealed I had been listening to a lot of The Dan’s 1974 album Katie Lied. It’s a question worthy of a book-length response, unfortunately I don’t have the drive or determination required to write a book. People assume I’m a staunch indie rock purist who only listens to bands that pass a battery of tests I’ve developed to assess their credibility, or lack thereof.
It would likely surprise, even shock, a lot of my friends and acquaintances to learn that over the past few years I have bought CDs by Steely Dan, Thin Lizzy, The Kinks, Neil Young, and a whole ass-load of Motorhead. For the sake of full disclosure I’ll also admit entertaining the notion, if only briefly, of delving into the catalogs of T. Rex, Elton John, Mountain, and early ZZ Top (but, that momentary lapse of reason was solely due to the fact that Motorhead covered ZZ Top’s “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” on an early recording). And then there are the current bands I’ve been enjoying that make no effort to hide the considerable influence of classic rock in their music, like White Whale, The Long Winters, Rhett Miller, Mary Lorson & Saint Low, The Minus 5, and The Broken West.
Maybe it’s the natural effects of aging. Maybe it’s inevitable that you’ll end up being that guy you swore up and down you never would. Or, maybe it was just boredom, the need for something outside of my sphere of routine experience that lead me to check out classic bands already enshrined in the rock pantheon. I was no stranger to Steely Dan when I bought the remastered CD of Countdown To Ecstasy, its second album, released in 1973, a few months ago. For many years I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with Steely Dan.
“Who Else Was Going To Do That?”
I’m not about to lay some ridiculous theory on you about Steely Dan embodying the core ethos and ideals of punk rock, or go on about how they have as much in common with Stiv Bators and Iggy Pop as they do with Pat Metheny and Winton Marsalis. Overzealous record nerds and critics have attempted that type of subterfuge way too often with way too many artists. You know, like when people say that Frank Sinatra is “rock n’ roll” because he embraced the same essential spirit of rebellion and exuded a similar up-yours attitude as early rockers? That’s just fucking bullshit, an absolute load of crap.
Frank Sinatra is, was, and always will be music for old people. And Sinatra was a sworn enemy of rock n’ roll. It’s well documented that he openly detested and disparaged it, basically called it garbage, an abomination. Fuck Frank Sinatra. Because of nonsense like that - people painting Sinatra as “rock n’ roll” - I’m not going to try and sell you any bill of goods about Steely Dan; they have no connection to indie rock whatsoever.
Some people might perceive the recent rekindling of my interest in Steely Dan as a flip, ironic gesture. A hipster championing some old band only because he’s confident nobody else in his circle of friends ever would. It might appear to be whimsical posturing; picking a band that most people would expect me to hate, and becoming its vocal proponent. That is not the case. Over the years, I’ve often realized that the song caught in my head at a given time is a Steely Dan song, mostly “My Old School,” “Bodhisattva,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Reeling In The Years.”
Now I’ll admit it would be a hoot to convince the style-conscious indie snobs that Steely Dan is the seminal, quintessentially overlooked band they have to have on their i-pod. Make them think that without Steely Dan there’d be no Death Cab For Cutie, Spoon, Camera Obscura, or Broken Social Scene, even though it’s not true. I thought about pulling this ruse with the Allman Brothers after I first heard The Black Keys. I don’t even like the Allmans, but there is absolutely no reason anyone who digs The Black Keys should ever scoff at Eat A Peach. Point being, oftentimes the chasm separating “credible” bands in the indie world from their ridiculed ancestors isn’t as wide as imagined.
But convincing indie rockers to embrace Steely Dan would probably be an extremely tough sell. I can’t think of any band, indie or otherwise, past or present, that sounds like Steely Dan. And maybe that’s why I like them. Like my friend James said, “Just the idea of the band is cool…I mean, who else was going to do that?”
He’s got a point. What other 1970s hit-makers and major label staples were writing lounge-jazz tunes about pedophiles, like “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies” from Steely Dan’s 1974 album Katy Lied? Now, I am by no means endorsing or condoning the practice of pedophilia, nor am I suggesting that every band should venture into such tricky, potentially sickening lyrical territory. But here’s the thing, a lot of seedy, creepy shit goes on in this depraved world, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. And to their credit, Dan songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen never let things get too graphic; a lot is implied.
And what’s up with that saxophone on “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”? It bores into your skull like a hallucinogenic drug. Much of the time it was just subtle skewing of pop music conventions that lent Steely Dan an aura of unsettling strangeness, like the trippy backward guitar tracks on Countdown To Ecstasy’s final song, “King Of The World.” As often as not Becker and Fagen’s songs didn’t assault you with their quirks or subject matter culled from society’s underbelly, their weirdness just hung in the air, like a haze of opium smoke.
“Any World That I’m Welcome To Is Better Than The One I Come From.”
My recollection of the 1970s is vague at best; I was born in 1973. But based on scraps of memory that sporadically surface from my subconscious, and impressions of the decade I’ve taken away from movies, books, and television shows, it seems the ‘70s were a time when many people used their personal freedom to experiment with sex and drugs, among other things, frequently to an extent that was self-abusive. Perhaps I’m totally misguided in my theorizing, but there seems to be ample historical precedent to explain why people would feel lost, adrift, and willing to throw caution to the wind during the ‘70s.
The hell that Viet Nam became, its graphic brutality brought into people’s living rooms by the news media, the enduring mental toll on Veterans, and the way that war tore America in two was enough to disillusion many who grew up in the peace and prosperity of the ‘50s, then subscribed to the hopefulness of the free-love hippies in the ‘60s. In addition, witnessing the Cuban Missile Crises, the Kennedy (John and Bobby) and King assassinations, Watergate, and the rise of international terrorism could certainly crush the idealism of an entire generation. All things considered, it would be easy to understand why some people believed the human race was on the brink of its demise. Many of them probably became fatalists and nihilists, or at least embraced hedonism, figuring there might not be a tomorrow, so do everything today, and enjoy it to the fullest.
Steely Dan’s music seems to capture the excess, experimentation, self-absorption, and darkness that underscored the ‘70s. The lyrical component was always slightly warped. Even one of the group’s first and biggest hits, “Do It Again,” has some of the bleakest words to ever be wed to a pop song. Certainly, not every one of the band’s songs was dismal and defeatist, but a lot of Steely Dan’s catalog has something unmistakably deviant and cynical lurking beneath its placid smooth jazz surface. Even relatively straightforward, nostalgic tunes like “My Old School” and “Reeling In The Years” pack a knowing resignation and bitter aftertaste.
This juxtaposition of dark, realistic lyrical content with some of the mellowest, most innocuous music imaginable, a lounge influenced jazz-pop hybrid, is one of the main reasons Steely Dan is so damn intriguing. Some would argue that I’m attracted to the gritty, subversive aspects of Steely Dan’s music because I am an eternal pessimist with a predisposition to be negative. They would have a point, but I have a different explanation.
I believe the most interesting music combines elements that are seemingly completely at odds with each other, things that aren’t expected to go together. A perfect example of this can be found on records by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Muffs. Inside their tight, concise, sing-along pop songs, modeled after ‘50s and ‘60s rock n’ roll pioneers as much as pop-punk bands that followed, singer/guitarist Kim Shattuck punctuates her vocals with lung-busting screams and primal growls. Long gone, and greatly missed, Buffalo group milf covered their hooky power pop tunes and soulful grooves with a thick layer of noisy, churning, swirling guitar that drove some casual listeners away from what were otherwise extremely accessible songs, but came out with intense, textured, infinitely interesting records.
“And Somebody Else’s Favorite Songs”
A simpler way of explaining Steely Dan’s appeal is Becker and Fagen’s knack for writing melodically centered, effortlessly memorable songs. I call this Abba’s Law. It explains why so many people I’ve known with otherwise impeccable musical taste and extensive knowledge love Abba…or The Spice Girls, or Madonna…you get the idea. They simply cannot resist the magnetic pull of the catchy, candy-sweet pop melodies designed with one purpose, to set up permanent residence in your head. Even at its most brazenly commercial moments, on its most grotesquely over-produced tracks, like “Peg,” “FM,” “Josie,” and “Babylon Sisters,” Steely Dan is maddeningly catchy, and several of Becker and Fagen’s tunes have haunted my memory for so long I doubt any exorcism could rid me of them.
Steely Dan will surely never replace Versus, Superchunk, Shudder To Think, Fugazi, or any number of other indie rock bands in my heart or CD collection, but I cannot deny I like them. I won’t stand behind them unconditionally however. The amount of wanking on any Steely Dan album is off the charts. These guys are trained and technically proficient musicians, and they were eager to show off their chops. Plus, their musical background, listening interests, philosophy, and approach to playing differ radically from my own.
Still, their form of expression is no less valid than any punk band. And in fact, I’m at a point in my life where I see very little difference between extended solos on a Steely Dan album and the noisy guitar experimentation of Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo; it’s all wanking to me. At least Steely Dan comes back to a chorus I can sing along with. I guess I really am losing my edge, huh?
In the liner notes of the 1998 reissue of Countdown To Ecstasy (MCA), Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote, “…There is a substantial body of opinion which holds that Countdown was the best Steely Dan album, bar none. Generally speaking, the type of person who typically holds this position is not the sort of individual you want sitting across the table from you at a dinner party, especially one where alcoholic beverages are being served.” I am one who holds the aforementioned opinion, so perhaps it’s not quite time to put me out to pasture. I can cling to that tiny remnant of rebellion, as derogatory as it may seem. We all do what we must to continue living with ourselves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
