Steal The Sunshine

I’ve been watching the music video for LEN’s 1999 hit “Steal My Sunshine” every day for the past week or so. At first I couldn’t figure out why – besides the fact that it’s a great song – but I’ve finally come to a conclusion: I missed out on enjoying the song when it was first released. Sure, I remember enjoying it. Who doesn’t? But I didn’t appreciate it the way I should have appreciated it.

I know this sounds ridiculous. It was a one-hit wonder that pretty much everyone has forgotten about by now. But it represents something that I know I and many other people take for granted: the amazing pop culture we’re surrounded with. It’s always been trendy to smash pop culture. In the 1970s there were bumper stickers reading “DISCO SUCKS” and these days everyone hates on reality television (I’m not a fan of it, but I just have trouble watching TV that’s not cartoons). But five years from now everyone will be watching “I Love the New Millennium” and recalling with fondness our high school and college years. We entered 9th grade in 2001 and graduated from college in 2009 – that’s the start of the new millennium for you. We’re the real millennium children – not our younger siblings born in the later 90’s.

Oh wait. They’ve already come out with the first five years of “I Love the New Millennium” – here’s some of the stuff they covered. Napster, segways, “Lady Marmalade” (the Moulin Rouge one), TiVo, Razor Scooters, David Blaine, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (THE indie movie of 2002), “The Ring,” “The O.C.,” “In Da Club,” Metrosexuals, Paris Hilton’s sex tape, Ken Jennings, William Hung, “The DaVinci Code,” and it goes on through 2007. But, as Kim noted, 2005 is still too recent for us to be nostalgic for it.

Next year at this time though – we’ll all be remembering 2005 with (some kind of) fondness. We’re an INCREDIBLY nostalgic generation. Sure, we all kind of make fun of the 90s but we make fun of it with fondness. Pokemon, Nickelodeon, even (God help us) Maximum Carnage, Age of Apocalypse, and Justice League Task Force. Yes, those were comic book references but I know everyone has a soft spot for Rob Liefeld and Image Comics of the early 1990s. Not every comic has to be freaking Sandman.

Where am I going with this? What I’m saying is that we have to appreciate our pop culture. We have to throw ourselves into it. You don’t have to LIKE everything. You don’t have to WATCH everything or LISTEN to everything. You just shouldn’t be ashamed of liking iCarly, Timbaland, and Ultimate Marvel comics. You don’t want to miss out on your pop culture. You don’t want to be the only one not to appreciate “I Love (the rest of) The New Millennium” when it comes out in a few years. And that’s incentive enough for me.

The Problem With Literary Movements

The history of literature has become a history of literary movements. The Romantics, the Beats, the New York School, the Surrealists, the Harlem Renaissance, the Imagists, the Lost Generation, the Metaphysical Poets, the Dadaists, the Symbolists, and the list could go on. No matter how small (the Pre-Raphaelites) or broad (the Post-Modernists) these groups of more or less like-minded authors are pigeonholed into groups on the basis of thematic and aesthetic similarities.

Some groupings, such as the Romantics, are justified. Shelley, Byron, and Keats were close friends, as were Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their writings all shared a rejection of Enlightenment values and they were all influenced by Milton and Spenser. However, groups like the Lost Generation lack such clear unification. This movement is normally considered to include Hemingway and Fitzgerald but a movement cannot rest on the writings of two authors alone. Other writers float in and out of the “movement” and the writing of Stein and Anderson are normally listed as influences, but that is where the unification ends. The Lost Generation is a nomenclature best applied to the actual generation to which these writers belong and not specifically to their writings. A generation cannot be described as a movement.

The problem with literary movements is that critics, professors, and readers tend to ignore writers of the time not directly associated with those movements. We immediately associate the writings of the 1920s and 30s with Fitzgerald and Hemingway while unjustly ignoring the writings of Dashiell Hammett, Nathanael West, and Sinclair Lewis. In fact, when there is no predominant literary movement in a country, authors of that time are practically forgotten in other countries. The best example I can think of is how American readers and professors generally ignore British writers of the 1920s through 50s. They are missing out on wonderful novels by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Flann O’Brien, and Anthony Burgess. Genre writers too are rarely part of literary movements and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, and Arthur C. Clarke are consistently and outrageously ignored.

I can’t disagree with the fact that it is easier to organize literature into movements and time periods. But by doing so we are ignoring writers who do not fit into specific movements. It is all well and good to teach classes on the Romantics and the Beats but what authors are we missing from these classes? Which authors are not put into the Norton Anthologies and are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the classrooms? It is not just women, homosexuals, and racial minorities that have been ignored – there are plenty of “dead white males” who have not been given their due. Now is the time to rectify that error.

Free Will

When I took Philosophy of Mind second semester last year I was pretty frustrated. I didn’t care about how free will works or about the relationship between mind and body. I hate those subjects. As luck would have it, my philosophy seminar (a required course) the next semester dealt with “Human and Divine Free Will.” As that class went on I became more and more interested in the subject. Now it’s all I think about when I think about philosophy. I suppose it’s like my new love for iCarly – the more you encounter something the more more interested in it you become.

I’ve gone back and forth on which theory of free will I align myself with. Is it determinism – which argues that we have no free will and that our actions are all predetermined (either by God or even the big bang)? Is it libertarianism (not the political party) – which argues that we have complete free will? Or is it compatibilism – which argues that we can have free will in a determined universe.

I’ve normally stuck myself in the compatibilist camp. This is an unusual move for me because I rarely take any choice that’s a compromise between two extremes. I normally go for the extremes – my name isn’t very indicative of my personality. But it’s always been hard for me to figure out if I want free will or if I don’t. Last semester I wrote a fifteen page paper defending the argument that compatibilism does not exclude moral responsibility – by the end of the paper I had concluded that libertarianism was the theory for me. Needless to say this made it difficult in defending my paper!

These days I find myself leaning towards the determinist camp. It doesn’t make sense that we can have complete free will if God is all-knowing. Of course I could be an open theist and say God has no foreknowledge and can’t interfere in our choices. But what kind of God would that be. It’s just stupid. Compatibilism is a great theory and I’d like to stick to my guns on it but there’s an appeal to determinism. Free will is overrated. At least that’s what I’m thinking right now.

Staying Shazam

Okay, I know. It’s one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. The critics love it. The audiences love it. The comic book geeks love it. But I have to come clean and say I found The Dark Knight very underwhelming. I didn’t get drawn into the picture because it was just an action movie with a guy in a bat suit. Yeah, Heath Ledger was great but he looks completely out of place wandering around what are obviously the streets of Chicago. It didn’t look or feel like a Batman movie to me.

But I don’t want to talk about The Dark Knight. I hate talking about it because I have to defend my feelings on it constantly. Sorry I didn’t like it, but what do you expect? I don’t like most comic book movies. They’re terrible and are poor reflections of the comics they are based on. Don’t even get me started on the Watchmen movie coming out.

What I want to discuss is how the success of The Dark Knight is going to impact superhero movies in the future. In fact, it’s already started to affect them.

For several years Warner Brothers has been developing a Captain Marvel movie and the development was finally getting somewhere in the last year or so. John August, a decent screenwriter, wrote a script that truly captured the spirit of the character: fun, comedic, action-packed, and enjoyable. Yesterday the news broke that his script has been scrapped – apparently because they wanted a darker storyline. Now, I can understand Batman having a darker storyline but Captain Marvel?

Captain Marvel is a completely different character in an entirely different setting than Batman. He’s a twelve-year old boy who says “SHAZAM” and is turned into an adult superhero. He’s got his sister Mary Marvel and his friend Captain Marvel Jr. to go with him. There’s even a talking tiger that hangs out with him sometimes. It’s an innocent, childlike world that has never meshed well with the DC Universe at large. Why would Warner Brothers want to make it darker? The answer is obvious – the runaway success of The Dark Knight.

Needless to say, this is ridiculous. A Captain Marvel movie would fail if it were darker. The character just doesn’t work that way. Even in the Kingdom Come mini-series he ended up being a pure, wholesome character. No matter how hard he tried, Lex Luthor just couldn’t make Billy Batson a truly broken, dark guy. The way I see it, if Lex Luthor can’t do it then Warner Brothers certainly can’t!

I understand the desire to make a movie that draws in audiences as much as The Dark Knight but don’t they realize the kind of character they’ve got on their hands? A Captain Marvel movie could be the first superhero movie made for kids! Basically every superhero movie – even Superman Returns – has been rated PG-13 and a good Captain Marvel movie could easily get a PG rating.

Whether I liked the Dark Knight or not is irrelevant. I understand that it succeeded because it played into what people saw as Batman: a dark and uncompromising character who fights twisted villains like The Joker and Two-Face. Studios have to realize that not all superhero characters are like that. Some are just fun and the success of the Iron Man film (which I loved) shows that some superhero movies should be lighthearted, comedic, and fun.

I’ve never been a big supporter of deconstructing superhero comics, especially these days. It was all well and good in the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s but it’s time to move beyond that. Classic deconstructionists like Grant Morrison and Alan Moore have gone on to reconstruct those superheroes in titles like Supreme and Tom Strong.

Some heroes are dark but not all of them are. Why force it? Studios just have to take each unique character as is and run with it.

Things I Love #1: The “Brazil Classics” Series

You just have to love David Byrne. Almost two decades after Talking Heads broke up he’s managed to stay at the forefront of the music world. Sure, the quality of his albums have been erratic since Rei Momo (an album which deserves a post of its own) but through his music label Luaka Bop he’s brought some kicking world music to a wider audience. By releasing albums by artists like Los Amigos Invisibles, Os Mutantes, Tom Ze, and Nouvelle Vague, Byrne has shown that world music does not end with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Buena Vista Social Club. In fact, the best world music is stuff that flew under Paul Simon and Ry Cooder’s radar.

Besides releasing albums by individual musicians, Luaka Bop has also compiled several compilation series: Cuban Classics, World Psychedelic Classics, and Brazil Classics – the subject of this article. Although the Cuban and World Psychedelic series have some fantastic material, Brazil Classics is the best-compiled and most taste-expanding series. Although there are seven titles in the series thus far (more please?) the first four are the best and are classic world music albums.

Beleza Tropical is the first and best entry in the series and provides a great sampler of Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) from the 1970s and 80s. Although all the songs were recorded after the Tropicalia movement of the 1960s ended many of those same artists are on this album: Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Jorge Ben (my personal favorite). The songs are deliciously different than what we’re used to hearing but they’re still accessible. These are catchy songs you can put on your iPod and always be in the mood for. In fact, a few of them are almost always on my playlist. This is the album that got me interested in Brazilian music and don’t be surprised if it spurs your interest too.

The next album, O Samba, features a more commonly known style of Brazilian music: Samba. The specific songs are probably not familiar to listeners but the style is. Although not as taste expanding as Beleza Tropical it’s a great toe-tapping album.

The third album, Forro Etc., also features a style of dance music, albeit less familiar in this country. Which is too bad, because it’s more infectious and fast-paced than samba. It’s hard to explain what it sounds like. You really have to experience it for yourself.

The fourth album, The Best of Tom Ze is a mind-blowing album. Ze’s music is so out of the park that for years he was practically the lost member of the Tropicalia movement. He might have remained so if Byrne hadn’t stumbled across his records while visiting Brazil. Although interesting and bizarre, the songs aren’t immediately accessible and I only recommend it if you’re very interested in Brazilian music (or bizarre music in general). It’s easy to see why Byrne loves this guy. He’s a genius and I’m thankful that I’m able to hear his stuff.

Which is the whole purpose of the Brazil Classics series – to give you music you haven’t heard but that you should hear. All of these albums are still in print and easily attainable. Give them a spin and see what you think.

Merry Christmas

I just got back from Christmas Day Mass. It’s the first time I’ve ever been to it and I liked it a lot. I wish Kim had been there with me because she would have liked it too. It was cool to see both Father Fred and Father Charlie performing the Mass and, although it was sparse in some areas, more people were there than I would have thought. I wish I could have remembered what they talked about. As usual it went in one ear and out the other.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Top 5 David Bowie Albums

I’m a big David Bowie fan. I’ve heard all of his albums. Seen a good chunk of his movie (The Hunger, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and yes, Labyrinth). He’s an innovative performer, producer, songwriter, and all around trendsetter. For an easy post I thought I’d list my top five albums by him. Normally when I make lists I don’t rank. It’s too tricky and arbitrary. But I did for this one because I have a pretty solid idea of what ones I like best.

5) Lodger (1979)

This is the third installment in his “Berlin Trilogy” – even though it wasn’t really recorded in Berlin at all. There’s a feeling of alienation throughout this album. Mainly it’s the alienation travelers can feel in other lands, the temporary residences and brief flirtations with residency (thus the title “Lodger”). Brian Eno worked with Bowie a bit on this album and you can hear his world influences sneaking through on tracks like “Yassassin” and “African Night Flight.” At the time he was working on this album he was also producing and collaborating on Talking Heads albums that were exploring the same global influences. “D.J.” and “Boys Keep Swinging” are great, catchy songs and all around this album combines the commercial and experimental better than any other album in the trilogy

4) Hunky Dory (1971)

I’m sure most Bowie fans would be surprised that I didn’t put Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane on this list. Sorry. I’ve never been as big a fan of Bowie’s Glam period as much as I have of his later work. Hunky Dory is an exception. It’s not really glam but it’s got elements of it throughout. This album combines so many great things: English music-hall dittys like “Kooks” and “Oh, You Pretty Things,” Velvet Underground homages like “Queen Bitch,” and oddballs like “Life on Mars.” This is Bowie having fun with musical genres, gender, and even occultism.

3) Let’s Dance (1982)

People got really pissed at this album when it came back. They thought that Bowie’s new album would save them from the excesses of 1980s pop. No such luck. Bowie’s album embraced it with the production of the always awesome Nile Rodgers (leader of the disco band Chic) who made the songs sound like they were written. “China Girl” has an Asian feel to it, “Let’s Dance” is a straight dance song, and “Shake It” sounds like it’s shaking throughout. Stevie Ray Vaughn’s guitar solo on “Let’s Dance” is great and adds a rock element to it that makes the song so unique among other 1980s dance songs. This is Bowie at his most commercial and it was his last commercially succesful album. It’s a great one and a fun one.

2) Station to Station (1976)

This is probably one of Bowie’s most misunderstood albums. The most recognizable song from it, “Golden Years,” sound nothing like the rest of the album and the second most recognizable song, “TVC15″ doesn’t fit in much better. Both are great songs but the best songs, “Station to Station” and “Word on a Wing,” show Bowie’s songwriting at his best and most desparate. They are great performances and so well executed that it’s hard to believe that at the time he was completely under the influence of heroin and was having paranoid delusions (including that Jimmy Page was coming to kill him)! The albums is filled with occult references and at times it can get pretty jarring – which is the fun of it.

1) Low (1977)

The first installment in the “Berlin Trilogy” is the best one, the best Bowie album, and my favorite album of all time. It’s damn near perfect. The production, the songwriting, the musicianship, and the collaboration between Bowie and Eno is at its peak. Songs like “Sound and Vision” and “Speed of Life” are so catchy it’s hard to believe how experimental they are. A lot of the album is accidental – Eno’s favorite way of songwriting – but it all flows seamlessly. “Warsawza” was written by Eno and it could just be Bowie’s best song. Who knows? All I know is that I love this album, have loved this album for years, and will always love this album.

(By the way, my favorite Bowie song is “Heroes” which appears on none of these albums)

(Didn’t Quite) Age Like Wine

It’s Christmas Break and I’m taking the time to reread some “classic” comic books that I haven’t cracked open since I was in high school. (And) when I say “classic” I mean Classic with a capital C – these are the books that pushed comic books towards maturity and critical success. Sixteen year old me was blown away by Black Orchid, Arkham Asylum, Watchmen, Animal Man, The Sandman, and Swamp Thing. The beautiful, experimental art, lyrical writing, and deconstructionist storylines appealed to me. Most of them were post-modern dark fantasies and all were written by British authors (Neil Gaiman says it’s something in the water).

So, while hacking up sick lungs and listening to The Specials, I’ve gone through a few of these classics…and found them lacking.

“BLASPHEMY!” cry the Fanboys.

Now don’t get me wrong. These are some seriously important comic books and they have to be read to understand the state of comic books today.

But let’s face it…they come off a bit forced. Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Grant Morrison (bless their brilliant hearts) were trying awfully hard to be good and literate and it shows…boy does it show.

For instance, is it absolutely necessary to draw back from superheroes and treat them so reverently that they come off as flat? Okay, okay. I realize they’re gods. I’ve spent the last eight years of my life defending them as such against Marvel geeks who get weak at the knees at the very thought of Wolverine and Spider-Man.

But, seriously! Superman is really a whole lot of fun – treat him as such!

Also, it seems like every scene has to be connected to the last through some repeating word or visual motif. For example: a phone rings at the end of one scene and the next scene begins with someone answering a different phone call. Or one character ends the scene with one word and the next scene starts with another character saying that word.

Do you know how unbelievably annoying that can get?

Finally, these comics end up coming off as just “Let’s make superheroes as dark, post-modern, and intelligent as possible” – which they did. But, like everything in the 1980s it’s stuck in the 1980s with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and Michael Jackson albums.

All these writers were relatively young at the time so we’ll cut them some slack because all of them went on to write bona-fide masterpieces in the 1990s that get better every year. The Invisibles, JLA, Supreme, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and every Neil Gaiman novel.

These are the books all the hipsters are turning to now that it’s cool to like comic books. Whatever. Let them have their fun. Comic book fans will always keep these comics close to their hearts and history will treat them respectfully.

But Grant Morrison just finished writing the Superman we all love, love, love in his drop-dead gorgeous All-Star Superman series. Alan Moore reminded us of superhero pulp roots in Tom Strong and Neil Gaiman channeled Jack Kirby in his Eternal mini-series.

Oh yeah. I didn’t mention Frank Miller on purpose. If you go out and say that The Dark Knight Returns is the best Batman comic ever you either go back to high-school or get a Flock of Seagulls haircut and watch reruns of Family Ties. Nothing is more 80s and dated than Frank Miller Batman comics.

The Divine Comedy of Life

I’ve always felt that Dante’s Divine Comedy was an underrated work. I recognize how ridiculous that sounds considering it is considered by everybody to be one of the defining works of the Western Canon and held in the same high regard as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Homer’s The Iliad (which I have guiltily never read). It’s a brilliant piece of writing in every possible way: vocabulary, structure, imagery, symbolism, and even characterization. It is an epic journey through the afterlife and contains some of the most moving scenes in literature, including my personal favorite, Beatrice’s farewell smile at the end of Paradiso.

However, to view the Divine Comedy as merely an artistically brilliant guide to the Medieval Christian afterlife is to limit its power to us as readers. The three sections – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – all correlate to different stages of life everyone goes through. They represent the cycle of dying, healing, and thriving. I don’t mean dying in just the literal sense but in all the little deaths we suffer every day: the snubs, the slights, the heartbreak, and the melancholy. We all deal with these little sins – these peccadilloes – and we have to move on from them. We have to accept them as part of the past and move beyond them. Only when we have accepted and atoned for these problems can we truly move onto our own personal “paradise” where we can thrive.

I suppose by now you can see how each section of the Divine Comedy relates to each stage: Inferno is the dying, Purgatorio is the healing, and Paradiso is the thriving. But let’s explore them a little more in depth. I’m not going to use textual references since I don’t have a copy of the work at hand, so some of the details will be lost. Sorry. Go read it yourself and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Those consigned to punishment in the Inferno are forced to reenact the very sins that damned them there. That’s a pretty twisted and terrible punishment on several levels. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but that’s the modus operandi for a lot of it. In our own lives we replay bad things over and over in our mine, unable to let go of the pain of the past. We find ourselves in the darkness of the abyss of self-pity, unable to forgive ourselves and those who wronged us. We are trapped by our past and our problems.

We have to move on. We must move on. That’s what Purgatory is for, right? It’s a place to work off all those Earthly sins that were bad but not quite terrible enough to send us to Hell. It’s a steep mountain to climb and climb it Dante does. We all need to climb this mountain sooner or later. We need to let go of the past and all those sins we kept with us during our time in the “Inferno” of our soul. You can’t climb the mountain to Paradise with all those things holding you down. You have to forgive yourself! You have to let go!

Finally, there is Paradise. It’s different for everybody and it’s exactly what you were hoping for. For Dante it’s Beatrice, but what is it for you? We can only get to Paradise and know the beauty of Paradise if we’ve been dragged through Hell and spent time atoning for our issues. No one is born in Paradise and if you think you are there now you better think about it more closely. Are you really thriving where you are right now? Or do you still need to climb a little bit more?

I do.