I love the track “Heroes” off of Bowie’s album “Heroes.” Bowie was at an interesting inflection point here in his career having burned through two (three?) identities. The iconic cover makes me think of Japanese Noh theatre, perhaps a hint of Bowie’s impending directional shift, but nevertheless falls, rightly, into the designation as being part of “the Berlin Trilogy.” It was a great run of work with Bowie and Brian Eno collaborating in West Berlin and harnessing the city’s schizophrenic energy to paint the beautiful story of the title track “Heroes.”
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day
Somehow the photography of the iconic album fits perfectly.
And, of course, the video: complete with late 70’s laser lights and fog effects:
There’s such a unified “feel” to this collection of media, it was fascinating to hear about an alternative take. Retronaut recently posted this series of other cover candidates, and they’re all marvelous.
Mr. CK, mentioned below is a comedian with some poignant, yet “blue” observations on life. You are warned.
From an interview with Louis CK in Slate:
A waitress said to my kids the other day, “Isn’t that nice that you’re getting to have a little lunch with your daddy?” And I was insulted by it, because I’m like, I’m fucking taking them to lunch, and then I’m taking them home, and then I’m feeding them and doing their homework with them and putting them to bed. She’s like, Oh, this is special time with daddy. Well, no, this is boring time with daddy, the same as everything.
And from his show:
“…a single mom your character meets at a PTA meeting tells you, ‘Just by showing up, you’re father of the year.’”
I love it that CK, loud and vulgar, makes the point that feminism has been proclaiming for so long, so forcefully, and with such agreement. Dads are assumed to be taking special time to handle their responsibilities, whereas Moms are assumed to know how to do that and to do it better. CK calls “boojive” on this and tears down a few hundred years of post-Victorian parenting modeling in a few sentences.
I’m proud of my male friends who have children: Patrick, Mike, Alfredo. All of them are very involved in their kids’ lives and don’t default to being there only when Mom calls in for support. Also, I’ll say I’m thankful for my own father who took time to make sure that we kids knew we were important to him and that our choices were something that he wanted to help us evaluate until we could do it on our own.
Huh, and I wrote that on Father’s Day weekend, unplanned.
I think Ryan and I must be on a similar wavelength lately as I too was thinking the exact same thing as him: I am thankful to not have come of age in an era where the internet’s depthless hard drives could store my equally depthless teenage narcissism or youthful folly for-ever. You can read Ryan’s take here.
As an early (may I say that?) adopter in the general populace (1994, dial up Unix shell on a SCO-V UNIX) of the Internet, I didn’t get off scot-free. Thanks to BBS’ and Usenet, I managed to write some pretty inane things (e.g. “Are you excited about Mike Modano and the Dallas Stars?”) and various comments of the form “Gillian Anderson is the most beautiful woman in the world!”). Thankfully these comments were widely spread, private (in the case of BBS’), and untraceable (in the case of Usenet).
Unlike what faces modern youth, my revelations of crushes, breakups, or photographs of humiliating pass-outs are not recorded, displayed, and / or, as in the case of particularly recirculation-worthy errors, spread globally with witty, degrading commentary added in sans-serif fonts. It seems that the internet has forgotten the essential truth of being young: as youths we fuck up. For a taste (possibly not-safe for work), consider Late Night Mistakes.
To say “fuck up” may seem a discordant note in an otherwise slightly-more-highly-minded essay, but I think “fucking up” is exactly what youths do. It’s not that the young “err,” implying a sense of understanding cause and the full length of effect and they do the wrong thing. No, rather they fuck up. They leave mowers in the rain, crash cars, text and drive1, and run out of gas.
When you ask them why they did (or did not do) what ought have been done, they often have no answer because, research shows, their brain is not fully wired up yet; in case you missed that, they literally do not know. It’s all the free will of an adult without the experience to see final consequences all while being divorced from the motivation. It’s asking for chess, a game of evaluating predicted long-term outcomes, from a Candy Land player (“I go to the green square now!”).2 This implies to me not that they chose to do the wrong thing, but that they simply fucked up. Incidentally, to me this seems the game of parenting: molding kids by providing rote maxims while hoping your kids don’t fuck up unto death before they can start making sense of the world as an adult.
When young the brain is not fully developed, the risk-evaluation cortices are immature and fucking-up occurs. Surely at the age of 25 everyone wishes the option to have a wipe-out, a quashing on mention of the fuck-ups in the previous 25 years. To remember the moments of burning humiliation, despair, isolation, and cruelty are the moments that forge our characters, but it’s nice to know they live back there away from quotidian existence. To feel that bitter flush in our temples and ears when the memories come back too clearly is our private boon, a spur to the right, or a sword-wielding, flaming angel warning off from the wrong path. Is it fair that my private character-forming experiences may be commandeered for sport, or that my lessons sans context are found later? In my generation that was not possible, for today’s it may be impossible to avoid. You know your errors will be documented by a dozen cell-phones, be spread like spilled quicksilver, and will live forever.
For me there is another concern. Not only does the burn of shame endure from moment of fuck-up unto the end of the electronic society, but knowing of the deathlessness of modern error, there will be a chilling effect on the healthy experimentation befitting to this time of life. To be clear, there are fuck-ups, but there are also experiments. Admittedly, sometimes that line is fuzzy, I grant. But if one is afraid to attempt an experiment for fear of it it being wrong and then having it recorded and disseminated as a fuck-up, then some wonderful people will not realize their full, true identity. It’s a pre-emptive shove to keep your exploration about your identity in the closet against the master paradigm. And note, I’m not strictly talking sexual identity, I’m talking about loving cello, being devout Muslim, being an atheist, struggling to be a poet. There’s a chilling effect as we see how deathless media can haunt you forever.
Imagine:
…High on hormones and ill-gained vodka, in a music-thrumming bedroom where the room spins red as her lips careen into her best friend’s… hours later her friend crushes her heart and her weeks of angst by publicly blabbing about the “lez shit” that her friend pulled….3
…The humiliating break-up from something you might work…hours later you have to endure a grilling via dozens of text messages…
…That Goth phase….
To remember and laugh, to move on, to accept is a blessing of aging, but to have it indelibly etched in so many 1’s and 0’s for eternal sport and to know that this is the case could make anyone run from seeing something as a folly of youth or an experiment and turn it into something, quite possibly, not worth living through and past.
The time is, sadly, inevitably coming (has already come?) where the Internet’s perfect, inhuman, and inhumane memory will drive a beautiful life to end itself. Perhaps I can take a page from Dan Savage in preëmption: “For those who have embarrassed themselves on the Internet, it gets better. No matter how bad it gets, we’re born naked, we die with little control over our bodies, you will do well sometimes and poorly others, you will rue and relish alike, and everyone is a fool in love. Try to be honest, nice, and respectful to others, especially those you share your secrets and bodies with. And lastly cut yourself and everyone else a little slack. Be that voice of conscience that doesn’t relish the safe, mean blanket of schadenfreude over the beautiful quilt of friendship.”
Whatever evidence is left, you are more than the sum of your experiences and their record.
Notes:
I’d almost rather give a teen a beer than a phone before putting him/her on the road
Obviously this varies by individual, so yes, there will be some teens who know more about electrical engineering by 16 than I ever will.
Times being what they are, this situation may now be a bragging point.
I feel like a wave of the future washed over my shore recently. I received a postcard from my health benefits program encouraging me to take advantage of “an exciting new service…a personalized, confidential genetic analysis.”
A what?
It continued:
“With a simple DNA test,…you can work with your doctor or a Navigenics genetic counselor”
Say what? Is that a job you can apply for, “genetic counselor?” Can you imagine the résumé for the person that applies for that job.
Completed course in grief pre-mediation for X42 haplogroup with disposition to ALS
And what would the bullet points look like for tomorrow?
Delivered haplogroup cross-referencing database for training AI voice agents for disclosure of low-IQ offspring prediction
Was this job even imaginable when I, pitiful creature of the 20th century I am, was born? I must be getting old, present technology is starting to feel bizarre. Read a portion of the flyer yourself:
I’m signing up for it, of course, but it’s amazing to think that the nucleotide pair in my cells can now be used to design a health regimen for my 30’s to improve my 60’s.
I really think Barack, excuse me, The President is really the coolest world leader.
Previously, my list was:
King of Thailand
Carla Bruni
Angela Merkel of Germany, for freaking out so stylishly when she got the Bush back-rub treatment
Now it is
Barack Hussein Obama, POTUS
King of all Cosmos
Carla Bruni
King of Thailand
It was a hard choice…
versus
In all seriousness, I recall my mom once saying that in her childhood, the Kennedy era, they thought that the government were “cool” guys. I remember her saying this to me and thinking, this is somewhere in the Bush I era, “you’ve got to be joking.” Something died between Vietnam, Watergate, and has, I believe, for my generation, been dead until the election of Obama. Not ever having seen it before, we didn’t know to miss it. Having seen it again, I don’t think that I could well settle for less again.
My entire life there’s been been one woman, and fellow Longhorn, who has made public service a core part of her life ( and getting rich in banking or oil, or both; about par for the course for Texipublican candidates ): Kay Baily Hutchinson.
I disagree with her on a great many topics, but I agree with her on more than just a few. Keep in mind that this woman served in the Texas legislature before I was born and has been a serving senator since 1993. Now she certainly had a bit of trouble here in Travis county about some misconduct around state resources used for her campaign, but these were not substantiated in a court of law.
There’s no way Sarah Palin is more qualified than KBH and not giving KBH the chance to politely decline is just an insult to her service record.
Greeting any new Leaguers while The League is away
I am a huge “This American Life” fan. Last year, for my birthday, The Leagues’ bought me an iTunes gift card which I promptly spent on TAL episodes. I got into it when I first moved to CA. Not knowing many people, having those stories there late on Saturday night became part of a ritual that helped me transition to living there.
My absolute favorite episode is #74 “Conventions”. The first segment ( or, “act”, according to show host Ira Glass ) introduces John Connors, a man from the midwest who goes to New York City for a weekend to celebrate “Dark Shadows”.
“Dark Shadows” is the Gothic–themed soap opera that showed on ABC in the late– 60’s: it’s pacing is nothing short than glacial, the production value is iffy, and the egregious use of the Theremin might be against the Geneva Conventions.
At the end of the convention, Conners feels “Dark Shadows”–fatigue and seems to be experiencing slight embarrassment while relating a story about a woman who, in the convention hall, before a panel of DS cast, bellowed:
“‘Dark Shadows’ Rules!”
Conners seems to have felt the shame that only a true fan of something cultish can experience. You’re shamed by the action of the other fan, but you’re also a bit shamed because the zeal of that fandom exists in you, although maybe not in dictum–bellowing grandiosity.
In the end, Glass gives Conners a chance to say on the radio “‘Dark Shadows’ rules”. Laughing, with a hint of shame, and very quietly, he says it.
I think this explains the way we all feel about our guilty pleasures that we obsess about.
“Danielle Steel rules!” or “WWE rules” or back in 18th England: “roman’s rule!”
I have felt this way about my love of Rush for many years. There’s a huge fan-base for the Canadian power-trio but most of our lives we live in the closet, but upon finding one another, there’s the immediate understanding.
the unbelievable bass breakdown to the slapback-effects laden “Free Will”, the poetic allegory of “The Trees”, or the master’s essay in Moog known as the record Signals? Much less to a pretty girl?
In the utterance of “Rush Rules” to end them all, enters the pean by one Stephen Colbert:
Recently I discovered that fellow Leaguer and former resident of the Hall of Justice itself, Nicole, has an aptitude for sythesizer. How totally awesome would it be if sweet, petite, gently sweet-Texlahoma-lilt-voiced Nicole were to get up behind an ersatz wood–paneled Moog and rock the socks out of the synthesizer-solo of “Tom Sawyer”? Equally acceptable would be the synth denouement out of “YYZ ( that’s Why-Why-Zed for the uninitiated )”
Although, playing that synth solo may be the synth crowd’s version of walking into Guitar Center and playing “Stairway”.
Rush fandom is a weird thing, but it’s oddly virulent. Even my Sublime-n-Sunshine SoCal girlfriend, of late, under the sway of the Teutonic Thunder drumming of Neal Peart has confessed that she has the sneaky suspicion that what I’ve known for many years may be true:
Once upon a time there was a genius software developer named Hans Reiser. He used to join Linux forums and lambaste other hackers as being foolish, prodigal, indolent, and was generally a bit of an egomaniacal ass.
In other words, par for the course in the world of software development.
But then he was indicted, and convicted, for the murder of his wife amid a tale of S&M, Linux development ( intimately linked ), Russian internet-ordered brides, and infidelity.
A crucial feature of the trial was, well, that the cops couldn’t find the body. Upon being found guilty, Reiser seems to have copped a plea with the judge such that he could get a lesser sentence in exchange for the victim’s family and, nota bene, his own children being able to lay the body of their daughter / mother to rest.
Here was Gawker media’s “Valleywag” summation picture:
First of all, and not to be juvenile, but a copy-editor would have caught the phrase “fingers corpse”—oh right this is blogging, ahem, never-mind.
Secondly, the incapacitated girl in the ad in the party dress appears dead if not really whacked out on laudanum. One could foreseeably think that that was the corpse under discussion.
The whole post is pretty distasteful, I’d say.
I’m reminded of pro-feminist blogs decrying things like “new bikini’s are scandalous” or left-leaning blogs that decry “It’s insane that McCain can run for president in the 21st century given that he can’t even use a computer” only to be served up, guess what, an ad featuring said bikini’s or a clip of the blogger-hating senator as an ad.
