Harrowing
I’ve been afraid for my life exactly two times in thirty-one years.
Both times have involved driving.
The most recent occasion was a little over a week ago. The weather forecast here in Oklahoma City called for light snow and freezing rain- not ideal driving conditions, but certainly nothing insurmountable. Wichita, my destination, went on to have 6 ½” of snow that day, the most since 1899, and I’m pretty sure that 90% of that total fell while I was on the Kansas Turnpike. Once I got to Blackwell the rain tunred into snow, which was sticking to the concrete on the interstate, slowing traffic to something like 40 mph, the perfect environment for Wilco’s
Sky Blue Sky. I thought Jeff Tweedy’s subdued voice would comfort me like a warm blanket and help the miles clip by. I was right.
...Until I hit the toll booth marking the beginning of the turnpike. Conditions and temperatures had decayed to the point that many people had pulled off to the side of the road to clear windshield wiper blades of ice and, if they were like me, regain some initiative. Little did I know what was in store.
A slight weather inconvenience turned into heavy snowfall. The surrounding fields had turned into sheets of white, enshrouded by heavy freezing fog as traffic slowed to a crawl. “It’s only a few more miles. I can handle this,” I thought. Bad turned to worse as the exit to I-135 became backed-up. I sat parked, all alone, looking at the back of a semi through the snow for about 45 minutes. Wilco proved to no longer be an acceptable distraction from “what-ifs” and creeping worry. I started to talk to God and put in some Beethoven Piano Concertos to perhaps numb my mind.
But at times like that, strange thoughts occur, mostly about society and civilization and how it all is balanced on a knife edge. “Introduce a little chaos like strange weather into our systems and who knows what is possible and what people are capable of doing,” I thought. I wondered stupid things, like if car tires or suspensions or banked turns or interstates are designed with absolute blizzard conditions in mind. To foster some hope I introduced the idea that surely some intelligent engineer had my personal safety in mind when he/she put together the plans for this turnpike.
I was ecstatic to see one highway patrol car pass by. It was encouraging to think that
someone knew that all of us strangers were sitting here waiting for something to happen. The semi in front of me was directed by the cop to give up on this exit and those of us behind him were apparently supposed to do likewise. I had one slight problem with this course of action: I had never driven
anywhere in Kansas beyond that exit before, even in ideal weather conditions, much less when I could literally see
nothing but white in front of me. This was the time when I had to turn off the music. Desperate times…Luckily I had a fully-charged cell phone to call my Father for guidance home, (the metaphorical nature of which doesn’t escape me.)
This was the scariest part of the trip. It was “white-out conditions,” as they say. Usually when you drive in winter you have the tracks of the cars in front of you to serve as a guide. No such luck on this day. The snow was falling too rapidly. I was forging a new path through snow of unknown depth on unknown miles of highway, barely able to make out overhead signs, expelling myself into a white void. The only markers of the passage of distance were the occasional abandoned car that had obviously careened off the road into a ditch or a wreck that just appeared out of the fog with no warning. It was like a slow-motion white nightmare.
I knew one thing. I could not let the car come to a complete stop, as that is most likely where the car (and I) would remain for many hours, in the middle of nowhere, slowly freezing to death.
The gods of winter weather highway protection were smiling down on me as I slowly inched my way to my destination- phone in one hand, the other hand steering, more like
suggesting a direction for the car to continue, mostly driving on faith. A trip that normally takes 2 ½ hours wound up taking about 6 hours.
I was never so happy and relieved to be off the road and with my parents.
The I's Have It
I start today’s entry with an inaugural “What NOT to listen to during the holidays…” My first contender for this illustrious title is John Lennon’s
Plastic Ono Band. I have not heard an album this dour in a long time. Apparently conceived as a gift for Yoko Ono, I imagine that upon hearing this for the first time, she might have said, “Thanks, you
shouldn’t have…” With songs like “Working Class Hero” and “Mother” and “God,” (a concept by which we measure our pain), Lennon has left far behind the ear candy of the music of The Beatles for spare, jaggedly naked songs in the “simple is better” rock vein. But the coup d’etat is the fact that this stripped-down primalism is matched with all sorts of pessimism and darkness, (the one glaring anomaly being “Power to the People.” This is the actual sound of a man losing his faith in
everything. It would be kinda like inviting Debbie Downer and her rocking band of depressives to come play at your metaphysics discussion group.
I.
Regardless of how the music affects a listener, it certainly raised an interesting question as I slowly drove through an ice storm with this music as the soundtrack. This album is in that group of 100 or so widely regarded as “The Best of All Time,” usually with reference to how “personal” the lyrical content is. (Bob Dylan’s
Blood on the Tracks often gets similar praise.) There is a questionable assumption beneath this common praise, namely that “personal = great!” Does “confessional”, or “self-reflective” music have a leg up on the competition? In other words, does art
have to be this personal and full of pain to be good?
After all, what we regard as “art music” or “classical music”—your Mozart, your early Beethoven, your Bach, etc. was largely the dance music of its time. On the other hand you have your Hector Berlioz or Van Gogh—deeply troubled and tortured individuals. Is one tradition more legit than the other? Hardly.
Maybe what’s going on with the reverence toward this Lennon album is a matter of context- i.e. it’s great in comparison to everything else going on at the time. I’m not knowledgeable enough to make that pronouncement. However, let us not forget Lennon’s history with this kind of confessional aesthetic, even while still in The Beatles: “Help!” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “I’m So Tired,” “Yer Blues…” There are a ton more, I’m sure. So, it’s not like he all of a sudden found a way to elucidate his inner turmoil.
II.
So to counter all of this I submit George Harrison’s song off Let It Be called “I Me Mine,” a bit of a rebuke for the human tendency to personalize the world into a tightly-wrapped bubble the size of yourself and your concerns only. Example? Our culture is fraught with them. Besides even this here blog, just about every website that I do business with: banks, merchants, services--all have a tab called “My _______,” for instance “My Amazon,” “My VISA,” “My ebay.” I’m positive it’s the goal of commercemongers to try to get the users of the site to feel like this giant conglomerate like Target has something to do with them other than as a mere provider of goods in exchange for money. The closer a user can get to confusing their identity with the things they buy and where they buy them, the better. Also interesting is how ubiquitous the letter “I” is in our culture now as well: ipod, iphone, itunes, irobot, iii. Me often wonder why Apple didn’t have the guts to capitalize that i? are they all e.e. cummings fans?
III.
So today I introduce a new feature to the Sic Semper Tyrannis blog. It’s called ISicSemperTyrannis. You might have previously known it as “comments.” Here’s the big question for you all:
Is music more powerful the more “personal” it seems to be to its creator? Do you like music that sounds like a diary set over chord changes?
Or do you like music when it’s more “universal”- expressing the hopes, fears, and observations we all have, i.e. a lot of McCartney’s stuff or maybe U2 or some other populists?
Or are you of the third stream—Radiohead or indie-rock fan—preferring non sequitur musical puzzles? Let’s hear it.
An Early Christmas Gift
Apparently, the onset of winter gets the creative juices flowing for me. A little involuntary cooped-up-ness gets me thinking about making music.
So, I offer you this mp3--
Be Still I oughta give you a couple warnings up front. First of all, it's a rather large file. The tune lasts over twenty minutes, so be patient with the download. (I'm not sure how this is going to work. You may have to right-click on the link and choose "Download Linked File.")
Another warning: the music contained therein has some very minimal, drone elements, which could prove challenging for certain personality or lifestyle types. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't on purpose.
What is this music? Mostly up to you to decide.
But for me it's as close as I get to an audible prayer. It could be useful for meditation, yoga, or balancing the checkbook. Also useful for ignoring.
If you're like me and like to listen to the sound within music, there are some pretty weird oscillations going on within single pitches which aren't easily identifiable until you've given the note some time to "sink in."
I really just wanted to create some music that encourages the listener to
S-L-O-W--D-O-W-N.
Let me know if you have technical issues and I'll hem-haw around until you forget about this post.
Hopefully you'll get something out of it.
A Stubborn Democracy
Yesterday I had an uplifting experience. In an event of suspicious timing, the second great ice storm of 2007 moved in just in time for the city-wide bond election. Since my neighborhood streets were clear I decided to go vote. Little did I know that the YMCA where I vote was without power. But did that stop the democratic process?
Not a chance.
I walked in the door to see gray-haired, convivial folks sitting in the dark, wrapped in blankets, greeting me and the other two or three people who walked in to vote as if they were neighbors. And in a way, we are neighbors.
I took the Coleman lantern that they provided over to the booth and voted, feeling like I was recreating a scene from over a hundred years ago, when folks might have galloped in on horses or some such.
I realized that though the times are quite different in this country from those days of hardy-souled voters, the glue that holds it all together is still the same.
She's Leaving Home
One of my favorite things to do while waiting for sleep to arrive is to listen music through headphones. I have done this for many many years.
A few nights ago I was listening to The Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper for sentiment's sake and to see if I can even still listen to this album I've known so well for twelve years or so.
Turns out I can. There's no doubt this album is one of the most creative, varied, active musical statements ever recorded. But I realized there is a song on there that gets shamefully overlooked in discussions of the Lads' best songs--"She's Leaving Home." It was as if I heard this song for the first time the other night.
There are a lot of little things that set this song apart from your run-of-the mill pop song. Number one with a bullet is George Martin's string arrangement. It's hard to tell where Paul McCartney's writing stops and Martin's input begins as the sentiment of the words is pure McCartney and he sings the melody as comfortably as if there wee a direct line from his brain to the microphone. Yet the strings are more than just "filler" or "sweetener," (indeed there are no traditional rock band instruments on this song) as Martin employs several ear-catching effects that betray his intention to make the song and arrangement indistinguishable from each other, as he did in several other Beatle songs:
1) There is much scalar motion in the basses and cellos that contrasts with the staccato upper strings during the verses. The easier route would have been just block chords a la a schmaltzy Celine Dion ballad for instance.
2) At the end of the shorter vocal phrases, like "Silently closing her bedroom door," Martin inserts little syncopated gestures to keep you listening
forward.
3) Something really interesting happens as Paul sings "our baby's gone." The upper strings play a triplet-introduced fanfare-type motif for three bars, which is never heard again in the song. I wonder what Made Mr. Martin decide to do that? Is that the emotional peak of the song? When we hear the sound of a mother's broken heart?
Could be.
If so, it's another indication of the greatness of the Beatles' songwriting. For, in this song we get both sides of a slice-of-life melancholy snapshot: why a girl decides that it's time to leave the safe comfortable world of her parents' home contrasted with the ache that a parent feels at that time. The Beatles were at the center of a youthful cultural revolution, no doubt, but this song is so artful in that it entertains the ideas of the older "establishmnet" as equally valid. (In fact, McCartney has gone on, in the
Anthology to say how glad he is that their lyrics were generally "peace and love" and not telling parents to "sod off.")
4) Finally, continuing on the topic of the uniqueness of George Martin's arrangement, there are the lithe trills that accompany our girl that's leaving as she's "waiting to keep the appointment she made"--another nice little flourish that corresponds to the hope and freedom of her new life.
In addition to the lovely string arrangement I was also struck by Paul and John's vocal interplay on this song. Just like the give-and-take between both parties in the song, the choruses have John singing the parts of the parents in first person (plural) and Paul singing a much higher descant part in third person narration and they never sounded more beautiful. I wish I could have been there to hear the conversation between the two when Paul said, "so I wonder-could we
both be singing something on the choruses?" Anyway, that kind of counterpoint is also very rare in the music of your average pop song.
If you've got
Sgt. Pepper, give this song a listen. Maybe you'll hear what I did the other night...
I Knew It!
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Merry Mikemas Everybody!
I write to you tonight on a blessed Mikemas Eve.
If you ever want to conjure up a wellspring of vaguely melancholy feelings, try using fancy digital touch-up tools to try to improve a picture of yourself when you were no older than a handful of days.
This is dangerous territory for my emotional well-being for several reasons:
1) I don't recognize that kid up there, but everybody has told me it's me. It's always odd to see evidence of the you that existed before you knew you.
2) Using a computer on an artifact that is almost thirty-one years old seems kind of anachronistically wrong, as if you were trying to improve upon a pure, simple truth. "Machine in the garden" or something to that effect...I am uncomfortable with that project.
3) Innocence, helplessness...I was once innocent and helpless?
4) I
used to be so damn adorable!
All that said, however, I must say that 30 was a good year and I am looking forward to 31. Thanks for sharing it all with me.
