|
|
|
made to be pop superstars
Sunday, April 14 2002
Despite how horrible I felt this morning, Sally nonetheless insisted that I take her for her morning walk. It was an amazingly beautiful day, but I felt like I was struggling through it encased in a massive block of transparent jello.
When John woke up I asked him how he was feeling and he said he feeling just fine, though I think he might have been fibbing a little. He said the cats hadn't bothered him last night either, and again, I didn't believe him.
He headed back to Vermont and I was left to exist through my day in a state of misery on the couch. The pain I felt was that strange, hard-to-place pain typical of my hangovers. I hurt, but nothing in my body actually hurt that much, it was mostly just a psychological condition in my head. It's a pure disembodied sprit of pain. There's also that regret thing. Why had I done this to myself? Why had I done the things I did last night? Why do I have any friends at all? I was also emotionally fragile, with a tendency to tear up about even the most trivially melancholy of thoughts.
To help turn my attention to more pleasant things, I mostly watched VH1's Allstar Jams Channel all day. I keep being more and more impressed with it every time I tune in. I've decided that it's a perfect companion to music file sharing software such as Kazaa or Morpheus, since it eclectically digs back into time to remind you of all those songs you've loved but forgotten about. Then you just add it to your music collection, possibly finding some other gems along the way. For example, I'd completely forgotten about that song by Zebra called "Who's Behind the Door," as well as Cheap Trick's "Tonight It's You."
Then, of course, there's the unvarnished historical accuracy of VH1's programming, which shows pop music periods in all their embarrassing detail. But some of those details aren't embarrassing at all and remind us of the sweetness and charismatic energy that first drew people to the likes of Michæl Jackson and Bono. For example, every time I see that Michæl Jackson video for the song "Rock With You" I'm just devastated by how timelessly sweet he is and the future I know awaits his bone structure, skin color, and personal life. Similarly, watching Bono perform "Two Hearts Beat As One" in front of Sacré Coeur Basilica, I'm unexpectedly fascinated by his sincere boyish amazement at the beauty and complexity of the world. Even in their pre-peak prime, you can tell looking at both these guys that they were made to be pop superstars.
Still there are plenty of things that irritate me in old videos. Particularly loathsome is the addition of sound effects and voiceovers to better tie-in the things happening in the visuals. Often these sounds happen as abruptly and unexpectedly as a MIDI file starting to play on Aunt Patty's homepage, jarring me from where I want to be (if, indeed, I want to be there): in the music. Another thing that makes me scratch my head is the dreadful use of "movie tie-in" when songs are featured in movie soundtracks. Often the movie tie-in is combined with the voiceover technique in such a way that both movie and song are equally diminished. Of course, who can really say what people were thinking and what they were expected to appreciate back in the 80s? It's as if the folks alive back then were some creepy species of alien.
This evening I noticed the continuation of an unfortunate trend in recent episodes of the Simpsons. This trend is towards increasingly raunchy college fratboyesque sexual humor. I read somewhere that this is a normal course for popular shows to take, since network censors tend to tolerate more sexual jokes and inuendo from shows that no longer have to prove themselves. Nonetheless, it suggests to me that they're beginning to deplete the creative juices that has made the ongoing Simpsons golden age such remarkable television. So far, this slightly raunchier breed of humor is only barely worth noting, yet I'd venture to say that it's beginning to change the voice of the show, which (to me at least) has always been a different sort of funny. Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan of raunchy sexual humor in the correct context, but when it comes out of Marge or Homer's mouth, it's icky, like your mother-in-law hitting on you.
Later, on Six Feet Under (the episode opening with the guy who strangles himself while performing masturbatory asphyxiation), I caught two offhand references to the September 11th terrorist attack, the first references I've heard in any sort of pre-recorded dramatic television.
Late tonight I saw most of a film called Southern Comfort, which documented the lives and struggles of transexuals in the rural south. Not only was there a whole group of transexuals hanging out down on the farm - but they had an interesting tendency to pair with each other heterosexually. The boy-to-girl trannies seemed to prefer the girl-to-boy trannies and vice-versa. You'd think they could save themselves a lot of trauma by just keeping their respective apparati and confining their gender reversals to crossdressing and perhaps hormone injections.
But how can I possibly know what it's like to feel like I'm one gender "trapped" within another? Identity is a complex thing and gender is only one part of it. This begs the question, are there other forms of being "trapped" in your body? Can one be a Jew trapped in a Hindu? A Bangladeshi trapped in a Serbian? A sea urchin trapped in a housewife? An astronaut trapped in a short order cook? Why do we only hear about genders being trapped inside the wrong body? Could this be because the genders are so intimately entwined from the very start? Unlike other entities, we usually have gender models from the get go and thus stand a chance of possibly emulating the one with genitalia not matching our own.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020414 feedback
previous | next |
