A Matter of Death and Life

October 12, 2014June 26, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Life is not random, some say, it is choreographed by a controlling force with a master plan that we may not understand at first, but will eventually come clear when we look back and see the final portrait. For others, life is a random series of moments, equivalent to an abstract pointillism painting. This belief suggests that we’re simply here one day, talking to our friends, gone the next. Human life has more meaning than the life of the badger in the arena of consciousness of life, but little more than that. The primary difference, for these people, comes from the act of looking at life, examining it with strained eyes, until we see a purpose that we believed was there all along. No matter how one looks at it, we can all agree that these moments of life are finite, and that it is an abuse to waste them. The latter becomes all the more clear when we’ve survived a death-defying incident.

Part of the allure of the story of the vampire is the dream mere mortals have of being immortal, so that these moments of life can be infinite. These dreams only become more profound as we age, and the realization of our own mortality becomes more substantial –and the idea of eventually becoming inconsequential, even to those that love us most, haunts us– we dream of immortality. The dream of immortality is one thing, the non-fan have argued, but the actuality of it would be quite another.

The import of the allure of the vampire story is the question that fascinates us, “What would you do if you knew knew that you were going to live forever?” The less obvious question, asked by cynical viewers/readers of the story is, “Why would you do it?” How exciting would the bungee jump be to the person that knew there was no chance they were going to die? The primal fear of falling would surely affect some vampires, as they were all mortal once, but if you can’t even be superficially wounded, much less mortally, how much allure would there be in the “death plunge” of the bungee jump?

In most incarnations of the story, the vampire is not only immortal and invulnerable to superficial injury, they can even manipulate situations to a point where they wouldn’t have to experience emotional pain. Through the power of their eyes, most vampires can convince mere mortals to do their bidding. As a result, no girl can ever dump them; no bully can pick on them; and no moron can ever do anything to mess their life up. In most incarnations of the vampire story, the use of this power is selective, so as to allow the mortals involved in the story to do things that give the story greater drama, but the cynics in the audience wonder why the vampires don’t just turn on their eye power and persuade the girl to love them. (I know most vampire stories involve the vampire wanting organic love from the girl that results from the mortal deciding to love them, but the very idea that they can circumvent this process by turning on their eye power diminishes this to a tool used by the author of the story to provide drama.) We cynics understand that thread of the story that the greatness of love lies in its achievement for the vampire, but when he is utterly devastated by the failure to do so, the vampire doesn’t have to experience that devastation. The vampire has a plan B. The eyes. Just flick on that power.

Mere mortals have no idea if the girl is going to love us in real life, and we have no plan B if she doesn’t. We are pretty sure that we’re going to survive the bungee jump, and the roller coaster, as they offer some comfort of being a controlled environment, but there is some fear –that results in some adrenaline– involved in the idea that we’re not 100% positive. If you were 100% positive that you weren’t going to die, or even receive some painful superficial wounds, why would you do it? Would there be any sense of accomplishment in achieving love from another, if you knew that you had such a solid plan B that you could convince the girl to love you, regardless what she decides.

Some of us have had near death experiences, from a car crash that first responders informed us should’ve resulted in the end of our moments; we’ve been informed that if our death-defying incident had occurred inches to the left, or right, we would no longer be here to talk about it; and others have had incidents that require no such explanations of how close they’ve come. Those that have survived the latter speak of a sense of euphoria that overwhelms them and profoundly informs the rest of their life. This sense of euphoria, they say, does not last forever, or as long as it probably should, but for the short time you’re immersed in it, your second lease on life can be euphoric.

In an attempt to explain this blast of euphoria that comes from being unsuccessfully murdered, author of the collection of essays We Never Learn, Tim Kreider, uses the plot of Ray Bradbury’s The Lost City of Mars to illustrate: “A man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes –in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, and exploding rocket ships– until he emerges flayed of all his Christian guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.”

In the essay, Reprieve, Kreider explains that after it was deemed that he would survive the attempt on his life, he considered everything that followed as “Gravy.” A term he derives from a man, author Raymond Carver, that was also granted a second lease on life.

Quoting from the proverbial “food tastes better” template of survivors, Kreider states that he did things he wouldn’t have done in his pre-murder attempt life, and what was once deemed troubling, dramatic, and consequential in the first life, became trivial in the scope of having survived. Kreider claims he even developed a loud, racauos laugh, in his reprieve, that caused “People to look over to make sure I was not about to open up on them with a weapon.” He claims that laughter could be heard when he complained to a friend, “You don’t understand me.”

The friend responded: “No, sir, I understand you very well –it is you who do not understand yourself.”

Whereas most survivors perceive divine intervention in their narrow escape, Kreider states that even in the midst of his euphoria, that “Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life For Some Purpose. I was not blessed or chosen, but lucky.”

I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. It’s a truism,” he basically states, that motivates most thrill-seeking adventurers to attempt what are basically “suicide attempts with safety nets”. “The trick,” he writes, “Is to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauque (Inspector Clouseau, played by Peter Sellers, in the movie The Pink Panther) hit man to assassinate you.

“It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes.” Kreider writes of his terminally ill father, writing that while in his last days: “(The man) cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his illness that he gave me the talk that all my artist friends have envied, in which he told me that he and my mother believed in my talent and I shouldn’t worry about getting “some dumb job.””

But, Kreider writes: “You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.”

The latter quote reminds one of a guest on The Tonight Show in which this guest talked about a love that spanned decades. She claimed that her husband provided her a white rose every day, and that the two of them never fought. In the aftermath of that interview, host Johnny Carson turned to his sidekick Ed McMahon and said something along the lines of: “It’s a beautiful story, and I wish I had the same (Carson was married four times), but I can’t help but thinking how boring it would be to never fight for that many years. I’m not calling her a liar. I believe her. I just think it would be boring.”

In great loves, and great lives, life can experience great highs and great lows, but the great highs cannot be fully appreciated without the contrast of great lows.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best,” Kreider writes, “Crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year (following the survival of the unsuccessful murder) as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.”

We all love to quote Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It’s important to prepare for things to go wrong, of course, but is it a truism that everything will go wrong, or is it a “maddening perversity of human psychology” that we only notice things when they do? If the petty jurisdiction of local weather provides us with clear and 60, how long will we remember that versus -2 and 10 inches of snow? And how beautiful is clear and 60 when all we’ve known, all week, is -2 and 10 inches? How beautiful, conversely, would clear and 60 be if we could use the eye power of the vampire to have clear and 60, 365? The dream would be one thing, the reality quite another.

A Review of David Cross’ Review of Music Reviews

May 15, 2014June 14, 2014 RilalyLeave a comment

If you had informed me that a cynical wit, the caliber of stand up comedian, and writer of the incredible Mr. Show, David Cross (aka Tobias Funke) (aka the Chicken Pot Pie guy), was going to mock the verbose, wordy, prolix, grandiloquent, garrulous, and logorrhea found in most music reviews, I would sing, “Hot Dog, Hot Dog, Hot Diggity Dog!” Like most comedic ideas, however, the ambitious idea of what the essay Top Ten CDs to Listen to While Listening to Other CDs portends is much more enticing than the actual results.

As anyone that has tried to sell the artistic merit of “challenging and difficult” music to a friend knows, describing music can be a difficult and challenging thing to capture. The effort that those of us —that know little to nothing about the complexities involved in music creation— put forth usually results in us saying something nonsensical along the lines of: “It kind of sounds like a cross between the second side of Led Zeppelin III and the first side of Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.” When our listener’s express varying degrees of annoying confusion, we usually end up saying, “I don’t know, here, just listen to it.”

Those of us that regularly read professional music reviews, regularly skip the time-consuming, flowery verbiage of music reviews, to their summation of the particular songs on the album that lets us know that This is the best song on the album, and that we may want to check out the propulsive, crunchy beats on That, but that the song “…And the Other Thing!” doesn’t quite accomplish what the band had probably intended it to. We then listen to the samples of This, That, And the Other Thing to make an informed decision on the album based on what the reviewer has stated is a decent representation of said album.

If the reviewer really enjoys the album, however, and I mean really enjoys it, you will usually finish their review with the belief that this latest offering from Quiet Riot could lead you on a spiritual journey not seen on this planet since Jesus of Nazareth spent forty days and forty nights in a desert.

As Cross writes of the website Pitchforkmedia.com:

It is a site that basically reviews music but in a very, very precious and often overly verbose way.”

In the essay, Cross mocks the idea of these tediously verbose music reviewers by writing his own fictional review, of a fictional band’s, fictional album, using an equal measure of verbosity to capture the essence of the particular review he lines up for the reader. The idea behind Cross’ indirect mockery is that most album reviews are overwrought and probably intended to either feed into whatever collegial relationship that the writer presumably wants to have with either the material, or the band, by lending it exaggerated weight, or that the writer of said review can find no other venue for showcasing his writing abilities and extensive vocabulary.

When Cross reprints the reviews, such as the unintended comedy Dominique Leone provides in his review of Animal Collective’s album Sung Tongs, for Pitchforkmedia.com, laughter ensues:

(The song) “The Softest Voice” layers clear-toned guitar figures upon each other, as (singers) Tare and Bear whisper in harmony above, as if singing to the vision peering back at them from the skin of a backwoods creek. The rustic, secretive manner of their voices and the barely disturbed forest around them suggests that whatever ghosts inhabit these woods are only too happy to oblige a lullaby or two. Likewise, the epic “Visiting Friends” gathers in faceless, mutated ghosts (i.e., oddly manipulated vocalizations from the duo) to hover over their dying fire in visage of nothing better than the tops of trees. The constant strumming moves alongside the voices, helping to keep them afloat, but never suggesting they should organize themselves into anything recognizable or predictable. It’s windy, and if it rains they’ll get wet and continue to play.

Again, it’s difficult to find the perfect verbiage to describe music, or the seemingly ethereal vibe of Sung Tongs, but some of the times the authors of these reviews get so carried away with their use of language that one can’t help but think that the reviews are intended to impress upon the reader what an adept writer they have before them. A reader finds themselves wondering, a thousand words in, if this review is so concerned with showcasing their ability to write like Faulkner that their attempts at sharing an appreciation for music becomes secondary. Either that, or Dominique wrote this particular review in the hopes that he might receive a call from Animal Collective’s Avey Tare that communicated a collegial respect Tare had for Dominique’s ability to capture the ethos of his album, in a manner a less adept writer would’ve struggle with. “You got it, Dominique, you really captured the essence of what we were trying to do with this album! I like you! I really, really like you!”

Cross then provides his thematic review of his fictional group, and their fictional album, in the same overwrought themes Leone used in his Sung Tongs review:

—why not listen to As I Became We by “Tishara Quailfeather.” The virulent and hermetically sealed pinings of the world’s only triple-gold-selling Native American artist living in an iron lung. It’s as if newly dead, and thus still pure angels, reached down into the Virgin Mary’s throat and gently lifted out the sweetest and more plaintive sounds man will ever hope to hear in his life. RATING—7.17

Again, if you’re anything like me, you would’ve rushed out to the bookstore to purchase Cross’s book I Drink for a Reason the minute you heard that this comedic legend attempted this particular spoof, in essay form. If you’re anything like me, you thought that these self-indulgent music reviews —done by writers that can’t get read anywhere else— are an untapped goldmine of material that probably should’ve been tapped long ago, but no one had the guts to do it to a reviewer that might be eventually be reviewing your material at some point, down the line. If you’re anything like me, you thought it was such a clever idea that you were just dying to laugh at all ten attempts Cross made in this essay, and if you’re anything like me you eventually ended up thinking that the idea of doing it was so much better than the finished product. It’s kind of funny, in that Cross successfully matches the theme of self-indulgence these reviewers engage in, but it’s David Cross’s maybe not as hilarious as this David Cross fan expected it to be.

The Big Lebowski and Philosophy II

May 13, 2014November 17, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

[Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part review of the subject matter discussed in The Dude and The Zen Master. Part one can be found here.]

All wars, all conflict, can be resolved, and redefined, through interconnectedness—

“You might think it would be wonderful if we could go in and extract all the evil people out of this world, like we extract cancer out of a body,” Jeff Bridges says in the collection of philosophical anecdotes The Dude and the Zen Master he made with Zen master Bernie Glassman. “But as Solzhenitsyn says, evil runs through all our hearts, and who wants to cut a piece of her own heart? We are part of nature and nature uses violence and war to make its blade sharper and sharper.”

Bridges expands upon this theme by describing cells and magnification, and how the magnification of a cell reveals that every cell involves two parties fighting for survival, and that those parties are both essential components of the same cell. “They are,” in his words, “an interconnected whole fighting for the same thing.” Bridges states that there is order within the perceived disorder of that cell, and if we were able to disrupt that order to such a degree that we were able to kill all of the germs, viruses, and bacteria in our body, we would cease to live. Germs have a right to live too, he concludes, –which when taken to Bridges’ extended analogy between the internal skirmishes that occur within a cell and the wars of human history– reminds one of Rosie O’Donnell’s line: “Terrorists have children too.”

Bridges then speaks about how the fight that occurs within a cell is equivalent to the fights between good and evil that have occurred throughout human history. Within a cell there is the constant division process that occurs in which the organisms fight, and who is right and who is wrong is less important than the fight for survival. When you alter the magnification even more, he says, you could equate that cell to the Earth, in which humans are fighting in the same manner, and each parties believes he is right, and when you alter the magnification even more, you have Space, where the simplistic differences between right and wrong are negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Taking such an analytical overview of humanity is a wonderful notion, if everyone agreed to debate the topic in that forum, planet earth would be a wonderful place to live in. Unfortunately, we cannot get some people to agree to that premise. They have petty grievances, team mentalities, and a stake in their own quest for power. If we took that premise and twisted it just a little to incorporate time, could we change perspectives even more? Petty grievances, both personal and geopolitical, often look even more petty over time. One of the reasons some writers refuse to write timely articles now is that we’ve looked back at those articles and realized not only are they not evergreen, what seemed so urgent at the time that we devoted days of writing, rewriting, and perfecting, seems silly now. It almost feels like we wasted two days of our lives. Team mentalities also seem silly in hindsight, in the “I didn’t say that” when they did. “I wasn’t that extreme” when they were. Killing other people, be they soldiers or civilians, over property lines, also seems not only horrific and a waste of human life, it also seems silly in hindsight.

We have to live on the sphere we call Earth, because no other sphere we’ve found thus far will have us. Doing so requires that we accept the realities of the place where we live in, and it also requires us to do everything possible to maintain livable conditions.

Bridges states that setting that forum to make planet earth a more wonderful place to live in should be the whole idea. He says that we don’t have to accept the realities of the place we live in, and that we can alter it. “Anyone that questions this,” says Bridges, “should look at how President John F. Kennedy set the course for landing a man on the moon. He said that at one point in our nation’s history, sending the man to the moon seemed a far-fetched idea, until the president changed the conversation by informing the nation that it would be done. After he did this, the conversation centered around how it was going to be done, not if it was going to happen. ”

Bridges general approach to war, conflict, and his specific approach to the attacks on 9/11/01, is that we should try doing nothing to see how that works. On the subject of 9/11/01, Bridges states that he was all for doing something to those responsible for that act, but that he didn’t agree that that something should involve such a global war on terror. He says that we should’ve spent more time examining our role in 9/11/01, and that we should’ve apologized for our role in making them angry. As anyone that has read the history of terrorism vs. America knows, we did try the tactic of holding those responsible in criminal courts, after the first World Trade Center attack, and al Qaeda saw that as a sign of weakness. They called us a “paper tiger” and decided to explore the idea of doing something more. We have tried apology tours to quell the animosity the world is purported have for America, and humanity has also tried appeasing the evil intentions of those that plan to do us harm. These procedures have not worked. We should, of course, continue to try every method at our disposal for maintaining peace on our planet, and just because one measure did not work, with one lunatic, doesn’t mean that it won’t with another, but there is a point where Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity comes into play, and Bridges fails to incorporate that definition into his line of reason.

A philosophical inconsistency later arises when Bridges begins speaking on the subject of slavery. He states that when we were forming our Constitution, it was a difficult chore for our Founders to find unity on the many subjects before them, but the issue of slavery proved to be so divisive that it threatened to end the proceedings, so they decided to shelve it for a later date. They decided that all of the other aspects of our founding were so important that they couldn’t be derailed. This, of course, came back to bite the nation in the butt, and Bridges believes that if the Founders had tackled this issue at the time, there may not have been the sense of disenfranchisement among blacks that lives on to this day. All of this is true, of course, and if we could go back in time, we might do that very thing. What Bridges doesn’t account for here are the intractable Founders, those who wouldn’t budge on the issue of slavery, and those who threatened to bring down the proceedings over this one, very sensitive issue. Hindsight shows us now what a grave mistake putting the slavery issue aside was, but The Founders probably believed, as former president Ronald Wilson Reagan later did that you try to get 80% of what you want now and worry about the rest later. Again, we do not intend to diminish the error, and the ramifications felt for the next three hundred years, but The Founders thought by laying the foundation of freedom, the people would eventually seek to have freedom for all.

If peace could be attained in a manner where all the good guys had to do was view the human characteristics of their opponent as nothing more than an organism that wants to survive, and that that opponent would then appreciate that acknowledgement so much that they sat down at a peace accords table to engage in a serious and genuine discussion of their grievances, the Earth would be a more wonderful place to live on. Everyone wants to live in that world. Viewing this world through that lens, however, neglects the irrational component of evil people. Why would anyone want to set out hurt another person? They do. It’s irrational, but they do. Yet, it appears that ridding the world of evil, in this manner, would be like cutting out a piece of our heart out.

The danger of viewing evil people through such a simplistic lens occurs when we believe those humans, who happen to be evil, are evil. The thoughtful approach suggests that we view these people as people too when they enter into a Munich Agreement. It’s simplistic to view the individual that just wants Poland and Czechoslovakia as evil, and it’s much more thoughtful to pare back our forces and draw down our defenses with the knowledge that peace is the solution. The danger occurs when that evil person leaves that peace accord, and joins their generals at the planning boards with the knowledge that they acted their part so well that we’re now a little more vulnerable to their forceful persuasion.

In a certain magnification of the historical lens, everything Adolf Hitler did may have been evil, but in another setting, say his, they could be viewed in another manner. Did Hitler wake up in the morning and think, I’m going to do something evil today, or was he eating apple fritters and drinking cocoa with his wife and dog? Hitler was a person too, and he had a quest for survival that was similar to the quest of germs, viruses, and bacteria. They aren’t evil, and they don’t invade our body’s cells with evil intentions. They just do what they do. If we happen to get cancer, as a result of their victory over our white blood cells, we may consider that a bad thing, but if we alter the magnification, and attempt to view it from their perspective, we could view it as their victory.

Modern day evil people may go home at the end of the day to watch Happy Days reruns, and laugh with their kids bouncing on their knees, but that doesn’t change the fact that the actions they engaged in that day left their streets littered with dead people, homeless people, and a greater portion of their population starving than there were the day before. If we view that from a different magnification, an objective view that accounts for their definition of these actions, we could see the mass slaughter of civilians as a victory for their cause. It’s all relative.

If you’re one that lives with the relative notion that murdering an estimated eleven million people is a bad thing, or that a leader’s policies led to the mass starvation of his people, then you have to be willing to set a course of actions in motion that will, in a temporary fashion at least, set aside the fact that these evil people are just humans, with kids, for at least as long as it takes to either contain their evil, or to set a precedent in the minds of evil men that their evil acts will no longer be tolerated.

Some peaceniks did not abide by the methods of achieving peace that The Dude did. His method alluded to the idea that the best way of achieving peace was through strength, and his record proved to be more successful than The Dude’s, Neville Chamberlain’s, or any other theoretical attempts at achieving peace in our time. We won’t talk about that person though, because he was icky, and his actions portend that there are icky, evil people that require alternative methods.