The Scene and Herd

In honour of the fiftieth anniversary of “The day the Music Died,” have a look at this version of La Bamba that I… stumbled upon. It’s amazing! And it’s hilarious. (Shout-outs to Johnnie, ’cause I know you love The Gipsy Kings.)

You can tell that the audience is overwhelmed and feeling out of place, desperate to match the wild energy on stage. Everyone is CLAPPING, like OVER CLAPPING but you can see on their faces that it’s NOT ENOUGH!! These people need to break into dance, maniac styles, cause they’re doomed to remember this event as this totally awesome thing they could see and hear but could not TOUCH! I’m glad  I wasn’t there because I get the feeling I’d be so energized by the performance I’d probably get the urge to shoot into the crowd or bite somebody that I didn’t know.

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=T4f75F1YbJ8]

This too much.

I can’t decide if I’m just jealous or truly annoyed. But I do know, you can’t make a Tom Waits cover album and then just go around saying anything you want. After a project like that, you should probably keep quiet for a few years (say, ten years or so?) so as not to disgrace yourself in comparison. 

Especially when it comes to saying things that might sound self-actualized.

My friend Sona says, “you have to be ready. You could change at any moment.”

I like this idea; change as a sudden assault. I like to think that change will just happen, just spring itself on me and all I have to do is be ready. Because I hate change. I will not encourage change and I will not seek it out.  I need change to… incite itself. And the quicker the better.

I like, as well, to think of this in the context of America at the moment. I like change personified as Barack Obama…right? It does make things simple. The lovers love change and the haters, like me, hate change (although I relish in political change n’ I like Obama). I feel good about this tidy idea. We all do.

Yeah, but in addition, I like to think of Obama as a sudden assault on the American people, a force you can’t stop.

Past love affairs have been on my mind. I’m revisiting for the sake of…a project, I guess. I’m consistently fascinated by how my feelings have changed for these lads that had me devastated once (the broken heart is almost pathetic for this fickleness). Towards most of them I feel a vague and pleasant well-wishing. But then, this is no rare thing. Many desperate loves morph into indifference.

There is an episode of 30 Rock where Lemon has to go to her high school reunion. She does NOT want to go for all the typical reasons. She was a nerd in high school, picked on for being smart and not pretty etc. But everyone, typically, urges her to go and flaunt her success. So she decides to go. But pretty soon after her arrival, one of the cool kids approaches. Lemon gears up to flaunt, but the cool kid immediately bursts into tears at the sight of her.

Okay, it turns out that Lemon was a bully in high school. She thought the cool kids were mean and hated her, so she made comments under her breath about their alcoholic parents and eating disorders to protect herself and all others like her. But her perception was all off. The cool kids were never out to get her, were humiliated by her comments and constantly trying to make peace with her so she would leave them alone. 

So suddenly, at the reunion, she has to deal with this new reality. She has done nothing different but now, suddenly, everything is different. She’s different.

You have to be ready.

I like to think of a passive America. I mean, I like to think that America did not change, but change arrived. All this time their perception was just…off. 

Like you when you thought you were in love. Like Liz Lemon in high school.

If he can sell a paper with his views on exercise and sandwiches, then maybe he can be our new Trudeau…or at least our Obama (you heard me right). Optimistic? Yes! A bit of a stretch? I’ll say yes, but only to calm you people down. You know I love the man, and it looks from the end like this is going to be a weekly foray. So Monday mornings just got better.

My question is, what happened to the two screenplays? Shouldn’t someone be on that?

I leave the house so infrequently that when I do, it makes me nervous. Today Alyssa says to me, still in her pajamas at 1pm, “we are making a social anxiety for ourselves.”

I reach some sort of breaking point this afternoon, so I set out across Dupont St. with my laptop. I gots the loonies my dad gave me, God bless ‘m. I thought I’d go get a coffee somewhere and half way there, I swear to ya, I notice my hands are a bit shaky. It’s the thought of going into some place and ordering a coffee alone. 

I was going to go to Madeleines, but change my mind at the last second, I think, to be honest, because I had a vivid dream that I worked there and now the sight of it is off putting. 

There is a diner right beside Madeleines so I go in there and order a coffee from an old guy watching Tennis. And I sit down in there and I think to myself, “I like diners. They’re, you know, what’s the word, nostalgic.”

I kid you not. I thought this thing to myself. Peacefully, I thought it. As though everyone I know has not thought this thing fifty thousand times (especially between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, when you love 24-hour diners because you think of them as sort of, ah, subversive or something, literary).

I am totally freaked out by this weird regression. And I am FREAKED OUT!

By the tone of this blog entry. I’ve been stuck in the house reading second-rate Canadian creative non-fiction.

I wish i had a subscription to The Hill Times. All I can get is this teaser and it’s making me CRAZY! (not enough to shell out, though) 
What was said?! What was done?! Was Ignatieff serious or was he trying to make Harper mad? Was he…teasing him? 

Can’t say I blame Harper for not acknowledging. If he moved into Ignatieff’s house he would have to change the way he ran the country. He would have to change himself, get vulnerable and indebted to the leader of the opposition. Damn, Ignatieff, way to take the high road and shake things up. I love you.

I also love the way this highlights how rich Ignatieff is inside his soul. This is the kind of thing people do when they are old money. “You’re the prime minister and you’re kind of down and out so…take one of my houses. I don’t need it right now.” 

MI knows how to be completely rich and completely generous at the same time. He’s so smart and sneaky. It’s kind of Christ-like.

When I was little, I read an Archie comic where Betty, Veronica and Archie are climbing a mountain and there is an avalanche. Archie gets buried and the girls think he’s dead. They cry and cry. I can’t remember how this turned comical, though I trust it did somehow (death avalanche mix-up haha). I cut out the page, with Betty and Veronica in tears, because it freaked me out so much. It wasn’t appropriate. It went against the whole nature of the Archie comic (where no one dies or ages, but many are poor and picked on) and felt very unreal. I hated it, to be honest.

Recently Alyssa stuck an Archie comic in the bathroom. The whole issue is about the gang at the carnival, usual highjinks; Jughead is packing it in, Arch is trying to get Veronica into the tunnel of love but loses out to Reggie, Betty is forgiving when treated poorly and everything is going the way you expect when BAM! Jesus is on the scene. Well, not Jesus himself, but his message.

This particular Archie comic is made by a man name Al Hartley, an artist who became a born again when he was “sterile, numb and filled with fear” at drawing nudie comics for Marvel in the sixties. He got the Archie characters licensed to him by the religious Archie president and launched a whole Christian comic book series. And they are totally weird.

Is Jesus in Riverdale? Is there any religion whatsoever there? Oddly enough, I think it more likely there is a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh than even a nominal Protestant in Riverdale (There are, however, absolutely no Catholics, I think we can agree). The Jew would be objectified, yes. But the mere mention of Jesus Christ is spooky. In the live action version in my head, Betty says “Jesus” and everything shuts down, freezes forever on that first religious frame.

What the hell is going on here? What, exactly, did Al Hartley unearth when he brought the gospel into Riverdale? I hate it, to be honest. Jesus talk in an Archie comic is as disturbing as the all American teenager being buried in an avalanche.

I was reading some optimistic economic forecasts (off warren kinsella’s last post highlighting optimistic economic forecasts) and I swear, if the economy is in an upswing by mid-2009 my faith is shot. Or rather, my faith is unflinching.

What I mean is, I have seen some of the most terrifying newspaper, business section and magazine covers in the past few months. They’re all like, black with swear words (because now that the world is ending, do whatever you want kind of thing) and I kept on having these surreal moments, telling myself “when you’re destitute and everything sucks you’re going to remember this day and the newspaper cover you noted a little too casually when you went to buy milk in the morning from the corner store. You didn’t even buy a copy!” 

Does nobody understand that my generation is so pessimistic, that when we read gloomy economic forecasts we assume no one knows what they’re talking about so we end up, by comparison, really optimistic? But this time everyone was like, “no, seriously guys this time it’s real. We’re in the shit” and  everyone I know was like, “maybe this time everything really is going to hit the fan” and we let our guard down and got worried and went with the crowd, freaking at Harper and pretending to put money into an emergency savings account? (Of course, we need that money now! haha)

If the economy is in an upswing by mid-2009, no one of my generation will freak out about anything, ever. Because, 2009? What were we getting so upset about? 

Thank you (I’m talking to, I don’t know the media I guess. Or the official opposition) for making us into the apathetic mass you, evidently, are dying for us to be. Ah, it’s so nice to be us. Nothing bad ever happens. Things are looking up. 

I think I’m going to become a Conservative. Conservatives are nice and positive. And steady, like the economy.