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.

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.

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.

All last year, save a few exceptions, I had to google Mexico news to find out what was going on over there. But the past few days suggest this previously, oddly contained war is slowly being enveloped by mainstream media. I’ve heard drug war details on the CBC, in the Toronto Star, all over the internet and even from my relatives. This bizarre phenomenon,  Mexico’s precarious position as NAFTA partner, tourist destination and war zone.

A plane went down in Mexico City two days ago with Interior Minister and former head drug prosecutor on board. Civilians cry Narco plot, but the official stance is still accident. Eight more bodies were found in Northern border town with one decapitated, hanging from a bridge to terrify locals. The national drug war death toll rivals Afghanistan and Tijuana exceeds Baghdad. The drug cartels’ increasingly brazen violent acts show their attempt to assert power and control while quelling any opposition.

But we all know this just leads to bloody war. Police and local government officials are targeted, threatened or murdered but ultimately replaced by those either more staunch and stubborn to wipe out the cartels, or corrupt individuals tied to the criminals. No one in between would take on such a god forsaken position. So the drugs are either going to meet with greater violence and opposition or a brief time in complete control before a desperate civilian uprising. 

Whatever happens, I feel like Mexico is headed into this terrible situation and when total civil war breaks out, no one over here will have seen it coming because we are too distracted by billboards and TV commercials suggesting we take a break there sometime this winter.

my life is about very little right now. i mean, i spend all my time doing about four things with about four people (but the four things and the four people are definitely the best - nnnnno complaints).

one of those four things i do is watch tv on dvd. oh YES i love to do this (another thing i do is eat. and when i can combine these two activities it’s heaven). there have been three main installments - Jericho, five days, and dead like me. dead like me was terrible, boring and embarrassing. 

five days was one of the best things i’ve ever seen. if you ever have five free hours (we still only rented it for less than 24 hours because it was a new release so we had to totally commit - paul runs a tight ship over there at movie art decor) of spare time and mental soundness, you should see it. watch it all in one night like we did. watch it late until 4 AM. put yourself through some real agony because it’s about murder and affairs and missing children, racism and bad friends. will leave you thankful and wiped.

but Jericho has been the real treat. a season and a half in about a week and a half, after the first few episodes we were riveted but unimpressed. but we finished it tonight and we’re all totally in love with it whether you’ll admit it or not, and we all love ronnie or ryan or whoever he is (this we’ll admit).

why do we love this stupid show? it resembles LOST, the way it starts small and gets bigger and you learn more and more and it’s never enough. the loose strings get all out of control and the sound bite at the end of each episode is almost as terrifying. less like, mental though. it doesn’t get in your head the same way and i don’t think i’m dreaming about it as much (although, you will dream about anything when you watch it hours straight like we do). 

it has these elements that you’re dying for without knowing it. i’ll list a few.

1. AMERICA - a country constantly at war. the price of peace is like, boredom or something. times of war and disaster make people better. if it were not for the nuclear (nucular?) upset, Jake would have remained a no good son and Emily would have married Roger. And Eric would have never become a real man. Stanley and Mimi would never have realized they were in LOVE, ronnie would have never made friends etc. there is this real feeling of “having no electricity is bad, but thank God all this happened because now our lives have meaning.” people want war. they love it! and that’s why everyone wants America, the country that just keeps waging and waging, one after the other wars against terror and drugs, gay people and Iraq. i thought the world loved (or hated - but hated because they really loved) America because they sub consciously like liberty and diversity and the idea of opportunity and like me, love the image of American soldiers giving hersey bars to war torn kids after WWll (this image makes me sad now). but the world, in their collective love/hate for the USA must know that America has not attained any of these things but is constantly striving for them. they will have those things in abundance when peace time comes.
but peace is never going to come for the USA because they have intertwined their existence with war, war which allows you a perpetual state of “we must have liberty we must have diversity we must become better in the face of this enemy.” 
because war means hope. 
peace means disillusionment and reckoning. that is why we love America, why we want to be America. because they never have to deal with peace. they never have to deal with anything.

2. perfect gender roles. the scene that best exemplifies this: bonnie, the deaf girl, is meticulously setting the table. mimi bursts through the door because mercenaries are on her ass. bonnie puts down the dishes and picks up a gun, blows off some faces before she dies (because she’s deaf) but saves mimi’s life. so the women still set the table and overbearingly ask their husbands to stay home and blurt out their secrets. but they can really shoot! the men cry when their fathers, wives and babies die. but they still kick fucking ass. it is a perfect society, a mix of protection and psychological comfort. this is what happens in war time?

3. God. i don’t think the Jericho allusion is complete or at all thought out. nonetheless, this small town is rudely awakened from their relative apathy when disaster strikes. they slowly realize how massive everything is and as conspiracies/truths surface, the outside world begins to matter because Jericho comes to understand the way they are affected by the big picture. in addition, some key players get toaffect the big picture (they get to save the world, man!).  And people are dying to understand that they are part of a bigger system, that their actions matter. We want to be important, even if that means we get bombed (this mentality is, obviously, horrifically pervasive in the USA). We want to believe that something or someone is thinking about us. Jericho never did anything that mattered to anyone outside the sweet little town, but they still get to be involved in “the greatest crime in the history of the world.”

now, should i attempt to interpret the biblical shout-out i can only conclude that ronnie hawkins is meant to represent Israel, because he is the only spy in the town. 
and small town America must be annihilated to make way for the chosen people - in this case either the CIA or black people