Push Through the Pain

With summer rampaging through the Midwest,a topic of conversation the other day was lawn-mowing. It's one of those things I refuse to do. Given my spoiled upbringing and living situations, this has been a feasible stance for me to take on the issue. Oh, I've done it before. But I struggle to think of more than a handful of times that it happened. Why this attitude? Well, for one, the smell of fresh grass nearly shuts down my lungs. I have to hold my breath and start smashing buttons on my AC if I pass a mowing crew on the highway. The other thing is that I am just not outdoorsy. I don't like bugs and I don't like being hot. I read somewhere the other day that there are things we just subjectively like or don't like, and trying to put that in rational terms that others will understand will just drive us plain crazy. I don't know if that applies only to the subjective fields of art and music or could be expanded to even personality quirks like hatred of mowing. Nevertheless, I find introspection to be a fun mental exercise, so I guess I'll continue with my thoughts even if they are mere rationalizations.

My step-mom asked me what I was going to do when I got my own place and simply had to mow the lawn. My first choice would be to figure out a situation in which I don't have a yard. But I would kinda like a kitchen garden some day, even with the bugs and the hot. And since it seems like I'm destined to take the family chihuahua with me when I go (he's firmly attached himself as my cat's best friend), it would be nice to have a yard for him. My second response was that I would somehow find an ancient push mower to use, but that was mostly a joke response because I didn't realize how feasible it would be. I just liked the idea of having an old push mower. I think part of it is my desire to not acquire things that will end up breaking in a way that I can't fix them. I was raised by carpenters and electricians, so I have a lot of intuitive problem-solving abilities when it comes to these things, but I know my limitations. Add too many parts, and that's it, I might as well buy something again. Plus, with the push mower I wouldn't need to worry about gassing it up and pulling a bunch of levers and throttles or whatever those contraptions have. I wouldn't have to worry about bothering my neighbors if I decided to do it early in the morning before it got too hot. It might even be a bit gentler on the grass and not throw out as many allergy-inducing pieces. All around, I like the idea.

I think I also have an attachment to the idea because I have memories of my cousins and I being maybe 9 or 10 and playing with an ancient, rusty metal push mower around my aunt's front yard. Why were pre-teens being entertained by a tetanus-inducing heap of scrap metal? Well, because I had one of those awesome childhoods that was un-blemished by helicopter parenting. If you wanted to wander the woods all day, crossing the creek (pronounced "crick") on dubiously structured overturned logs and jumping into the deep parts of the water that later turned out to be wastewater drainage ponds, well, those were your mistakes to make. That last part? Totally happened to my cousin and his friend. I was part of the contingent that did not jump into that water and got to laugh as he got hosed down in the yard and smelled, literally, like shit for the rest of the day. We also played make-believe Boxcar Children, and our grandpa would take us down to the country dump-site for various things to help our little imaginations.

Anyway, I was so shut off to the idea of lawn work until I went on this little foray that I didn't even realize they sold modern push-mowers. I have tunnel vision when I go to places like Lowe's or Menards because I hate going there if I can avoid it (wandering a store the size of a city block so I can find the exact door hinge that I'm looking for but will probably not find when I do reach the correct aisle is just not my idea of fun), so it's not like I'm browsing the shelves for the latest trends in home maintenance. One of those trends, green living, means that when I do get my own place with the tiniest yard I can find, there will be numerous choices for my hippie yard-work desires. Woo!

Yes

The Passage

Only I would take a "break" from Moby Dick to read a 750 page monstrosity for my own amusement. I'm happy I did, though. The weird thing is how and why this book caught my attention in the first place. Well, not entirely weird, since Momo basically just sent me the NY Times article on its release. What I mean is that the focus of the NY Times article was on how this entire book's publication and fast sale of the movie rights (both happening I think before the book was even finished), was because it was supposedly a vampire story. And I guess it is, in some vague sense. Definitely more Bram Stoker lore than Twilight, that's for sure, but the fact that the infected resemble vampires isn't really a focal point of the story. Going into it the only things I knew about the story were in that article. I really didn't know what I had signed up for at all. I just picked it up and started. Lucky for me, the only kind of book I like better than a cheesy vampire romance is an apocalyptic outbreak drama, which is exactly what this is. (How great is that wiki article for those of us predisposed to checking our way through reading lists?) In my list of all time favorite books that I have read over and over again, The Stand, World War Z, and The Andromeda Strain rank high. There have seriously been times where I have finished one of those books and had the desire to just flip back to page 1 and start all over again (and sometimes I have done just that). Also, I will watch any awful tv-miniseries version of those books, even if they do "star" Benjamin Bratt. I don't know that anything could be said to star that stilted-acting-generically-attractive man. (I'm not sure I even knew I had a thing against him until now. I think it's the fact that an episode of Law & Order with him in it means I am being denied Jesse L. Martin, and I really only like that series for the holy trinity of Orbach, Watson and Martin).

The Passage is a little too long to indulge myself in reading it that way, but it holds my fascination in the same way as those books do. Even when the premise seems laughable (a disease that creates murderous zombie rage or blood-sucking superhumans), the plausibility of the human reaction is what makes the story so great. I just got chills thinking about some of the common scenes that these books have. Nearly all of them have passing scenes in which the protagonists find a church, full to the brim of people getting their last minute worship on, or performing mass suicide to avoid the inevitable, or performing mercy killings of children to spare them the coming danger. That's the lesson, kiddies. It's always easier to die than survive, to pray rather than do something, anything.

But that's just Act 1, Scene 1. This book is like 5 books in one. And 5 styles in one. At times it would be more like World War Z or a Crichton novel. There were passages that were meant to be documents and data that were released as a historical or scientific inquiry. The author may claim he's never read Twilight, but I would be shocked to learn that he hadn't read Z or Andromeda. Possibly The Road, too, but someone who has read that one will have to fill me in. But there was this whole supernatural element that was much more Stephen King. I know I'm just listing off other stories and using those to describe this boo, but that is completely what it read like. It was like someone combined all of those books into one and maybe expanded into a little bit of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, and there you go.

There are a few reasons that I bring up Xenocide, but I'll try to focus on the parts that for one, aren't spoilers, and for another, are things I can easily explain, since it seems like I am the only one in the world who has read that line of Card's Ender series. After the first part of the story, the disease-ravaging part, the story focuses on a community of survivors. Not only that, but it skips ahead 100 years to the descendants of those survivors and the community that they have built. In Xenocide, a series of events leads to the opening up of the star system, and groups of people choose a planet and start to build their own world there. Over time and generations, they become isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Space travel takes too long to make travel between the communities feasible, and although their means of communication is instantaneous, the happenings of the outside world become less important than the day to day drama of crops and interpersonal relationships. It's this disconnect from the outside world that is common to both stories. But what I enjoy is the author's mental exercise in socio-cultural origins in these situations. What lingo would we develop to refer to things? What words and concepts would we lose entirely because they were irrelevant to our existence now or the technology was gone? And how would that change us, as a people? What mistakes would we make again, when all the people who remembered the past were all gone? As I said, The Passage is a bunch of books in one, and it moves on from that examination and back into the stream of the battle between infected and survivors, but the glimpse into a world where children might as well be born on a different planet for all that it resembles our own upbringing is one of my favorite parts of this book.

I just re-read that article and realized that he has plans for a trilogy. That is a word that makes me shiver with anticipation my friends. Love it. Although it does make me re-evaluate the ending, since I thought that I was going to have to mentally and emotionally adjust to deal with the loose threads that he had left. I don't know that I would be disappointed if he decided not to finish it. There's something poignant about the ending, however unresolved, and there are mysteries that may be diminished by a resolution.

p.s. I just glanced at the Amazon reviews as I was adding links to this entry, and someone noted that this was definitely not Twilight; they won't be making "Team Babcock" shirts any time soon. Please someone else finish this book so that they can find that as hilarious as I just did. Now I'm tempted to do just that. What a conversation starter that would be.

"I'll die a pagan"

I'm supposed to be reading Moby Dick with a friend. I was also supposed to be blogging. Let's just ignore the hiatus and attempt to get into this thing. First, an aside.

I'm a bad reader. Granted, I'm fast. But I read like I do a great many other things in my life - all at once or not at all. Meaning that whether a book is 150 pages or 1500, I want to read it beginning to end in one sitting. This is great for being able to say that I started at the beginning and saw all the pages hereafter, but it makes for a meaningless journey and sometimes a complete inability to recall anything I just read outside the general structure of the plot. This explains why I gravitate towards the simple stories - the young adult, fantasy, sci-fi, the recurring character series in which the entire series is explained over and over again in the first few pages. I enjoy and have enjoyed more complicated fare, of course, but it just utilizes a whole different part of my personality and brain to do so. Anyway, that's why this has been difficult, in a nutshell. I get distracted when I stop in the midst of a reading, but if I blow through it I can't remember any of it to discuss with others. I finally decided that I would divide the book into 5 portions, each one about 100 pages, and just tackle one piece at a time.

When a friend texted me late one night asking whether I thought the whale from Moby Dick hated Ahab, and then subsequently decided that she wanted to attempt a re-reading of the story to find the answer, I agreed to participate, to change my m.o. I've read it before, for a class in college (Great American Lit). My approach to it back then was kind of amusing. For one, I had a crush on my professor, so I was determined to have his esteem. I even read The Emperor of Ocean Park in my free time because he was giving a talk on it at a school function that I had decided to attend. Nerd-crush. Anyway, I also decided that if I was going to tackle this thing, I was going to do it right. I was not going to use study aids. I was not going to skim when it got boring. I was going to read every single word on those pages so that I could say with all honesty at the end that I had done it. And you know what? I still didn't remember a single thing outside of the general plot. Sure it was like, 8 years ago, but there are just a number of things that stand out to me during this re-reading. I have found myself laughing out loud while reading it. I'm completely entertained by Melville's sense of humor, but also amazed by the poetry of his sometimes over-dramatic tirades. Have I changed so much in those years that these things passed me by back then?

In an effort to parse my writing (I really could use an editor), I'll try to give broad sweeps. You can read the story for yourself, or barring that, you can read the Cliff Notes or Wiki or what have you. I'm just going to say what I thought, pretending that we have all read it and are just having a discussion. Starting with the Extracts/Pre-Chapter text. I'll just say I don't know what the point of it is. Perhaps someone else can enlighten me? To me, the first portion, about the usher, seems to mock a person who would obsess over the words, the names of things. Maybe it is telling us not to be concerned about the names of things, the words one chooses to use. Or maybe it's just the opposite, that words have importance. The second portion, about the sub-sub librarian, also seems to mock obsession. The librarian collects every mention of a whale, but he will never be able to tell the full story. I think it seems like Melville is apologizing in advance for the fact that he will be unable to ever cover all of the bases when it comes to whales, even though he has obsessively tried to do so in the text.

If any book was designed to get you from the start, it's this one. For all that he is clearly and very apparently a learned man and a good writer, Melville created in Ishmael (or re-created himself in Ishmael), a man who defends slaves, cannibals and the riff-raff of sailors. "Who ain't a slave? Tell me that," he says, and he claims that they're the ones who see things first hand and actually determine what happens after that. The first line of the story is a classic, but it's the following paragraphs that get to me. He talks about how the land makes him mean-spirited and how just has to get to sea and away from the land.

Those were the parts that enchanted me. The ones that made me laugh out loud mostly centered around Queequeg, the cannibal that Ishmael befriend's on his land-based journey to the Nantucket ships. I loved imagining Ishmael having a crazy fit when the landlord told him about his roommate being a cannibal and a head-hunter. I could just see the sputtering, the indecision. Their subsequent spooning in bed and Pagan friendship-marriage is bizarre, but for some reason I like the idea of Ishmael having someone to watch his back. It comforts me for some odd reason. Although his cannibal nature worries the Quaker owners-captains of the Pequod at first (even though they are "fighting Quakers...Quakers with a vengeance"), when they see what he could do with a harpoon, Captain Peleg announces: "We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats." I was sad to see the ship disembark and leave Captains Bildad and Peleg behind.

The cannibals and Quakers allow Melville/Ishmael to expound on one of his favorite subjects and mine - religion. It's part of the reason I like Ishmael so much and am so invested in his character's fate. He is an all around accepting and egalitarian man. Husband to a cannibal ("I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy."), tolerant of the religion of others even if it forms no large part of his own personality, and able to see the poetry of a good sermon. I don't think I have ever enjoyed a real-world sermon as much as I loved Chapter 19's sermon in the sailor's chapel; it was as if I had never heard the story of Jonah before now. In one memorable portion, Queequeg asks Ishmael to join him in his evening worship to his idol, named Yogo. Ishmael justifies joining him by saying that to worship is to do the will of God, and the will of God is to follow the Golden Rule. Since Ishmael would have Queequeg join in his own particular form of worship, it follows that Ishmael must join his. That means he has to worship a pagan idol. Clearly, Christians have never really subscribed to the Ishmael school of religious theory. Also, Ishmael should have been a lawyer.

Chapter 23 is one of the shortest chapters (although they're all pretty much just snippets in the grand scheme of things), but I love it's language and the story it tells. Truly, these little "pointless" asides are the reason the story is so long, but who would deny Melville these little jaunts when they're so lovely? For whatever reason, Ishmael is commenting on seeing a familiar face as they're leaving port. His name is Bulkington, and he was a man that Ishmael had encountered when he first sat in Peter Coffin's Inn. A group of whaling men came in from a ship that had just returned to port from a long voyage. This man, Bulkington, had just returned from one voyage only to sign up for another on the Pequod. "The land seemed scorching to his feet," Ishmael comments. He compares Bulkington to the ship itself. To others, the port and land stand for safety and comfort. But for a ship, land is dangerous. Coming up on the land would destroy her. "With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again; for refuse's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!" This chapter, which Ishmael/Melville calls the stoneless grave of Bulkington, breaks my heart for all of its seeming randomness. There are several instances of Melville doing this - talking about fighting against inevitability. Or that's how I interpret it anyway. For one, the sermon talks about how obeying God is disobeying oneself, and how that's the hardest part. Then, Ishmael ruminates on how he thinks that perhaps this life is just a shadow, and that death is the real thing - that in death he would shed the bad portions of himself and become a better man. Maybe like falling is easier than fighting gravity and staying upright. Now this - the ocean, supposedly a ship's only friend, constantly tries to push her into the land and destroy her, and she must fight to remain out at sea. I'm still thinking on this theme, I'll try to expand on it later, because as of now I still don't know what he's trying to say. Is he saying that it's worth it to fight or not? Is he a fatalist?

So those are some of my impressions, as briefly as someone like me is able. But because there are so many parts that I love, I'll leave you with a few other random bits and pieces of this amazing writing.

"Can it be, then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?"

"The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself."

"Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan."

"He was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him."

"Very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another."

"Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans."

"I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug."

"If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication."

"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!"

"Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff!"

"It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems—aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me."

Trash Talking the TV

Somewhere I heard that when you're low on certain vitamins and nutrients, you crave the food that has the ones you need. Well I don't know what vitamin deficiency leads to an irresistible urge to watch trash tv, but I have it. Probably to make up for the fact that The Bachelor is over. Oh, Jake, I believed you might be a normal human being who simply made the regrettable decision to go on national tv not once, but twice. Then you chose fellow attention-whore Vienna and Dancing With the Stars. One of those life choices I might have been willing to overlook. But both? Combined with your previous track record? No, good sir, that I will not abide.

Ok, fine, I still like you. Just...keep your shirt off to remind me of that fact.

Really, I'm not actually all that invested. I get involved in tv shows, especially reality tv shows, the same way most people get into drugs. That is, I watch them as a social activity and probably wouldn't do so if other people weren't involved. There are not many shows that I watch by myself. Even if I'm the only one in the household watching a particular show, I have a friend somewhere else that I discuss it with later. I need feedback in order to make it real. I have no idea what that says about me, so feel free to play internet psychologist.

Proving just how trashy the Bachelor was, I have indulged myself twice this week with shows that normally would not catch my interest. First it was the E! show "Pretty Wild", a show revolving around 3 teenage girls and their former Playboy mother. I have no idea what the premise for this show was supposed to be originally. I'm not sure E! knew either - they were just following the formula of hot girls + cameras + ? = profit. After the pilot episode, that ? has a myriad of options for this particular show. Irresponsible fame-whoring mother, underage drinking, criminal charges. I read somewhere that E! was basically hoping that this would be a wilder, less responsible version of the family dynamic in "Keeping Up with the Kardashians".

"That's right, by comparison, we're 'responsible'."

Woah. When the Kardashians are the classy version, you know this is going to be trouble. Let's start from the top of the problem pyramid and work our way down. The mother. Oh lordy, the mother. A former Playboy bunny and lingerie model, the mother wants the same classy lifestyle for her daughters. In the pilot she is shown doling out Ritalin to the girls due to their ADHD diagnosis somewhere along the line, doing a roll-call for the pills not unlike every mental asylum movie I've seen. It gets better, though. She home-schools them. Maybe she's hiding a doctorate education in her ditzy act (after all, "Girls Next Door" Bridget has a Masters in Communication), but I have a feeling those girls can only do fractions because their drug dealer taught them. It still gets better. She teaches them lessons based on The Secret. Seriously. The little bit of their "schooling" that they show has her handing them piles of magazines and asking them to make a photo collage of responsible role-models, representing the people that they look up to in their lives. Angelina Jolie is a popular choice for the girls, mostly due to her hot husband.

The Secret is that we have daddy issues.

Maybe I'm being too harsh about the school and they just edited it to look scary. After all, the two older girls are somewhere around 18 at the time of filming, so maybe the others have already graduated and are just doing this as a bonus. The youngest girl, Gabby, 15 at time of filming, is the most responsible of the three. By far, if editing is to be believed, since she seems to not party or drink and cleans up after everyone else in the house. The oldest, Tess, actually isn't related to the other two at all. It's kind of bewildering really, especially given the fact that it's completely implied that the three girls are sisters and being "raised" and "disciplined" by the mother. But Tess is actually unrelated to everyone in the house - the girls, the mother, the rarely seen step-father and absent biological father. So while at first it seemed kind of crazy that Tess stayed out all night and walked into The Secret home-school totally hungover (getting a weak reaction from the mother figure in the situation), when you realize she's over 18 and lives there voluntarily, it's a bit different. Plus she's already done some Playboy modeling of her own. It's entirely possible that the explanation for all of this was left on the cutting room floor as a result of the drama that took place just 3 days into the filming of the series. Hence the reason I said that it is hard to tell what E! originally had planned for the show. Three or four days into filming, the LAPD knocked on the door with a search warrant based on their suspicions that the third daughter, Alexis, was holding property that was stolen as a part of the celebrity burglaries happening at the time, lamely entitled The Bling Ring. Alexis gets arrested as a result. The cameras kept rolling, the cases are still pending, so I imagine now a large part of the show will focus on the fall-out from that.

As if that weren't enough, as a result of this little piece on one of my fave sites meant I had to track down a new CW reality show called "High Society". I was sucked in by the promise of some woman being racist and homophobic and awful, and she delivered just as that article said she would. It should be noted that immediately after saying that she used the n-word regularly and didn't have many friends that weren't skinny and white just like her, she said that she wanted to work at the UN someday. I'm still digesting that tidbit. Was that a joke? Is the leathery face preventing me from reading sarcasm in her facial cues? I just don't know.

"The United Nations is a fashion house, right?"

I expected that to be the be-all and end-all of the episode, but the show has some real scene-stealers in it. Allegedly, the focus is on Tinsley Mortimer, a New York socialite recently divorced from Topper Mortimer. Although not poor prior to the marriage, it seems Tinsley didn't become a socialite until she married into the Mortimers (an old money family with interesting genealogical connections like the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay). Apparently she enjoyed the parties and the fashion shows whereas the Mortimer family disdained press, resulting in bad juju in her marriage. Actual high society old-money families don't generally attention-whore. There was a subdued murmur to that effect when NYC Prep came out, claiming to be the real world Gossip Girl, with people criticizing the people who appeared on that show as being the bottom of the prep-school barrel. Not a bad barrel to be on the bottom of, but apparently the real rich and fabulous think seeking out bad press via reality shows is tres trashy.

Anyway, Tinsley is kind of boring. She designs handbags (like every single no-talent socialite you've ever heard about). Her mom really wants her to make it work with the ex and is horrified that she is moving from her fab Upper Eastside place to scary Midtown. Mom also disapproves of the latest boyfriend, a ridiculously tall German Prince of some sort. So blah blah blah on Tinsley. But her friends include the Crazy Racist Chick who looks like she's lived a hard life already as well as CRC's sworn enemy, Paul Johnson Calderon, aka PJC. He's fabulously gay, but based on some of his behavior, I would guess he is not really fabulously wealthy. But he is a genuine scene-stealer, and I want him in every moment of this show. Luckily, he's a bit of a klepto, so scene-stealing seems to be on the menu if this show continues.

"Admit it, I'm stealing your heart right now, aren't I?"

Just in this episode he makes out with a very hot model, throws a can of PBR out of his limo, throws a tumbler of whiskey into someone's eye, evades the police called to the club as a result of said whiskey incident, and demonstrates how far he can pull wool over his mother's eyes. I find the last one the most interesting. His mother comes to the city to visit him, and she interviews that she thinks the two stints he spent in rehab really taught her son his lesson and that he probably only has one drink when he goes out now and is looking for a serious relationship. Cut to clips from the previous night of PJC getting trashed and making out with a random guy at a party. I wish we could have like, picture in picture of her watching this episode. Especially as we get to the next part, where he asks her for $50,000 from his trust fund so that he can get his own apartment. I'm a little unclear as to where he's living now, but, whatever, it's not like I want this show to be an hour long just so we can learn mundane things like the fact that he has a roommate or something. She chastises him blowing through $200k of his trust already and says she'll have to think about it. That is indication #1 that PJC is not as rich as he seems (I don't count the stealing incidents because that can indicate something more than just needing money). I mean, based on drink prices alone, I don't think $200k is all that impressive to go through. We're not given the amount of time, but anyway, whatever. The fact that his mother and he are treating those numbers like big numbers tells me that they're not all that rich. That may be a lot of money to me, but it shouldn't be to them. I just watched "Selling New York" last night on HGTV, and those people didn't even bother haggling over a 2.3 million price tag, they just paid it and moved in, netting their realtor a one-time paycheck about four times the median NYC annual salary. (Further reading reveals that they may not have paid the full price, so who knows. You mean reality tv isn't real?!? Say it ain't so! Either way, PJC isn't going to be doing a cross-over episodes for that series.)

When PJC's deluded mother agrees to give him half the amount he asks, he immediately rents a luxury hotel suite and calls up his friends to help him spend his hard-earned cash. He has a bubble bath drawn and champagne popped while a personal shopper brings him a couple racks of clothing to browse. Then of course they go out on the town and he buys rounds of drinks for his friends and shots for random hot guys in the vicinity. I'm worn out just thinking about what a hectic day he must have had.

Next up on the blog front - I'm in the process of two different reading groups with my friend Linda, so I'm thinking I might write up some thoughts on those. That's assuming I can get myself to sit still for a couple of hours and read. I'm a fast reader, but not when I'm actually trying to remember what I've read and think about it. Then I have to stop and make notes and high-light and look things up, etc etc. I'm a few chapters into Moby Dick, but I need to move it along if I want to be able to take part in any meaningful discussions. That's right, from trash tv to Moby Dick. Diversity, that's how I roll.

Autotune the Universe

I could spin this particular topic off into so many tangents that we could have a 3 day conference on it. I'm sure someone out there already has. One of the tangents is social media. As a brief blip of a comment, I have many opinions on the extent and nature of social media's change on human interaction. The sum of which is this: tell it to the 19th century. Every major advance in technology has changed us and yet changed nothing really. Facebook, Chatroulette, the party line - just the latest stop on the line.

The one social media/internet tool that I'm focusing on for the point of today's discussion is Youtube. I find it amusing the way in which social gatherings frequently devolve into everyone showing the randomness they've found on YouTube (or the internet in general, but it's frequently a viral video of sorts). I remember taking a fall break trip to NYC and sitting in my friend's basement while someone showed us videos of 4 foot long centipedes that would peel off cave ceilings to digest bats. Urgh, that still haunts me. Around Halloween, my roommate and I would watch numerous "ghost" videos. I've shown everyone I know this in order to explain why I couldn't sustain meaningful relationships for 3 years.

Do you see how these tangents are going to come back around to autotune? Yeah, me neither. Let's see how we can bring this all together. Most of this topic is interwoven with my time spent searching Youtube the other day. I was spurred by a video/song sent to me by Jersey that featured a very excellent cover of "Hey Ya".

1. Cover Songs

I spent a good portion of a day on Youtube, looking for cover versions of popular songs. Anyone who knows me knows that I have an affinity for cover songs. I especially love when something completely different is done with it, in particular when rap songs are turned into softly sung acoustics (i.e. Ben Fold's cover of Bitches Ain't Shit (nsfw), Jenny Owen Youngs doing Hot in Herre). It's like the musical equivalent of drag. Wow, yeah. I just wrote that, but I totally agree with it and it makes me understand more about my love of covers. I've read enough about drag in gender theory texts to know the main tenets. In theory, it's a hyped up "performance" of what it is to be a man or woman. It's an homage in exaggeration. Drag makes it clear what is great about the gender but you can also see what's ridiculous about it. I think that there's something more authentic about gender (and cover songs) when performed. Maybe authentic isn't the word I'm looking for - I'm struggling to find the word, but basically everyone knows that these actions are put on, purposeful. Because you're not getting the popular song that was formed and manipulated by a million executives and put out into the mainstream on their terms, and you're not getting gender as performed by the person who was molded and shaped into those behaviors from birth. Ok, I love this analogy, but I really am going to take it back to cover songs and quit attempting to parallel everything. I think cover songs mostly show you just how good a song is. Even when it's performed with a different voice, tempo, accompaniment, the bones of the song are so good that they translate. It's an embarrassing story, but maybe it proves my point: I heard the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt" first. I wasn't a Nine Inch Nails fan. Loving the song, I put the lyrics in my AIM profile and attributed them to Johnny Cash. You know, the little profile box you used to express yourself before Myspace/Facebook/Twitter expanded the franchise to include farm animals? Always looking for a way to make fun of me, one of my friends pointed out that I was quoting Trent Reznor. Oops.

2. The Talent Pool

Naturally, my searches branched out into the stars of Youtube, the people who post hundreds of videos of them singing in their bathrooms or on their ratty looking futons. Maybe they'll get a record deal, or a Superbowl commercial, but for the most part they're producing music with pretty basic technology for no money in an environment that will get them seen by the internet, but maybe not the world at large. There are a lot of talented people on there. And sure, some of them have some decent recording equipment. And maybe they're even working musicians, as small time performers or instructors or whatever. The point is, all of these people are less well known than the person who come in 8th place on American Idol, and yet some of them are much more talented than the people who come in first.

That's the nature of one of my tangents, and it's one that I know tons of people have spoken about before. Since I have had an on/off viewing of American Idol, this is one of the rare years I've tuned in for the full show, and seeing what I have seen, I feel the need to comment. It's a love/hate relationship that I have with reality tv. No one with any passing acquaintance with musically talented people would believe that this show is actually looking for or finding talent the majority of the time. Anyone who hangs out with people actually working as singers would know that there is a very large pool of people who can hold a tune and look good doing it. These same people get rejected from shows like American Idol. Sometimes it's because their story isn't interesting enough. Ding! That would be clue number one that no one is looking for talent. The other reason may be that the show purports to take someone more raw who has no training in music, just a love of it, and give them the chance to pursue it in a way they can't or don't already do in their daily lives. Ok, that one I'll take. And maybe, if you had 24 people with perfect pitch on the show, the show would be less entertaining. I find that hard to believe that people would rather hear awful performances than celebrate an abundance of talent, but maybe that's the reason I'm not a reality tv producer. Like I said, most people know that this is what tv does, but I worry that there's still a lot of people who think that all 24 of those people represent the super-talented cross-section of America, and that's where they get the delusion that they can actually sing and possibly make it on the show. Hence the painful auditions of delusional people. Also, I blame karaoke.

This can also go the other way, though. For one, people are used to hearing studio versions the vast majority of the time - on the radio, their ipods, and even in concerts where lip-sync is heavily utilized. So people forget what it sounds like for real people to really sing. Studio versions are done in multiple takes, layering and piecing together hundreds of sessions, applying tricks (like Autotune) to make it sound cleaner than the real, live person ever could. How this affects American Idol is that sometimes people are not impressed by a performance that is actually pretty good. If you were to put Taylor Swift on that stage with no production tricks and limited rehearsal time...well, just watch her performance on the Grammys really.

I'm not sure where the rest of that tangent was going, so let's just move on to my Autotune dilemma.

3. Autotune

Autotune, if you're not familiar, is applied both in studio and live situations. It corrects the sound of the pitch to the nearest note, making flat and sharp notes right in line with where they should be (see this awesome explanation featuring Weird Al here - see, I've been on Youtube a lot lately). Although I've heard my sister complain that she wished Glee was less Autotuned, I'm not sure that most people can tell the difference between a performance that is or isn't "real". I quote that word because the industry has been applying all sorts of technology to make sound better quality for years, so who is to say what is real or not? I guess I would draw the line between advancements that make the sound you hear on the cd more like the live, true voice of the performer in person, and those that distort it to make it sound better than it actually is.

This is the dilemma I'm facing - I can't tell the difference between something that has been Autotuned and what hasn't, unless they're using more of the obvious effects of the device which make it sound robotic. So if I enjoy a song, does it make a difference? I can appreciate live music, I can enjoy the imperfections of Youtube stars, I love Broadway singers who always sound more perfect than humanly possible, and I like albums that include lies. It's an odd moral dilemma, but not a unique one. Prior to autotune, knowing that Britney Spears couldn't actually sing didn't stop me from singing along to her songs, dancing to them in clubs and college basements, etc. The songs were still good, even if they weren't "real". And yet something about this latest trend offends me, because it's not as obvious of a lie as Britney Spears was. When Britney sang live, you could tell because it sucked. When someone uses Autotune at a live performance and sounds great, you have no way of knowing whether or not they're actually talented. And since you can't tell the difference, it feels like a betrayal.

What I wish would happen is a division between artists we recognize as real, and those that are more performers. It's not possible, but I wish there was a difference. Performers who can't actually sing can get MTV awards, but not Grammys. Something like that. Or just have people make studio albums that are overproduced, and then have drag queens lip-sync those songs during live events. Then everyone knows what is fake and what is real and we all can enjoy the spectacle without questioning our perceptions of talent and reality.

To access my current list of Youtube favorite videos, go here. It includes all manner of videos I've added to my favorites list lately, but you should be able to see my top 6. If you only waste a little bit of time on the internet today, I really recommend you watch those videos.

Not This, But That: An Interlude

I started writing up a blog that was going to be a mish-mashed combination of topics such as American Idol, autotune and Youtube artists. I'm still writing it in fact, so I offer this mini-entry as an apology. I think I may have to go to a regular schedule of just two or three days a week so that I get a format and stick to it. The Oscars threw me off that plan last week. I might continue working on the entry for a couple of days and start with the schedule on Monday or Tuesday, depending on whether I decide to do Tues-Thurs or Mon-Wed-Fri. We'll see. Until then, I wanted to show you the following video.

Why? Because part of my article brought up drag. Which got me thinking of that episode of RuPaul's drag race I caught last week, in which one of the queens imitated Carol Channing, to my utter delight. If you can catch an episode of it, it's great.