sovay: (Sydney Carton)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2024-01-26 07:35 pm

I hold hands with the business plan for the guillotine man

I have slept about six hours total in the last two nights. My recently prescribed inhaler may not be doing the job it's supposed to. It is my opinion that nothing about this month needed to be as difficult as it has been.

I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.

Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.

In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.

I miss my little cat.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2024-01-27 10:01 am (UTC)(link)
Oh me neither! (I think it's been about the same here as for you -- doc appts and vet visits.) But suddenly ppl were RECCING this to me. I was like, what. Why. I think it might be part of the stupid Millennial v Boomer thing?

(If anything it's always been Boomers v Gen Exers, a lot of us were their kids!)
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2024-01-27 10:10 am (UTC)(link)
Lol I grew up on my sister's early Joel records, Moving Out and the Stranger and Under Pressure. Then there was that Allentown video! He did Back in the USSR literally! Then it was like aliens replaced his brains w mush, suddenly he was doing this doo wop shit and his first Greatest Hits came out and after that he just wasn't for me.

The totally No Homo video for Allentown:

https://youtu.be/BHnJp0oyOxs?feature=shared
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2024-01-27 10:16 am (UTC)(link)
It works much better for me as a generational slice than an assertion about history. Your points about his birth year also makes me wonder if part of the crashing compression of the last verse is the difference between the pace of childhood and middle age suddenly slewing up in the windscreen

Oh yes, totally. Like 9/11 was a terrible shock to me, but I don't think my memories are going to be the same as someone's who was a kid then. It wasn't formative.

IS THAT VIDEO NOT THE BEST. I really love the ending.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2024-01-27 10:20 am (UTC)(link)
Aww, I like your mom.

I can't keep millennial and gen z and The Next Ones straight, it's embarrassing. For years I thought millennials were ppl born in 2000. /o\
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2024-01-27 11:14 am (UTC)(link)
It's going to sound dumb but about up until mayyybe perestroika I was terrified of nuclear war and so was nearly every kid I knew. The idea that someone could press a switch and end your life and you had no choice....(THANKS REAGAN) AIDS had a similar effect years later, the feeling of endless threat. I think it had a giant impact on kids for generations, really (my mom's school did atom bomb drills in the 50s, I was assigned The Day After as homework). Ppl had to shove it out of their minds on a way I don't think was good for them or democracy.

Tl;dr Wargames! basically
asakiyume: (feathers on the line)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2024-01-27 02:31 pm (UTC)(link)
history isn't something you can wake up from --right; it's this constantly turning kaleidoscope. Sometimes the pattern is one you hate. Sometimes the pattern is one you like.

... I got this when I was a young parent: there'd be some period with kids that was really rough, and my mother would say, Wait five minutes. And sure enough, the situation, the kid, the everything had changed. Of course the opposite was also true: there'd be wonderful moments, blissful times, but those slide away as well.
asakiyume: (far horizon)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2024-01-27 02:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I miss your little cat too. I miss his adventures--for me! As a reader. And more, I miss him for you.
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2024-01-27 02:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Very true.
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2024-01-27 02:43 pm (UTC)(link)
I mean...the Baltics are still independent, and South Africa is, so far as I can see, still in the process of actively working on its shit. So...it didn't happen as fast as I wanted, as thoroughly and as universally as I wanted, when that song came out. But.
troisoiseaux: (Default)

[personal profile] troisoiseaux 2024-01-27 03:02 pm (UTC)(link)
I looked at the lyrics. "Obama, Spielberg, explosion, Lebanon."

"Trump got impeached twice / polar bears got no ice" is a personal favorite, absurdity-wise.

(I will say, I obviously knew on an intellectual level but - until suffering the psychic damage of the FOB cover - had never really thought about how much the OG "We Didn't Start The Fire" was a mashup of pop culture + actual serious geopolitical events...? (e.g., "North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe"))
Edited 2024-01-27 15:03 (UTC)
alexxkay: (Default)

[personal profile] alexxkay 2024-01-27 06:32 pm (UTC)(link)
That is a fun video. In my own, personal, anti-Lee-hagiography headcanon, the final line is "*He* didn't start the fire." Granted, he contributed a lot, but without Kirby and Ditko, there isn't a Marvel Universe.
alexxkay: (Default)

[personal profile] alexxkay 2024-01-27 06:36 pm (UTC)(link)
You make me wonder if Billy Joel was at all influenced by Tim Curry's (and Michael Kamen's) "I Do the Rock". A wee bit of googling shows that I am not the first to make the comparison.
aurumcalendula: gold, blue, orange, and purple shapes on a black background (Default)

[personal profile] aurumcalendula 2024-01-27 10:17 pm (UTC)(link)
*hugs* I hope you get more sleep and your inhaler does it's job soon!

I haven't had the misfortune to hear that cover, but it sounds terrible! (and now I kinda want to see if I can find a good cover)
thistleingrey: (Default)

[personal profile] thistleingrey 2024-01-28 02:34 am (UTC)(link)
it had never occurred to me to think of it as a story rather than a catalogue until the cover prompted me to think about its use of chronology and I like that it works to tell one in this fashion

Ah, that makes sense. For me it was mimetic of "The personal is political" because I was the right age to have instructors telling me that, annually, then and for the next few years--and because I knew even then how old he was; he grew up through that sentence, kind of. Thus I can't help but read the song as his good luck that his ability to make a collage resonated with a slice of potential listeners. It doesn't feel like a catalogue to me; the juxtaposition of pop and serious is a deliberate lens on lived experience, where one often doesn't have the distance to split stuff neatly by type or intensity until much later, if at all.

I'm interested in the way it works

Yes, me too. My Gen Z kid said almost involuntarily, "OK, Boomer," when hearing a bit of the original (not the FOB cover) via Tiktok, then paused and asked me, "Is he?" Yeah.

but also extremely tired

Sorry about the tiredness, and (always) no worries. *hugs*
ethelmay: (Default)

[personal profile] ethelmay 2024-01-28 02:38 am (UTC)(link)
We built the extension, which took a 1.5-story three-bedroom house (two plus converted attic) to a two-story four-bedroom house. The original outside stairs (which were covered, with locking doors at top and bottom) had been a sort of garden shed substitute for the previous owners (who were much more dedicated gardeners than we are), full of pots and old seed packets and cobwebbed windows, rather charming. Now the area where the stairs used to come out is a crawl space under what we grandly call the breakfast room (an eating area adjacent to the kitchen) and the new back porch. The stairs are unfortunately now filled with stuff that we probably should have either thrown away or been using properly. Something else to deal with a la Swedish Death Cleaning.

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