![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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.
no subject
ETA context: I think the song landed differently because of immigrant parents.
no subject
It is an extremely U.S.-centric song even when incorporating worldwide events, but 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, whether I agree with its reading of history or not. Oppenheimer is out there arguing that time broke in 1945. It used to be the First World War. I acknowledge that I have been saying that time went weird in 2020, but I know it's subjective: I can watch people all around me behaving as though nothing has changed since 2019.
ETA context: I think the song landed differently because of immigrant parents.
I don't know if it's a matter of the song landing differently: I'm interested in the way it works, not whether it reflects a version of the twentieth century I subscribe to. I am generally skeptical of lapsarian narratives whether the fall is supposed to have occurred Biblically or at any point on the historical record since.
no subject
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*
no subject
I don't think that a catalogue has to be trivial: I just don't think of it as automatically narrative. This post is also probably the most thought I have devoted in my life to this song, since I can't remember hearing it until adulthood: I got most of my Billy Joel from a college partner.
Sorry about the tiredness, and (always) no worries.
Thank you.
*hugs*