Dreaming of Reality TV

 I dreamt I was at a college dinner, one of those that they might serve to get everyone acquainted with the college at an orientation.  I was sitting at a table with all these other people, most of which were very odd, and there were television cameras all over the place, above and in the corners.  It was perfectly normal, except, I knew that the people I sat with had various psychological disorders, ones that would not get along well without medicine...etc... After a time I left the room and found myself in a large television studio, a place with large "habitats" where people were going about their daily lives, except with cameras everywhere.  Sorta like The Truman Show, except this one had an odd twist to it.  The characters in these stories were picked from mental institutions, facilities, along with normal people, all in an attempt to make a Reality TV show where the people in the situations were just a little more odd than normal, and watch the madness unfold.

I remember while I was working at Borders, that we had a running joke (at least, my coworkers did prior to me working there), that we were unwittingly a part of a Japanese Reality TV show called Happy Booktime Go!, where the strange customers and the strange employees interacted and provided hilarity for the viewers. It made sense, as some of our customers were indeed very strange.

But in my dream, they had more control over the people.  People were taken from one scenario to another, their memories wiped and replaced with alternative ones to match the theme.  Those that were boring or lost ratings were eliminated... as I saw people with machine guns around, for that purpose.  It was built into the show as a terror plot, or a bank robbery, or something like that.

Yes, it was a strange dream, one that I had prior to waking up, which is when I have the strange ones I remember, right before I wake up totally, coming out of the final sleep cycle.  It got me to thinking though.  All our television shows, whether they're actually called "Reality TV" or not, are similar to this. People watch Gotham or Modern Family, and they are just interactions between very odd people, some that deal in gruesome murders, some not.  Some have outrageous violence and sex, some don't. Some make commentaries on society using stereotypes (which may be true or contrived), and some are just made to humiliate people.  I don't honestly think that Chris Rocker is going to become any more loved after his stint on Survivor than what he was before.  He is societies' Joker, made up to be laughed at and scorned, to make everyone feel a little better.  We are better than him, at least.  Push your scarecrows over, and feel better about our lives.  I mean, we all lead lives that may or may not be difficult, but we can all be assured that the side show mentality of the television shows will pick people who are living much worse lives than we are, and it makes us feel good.

So why not pick those people out of the crazy farms, the looney bins, the Mental Hospitals, and put them in a place where they can entertain the rest of us.  There are enough of them, even in the smallest towns, that we would never run out of stooges to laugh at.  So what if they like running down the street naked with a lamp shade on their head... that's funny!! At least we're not like that!

It can easily go that way, you know.  The normal life is no longer appreciated.  Those that live comfortable lives want to see the way others live, so we can laugh at them and scorn their ways. We watch Hoarders or 16 and Pregnant and feel badly for them, even as we laugh at their misfortunes. And we turn the TV off (if indeed it ever goes off) and feel better about ourselves.  It's either that, or take medicine, and the other way is cheaper, and more fun.

I haven't watched much television since moving to Dallas, except for Football on weekends, and even then, I could listen to it on the radio just as well.  I love the Simon & Garfunkel line from "The Only Living Boy in New York," "I get the news I need on the weather report."  It's what I worry about the most, if I got rid of television and cable and everything all together.  I wouldn't have that outlet for looking at storms as they come in.  Sure, I can use the radio and the radar on the Internet which I can read as well as any meteorologist can, but the reassurance of the TV Weather Guy is something that has been coded into me since I was a wee child watching Gary England on CBS in Oklahoma City. So I think I'm going to dump cable, keep the Internet, and then hopefully by the Spring, I'll have an antenna strong enough to pick up the channels on the south side of Dallas (all the towers are in Cedar Hill, and Downtown Dallas is between me and them).  Until then, I'm going to unplug this thing and use it for computer games and other escapes from reality.

I have no problem escaping from reality, but I want to do it without making fun of other people.  I would rather do it with books, Audio or otherwise, and put the images in my head, instead of on my screen.

"Time Is the Final Currency"

 Noel Paul Stookey once said of his hen-house turned home in Blue Hill, Maine, that sitting on his stairs at 7 in the morning, watching the sun come up over the Atlantic, that he was blessed, having moved away from New York City and all the hustle and bustle.  People thought he was crazy. "There are two ways to miss things," he said, "One is if it goes by too fast, and the other is if we go by too fast.  I've always complained about the bicycles speeding by me as I walk, or the motorcycles, that they zoom down the paths so fast that they miss the beauty that's all around them.  Sometimes it's better to watch the trees grow, and look up into the sky and watch the planes circle and descend toward the airport many miles away.  That time slows down in the rural areas, it's such a wonderful experience.  It's no wonder that people leave the urban areas and go out to the boondocks where they will be away from all the noise and commotion.  I know I would.

There's nothing better in this world than being at my grandparent's lake house in Sulphur, Oklahoma, late at night , looking out the window over the Lake of the Arbuckles, and watching the moon rise, listening to the crickets, sitting in a recliner and letting the world go it's own way.  In quiet reflection I have those memories now.  I don't know if I had them back then.  If I had more money than sense, I'd buy that lake house back. I wrote a blog about it here.

Or perhaps, since I'm in Georgia, I'd go with a house here.  There's a house in Washington County, just across the line from Deepstep, GA, that is a wonderful house out in the woods.  The only people that go by it are hunters during deer season.  Beautiful dark wooden floors and furniture. I found it on Google Earth, and have a mark on it, just in case...  I doubt I'll ever have the money to get a  house like that, but even something similar would be nice.  Something Thoreauish.

I know it's a little early to think about this for me, but it's come up because of my mother's recent heart surgery, and her having to face her own mortality. But she's talked about how she wants to live out the rest of the years of her life. And it got me thinking about the same thing.  Truly, I'm only 36, and I have half of my life left to live, and who knows how the country will go during those years, or the economy, but I do know that I'll make it somehow.  And I also know that, when the time comes for me to grow old, I want to do it away from the city sprawl.  I want to watch the rings form within the trees, year by year.

It's amazing what things will get you thinking about your own mortality.  I guess it's something that's been going through my mind lately.  My mom said that while she knows that God and Heaven await her after she dies, that until then, survival and living are pretty important.  There's a natural fear of death, I think we all have that, but I think the more fearful part is losing control of the life you have left.  I've seen it, through my grandmothers, how dementia and finances and diseases can slip reality away, where dreams become more real than reality, and there are times I wouldn't mind that, but life is so amazing, so beautiful, I don't think I would want to spend the last part of my life stuck in some room in a nursing home, propped up in a wheelchair in some hallway.  I've seen too many old men like this at the rehab place my mom was in, and also at the nursing home my grandmother was in temporarily.  Don't keep an eye on me, dear nurses, take me outside and let God keep an eye on me. He's done that well so far.  Let me see the cardinals flit from tree to tree, and the summer wind ease up gently against my face, and then on to places unknown.  It's better this way.

I also say all this because I've heard some great music lately, a pattern in the writings of some great rock songwriters, as they look at their own lives and see death a'coming.  The advantage that they have is that they can express their feelings (much like I do here in a blog) through the art media that they are known for.  And while they create their works, much like the artwork on the blog above, they release it for us to hear and see and say, "yeah, I get you." Thankfully, with the Internet being what it is, I can put together those works here on the blog.

Bob Dylan took a weekend and wrote all of the songs in Time out of Mind, a masterpiece of blues and introspection that I absolutely love.  I think he, like the other's I'll show below, got to the point where they calmly look at their old age and see death coming, but not quite here yet.  It's off in the future a little ways, but close enough to pay attention to.  The track I love , well, I like all of them, but the one that fits this blog is "It's Not Dark Yet."

 

His tour mate for the past few years, Paul Simon did a track on You're the One that sounded like it would be his last album (he's done 1.5 since (the one he did with Brian Eno was not worth the .5), and it deals with the end.  The image where he can "release [his] fists at last" is so powerful.  Such a haunting song.  And all of these are.  Nostalgic, Raw, leaving the singer exposed without many instrumental backups to keep the voice hidden.

 

Finally, check out David Crosby's new studio album, Croz as a wonderful mixture of introspective songs and lamentations about the way the world is (although not so much that the ideology sticks out like a sore thumb) The first track has a minor key meandering sound, while talking about the city, and it reminded me of the other songs that deal with age and mortality.  His other one that fits this is "Time is the Final Currency" from the album CPR he did with his biological son, but it's harder to find on Youtube.

Sticks and Swords

There is nothing like an "L" shaped stick. Any type of tree will do, with the branch at a right angle to the other, or perhaps two. The idea of a boy playing with a stick-gun would make some people now cringe and report them to the school authorities or worse, to the police, but there was a time when a stick was a boy's trusty companion.  Even just a plain one would make an excellent sword, one that would rival Excalibur, or the Sword of Omens (for those that lived in the 80's.)  The trees became bases, the thickets a shelter which could withstand any storm, be it real or mental.  A well placed chair, or a blanket, and you have a place to think, or read, or to plan attacks on the neighboring base across the yard.  Even better, a couple of well nailed planks of wood became a treehouse, and the adventures were glorious. Would that every child have a favorite stick to play with. I've always had a walking stick that I used as a staff, as something to twirl around like Donatello would do (TMNT reference), and as a trusty companion on my walks.

And after it rains, there's a rainbow, but all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there, it's just imagination they lack...
~Paul Simon "My Little Town" 

I remember walking around the neighborhood in the early 90's. Rolling Green, our little microcosm of people... such amazing times... but that is for another time. Anyway, we would make up games. One, I remember, was a collection of street hockey, football, and ultimate frisbee. Or something like that. That was fun!! But anyway, I would walk around the neighborhood in the summer, with school out and not a thing to do but watch old reruns of Lost in Space, and I would try to find someone that would want to play something. I'd even settle for watching them play basketball (I didn't play very well. I was a wall. It wasn't fun.), but everyone was out at their respective Soccer camps. Organized sports, in whatever form, is an attempt by adults to bring structure and rules into a child's world. Sure, it is a chance for bonding, lessons to be learned, rules to be followed, the social hierarchy to be introduced. But it doesn't allow children to be what they are... children. It doesn't allow for the growth of the imagination, for the boundaries of creativity to be stretched beyond the goal lines.

Remember when... we were a'chasin' after Wooden Airplanes...
Yes I believe that was, the finest time.
~Art Garfunkel "Wooden Planes"

I believe that this lack of imagination is what will eventually kill the movie industry. The imagination of directors, to use props, fantastic new camera technologies, inventive sound effects mixing the rain forest with factory sounds (or something like that...) I've said before, I would much rather see the potato disguised as an asteroid than realize that everything I'm seeing is a computer generated image. It's what made (among other things) the Star Wars Prequels so bad. It's what makes most of the summer blockbuster movies ones that have a sequel number after them or ones adapted from movies made only a few years prior. I have had it with dozens of superhero movies every summer. I won't go see them... I will barely go see any other summer blockbuster movie. Too many explosions and useless scenes made for sensationalism instead of intelligent thought. I get the feeling that some directors use no imagination, not to mention thought at all. Speaking of science-fiction... I was having a conversation with a friend of mind, Steven, who was lamenting the fact that Legos have developed more into specific lines of toy brands, with mythologies and characters all their own, instead of giving children general blocks and instructions and waiting for them to do something with them. He said this, in Italics: 

"When Lego first started introducing their themed kits, the idea was that a child could be encouraged to use their imagination to build something completely different with the blocks provided, but they don't do that anymore. Pieces are custom designed to fit together in a specific way now to recreate some licensed product. They even have moving parts and "firing" missiles and "mini-figures". There's room for imaginative play, but no room for personal creativity. With the same set of Legos I built spaceships and magical swords and seagoing submersibles and all kinds of wacky things. The Lego sets represent an ongoing trend in "interactive" toys that seem to play with themselves. Nerf guns that work better than real firearms, action figures that talk and practically move on their own, and video games. Know what I had in my toy box when I was a kid, besides a collection of mismatched Legos? Sticks. Sticks that I found in the back yard (pine sticks can make very good "swords"). Sure, I had a huge collection of G.I. Joes at one point, and I had some pretty imaginative campaigns against the less well equipped Cobra forces, but give me a stick and some privacy in the woods behind the house, I was Conan the Space Marine. 

We must return the gift of imagination to our children. I see kids now walking around with their faces buried in tablets of glass and metal, as if worshiping this device, concentrating more on the game at hand and not on the world around them. Course, I sometimes think that the kids are simply afraid of nothingness, of what their brains might say or think or do if they didn't have the soccer camp, the cell phone, the constant stimuli. Might they find themselves growing up into adults, and find out that they had truly never lived? I sometimes think of myself as that Pedestrian in Ray Bradbury's short story of that name. In the world so consumed by technology that no one ever goes outside, a lone person walks, and, upon being stopped by the police, they find him crazy that he is not involved in the addictive stimuli provided at great length by society, and is carted off to some mental institution. (If you want to experience the story in an interesting fashion... with distractions of light, sound, and rhythm, what we would experience in the real world, try this Youtube Video of Ray Bradbury's story.)

I could just as easily used Gene Wilder's singing of "Pure Imagination," or the idea that The Neverending Story is a parallel of people losing their imagination to this world, resulting in the ominous cloud called The Nothing, but I think I'll leave you with a song, one that I bought originally on my High School Graduation night, on Peter, Paul, and Mary's Lifelines album. A song written by Buddy Mondlock, and in this video, sung by him, Art Garfunkel, and Maia Sharp:  "The Kid."

The Afterlife

The songs that buzz over our heads in the grocery stores or the malls, do we ever actually listen to them?  Sure, the idiots that put in commercials always seem to interrupt the best songs.  Cut off a Crosby Stills and Nash song, but let Michael Bolton go by unscathed. Honestly, I've always listened to the music while I worked, as it made the day go by quicker.  A song can take up 3 minutes of time, or more, and while working, it makes those minutes seem less stressful.  You tend to forget about the ticking of your watch and forget about what you want to be doing.  That, of course, is the reason, as it provides pleasure into an otherwise silent room.  Allan Bloom compared music to instant ecstasy, orgasm if you will (and that's for a later blog), and there have been studies that make disciplined decisions harder to make while in a sexual mood. See the book Predictably Irrational, Chapter 3, I think, for that study.  So people, hopefully, buy more because the music is on.  But I have digressed from the intent of this post.

***

Recently, we have been playing Paul Simon's So Beautiful, So What and k.d. lang's newest album.  Both have songs on them that describe Heaven. I found it odd that two recent albums would have such descriptions of the Afterlife, given that these are not Gospel albums at all.  Further, the depictions of the hereafter are much different than that of conventional Christian belief.  Paul Simon's take turns out to be a long line where you wait to see God, after filling out a form, much as you would at a voting station. In the song, the main character starts hitting on a woman in line, who, knowing that she was dead, just shakes her head.  Reminds me (as a sidebar) of the lines in Bob Dylan's "Talking World War III Blues," where the man fins a woman, suggests they go play "Adam and Eve," and the response is "You saw what happened last time that started."  Anyway, life is mirrored in the line that Paul Simon has us wait.  And yet when we get to God, someplace high in space, we have lost the words we were going to say, as if we had any to begin with.  Instead, we have a snippet of a song.



In k.d. lang's track, Heaven is a bar. A bar everyone wants to get to. One where everyone knows your name.  Now, as much as we want Heaven to be like Cheers, Lang states in the chorus that "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." Heaven is then compared to a party, where, after everyone gets there, the same thing happens over and over, and when the "party is over, it starts again / exactly the same."  This doesn't sound like a Heaven I would want to go to, and both images are frighteningly familiar.  They have created Heaven in the image of man's world, just as the images of Mount Olympus and the jealousies and tantrums of the Greek Gods parallel the actions of man.  What Paul Simon and k.d. lang forget is that God created us in His own image, not the other way around. 


Take Stargate SG-1, for instance. The place where the Ancients go as they are ascending looks a lot like a restaurant, where the papers report on the goings on of Anubis and other bad guys.  In Star Trek: Voyager,, the Q Continuum looks like a shack on some road in a western state.  Again, nothing ever happens in these places, and it all repeats itself for all eternity. 

A couple of other examples.  In Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief,, the underworld, guarded by Cerberus, is basically a long line in which people wait in to get into the world of Hades.  How pleasant. In Pullman's The Amber Spyglass , the afterlife is a bog full of dead zombie like people, colorless, lifeless.  Of course, for Pullman, God is the bad guy, and Heaven is another dimension which is working on controlling the rest (see the episodes of South Park in which Heaven starts a war, and Kenny is the hero.

These are not the Heavens of the Christian faith, although there are other ideas that are positive.  Look at the afterlife talked about in Final Fantasy VII, where all life joins the undercurrents of power and song that flow through the Earth, giving it beauty and life.



While this has no comparison to Heaven, I believe it could be compared, given the harmonies and music that are discovered in the strings of molecular particles such as Quarks.  I talked about this before, in my blog post here. 

There are so many other images of the Afterlife that are used in modern day works of culture.  Take the waiting room in Beetlejuice, or Heaven in the movie Defending your Life. In these depictions of what comes after, it is a mirror of today's world, where waiting and defending are all that is done.  There is no enjoyment of the passage of time, which is of the utmost importance since time is eternal.  In fact, that is the main point of this blog.  When we look at Heaven, we think of eternity as a linear time model.  But the Bible depicts God as being outside of time, the Alpha and Omega, so we surely cannot expect Heaven to be in a linear time frame.  Thus the idea of a waiting line doesn't work. We would exist in a time aspect that is far different from the model we understand today.  It would be more like the Prophet's universe on Star Trek: DS9.  Past, present, and future mean nothing in this time frame, but song and vibrating emotions do. 

People spend so much time thinking about what happens after you die.  I think more time needs to be spent living.  Even for Christians, there's a whole lot of livin' goin' on (Ernie Haase song) between the Cross and Heaven.  If we accept death, which we must, then life is so much easier to deal with.  And if we see the afterlife as some gloomy bog or an endless line, then there's no point in dying, no point in living. What would living morally, toward the virtues of some loving God, what would that matter?  We should try and live by our own beliefs, our own morals, those that we have adapted from our faith, from the lessons our parents and other elders have taught us, and then, believing in what we do, when we die, whatever happens, will happen.  Jesus was assuring us life after death, but was also assuring us life before that death.  Let's not worry about what it looks like, and make this life the best we can.

Music Review: Dar Williams, _Many Great Companions_

Anyone can throw a song together. Even songs that have some semblance of rhythm, theme, meaning. I even like some of those songs, as Gorillaz demonstrated. Look up the lyrics from the Demon Days album, and you'll not be able to make heads or tails of them. They're just words, put together with a dance beat, and they make a song. What makes Demon Days so effective is that the words they use, the images they conjure up in the mind are like paintings, of color and light, images that tell the complete story of a night's sleep, complete with storyline and symbolism. But the songs themselves aren't stories, but fragments of them.

Paul Simon said that on his trek through the countries of Africa, discovering the beats and tunes that would become his Graceland album, that he learned how to not make songs so linear, so symmetrical. This allows him to use imagery in more of an impressionist fashion, where nothing is solid and plot driven as, say, "The Boxer." Story-songs are not inferior, however, just different. Each strand of songlines become a different type of painting, just as a Monet piece is just as valuable as a portrait by Van Gogh, or a landscape by Turner.

So we've looked at some of the masters of songwriting, and in America there are many that have graces our culture with sound and song. I've always said, that if the Earth becomes overcome with everything and we need to depart it like the Robinson's did on Lost in Space, they would have to take a database of the world's finest works with them. But which would you choose? Arthur C. Clarke decided to eliminate anything that dealt with the biases of Earth, which unfortunately meant ridding the colonists and their descendants of all Religious texts and imagery. But what would you include from the genre of the Popular Song? Sinatra? Dylan? Cher? How about songwriters such as James Taylor or Elton John? There are too many to count, and too many "popular" popular songs that probably should be left out. I don't think you would include the Macarena in the mix, or "The Thong Song," even though they were extremely popular at the time. You have to delve into the art form and find those that truly represent the art form.

I would argue that Dar Williams' work, especially those of her greatest his album, Many Great Companions, would qualify to be included. The intimacy of her lyrics, the complexity of the symbolism, her mastery of using words and music together to paint an image is so precise. She is part of a lineage of songwriter that goes back to the folk days of the 1960's, from Joan Baez, Carly Simon, and James Taylor. As long as the songwriters keep writing, the art form of the Popular Song is in good hands. While we groan over the puerile lyrics of Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber, we can appreciate that there are artists like Dar Williams and David Gray, amongst others, that are writing for the intelligent admirers of song and art.



Especially poignant on this album is "February," which uses symbolism to parallel the weather and the settings of the seasons with a fallen relationship. Also, "When I Was A Boy," tells of a woman who, in her youth, lived as a boy, and then grew up to see how image driven the world is, stereotyping men and women into one form or another. Her songs tell of growing up, losing the innocence of childhood and experiencing the changes in spirituality, of the relationship between teenagers and God. Such fine music. If nothing else, pick up the greatest hits album, the second CD, as mp3 files. You won't be disappointed, and maybe the lines of color and light will come through for you, too.