The Storyteller

What will the world be like when there are no more stories to tell? When the tales that are told come from Hollywood, and the windows at night are filled with the blue flickering fluorescence of the Television screens. How will we know our neighbors, or even our own families? When children ignore the memories of their elders by sticking their faces into the nearest tablet, futuristic Game Boys with touch screens and instant access to the world's entertainment, but no memories of days gone by.  No, we will not know the people who live just down the hall.  And it's a shame. The rocking chairs will become brittle from non-use.  I know when I finally get a house of my own, it shall have a front porch and a rocking chair.  In the evenings, after the hot sun has gone down, the only flickering I will see, as I sit in my rocking chair with my book, will be the bioluminescence of the Fireflies.  The book will tell me stories.

But I remember when my parents would tell me memories from their childhood. I have memories of things that happened way before I was born.  I remember my mother, on one cold Christmas break when she was a child, learning she had measles, and screaming out MEASLES!!, or my grandfather, having a nightmare, only half conscious, yelling out "I've got a gun! I'm gonna shoot!" repeatedly, and they lived in a duplex, so the other half of the house could hear him threatening violence.  I remember my dad, not having any tact at restaurants, making a big deal over getting out his pocket knife to cut his steak.  (That runs in the family... I have no bones about getting my own silverware or even a refill if I can reach the pitcher.)  I was there for none of those things.  They are all stories that my mother and grandmother told me, over and over, until they became my own memories.  But our children will not have those memories, at least, that's what I fear.
***

I'll be honest with my recent housecleaning.  Since the funeral, I've been going through the house and carrying boxes with me.  Trash Box / Garage Sale Box / Keep Box. The first two have vastly outweighed the third.  I cannot come right out and call my mom a hoarder, because I don't think that was quite it.  The way I look at it, she saw an object and attached an emotion, a memory, to each thing.  The garland on the Christmas Tree would be the decoration, but the memory would be the box it had come in, those that were barely hanging together (and I surreptitiously threw away several years ago).  She kept almost all the clothing she wore throughout her entire adult life, because the memories attached were the things she did while wearing those clothes.

Ah the memories... and look
 at the space it consumes.

I understand this feeling; I do the same things, to some extent.  I have 7 Commodore 64's in my closet, hoping that I would get a power supply that worked (I only have one, and it barely does), and so I could actually use one.  Which is silly... I have emulators on my PC with all the games I could ever think about playing on the C64.  But the memories of playing those games, of beating Blue Max or Zaxxon (which my dad and his neighbor would sneak out of church, go to the corner cafe, which had Zaxxon as a coin-operated video game, and play it instead of hearing God's word.), that's what I attach to the machines themselves.  I've learned, however, to look ahead at my life, or rather, to the end of it, and see where those memories go. Do I want my relatives tossing out all my junk, or selling to some stranger who may or may not have those same memories?  What stories do those objects tell? Like most idols of biblical times, they say nothing.  The stones are silent.  We can tell a way of life, a preference of color, of sound, but that's about it.  I'm not saying that we need to be like my grandmother, who felt that the more she gave/threw away, the closer she would get to heaven.  There has to be a happy medium. The message should speak out through the things you keep, not buried in the things to be thrown away.

You see, to me, the objects tell stories because the memories are silent.  There's no one rocking in that chair anymore, they are all watching Reality TV in the living room.  Should we know our parents and grandparents only by the stuff in their dresser drawers?  And nowadays, stuff is inundating us.  Every time we go to the store, the kids want a toy, or a book, or a whatever-that-thing-is-next-to-the-register.  And we take it home, and it sits on the bedroom floor for a while, forgotten, but if we go to pick it up and throw it away, a hissy-fit is sure to ensue.  You see, the child has instilled the act of getting that thing, the attention of the parent, with the thing itself.  The more stuff someone has, the more love they have received.

I knew a family in Milledgeville, where I went to college, who had to move every now and again due to lack of funds.  Usually, they had to leave their stuff behind and start all over.  The only things that were constant were the hand drawn pictures on the living room walls, the pictures.  That was about it.  And she sat in the rocking chairs in the front of her house and told stories of her life, and that of her children, endlessly, until those memories became mine because I knew them.  They were poor, but they needed little in the way of "material goods," to make them happy.  I'm sure that's not always the case.  Everyone would like a new television or a new cell phone or the latest book.  It's the perspective that I admire.  Richness in perspective.
***

You know my favorite character in the world of Fraggle Rock? Jim Henson voices the wise Fraggle Cantus, the Minstrel.  He is a storyteller, much like Henson himself.  Of course, with everything in Fraggle Rock, it is all done with music.  He goes about the rock singing songs and telling stories.  I wish that was what I could do.  Listen to the songs of the people here, on this Earth, and tell their stories.  Because it's those memories that live on in the minds of others.  The souvenirs will all rot away in the landfills, but the memories behind them will go on, if we tell the stories enough.  Never in this world have we had so much ability to keep the stories of our family alive, with pictures, movies, webcams, cell phones, Youtube, the Internet... and never before have we kept those voices quiet.  Why do that when we can stuff our mouths full of cinnamon and put that on Youtube? We let entertainment get in the way of memory and wisdom.  So much wisdom, and we're going to let it slip away... and look where that has got us.  Look at the world now... it's not pretty.  Gather ye junkpiles while ye may, for one bursted bubble (economically speaking,) and we're all toast.  It's a negative way of looking at things.  I know.  That's why it's so important to understand how to just get up and move, without the junk, and have all those memories stored away inside yourself.  They can all still be passed down, just without the coffee cup found at a garage sale to illustrate it.  Shrink all your belongings into one room.  How important, then, is each thing.  We have let material inflation catch up with us.  Reduce the supply, and increase the value.  And yet, each memory is priceless.  The thing represents the dollar, the memories behind it are the gold bars residing in Fort Knox.  And more.  We should hoard the gold, the memories, not the items that represent them. When we pass those on to our children, they shall be wealthy indeed, and far better off for it.

Musical Potatoes and Painted Shoes.

Sometimes it's better to see the strings.  Sometimes it's better to have asteroids as potatoes and painted shoes.  If you're making a movie, and all the setting and non-human characters are created by computer, if the star of the film is sitting in front of a monitor someplace manipulating images, it's likely to pull down the film.  When I think of my favorite movies, Where the Wild Things Are, The Neverending Story, and the original Star Wars movies, most things were made of costumes, models, giant sets.  A minimal amounts of green screens.  Actors nowadays will never know how to interact with their settings, as they are all acting in front of a screen made to digitally manipulate images.  I mean, why shoot a film out at the ocean? Just create the scene, put sand on the ground, and get the right sound effect files from the studio  computer.  Jaws would (and is, have you seen the Syfy movies recently?) be so much easier to make.  No need for skinnydipping scenes and blood and the sound of actual orchestras.  Just create the sounds of the cellos on computer.  We don't need the flute players anymore.  They should go get a real job.

Of course, I'm being highly sarcastic.  Star Wars would be nothing without John Williams and his brilliance.  But maybe, just maybe, if Yoda were a puppet, and the city of Naboo had been made in some set in Brazil, maybe the new movies would have been better.  Heck, people might have actually enjoyed Jar Jar Binks, instead of finding ways of killing him.  The same thing goes with the music of any movie.  But usually movies have budgets big enough to have a big name composer create a score for it.  What happens when you are trying to make a video game, and it's the 1980's, and the technology isn't there for orchestral works, and your budget is slim?  Well,  you make your musical scores out of potatoes and painted shoes. Lets go for a musical adventure through some of the video games that I dearly loved as a child, not for the game itself, necessarily (although they were all great games), but for the music that artists do not get enough credit for, even after leaving tunes in people's heads for years.

There is no one who lived during the 1980's, and picked up the Nintendo controller, that can't instantly recall the theme for Super Mario Brothers.  But let's go back farther than that, to the days of the Commodore 64.  I must say, before I start this, that without the people that use Youtube as a place to store the history of mankind, from videos to TV to music to historical events, like Yeats' Graecian Urn, most of these pieces would be forgotten.  Let us hope that Youtube retains its function as a time capsule for future people to experience the amazing things that our generation has created.

Dig Dug  The melody track has basically two notes, with the other tracks going around it.  Dig Dug took the annoying siren noise of Pac-Man and turned it into something worth listening to.  And don't tell me that the modern day games are hard... they're nothing compared with the primitive AI of the Dragons that like nothing more than to breathe fire at you before you can blow them up.

        Another version, played on the piano.






Necromancer, by Synapse Software, was amazing, if you kept an open mind.  Grow trees to crush spiders, so the spiders won't grow and attack you while you fight the evil wizard.  It's the beginning song that makes the whole game, tho.







Or if you want to play the game, click here: C64s.com.

Star Soldier and Gyruss.  Nothing like space shooter games, where the space ships can bomb and blast everything in the air and on the planets below.  Actually, I loved Zaxxon from the C64 days, but when the Nintendo came out, these two were the best space games made, in my opinion.  Power ups, spaceships that are everywhere (think Galaga), but you've got to have the stimulating music to match the weaponry, something to activate my ADOS (Attention Deficit Oooh Shiny!).  These both do it well.....












And speaking of stimulating, you can't go wrong with the Intro Theme of Double Dragon. I was never any good at fighting games, but the music on this one was amazing!

 

And before I leave Nintendo World (which, honestly, I could go forever about Zelda and SMB...etc...), there is no video game company which was better at combining graphics, music, and, well, everything, than Capcom, especially the Mega Man series.  Mega Man 2 I would play just for the music.  I'll put the Bubble Man stage here, just because it fits so well with my next point about video game music. 

There's something about water levels and video game music. The 3/4 time of Super Mario Bros, level 2-2 is among the first actual "water" levels that I remember. When 16-bit music came out, composers used the water levels in games to let their ideas shine. The water levels were the soothing, ambient levels, where you could take the level, put the music on loop, and chill for an hour or two. Take Donkey Kong Country, for instance. I'm going to include a track on here now that is actually a remix from OCRemix which amplifies the original score. Just listen...

Perhaps the best water level music comes from the Playstation, from Final Fantasy VIII, the Fisherman's Warf level. Also check out OCRemix artist Tepid's version of it, which I have put on loop in my car and listened to it while I drove: You'll have to click here to listen to it.

Final Fantasy has such wonderful themes, so I'll put 2 more here and then leave it at that.  What I'm trying to point out is that, while the Orchestral works of modern day games are beautiful and, in some cases, easy to make, the beauty that these composers made with just the most basic of electronic music technology is well worth listening, too.  Discover the songs from your favorite games, and then see if there's any great Remixes done on OCRemix.  Below is Relm's Theme from FFVI and then the final theme from Final Fantasy Legend from Game Boy. For the Game Boy theme, click on this link: This Link Here.

 

Commodore 64s, Mustangs, and Norman Rockwell

No, I'm not going to start waxing poetic about the ancient computers rotting away in my closet. It's odd that I should even have them. I mean, there's not much I can do with them. I have one power supply that barely works, no monitor that will work except the TV in the living room, and the disk drive loads up disks in about an hour. Plus the fact that I have all the games I love to play on the emulator programs on my ultra-fast PC computer that cost about half what my parents bought the C64 at Service Merchandise 25 years ago.

So why do I have the things? Come to think of it, why does my mom still have her 76 Mustang rotting away at the bottom of the driveway, even though some people have offered good money to take it away to restore it to its former sexy beauty (how I used to lay in the back seat while going to the doctor, throwing up, or on hot days coloring in books, only to have the crayons melt all over the back of the fold down back seats. Or looking up at the stars in the back, without seat belts, seeing stars that most people nowadays will never see because the lights are too bright and they're all inside twittering anyway.

Obviously, these material things are tied to past memories. Ones that, yeah, we could get rid of the actual things and still have those memories, but human nature just doesn't work like that. Sure, I could be Thoreau, living at his log cabin at Walden Pound, imagining the people walking around with their stuff stacked on their backs like Indian merchants who used elephants to sell their wares. There's so much stuff that we keep because there's memories that are tied to those things. Memories just aren't permanent. We need photos or movie ticket stubs, or old computers and rusty cars, or the wedding ring stuffed inside the sock drawer to remind us of those memories, both good and bad, of older times.

And while I've talked about Nostalgia many times before, there are things that I have experienced recently that show how much we try to keep the past with us. To recollect in times of peaceful contemplation. The idea of a memory restored, in the notes of a song, in the paint strokes of a master, in the rusty carcass of some old, beloved machine, now long ceasing.

Shana, one of my Facebook friends, posted a link to a Youtube video, one that has a portion of a Sesame Street song from long ago. It's easy to find, just go to Youtube and look up Vintage Sesame Street. Any one will do. Where did those old TV shows go, anyway? Now, with these days of "Reality" TV shows and endless, nauseating examples of the back-stabbing, base, immoral ways that humans treat each other. That 3 year olds probably could tell you more about MTV than PBS. Then you go on the Internet and there are, amongst the porn sites and videos of girls beating each other senseless, videos on Youtube that bring back the joy of the TV. Sesame Street, Pinwheel, the list is endless, of shows that we watched as children. And now we can enjoy them all again from Youtube or from DVDs or Hulu.com, or whereever. But what is that we would watch these silly cartoons when reality is so complex? It doesn't make any sense. Except it does, as we're not watching the shows for themselves, but as a way of remembering times when those shows were new. To experience again the quiet Saturday mornings when the TV would be on, showing cartoons, and the sunshine would come through the blinds and show up as rays bouncing off of dust. It's not the TV shows themselves, but rather the memories stored with them.

People have been doing this for centuries, even before television. In the 1800's, Britian enjoyed the landscape paintings of Mallord William Turner, who, along with Wordsworth and Colridge and others ushered in the Romantic age. The ironic thing is that, while aristocrats and art lovers gazed on at the forests and idyllic glades of Turner, the Industrial Revolution had just chopped down all of England's forests, leaving the landscape empty and barren. We only appreciate that which is being destroyed. Else, we take it for granted.

But back to TV. Recently I procured a copy of the movie Maya(1966), staring Jay North (Dennis the Menace), in an effort to get movies and shows that I had watched as a kid (and, okay, as an adult, too. :) ) I just got through watching it, and I did some research on it, as I remember seeing the TV series by the same name on TNT in the early 90's. Turns out, there were 18 episodes made of the show, filmed all in India. It enjoyed good ratings, but was canceled after only one season, because filming entirely in India was too expensive. This last chance for Jay North to continue his career was evaporated by budgeting. But anyway.... the movie is very good, one that brings out the Romance of a foreign country, wild surroundings, rogues, ruffians, snakes, tigers, elephants. It very much reminded me of the recent Secondhand Lions which was, ironically, the last movie made by Haley Joel Osment before he did his little car/pot accident thing, and succumbed to Child Actor Syndrome. Action, moral lessons, in the vein of Tom Sawyer or other adventures. But these adventures are things that children aren't experiencing anymore, since they are all inside playing their Guitar Hero, or on the Soccer field playing organized games from age 4 on up.

In this instance, childhood is very much like the landscapes that Turner made. We are destroying childhood, and so we create works of art that remind us of those days. Take the art of Norman Rockwell, or the recent flood of books, like The Dangerous Book for Boys, which teaches boys how to be boys again (there are books for girls, too, which brings up the argument of if this is all being destroyed by sexism, but that's for later). Kids are being felled by real life just as the British trees were cut down and used for mass production.

So we keep our old stuff, and watch our Youtube videos, and dream of days when things weren't so complicated, and then we go about our new-fangled lives. I guess, if keeping those old things around might get us to slow down a little, take a break, maybe it's a good thing.