The Soundtrack (?) of my Life

I usually ignore stuff like this, but a friend sent it to me and it gives me an excuse to listen to my new Ipod dock.  And write something.  The 'pod is on random, and these are the first 17 songs that come up:

Opening Credits:
Won't Get Fooled Again-The Who  This would seem to imply that I've been this way at least once before, or maybe in a previous life I was David Caruso.  "What we do know, is that I was once a cow, and it's time to slaughter the butcher."

Waking Up:
Shiny Happy People-REM  This could not be more wrong, unless the next line is "that I've shot because I hate people in the morning." 

First Day At School:
Picnic-Sideways movie soundtrack  "Wine Safari" from this movie would have been a better choice, as I frequently felt like I wandered while walking to school for ten years (except I never drank any wine en route).

Falling In Love:
Fade Into You-Mazzy Star  Gag.  Let's just move on. 

Fight Song:
South Central Rain-REM  Does the fact that Michael Stipe whines "I'm Sorry" five billion times in this song mean I am a wuss?

Breaking Up:
Down to the River to Pray-Allison Krauss/O Brother Wher Art Thou soundtrack  I don't think I've ever broke up with anyone, and if I had, I don't think I would have felt the urge to go down to the river.  Unless it was to live in a van.

Prom:
In the Evening-Led Zeppelin  Went to two proms, and they were both in the evening.  OOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Life:
Boy in the Bubble-Paul Simon  Perfect, until five or so years ago.

Mental Breakdown:
Are You Some Kind of Hypnotist?-The Flaming Lips  Well, are you?  I can't think of anything else to say.  These walls sure are pretty!

Driving:
Some Might Say-Oasis  This is indeed one of my all time favorite driving songs.

Flashback:
All She Wants to Do is Dance-Don Henley  No literal connection here, though this song was playing at an exact pointin time circa 1985 that I would like to forget about completely, and no, I am not elaborating.  I saw the video for this song on "The Tube" this morning and now I have been reminded of this incident twice in ten hours.  I shall now scrub my hippocampus with a brillo pad.

Wedding:
Reelin' in the Years-Steely Dan  You've been telling me that you're a genius since you were seventeen.  After all this time I still don't know what you mean!

Birth of Child:
Signs of Love-Moby  Considering the refrain of this song is "I fly so high, then fall so low" I am led to believe that when we do have a child, he/she will either be born on an airplane or will be a complete hellion.

Final Battle:
Marble Halls-Enya  Does this mean that I am to die amongst that hallowed fields of Ireland?  Or do I trip in a hallway strewn with many marbles?

Death Scene:
Crazy Love-Paul Simon  This makes absolutely no sense.  There's nothing in the song about death.  If I were to die to this song, people would come to my grave and mock me endlessly.  "Nice death scene, Shakespeare."

Funeral Song:
Across the River-Bruce Hornsby  Fun.  Apparently I can make my reservation to go across the Styx.  Like I will sleep tonight.  Charon-party of one?

End Credit:
Just a Job to Do-Genesis  That's it?  And lo the irony of having a life end with a song from the band named after the book of the Bible that covers creation.  That'll learn me.

Three down, two to go

It's been a long two weeks.  I hope Alec Baldwin was enough to tide everyone (all seven of you) over.  It still cracks me up every single time.

Today was the official end of my third semester as a graduate student.  Two more to go before I return to the Real World after what will then be a five year absence. 

Wow.  I have to let that sink in for a second.

This was a strange semester.  First, because of scheduling conflicts (the university's, not mine) I only took two classes, as opposed to three in each of my prior semesters.  Despite this, I felt much busier this semester than I ever did in times before.  I'm not really sure why.  I do know that my nonfiction workshop (my concentration) had more assignments than any other I've taken, and the literature class (on film, thank goodness) kept my interest, so I was always up for some work.

No matter how well I think I plan, the last few weeks of every semester always kick me in the back side.  First was a fifteen page paper on Eastwood's Unforgiven that I turned into eighteen pages. I had a lot of things to say.  Three days later I had a "profile" assignment due in nonfiction, one that I did not particularly enjoy and resulted in me spending more time on it than I anticipated because I thought it was crap.  I hate turning in crap.  It was received better than I expected, but I'm still not happy with it.  After that, I had to prepare for a final oral assignment on American Beauty. 

Right now, one of my ideas of hell is a double feature of Unforgiven and American Beauty.  Don't get me wrong, I love both movies, but I've seen enough of both to last until 2010.

Then on the 12th I had the Democracy Burlesque show (they might want to think about updating their website. I'm just saying)-more on this later.  After that, my final portfolio was due for nonfiction . . . blah blah blah.  Is this even interesting?

I did have a reading Friday downtown, and I nailed it.  Two "public" appearances in four days.  Obviously I am still asleep.

I'm looking forward to a little down time, but in all honesty I have a ton of stuff to do.  I have a pile of reading material in my basement that has to be dealt with before it spontaneously-combusts (which is what my wife will swear happened as she holds the smoldering match in her hand, and I can't say that I will blame her) and I have to start organizing my thesis since this upcoming semester is when I start turning in portions of it for review.  I have a lot of material written so I am not worried about content, but I am concerned about style.  Whatever.  It is going to keep me plenty busy.  The start of the next semester is five weeks away.

I need to do better at keeping this up to date as well.  I always write better in the other parts of my life when I visit here and update often.

Back to the twelfth: it was fun, interesting to see people performing something you wrote, knowing what words are going to come next (and cringing when they are messed up) and gauging reaction to what you thought was going to happen.  There were some lines that I thought were hysterical that got nothing, and parts that I thought were just filler that got a lot of laughs.  I got great support from my family, my brother, sister-in-law, mother and wife were all able to attend.

And, as we will see, my brother is quite talented with the video camera.  Here it is, in all it's glory: "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year."

(It does have some salty language, if that stuff offends you.  Not a lot, but fair warning.)

 

 

"I'm metal from the waist down!"

Don't know how long this will stay up, as NBC usually gets snarky and makes youtube remove anything posted from SNL as soon as they realize it is on there. I hardly ever watch the show anymore becomes it just isn't funny, but if they made Alec Baldwin the permanent host, I'd never miss it again.

Back to you in the studio, moron

Wow.  I just learned something from watching the local news:

Sometimes, it SNOWS in Chicago!

What a bunch of troglodytes we have for a news media here.  Tomorrow is December 1 and to ring in the new month we are going to be socked good by a major snowstorm, maybe even a blizzard.  If you watch the news, you'd think it never happened before.

Let's go live to a local hardware store and see what people are buying!  Snow shovels?  Salt? A snowblower or two?  WOW!  I'd think lawn mowers would be HOT this time of year, you know, gifts for your favorite lawn care professional.

Over at the grocery store, people are stocking up on water and other assorted types of food?  You're kidding!  I would think that with the impending storm that folks would be making dinner reservations at restaurants all over the city.  Who wants to be stuck inside cooking in winter weather?

I actually heard someone on a broadcast this afternoon say "Don't go outside tomorrow without a jacket."  Can I still bring my SPF 3,212?

But the best news coverage will come when the storm is over, and your faithful roving reporter will head out to the side streets of the city to report on what people are using to "save" parking spots that they have shoveled out for themselves.  I can't wait to see the assortment of lawn chairs, card tables, and garbage cans.

Remind me again why I have a television?

We all got it coming, kid

I watched two movies last Friday.

It was a mighty depressing day.  I had trouble sleeping so I was up early, by seven, after only a few hours sleep.  It was overcast outside, the clouds hanging low enough to feel them breathing on your neck.  I was flipping through the channels when I came across a movie on the Independent Film Channel that was just starting, called The Grey Zone.  I had never heard of it.  It tells the story of a certain group of Jewish people at Auschwitz, the Sonderkomando, (can't find anything on line to adequately explain them better than I can after seeing this movie), who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoriums of the camp.  It was a positively gut-wrenching movie, as brutal a depiction of the Holocaust as anything I have ever seen, read or heard.  Throughout I kept telling myself that I was going to be massively depressed if I kept watching to the finish but I couldn't turn it off.  I felt obligated to watch the whole thing.

It's a powerful movie, but it is extremely difficult to watch.  And it did its job, adding to an already miserable day.  Man, was I down by noon Friday.  I got testy with a telemarketer who had the unfortunate fate of calling here in the early afternoon.  I usually do not answer calls that I don't recognize, but I was in the mood to make someone else miserable.  I also fell off a chair onto a hardwood floor reaching for something by my desk, one of those moments when it seems like you are moving in slow motion, long enough for you to think "I'm going to hit the floor hard, and it's going to really hurt."  I landed on my hip.  Good thing I am not forty years older.

In the late afternoon, I watched A Prairie Home Companion.  I enjoyed it, but it's not exactly a pick-me-up film either.  There's a ton of references to death, both literal and figurative.  It's a movie that reminds you constantly that you are going to die someday.

The movie was directed by Robert Altman, whose "someday" came yesterday at the ripe old age of 81 (insert trumpets ofirony here).  There's a profound line in the middle of the movie: "The death of an old man is not a tragedy."  That's correct.  I don't think I have ever heard of the death of someone in their eighties and thought "what a tragedy."  Rather I tend to think how fortunate that person was, to have lived that long and experience so much.  It's staggering to think about all the things that have happened in this world since 1925.

But then I remember the scenes in the first movie showing the bodies of children being tossed into mass graves, and I am reminded that there are no guarantees that any of us will live as long as Robert Altman.  Who knows, I might not even live another 81 more minutes.

(I have to go to the dentist tomorrow.  I will not miss that when I am dead.)

I'm starting to ramble.  I probably should have not watched another movie today, but I am taking a film class this semester and have to write a final paper on a film of my choice.  I wanted to select a film that I really like, and after making a list of about ten possibilities I decided on Unforgiven. Again, not exactly a pick-me-up but it's such a beautifully shot film.  I love the underlying theme of redemption in the movie.  It has a lot of great scenes, and the best is towards the end. Will Munny (Clint Eastwood) and the Scholfied kid are in a field, the kid sitting against a tree, falling apart because he just killed someone for the first time.  He starts talking about how unbelievable it is, that the man he killed isn't ever going to breathe again, and then takes a big swig from a bottle of whiskey, holding back tears.  The camera cuts to Eastwood, we see the gray sky behind him and hear the wind.  It's quiet for a moment.  What follows is my all-time favorite dialogue in movie history: 

Will Munny: It's a hell of a thing, killing a man.  You take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have.
The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess he had it coming.
Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

Indeed, we do.

 

 

Blatant self-promotion, part 57

Last spring I took a class on play writing.  I went into it with no prior experience and wasn't sure what to expect.  It focused more on writing actual scenes than full plays, so I wound up writing about ten different works through the course of the semester.  I enjoyed the class.

I got a message at the start of the fall semester from the gentleman who taught the class that he was interested in producing one of my scenes, which took me by complete surprise.  Tonight, after a few re-writes, I have found out that it will be performed in December.  It's part of a review entitled "Democracy Burlesque."  The piece itself is entitled "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and deals with the tropical vacation happenings of a few mythological characters.  I don't want to say more because it has a few twists to it, on the off-chance that one of my twelve readers might actually see it!

If I had written a book, I'd be known officially now as a "published author" but I have no idea what this will make me.  No matter, it's an exceptional feeling.

Bears game? What Bears game?

You will watch this many, many times. There will be times when you watch only the ball. There will be times when you watch only the goalie. There will be times when you will close your eyes and just listen. This is only four seconds long. You will spend so much more time than that watching this again and again.