BunnyBlinks

Last week, my friend John and I were discussing the movie at a favorite local restaurant, whose kitchen, by the way, is lovingly managed by my friend, the culinary genius Chef Jen. The restaurant sits across the street from Madison’s Barrymore Theater, whose marquee is more likely to advertise a sold-out John Prine or Moe show than something I’d be more likely to attend. (For the record, I’ve seen a few amazing shows there during my time in Madison: I’ll never forget dancing to Moby’s “Go,” after which he commented on the appropriateness of the faint, twinkling light’s on the theater’s ceiling, nor could I ever forget Cibo Mato’s sexily slogging hard-core cover of “Welcome to the Jungle” — if anyone is able to find a clip of them playing that song, please send it my way.)

Anyway, the movie includes a few scenes where Dustin Hoffman’s character gives us a lesson on narrative, and John and I were discussing one of the main (and self-referential) themes of the film: does this particular screenplay (and the fictional novel whose writing the screenplay examines) have to be a tragedy — this kind of tragedy, not this — for the story to have any value?

Staring across the street at The Barrymore, I remembered how Michael Franti had recently performed there. I missed the show, and the accounts of my many friends who attended suggest I missed a good time. I’ve never listened to much of Franti’s music, in part, I suppose, because what I’ve heard is a little too overtly political lyrically for my ear to nuance it in a way that can make the music enjoyable for me. (Franti’s audience might’ve been an issue for me some years ago, but these are different times, and I’d like to think I’m over my old hang-ups.)

Drawing on our respective fields of study, John and I discussed a few plots and heroes before I suggested that our mutual distaste for the “Hollywood ending” was arguably rooted more in a distaste for predictability than a belief that a character has to die.

I thought about the first time I’d heard “We Don’t Stop,” which was one of only a few Franti songs I’d heard when it came out in 2003, a year by which many of us had come to internalize the sense of depression and futility with which the Bush regime was weighing us down. No one seemed to listen to our complaints, and the few heroic voices we could seek out were so faint they didn’t need to be silenced. They just were ignored.

“We Don’t Stop” struck me as different. Its message was political, critical, and even artistically expressed. The music demanded we remember we could still dance, and not simply to escape the reality that we’d somehow allowed W to not only come to power, but to take away our own. I won’t entirely dismiss Franti’s neo-neo-Adornian critics (of the non-academic world — I admit they might not call themselves that), that his music is so polished, poppy, and over-produced that the lyrics are rendered trite, or somehow inauthentic. Still, the song is a good opening for a discussion of contemporary artistic responses to tragedy. Do heroes have to die? Is it wrong to experience joy if we seek to accept responsibility for our political sins?

“We Don’t Stop,” like Stranger then Fiction, makes a good case for preserving the life of the hero. Who could possibly wish harm upon this guy, who was inspired by the song to do, um, whatever this is:

The funky beats of “We Don’t Stop” give us permission to accept that there really is hope.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Yesterday’s speech was given to a general (not exclusively religious) audience, and so I wasn’t dreading the eventual onset of offensiveness that inevitably spills from the mouths of most other famous preachers. In fact, I quite enjoyed the romp. It was funny (check out the part beginning @ 3:05 in the above clip).

What got me most, though, was the music lesson (beginning @ 5:40). Sure, a musicologist would want to nuance Wright’s words a bit more, in an effort to be critical of the race-based generalities he discusses as if they were absolute truths. Still, it’s not often we get the chance to hear (ethno)musicology mentioned in the mainstream media, let alone the chance to hear time signatures discussed and solfege performed as if both were shared components of American cultural practices.

Wright’s pretty much right on this one, doncha think? I know James Brown liked to think he shifted the beat of his band to “the one,” but that doesn’t jive with where we clap, does it?

Yes, of course, some of that stuff is awful, but political fighting is harsh, and if women are going to be in it — really in it, as Hillary is — they’ll have to get knocked around. I’m not going to wring my hands over this. It’s part of progress. Males are savaged too. It means they’re taken seriously.