We all know the saying, don’t we? Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. Well apparently the government of Burma wants to test that theory out.
Don’t they have Youtube in Burma? Someone needs to show them the old videos of cops using attack dogs on unarmed blacks during the civil rights movement, and explain to them exactly how bad it looks when you open fire on Buddhist monks. (Or any other kind of monk, for that matter.) Here’s a clue, guys – you don’t come out looking like big studs when you shoot unarmed pacifists. And are you really thinking the monks are going to cave? First of all, these guys believe that they will be reincarnated (and dying a hero has to help you on the grand karmic scale, right?) and second of all, these dudes used to SET THEMSELVES ON FIRE to protest the Vietnam War. (Well, not the actual same dudes.) So they’ve established a Clint Eastwood-esque aura of toughness… or should I have said Bruce Lee?
You know how sometimes you have an idea rolling around in your head for a while, and then something happens that crystallizes your thoughts perfectly? Well, that has just happened to me.
Britney Spears had an ill-fated comeback performance on the MTV Music Video Awards. Now, apparently it was bad on a number of levels (I didn’t see it myself). According to news reports I read, her lip synching was off, she missed her marks for the dance routine, and was just generally completely uninspired. But what almost everyone seems to be focused on is that “she’s fat.” (Fat, of course, being a relative term.) For her part, Britney apparently insisted on wearing what was essentially a black bikini on stage, which kind of made it easier to pick out flaws in her body.
First of all, I don’t love or hate Britney. To me, she’s just the poster child for what’s wrong with the music industry today. It’s all flash and no substance. It’s about the 20 tracks of vocals and instruments overlaid to cover the fact that the artist can’t really sing. Sure s/he can carry a tune, but they can’t sing. Then there’s a highly polished stage show, featuring lots of skin, flash and dance moves, so you are mesmerized away from the fact that the person is lip synching instead of singing (call me old fashioned, but if I pay $50 to go to a concert, the artist had better freaking sing). Britney is not the progenitor of this concept, so it’s not like I’m blaming “the day the music died” on her. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember Madonna and Janet Jackson kind of starting the lip synching dance tours (just like Solid Gold, complete with cheesy dancers!) so the idea is probably older than Britney is. All this is not even bringing up the ridiculous lyrics of most songs today. That’s a whole nother post.
Anyhoo, my point (and I do have one) is this:
Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about musicians of a different era: Ella Fitzgerald, Kate Smith, Sarah Vaughan… those women could sing. Good Lord, could they sing! Try and picture any one of those women having a successful music career today, though. My God, they’re fat! Even folks like Louie Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and (dare I say it?) Frank Sinatra might have trouble getting a contract today – after all, they didn’t have fab bods either! (Dean Martin and Perry Como, on the other hand… they’d probably be big stars.)
In a nutshell, that’s why I don’t like 99% of today’s music. I don’t want to hear high-tech mixing to make up for lack of talent. I want to hear singers. I want to hear Ella sing “Mack the Knife” and know that I could never sing like that. I want to be left awe-inspired.
The really telling part to me about the latest Britney fiasco is this: she insisted on wearing next to nothing on stage. Evidently, they tried to talk her out of it. I think that is really the flash point: she knows. She gets it. On some level, she knows it’s not about her voice. It’s about her body. So she tried to give the public what they wanted, and they ripped her apart for it.
Me, I’ll take Ella any day. If you’ve never actually heard any of these people sing, check them out. You Tube has all kinds of videos of them singing on old TV shows. A lot of the footage is still around. Watch some of it, and see what true talent looked like. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that decades ago, Ella was discriminated against for her race, but even racists knew talent when they saw it. She would be discriminated against today too, but for her weight, not her color. And today, I don’t know that anyone would give her the time of day.
And Ella singing “Mack the Knife” – well. Watch it. It’s black and white, it’s fuzzy, and yet… you won’t be able to take your eyes off her. Her talent, her enjoyment of what she’s doing (she knows she’s kicking that song’s ***), her sparkle – it’s an amazing thing to watch.
Here’s Ella – in London in 1961. If you don’t have time to watch the entire 8:24, Mack the Knife comes in at approximately 4:20. (The first song is great too – Lady Be Good.)
OK, I’m in a bad mood, so that probably doesn’t help matters much, but I’m sorry. Johnny Depp gave an interview in Rolling Stone recently where he talked about Keith Richards, and how cool he is.
What exactly is cool about watching a 60-something guy stumble and teeter around and try desperately to pretend he’s still 25?
Frankly, his sort of antics aren’t even cool when you’re 25, but they are just pathetic when you’re 65.
And it’s sooo dorky for Johnny Depp to think that this guy is any kind of cool.
I’ll tell you the same thing I have been saying for years:
Grow up Get a haircut Get off the dope Try listening to some real music for a change
Many moons ago, when I mentioned to my seester (not The Clam, the other one) that I was going to rent “The Wall” (the Pink Floyd movie), she told me that, unless I was planning on getting stoned first, the movie wouldn’t make sense to me. I scoffed at her, but at the same time never rented the movie. Well, now I understand what she was saying. There are things which (apparently) make perfect sense when you’re stoned out of your gourd that are beyond those of us in the sober world…
“Let me explain. Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean. This is one of those observations that’s 99.99 percent irrelevant. What are we to make of the fact that he is Korean? Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun, it looks like he may have just put together a peace formula for civil war-wracked Sudan — a formula that escaped his predecessor.
“So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.”
I’m sorry – I know I haven’t been following the story 24/7 like a good little girl, but who exactly is focusing on the fact that the shooter is Korean? (Except for Koreans themselves, who are apparently mortified that one of their number could do such a thing. I simply found it hugely ironic that, much like SAT scores, Asians even out-performed your average white guy in this horror. Bell Curve, indeed.)
OK. That was tasteless.
But back to my point. What in the hell is this guy talking about? Does anyone have a clue? And does the fact that the new SG of the UN is Korean, and ostensibly a nice person, somehow exempt all Koreans from committing crimes?
I’m not trying to get in the middle of the whole gun control argument. I think it’s tacky to discuss this this early – kind of like the people who asked, when I told them my aunt had lung cancer, “Does she smoke?!”
As far as the issue goes, I know where I stand and why, and I’m so over having this debate, because nobody has the slightest intention of even listening to the opposition with an open mind any more. So why should I waste my breath trying to make my point?
Besides which, 2 guns did not wake up one fine morning and decide that they wanted to take down some college kids. That’s absurd. And the kids weren’t killed by a Korean. They were killed by a mentally disturbed person. That he was born in Korea is beside the point. That Ban-ki-Moon is Korean is beside the point. That he may have come up with a peace plan for Sudan is beside the point (and I’ll believe that when I see it).
The guy was sick in the head. He killed them. That’s the point. Period.
So last night’s dual storyline was dumb on a couple of levels. First, the team was split up. House and Cuddy were flying back from a medical symposium in Asia (I kind of zoned out there, as I tend to do when Cuddy talks, but I think it was a WHO symposium on pandemics. OK, 1) Isn’t the WHO (not the band, the World Health Organization) part of the UN? If so, then why wasn’t the symposium in either New York or Brussels? 2) I get it – Bird Flu, Asia, pandemic conference. But since the furthest west the Bird Flu has come is Turkey (hahaha) again, WHY? You are going to have a symposium of the smartest medical minds in the world smack dab in the one part of the world where the pandemic hangs out? Are you challenging the disease to a smackdown? Do diseases enjoy irony?)
Anyway, I think it was just part of building up the “why House and Cuddy are on an airplane heading back from Asia” thing. Sometimes I over think these things instead of going with the flow.
The other storyline had to do with the remnants of the team: The Three Stooges and Wilson. Their patient is a 60ish woman (who I swear was Ellen Travolta) who collapses at her home. Now, the person who called it in was apparently a lesbian prostitute that Ellen had hired. As they are trying to figure out what is wrong with her, she confesses that she went to Caracas recently (a crisis having to do with turning the same age her mother was when she died) where she not only drank the water and ate salad, she got a tattoo, got drunk, snorted cocaine off a gay man’s stomach and did the nasty with El Gordo. She explains that she never does stuff like this and it was stupid. Dr Wilson leaves, looking a little shell-shocked, and she says to the hooker, “It’s my fault I’m sick, isn’t it? I can’t believe I was so stupid.”
And the hooker says, “No, it’s not your fault.”
OK. First of all, if I were you, I wouldn’t take advice about whether behaviors have consequences from a prostitute. She’s not the best person to ask.
Second of all, it could be the reason. (Turns out it wasn’t, but still.) You don’t have to do stupid things constantly for 60 years in order for the consequences to bite you. Sure, sometimes you dodge the bullets. But other people are actually unlucky enough to get pregnant the first time, or get a disease. Or, like me, get mugged the one time they get gas after dark.
To my mind, the “don’t feel bad because you’re sick, even though you just acted like a drunken sailor. It’s not your fault” concept is really irresponsible. Bad things do happen to good people. And bad people. And indifferent people. But your choices can make a difference.
All in all, last night’s episode was a let down, especially after last week’s really thoughtful episode.
The Big Seester Sez... 