Things I’ll Never Get Sick Of, Part 1

We live in a disposable society. As Americans (and perhaps as humans?), we are almost expected to live in diametric opposition to the rest of nature in that we do not strike any sort of balance with our environment. We exhaust resources with nary a worry and move on to the next thing. (Didn’t Agent Smith more eloquently expound on this topic in “The Matrix?” I believe he did. So go smoke a bowl and watch it, Neo.)

“I’ll enjoy watching you die…Mr. Anderson.”

American media—music, books, film, etc.—is a function of this philosophy. “Everyone’s going to get sick and tired of everything in a couple months anyway, so why make anything good?” Well, fuck them. Stuff that’s really good I never get tired of. I might be a little sociopathic in the sense that I can listen to, read, or watch the same thing over and over and over again, but I don’t care. Good is good.

The Beatles
I know I said in an earlier post that I can understand why someone wouldn’t like The Beatles. Well, I was wrong. If you don’t like The Beatles, there is something seriously wrong with you. So just let it go and admit their music is completely fucking awesome. ‘Cause it is.

The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
Some of you who know me reading this have probably heard this story a million times, but it is in NO way creatively embellished or apocryphal. I swear:

When I was 7 years old I was sitting there in music class behind Andrea Halpern who I thought was really pretty just minding my own when our music teacher, Mr. Jim Thompson (no relation to the former governor but who in fact did lop off 3 of his fingers with a band saw about halfway through the school year and we never saw him again), decided to expose us to a little bit of classical music. The first piece he played for us was “Little Fugue in G Minor,” by the illustrious Mr. Bach.

You can listen to a version on piano here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVadl4ocX0M&feature=related
(Note that it was originally written for organ, I believe, and that there are now myriad versions, including one played by a full orchestra.)

In a word, I was floored. I had never heard anything like that. I was changed that day. I’ll never forget it. I think it was the first time I was MOVED by something.

And so here I am, almost 30 years later, and I’m still listening to this man’s music. I own every major piece (sometimes several times over in different recordings) and have begun to collect and listen to the lesser-known ones.

I like Mozart and I like Beethoven but Bach started it all. The musical language which was and is used to create everything you have heard and will ever hear in your life started with Grandpappy Johann. He represents the pinnacle of Baroque style and in many ways, therefore, the pinnacle of all of Western music.

Individuals I know who like classical music have expressed a dislike for the seeming robotic nature of fugues and other contrapuntal writing and insist that Bach’s music is “unemotional.” I gotta go ahead and call bullshit on that one. If imitative works like fugues and canons aren’t your shit, so be it. Bach has many other more linear works that might grab you:

1. Any of the harpsichord concertos, namely the A Major (BWV 1055) and the F Minor (BMV 1056)


2. The Italian Concerto and French Overture (written for harpsichord but easily found on piano)


3. The Cello Suites are deservedly famous, although solo cello becomes a bit tiresome to listen to after a while, I find


4. The Concerto for 2 Violins is pretty amazing


5. The Brandenburg Concertos are probably his famous works and are very easy to listen to
   
6. The Five Orchestral Suites are wonderful and you’ve heard his “Air on a G String” from these at every wedding you have ever been to, including mine
   

Happy listening. 27 years and counting for me and I listen to Bach almost every single day of my life.

The word “Fuck”
I love cursing. Some would contend that people who curse are just too lazy, insensitive and/or dim to conjure the non-offensive words to make their point known. Again, fuck those people. Cursing is so integral to our nature as human beings. I heard this story on NPR one evening about this man who wrote a book on cursing. (Wouldn’t he be fun to have dinner with? “You’re a filthy cocksucker, or as they say in Arabic: chaim’laal! More wine?”) Based on his exhaustive research, he contends that most likely our first words as humans were in fact curse words. Mute stroke victims, dementia patients and others similarly afflicted show significant brain activity when they are exposed to curse words. Curse words are part of us, part of our history as a species.

And “fuck” is the granddaddy of them all. I’ve said “fuck” probably 10,000,000 times in my life and I’ll say it another 10,000,000 before the end. Well, probably 15,000,000. After all, I’m having a kid.

“I’m the executive sales manager!”

Fargo

I must have seen this movie 25 times. And I could watch it again right now. It’s pretty much the perfect movie. It’s got everything. The acting is brilliant across the board. William H. Macy AND Frances McDormand?!? Come on… The story is wild: the disclaimer at the beginning about how it was based on a true story? Yeah, that’s bullshit. That’s just the Coens fucking with your head. Even the music is awesome. Carter Burwell features the viola da gamba, an antiquated progenitor of the cello, which has this isolated, lonely sound. “Fargo” is funny, scary, violent, sad, intelligent, silly and deadly serious.








The Paris Codex
You can read about and even see the Paris Codex here (http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/codex/), but in a nutshell (“What am I doing in this bloody great big nutshell?”) the Paris Codex is a surviving paper book of the Postclassic (after 900 AD) Maya. Most of their paper books were burned during the Spanish Inquisition and as a result only four have survived: The Paris, The Dresden, The Groiler and The Madrid. They all contain information about gods, chronology, royalty, warfare, economics and astronomy, among other subjects.

Anyway, I’m a big Maya history buff and every once in a while I’ll go to the website above and just look at the pages. It’s just so COOL and exotic and weird. Of course I can’t read any of it or anything but I simply appreciate the esoteric nature of their writing system and wonder how it came to be. Kind of “discovering” my interest in Mayan culture this late in my life (my wife and I went to Belize and Guatemala in 2005) has made me feel like a kid again.







Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee
You can keep your Starbucks. Seriously. Keep it. It’s gross.

Gimme the good stuff. Yeah, that’s right. What’s that? You…you want me to…to drink you? Oh, you’re SO naughty, DD! If I must…

I think there’s real honest-to-God crack in there. There’s no other way to explain the fact that’s it so FUCKING good.

The above photo is the result of doing a Google image search for "I fucking love dunkin donuts coffee." God bless the Internet. --Ed.











Art Tatum

Art Tatum is the greatest musician you’ve never heard of. He’s unequivocally the greatest jazz pianist who ever lived. (No one, really, can make an argument otherwise. Well, I mean, you could…but you’d be a tremendous douchebag.) He also may be the greatest jazz PERFORMER who ever lived. Furthermore, he may even be the single greatest performer in any genre on any instrument in the history of recorded music. Seriously.

Art Tatum knew 10,000 songs, from Tin Pan Alley to Dvorak. Every time he played any one of them he would completely deconstruct it and put it back together in some other beautiful form. Imagine the Sistine Chapel made out of Legos. If “Someone to Watch Over Me” was that Lego Sistine Chapel, Art Tatum would take it apart and put it back together into a perfect replica of Notre Dame. Then he’d take Notre Dame and make Machu Picchu. Get it? He was incredible.

Art Tatum was rarely recorded during his all-too-brief life and when he was the conditions were always really shitty. But it almost doesn’t matter. It’s so brilliant. He died in the mid 50s due to kidney failure brought on by excessive beer drinking. Seriously.

RIP, Art Tatum.