Jazz, Gangs, and Jim Gardner
Music: Orrin Evans feat. Sean Young at Ortlieb's Jazzhaus. Saturday, November 12th, 2005.
Film: The Warriors (1979)
Book: Jarhead (2003)
When I was growing up in Drexel Hill, my Dad and I watched Action News every night at 11:00pm. I went to bed for ten years thinking that Philadelphia was a place of death and drugs, a place where I would be shot on sight and my kids would die of smoke inhalation when my block of row homes caught on fire.
And that's kind of true, still.
But I've also realized that Philadelphia is alive with music, which is something Jim Gardner never told me about. Music is the blood that keeps this city alive, and the beating heart of the city is a small wooden bar in Northern Liberties called Ortlieb's Jazzhaus.
There are other great music venues in the city; the First Unitarian Church, the Electric Factory, the Troc. But the music I've heard at these places simply exists in the city where its made, despite the city where its made. Jazz happens in a city of turmoil because it takes the turmoil and forms sound. Philadelphia jazz boils up from the asphalt and floods the streets. Ortlieb's Jazzhaus understands that it needs to be a dam, nothing more.
*
If you're between the ages of 20-30, you are part of a generation that memorized the rhythms of Snoop Dogg lyrics in Phonics class. We learned early that music is an art of the beat, and that the geography of music is equal to harmony. Songs about Compton spoke to us, even though Compton would eat us alive and we knew it.
But the beats have become boring, the lyrics depressingly vacant.
And still we ignore jazz.
Orrin Evans, a young Philly-born-and-bred jazz pianist who played at Ortlieb's in November, is a must-see for a Philly audience raised on beats. You cannot listen to his music without realizing that rhythm and jazz are one in the same, and you can't leave without salivating over the potential power of hip-hop and mourning the lost years of complaining about Mo' Money Mo' Problems in a world where Mo' Money Significantly Less Problems.
All this would make it seem like Orrin Evans is a jazz/hip-hop crossover artist, like the Roots back when they mattered. But there is no crossover here; Evans is simply a guy who knows that the piano is, by definition, a percussion instrument. The best passages of the night were based on simple repeating rhythms, some gospel-flavored, some hypnotic and mathematical, others completely floating above the idea of time and riding on feeling. At his best, Orrin's playing consists of a rhythmic structure that grows, expands, contracts, expands and contracts and expands until the lines bend and break.
While listening to his gorgeous reharmonization of Autumn Leaves (which later exploded into an incredible bass-n'-drums dancehall showdown), it becomes clear that Orrin Evans is an impressionist, but also that term "impressionist" belies the meat and power behind the work. There is a kind of rhythmic sensibility in Orrin's playing that you don't hear in Bill Evans—-Orrin plays a style of piano that lends more to James Jamerson's command of a Motown groove than to Ravel and Debussy's delicate unfolding of ideas and emotion. The harmonies are generally straightforward but Orrin's not afraid to take it into Stravinsky-like dissonance, always jabbing, his head bobbing around like a vessel for the streets.
Why, then, doesn't anybody our age listen to jazz? Why do we write it off as "all sounding the same" when nine of the ten FM radio stations in Philly all recycle the same hip-hop beats from 1996?
The key to appreciating jazz for our generation is to understand that jazz, unlike hip-hop, is pretty much the art of coloring. Whereas rap tends to be rigidly structured in a looped beat, a good jazz tune is a page in a child's coloring book--broadly outlined, allowing plenty of space and some slight lyrical guidance at the bottom of the page. The colors and techniques used depend on the musician's ability and taste.
Orrin's improvised solos sound like coloring with sharp melodies in spurts using the tip of a crayon. He is a pianist of seemingly limitless ability--the equivalent of the kid in everyone's art class with the gigantic box of 537 crayons. Colors you didn't even know existed, colors that indicated the people at Crayola were just getting to their experimental White Album phase after years of 8-crayon pop. To limit the colors to individual crayons is an understatement of Orrin's imagination; it's more like he's got a huge room of those hot vats of melted crayon you see on Mr. Rogers' tour of a crayon factory, and Orrin's adding whatever the hell he wants and dipping his hands in and painting a sculpture with his dipped hands, and every now and then he flicks color in your eye and you're afraid that he just blinded you, but then you open your eyes and you suddenly have crazy x-ray vision and you can throw stuff around by looking at it. You need to hear him.
*
The best art comes from a strong sense of geography. Orrin's music is steeped in his turf--it breathes the soul of Philadelphia and exhales music. Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" was not recorded in rural Iowa. The strongest character in the best novels and movies is often the setting itself. We are creatures of habitat; no matter who we are or what we do, placement defines us. It is inescapable, and certainly worth exploring through art.
The Warriors, a ridiculously cool movie from 1979, takes this idea to its literal extreme. The story begins with hundreds of gang delegates gathered in the Bronx to listen to Cyrus, the man who would unite the gangs to rule New York City. The Warriors, our favorite Coney Island gang, are skeptical but go along anyway. The gangs unite and they're going to take over NYC one borough at a time. Why? Because there's 60,000 gang members and there ain't but 20,000 police in this whole town. Can you dig it?
Apparently someone could not dig it, and Cyrus gets shot by a crazy guy from the Rogues. And everybody thinks that the Warriors did it for some reason. So now there's about 500 gangs across New York City looking to "waste" the Warriors before they can get home to Coney Island. For readers unfamiliar with New York City, the distance between the Bronx and Coney Island is about the distance between Northeast Philly and Morocco.
It's obviously a flawed story; I'm not sure if Cyrus and the 500 gangs realize how much paperwork is involved in collecting taxes and writing budgets to keep the largest city in America running, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that there's a gang waiting at each stop on the train, and they all have super-fun matching costumes that tell of their geography.
And, with this, The Warriors shows us the danger of organized youth with nothing to lose. At its core, the movie is a rhapsody on naivety, a examination of how one Hitler-esque political leader with strong rhetoric can unite the confusion of youth into a force that destroys lives. It is a story of turfs, as all things are, but few stories draw their lines so clearly and colorfully.
It's important to mention that I did not rent The Warriors; rather I watched it on Spike TV, the only station entirely devoted to assuring dudes they're not gay. And there's good reason for its dude-heavy audience--The Warriors knows that we want nothing more than conflict between interesting, well-defined characters or groups. It is the basis of wrestling, football, American Gladiators, global politics, and just about anything that a guy has ever been interested in. We grew up with East-Coast-West-Coast rap while we played Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombats 1-through-Ultimate. We are fascinated with match-ups.
But is there more to life than match-ups? Is there more than turf?
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when Swan, the leader of the Warriors, gets off the Coney Island train at Stillwell Avenue. The sun is rising and the sky is gray. The camera shot is long, patient. The journey is over. Swan steps to the edge of the platform and looks out at the Coney Island skyline as the sun rises.
"This is what we fought all night to get back to?"
After a fairly awesome climax that I won't give away here, Swan and his girl stare out into the Coney Island sunrise as the credits roll, both wondering that same question, yearning for something more than fighting, something more than stupid male gang conflict, senseless violence, and their transient lives of misplaced fury. Together, maybe they can start anew. The song begins, the lyrics ask, "Somewhere out on that horizon...I know there must be something better..." Before the lyric ends, Spike TV shoves the rolling credits into the side of my TV in order to show me an X-treme In-My-Face advertisement for the show "Ultimate Fighter 2," which, among other things, features a slow-motion shot of a shirtless guy slamming his knee into another shirtless guy's face.
*
The only reason The Warriors, a relatively obscure cult movie from 1979, is experiencing a rebirth of interest is because of the new PS2 video game "The Warriors" from Rockstar Games. The game looks visually incredible, of course, and unbelievably violent, of course. I would expect no different from the makers of Grand Theft Auto; I remember playing GTA in college and admiring the artwork while simultaneously being disgusted at how the game just allowed me to kick an innocent bystander to death with no consequences, not to mention being really disturbed at how I missed my 1:30 calculus because I was busy kicking an innocent bystander to death. And still, people wonder how our generation has become desensitized to violence. Here's the reason: somewhere, a long time ago, some guy wearing a suit in an office did some research and realized that violence sells. I know that, Jim Gardner knows that.
I can't imagine the generations below us. Toddlers are growing up watching CSI. Network TV tries to out-grotesquely-murder one another by disguising beyond-pornographic violence as competing shows within the "forensic investigation" genre. Commonly-accepted American entertainment has run out of resources and its finally realized that we exist in a country where you can show the corpse of someone skinned alive and left in a dumpster as long as you don't show nipple. They will go as far as we let them, and we've somehow allowed them to tap into the violent bloodlust that secretly pumps through the core of humankind. And, what a surprise, they've built a well and it spews cash into the air.
How fitting was it, then, to watch a commercial for the Marines tucked neatly inside a movie where young men are inspired to kill other young men simply by the idea of protecting one's turf. The commercial aired right after a scene where the Warriors wasted the Baseball Furies (a gang in olde tymey baseball uniforms and painted faces, how awesome is that) using the Furies' own baseball bats. Then, in a voice that could very well be Olmec from Legends of the Hidden Temple, we learn that the U.S. Marines undergo "the most grueling conditioning...they are shaped, hardened, and sharpened...ready to stand among the most elite of all warriors."
Yes, they used the term "warriors."
The few, the proud, the hijackers of context.
*
Anthony Swofford, author of the book Jarhead, was a Scout/Sniper Marine, not unlike the holographic ones climbing volcanoes in the Spike TV commercial. His book is essentially a chronicle of how the Marines pumped him up with violence and a dizzying need to kill things, and the world only gave him the Gulf War, the biggest military cocktease of all time.
It is a very good book, but uneven. It is 20% jaw-droppingly perfect, 80% eh. There are many weak sections; the day-to-day life of a marine is not all that interesting, and okay, I get it, your girlfriends at home are cheating on you, and carrying things around in a desert is difficult.
The strongest parts of the book, however, are filled with images that will haunt your dreams and eat them whole. Swofford, despite his training, sees no glory in violence but only stupid, meaningless, horrifying but necessary death. He leaves his squad to explore a recently bombed-out cabin, finding a circle of dead Iraqi soldiers. He sits with them. He sees a corpse stuck half-way in the sand and wonders if the bottom half is still alive, wonders if it doesn't yet know that death lies above. He watches a building explode through his binoculars and imagines the rising dust cloud to be the "last breaths of the men now dead." He laments over the fact that wars must be fought and apologizes to the "mothers whose sons will die horribly."
But even the great parts of the book often have a sentence tacked onto the end that suffers from Chuck Palahniuk syndrome; the self-awareness of Swofford's writing is annoying, as if he were thinking, "Wow, look how amazingly f'd up this last sentence is....Wow." At certain points you can't help but see him sitting back with his arms crossed thinking, "Man, I've outdone myself. Look at me, I am a writer and this randomly poetic sentence will blow your mind." And those little awkwardly-placed drops of narcissism can deflate entire paragraphs of beauty.
Swofford argues that all violent war films tend to glorify war, that Marines would sit and watch Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now repeatedly to get psyched up for killing. He reacts with a book where war violence is silent and meditative. There are no valiant gun battles, only the view of faceless death happening hundreds of feet away. "The bombs make a soft thud of a noise," he writes as he studies depressions in the sand that "look like marks a fist would make in a block of clay." He describes the violence in broad strokes as it happens, through binoculars, and we are powerfully taken by the aftermath.
It's tough to imagine that Jarhead would be used in the same psych-up way that Swofford describes; the violence is muted, only reflected upon. Swofford has written a soft thud of a book, dropping like a bomb on sand and leaving us horrified at the swift, silent outcome.
Therein lies the power of Jarhead--examining the silent wreckage of war and the unspoken understanding that it's all necessary. Not by choice, and certainly not by logic, but by the simple fact that humans need to kill each other.
You don't get this from the movie commericals, though. What you get is Kanye West saying, "We're at war...we're at war with terrorism." Most of my red-blooded friends have left the theatre disappointed; hearing "Jesus Walks" while seeing planes and explosions makes you think you're about to see the greatest battle film of all time. If "Jesus Walks" were to play during a trailer of Three Men and a Baby, it would look like the greatest battle film of all time.
What does all of this mean? The guy wearing a suit doing research in his office was correct, and the power of violence will not only sell movie tickets and books but will also allow countries to do gentlemanly business with one another by exchanging bodies. Swofford's book is disgusted by violence, yet, as the movie commercials show, even the most tender exploration of war's silent horror will excite somebody somewhere to kill somebody else. To think otherwise is to believe in a world greater than our own.
*
To this day, my Dad still watches Action News every night at 11:00pm. Jim Gardner fills him in on all of the awful things that happened in Philadelphia during the day. Then my Dad goes to sleep, just as he has for the past 20 years.
I've begun to think that this routine fosters a real sense of sadness. "For me, Jim Gardner, Cecily Tynan, and the rest of the Action News team," the lullaby begins, "we just want to remind you that, despite the fact that you were awake for 18 hours today and worked hard for the good of your family and mankind, people are still killing each other and children are still dying of smoke inhalation in flaming row homes. Goodnight."
Now that I'm somewhat older, I choose to watch the news in the morning. I see that the world is crumbling while I'm beginning my day, and then I go out to fix the world. I fixed it yesterday too, but then I went to sleep and everything fell apart.
Film: The Warriors (1979)
Book: Jarhead (2003)
When I was growing up in Drexel Hill, my Dad and I watched Action News every night at 11:00pm. I went to bed for ten years thinking that Philadelphia was a place of death and drugs, a place where I would be shot on sight and my kids would die of smoke inhalation when my block of row homes caught on fire.
And that's kind of true, still.
But I've also realized that Philadelphia is alive with music, which is something Jim Gardner never told me about. Music is the blood that keeps this city alive, and the beating heart of the city is a small wooden bar in Northern Liberties called Ortlieb's Jazzhaus.
There are other great music venues in the city; the First Unitarian Church, the Electric Factory, the Troc. But the music I've heard at these places simply exists in the city where its made, despite the city where its made. Jazz happens in a city of turmoil because it takes the turmoil and forms sound. Philadelphia jazz boils up from the asphalt and floods the streets. Ortlieb's Jazzhaus understands that it needs to be a dam, nothing more.
*
If you're between the ages of 20-30, you are part of a generation that memorized the rhythms of Snoop Dogg lyrics in Phonics class. We learned early that music is an art of the beat, and that the geography of music is equal to harmony. Songs about Compton spoke to us, even though Compton would eat us alive and we knew it.
But the beats have become boring, the lyrics depressingly vacant.
And still we ignore jazz.
Orrin Evans, a young Philly-born-and-bred jazz pianist who played at Ortlieb's in November, is a must-see for a Philly audience raised on beats. You cannot listen to his music without realizing that rhythm and jazz are one in the same, and you can't leave without salivating over the potential power of hip-hop and mourning the lost years of complaining about Mo' Money Mo' Problems in a world where Mo' Money Significantly Less Problems.
All this would make it seem like Orrin Evans is a jazz/hip-hop crossover artist, like the Roots back when they mattered. But there is no crossover here; Evans is simply a guy who knows that the piano is, by definition, a percussion instrument. The best passages of the night were based on simple repeating rhythms, some gospel-flavored, some hypnotic and mathematical, others completely floating above the idea of time and riding on feeling. At his best, Orrin's playing consists of a rhythmic structure that grows, expands, contracts, expands and contracts and expands until the lines bend and break.
While listening to his gorgeous reharmonization of Autumn Leaves (which later exploded into an incredible bass-n'-drums dancehall showdown), it becomes clear that Orrin Evans is an impressionist, but also that term "impressionist" belies the meat and power behind the work. There is a kind of rhythmic sensibility in Orrin's playing that you don't hear in Bill Evans—-Orrin plays a style of piano that lends more to James Jamerson's command of a Motown groove than to Ravel and Debussy's delicate unfolding of ideas and emotion. The harmonies are generally straightforward but Orrin's not afraid to take it into Stravinsky-like dissonance, always jabbing, his head bobbing around like a vessel for the streets.
Why, then, doesn't anybody our age listen to jazz? Why do we write it off as "all sounding the same" when nine of the ten FM radio stations in Philly all recycle the same hip-hop beats from 1996?
The key to appreciating jazz for our generation is to understand that jazz, unlike hip-hop, is pretty much the art of coloring. Whereas rap tends to be rigidly structured in a looped beat, a good jazz tune is a page in a child's coloring book--broadly outlined, allowing plenty of space and some slight lyrical guidance at the bottom of the page. The colors and techniques used depend on the musician's ability and taste.
Orrin's improvised solos sound like coloring with sharp melodies in spurts using the tip of a crayon. He is a pianist of seemingly limitless ability--the equivalent of the kid in everyone's art class with the gigantic box of 537 crayons. Colors you didn't even know existed, colors that indicated the people at Crayola were just getting to their experimental White Album phase after years of 8-crayon pop. To limit the colors to individual crayons is an understatement of Orrin's imagination; it's more like he's got a huge room of those hot vats of melted crayon you see on Mr. Rogers' tour of a crayon factory, and Orrin's adding whatever the hell he wants and dipping his hands in and painting a sculpture with his dipped hands, and every now and then he flicks color in your eye and you're afraid that he just blinded you, but then you open your eyes and you suddenly have crazy x-ray vision and you can throw stuff around by looking at it. You need to hear him.
*
The best art comes from a strong sense of geography. Orrin's music is steeped in his turf--it breathes the soul of Philadelphia and exhales music. Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" was not recorded in rural Iowa. The strongest character in the best novels and movies is often the setting itself. We are creatures of habitat; no matter who we are or what we do, placement defines us. It is inescapable, and certainly worth exploring through art.
The Warriors, a ridiculously cool movie from 1979, takes this idea to its literal extreme. The story begins with hundreds of gang delegates gathered in the Bronx to listen to Cyrus, the man who would unite the gangs to rule New York City. The Warriors, our favorite Coney Island gang, are skeptical but go along anyway. The gangs unite and they're going to take over NYC one borough at a time. Why? Because there's 60,000 gang members and there ain't but 20,000 police in this whole town. Can you dig it?
Apparently someone could not dig it, and Cyrus gets shot by a crazy guy from the Rogues. And everybody thinks that the Warriors did it for some reason. So now there's about 500 gangs across New York City looking to "waste" the Warriors before they can get home to Coney Island. For readers unfamiliar with New York City, the distance between the Bronx and Coney Island is about the distance between Northeast Philly and Morocco.
It's obviously a flawed story; I'm not sure if Cyrus and the 500 gangs realize how much paperwork is involved in collecting taxes and writing budgets to keep the largest city in America running, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that there's a gang waiting at each stop on the train, and they all have super-fun matching costumes that tell of their geography.
And, with this, The Warriors shows us the danger of organized youth with nothing to lose. At its core, the movie is a rhapsody on naivety, a examination of how one Hitler-esque political leader with strong rhetoric can unite the confusion of youth into a force that destroys lives. It is a story of turfs, as all things are, but few stories draw their lines so clearly and colorfully.
It's important to mention that I did not rent The Warriors; rather I watched it on Spike TV, the only station entirely devoted to assuring dudes they're not gay. And there's good reason for its dude-heavy audience--The Warriors knows that we want nothing more than conflict between interesting, well-defined characters or groups. It is the basis of wrestling, football, American Gladiators, global politics, and just about anything that a guy has ever been interested in. We grew up with East-Coast-West-Coast rap while we played Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombats 1-through-Ultimate. We are fascinated with match-ups.
But is there more to life than match-ups? Is there more than turf?
One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is when Swan, the leader of the Warriors, gets off the Coney Island train at Stillwell Avenue. The sun is rising and the sky is gray. The camera shot is long, patient. The journey is over. Swan steps to the edge of the platform and looks out at the Coney Island skyline as the sun rises.
"This is what we fought all night to get back to?"
After a fairly awesome climax that I won't give away here, Swan and his girl stare out into the Coney Island sunrise as the credits roll, both wondering that same question, yearning for something more than fighting, something more than stupid male gang conflict, senseless violence, and their transient lives of misplaced fury. Together, maybe they can start anew. The song begins, the lyrics ask, "Somewhere out on that horizon...I know there must be something better..." Before the lyric ends, Spike TV shoves the rolling credits into the side of my TV in order to show me an X-treme In-My-Face advertisement for the show "Ultimate Fighter 2," which, among other things, features a slow-motion shot of a shirtless guy slamming his knee into another shirtless guy's face.
*
The only reason The Warriors, a relatively obscure cult movie from 1979, is experiencing a rebirth of interest is because of the new PS2 video game "The Warriors" from Rockstar Games. The game looks visually incredible, of course, and unbelievably violent, of course. I would expect no different from the makers of Grand Theft Auto; I remember playing GTA in college and admiring the artwork while simultaneously being disgusted at how the game just allowed me to kick an innocent bystander to death with no consequences, not to mention being really disturbed at how I missed my 1:30 calculus because I was busy kicking an innocent bystander to death. And still, people wonder how our generation has become desensitized to violence. Here's the reason: somewhere, a long time ago, some guy wearing a suit in an office did some research and realized that violence sells. I know that, Jim Gardner knows that.
I can't imagine the generations below us. Toddlers are growing up watching CSI. Network TV tries to out-grotesquely-murder one another by disguising beyond-pornographic violence as competing shows within the "forensic investigation" genre. Commonly-accepted American entertainment has run out of resources and its finally realized that we exist in a country where you can show the corpse of someone skinned alive and left in a dumpster as long as you don't show nipple. They will go as far as we let them, and we've somehow allowed them to tap into the violent bloodlust that secretly pumps through the core of humankind. And, what a surprise, they've built a well and it spews cash into the air.
How fitting was it, then, to watch a commercial for the Marines tucked neatly inside a movie where young men are inspired to kill other young men simply by the idea of protecting one's turf. The commercial aired right after a scene where the Warriors wasted the Baseball Furies (a gang in olde tymey baseball uniforms and painted faces, how awesome is that) using the Furies' own baseball bats. Then, in a voice that could very well be Olmec from Legends of the Hidden Temple, we learn that the U.S. Marines undergo "the most grueling conditioning...they are shaped, hardened, and sharpened...ready to stand among the most elite of all warriors."
Yes, they used the term "warriors."
The few, the proud, the hijackers of context.
*
Anthony Swofford, author of the book Jarhead, was a Scout/Sniper Marine, not unlike the holographic ones climbing volcanoes in the Spike TV commercial. His book is essentially a chronicle of how the Marines pumped him up with violence and a dizzying need to kill things, and the world only gave him the Gulf War, the biggest military cocktease of all time.
It is a very good book, but uneven. It is 20% jaw-droppingly perfect, 80% eh. There are many weak sections; the day-to-day life of a marine is not all that interesting, and okay, I get it, your girlfriends at home are cheating on you, and carrying things around in a desert is difficult.
The strongest parts of the book, however, are filled with images that will haunt your dreams and eat them whole. Swofford, despite his training, sees no glory in violence but only stupid, meaningless, horrifying but necessary death. He leaves his squad to explore a recently bombed-out cabin, finding a circle of dead Iraqi soldiers. He sits with them. He sees a corpse stuck half-way in the sand and wonders if the bottom half is still alive, wonders if it doesn't yet know that death lies above. He watches a building explode through his binoculars and imagines the rising dust cloud to be the "last breaths of the men now dead." He laments over the fact that wars must be fought and apologizes to the "mothers whose sons will die horribly."
But even the great parts of the book often have a sentence tacked onto the end that suffers from Chuck Palahniuk syndrome; the self-awareness of Swofford's writing is annoying, as if he were thinking, "Wow, look how amazingly f'd up this last sentence is....Wow." At certain points you can't help but see him sitting back with his arms crossed thinking, "Man, I've outdone myself. Look at me, I am a writer and this randomly poetic sentence will blow your mind." And those little awkwardly-placed drops of narcissism can deflate entire paragraphs of beauty.
Swofford argues that all violent war films tend to glorify war, that Marines would sit and watch Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now repeatedly to get psyched up for killing. He reacts with a book where war violence is silent and meditative. There are no valiant gun battles, only the view of faceless death happening hundreds of feet away. "The bombs make a soft thud of a noise," he writes as he studies depressions in the sand that "look like marks a fist would make in a block of clay." He describes the violence in broad strokes as it happens, through binoculars, and we are powerfully taken by the aftermath.
It's tough to imagine that Jarhead would be used in the same psych-up way that Swofford describes; the violence is muted, only reflected upon. Swofford has written a soft thud of a book, dropping like a bomb on sand and leaving us horrified at the swift, silent outcome.
Therein lies the power of Jarhead--examining the silent wreckage of war and the unspoken understanding that it's all necessary. Not by choice, and certainly not by logic, but by the simple fact that humans need to kill each other.
You don't get this from the movie commericals, though. What you get is Kanye West saying, "We're at war...we're at war with terrorism." Most of my red-blooded friends have left the theatre disappointed; hearing "Jesus Walks" while seeing planes and explosions makes you think you're about to see the greatest battle film of all time. If "Jesus Walks" were to play during a trailer of Three Men and a Baby, it would look like the greatest battle film of all time.
What does all of this mean? The guy wearing a suit doing research in his office was correct, and the power of violence will not only sell movie tickets and books but will also allow countries to do gentlemanly business with one another by exchanging bodies. Swofford's book is disgusted by violence, yet, as the movie commercials show, even the most tender exploration of war's silent horror will excite somebody somewhere to kill somebody else. To think otherwise is to believe in a world greater than our own.
*
To this day, my Dad still watches Action News every night at 11:00pm. Jim Gardner fills him in on all of the awful things that happened in Philadelphia during the day. Then my Dad goes to sleep, just as he has for the past 20 years.
I've begun to think that this routine fosters a real sense of sadness. "For me, Jim Gardner, Cecily Tynan, and the rest of the Action News team," the lullaby begins, "we just want to remind you that, despite the fact that you were awake for 18 hours today and worked hard for the good of your family and mankind, people are still killing each other and children are still dying of smoke inhalation in flaming row homes. Goodnight."
Now that I'm somewhat older, I choose to watch the news in the morning. I see that the world is crumbling while I'm beginning my day, and then I go out to fix the world. I fixed it yesterday too, but then I went to sleep and everything fell apart.
posted by Joe at 3:23 PM
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