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Further thoughts on music to exercise by

February 11, 2008 by

I listened to my new running playlist this morning on the way in to work, and realized another thing about it (and playlists like it in the past).

I start my runs (in general) with the dark, the sarcastic, the angry.  The first three songs on this new playlist are each, in their own way, a solitary middle finger with a backbeat. 

The emotional arc of my music and the emotional arc of my runs are pretty much in synch, and I don’t think it’s any accident that I’ve ended up packing the front end of my playlists with “…and the horse you rode in on” music.  Like many (most?) people, exercise is only partly about corpore sano – it’s also about mens sana.  I’m clearing my head as I burn calories, and the first things I need to deal with (at least lately) are feelings of anger and frustration.  These are pushy emotions in me – dominant and aggressive* – and they end up leashed in tightly in a lot of daily life.  On my own, on the trail, they can rampage around a bit and help to get my physical motor turning over in the first 10 minutes or so of exercise.  It’s a healthy way to cope, I think.  These “negative” emotions can be put to good use, fueling my pace as the first few hills put my body to the test.  After that first ten minutes, “angry and frustrated” morphs into “fierce and strong.”  And “fierce and strong” is a nice pivot point for me emotionally.  From there, I can pretty much go anywhere -  good or bad.

For anyone not familiar with that internal landscape transformation, the transition from the baffled confusion in Richard Thomson’s moody, angry Read About Love (lyrics here) to Help Me Suzanne, which is a light, classic pop song with a happy chorus oozing with shiny gratitude (You gave me the reason/For feeling like I do/You gave me the reason/I’d like to thank you) would have to constitute some sort of musical whiplash.  Having burned off my initial exercise-rage, however, this is exactly the sort of thing that helps me pivot off to a more positive range of emotions, extended by Spoon’s groove (never mind the fact that I don’t ever want to know anyone who can remain filled with rage in the face of Keepon) and The Scissor Sister’s bouncy silliness.  Shawn Colvin simply puts the mellow frosting on the new-attitude cake.

*Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of Dog Whisperer lately.  More on that later.

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…But is it art?

January 30, 2008 by

Fear not – this isn’t going to be one of those posts that wafts about the idea of whether knitting is an “art” or a “craft” and what that particular semantic exercise means in terms of intrinsic or perceived value of the pursuit or of the finished object, the role of gender differential in determination of worth, etc. etc.

Actually, from my postings of late, probably nobody expects me to talk about knitting at all any more (is this a knit-blog?  Well, no.  Actually not.  It’s the blog of someone who happens to knit and goes through various fits of actually writing about it.  I think the first three years or so of the blog was almost entirely knit-free, as a matter of fact.  Interesting, that – well, to me.  Stop with the parenthetical digressions before you lose your readers, J.  Oh.  Okay).

No, what I meant to dash in and link to and dash away again was more about two ideas I’m sort of holding up next to one another and seeing if they have anything to do with one another or if they’re just two things I happened across yesterday.  One is the re-thinking and re-crafting of an art* form, introduced into my current thinking queue by Steve Martin’s biographical essay in Smithsonian about his early career.  Here is a guy who took the idea of “joke” and turned it on his head.  In my humble opinion, he and some of his contemporaries (Monty Python in particular) enlarged the entire idea of comedy.  Instead of the ordered logic of: setup, punchline, laugh, this group went along with something more along the lines of: setup, pick one or more of the following:

  1. random digression
  2. oddball silliness (e.g. a fish-slapping dance, banjo playing, nonsense words)
  3. OJARIL**
  4. any combination of seeming opposites (stiff authority and silly walks, superheroes and suburbs, scripture and instruction manuals, etc.)
  5. taking a complete and utter absurdity of a premise and carrying it solemnly up to and past its “logical” conclusion (Cf: The Parrot Sketch or Upper Class Twit of the Year, or Martin’s “I gotta get me a pair of cat handcuffs and I gotta get ’em right away. What a drag…I found out my cat was embezzling from me…He’d go down to the bank, disguised as me—little kitty nose and glasses, little kitty arrow through the head…”)

…and in the case of the Pythons, then off to a Terry Gilliam cartoon/fever dream that would end up morphing into the next sketch (because they never could end their sketches, or so it seemed).  I seem to recall that Martin’s bits tended to either trail off or ram straight into the next one as well (not having a cartoonist stashed somewhere on his white-suited person). 

Oh, and by the way, insert “laugh” wherever you like in the above.  There’s no punchline to wait for.

Compare that (or not – like I said, I’m still holding these ideas up next to one another and seeing if they have anything to do with one another) with these “reviews” of milk at Amazon.  It strikes me that this is almost the creation of a new form of expression.  Coleridge poems reimagined as odes to milk, neo-noir vignettes featuring milk, extended absurdist plays on the notion of “jugs” somehow wrapped into a sweetly nonsensical story of a couple’s engagement, and of course the inevitable haiku.  All written as a response to the idea of how innately absurd it is to write a review of a commodity item.

Is there a connection here, apart from the temporal one of my having seen both of these yesterday? 

*Humor is so an art form.  Work with me here.

**The Python’s term for Eric Idle’s rambling and yet rapid fire monologues.  It stands for “Old Jokes and Ridiculously Irrelevant Links.”

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Memery by way of Think-Link

November 9, 2007 by

Cici was kind enough to want to know what randomness I could come up with in eight easy bites.  Despite promising myself no memes, I realized I had several not-quite blog posts rambling around in my head, as well as some responses to stuff I had read, so I figured I’d come up with eight of them.

1. Weather: It was cold enough this morning that I ran in my new quilted vest purchased from my favorite purveyor of inexpensive workout-wear: Target (it’s also bright pink enough that John burst out with, “Run Barbie, run!”).  I watched my breath puffing in the cold air and thought about how swiftly we have come to this chill, austere point in the year.  I was also grateful for the end of Daylight Savings, since I have a few weeks’ reprieve from running in the dark.  My mom, an afternoon walker, had a simultaneous notion in the opposite direction.  You can’t please everyone.

2. Semantics: How telling is it that the original last sentence of the paragraph above was, “You can’t please anyone?”

3. Knitting: I am simultaneously working on a cozy cashmere vest and a rough-ish wool sweater.  Both items are for me (Mine!  All mine, I tell you!).  Both have their charms, and though they are very different textures, it appears I have entered my Tweed period.

4. Holidays part 1: I am horribly behind in my Christmas shopping.  Normally I am one of those really annoying people who starts Christmas shopping in January.  Aside from a few purchases squirreled away from our vacation this year, I have no idea what I’m doing.  This is a recipe for disaster: panic, overspending, and disappointment (mine, at least) are sure to ensue.

5. Holidays part 2: Having knit for everyone (and I mean everyone) on my gift list last year, almost nobody is getting a handknit gift this year.

6. Television: We are watching the old BBC series, “All Creatures Great and Small” from Netflix.  I remember it being a high treat when I was a kid.  It may be even better now.

7. Family: I am eagerly awaiting my best friend’s baby, who if she doesn’t arrive soon of her own accord is going to garner herself an eviction notice.  I keep getting e-mails from Maria titled, “Still Pregnant.”  This is good news at 4 months.  It is tedious news at 9+ months (and yes, I am aware that pregnancy is measured in weeks and perhaps days and possibly hours at this point – all I know is the kid was due on the 5th.  She’s late, and Auntie Jill is a punctual sort.  Get out here so I can meet you and commence spoiling you, kiddo).

8. Blogging: I am selfishly delighted that Lianne is blogging regularly.  She’s a delight and a wonder to behold, the way she approaches the world with humor, insight, patience, and intelligence.  I only wish that she were coming to visit me on her travels.

You’re supposed to tag eight people at this point, but I shall do the cop-out thing and say tag yourself if you wish to participate.

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Courage, Miss Honeychurch, courage and faith… The steel knives… are in the other carriage.

October 8, 2007 by

There are two kinds of faith: stupid and smart. Where the atheists fall apart is when nobody bothers to explain the difference to them, and I speak as one of them; overcoming the stupid kind of faith inevitably leads to a denigration of the smart kind, because they both look the same from the outside.

Interesting – I’ve never quite put it that way, but I have had friends with a swift and dismissive way with faith and religion that has sometimes bothered me deeply. I’m not one of the faithful myself, but I have a lot of respect for the things that motivate people (respect as in, “I have a lot of respect for that dog’s ability to take my arm off”). There’s a sort of juvenile whistling in the dark that is characterized by, “F**k that s**t – it’s stupid. Opiate of the masses, dude,” and this automatically dismissive attitude is not only dangerous because religion in the service of hate and fear can create chaos and pain – but also because religion in the service of love and caring can create hope and joy. It may not be the same hope and joy that a TV show provides us when we see Martha and the Doctor view Tim Latimer’s wartime honors with poppies on their lapels, but it’s a sibling or cousin.

What use is hope and joy? Well, I for one believe better things and better worlds can be created out of it. Certainly, from my perspective our entertainment is made better by it (the creators of works like “Saw” can keep their unrelieved brutality – I don’t have need for it in my psyche). But doesn’t inspiration have real, practical value also? I see photographs of the Great Wall of China, and I have to grimly acknowledge the accomplishment, but it does not make me want to go out and build. However, when I see labors of love – fine lace, a beautifully crafted home, the soaring and capricious gravity of a Calder mobile – my hands itch to make, my brain starts to weave words that might be worth reading.* I see something, I think about what it might mean: if there is joy there, it gets my own creative process moving.

How this differentiates (or if it differentiates) from the mad experience of having one of my HS English teachers get up at a chalkboard and ask a class of wary teenagers to identify all of the potential themes we could from William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” letting us gradually spin ourselves into a sort of giddy oblivion culminating in the realization that when you say everything depends on something (even or especially when it is as prosaic an object as a red wheelbarrow or simple wooden cross) that yes, in fact “everything” means exactly what it says, I don’t know. There is a code, and it’s no code at all, and those who say, “This means only what it says on the page,” and those who say, “This is symbolic of X and never Y,” are both as incorrect as they can be.

Religion, like art, either speaks to our selves – our personal experiences – or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t speak to you it may or may not entertain. If it does… it can inspire.

*Though anyone might get it wrong from simply looking at exteriors:
Rev. Eager: Remember the facts about this church of Santa Croce; how it was built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism.
Mr. Emerson: Built by faith indeed! That simply means the workers weren’t paid properly.

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