Monthly Archives: May 2016

Night of the Living Dead (YGtCTO #3)

You Have Got to Check This Out

Movie directed by George Romero
Written by John Russo & George Romero

More than twenty years ago, we lived in Pittsburgh, the promised land of zombie flicks. Not only did we live in Pittsburgh, we lived a block away from Tom Savini and he had the coolest house on the block, especially at Halloween. This was around the time of From Dusk till Dawn, so he was all over the newspapers, which was cool because nobody showed up in our neighborhood to scare the children, at least as far as we could tell.

This was a good fifteen years after I had first seen Night of the Living Dead in a high school auditorium as the weekend entertainment provided by the school committee in charge of such things. I am pretty sure the biology teacher who advised the committee just wanted to get a rise out of the student body.

As I said- we were living in Pittsburgh and a local experimental rock band put on a show where they stood behind a giant projection of the film and played their own soundtrack. I have forgotten their name, but I remember it as being epic, full of angst and shock and operatic sadness, much like the film itself. At the time, the event seemed unique, but it appears from a quick internet search that people do this all the time now, from Des Moines to Boston. The amazing thing about this film is that it keeps inspiring more art. I don’t mean the decades of zombie films that have filled the multiplexes (and streaming services) but the true children of Night of the Living Dead who believe they can make films and craft the music that these bands perform.

Every time I see the movie, I walk away amazed by the accomplishment of this passionate, inexperienced film crew guided by George Romero, a local commercial director. Hell- props to everyone, even the money guys who saw something in what was being done and kept the cash flowing. Because, the movie is brilliant- as thousands of college students debating its meaning have proven. But that is not the heart of its greatness.

At its core, the characters matter- those actors delivered performances that defy the restrictions within which they worked. Even the zombies are perfect before they became such a universal symbol for unthinking servitude to cultural and political powers. Now think of every other zombie film (with one exception) and the characters end up having to fill a place. I mean that they are already predestined for their doom- you see it coming a mile away. That’s the fat guy. That’s the scientist. That’s the misogynist. But somehow, in Night of the Living Dead, these are people facing the ultimate betrayal by nature and ultimately by their fellow man.

The thing is that it can happen again- many have tried, but Zombieland succeeds the best for me as the characters seem three dimensional, even Bill Murray (a great actor in an unforgiving role). Zombieland even fits my criteria for the unexpected list of survivors (or should that be list of deceased?).

In the end, it really is all about characters as complete people, whether running on a beach into a lover’s arms or running away from certain doom. Perhaps that explains… why do I root for the zombies on Walking Dead?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 297 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Epitaph for a Spy (YGtCTO Words #1)

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Book written by Eric Ambler

I confess that I do not know how Eric Ambler does it. His books are blazingly intelligent, fair-minded, and massively entertaining. The characters run the gamut from truly heroic to vile gutter snipes. He juggles multiple plot threads and sticks the landing. The stories provoke thought, probing the dark sides of inflammatory political issues in ways that no doubt infuriate partisans. For me, he finds the humanity within the distress, without creating cardboard cutouts of the villain driven to his evil by others. He does not excuse the inexcusable. People make their choices. They may not suffer for it, but their behavior is held up for readers to see and judge. And Ambler did it for forty years, leaving a memorable back-list.

If there is a standard Ambler situation, then it doubtless includes a fish out of water- an important citizen who finds himself among people of unexpected ill will. Our hero is obviously imperfect, probably even a little rotten, but we sympathize with him because his choices are not unreasonable. In The Levantar, we find our hero in place because he has inherited the family business which he hopes to maintain as a going concern. In Doctor Frigo, he has built a life in the Carribean as an escape from family tragedy in his native Latin America, except the tragedy lends itself to exploitation by powerful men. Each of these men is thrust into espionage and betrayal. They have a moral compass, but it proves less and less applicable as their situation unfolds.

So, is Ambler a poet of the morally ambiguous? Isn’t anyone who writes a spy novel? James Bond always acted on the side of the angels, but he did the devil’s work- what else is a license to kill? He was a rogue in a black and white world where even he could tell the bad guys from the good. After all, the bad guys were the ones trying to kill him. Ambler’s heroes often face the threat of death, but they have invited it. In Passage of Arms, the naively infuriating couple at the center of the shenanigans have made a series of choices that reasonably lead to their inevitable incarceration in an Indonesian prison- given half a chance, most readers would reach into the page and slap them up the side of the head. And yet we root for them to come to their senses and live to be naive another day.

The exceptional aspect to Ambler’s work is what I raised above- his striking ability to portray volatile situations in a manner that his books appeal across the political spectrum. Short of being an evil despot yourself, he should be eminently readable whatever your stance on the issues at hand. I have not fully decided if that is because he is so even-handed or because he is an equal opportunity offender, but I think there might be something more special at work here. By granting humanity to all of his characters, the stories rise above mere politics- they even surpass the espionage genre. These books become works of art that illuminate life at its most extreme.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 298 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Judy and the Dream of Horses (YGtCTO Music #1)

You Have Got to Check This Out

Song performed by Belle and Sebastian
Lyrics and Music by Stuart Murdoch

“Judy wrote the saddest song
Showed it to a boy at school”

I treat Belle and Sebastian like a singles band, picking and choosing favorite songs (Dear Catastrophe Waitress, for instance), but Judy and the Dream of Horses makes any list of great songs. Life is better knowing that someone made this so well, so beautifully, with such rhapsody. Speaking in the moment, this is my favorite use of a melodica in any song ever.

Has any song ever captured the artist’s anxiety better? Has any song ever presented a better salve to said anxiety? Soon as those vocals start soaring halfway through the song, don’t you want to create something? Don’t you want to grab the nearest person and ask them if they have heard this tune? If you need art in your darkest moment, then look no further. Ultimately, this is a song about the solace and ecstasy of making art. Neil Gaiman has spoken about the importance of taking mistakes, personal setbacks and tragedies and turning them into art. The ability to make art is what saves many of us. Judy steps outside of herself and takes the chance.

Clearly, Judy and the Dream of Horses is an ideal exemplar of the need to communicate that drives the songwriter. She shows the song to someone, seeking understanding. The contrast between what she could simply tell the boy at school without the song and what her song expresses is that divide between not art and art, resolved by the structure imposed by the song that Judy writes. She cannot express how she feels in mere words, but can reveal something about herself through the veil of art.

Self-referential art (art about art) provides a forum to talk about the structure necessary to define the edges of art rather than simply existing as a piece with structure imposed upon it. Paul Valéry and others have talked about the difference between poetry and other forms of written communication, drawing a comparison to the difference between dance and walking. The very act of imposing a structure on a piece of art allows it to be the means of communication. With normal spoken words, we look to grammar and expression while allowing freedom of structure. Art uses structure as grammar and the template for expression, adding to the power of what is presented. The painting says more because of the artist’s efforts in the creation. When we walk from here to there, we feel an experience vastly improved over the mere act of standing still. The structure of a pop song provides the same forward impetus, granting a through line to those three or so minutes. Great art is the successful imposition of structure (craft, if you will) on unformed ideas. The more abstract the idea expressed, the more structure helps convey the meaning intended. Consider Judy and the Dream of Horses without the building horns. The song potentially becomes a tragedy and her life a farce, legitimizing unfortunate views of the song already out in the world.

Speaking of which, interpretations abound of the lyrics, including the salacious and downright disturbing. In the end, art is communication, passing information from the creator’s brain to the spectator’s brain. The message received may or may not be the message sent. The message received by one may not be shared by any other. The artist’s responsibility ends at the boundary of their brain.

A word in favor of libraries: when money was tight and the child was young, we spent a lot of time at the neighborhood library, a luxury that made us better, happier people. The library stocked everything, from the expected tomes to compact discs and videos. New music purchases were outside the budget, but borrowing music was limited by what we could carry (and the ten discs at a time limit placed by the powers that be). We cycled through everything, but made fewer new discoveries than you might expect. The library does tend to stock the expected (really popular pop music) and the extremely unexpected (international folk music selected by someone who made their selections based on a limited budget and limited time). So, the first Belle and Sebastian CD was a very pleasant surprise.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 299 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.