Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song written by Shane MacGowan
Performed by The Pogues

Ecstatic and angry. Listening to the Pogues can feel like time spent with a manic personality. Make that a charismatic manic. The fascinating thing is how well that manner is channeled by the music. Surely, the band has had its struggles, particularly with their lead singer, but the art- I could listen to them all day. And have done so. And have been asked to stop, for just an hour… please. Which probably raises some question as to the type of person that responds to their music.

No one raised in any faith who has ever asked questions of that faith has not felt as though they have fallen. Art can be a response to that lapse. So can vice. Both can bring a sense of elation. Art is an attempt to restore or instigate communication with the ephemeral. Surely, the artist appreciates the kindness of audiences, but somewhere along the way, the art takes on a life of its own. Robert Johnson supposedly did the devil’s work and ended up in the ground unmarked, but I doubt the Pogues were thinking of him. In the end, Johnson and the Pogues get closer to heaven than any person has the right, making music that surrounds and glorifies the human experience in all its facets.

For the album cover, the octet is augmented by James Joyce, the patron saint of modern literature. I have no better idea how Joyce would have felt about that then whether or not W.C. Fields would have been happy about being on an album cover for the Beatles. Joyce can read like a manic depressive with OCD, so there is that shared heritage beyond their mutual country of origin.

One of the things that you notice about protest music is a certain world weariness that pervades the content. Maybe that’s what made Edwin Starr’s War stand out from something like Eve of Destruction. Protest-worthy events continue piling up without end. Our art and our common existence requires that constant infusion of fresh blood that discovers new crimes and old sins anew.

The Pogues took their anger and crafted phenomenal music. Everywhere they turned, they found something to be pissed off about, even when they had a good day at the horse track, they manage to sound annoyed.

Then, there is Fairytale of New York. What does it say about me that I get goosebumps when Shane MacGowan reminds his love, after all the vitriol, that he kept her dreams with his? No other song in pop music so beautifully encapsulates the immigrant couple’s trial. I have called attention to Kirstie MacColl before and I am at a loss… Ah, hell, here come the tears again.

Sometimes you need Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring or Francisco Goya. Picasso needed to make Guernica. The Clash needed to sing Spanish Bombs. The Pogues needed to exist because we need to be angry and sad and happy to the extremes. Sometimes you need to drive down the street with the music blaring a bunch of punks.

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. 260 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.

Movie directed by Robert Altman
Written by Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on the novel by Edmund Naughton

When I was growing up, some magazine lying around the house purported to dissect the best movies that had ever been made. They sliced and diced by genre and critic and popularity and awards and whatever else they could use to fill the space. This was well before the Internet, so spending time perusing its pages was pretty much the best equivalent available to surfing IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert’s site– essentially a good way to spend an hour if nothing better were available.

I remember that the editors of the publication had saved their final pages for critics’ selections of the best movie ever. As it floats before my mind’s eye, the usual suspects of that day were named: Citizen Kane, Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, Casablanca, and Gone With the Wind. Growing up in a movie household, I knew all of them but two. Citizen Kane made its way to me in its time, but one lone outlier had selected M*A*S*H, a film that I knew as the television show, which I had not really seen yet. Careful close reading revealed that the same critic had also called M*A*S*H the greatest war movie, also- explicitly praising its anti-war tone.

That was enough to make me think that I might not want to ask around the house about the film since I really had no idea what sort of can of worms I might be opening. Self-censorship, especially the unnecessary kind, is never a good thing, but we do learn it at a young age. The most I ever heard from my dad about the movie was that he had enjoyed it- I think he had seen it with one or both of my older brothers. So, I was on my own later to make sense of that first viewing. Robert Altman does not make easy films. By the time I got to it, the TV show was burned into my consciousness, so I had to set that imprint aside. In the end, M*A*S*H, Nashville, and a lot of others by Altman proved favorites, and always enjoyable.

For whatever reason, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and I had never intersected until recently. I’ve been thinking about that critic who called M*A*S*H an anti-war war movie (which most “war” movies are- they may be patriotic, but truly pro-war themes usually falter after “we had good reasons”). One of my viewing companions asked if people really thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller as a western. The ambiance is present and there is a long gunfight, but the world shown is not standard Western fare.

I thought the movie was fantastic, but could it have existed without all those westerns before it? The strange thing about stories that “defy” genres is that the person who writes them has to inhabit the genre in order to see the unexplored corners. You need to slip into the envelope before you can push it. Genres only become tired when people police them for acceptable content. Between the border pushers and the authors wishing to avoid classification, I don’t know where this all leads. Readers are playing fair when they just want a mystery… are they in conflict with the writers seeking their attention?

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. 261 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.

Book written by Peter Straub

Like many of my generation, that first horror novel was written by Stephen King. I spent winter vacation one middle school year devouring The Shining. As intended, I was terrified and so enthralled that I finished the book anyway. I recall my parents discussing whether or not they should intervene in my reading choice. They doubtless had concerns about mature themes, which I mostly glossed over, reveling instead in the ghosts and the living topiary. In the end, they probably regretted not stopping me as it turned out that The Shining was the stuff that nightmares were made of.

Be that as it may, I mostly conquered the bad dreams, but kept on reading Stephen King. Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Christine, and Pet Sematary all followed whenever school allowed. Looking back on them, they constituted something of an explanation of adults for me. At an age and in an era that seemed determined to paint the world as a great divide between youth and maturity, these books found heroes and villains across all ages, many races, and the entire economic spectrum. To someone unfamiliar with the history of Gothic literature (really not too hip to plain literature either), they opened up whole worlds of storytelling possibilities.

Between a sister-in-law who willingly shared her reading habit and the local library, I had ready access to the legions of writers who followed King into the suddenly burgeoning field of horror authorship. Many were talented, but none held my interest at the time. At some point, Ghost Story landed on my nightstand and that changed.

The setting in a small New England town was familiar from King’s oeuvre. The language, however, was different. The rhythm and pace felt special. The villain was a seductress, somehow more adult and more primeval than anything I had read before. Despite the vampires and zombies and poltergeist and apocalypses of other books, the sweep of years in Ghost Story felt like a grand scale fight against something that could not be defeated.

The conceit of the story around the multiple narrators and their ghost story telling group gave layers that resonated even with an inexperienced reader like myself. More than that, the behavior of the men echoed that strange tendency of repeat readers to return to the horror genre even when it terrified the bejeezus out of them.

While I had been reading scary things for quite a while, I still struggled to make my peace with frightening movies. When it came time to see the movie based on Straub’s book, I could not resist the enticement, but I distinctly remember my trepidation with every scene change. The strange and usually comforting sight of Fred Astaire and John Houseman on the screen did nothing to calm my tremors. I loved every minute of it, glimpsing a future willingness to watch darn near anything.

At a time when vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, and what have you seem passé, the thrill seems almost gone. We’ve had monsters killing children for so long that the very idea of literary horror seems absurd. King continues to sell books, but he has been an anomaly. Harry Potter certainly had horrific elements, but they were hardly the point. Maybe these tales were always destined for the moving image and that same subset of people who seek out collections by Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams.

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. 262 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.