Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song performed by The Clash
Written by Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

Punk Music was no more the antithesis of music than Jazz, Romanticism, or Rap. Like Dogme 95 and Fauvism, it was an aesthetic adopted by artists in order to facilitate their creative drive. The real questions for every dogmatic artistic movement arise when the world takes notice. How many young artists have sat around a bar or coffee shop, half-pissed and fully pissed off, scribbling down their list of demands? And they will never, ever compromise. Religions are created from these half-formed doctrines, let alone artistic movements.

Then somebody, maybe multiple somebodies, actually go out and create. And someone pays them for their art. Time passes and the art gets repeatedly bought, maybe even praised by the establishment. Maybe some of the original drafters of the doctrine start to admit that everything about the world does not suck, like food and drink. Where does the compromise go too far? When do the shillelaghs come out?

London Calling is a tremendous, angry album, an attitude that the Clash had pretty much mastered by the time they arrived in the studio. The spittle practically drips into your ears from the headphones. They are rooting for the rude boys, ticked about the clamp down, dismayed by consumer culture, hate war and love reggae. Also, somewhere along the way, that punk aesthetic of thrashing on your instrument… not so much. (Bear in mind, from fireHose through the Sex Pistols, you find an awful lot of people who always said they made music, just maybe not the kind you like. And they were right.) The members of the Clash were musicians before the band, just with a lot of issues to work through.

I hear London Calling as an album about that eternal argument over dogma. The tension is over compromise. How far is too far to go? Should Train in Vain even be listed among the songs if the record company wants it to be a pop hit? Are we pissed if we can dance without the slam? Isn’t reggae music by people even more disenfranchised than us? Is punk outsider art and what happens to outsider art once you sign with a big record company? What would Woody Guthrie do?

In the end, the Clash crafted song after song that ultimately create that catharsis sought by all artwork since Aristotle named the experience. Through their own turmoil as a group and as individuals, they somehow captured all the anger that comes with being overwhelmed with ennui. They had accomplished so much more than envisioned and they could be satisfied with their place in the world, until they looked at the world around them. How do you maintain that dismay when you are no longer living on the streets? How do you carry the weight of the world without being crushed? Are you allowed happiness knowing that so much needs to change?

Like so many art strains, Punk music arose from diverse sources with varied agendas, but London Calling captures that common thread- never stop questioning everything. What more can we ask from our art?

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. 296 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 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.

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.