Monday, September 24, 2012

Oh Make No Mistake My Friend All Of This Will End So Sing It Now: "Sing Your Life"

The things you love most are the things you return to again and again.

Hence the concept of the dog-eared page. Or buying DVDs in an age when it's just as easy not to. The desire to own and mark what you know you will want to see again.

The things I return to are usually things I hardly realize I am returning to, because they never feel old, they just feel good.

Here are some of them:


The song: Morrissey, "Sing Your Life"; 1991

From Morrissey's wonderfully off-kilter second solo album Kill Uncle, this song encapsulates a lot of what I love about Morrissey: he has a very clear-eyed (some would say overly so) view of exactly what sucks about life but he loves it anyway.

Sort of like how in the opening scene to Annie Hall (one of the first DVDs I felt compelled to own) Woody Allen tells that joke with the old ladies in the Catskills about how the food is lousy, and such small portions.

This view of life is pretty close to mine, I would say.

(Previous Morrissey: "Everyday is Like Sunday")

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The song: Neko Case, "People Got A Lotta Nerve"; 2009

Y'know, they call them killer whales
But you seemed surprised 
When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank


The message that I get from this one is that the essential nature of things will out, despite whatever genteel conventions the things seem to abide by,

and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing,

and that animals are people too.

(Previous Neko: "The Needle Has Landed"; "Running Out of Fools")

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The song: PS 22 Chorus, "Firework (Katy Perry cover)"; 2011

And this, which has twice in a row made me cry real tears when it came up in the Katy Perry movie. Why? Because this song is the perfect one to be sung by children, because they can do it with no irony and the listener wants them to believe it in a way we are afraid for adults to want to believe it.

Because hope in some way requires ignorance, but that also isn't necessarily a bad thing. You ever done something that was hard, knit a cabled sweater or assembled a set of shelves, that you didn't know was hard? If you'd known how hard it was you wouldn't have done it, but you didn't, so you did.

Kind of like that.

(Previously: "At the Movies with Amy Wilson: Katy Perry Part of Me 3D")

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So those are some touchpoints of my ongoing efforts to form a unified theory of everything.

Another one is that everybody should eat pineapple when they feel kind of blech.

So now you know.

Yrs,
AW

inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com