Ramsayings

I was lucky enough to see Sparklehorse during that fateful CMJ festival that got pasted together in the wake of September 11th. He performed in front of a gigantic American flag the owners of the Bowery Ballroom hung at the back of the stage. He seemed really uncomfortable with that. I’m sure at least some portion of the audience did, too. I know I did.

I’m sorry to say I don’t remember much of the set. It wasn’t particularly long. He opened with ‘Homecoming Queen,’ but forgot the words. The audience jogged his memory by chiming in. He played the hits passionately. I’m reminded that he covered GBV’s ‘Smothered in Hugs,’ which you can listen to over at Chromewaves. It was amazing.

I have to admit that I expected some of the guests from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ to join him onstage. I don’t know what I was thinking. I had only been in NYC for a year and I truly believed that that sort of thing might happen. He didn’t tour much. He was in New York. What else was Nina Persson doing that night?

I didn’t think much of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ at the time. I had fallen in love with Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and Good Morning, Spider over a few troubling summers, working jobs I hated while saving money for school in the fall. Those songs were anthems to my ears, the perfect soundtrack to anyone who’s shuffling along in the twilight of joblessness and underemployment.

I’m not sure why I never really got his next album, It’s a Wonderful Life. The guy made a living off of wildly uneven albums, but something about this one didn’t quite connect. I loved songs like ‘Piano Fire’ and ‘King of Nails,’ but some of the cameos just didn’t work for me. I shelved it.

I haven’t listened to Sparklehorse much since. I went back to those records after news broke of Linkous’ death and found them to have the same amazing qualities they did when I first listened to them almost a decade ago. I can still picture myself making a 120 mile roundtrip commute in my decrepit Dodge Shadow, blasting Good Morning, Spider at top volume and it still makes me shiver.

My friend Eric tweeted late last night,” ‘Up in the Air’: politely misguided liberal fantasy, or egregiously clueless and downright offensive in parts Piece Of Shit?”

It made me think of the clip above. I watched Up in the Air earlier this week and wondered what the fuss was about. It tries to do a lot, but I’m not sure it accomplishes very much. It’s boilerplate romance-gone-wrong fare, freighted with a message about how our priorities are wrong and somehow the horrible economy will help us figure out what’s important. Sorry, Mr. Reitman, but the notion of making lemonade doesn’t work when you can’t afford the lemons in the first place.

For people who’ve never been laid off, it seems like the stuff dreams are made of. You’re freed from a job you probably hated anyway; you get some severance, or at least unemployment; and you can reevaluate things and move on. Which is the logic that informs this amazingly hilarious Onion article I read way back in October 2003, when I was about six months into what would be a 2+ year underemployment bid.

I felt that the testimonials that came at the end of the movie from folks who’d lost their jobs in the recent downturn echoed the hope the Obama campaign gave them. Their optimism and their reliance on family to support them in their time of need were both very poignant, but Reitman conveniently leaves out all the stories from the past few years about folks who’ve lost their jobs and have then gone on to violent attacks on their workplaces and communities.

Is Reitman the new W.D. Howells, that is, someone who puts a smiley face on realism? There’s but one “dead end” in the movie, the woman who follows through on her threat to commit suicide. Everyone else just goes on their merry way, for better or worse. Whether it’s finding a new job, or having an affair, or just running away from it all thanks to a nearly infinite supply of frequent flier miles, everyone can find an escape from the humdrum, if not outright happiness.

I think it’s that that people dislike about Reitman’s movies. The simple-mindedness. The breezy dialogue. The beautiful people. The whole ‘resiliency of the human spirit’ trope, which sometimes just seems a little more realistic than the way it’s presented here. Reitman’s youthful, privileged worldview makes it difficult to see things differently than he does, that is, through a lens of infinite possibility. The problem is that Reitman’s skies, like those in Up in the Air, are sunny and cloudless.

Snow, originally uploaded by hhannigan.

Sorry for not having written more often last month. I feel like I’m still mentally digging out from all that snow. This week has erased almost all memory of 24+ hour snows, but I still harbor a fear that we may get nipped again before March is out.

In the meantime, bask in the glorious sunshine!