They Said That Queens Could Stay Monday, May 02, 2005

Monkeying around with the template (you like?) a little last night, I discovered the Archives feature actually works now--after almost two years of bupkiss. (The Google Search toolbar still doesn't, so everything evens out.) At any rate, I started tooling around in the early days of this blog, and was a little bemused to see how clenched it's gotten. This started out as a journal, and somewhere along the way turned into a soapbox. I'm not going to abandon the high-fiber postings, but I'm going to try to fit them into a gentler context of day-to-day stuff. So if you want to know where I stand on abortion, you have to read about what I had for lunch.

On that note, holy Christ almighty, am I tired. I set myself up for it with a Diet Pepsi yesterday afternoon, which kept me bopping well past midnight. I recognize that Diet Pepsi will not only give me cancer but tastes like it too; but, hey, I could win an iTune under the cap! Every penny counts.

I don't think I've described my commute these days. Since I went on unconscionably about riding the light rail to Manhattan, I should give the Turnpike its due: forty-five minutes in the dark, with lunatics rimming your bumper to get you to move right. To stay awake I play little games: Can I get down to Exit 11 before the news comes on WFUV at 5 a.m.--and then switch to WXPN in Philly, so I get uninterrupted music the whole way? I used to try to time the Stern show that way: get in the car just after a commercial break and then hit as few of them as possible on the drive down. The tortures of the abyss are nothing next to sitting through ten minutes of steroid powder and premature-e cream. ("I came rubbing the stuff on!" --Groucho Marx)

No train means no time to read, but it does mean time to think. It's depressing not to be excited over the prospect of a Hitchhiker's Guide movie. I loved those books as much as anybody, way back when; they were my early teens as much as Monty Python, Star Wars and Steely Dan. Now those icons--with one notable exception, of course--just don't signify anymore. Hitchhiker's started to seem smug and overly cute, identical in tone to too many spazzy sci-fi fans I had known over the years. Yours truly included, of course. So when I tried to get past spazziness, I started distancing myself from a lot of that Anglicized Irony Lite.

The movie, then, already had one strike against it. Then a pair of conservo-reviews reminded of something: Adams was a hardcore atheist, and the humor of the books is impossible to separate from that worldview. Conservos, of course, can be as hypersensitive as any deconstructionist when it comes to sniffing out verboten tropes. But I think they're onto something here. To a thirteen-year-old suffering under Jesuits, "42" is sophisticated, hilarious and transgressive. Now it seems like the kind of joke a thirteen-year-old would make.

Thinking about Springsteen, too...he got a lot of comparisons to Dylan, of course, as well as Tom Waits, who is a rough contemporary of his. But does anybody ever stack him up against Billy Joel? I've been realizing lately how fond I am of the schmaltzy old guy--and realizing that he did a much better job at capturing the "ordinary guy" vibe than Bruce ever did. Springsteen's teenage songs are all West Side Story: operatic, stylized, phony names and huge emotions. Joel's teenage stuff...de gustibus, I guess, but Scenes From an Italian Restaurant sounds true and targeted in a way that Springsteen doesn't. Right down to the names, and pronunciations, of "Brender and Eddie."

I know that this seems like the Ream the Boss blog sometimes. Honestly, I don't go out of my way to bash him. It's just that over the years, he's accumulated lots of extra-artistic baggage and it's really tough for me to get past all that and hear the music for what it is. Sometimes that's my fault as a listener; sometimes it's the Music Machine; sometimes it's Bruce himself. If you present yourself as a Down the Shore Woody Guthrie, you tend to invite comparisons. Sometimes they're not flattering.

Let me put that in a nicer light: Springsteen raises tremendous expectations for me, many of them unfair. I genuinely want to believe his billing, and hear an artist who can pull off all the stuff that he and the Machine promise. He does tremendously solid work; but a lot of it falls short of the heights, by my ears. I like him best when he does something at a kooky angle, something that doesn't have the weight of the Man of the People suffocating it: My favorite songs of his, which I will lose lots of credibility for, are Atlantic City, Tunnel of Love and Darlington County.

At any rate, Billy Joel. He's never going to save the world, as Springsteen just might. He's never going to be operatic. But I think when he's at his best, he has an unparalleled flair for the demotic. I knew Brender and Eddie; on the Magic Rat, I am agnostic.

@ 9:33:00 AM,

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