On my birthday last week, my friend Kurt led a few people on the banjo in the singing of this number in lieu of the customary “Happy Birthday to You.” There were few on the scene, but most of them knew the words, so it was perfectly, appropriately sobering. I encourage you, too, to sing murder ballads on your birthday.
Thanks to Colin, Andy and Shanai at the WBSC, too, for a tremendous birthday party Saturday night. There was singing at that one, as well.
I am very likely in an embattled and sleepy-eyed minority here, but I really love the end of daylights savings in the fall. You can spend the entire summer enjoying long, lazy, well-lit evenings that dip off imperceptibly into twilight sometime long after supper, where you bike around without lights in white pants rolled up to mid-calf until at least 9:30 pm, at which point you realize the day is very nearly over and you haven’t accomplished shit except drinking a lot of summer cocktails with lime garnish and exploring a dozen city blocks worth of south Minneapolis commercial architecture. Yes!
So it feels right that as bike-and-white-pants season comes to an end, you trade all of that in for darkness, enforced solitute and a re-committment to the sort of unwavering Nordic work ethic that gave America everything from The Boat of Longing to “The Toolmaster of Brainerd.” Time to hit the studio! Time to up your Netflix queue to four-at-a-time!
Here in Minneapolis, the sun will set at 4:55pm today, and then continue to set two-and-a-half minutes earlier with every passing day until Hippie Holiday Winter Solstice. By the end of November, the sun will have set completely at 4:30 in the afternoon. The entire state will be plunged into darkness by the time I leave work, in other words.
I still find that tremendously exciting for some reason. It makes you feel as if you are privy to the secrets of the North, as if you have a shared kinship with Canadians and Swedes and Russians and Alaskans and Finns that everyone in the rest of the hemisphere doesn’t get as they go on with their subtropical sweating and stinking well into November.
I will be sick of of all of it by late March, of course, but I’ll have gotten a tremendous amount of work done, and will be ready to jump back into warmth and light with a sweaty, white-pantsed fury.
Also, uh, since it’s my birthday and all, it seems like it’d be OK to point out this hilarious and utterly terrifying photo — my friends Allen and Pamela went costumed as your correspondent for Halloween last weekend, right down to the red socks, vintage campaign lapel buttons and furry Russian hats. If people didn’t know who I was, they just said they were “Amish rabbis,” which works, too.
There is also a photo of them making out, but I have sworn to never look at it. The metaphysical implications are too terrible.
Robin Scott, of the Scottish band M, whose song “Pop Muzik” was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on November 3, 1979:
“I was looking to make a fusion of various styles which somehow would summarize the last 25 years of pop music. It was a deliberate point I was trying to make. Whereas rock and roll had created a generation gap, disco was bringing people together on an enormous scale. That’s why I really wanted to make a simple, bland statement, which was, ‘All we’re talking about basically [is] pop music.’”
That’s a very late-1970s sentiment, the touchingly naive and idealistic concept that people might be coming together on some global scale to fulfill, in some way, the promises of the 1960s (by dancing, I guess). I suppose that particular party came to a pretty abrpupt end almost exactly one year later with the election of Ronald Reagan on November 4, 1980. Morning in America! No more of this gay cosmopolitan utopian bullshit!
This optimistic, internationalist pop anthem that positions itself with one foot in the past and one foot in the future is thirty years old today.
And actually, so am I! I am also a relic of a forgotten time!
“Mr. Simon was a forefather of situation comedy writers, and his scripts for stage and screen were embraced by actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But sitcoms have given way to reality shows like “American Idol,” one-liners to the sardonic humor of “The Office,” and the heavily plotted comedy of Mr. Simon’s film “California Suite” to the animated wit of “Up” and the fratty banter of “The Hangover,” two of the summer’s biggest hits.”
From Sunday’s article in The New York Times about Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs closing on Broadway so quickly.
I realize it’s just a tossed-off line, not meant to be a serious diagnosis of the state of American comedy, but I still find it to be a strange statement nonetheless. I suppose I can see where ”sardonic humor” has replaced “one-liners” (though I’m not sure Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon would agree), but I’m not sure how “animated wit” might have replaced “heavily plotted comedy”; I mean, wasn’t Up about as traditional a piece of heartstring-tugging comic narrative cinema as one could imagine? It even starred Ed Asner, who’s actually acted in a Neil Simon production! The road from The Goodbye Girl to Up is not a long one.
Comedy, like any form of popular art, is a continuum — there’s never clean breaks from the past. For example, can it be said that Woody Allen’s neurotic brand of sophisticated urban comedy made Bob Hope’s schtickier brand of self-deprecating comedy obsolete? I guess so, but that statement is negated by the fact that Woody Allen stole a ton from Bob Hope, a fact Allen happily admits. That doesn’t take anything away from Hope or Allen.
I think it’s too pat to say “audiences don’t like that scripted stuff anymore — they prefer fratty banter.” The reality is always more complex, and it’s a lot more interesting to poke and see where those fault lines have formed, and just how these changes in taste have manifested themselves.
Questions for discussion:
- Who are the transitional figures between Felix & Oscar and Harold & Kumar?
- If Walter Matthau were still alive, would he ever be cast as Will Ferrell’s father? Zach Galifinakis’s? Why does it make sense that he might have appeared in a cameo on 30 Rock, and not on The Office?
- What does Chevy Chase’s presence in the new comedy show Community suggest?
- Should Neil Simon begin writing videos for Funny or Die? Should Robert Redford start appearing in them?
- What will future generations make of Cougartown’s slow, inevitable transformation into a Larry Gelbart sitcom?
“Sheesh, simmer down, crybaby—the rest of us middle American die-hards have been dealing with our own squads of AAA losers for decades, so join the club. But of course it’s not just Mets fans who get a bruised ego and have self-righteous hissy fits after a disappointing season—Cubs fans are downright scary when the subject of entitlement comes up. And don’t they still burn Kenesaw Mountain Landis effigies on Chicago’s Southside every October? Nobody holds a grudge like a real baseball fan.”
My old pal Katie, a diehard Reds fan, writing over at Mercy Missiles on the subject of postseason baseball misery in flyover country.
If you’re not following Mercy Missiles, you’re missing out on the best of pro baseball, Louisville politics, old television shows, mixed drinks and other very important subjects also dear to our hearts over here at S. 12th.
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