There have been flash thunderstorms that ripped through where we live in the past two days. These lasted only 5-10 minutes but were pretty scary because of the force of the water and the winds. Yesterday's storm was especially bad. Power lines were shut down (no nice underground cabling like in New York or Singapore here) because tree branches thrown onto the lines. I also saw some power line poles that had they're heads broken off. We took a walk (because Sourdough needed a walk) after the storm and there was quite a lot of physical damage to the trees. Two huge pine trees that flank our building -- they reach up to the third story, so I'm guessing they're about 30 feet tall -- were uprooted and lay on their side like felled giants. Over by the pond, a huge willow tree was uprooted as well. This was probably the event of the week for most people staying here and lots of people were out of their apartments -- gawking at the uprooted trees, taking photos with their cell-phones and generally taking in the spectacle of the storm's aftermath.
Anyway, after losing power, our first reaction was to figure out how to make sure all the food we had stashed in the fridge and freezer wouldn't have to be thrown away. We had no idea how long the outage would last, so we decided that we might as well make an event of things (the slightly celebratory mood was probably enhanced by the fact that I've passed my driving test - a kind of final frontier for me - and the recent news that several of Edna's papers from her dissertation have been accepted in top education journals) and go out and get a grill and grill all that food as it thawed.
A quick phone call to a more grill savvy friend narrowed down our options quite quickly. Apparently there are laws about the kind of grill you can use on the balcony of an apartment in Lansing, so we could only get a gas grill -- the kind fueled by a propane tank. True aficionados don't think highly of gas-grills because charcoal and coal grills add aroma to the food but we didn't have much choice in this one. (Also, see this NYTimes video in the middle of the page, which I had chanced upon earlier in the day).
I used to do a lot of BBQing in Singapore (for large crowds -- having to feed the church youth group or my classes of students and where flavor was pretty much secondary to everything else that went on at one of these gatherings) but that was with charcoal grills which you had to take a lot of time to stoke and get up to heat, so I was pretty apprehensive about using a gas grill. The notion of attaching a propane tank to a flimsy nozzle and all the cautionary labels about the hazards and potential explosions were pretty scary. Plus, I was never very good with bunsen burners in secondary school (I shamefully recall the fact that the last time I attempt to turn one on, during my O-level Bio practical exam, I wasted precious minutes fiddling with matches and the gas control). At the same time, a gas grill is much cleaner and takes much less time to get into cooking mode. Anyway, we found a cheap (small, portable and "Made in China") one at Meijer (16 bucks), brought it home and assembled it. I had some trouble getting the grill ignited (because the in-built ignition switch doesn't work I think) and caused a pretty spectacular fire ball that would have singed off my beard if I had one (reminiscent of the silly stunts we tried to pull with 30 cent lighters in sec. school ... the most memorable being the blue flame running up one's jeans) when I finally got the thing going after using a gas lighter (must remember to let the gas clear if one fails to ignite the thing and not put my face right in the grill ...)
At which point, the electricity came back on, making the whole need to grill redundant. However, I just couldn't pass up on an opportunity to grill (after nearly burning off my eyebrows and inhaling lots of gas) so I quickly thawed out some chicken, rubbed it with a quick seasoning and proceeded to cook it. They turned out pretty nicely in the end. In fact, Edna was impressed enough (with the flavor, if not appearance) to declare that we would do a major grill session today!
Just in case readers of this blog were utterly disgusted with my last lengthy post on High School Musical, here are links to recent articles which suggest that we (reviewer of trivialities and irritated readers) are in good company:
In my last post I admitted that I didn't really like the slow-moving bulk of Camelot. This is generally true for me and musicals. Perhaps the only two movie musicals that I've enjoyed are The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. Of course I'm not really "into" musicals and haven't watched that many (my guess is that my familiarity with the genre is just about as lay-man as things get) so it might be wrong for me to even have an opinion about these things. In an effort at full disclosure, I'll admit that I fell asleep during Les Miserables, and didn't really enjoy The Phantom of the Opera or Miss Saigon. Also noted is the fact that despite living in New York for 2 1/2 years, I didn't watch a single musical despite walking by Times Square almost every week. The closest I got to a musical in New York was standing in queue at the Mama Mia discount booth in hopes of securing a cheap seat for my mom when she was visiting. (No luck - no student tix during the summer).
Which is why I was a little confused at my setting aside an entire evening to watch (on TV) an avowedly "bad" musical made for 10-14 year olds: Disney's High School Musical. Perhaps it was the desire to watch something truly commercial and mindless or some strange nostalgia for JC (the musical's portrayal of cliques and cool while hopelessly stereotypical had moments of truth). At any rate, while I'm still embarrassed about watching (and enjoying at some level) the in-your-face emotional caricaturing that shamelessly unfolded on the screen, watching this blockbuster hit for Disney did lead to some thoughts about the culture industry that so dominates our tastes and insinuates itself in our fantasies.
Most reviews of High School Musical compare it (unfavorably) to Grease. The superficial resemblances are striking: the leads meet each other on vacation (and vaguely flirt while singing a Karaoke number), she comes to his school as a new transfer student (and he rules the school cause he's the cool captain of the Bball team), because of their attraction to each other they manage to break out of their cliques (he from the jocks and she from the brainiacs) to do something that they both love but have hidden from the rest of the world: singing. Like Grease, this journey is not without complications as friends try to pull them back into their circumscribed social roles in a tightly straited High School. And finally, the big event that all of us wait in anticipation for is a kind of performance (the final auditions for the parts in a musical in High School Musical and the spot on an American Bandstand-like show in Grease).
Aging Well Despite these narrative similarities, there is a profound difference in the spirit of the movies. One just needs to look at the pictures of characters from one movie mapped against their counterparts in the other:
The male leads: Troy Bolton (School's Golden Boy) and Danny Zuko (questionably and ridiculously cool)
Their female counterparts and love interests: Gabriella Montez (Genius kid who's new to the school) and Sandy Olsson ("I'm from Sydney, Australia")
Sidekicks: Chad Danforth (basketball team mate) and Kenickie (fellow gang member)
Somewhat nasty female antagonists: Sharpay (!?) Evans (who leads her own clique that consists of her brother and herself as she tyrannically dictates the Drama Club and expects to star in the school's musical) and Rizzo (chief Pink Lady).
These images (I know to do this properly I need to get the DVDs and make proper screen captures but images off the web will have to do for now) are meant to demonstrate how a 1978 movie depiction of what a High-Schooler looks like has radically shifted in about 30 years. Of course, Rydell High is a very different place from Eastside High but just the age of the actors is telling. John Travolta was 24 when he played Danny Zuko, Olivia Newton John 30 (even though she looks closest to a 16-18 year old) and Stockard Channing (Rizzo) was 34! When one watches Grease now, you're struck by how impossibly old everyone looks. The cast of High School Musical, on the other hand, all range in and about high school age, with the oldest from our list (Ashley Tisdale, who plays the Sharpay character) being an old 22. So the shift demonstrates a fascination with youth that has overtaken our collective sense of what it means to represent being in school. (For more of this, go watch To Sir With Love). Of course, one could argue that Grease, made in 1978 but set in the 50s/60s deliberately cast older looking actors to bank on the nostalgia factor and High School Musical, made about Highschoolers but aimed at Tweenagers, wants everyone to look much younger. Still, I don't think that really detracts from my point that the cultural industry has managed to install a thirst for the Fountain of Youth in the collective consciousness.
A Place to Belong Of course the other striking thing about the two films is the way they situate the lead characters with respect to the social structures of school culture. In Grease, all the action occurs in the margins of school life with Danny Zuko and his boys comprising the T-birds while Sandy tries to fit in with the Pink Ladies. Even the institutionally sanctioned finale (the first finale of the film's triple endings - the other two being the car race and then the reuniting of Danny and Sandy), the nationally televised dance-off, gets hijacked by these characters who don't really fit into the mainstream. What defines these characters is how far they stand from being integrated into a school community as they mock the athletes, spike the punch, and of course, moon all of America when they get the chance. But in High School Musical, no one is really on the outside. Troy Bolton is right in the middle of school life and even Gabriella quickly gets picked to be part of the school's Science Decathlon team. Even if the theme of this film is how borders are crossed, they're crossed from ostensibly safe positions of well-defined and institutionally accepted identities. Even the bad guys belong, as Sharpay Evans and her very metro-sexual brother rule the Drama club and incestuously engage in plotting against others while patting each other on the back.
"You're the One that I Want" Indeed, this question of belonging extends into the way transformation is conceived differently by each movie. At the end of Grease, Sandy decides that she must change in order to win over Danny's heart and his clique's approval, she transforms herself into a vampish fantasy babe along the lines of the Pink Ladies (pictured left). This over-the-top metamorphosis is, of course, an ironic comment on the nature and value of transformation, for all that she needs to do really change is to wear the right clothes, get a big hair-do and don some attitude. Danny's own failed attempts to become a jock (in order to impress Sandy) earlier in the film have pretty much the same effect. In High School Musical, however, transformation is taken more (and much too) seriously. The leading characters, already stars in their chosen arenas of the basketball court and science lab, show their peers that they can do it all by turning out to be stellar singers as well. In sharing this hidden talent with each other and later with the rest of the school, Troy and Gabriella, 'discover' their true selves and true love. The fantasy here - you can be anything you want to be as long as you don't worry about what your friends think - posits the multi-talented individual as the norm, and transformation becomes a stamp of individual agency that has the power to cut across stereotypes and reformulate group relations, instead of being a superficial (yet effective) tactic that is used to mask the fear of not belonging. Even though this seems to communicate 'positive messages' (such as "Just be yourself!"), in the world of High School Musical, only the exceedingly resourceful, intelligent, and good-looking have any chance of being individuals. You can't find love by donning tight-clothes, getting big-hair or dancing in high-heels in Walt Disney's universe.
Music and Lyrics Grease achieves witty commentary on the strange obsessions of teenagers with its silly and clever lyrics. Some element of the concrete and particular (my strange obsession) is always present whether we want the lovers to tell us more about their summer frolicking on the beach, dream about "Grease Lighting", or get advice about beauty school from Frankie Avalon. In the final sequence, when the entire cast sings "We Go Together", the frivolity of being teenagers is brought out most clearly in lyrics that go
We go together, Like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong, Remembered forever As shoobop sha wadda wadda yippity boom de boom Chang chang changitty chang shoobop, That's the way it should be, Wha oooh, yeah!
The nonsensical lines that require skillful singing are precisely the point of being a teenager, of being obsessed with extraordinarily complex and esoteric trivialities that don't really matter in the long run. The spaces that these lines open up allow a certain mode of negotiation and creation even as the idiosyncratic (and highly technical) are mastered.
If the trivializing ending of Grease performs this insight into the teenage mind, High School Musical dramatizes the abolishment of that mind. The teenager is turned into a spokesperson for every kind of high-minded abstraction that modern societies idealize. In fact, Singapore's NDP planning committee should seriously consider jettisoning yet another failed attempt to come up with a "national day song" and just turn to High School Musical's fabulously Singaporean (they're even decked out in red and white) ending. With stylishly vague platitudes emoting that "we're all in this together", every tween's fantasy end to a highschool movie dovetails into the ideological template for any state that wants to dilute and eventually flush clean the heterogeneous desires and dreams of its people. Unlike Grease, which leaves us stained with its idiosyncratic observations of teen hood that, like grease, can't really be fully gotten rid of, High School Musical effaces any trace or possibility for difference:
We're all in this together One sweet note That we are We're all stars And we see that We're all in this together And it shows When we stand Hand in hand Make our dreams come true
I am well aware that infinitely more subtle minds have taken the Disney entertainment complex apart for far more profound reasons. Amongst the most illustrious, Theodore Adorno, who found in
Disney hygiene, a funereal reading of Mickey Mouse culture and its sadomasochistic phantasms. At the tail end of Mickey Mouse's orbit around the globe, Adorno concluded that both fascism and the culture industry were "psychoanalysis in reverse". (Laurence Rickels, The Case of California 52)
I should end with this quote which seems to be a fitting conclusion to what I've been trying to get at in this post. I've definitely gone on too long indulging the guilty pleasure of re-visiting a guilty pleasure, perhaps because of High School Musical's effectiveness in dictating what counts as pleasurable. And, after all, I need to go catch the world TV premiere of High School Musical 2.
Camelot. This is the 60s musical that I thought I had to acquaint myself with in my attempts to be a good medievalist. It seems to be based not so much on "traditional" sources but on T.H. White's Once and Future King (which contains interesting ideas about Arthur's youth, Merlin's mentoring and the political conception of the Round Table). Like most extravagant productions from the period, this was bloated and slow moving (like Lerner and Lowe's other hit, The King and I). I didn't make it to the end. BTW, look who's playing Arthur in a Camelot revival that's actually going to make it's way to East Lansing. Yup, Lou Diamond Phillips. I really liked him in La Bamba and wasn't he in Young Guns as well? Perhaps he will make subjecting myself to 3 hours of slow-moving singing worthwhile.
Gerry. I learnt about this film while reading an NYT article that assessed Matt Damon's career thus far. It's a strange plotless adventure of two pals (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) who decide to trek the desert wilderness in Utah, and end up getting lost. The film showcases the rugged and unforgiving landscape but really tests one's patience with long shots (five minutes and more) of just the two of them walking the barren landscape. Thank God for the tracking function on DVD players.
Capote. I enjoyed this much more than the other two!
Having never been able to drive, I've never taken an interest in cars. But since I'm planning to take the driving test soon, I just wanted to make sure that our car is in an OK condition for the test. The car, a 1999 Toyota Camry, has, since the first day we got it, always shown on the instrument panel that something's wrong with the rear lights. We've checked it and all the rear lights work, so we put it down to a quirk of an old car. But it dawned on me about two days ago that we've never really checked the "high mounted stop light", the superfluous thing that lights up on the rear board, that sits between the speakers in our car. In fact when I got Edna to go out and look again yesterday, she missed the light completely and it was only after I pointed it out physically that we learnt that the light doesn't work. So we've been driving without a "high mounted stop light". And so have many drivers given that I can't help but notice whether that light lights up whenever we hit a red light now. (Another Bono Moment whole thing is interesting but 4.25 for song itself). So, my penchant for taking things apart kicked in. After all, how hard could it be to check a light bulb after years of taken electrical and electronic things apart and (almost) perfectly putting them back together again. So, with the handy 1999 Toyota Camry manual in hand, I peered into the fuse box (fuse was ok) and dismantled the rear light (bulb and contact points seem ok). I was really tempted to dig into the wiring to see if I could do anything but decided that this was no Tamiya / Airfix model kit. Better to bring in for the pros to figure it out.
We caught Becoming Jane watch with their girl friends (probably leaving their husbands free to go laugh at Jackie Chan in "Rush Hour 3" with their buddies). It was quite nicely done and like every Jane Austen inspired period piece, had one ball too many, an impossible number of empire line dresses for the protagonist's wardrobe (strangely enough, Jane's sister appears in scenes timed several months apart in the same pink dress), and an improbable reserve of witty repartee (which is the point, I suppose). Still, it's a pretty interesting addition to a slowly growing list of films that try to suggest how an authorial existence might have been crucial (in direct or unexpected ways) to the works by which we at the cinema yesterday. I think there were only about 4 men in the largely middle aged female audience. It certainly was a film that a lot of women went out to remember them. Becoming Jane isn't bad though it's a pretty unsophisticated statement about how an author's life translates into her writing. That growing list of films about authors? I'm thinking of Shakespeare in Love, far and away the most effective and amusing because it doesn't pretend at any veracity, Capote, The Hours and Sylvia. I guess Naked Lunch and Henry and June would be on the list too, though they were made somewhat earlier. What else is there?
Anyway, authors about whom films should be made (perhaps films have already been made and I just don't know about them): Herman Melville. And there's a ready-made title in "Call me Ishmael". Ken Kesey / Jack Kerouac Hemmingway. (who was a popular source of film adaptations in the 40s and 50s, right?) Chaucer. James Joyce. Proust. S.R. Delany. The Bronte Sisters. (Hah -- I half-suspected that there was already a film on them, and checking IMDb, this turned up.) Lord Byron. E.M. Forster (who is the single novelist whose books have been turned into film adaptations at a rate that compares to Austen but who seems to have fallen out of favor. Henry James is the other guy who was a pretty popular source for adaptations.
I guess there are only so many ways to show writers at work ...
Three films that I've watched since the last post. Michelangelo Antonioni's (who just recently passed away) L'eclisse. It was heavy going, with all those long lingering shots that silently capture the turmoil of indecision and frustrated desire. It tracks the transitional space between the afterlife of one relationship and the birth of a new one, with the film spanning precisely the time from a break-up to a consummation. One of the controlling motifs and settings is the stock exchange where the male protagonist (Alain Delon) works and how its esoteric yet eminently precise practices obliquely represent the emotional vicissitudes that the lovers experience. It was the first time that I've seen a film with Alain Delon in it and I must say that he's really good looking. Click on the image for a really nice synopsis-analysis of the film.
Of the three films I'm writing about, Babel was the most disappointing. It's a great film if you're into bashing the white man and his thoughtless cultural colonization but there was a lot of inflated fluff. I think the feeling of dissatisfaction I have with the film lies in the way too many moments that are shot like standard made for Hollywood sequences, which establish event, place and character with too much certainty. At some moments you're thinking, "Ok, I get it already ... either assemble more interesting shots or move on ..." I thought, however, that the way the stories were interlinked without being chronologically synchronous (the film itself becoming a fourth dimensional Tower of Babel that holds together the illusion of a unified sense of time) was pretty interesting.
Bleu. This film is part of the Three Colors series of films that Krzysztof Kieslowski made in the early 1990s. I actually watched this when it showed in the cinemas. The interesting thing (for me) is the way I remember (or misremember in this case) my watching of the film. For the longest time now, I've always thought that I watched the film in 1989 with a classmate. This made sense to me for on artistic grounds as I've always thought that the trilogy was made to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution as well. (See, displaced memories always depend on elegantly dreamt up causes.) As it turns out, Bleu was only released in 1993. It's a significant shift for me because it demonstrates a certain repression taking place. I've always thought that we watched Bleu because my friend was a cool 15 year old who was extremely cultured and a committed Francophile (which he may have been). So 1989 was an appropriate date. But 1993 was a very different (and difficult) year for me and it turns out that my friend was probably being really nice in deciding that companionship, a movie in a foreign language, and the lovely Julie Binoch might lift my spirits. For that gesture of kindness, I am belatedly most grateful. I guess it may have worked its magic then, but sadly, I'm only placing it (the double "it" of the movie and the act of kindness, I intend to separate yet combine them - can I? - and don't want to use the plural demonstrative pronoun) back in its proper place amongst remembered things about 14 years too late. The film follows Julie Binoche's character as she tries to erase her past after the traumatic loss of her husband and daughter in a car crash that opens the film. Because her efforts at "running to stand still" only have the effect of the past haunting her constantly, and finally returning with a vengeance, watching the film caused me to experience an uncanny return of the repressed. Anyway, as this link suggests, that friend has gone on to great things, and as much as a dedicated blog post and a great U2 song can, I wish him well.
I watched this little documentary / film about staging a play yesterday called Shakespeare Behind Bars. It chronicles an actual prison program in Kentucky that has inmates put on a Shakespeare production every year after about 36 weeks of preparation. The film is very very tenderly put together, with obvious biases against the prison system. We comes close up to the inmates (many of them killers ... of wives and lovers) as they reveal themselves and their pasts even as they are interrogated by the roles that they play.
The play, one of my faves, is The Tempest, and it was nice to see a documentary (and production) that did not focus on the "play within a play" motif that dominates most interpretations. Instead, the forgiveness theme of the play was what the the inmates connected with, and this showed as they dealt with their character and personal struggles.
It wasn't all triumphal. One of the players, a great interpreter of that sly intellectual Antonio (and in prison for sexually abusing 7 girls ... I'm sure he was a lit teacher ...) is placed in solitary confinement and later transferred to a maximum security prison. Interestingly, the film doesn't try to explain what he did wrong but captures the sense of unease and uncertainty as the other members of the cast try to get a handle on the rumors that surround his disappearance. Sadly, his replacement, an initially enthusiastic youngster who is in for two life sentences without parole, later drops out of the production (because he wanted to get his tattoos finished and tries to get them done illegally in prison), and ends up committing suicide by hanging himself by his shoe-laces.
It's a powerful documentary and Shakespeare as therapy works wonders of revelation if not always redemption. You feel bad for the convicts after their enthralling adventure with the Bard, when in the "Updates" section of the "Bonus Features", you learn that almost none of them make parole. But as one of them puts it, at least there's Shakespeare next year.
I finally got myself a library card from the Capital Area District Library, which is public library that serves the greater Lansing area. Their holdings aren't bad and what really prompted me to go and get a card made was the desire to do a Bergman retrospective (although I'll probably do that in bout a month's time, after the Orals) and the fact that I'm learning how to drive (another story for another time), thus making the libraries accessible. So, I've requested a whole list of movies from the libraries (they too have a nice delivery service like the NYPL), and I collected my first batch of movies yesterday.
The first thing I watched was "Eros", a series of three short films by Wong Kar Wai, Steven Soderbergh and the recently deceased Michelangelo Antonioni. There's a nice review of the three films here, (which essentially says only Wong Kar Wai's piece is worth watching) although I think that the second film by Steven Soderbergh was pretty interesting for me as it involves the dreaming up of a clinical situation that parodies a psychoanalytic session. Anyway, the DVD had a really nice cover too.
I don't get to listen to music much these days as I can't really concentrate if there's anything playing in the background when I'm reading Middle English or Theory. But, since I've begun running (ok ... slogging as in slow jogging) more consistently, I've been able to pay quite close attention to the music piped through my earphones. I've got a U2 playlist (of course) on my ipod and something about the nature of Bono's lyricism struck me as I was listening to Stay (Faraway, So Close). These are the lines:
Faraway, so close up with the static and the radio With satellite television you can go anywhere Miami, New Orleans, London, Belfast and Berlin from "Stay (Faraway So Close)"
How does Bono manage to string together proper names and achieve that sense of space and history that he does? Part of this relates to the way the line is timed. "Miami" and "New Orleans", are stretched out over two measures, creating an anticipation for more. And then, we get, in the next two measures, the expansive "London, Belfast and Berlin" - cities with tumultuous histories, and possibly located in dramatically different political-spatial realities - and the line is suddenly flung into the wide open spaces of satellite TV.* Of course, despite being able to achieve the epic and universal scope that they do, the lyrics of many a U2 song achieve that expansiveness precisely because there is always a concrete specificity of reference and image. I've always associated the lines quoted above with the bridge-like section of a much later song, "Beautiful Day":
See the world in green and blue See China right in front of you See the canyons broken by clouds See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out See the Bedouin fires at night See the oil fields at first light and See the bird with a leaf in her mouth After the flood all the colors came out from "Beautiful Day"
The phrase that really gets me in what essentially is a list is "Bedouin fires at night" largely because it contrasts the vast movement of flight over land and sea against really specific kinds of activity. I think way the lyrics zoom in and across (I'm thinking Google Earth here) are pretty spectacular because they don't compromise on the splendor of being able to observe detail from "such great heights" (as another great songwriter would put it). The fact is, the bridge ends with a stunning movement back in time with the dove of Noah's flood now making an appearance. Movement takes on mythical proportions, and like the spirit of God hovering over the uncreated expanse of the earth to be, the lyric manages to compress space and time and transform it into promise.
Just two more examples of the lyricism of the concrete. The first is from "Pride (In the Name of Love)", a song which enshrines the legacy of MLK.
Early morning, April four A shot rings out in the Memphis sky Free at last, they took your life They could not take your pride from "Pride (In the Name of Love)"
This final verse shifts out of the repetitive line pattern of the first two verses (which deal with universal situations of persecution and resistance -- "One man ..." could be Everyman) and focuses on the shooting of MLK itself. Even though it's factually wrong -- MLK was shot in the evening -- the date and location of the event, as well as the fact that the verse is addresses the dead King (and thus his legacy), creates another kind of precision: one that reminds the listener that the actual sacrifices of great men must never be in vain.
Finally, from one of the greatest U2 songs that hardly anyone likes: "Angel of Harlem". I know there's something pretentious about some Irish guys going on about jazz history and one of its tragic leading ladies, Billie Holiday. But I'm sure I haven't been the only person whose ears were opened by lyrics ("We got John Coltrane and a love supreme") to explore (and fall in love with) the music that inspired them. So, even if the identifications are somewhat superficial, at least they've generated a new generation of poseurs. (And as Bono's shown, all it takes is poseurs to change the world). Anyway, the song opens with that evocative detail that I've been going on about.
It was a cold and wet December day When we touched the ground at JFK Snow was melting on the ground On BLS I heard the sound of an angel New York, like a Christmas tree Tonight this city belongs to me, angel from "Angel of Harlem"
What's interesting is the way the acronyms work powerfully to create that sense of U2's cool "insider" status with this very foreign world. (Come on, people fly into New York's most congested and inefficient airport just so they can say "I came through JFK") "JFK" obviously works especially well because it resonates with an idealized image of the man as well. Now here's the somewhat embarrassing thing. All these years (and it's been many many years that I've listened to this song and regarded it as one of my faves), I've always assumed that the fourth line went "On the BLS ..." and pictured Bono being driven down some highway to Midtown Manhattan. Only when I picked out the lyric to write this piece did I realize that 1) there is no BLS that runs around New York and that 2) it makes more sense that "BLS" refers to a radio station. So, I was going to conclude that Bono just made the "BLS" thing up until I ran a quick google search. It turns out that there is a WBLS 107.5 (or 'BLS) playing out of New York. The fact that it plays R&B (it was a quick and short search ...) makes it possible that it was playing in the car and Billie Holiday was on at the time. (I'm sure all this can be confirmed by looking up an interview with the group about how the song originated but ...) Anyway, we have, nicely captured in a song, U2's own sense of how a precise moment of reception, not necessarily characterized by listening to the music alone, but also hearing in it the history and geography of an age, can lead to that wonderful feeling of being indomitably caught up in the present: "Tonight this city belongs to me".
That precision of affect also explains why U2 continues to get to me and probably will continue to do so for a long time more to come.
*The line also reminds of lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land":
What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem** Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal (366-376)
** Which reminds me that U2 actually has a song called "Jerusalem". It's ok but it's before they became subtle and clever in their use of Biblical references. But for a nice video of U2 25 years ago, here's a YouTube link to a high energy performance of that song.
