Blue Skies

For whatever reason I started my fourth hour today talking about George McConnell and Samantha Johns' "Snowfuck."  Explaining this to them went about as well as you would expect - whether you know the show or not.  I remember why - I was thinking about music.  George this morning posted the song "Blue Skies" which is a painfully beautiful song that I first heard during the painfully beautiful "The Thing."  (a flavorful sample of their work can be seen here.)

I was thinking about The Killers (whose song I Can't Stay has held a similar beauty/pain in my heart for the past few weeks), and about how all these kids in front of me knew them already, and more and were carrying these little bits of beauty and sadness in the form of music we hadn't heard or known about.  But we still didn't know about the music they had.  So I asked them about music and talked with them about The Killers and Noah and the Whale and ultimately Snowfuck and The Thing.  I ended up on a bit of a rant.

Part of my internal narrative is that as I age (grow up) I would mature out of states of emotional turbulence.  I shouldn't limit that to my internal narrative - that is how we tend to talk about 'growing up' isn't it?  We tell people who are upset about this or that to grow up (unless we justify their turbulent state - death or a breakup - at least for a period of time).  My Mom once said to me that being an adult meant being able to cope with difficult circumstances while being able to carry on in other parts of life.  I was an emotional kid, and while feeling down was a serious bummer, I also frequently felt up, which was amazing.  I figured adulthood would provide me with a more stable emotional life, with the highs and lows replaced with some abstract sense of tranquility and inner-peace.

Well I'm starting to call bullshit on that one.  Certainly there is some peace out there for us to access from time to time, when my schedule relinquishes me for a moment or two.  Much more enjoyable were those periods in my 'youth' where I touched on something risky and powerful; when I was nearly incapacitated by my feelings.  This was called drama by me and others.  Drama!  Look out!

When I made my attempt at explaining the strange and beautiful performances, my students balked.  The scene from The Thing that persisted for me, that is intractable from the song Blue Skies, was two characters lightly boxing or wrestling, then locking eyes and facing off.  They looked like they were about to fight or make out, and they sort of did both.  It was an intimate moment - it looked unrehearsed.  It was intimate.  One pulled out a sandwich, took a bite, then the other took a bite and suddenly they were kissing - this tender moment mediated by a pb&j.  But my students weren't having it - 'you paid to see that??'

So I tried again - a friend in high school crushed on someone, took an opportunity in an elevator and kissed him - no words - and they went on their way.  My kids demanded to know what happened to them - did they get married, and so on.  This moment was more recognizable to them but still did not fit the narratives they knew.  It was an episode, I told them; it was a moment suspended in time, just like the first.  Two people acting on an impulse that drew them together.  Here I held up my hands like puppets with closed mouths and drew them together, like for a kiss.  Don't we all just wish that would happen to us, I said.  These moments so beautiful they almost hurt.

Maybe I'm waking up from something; I can't really justify not knowing The Killers.  But discovering them was truly an exciting moment.  Here was a range of songs that I thoroughly enjoyed, some of them beyond reason, and they seemed to just appear on my horizon.  Blue Skies was similar.  These songs articulate something beautiful and sad.  They seem to capture a suspended moment of potential.  The songs have a deadline, a finish, and when we rehearse them, play them back again and again they lose something.  They age.

The Thing, like a lot of the work from George McConnell and Samantha Johns, also generated a charged gap between me and my hopes, the beauty and excitement of a potential connection and the sadness of our longing for that connection.  Those works felt immediate, unrehearsed.  I've sometimes wondered if watching TV and movies of the moments we hope for in our lives is like rehearsing them.  How can we avoid measuring our experiences against those we see?  How refreshing to see a performance that felt like listening to great music for the first time.  Hearing that song again brought me right back there.

I'm not sure what part of me is horizonal at this time, experiencing that gap.  Maybe that's just part of being a person.  I finished my rant to my students and with some effort pulled back on course.  I was shaky and distracted.  These pop songs like candy.  Fleeting, unfulfilling, earth-shattering songs.

Thanks for reading!