Observations on Pearl Jam 20

My observations on the recent Cameron Crowe doc with Sun Tzu's retorts in red:

I think the PJ doc effectively revealed these things about the band and the Seattle scene as a whole:

1. Mother Love Bone was set to become the biggest band out of Seattle and probably would have been bigger than Nirvana if not for Andy Wood's death. 

I saw no reason whatsoever to think this other than the fact that everyone in the film bragged about how good he was.  As you explain further below, they are not reliable sources. 

2. Pearl Jam reached the big time much too quickly.  Ten should have merely opened the door for mid-level venues, thus allowing them to create more music together before fame warped their idea of the kind of music they could create. 

Whatever.  I don’t feel too sorry for them.  I don’t think it’s as hard as artists make out to stay in the shadows.  At some point these whiny artists had to cave to their greed and that’s when they get caught in contracts forcing them to play big venues and such.  I think what’s more accurate is that Eddie is a big ole emotional candy a$$ and had a tantrum after Ten was a success and drug the rest of them down into the subpar music doldrums…..Qualifier – Pearl Jam’s subpar music is still good of course. It just isn’t the pinnacle of what they can do.   

3. Pearl Jam was superior to Nirvana in every way: musical talent, songwriting talent, lyrics, and performance.  They never believed that fact and always felt the need to impress Kurt Cobain, who ironically was far more insecure than Eddie Vedder. 

I think it’s short sited to say one band is better than the other.  Is Guns & Roses better than Mettallica?  But I do think it’s accurate to say that PJ had an unreasonable need to kiss Cobain’s a$$ which I just don’t get. And no I don’t think Cobain was as talented as even Dave Grohl but to compare the two bands’ music is just irrelevant for lack of a better word.

4. The great Seattle bands (PJ, Soundgarden, AIC, Nirvana) were very content to play small venues and seemed legitimately happy in their niche.  You can actually see them go from wide-eyed, hungry rockers to cynical a--holes throughout Cameron Crowe's footage. 

Agreeance.

5. Pearl Jam became Ticketmaster's minstrel puppet.  Stone and Jeff unwittingly made fools of themselves before Congress. 

Agreeance. They got a lot of praise but also looked foolish.  They weren’t prepared properly for that. That’s not their fault.  They should have had an attorney.

6. The band ceded too much creative control to Eddie, who was too musically insecure to have a vision.  

Agreeance.  I never understood that.  Why they just stepped back and let him take over what they had built.  But they seemed content to do so. 

7. The Vitalogy album was a reaction to Time magazine putting them on the cover. 

Or just another random tantrum.

8. The band had no intention of staying together this long, and their later work affirms this. 

I don’t think they had a plan at all.

My favorite scene in the film:  Stone Gossard is taking Cameron Crowe on a tour of his house, and Crowe asks him if he has any unique PJ memorabilia saved over the years.  Stone looks all over his house for something, can't find anything except a couple of old CDs and a coffee mug, so he takes him down to the basement.  As he's digging through his sh!t, he spots something in the corner and says, "Oh, here's a Grammy."  That scene spoke volumes to me.  

Yeah, he certainly doesn’t give a sh!t about acceptance does he?

The Art of Television

I must confess that I have become hooked on TV.  I can't help it.  I have two wonderful inventions that feed my addiction: the DVR and a Blu Ray player with Netflix.  I'm not supposed to watch this much TV.  I'm a teacher, one who majored in English, and I should be reading books, but I just can't help myself: there's so much good TV these days.  In fact, TV may be surpassing film as an art form. Critics have traditionally scoffed at TV because of its caricatures, convoluted plots, and heavy-handed themes.  It has always been the lowest form of entertainment.  TV has given us the laugh track, The Fonze's shark jump, BA Baracus, Kirk Cameron, soaps, awards shows, MTV-style editing, Jersey Shore, and countless other IQ demolishers.  Television was created to move products.  The stories have always been incidental.  In fact, it was a sign of failure when an actor went from the big screen to the small screen.  Now, I believe the reverse is true.  The broadly drawn caricatures and manipulative plot devices have ascended to the big screen in all their "mind-blowing 3D" glory, while the TV has become a more sophisticated medium.

Fresh on my mind is the brilliant series Breaking Bad.  The premise of the show has all the makings of a gimmick: a straitlaced chemistry teacher gets cancer and decides to sell meth to set up his family financially after he's gone.  Up until the 90s, that concept could have easily been packaged as a sitcom (cue the laugh track when Walter White's bumbling DEA agent brother-in-law nearly catches him cooking meth in his RV lab).  It could have also gone the route of the cloying, dripping, overly sentimental TNT drama (cue the group hugs and affirmations of life-lived-to-the-fullest after Walt gets his cancer diagnosis).  Instead AMC has given us a show that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence.  Even the flattest character on the show, Saul Goodman, is a fully fleshed-out human being, albeit one with no conscience.  Character development drives the plot.  The most implausible scenes in the series (more recently, Gus's poisoning of the rival cartel and narrow escape from Mexico) had to happen and were appropriate to each character's story arc. 

Walter White has the makings of an Aristotelian tragic hero.  Here is a well-intentioned man with a tragic flaw who, as the creator has suggested, will ultimately fall.  He may attain redemption during the final season, but his choices throughout the 5-season story arc will catch up to him, as they did to anti-hero Vic Mackey in another brilliant show, The Shield.  And if it delivers, as I hope it will, on its tragic hero's development, the audience will be moved to fear and pity, because no matter how low Walter White sinks, we still identify with him and do not want to see him fail.  The question is, will Walt face his inevitable downfall with dignity as did Hamlet, John Proctor, or Walter Lee Younger? The best thing about this show is that we have no idea, and our inability to predict the outcome is not based on contrived plot scenarios, the possibility of a deus ex machina, or a red herring. Our uncertainty stems from the show being led by a highly volatile, unpredictable character who, like us, has no idea where his journey will end. 

Can television, that brain-rotting device our parents told us not to sit too close to, be art? I believe good art is provocative, challenges its audience, and forces us to examine our own values. At least, that's what I look for in books, great films, and, yes, TV. Thankfully, with the rise of great TV shows has come a technological revolution that allows me to sort through the rot to find something that actually stimulates the brain.

Our Dwindling Vocabulary (part I)

Mark Twain once said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. Sometimes I struggle to find the right words, especially in awkward or emotionally charged situations. I'm terrible at expressing the correct sentiment toward someone who has lost a loved one. I speak in cliches at weddings and in maternity wards. Lofty vocabulary, if I could even summon the means to express it, would be more than useless. It would be pretentious.

So there's that.

Then there's the person forever without words. There are those incapable of summoning any vocabulary for any occasion. They speak primarily in verbal pauses with occasional emotional interjections and trite platitudes. If a court reporter were to transcribe the conversations of chatty teenagers, professional athletes, reality stars, or rappers, he might fill page after page with likes, you knows, ums, uhs, you know what I'm sayings, and non-witticisms such as we got to take it to the next level or everything that happens, happens for a reason.  The more sophisticated transcriptions might include something about empowering women (more on this to come) or putting oneself back out there, which will be no more than 7 words away from finding closure. Supposing the court reporter were accompanied by a sketch artist, the sketches would reveal honest expressions. The platitude dispenser doesn't have a disingenuous bone in her body. She firmly believes that um, you know, you were just, like, never there for me is a unique and convincing summation of 15 years of marital woe. There's not a hint of irony in that statement, for irony might require additional words for her to deconstruct the platitude, not to mention the concept of irony itself.

I've always thought of this phenomenon as a form of illiteracy, but I'm beginning to think it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it's not a scarcity of words but a scarcity of ideas. Are people becoming less and less capable of expressing ideas, not because they lack the words to express them, but because they lack the ideas themselves. Are we living in an idea-deficient age?

The Sneering Buzzard

A man named Edward Abbey once said, "I often tire of my role as the sneering buzzard on a dead tree."  I'm not perched upon a loft or sitting on a high horse. I'm on a dead tree in an ever dying world, trying to decide if I'm going to die along with it or somehow rise above it. In the meantime, I will continue to sneer.