A Touch of Guilt: Music and Guilty Pleasures

Anyone who has relatives probably knows that although guilt is an emotion we feel internally, it can be externally induced. Guilty pleasures are no different. We might feel self-conscious about liking a song because we’re afraid of what other people might think or because they’ve already shared their opinions. I remember my poor junior-high classmate, Andy, who let it be known that he liked the group Abba. Boy, did we set him straight and make him wish that both he and Frida had never been born.  In hindsight, Andy was right – Abba has its merits – but it was a catastrophic failure of self-awareness to divulge his taste to a bunch of ignorant 13 year-olds.

I thought of Andy last month when my friends and I trudged through the theme of Guilty Pleasures during our regular album night in suburban Milwaukee. I’ve found that guilty pleasures change depending on who you’re with and correlate inversely to one’s age.  Today I have no problem at all admitting to my friends that I like the song “Mandy” by Barry Manilow, but back in high school?  Forgetaboutit! 

I approached the theme this way: a guilty pleasure is a song that I wouldn’t play on the jukebox in a biker bar.  That seemed to open the theme up a bit!

Here’s my list from that evening (and the list could go on and on):

Invisible Tough, Genesis

Girls Chase Boys, Ingrid Michaelson

The Name of the Game, Abba (thanks Andy!)

Without You, Harry Nilsson (this was written by Badfinger, so naturally it didn’t become a hit until later)

Our Lips Are Sealed, The Go-Go’s

Rainy Days and Mondays, The Carpenters

Tubthumping, Chumbawamba

If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot (fun fact: Lightfoot sued the composer Michael Masser for the Whitey Houston hit “The Greatest Love of All,” which shamelessly stole from the B section of Lightfoot’s song.  I understand the case was settled though I’ve been unable to find specifics on-line.)

Unwritten, Natasha Beddingfield

The Middle, Jimmy Eat World

Let’s Talk About Me, The Alan Parsons Project

Walking On Broken Glass, Annie Lennox

Even Now, Barry Manilow (I’d have played “Mandy” if I owned it!)

Too Late, Journey (This band has made a comeback to give them an air of legitimacy, but try admitting to liking them back in the 90s – it was tough.)

Add to this list the multiple show tunes I could have played (Fiddler on the Roof songs, anyone?), campy songs by Ella Fitzgerald (“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”), a song from the Brady Bunch (“When It’s Time to Change”?  That song rules!), songs by Burt Bacharach, Paul Williams and Marvin Hamlisch, and virtually every song written by Alan Menken (except “Beauty and the Beast” – I could kill him for that one).  Plus the entire James Taylor repertoire, Carol King, Sara Bareilles, many of the old Motown girl group hits, ballads by Ben Folds, yada yada yada.

Which begs the question: after all of this, what would be left to play in a biker bar? Not much, I’m afraid, except for classic rock and a few songs by The Replacements. I prefer the songs that induce just a touch of guilt.

Review: I Smile Back

After watching a free screening of Sarah Silverman’s film, I Smile Back, I tried to think of other movies that made me feel as miserable as this one did. I’m sure there are dozens, but the two that immediately came to mine are A House of Sand and Fog and Revolution Road. For me, those films, while being completely depressing (and in the case of A House of Sand and Fog, a waste of much-needed time together for my wife and me as we wrestled with having three children under the age of six), at least had some compelling elements: A House of Sand and Fog offered an interesting glimpse into the life of an Iranian immigrant (plus it had Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly); Revolution Road gave an honest portrayal of the life of a 1950s housewife who isn’t ready to sacrifice her dreams (a topic I find fascinating, plus it had Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio). 

Unfortunately, I Smile Back is stuck in the hidden suburban drug culture, a topic I find excruciatingly boring. (Wasn't it already passe in 1966 with The Rolling Stones's "Mother's Little Helper"?) Twenty minutes into the film I found myself antsy with Silverman’s portrayal of a housewife who sinks into episodes of dangerous drug use and its byproducts. Silverman is very good, as is the supporting cast (including Josh Charles of The Good Wife and – one of my favorite shows of all-time – Sports Night), but the story itself is lacking. My friend Terry was more forgiving, but for me the film was predictable and all-too familiar. Yes, drugs are bad. They make you do bad things. They tear families apart. So what? What on Earth is this movie bringing to the forefront that hasn’t been done a thousand times before and a thousand times better?

And maybe that’s the problem. While a movie like Goodfellas is a gangster movie with a drug element, I Smile Back goes all in with the drugs with no interesting side story to supplement the main theme.

Afterward Terry and I discussed the film briefly while in the theater bathroom when a man asked us, “Did you just see that Smile movie?”

“Yep.”

“Man, that was dark!”

You betcha! And look, I’m okay with dark films that have something interesting to say (Buried, for instance), but I Smile Back is trudging up familiar territory. Despite the wonderful performances, there’s no way I could recommend this movie to a friend.  At some point you're taking someone's free time and choosing to shit on it. That's what this film does.

The Big Short and Being Human

Back in the late 80s when I attended UW-Madison, I had a conversation with a fellow student and expressed my opinion that the way we value a nation’s economy is going to have to change – that we can’t continue to measure economic growth largely by how much of its natural resources we’re expending. In essence, I argued that the entire world economy is a one giant Ponzi scheme (though I didn’t know the term Ponzi scheme until Bernie Madoff entered the picture). I still believe this to be the case. After all, a stock’s price is supposedly the present value of all future earnings, but we know that most companies that exist today will one day disappear and be sold for peanuts (Pan Am, Blockbuster, Enron, Woolworths, Tower Records), and the present value of a string of zeros is zero, so we’re really betting on short-term earnings. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who has a rare long view when it comes to business success recognizes that his company will one day be disrupted and perhaps no longer exist (watch 13:20 of this 60 Minutes video).

It’s one thing to have this viewpoint about a system that’s largely on the up and up: that’s run by smart people with good intentions but who sometimes fall short or make mistakes. It’s quite another to discover that the people driving our economy are incompetent, greedy, short-sighted, ruthless criminals. If you’ve seen The Big Short or read the Michael Lewis book upon which the film is based, you’ll likely spend some time rethinking your investment strategy. After all, does it make sense to invest your retirement savings in corporations run by buffoons? The answer: what choice do you have? If you could earn 5% guaranteed in CDs you might do so, but you can’t, so if you’re like me you’ll throw the dice and hope that the pyramid scheme of the U.S. economy can hang in there for a little while longer.

I tried reading The Big Short a few years ago and had some difficulty. It does get complicated. But having a visual helps me enormously, and the film’s director Adam McKay (of Anchorman fame) does a marvelous job of acknowledging the complexity of the movie’s subject while helping the audience along the way. I still left the movie with a few lingering questions (that I hope to answer by giving the book another shot), but generally felt more informed than when I arrived, while still being entertained in between. 

No small feat.

Michael Lewis has a terrific piece in the week’s Vanity Fair that describes the minor miracle that any of his books have been made into movies (and successful ones at that: Moneyball, The Blind Side), least of all a film about credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. You’ll also learn what you likely already knew: that incompetence and greed are as prevalent in Hollywood as they are on Wall Street. 

If only it ended there. But it doesn’t matter whether it’s Wall Street, Hollywood, government agencies, the Chicago police force, horny priests, Oregon ranchers or religious zealots: we as humans seem to be preprogrammed to abuse power, blur the lines between right and wrong, desire more even when we have enough, sacrifice long-term benefits for short-term gains, and hurt people for our own benefit. So why is it when we read about our brethren behaving badly we feel smug about it and think we would never fall into the same trap despite history telling us otherwise?

There are different schools of thought here. My own viewpoint is that religion – for all its faults – helps ground us in humility and gratitude, two essential ingredients to keep from following our worst instincts. Perhaps the people running our biggest firms would do well to spend more time in the pews or our nation’s religious institutions and less in the office.

But then how do you explain the clergy sex abuse scandal? Yeah, that's tricky. After you see The Big Short go watch the marvelous film Spotlight and then tell me your faith in mankind hasn’t been just a wee bit shaken.

Prince's Refrigerator

A little trifle for the holidays...

Prince, the former The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, has been shown over the years to be a weird dude.  For a lengthy but funny example of this, check out film director Ken Smith’s monologue about his experience filming a documentary for The Artist himself.

But earlier this week a friend of mind shared a fantastic blurb brought to you by the food and drink magazine Heavy Table.  Now you too can know the contents inside Prince’s refrigerator (or at least what was in his fridge four years ago), and what’s really cool are Prince’s comments.  He sounds funny, approachable and human.  Go figure.

And can a guy who really likes Dunk-a-roos really be that weird?

Have a terrific end to 2015, everyone.  More music, essays, fiction and gigs are to come in the New Year.

A Loss of Electricity

Two years ago my boiler stopped working just as the outside temperature plummeted to the single digits, leaving my family scrambling for a solution as our thermostat displayed 55 degrees and falling.  Luckily a knowledgeable neighbor provided a quick fix until I could get my HVAC guy in, and all ended well, but the episode left me aware of just how unprepared I am to withstand even the shortest power outage, especially in the winter months. 

Although numerous communities in the U.S. have suffered severe outages as a result of natural disasters, as a nation – with the exception of the short-lived Northeast blackout of 2003 that affected over 55 million people – the U.S. has managed to avoid the widespread calamity that Ted Koppel illustrates in his new book, Light’s Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.

Poke around on-line about the electric grid and you’ll soon find commentary from the most extreme elements of our society (i.e., complete wack jobs).  Fortunately, veteran journalist Ted Koppel’s voice lends a degree of sanity to the polarizing issue.  Will his voice make any difference?  Time will tell, though I think he’s done a great service to highlight to the general public just how vulnerable our electrical grid is to terrorism – most likely of the cyber variety.  We’re talking potentially a hundred million people without power for weeks or months, a crippling of the U.S. economy and the U.S. military, and people’s worst instincts taking hold through looting and violence.  (You know, the kind of scenarios we pay millions to see as long as they’re on the big screen and not happening in our own backyards.)

Koppel provides expert testimony from both in and out of the electric industry and the government agencies who are supposedly equipped to either handle a major crisis (FEMA) or prevent a crisis in the first place (DHS).  (A word of caution: neither has a plan in place to respond to a major cyberattack.)  When Koppel asks General Lloyd Austin of U.S. Central Command if there is a danger of a cyberattack taking out a major section of the U.S. electric grid, he answers, “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when someone will try that.”

The words of a paranoid?  We would do well to recall the domestic terrorist attack on a California substation in April of 2013 that knocked out ten transformers.  Many think that this event was a dry run to something bigger, but with a cyberattack one doesn’t need AK-47s to inflict damage to the electrical grid – it can all be down remotely.  As Koppel reports, there are nation states to be concerned about like China and Russia, but they have a limited desire to inflict damage on a country that could inflict as much damage in return.  Of more concern is a country like North Korea who’s already demonstrated a desire to inflict damage to the U.S., who’s already hacked Sony, and who has absolutely nothing to lose.  Of course, a cyberattack wouldn't need to be state-sponsored; terrorist organizations also pose a significant threat.

Light’s Out isn’t all doom and gloom (though it is, mostly).  Koppel interviews a number of “preppers” – people who prepare for the worst through a variety of measures, including the storing of food, water, medicine, fuel and the like – who would likely be able to withstand an electrical outage for months.  Yes, some of them are wack jobs, but many are just regular people who want to have a plan in place in case of a long-term loss of power.  Even better prepared are the Mormons who – in addition to instructing personal actions – have a structural system in place that would help provide safety for its members in the event of a national disaster.

Where does that leave the rest of us?  Koppel doesn’t delve into details, which is rather a shame, but there are countless resources on-line and in print that can help the average Joe become a little more prepared than he is currently.  We're not talking silly duck and cover drills in the event of a nuclear explosion; we're talking sensible steps involving freeze-dried food, water storage and the like.  If enough Americans do this, then some of the panic that might ensue after a significant loss of power can be avoided while responders attend to those who are most in need. 

I’m going to devote a little time and a little money in 2016 to be a little more personally prepared, and I hope you consider doing so.  Getting our politicians to prepare will be a whole other endeavor.