Turn and Face the Strange

Life beyond C Major

I’m still nostalgic for the music that made me. I have those mutually known such that with one phrase I can communicate a set of feelings to my wife, and sometimes to my generation. So I took half a day extending the Teenaged Bedroom idea into a couple other dimensions.

The Blindside
In various places on youTube you can spend 100 minutes sampling 671 songs for alternative rock in the 90s. Since it’s Billboard there’s a lot of Morrissey, Smashing Pumpkins, INXS, B-52s, U2, Pixies, Lenny Kravitz, New Order, REM and Fine Young Cannibals. Not enough Green Day, Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots for my taste. And who the hell are Lemonheads, House of Love, The Charlatans, Juliana Hatfield, Dada and World Party? Didn’t see one song by Modest Mouse. WTF? There were lots of groups like Oasis, Portishead, Better Than Ezra, Ben Folds Five, Collective Soul and Counting Crows that I’ve heard of but really didn’t pay attention to. A few that I studiously avoided as overrated like Bush, Kid Rock, Beck and They Might Be Giants, but for the most part the whole thing was like listening to highly rated commercials, crap I’d prefer not to notice at all.

But there were some that piqued my curiosity. Local H, Tin Machine, The Ocean Blue, Tonic, Live and the Goo Goo Dolls. So I listened a bit more. This time I recalled a particularly lonely period in my life when I was mad focused and not interested in experimenting. I listened to the lyrics of some of these songs and collected the vibe of them imagining that I could bond with the kind of the girl who dug The Creatures or Sara McLachlan or Silverchair. Where would I be now if I let myself take that meandering detour?

After a couple hours of this, I was exhausted. I realized I would never, in three lifetimes, be able to take all of this corner of rock music in and understand its nuance and actually feel along with it as if it were natural. But then again, considering how I did feel for Korn, Radiohead, The Pretenders, Midnight Oil, Papa Roach, PJ Harvey, The Offspring, and Breaking Benjamin during odd moments across my life, who knows where I might have taken my affections for the strange into a deeper commitment. In my exhaustion I felt small, but I also felt redeemed.

You see I wanted to know jazz standards. And as I slew through the YouTube channels playing those, I can identify Green Dolphin Street or Misty in the first few beats and notes as naturally as (K. 265). I wanted to know classical, especially piano. And I realized how much I have lived my own life as it pleased me, far outside of C Major, yet without all of the Alternative Rock of the 1990s and 12 other genres in 4 other decades, and huge volumes of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours of entertainment products designed to do whatever the Goo Goo Dolls think they are doing. Creating an environment for what? I may never know.

Am I truly redeemed? Only somebody steeped in that flavor might tell me what I’m missing, what emotions I might have articulated sooner had I payed more attention to The Dave Matthews Band, whom I’ve seen live three times and been bored to death, but actually find their recordings more interesting than I remember. Still, it turns out that I’m much happier having seen Eric Johnson. I still love listening to Jeff Beck and it seems to me that he and John Scofield know what they are doing with an electric guitar and the rest of those pickers are pikers.

Still, I feel a bit blindsided. I recognize the difference between art and arts & crafts admitting that we have an awful lot of artsy crafty people with plenty enough big swinging producers that make sure we get a chance to hear them out.

Eclexia Revisited
A theme I haven’t harped on about much recently is the disease of eclexia. I wrote this upon the death of Hunter S. Thompson:

Part One: The Sin of Eclexia

"A little bit of everything adds up to a whole lot of nothing."
-- Cobb's Rule #1

There is probably no such word as 'eclexia', I just made it up, but the sin is real. It is the fatal attraction to novelty and change. It is the mindless sacrifice of tradition at the alter of the new. It is the inability to find satisfaction in the settled.

Eclexia is characterized by a restless antipathy to the established and an overweening desire to get away from it. The eclexic is eclectic to a fault. Their fatal flaw is that once the novelty of the thing has worn off, once it becomes established, their interest and respect fades rapidly.

Eclexia is a sin because it is fundamentally disrespectful of the efforts made by people who bother to study something specific. It acts against collaboration in solving standing problems. It refuses to focus. Thus the eclexic requires some outre personality which allows him to eschew the 'mundane' tasks that are faced by all of us. In that regard, eclexics are dependent on an established alternative subculture - something that allows them to easily be understood as 'cutting edge' or 'radical' even if they are not talented or committed in any way.

Today, I wouldn’t call eclexia a sin, but a malady - a kind of suffering which is not such a matter of self-imposed exile but a hazard of our postmodern interwebz. No doubt our environment has its poisoners, but that’s not the point today. The point today is that it is practically impossible to be open-minded enough to be non-discriminatory of the vast amount of ‘content’ that is served to us. I’m beginning to think there is more toxicity out there in the intent of production than in the defects of consumption. Now perhaps I have to read Kill All Normies.

---

One of the implicit themes of Stoic Observations is that it is truly difficult, requiring a sustained effort informed by ancient and classical philosophy and wisdom, to navigate through the complexities and diversions of the WEIRD world. The result of an eclextic or perhaps even eclectic choice is, I believe, of greater detrimental consequence than the constraints of a lack of choice given youth in their education. We have passed the lines of reason in our accessible mainstream where we have lost our ideals of masculinity and femininity and the vulnerability of children.

So why are our arts not saving us?

Because we have too much entertainment and, artsy craftsy productions and not enough actual art. When we simply turn and face the strange, are we embracing the right kind of changes?

Critics have had all sorts of interpretations of David Bowie’s Changes. I’ve always loved the song, but only as a song. Now I’m intrigued by the lyrics. Leave a comment. Ask your favorite LLM for some of those interpretations. How do you read it?