02/28/2012

Well, the weather is nasty outside (icy) so I’m at home with a “found” night. I am sure you can guess how I plan on spending it.

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I bought a DVD from the music store last week. There are all manner of “how to play” DVDs or “how to play like PersonA”, and I was browsing through them. I came across one that just says “FLEA” on the cover, and since he is the eminent bass player of our generation I decided to buy it.

It’s not at all what I expected. There is very little instruction here. It’s essentially an hour interview but it’s really cool.

It was filmed in 1992. Your first clue it’s pretty dated is that the title card is obviously made with Paintbrush on the old Mac computers (or something similar to it). Secondly, the person conducting this interview is River Phoenix. They were close friends. This was filmed less than a year before he died, and Flea was there playing at this nightclub and I think saw him die. To think as you watch the two of them, they have no clue about that being about to happen. It’s sad. To be honest he appears to be high during a few of the segments, he is fidgety and… well, he looks like somebody who’s stoned, like on a stimulant. You would expect an actor to be articulate and composed, but he does not seem to be.

There’s very little instruction of any kind… there’s him just jamming with his drummer at the time, and these segments where Phoenix is asking him how he came to be where he is. It was interesting, he had no interest in rock music at all, he came from a musical family and was an accomplished jazz trumpet player. But life completely changed and took him on a totally unexpected path.

Not much educational value really but interesting. This disc is like a time capsule. I mean, there’s a guy wearing purple jeans with the cuffs rolled up at the bottom.

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I was reading the news about that shooting at the school in Ohio the other day, and it sounds like the story is that the kid was mentally ill, maybe there were warning signs but nobody took any action on them – what you’d naturally suspect would be the scenario I guess.

But that first afternoon, the story was that he was a bullied teenager and he just snapped. And… the reporting really rubbed me the wrong way.

I get that bullying is a huge problem, and I think we need to seriously address it at all levels in our society. But I hate that it’s reported that someone snapped and killed some people because they were being bullied. So you end up with this narrative in the media that basically, the bullies killed all these people. That, although seriously in the wrong, kids essentially doing what they have done throughout all generations, picking on each other… that they are to blame for this.

Sorry, but… life is rough, you know? We can’t go around excusing this. The fact that you were bullied does not excuse this in the least. Why don’t we say yeah it’s wrong to bully people, but it’s first and foremost a lot worse to kill them?

Instead of seeing this from a victim mentality kind of perspective, why don’t we try to deter this by showing people the hurt and pain they’d cause, rather than claiming they were helpless products of their environment, which does nothing to deter and may even encourage it?

I guess it’s a persistent thing you see in the news media, everyone being blamed for something except the person who’s actually responsible.

We ought to start asking things of people again, in this culture… own your life. Take ownership, fix your problems, battle. The fact that someone does something terrible to you doesn’t relieve you of your personal responsibility.

Again, I realize that if people are mentally disturbed then it’s different, but the line of reporting bothered me.

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There’s so much sensationalism… it’s like media is almost nothing but sensationalism. Look at any area.

In sports – say ESPN – it used to be highlights, scores, stats, numbers. Now when you watch the broadcast it’s like TMZ with athletes. It’s about their personal lives and who disrespected who and who is feuding with who. It’s like pro wrestling meets a soap opera. Even the way games are shot for broadcast is different – instead of those non-action shots being from the waist up now we’re seeing these close up face shots, replay after replay of people emoting. Sports coverage has become 99% emotional… it’s… we’re losing the games and getting sports-entertainment.

Another example I think of is, the large internet brouhaha about SOPA. Now, I am not in favor of SOPA, I don’t have a position on it. From what I read I would be inclined to be against it. But nobody was talking about the issue, it was all emotional responses. People were writing things here like “SOPA could mean no more google, Facebook, or youtube!” which is just patently absurd.

I wonder what it is about us culturally that has brought us here.

Nothing is enough for us anymore. Nothing simple satisfies us. It’s all got to be sensational. Why?

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I’m now less than two weeks out from Radiohead. Gonna rock.