Dreams are one of the most fascinating and least understood parts of the brain’s complex machinery. Science tells us that dreams are an essential component of sleep, that they help us generate memories and process all the information that we take in over the course of the day. No one knows for sure what their significance is, although everybody from Freud to Fleetwood Mac has a theory about what dreams mean. But for the most part, we’re all just guessing. All we know is that when we go to sleep we enter into a hazy, psychedelic netherworld where David Lynch seems to be directing and the earthly laws of physics don’t necessarily apply.
Some people have really mundane dreams, full of shopping lists and workday trips to the copy machine. Other people still have bad dreams (or “night terrors” á la Homer Simpson) well into adulthood when most of us have either chased down or come to terms with our personal demons. Stress dreams also seem to be universal, haunting people with incomplete work assignments and unplanned nudity in high school class rooms.
Personally, my dreams are a mixed bag. They almost always feature a bizarre and disconnected narrative that is more like a low-grade acid trip than anything that could possibly happen in real life. They are definitely weird, but I usually don’t get any of the cool stuff - flying, sex with hot science teachers, the ability to shoot lasers from my finger tips, etc. I don’t even dream about midgets, which I guess negates the David Lynch comment from the first paragraph.
There is one pervasive quality to all my dreams though: they are really fucking dreamy. The plots always twist and turn in opiate waves. Earthquakes and aliens come and go like character actors. Through it all I always get the feeling that I’m a spectator watching a very realistic demonstration of the five senses. I feel and understand things as much as I see and hear them. I’ve never had the opportunity to go sleepwalking, but I imagine that’s what it feels like to bare witness to one of my dreams.
If I was to give them each a soundtrack, I would say that more than one of my dreams would synch up to the track “Eddie” by Philadelphia’s Evening Magazine. The keyboards float over the whole song like a blue fog while the drums crash in and out of the picture, dragging a serrated bass line close behind. The singer may be telling a story, but I can’t quite catch what it is. Instead, individual words and ideas come in and out of focus. Through it all there is an acoustic guitar that you don’t really realize is there until you realize it’s been there all along.
A lot of times you hear star athletes and contest winners describing their success as a “dream come true.” The dreams they talk about are day dreams, flights of fancy or glorified wishful thinking. But what if real dreams were to come true? The world would be a strange assortment of monsters, naked high school students, and midgets loaded with abstract symbolism. I don’t know what role David Lynch would play in this hypothetical world, but Evening Magazine would have my vote for house band.
There is no doubt that we live in a global society. A lot of people think that recent technology has bridged the international divide, but really we were mixing cultures long before the internet and cable television. Thanks to a long history of immigration, political strife, and spice merchants gone astray, the human population has been shifting around the globe for hundreds of years. Inevitably this lead to the vibrant cross-pollination of cultures that now manifests itself in the form of Weng Weng, the pint-sized Filipino special agent or Speak, the Hungarian rapper with a heart of gold and a tenuous understanding of the English language.
Just like Speak and Weng Weng, the result of this cultural exchange is often a strange and distorted amalgamation of the original source material. Take, for example, St. Patrick’s Day. Ostensibly this holiday exists as a way to celebrate the culture and heritage of this country’s Irish immigrants. However, St. Patty’s was long ago appropriated by liquor companies and enthusiastic members of the collegiate fraternity system. What started as a day of soda bread and Irish proverbs is now known around the country as the day to get hammered drunk on whiskey and pinch anybody who’s not wearing green clothing. Try explaining this phenomenon to a real live Irish person. They’ll look at you like you just pissed in their Guinness.
This is why translating novels or poetry or even film dialogue is such an art. You can’t just exchange the nouns and verbs for their foreign counterparts; you have to make sure that you get the complete meaning and cultural nuance of the idea behind the words. Oddly enough, one of the people who seems to understand this is the guy who first imported Swedish Fish to the US. We know the candy as a sickly sweet confection that’s a dark rouge color and tastes like a combination of cherries and red Gator-Aid. In Sweden however, the Swedish Fish (btw, over there they just call them “fish”) are black and come in “salted herring” flavor. As a genuine red-blooded, apple pie loving American, let me be the first to say, “Ewww, gross!” Please keep the salty fish flavor as far away from my candy as possible.
I’m not trying to diss Swedish culture. I’m just saying that the Swedes seem to be pretty smart about what they keep to themselves and what they decide to send our way. At the moment, my favorite Swedish export is pop rock band Ram Di Dam - although I can’t say for sure which way the current flows on this one. Either these guys took American rock acts like the Strokes and Interpol and cleaned them up with a little Swedish pop magic, or they are part of the new tradition of Scandinavian rock bands that have mastered the art and style of the American pop song.
In either case, the result of this particular cultural melting pot is delish. The guitars jangle, the drums strut, and somehow the singer ends up sounding like he spent the last 10 years of his life smoking cigarettes on the Lower East Side. Moreover, they’re better than green beer and way less strange than watching the inmates of a foreign prison perform Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on YouTube.
I did not have what most people would consider a normal high school experience. And by “most people” I mean the actors I’ve seen playing high school students in big budget Hollywood films. From what I’ve seen on screen - and, by extension, what I can only assume is an accurate representation of everybody’s experience - most high schools are filled with middle class white kids who have to tackle tough decisions like what college to go to or where to park their convertible. The one exception to this rule is the occasional inner city high school filled with troubled Black/Hispanic/Asian kids who are in desperate need of an obstinate, jive-talking teacher to inspire them to greatness. But I digress.
From what I understand, in high school students separate themselves into groups or cliques, each of which has its own code of conduct. Throughout their high school career, students must navigate a complicated social maze of cool kids, jocks, and awkward sexual experiences. There are big dances, football games, and important parties that one is either invited to or not. There is one girl who is usually considered the hottest of all the girls, although her friends are likely to be almost as attractive. As a result, they wield a disproportionate amount of social power and are admired and/or feared by the other students. Also, if my facts are correct, they should all be named Heather.
Sadly, this does not even remotely describe my time in high school. My school was rough. We had race riots that twice shut the entire school down for a week. The Asian Mafia once started a war with the Samoans that ended with a S.W.A.T. team pulling a bunch of machine guns from a windowless van in the parking lot. Our first and only dance was cut short when somebody fired a gun through the roof of the gym. Our basketball team was so gangster that a rival gang once came to a game, chained the doors shut, shut off all the lights, and then beat everybody with cro-bars and baseball bats. Also, my P.E. teacher was an alcoholic, my locker frequently got set on fire, and I once saw a girl stab a guy in the neck with a pair of oversize scissors.
Needless to say, I kept a pretty low profile. I ate my lunch in the car and spent most of my free time with the jazz band. I took honors classes with more or less the same 30 kids in every class and generally kept to myself. I had a girlfriend and played in a rock band, but I never thought of myself as anything but one of the kids who went to school every day hopping that he wouldn’t get robbed or shot. Forget about parties, or cliques, or hot girls. I was just trying to survive.
So imagine my surprise when I found out that I was one of the cool kids. I recently got back in touch with an old classmate, who now works with my sister. She told my little sister that she didn’t spend much time with me in high school because I was part of the popular crowd. Really? Wow. I did not know that. Guess I misinterpreted that sense of impending dread I used to feel each day as I left for school.
Anyway, it turns out this former classmate is also a wealth of music knowledge, and she turned me onto a local band that I didn’t even know about. They rock the moniker Maus Haus and play what I would describe as freaked out electro post-rock. Pop melodies and monkish chants float around heavy synthesizers and distorted guitars. The rhythms shift from fusion-like jazz funk beats to the type of wild outsider rock that people are now stealing from Captain Beefheart. It’s the kind of music that pulls you in and then immediately spits you out when the song is over.
If you’re keeping track, that’s three more things you can add the list of things I did not know. To summarize: 1) There is an awesome post-rock band from San Francisco called Maus Haus, 2) I was, as it turns out, one of the popular kids high school, and 3) Being popular is not at all like it is in the movies.
One of the more nefarious details of the current US credit meltdown is what’s happening at the top of this big, steaming pile. While thousands of people at the bottom lose their jobs and life savings, and while the government contemplates a record bail-out package, a lot of the top executives who oversaw this disaster are quietly leaving the scene. And guess what? They’re doing so with their pockets filled to overflowing.
It turns out that most of these CEOs have a so-called golden parachute that provides them with exit packages worth millions of dollars - regardless of the terms of their exit. Sure, they might lose their job when their company is sold or goes belly up, but they shouldn’t have any problem landing on their feet. Why? Because after several years of clocking six and seven figure paychecks they get an extra couple of million as their parting gift.
Ha! Here’s your “punishment” for fucking up the US economy Mr. Filthy Rich Executive! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
Look, we all know that life is unfair and some have more than most, but this is just plainly, blatantly, insultingly wrong. You know what happens to me when I am late on a single payment for my credit card? It goes on my permanent record, archived as a poisonous little weapon that can be used against me for at least seven years whenever some financial institution wants to deny me a loan, charge me a higher interest rate, or make it difficult for me to rent an apartment.
Right now I have a huge scar on my credit report because of an unpaid hospital bill. Four years ago I spent three and a half hours in an emergency room waiting for somebody to look at my broken hand. Finally I got sick of waiting and left. Unfortunately, I had given them my name and social security number when I checked in, which later allowed them to bill me $350 for my visit. Yes, that’s right. They charged me $350 to sit, untreated, for three and a half hours in the waiting room before leaving of my own volition.
Needless to say, trying to get this problem straightened has been a nightmare of paperwork and fruitless phone calls to creditors. I’m sure every one of you knows exactly what I’m talking about, because every one of you has spent some portion of your life on the phone or in a bank or online with your credit card company arguing about some rule in the fine print that allows them to pointlessly fuck with your world. It’s par for the course these days. Everybody who works or has some small amount of money understands the delicate and tenuous nature of their credit rating and how easily it can be used to make life difficult.
So here’s what I propose: First, the above mentioned executives should not receive any sort of exit package. I know their contracts may guarantee it and all that, but so what? You broke the American economy. Entire generations are going bankrupt because of your greed. Let’s see you get a team of expensive lawyers to fight this one when you’re paying for it out of your own unemployed pockets.
Secondly, and more importantly, every single top executive who profited from and/or had a hand in the current economic crisis should have his bank account drained and his personal credit score lowered to 150. After that, it won’t matter how much cash they have stuffed in their respective mattresses. Want to start a new business? Too bad, your small business loan has been denied. Want to apply for a credit card? Sorry, we can only offer you a $250 limit with a 34.99% APR. Want to rent a house, or install cable, get a cellphone plan, buy a car or turn on your utilities? Unfortunately your credit score tells us that you are an irresponsible and untrustworthy person.
I think the country would be a very different place if the people who created this mess had to walk a mile in the shoes of the people who trudge through it every day. I think that if huge corporations and monolithic financial institutions remove the piles of money that stand between them and the people they’re profiting from, they’ll see how rotted out the system is. I think it was their own greed that brought on the fall in this case, but it was bound to happen one way or another. As the great financial analyst/record producer Alan Parsons once said, what goes up must come down.
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