Shake it like a Polaroid picture!!!
"This is my happy song," my cousin Tim turned to me and said as I did about as much getting down as is possible for a bundled up white boy constrained to a seat in a freezing Soldier Field.
"It's probably everyone's happy song right now," I responded like a jerk on the subject of Outkast's "Hey Ya!"
Even though the song has become love-it-or-tired-of-it party driving vernacular and Tim Martens' official Happy Song, I've been wondering about how really happy the song is. Somewhere between the body moving hand claps and peppy guitar strumming and the get-unmoving-bodies-moving call and response, there's real despair in the song. The lyrics, about the seeming impossibility of love being able to hold two people together for long, tends to show that. Even if we aren't paying attention to (or making out) the lyrics the first hundred thousand times, the song still reaks of a melancholy darkness. Just listen to the wilting delivery of the title phrase, or the eerie lonely echoes of the chorus chimes and Andre's calls.
But it's a song that overwhelming makes us feel happy. Do we find joy in this celebration of our mortality? Do we just ignore the song's mood of impending disaster so that we can clap along? What does either say about our relationship with music as it relates to ourselves?
Is it even worth thinking about or should I shut up and dance? Hey ya!
Input by Mike at 11:28 AM
Monday, December 15, 2003
The Times They are a Changing
A little forewarning. I'm making the move to fold the creative writing of Robots Fighting into Dmitry's xpehb.com . This is the first part of a number of moves which will be enhancing the experimental aspects of RF, and will be a major move in establishing the magazine. Regular features will be bolstered but organization will be less formal, making more room for informal experiments in presentation while keeping a focus on interesting style.
I want to create a sort of frontier of writing and visual art that can be explored and consistently be filled with surprises. I don't want people to say, "Who the hell is Tim Howard?" and never read about his approach to songwriting. I want readers to stumble upon things and make connections and most importantly feel like RF is a place, that it is as intended a sandbox in a warzone.
I also want more psychological freedom for myself. A magazine is measured in issues and volumes and for a personal project like RF, I don't want to get caught up in an expectation of linear production. As I've come to realize, I dig myself into holes in order to dig myself out of holes. If I can produce laterally... spend 8 hours working on a cryptic flash animation or the script to a comic book and not feel that what i needed to do is finish that Shattered Glass review. The way I work, I feel the refocused concept for the RF website will actually help me improve production.
I know that may sound odd. But that's my thinking.
Anway, Dmitry is being given a great amount of access to my creative writing, so a lot of poems which were only ever publicly read or printed up for classes will get an expanded audience. I am excited to be able to share a lot of these pieces to a bigger audience, and I continue to commend Dmitry for the exquisite site he produces.
Input by Mike at
6:58 PM
