Hank Williams Jr., “Country Boy Can Survive”: Showing this video to others feels like breaking the baby pictures out. It brings to mind thoughts of nostalgia and minor embarrassment, as most of the scenes in the video remind me of the small town of my childhood. The small town café, the mechanic’s shop, the grain elevators; this was my life. One scene in particular (about 1:07) brings images flowing back. The scene shows hunters moving through a wood. One of the hobbies my father and I enjoyed was anything to do with firearms.
He had a decent collection of antiquated rifles, they were the only thing he would accept as a good firearm; he laughed at people who used new low recoil rifles with scopes and butt-pads. One of my favorite rifles in his collection was a 30-06 that was older than he was. His father had bought it from army surplus when they were selling after World War II. It was a long, rustic, and strangely beautiful weapon. It was a bolt action, capable of holding only six or eight bullets, I can’t remember for sure which. The wood showed its age, as it was pock marked with dents and scrapes from stock to forend. The rear site was a small hole about the width of a sharpie head, and the front was a raised bead about the diameter of the tip of a pen. There were two dials on the rear site block for adjusting for wind and distance, neither of which did I have the patience to master.
One experience as a child that the scene in the video reminded me of was the first time I attempted to fire that rifle. I had reached the admirable age of about eight, and the mighty weight of a little under 70 lbs. I had done reasonably well with .22s up to this point, but a 30-06 is no small gun. My father had a cruel sense of humor, and the first time I tried to fire that rifle, I was standing straight up, and he decided not to warn me. The kick knocked me straight on my back, and my dad about fell on his laughing. Despite the bruised shoulder and ego, it is still one of my favorite pieces.
Let Go, by Frou Frou: Weird song, weird movie, weird people. Perfect. This video is a slew of scenes from the movie “Garden State” (Yeah that’s right, kind of a chick flick but nevertheless a kick ass movie). While one of the best songs from the movie plays in the background, it visually tells the story of a man who has come back to his hometown after several years of absence. The part of the video that struck me the most was the scene where he is at a party (roughly 1:00 and off an on for the rest of the video). While under the influence of God’s most curiously toxic yet delightful creation, ecstasy, he is shown having the time of his life yet feeling harrowingly awkward.
The scenes bring me back to the first ‘social’ (sounds better than ‘party’) house that I can remember. I imagine that being filthy rich and growing up dirt poor in a small town have one thing in common; the extreme need to entertain oneself. Ergo I was introduced to the Knudsen household, which was, much like the household above, ridiculously enjoyable yet awkward(There was no ecstasy…). It was an old house on a hill, possessing an ironically comfortable feel due to years of mismanagement and maltreatment. It had a basement and two stories, with porches on both floors. The carpets were old shag rugs with a peculiar animalistic smell to them, and none of the walls or ceilings were ever really finished, giving the rooms a nasty pseudo hardwood feel to them. Despite the rundown aura of the entire property, there was an uncannily exquisite stove and a horribly misplaced brass and oak door that must have been wondering what ungodly sin that tree had done to damn its existence to this household. I’m sire the house has been condemned for demolition by now, but no wrecking ball will be able to purge me of the experiences I had there when I began to understand the beauty of human interaction.
Rise Against, Survive: This isn’t an official video for the song, but its cooler so that makes it ok. The video begins with a biker beautifully demonstrating a classic ’crash and burn’ off the side of a hill. It then fast forwards to three months later and shows the adrenaline junky nailing the jump, in accordance with the overlying lyrical theme of the video, survival. The song is urging getting up every time after a fall, as said in the chorus: “Life for you has been less than kind. So take a number, and stand in line. We’ve all been sorry, we’ve all been hurt... But how we survive, is what makes us who we are.”
Most kids have some sort of experience with bikes throughout their childhood, and mine was no different. My cousins and I were infamous among our town for turning public sites into jump ranges. My first bike was pretty sweet. It was tiny, which I guess fit my five or six years. It was a one speed, off brand chrome beast with neon green stickers plastered all over the frame. There must have been something weak about the tires because they could never seem to hold air for longer than a week or two, no matter how many thorns and nails I put into them.
By the end of a few years, that bike had had the crap beaten out of it. Those sweet stickers were peeling off, the wheels were bent slightly, causing the bike to bob up and down when I coasted, and the rubber grip from the right handle was almost completely torn off from countless wrecks. Common sense would say that we would have stopped jumping off of anything we could pile up, but would have been way too easy.
Blink 182, I Won’t Be Home For Christmas: ‘It’s Christmas time again,’ and what would a video biography be without a section on Christmas (since the season now encompasses 1/6 of our lives…)? This song is very fitting for me because of my attitude on Christmas, but the part of the video that caught my attention was his girlfriend putting up Christmas lights while the singer was contemplating suicide by latrinal asphyxiation.
No matter what the weather is the Friday after Thanksgiving, there is a tradition spanning back thousands of years in my immediate family that says the Christmas lights on our house must go up. The exterior festive décor of our home has been evolving every year, but the basics remain the same. There’s a ridiculous amount of lights, always the colored kind, since we save the clear for inside. Every aspect of the house that can hold a straight line or spiral or more or less spirited up somehow. The only thing that’s missing is something my father’s been looking for for years; a big, shining white star to put on top of the house.
The crown jewel of the Christmas display was the manger scene. A while back my brother took it into his hands to fashion life size wooden replicas of the Holy Family and their motley posse. We somehow always manage to muster up some hay bails to place around the wooden frame of the barn/cave thing. Even though I’m not a fan of massive Christmas celebration, I can’t help feel a little noel cheer when I see the lights.
Chad Kroger, Josey Scott, Hero: Let me first say one thing that will summarize this entire piece; Spiderman is amazing. I believe this song was the theme song for the first Spiderman movie that came out a few years past. Way before the movies came out, and even today, Spiderman was the coolest guy on the planet. When I was in grade school, his cartoon would be on from 3:30 to 4:00, and my principle reason for not wanting to be kept after school was so that I could make it home before the show started.
I could identify with Spiderman at the time; he was a loveable nerd who some people couldn’t get enough of while a whole lot more wished that a giant newspaper would smash him and send him down the sink to the spider cemetery. I couldn’t identify with his heroics, but they were something to dream about. He was the classic underdog story, always outmanned and usually fighting someone three times his size, but he managed to outwit them to come out in the end with a victory and sometimes the girl.
My parents weren’t very fond of the fact that I spent my afternoons with Spidey; my mom thought he was too violent and my dad thought I should be doing homework. The latter was most likely true, as I had a horrible time with doing homework as a child. When a ten year old gets to choose between swinging through the skies of New York with someone cool like Spiderman or doing long division, there’s really not much doubt on which he will choose.
Melee, Built to Last: This video would probably seem crazy to anyone who hasn’t seen a movie in the last fifteen years. However, for the rest of us who grew up watching a flick every now and then, at least a few of the scenes seem very familiar in a parodic way. The scenes that he encounters in the video are all from movies that my generation and I grew up watching, including but not limited to Pretty Woman, 16 Candles, Ghost, Titanic, Say Anything, Napoleon Dynamite, American Pie, Broke Back Mountain, My Girl, Hope Floats, Happy Gilmore, Jerry McGuire, Forest Gump, and A Walk to Remember.
Collectively, these scenes developed a good deal of the clichéd stereotypical images that come to my mind when I think of relationships. There are the lovable images of a girl with roses jumping into some guys arms, porch front serenades, piggy back rides, and making out on the beach. Then there are also more down to earth yet more comical scenes of people doing things like playing tether ball, a mime kissing the invisible person in front of him, or Jim from American Pie violating an apple pie (I‘m sure it was consensual).
If we would compare these to love scenes from the 50’s, I’m sure we’d see quite a difference. I guess love has taken a bit of a turn since then. There’s also a scene with two cowboys cuddling on a picnic cloth. My mother would say society’s going to the crapper. I don’t mind it that much.
Tracy Chapman, Give Me One Reason: So, how in the hell does this video relate to me? Well, other than the remarkable resemblance between Ms. Chapman and I, it is one of the songs that a couple of friends and I that could hardly be called a one gig band played. We picked the song because it had a slow swinging beat, was something most people knew, and was easy to play. These were the characteristics of the band. We weren’t too flashy, we weren’t very deep, and we weren’t very good. A plan for stardom is doomed to fail if you throw together a lead guitarist that like hard rock, a rhythm guitarist that like Ben Harper, a drummer that’s usually too hung over to show up, and an insane blues harmonica player.
As you can imagine, the music we made was a strange mix. When we actually came up with a few originals, what came out of the oven was something that kind of reminded me of a Caribbean mix, like Santana only not nearly as cool (and usually acoustic due to our drummer’s chronic brown bottle flu). The experience was unforgettable though, and for a summer, the four of us (maybe I should say 3 ½) were kings of our own little pathetic world.
RED, Lost: This video’s link to my life will be pretty easy to figure out: the halo trilogy, and the time that my friends have spent playing this thing. While other groups of kids would choose to do whatever kids these days do on Saturday nights, guys in my class would often end up in someone’s basement, with four or five X-boxes linked up together, having massive computerized battles to the death.
God knows how this game will stand up to games twenty years from now, but for the time that they were released, all three games had outstanding graphics and movement. The game isn’t insanely gory like some are (see Manhunt 2) and in campaign mode enemies have adorable original conversations before you crush the back of their skullJ. The games take you to crazy new worlds in a time that we wouldn’t recognize today. It’s a semi-original story that takes place about 500 years from now; there’s a big war and everyone’s getting there butts kicked until the hero comes.
The best part of the game, however, has been proven to be in multiplayer. No matter how good AI is, human players usually make a game a lot more interesting. There’s always a good deal of pent up energy and tension in a group of friends, and I can’t imagine any healthier way to absolve our differences than to hit someone in the back of the head with a sticky grenade (except for hitting them in the front of the head).
