Thursday 28 March 2013

What Is It To Be Human? The Beatles

This week I was asked to write an article for a very local and very unread magazine. The article was suppose to act as a collaborative written portrait of The Beatles. Each writer was asked to write 300 words in response to "What is your favourite Beatles song?" I couldn't do it. How do you label one Beatles song a favourite? How after listening to every one of their Studio Albums do you sit down and select one song, a window of perhaps 4 minutes and say "this is exactly why I like the Beatles". I just couldn't do it. It felt exactly like my hopes to be Pope; impossible. Only this time it was impossible for reasons beyond my gender.
 
A friend once said "I just don't understand how The Beatles are relevant anymore". It is safe it say that we are no longer friends. The Beatles were (and still are) the most unprecedented musicians known to humanity. No one before, and no one after has impacted music like they did. I recently watched a bit of a rockumentary on The Beatles. It covered their first US Tour; the ultimate uprise of the Beatle-mania epidemic. It is so easy to forget how many people the music of The Beatles has effected. Because each time I listen, they seem to be talking directly to me. It is almost as if no one can touch our conversation.  
 
But perhaps instead of "What is your favourite Beatles song" the editors of the very local and very unread magazine should have posed the question "What is it to be human?" I don't know music. But I do know, a little about emotion. Music is such a precise carving of emotional expression; it is instant and extraordinary beauty. Perhaps, what I like most about the Beatles is that through the evolution of their sound... so many emotions are tapped into. The Beatles drag you to the core of humanity; there is a song that exists for everything.
 
 The Beatles endure me. And that is what I like about them. I like that my favourite Beatles song in January 2004 is different to my favourite Beatles song March 2013. My current favourite Beatles song is In My Life.  But that will probably change by next Friday because I have a whole palette of emotion to dip my brush in between now and then.

Sunday 3 March 2013

I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant; Some Unedited Discourse For Sunday Night Consumption

I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant is possibly the best thing to happen to reality television since Fear Factor. It has all the medical sass of Embarrassing Bodies, yet more drama than Big Brother. How this program slipped under my procrastinating radar for so long is beyond me.
 
If you are unfortunate enough not to have made contact with this Jesus of reality television, prepare to have any lucid thought totally blown.  Every episode reenacts the "real life" story of women who either think they have intense menstrual cramps or a mother fucker of a bowel movement. Like the title suggests, these women suddenly give birth, the catch... they don't even know they were pregnant. As I write this I feel as though I make it sound repetitive and boring, and for the most part it is. But there is something almost compelling in which the miracle of life commence in a toilet bowl or (my personal favourite) "sweat pants".
 
 
I honestly don't know what I find so intriguing about this show. Perhaps it is just the face the actors pull when someone tells them they are in labour, or crowning. They often look more surprised than I did when I saw the images of Tony Abbott in speedos. Perhaps it is just the general concept that 99% of these women think that labour pain is just them taking a massive shit. To be honest, I don't really want to know why I am attracted to this show. The more I think about it, the more I realize the inappropriate nature of my attachment. Do me a favour and get half as addicted as I am.
 
 
WARNING: Viewers may contract the quite real fear that they will give birth at any given time.