Right now I am making an exception to the rule

In my very first post I had promised that if there is any topic that I will definitely not write about on The Introspective Introvert, then it would be politics. Not because I don’t have any opinion/s about current political happenings, but because I didn’t want my posts to be a virtual battleground. There are enough of those all around us anyway. And as the venerable George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.’ Not that I am insinuating that there are any ‘pigs’ in my motley bunch of subscribers … but you get the drift.

I feel that topics of political or quasi-political nature bring out the pig in all of us. I am sure there are ways to ensure that things don’t become nasty – only I don’t know them. Kareem Abdul Jabbar does. In his Substack (you should check out) he does a brilliant job of voicing his opinions without coming across as strident or toxic. But it is not everyone’s cup of tea. I have to admit I am not so good at it. I am, rather, the more passive and pensive types who will consume, absorb, and internalise, and then … keep my views to myself. Sure, there are some occasional intense sessions where the thoughts and views flow freely. But those are few and far between, among very close friends, and they are usually accompanied by (and an outcome of) some of the choicest liquors that tend to flow freely in such sessions.

So why am I writing so much about a subject that I swore not to write anything about on this forum? Am I going to break my promise? Not really. But I am making an exception to my own rule, to a certain extent. I feel I just might have struck gold in trying to achieve that balance that KAJ so effortlessly achieves in post after post. And aiding me achieve this is, of all things, a music video!

The current, and some not so current, happenings in different parts of the world reminded me of an old Van Halen music video for their song Right Now. For those who don’t profess much knowledge of the band Van Halen (even I don’t, so I have Google researched), this Dutch sounding named band was actually an all-American hard rock band formed in the 70s. It was largely a family affair – the name of the band is the surname of more than half the band members. Eddie Van Halen (RIP) was the most known among them for being the fastest guitarist in the world in those days. Many more people will suddenly relate to him when I tell them that he did the guitar solo in Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Van Halen was the archetypal rock band – long hair, unkempt, substance abusers, alcohol abusers, abusers in general, surrounded by groupies, risqué, and all the other clichés that one can think of.

Now here is the thing – just like every superficial sounding and looking actor/actress pines to do a role of ‘substance’, so do rockstars pine to be taken seriously … to be seen as people with a conscience. Right Now was meant to do exactly that. Sammy Hagar, who had taken over from David Lee Roth as lead singer/songwriter, wrote the lyrics to announce that the band had matured and could write stuff that went beyond girls, sex, drugs and rock and roll. (An aside - Right Now featured in an album that was titled For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. There is a reason I have made the first letters of the four words in bold. Get it? Now pray tell me how was one supposed to take the band and their work seriously?)

I am of the firm belief that MTV made music into a visual medium (hmmm … now that could be an interesting topic for a future post) and the video for Right Now is proof. So when I said earlier that I was reminded of the video, I was choosing my words carefully since I am attributing credit to the music video, as against the song for which it was made. Because, the honest to God truth is that the lyrics actually don’t measure up to the level at which the video operates – they are not bad, though. Now Sammy Hagar, obviously, didn’t want the video to happen in its current avatar. 'I wrote the best lyric I've ever written in Van Halen, I'm trying to upgrade this band's image … with lyrics to where we're finally not just a party band that can play instruments, and they wanna put words underneath? Why don't they use the words I wrote? They're great words. It's a statement. It's gonna be confusing!', he lamented. The director of the video, Mark Fenske, had a cheeky way of acknowledging the quality of the lyrics wherein at the point when Sammy Hagar appears, a super (term for titles or text added to a video, not to be confused with subtitles) mentions ‘Right now maybe we should pay attention to the lyrics’. My pov is that Mr. Hagar should be grateful that there was someone who visualised a higher state for his sub-par lyrics to take refuge in. Anyway … here is the video for you to enjoy. (It’s only 4 minutes - so even if you don’t subscribe to this genre of music, I would urge you to watch it for its production.)

Now why was I reminded of this video on introspecting about the times we live in? The year the song (and the video) came out – 1992 – was in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War era, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tiananmen Square revolt, the first Gulf War, and a whole host of world changing epochal events. Though it was made more than thirty years ago, almost everything written on the supers in the video still holds true. Not just about how countries are behaving with each other, but so are people in different parts of the world. Thirty years on, humanity and its lead representatives in politics, science, technology, arts, information, news, sports, and what have you, proudly proclaim that everything has changed, become better, bigger, smaller, more powerful, more sustainable, more eco-friendly, more friendly, faster, closer, and a whole bunch of other ‘…er’s’. But has it?

When you read the supers once again and contextualise them to current times, you realise that actually the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same … or possibly become worse.

Everyone talks of climate change catastrophies, and yet no one is changing their habits for the better.

People are going about their lives, planning out things like there is no tomorrow … because someone keeps telling them that there is no tomorrow.

Politicians are scaling newer depths.

Science is easing things, and making them complicated at the same time.

Technology is making everything wireless … for which more wires are needed to charge those wireless things.

Sports are seeing unprecedented records being set, only to be dented by the stigma of newer and newer drugs.

Social networks brought people closer, only to make them lonely, distant and untruthful about their individual realities.

We are exploring new frontiers in space, and going back in time at the same time.

The more progressive we are becoming, we are plumbing newer depths of racism, religious hatred, bigotry and misogyny.

The more competitive we are becoming, the more ruthless and vicious we are becoming in pulling down others.

Every year a Nobel Peace Prize is given, and every year a new war erupts.

The more billionaires we are producing, billions more struggle to stay above the poverty line.

The more we profess being sensitive to the vagaries of nature, the more we plunder and rob Mother Earth …

Oh, I could go on and on. The litany is never ending, and so I will restrain myself before I (to quote a part of the lyrics) ‘miss the beat and lose the rhythm’.

Since the video is so damn good, it is also visually distracting wherein the real depth and gravitas of the words we see on screen don’t have the impact they would otherwise have when read in isolation. So here is the full compilation of all the supers that appear in the video.

Right now, Ed is playing the piano

Right now, people are having unprotected sex

Right now, opportunity is passing you by

Right now, justice is being perverted in a court of law

Right now, blacks and whites don’t eat together very much

Right now, you could be outside

Right now, the light from a star in M-5 is heading toward Earth

Right now, the light that left a star in M-5 a thousand years ago is getting to your house

Right now, God is killing moms and dogs because he has to

Right now, guilt is turning someone inside out

Right now, Van Halen is planning a world tour

Right now, a bomb factory is hard at work

Right now, you are sitting too close

Right now, somebody’s got the wrong idea

Right now, oil companies and old men are in control

Right now, it’s business as usual in the woods

Right now, nothing is more expensive than regret

Right now, people who can’t breathe are bumming

Right now is just a space between ice ages

Right now, youth is king

Right now is a good time to repent

Right now, the truth is being obscured

Right now, science is building a better tomato

Right now, pigs are becoming lunch

Right now, someone is working too hard for minimum wage

Right now, a convenience store is open

Right now, Mike is thinking about a solo project

Right now, your parents miss you

Right now, oysters are being robbed of their sole possession

Right now, no one is safe from loneliness

Right now, it’s cold where someone you love is

Right now, it’s nicer in Cabo

Right now, a mad man is wandering the streets of the town you live in

Right now, a tired man with a wounded heart is sitting in a coach seat on a East-bound transatlantic flight looking out the window wondering how to say ‘dog’, ‘howl’ and ‘moon’ in French just in case it comes up

Right now, she is going on with her life

Right now, time is having its way with you

Right now, forces are aligning against you

Right now, someone is walking on to a nude beach for the first time

Right now, Ed’s has got his hands full

Right now, you wish you had a larger TV

Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do

Right now, you aren’t doing what you most wish you were

Right now is harder than it looks

Right now, your memory is getting longer while your life is getting shorter

Right now dogs have it good

Right now is not the fault of the Japanese

Right now there is no cure

Right now people are doing it for money

Right now a bowl of soup would be nice

Right now keeps happening

Right now we must be going

(It’s been many years now that I suffer from what are called ‘birthday blues’. Maybe this post is an outpouring of those blues. Happy birthday to me! 😊)

Be braver. Be kinder.

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One of the supers in the video states ‘Right now is not the fault of the Japanese’. My interpretation of it is that one of the biggest epochal events was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened because of the Pearl Harbour attacks. So if the Japanese hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbour, would the world have never experienced an atomic bombing? And would the various wannabe superpowers have clamoured to develop their own deterrent capabilities? And would the Japanese get the mojo for world domination in terms of electronics, automobile manufacturing, etc to reclaim their rightful place as one of the largest economies in the world were it not for the devastation of the bombing? The jury will always be out on this one. Which is why for Keep Watching this time I am sharing the review I wrote of Oppenheimer – the architect of the atomic bomb. When you watch the movie and the events that led up to the bombing, it doesn’t seem fair to pin the blame exclusively on the Japanese.

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Christopher Nolan’s epic saga on the years leading up to the development of the atomic bomb, and the subsequent trial of J. Robert Oppenheimer manages to get you hooked, but only so much. Based on the 700 odd page tome named Prometheus, the movie crushes under its own weight of expectations, the sheer quantum of source material that Nolan seems to have had a tough time sieving through to make it to the screen and the delicate balance that he’s had to maintain in bringing cinematic opulence while staying true to the book is amply evident. As a result the characterisation of its eponymous character is never fully developed. It leaves you cold, just the way the protagonist has a cold, scientific approach towards the hottest invention known to modern mankind. Result is that his flip after witnessing the havoc it resulted in towards controlling the spread of nuclear science post the bombing feels a little jarring. The lines of Strauss, Oppenheimer’s arch nemesis, ring true, ‘How could the man who saw so much be so blind!’ There are really strong moments scattered across the 182 minutes, but they’re not epochal enough to remain with you. In spite of these, what truly lifts the movie are the brilliant performances by brilliant actors. Needless to say Cillian Murphy has one hand (if not both) firmly on the Oscar statuette. And so does Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss. Matt Damon as the general in charge of the Manhattan Project and Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s wife are superb. (4* seems low considering the hype which made me think it’s a cinch for 10/5)