Context Is Everything

I am obsessed with contextualizing random moments in time. I realized that this is somewhat of a problem of mine. Not a problem in the traditional sense that of what a problem is, like, "Mike has a drinking problem." It is mostly just a time suck that I fall in to when I should be in bed. Thanks to the internet one can access news archives and dredge up age old news reports, magazine articles, and basically anything else that is out there.

This goes hand in hand with a minor fascination in placing music in the context of the greater pop culture land scape. I tend to claim that I'm not a music buff. I also typically claim I am not particularly passionate when it comes to music. I don't mind listening to the radio and I guess I could describe my music listening pattern as strongly as, if its catchy than I'll probably like it.

What I do end up doing a lot of though is reading music reviews. Last night I was digging up old reviews of the U2 album War. I was also watching old concert footage of them performing songs like New Years Day. Besides the fact that New Years Day is a great song and probably my favorite U2 song, I had a good bit of fun trying to imagine how exciting it would have been to be the age I am, but listening to this album for the first time. Imagining going to the record shop and picking up this record. I tried to find a review from England or Ireland. Namely because War was the first album from U2 to do significant sales outside of those two countries (Or rather Ireland or the UK). And since this was before U2 literally was one of the biggest rock groups in the world, I think it is worth exploring the idea that Ireland was proud of this group on the basis that they were somehow representing Ireland to the world...in the way Canadians view their exported celebrities as not just famous people but vaguely as heroes.

There does end up being some bizarre conflicts within my own reality though. For example, the election of Obama in 2008 is barely a memory at all. He's only served half his term up to this point and it is really not that long ago that he was elected. Yet, the other night I spent a few hours rereading some of the election time coverage. In particular I spent time reading stories from the days right before and after the November election and a few stories from right before the inauguration. Hyperreality is the wrong word for the way I felt but I'm just going to say it anyways because I can't think of a better way of putting it. I actually remember where I was on the night of the November election. I remember feeling pleased that he was elected and there was what some would call an 'electricity' in the air.

Yet while rereading the news stories about African-Americans who never thought they'd see the day of a black president while growing up in the Jim Crow south or the first hand reporting from a reporter in Chicago somehow made my own memories feel false and even incomplete. And what I'm about to say is not a wholly original idea from my own mind, but when I re-read those stories about the 08 Election, I know how and why this was a big deal and I want to be part of it, and in a way I was, but in a much more real way, I was merely watching this event pass me by. And in a way it passes everyone by. Every moment does. And I suppose that was what these stories from the election are for. They help contextualize what is going on in an election, and put some perspective on the entire event.

This is why I enjoy history so much. I was a history major in college. 1968 was one of the craziest years in world history. And I'd imagine if you were a striker/protester in 1968 in France as a young man or woman it was an exciting and daring time. Or for a more familiar concept, lets say I was a young college student in the United States. I attended UC-Berkley and I was the stereotypical student who protested the war in Vietnam. And in retrospect if you were still alive today, I would guess that I would probably look back at that time and think that maybe I was naive but I was part of something bigger and that it was a whirlwind time where the country truly felt like it could be torn apart...or maybe not. But these notions hold more sway as you get further from them and they can be written about and dramatized until the only real feelings are fleeting nostalgic memories that are probably half false. Which is probably why photographs are so powerful since they capture fleeting moments but freeze them forever.

This is also probably why Vietnam to me is now nothing more than a few movie montages like this: