I've been driven to updating my blog through a combination of exam time procrastination and blog-neglect based guilt. I'm concerned that having these factors as my main motivation will result in a relatively unentertaining post. I have an exam in Hillsborough that starts in two and a half hours. I've created a Facebook event inviting people to come and play Risk at my house, and I'm sad that nobody has said they are coming yet. I rewrote the lyrics of BBK's 'Too Many Man' especially for it as a promotional item:
'It always seemed ironic to me that it didn’t lead people to recognize the commonality of all their points of view, but rather, "This must be about us and only us.'
"Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like "Groundhog Day" to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something."
Shorty I rep Risk okay,
Monday to Sunday like Risk all day
You're fearful and tearful, I'm cheerful and giving you an earful; you've never been rekt this way
Man get shook when they see me play
Pass the red dice then see me slay
Seem happy when we start the game but they're always bare vexed when they go away
YOU NEED TO PUT A HORSE ON THERE
YOU NEED TO PUT A HORSE ON THERE
THERE'S TOO MANY MAN, TOO MANY MANY MAN,
TOO MANY MAN, TOO MANY MANY MAN
I'm pretty sure that's fantastic. It's only been up for like half an hour, so the call from Reach Records probably won't come until tomorrow.
Risk is a fantastic game. I'm not sure why. It's like the game itself isn't fun, but the half hour before it starts is inexplicably thrilling. It's like the rush you get before you dive into ice cold water, or during the setup time of a paintball game. Your mind and body ready themselves for an intense physical, mental and emotional challenge. If you lose, the game is always disappointing, but if you win, it's like all the grief and frustration of the last six hours is paid back three times over in the glory of your victory. It's basically a form of gambling that uses personal trauma as currency.
Why do we like what we like? I think we kind of choose what we want like a lot of the time. Like why love cats, or hats, or Risk or Groundhog Day? These are all fantastic things, but there are loads of fantastic things. How do you pick which ones you want to really treasure? It seems to me that professing love for many of these things actively increases the love I have for them. I was reading about Groundhog Day today when I should have been revising. Because it's got a relatively moralistic narrative about the human condition, loads of people of various religions understand it as kind of allegory for their own belief. Especially Buddhists, but also like everyone else. Director Harold Ramis writes:
Interesting. My bud Dave Stewart thinks it's a poisonous celebration of basic moralistic self sufficiency, but I see it as an exploration of the dissatisfaction of worldly pleasure and the (seemingly) inescapable burden of our selfishness. It's after Phil tells Rita that he's "come to the end of [himself]" that he is enabled to love other people, and is thus set free from his perpetual unhappiness. For me, the most important message of Groundhog Day is the diagnosis of selfishness as the disease that has dissatisfaction as its symptom. Obviously from there I would springboard into our need for an omnibenevolent deity to liberate us from our own nature, but that's not really what the film is really about. It's a funny coincidence that most things we see convince us of the truth of what we already believe. But believe this: Groundhog Day is a fantastic film. One reviewer writes:
When's the last time you watched Groundhog Day? What did you think about it? What does that say about you? If you've never seen it, hit me up around February second next year. Maybe after we've watched it we can have like an essay writing competition or something.
Cool, groovy. Enjoy your summers, kids.
