My favorite song the past week or so has been the Tajik national anthem from the Soviet years (the tune is still used today but with different lyrics).  I have no idea what those poor people are singing about.  I tried doing a google translation of the lyrics and there’s a lot about Lenin’s call and flags illuminated by crimson lightning and fighting enemies.  Whatever it is, the song sound very dramatic and just slightly sad.

I’ve gotten to listening to a bunch of anthems.  The Armenian one is good and so is Russian one.  The Germans have a very dignified song and the Japanese have an extremely solemn one that’s about the emperor. I think the French have the best national anthem, it really ignites a franco-fire in my soul.

I’ve also been listening to the Star Spangled Banner a lot since Obama became president.  Here are my thoughts about our national song.  1) As it is popularly sung it is a terrifying noise, everything is drawn out – the song was once a bar song and it needs to be snappy and fun.  2) Singers who especially draw out the end of the song (the land of the free and home of the brave part) are terrible people. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE AMERICAN PEOPLE 3) The song should always be sung in its full form – or the final verse only should be sung.  That verse is genuinely rousing, especially when it comes as a crescendo at the end of the entire song.

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Also stirring is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s lyrics written during the Civil War…

When our land is illumined with liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strikes a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that tries to defile
The flag of the stars, and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained,
Who their birthright have gained
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave,
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.

When I listen to the Star Spangled Banner in its full form (as sung by the Robert Shaw Chorale) I genuinely get goosebumps (it might also be because I’m thinking of Obama).  I have never gotten goosebumps from the Star Spangled Banner before hearing it in its entirety – I’ve always felt that it fetishized the flag and didn’t really say much about our country.  The Marseillaise, by contrast, is about the birth pangs of their Republic and in the right situation can make earnest French people cry.

That’s what I think is the true mark of a great anthem – the ability to stir up such feelings about a country that at a crucial moment can bring its listeners to patriotic tears.   It’s nice that we have songs to sing about our country for when we feel inclined to sing about it and that new Americans can learn the tune and the words and thus automatically be members.  The same goes for clubs and groups, sharing songs seems like a great lost art-form, schools had songs that students actually knew how to sing.  Did Masons have a song like the Stonecutters song in the Simpsons?

Some people were born utterly driven.  They are tireless.  They are productive.  They never slow down.  I am not one of these people but I was once more ambitious.  I don’t know what eroded that ambition -  defeats along the way, more ambitious competition or complacency – but at some point it felt like I was to comfortable and didn’t have more strive in me.

Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood says “I have a competition in me; I want no one else to succeed.”  I need to regain my competition.  My father would often watch these huge epics where men walked over the Earth in search of treasure of some sort or another, or would trudge on these vast military campaigns – being pawns in huge global dramas, and he’d say “wouldn’t they have been happier if everyone stayed at home?”

Yes, everyone probably would have been happier if they had all just stayed at home.  Far fewer people certainly would have been hacked to death.  There’s also something to be said for leaving your mark on the world.  It’s hard to get ambition if you don’t got it, but sometimes a small spark can really set off a huge conflagration.  All that dead wood that’s built up in my head and my life over the past few years – I think – will set off a most wondrous era.

Sometimes the memories we aquire of an annual event become enmeshed withi one another – it becomes difficult to remember what transpired on which year.  I tried the following exercise to see if I could remember what I did every year for New Years Eve and to try and figure out if there was any pattern for what made a good holiday and what made a bad one…

the year written indicates that the holiday was to celebrate the beginning of that year…

1998 – Sayville First Night – this was a weird thing my hometown on Long Island held where there were lots of high school bands playing and other things to prevent us from drinking.
grade:B

1999 – same thing, but this time it gets a C+

2000 – ah, the millennium.  Y2K.  I went with my friend Devin to his friend Joe’s house who was having a huge house party.  For the actual count-down I walked a few houses south to my friend Lily’s where they had a lit a fire in a garbage can on their front lawn.  Not long after I returned to Joe’s.  (Lily’s house was dry and Joe’s was wet)
grade: B+

2001 – ?????????????

2002 – Party at my friend Ian’s in Bayport, L.I.  I remember having a good time but there also being some drama at the party – I don’t remember what it was.  Drama. Drama.
grade: B

2003 – This was my first day residing in my first apartment in New York City – in Astoria.  These guys were my friends from college and we had a good time playing games and watching TV.  I don’t remember many details other than it was so dry that people wouldn’t have one of those chocolates that has brandy in it.
grade: B-

2004 – This year I started my New Year’s Eve off at Homer’s.  In 2004 his parents still lived in a Boerum Hill brownstone and they made a very nice dinner.  We then went to another friend’s family brownstone in Park Slope and played silly drinking games and went on to the roof and watched the fire works go off marking the beginning of 2004.  I remember taking a taxi home to Williamsburg and loving what I saw out the window at every stage of the way.
grade: A-

2005 – Again – this began at Homer’s parents’ house.  I think by this time they were living in Windsor Terrace.  There was no solid plan for the evening – we went to a party at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  It was cool but sort of hard to get to and from.  Again the new year was rung in on a roof.  I remember getting many strange phone calls but from whom, I cannot recall.  Then we went to the East Village where Homer’s favorite dive bar was going to be making its last call.  This was not so fun – my first New Years on Manhattan Island.  Gross. This night dragged on and on with me and Homer’s girfriend Catherine fading out at around 4am, much before the last call.  The subway ride home was strange, but the next day on my train ride back to Long Island I remember how great 2005 looked.
grade: B

2006 – This was maybe my best New Years.  It started off by having dinner at my apartment with a bunch of people.  We then all split up and I went – with my friend Ralph – to my friend Ari’s brownstone in Prospect Heights.  I remember tying balloons with new year’s wishes and releasing them – that was really nice if a little environmentally irresponsible.  Around 1pm, Ralph and I went to our friend Jimmy’s loft space on the Gowanus Canal.  Huge huge party.  Music. Dancing.  A Coke machine that had cans of Rheingold in it.  I got home and tried to throw up but failed and fell asleep on the living room floor.  The next day I had to go to my father’s swearing in ceromony.  The bumpiness of the Long Island Railroad was not a good thing for my stomache.  I wanted to throw up so bad.  But I didn’t – I couldn’t.  When I got to Sayville, I drank a glass of Pepsi and let out a giant burp and I was hung over no more.
grade: A

2007 – New Year’s Eve was on a Sunday in 2006 and I went to my friend Katie’s bar to hang out for some cheap drinks and meet up with her fiance and his friends.  This was great, and when Katie got off at 9pm we walked over to Will’s old house over by Grand St. in Williamsburg.  He and his friends had lived in that house for years and they were kicked out so the building could be demolished and a condo built there.  The lease ran out on December 31.  The building was utterly abandoned – no power, no water and no heat.  We trashed what we could, scavanged what we wanted and went on to the neighbor’s roof to see the fireworks.  When we got up to the roof, an old man came at us with a knife  because he had heard our footsteps and thought we were burglers.  We calmed him down just as the new year 2007 struck.  There night went on with more exploring the abandoned building – which was freezing.  On the way back to the subway I bumped into a girl who lived on my floor in college.
grade: B

2008 – This New Year’s eve began by visiting my friend Ryan at his bar in Cobble Hill.  Then met up with Homer and Catherine at our friends’ apartment in Williamsburg.  There was some good dancing but I don’t remember anything memorable really happening.
grade: B-
so.
I can’t see a definite pattern with anything.  Who knows what makes a good New Years Eve? Not me, that’s for sure.  I think this year I should like to keep it low-key but I’d still like to party a bit, just because I’m excited for 2009.
If anyone reading this was with me New Years Eve 2000-2001, let me know what I did! I CANNOT REMEMBER.  Most of you reading this will assume because it was that AWESOME.  But more likely the case, I was sitting at home alone with a bag of Doritos and a 3 liter of Cherry Coke watching a Twilight Zone Marathon on the sci-fi channel.

Last night I was anxious and feeling underwhelmed when I went to sleep, maybe then it’s not surprising that I suffered a dream that preyed on those feelings.  I don’t know what to think about dream interpretation – I guess some of my dreams have meaning (they’re probably about sex even when they’re not about sex) – others are enjoyably bizarre but this one was not enjoyable but it was exhilarating.

I awoke in a sweat.  I was in a tent.  It was light outside, cool, but not cold.  There was the sound of people working outside in a camp.  I look down to discover two macabre sights.  The first were my hands – they had been severed, leaving stubs that already had had time to heal.  The other was a human head – the head of world’s most famous fugitive: Osama bin Laden.  His body was laying in the tent just a few feet away from me.  I did not know if I was a prisoner or if my presence in the camp was even known.  I just knew I had to get out of there and, for the twenty-five million dollars, I had to get this head out of there with me.  I knew how I arrived there but the memories came only if I thought about it – like remembering some book I had years ago, I don’t remember it now though.  I managed to wrap up the head in a rag with my stubs and hold it between my arm and my body on my left side.  I left the tent and snuck my way out of the camp.  Before I woke up, I remember sitting in an infinite desert wondering how I would make it back to an American Army base without being discovered or mistaken for a terrorist myself.

A couple of weeks ago a friend recommended that I read My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain describing a soldier’s life in U.S. Army that occupied northern Mexico during the Mexican American War of 1847.  There are two things that are mind-blowing about this book.
1)What went on is really intense.  There were two U.S. Armies that invaded Mexico, the first one invaded from the north and marched down through Monterrey the other one landed at Veracruz and captured Mexico City.  The army in Monterrey basically stayed stationary for most of the second half of the war and was subjected to boredom and brutal guerrilla attacks.  Forces allied with the army like the Texas Rangers would often brutally retaliate on the guerrillas and the local population.   It shows the awfulness of our conquest of the continent and the destructive and creative forces that went in to expansion.

2) The other thing that this had me think of is the nature of conquest.  The Americans invading Mexico were very influenced by a book that had just been written on the Spanish conquest of Mexico and conquistadors were very much on their mind – everyone was already talking about the “Halls of Montezuma.”  The second American army landed in Veracruz and marched on to Mexico City, following a similar path to Cortes when he conquered the Aztecs.  There were many reasons why the US was able to conquer Mexico so quickly including superior technology and infighting within Mexico, however it’s really interesting to see the similarities and differences between the US invasion and Cortes’s invasion.  Both invasions were wrapped up very quickly.  The more I read about the conquistadors the more I’m shocked at how quickly the Spanish took over everything. In 1492 no one had any idea that there was anything going on over here.  It took them ten years just to figure out that they weren’t in India.  But just 10 to 25 years after that they had conquered the major civilizations in Mexico and Peru.  It blows my mind because they had no maps, no supplies, no communications and no conception of the people they were encountering.  How did they do it so quickly??

I also have been thinking a lot about American unity.  Making all the countries in the Americas a little bit closer and have it be that when we say American we mean all Americans from Tierra del Fuego to Nanuvut.  Are there any organizations already doing this? Does anyone have any thoughts about this?