Sunday, November 30, 2008

Magically Delicious

Back in June I went on a diet and started exercising, and ever since then I've been running a few times a week (more often in the summer, somewhat less in the fall/winter but still pretty regularly). Tonight I went running in the rain after a nice dinner over at Eric and Lauren's (who this afternoon kindly invited us over for dinner). Usually when I'm running I think about death or something like that, but tonight I was thinking about Art, and about Lucky Charms.

Lucky Charms is the best cereal, and when I was young I didn't really understand why it is the best cereal, I just enjoyed it. But as I got older and tried different things, I began to understand why it is the best cereal. One of the things that I tried that helped me to understand why Lucky Charms succeeds in being the best cereal was attempting to eat all of the oats and leave myself a bowl full of marshmallows. I figured that getting all of the oat-eating out of the way would leave me, at the end of the bowl, with about 10 bites worth of pretty much pure sunshine happiness. But I learned it wasn't true. For me, anyway. Spoonfuls of marshmallows were not as good as a mix. A balance. Of oats and marshmallows.

And here's the really important thing that I've learned since then: it's the oats that make Lucky Charms a cereal that can be regularly and consistently enjoyed--I could eat it every day and still be OK with it. And it's because of the oats. Just marshmallows I would get sick of pretty quick.

I think the Lucky Charms folks get it right because they have more oats than marshmallows. The marshmallows are there pretty much just to spice things up a little bit, but it's really the oats that keep you coming back for a lifetime.

And the same is probably true of Art. For the analogy, I think of marshmallows as things that are florid, poetic, aesthetically beautiful -- the chorus, the hook, the really nice lighting; I think of oats as things that are mundane, boring, simple, quiet. The verses. The general wash.

Bob Dylan songs are, to me, the Lucky Charms of music; it's why they've stood the test of time. There's some great poetry in them, but there's a shit ton of incredibly mundane lines, too. The things are composed entirely of verses and no chorus, for the most part. And even breaking it down further, the lines are generally composed of oat words with a few marshmallows that are the ones that steer the line downward into your gut. And the music behind it all is usually pretty generic, repetitive, unassuming. Oat music.

So, the point of this all, I guess, is just a reminder to myself, to return to: if I start working on more music, I'm gonna focus on the oats.