Coldplay's 'Viva la Vida' & Lyrics

Myth prefigures art, art prefigures physics, and physics prefigure the unthinking efficiencies of resulting orthodoxies. I've heard this song quite a few times this summer, not least because it has climbed to #1 on the charts. Like all their other work, Coldplay's trademark poppy-flows lull you into swaying trances, and as the overwhelmed words wash over you, the song becomes something like a holograph. Beautiful, rotating, floating just beyond your grasp, you never quite get at what they're about by just listening.

The band's music in general and this song in particular are vessels, it seems, for world music and for an entirely different commercial model, bearing other artists and styles away from nearly a century of American dominance, ostensibly from what has become a usurious, hyper-vigilant Industry, a rusting monolith thoroughly ill-suited to digital distribution. The album 'Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends' is themed around guerillas and insurgencies, around love in all its diversely and promiscuously international forms, around the global cycles of war and peace. Song and album were both produced by Brian Eno and released exclusively on iTunes on May 5th, with Europe having to wait quite a while for production of a physical CD. By the 30th of June, the album had sold more digital downloads than any in history.

The clearly audible first line, "I used to rule the world," is a tip-off to greater depths and possible endurance, as is its title from the Frida Kahlo painting of watermelons; the album's cover art is from the 1830 painting by Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People. I dawdled a while before searching out the lyrics, but sure enough, frontman Chris Martin, better known in the US as Gwyneth Paltrow's husband (for whom he wrote the intimately disclosing song 'Yellow'), penned a title-track meditation on imperial strivings and deceits: "Revolutionaries wait...for my head on a silver plate. Just a puppet on a lonely string...oh who would ever want to be king?"

Martin thinks Saint Peter will never call his name. Not sure about that, but funny enough, the song and album's release are an artist's crowning achievements, ones which surely demanded an intense devotion to craft, which surely plant new guidons for others to follow. The viddy is of them playing to an adoring, seemingly thrown-together crowd at the BBC Centre. Here are the lyrics:

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemies eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
Once you knew there was never, never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world


It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People could not believe what I'd become
Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells are ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can not explain
I know Saint Peter won't call my name
Never an honest word
And that was when I ruled the world

No Popcorn For Old Men

I've seen almost every known Coen brothers movie. I watched 'Blood Simple' in the International Cinema screening room in college, have quoted lines from 'The Big Lebowski' to my doctor ("Mark it 8, Dude!"), bought the soundtrack to 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?,' and 'Miller's Crossing' pretty much describes my job. Sometimes John Goodman storms unbidden down the flaming hotel hallways of my mind's eye with a shotgun roaring, "I'll show you the life of the mind, I'll show you the life of the mind!"

But I'm not going to see No Country for Old Men. I'm more curious about why the Coen brothers agreed to make the book into a movie at all. Those who have read the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, the title ripped off from a line in Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium (nice way to earn a Pulitzer, Co-mac), will know there's no artistic reason to make a movie out of it.

For those who haven't read it, nor seen the movie, I'll gladly spoil it with a review: there's a foreign super-assassin loose in New Mexico trailing stolen drug money. He has a strangely scrupulous, murderous moral code. He tracks and kills a Vietnam vet who found the drug money and wants to keep it. The sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones is a war hero but can't catch the killer because he's a super-assassin. After killing the Vietnam vet and recovering the money, the super-assassin, name of Anton Chigurh, goes and kills the dead vet's young, innocent wife. Why? Because he said he would do so, and a promise to death is a promise. Tommy Lee Jones then feels very bad, and retires, knowing that pure evil is still out there and he wasn't man enough to stop it. Are we redeemed yet? No. And we never will be. Roll credits.

So to the Coen Brothers: screw you. Yes, I do mean both of you, Ethan. Why don't you go and do a re-make of The Hudsucker Proxy. That'd be fun. Better yet, start making children's movies. Here's a suggestion from the Winnie the Pooh genre:

Christopher Robin Must Die

Now that would be progress. And Cormac McCarthy, you need to start writing children's books. How about this one?

Baby's First Meat Grinder

I'm sure Francis Ford Coppola would be willing to direct. Let him.

Children Of Men: Movie Review

"Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men."
Psalms 89:3

Recently, I listed the film of this post's title as a favorite movie. It asks questions: what value have our selfish genes, and the cultures they sprang from? Is their enshrinement worth the price of the world?

Well before I saw it, Bruce at The River Blog gave fair warning. Here was his run-down:

Basically, the new dystopian sci-fi thriller is a documentary.

For the battle scenes, substitute the urban warfare of Iraq.

For the scapegoating and caging of immigrants, substitute “terrorists” and Halliburton detention camps.

For the suicide drug Quietus, substitute Prozac.

For troops on the streets, substitute post-Katrina New Orleans or present-day Baghdad, or....

For The Uprising, substitute Hezbollah or Hamas.

For the infertility epidemic, substitute despair due to pollution, global warming, and the tyranny of elite scumbags.

For the pot-smoking, philosophizing Michael Caine, substitute you and me.

And for the birth, substitute the second coming, hope, and salvation, obviously.

Bruce's glowing review failed to completely dissuade Lord Wife and me from attending a showing as a comedic pick-me-up one Baby-Sitter Saturday night. Generically, Children of Men is a road movie spiced up by a spiritual quest welded into sci-fi and Grail sub-genres. My only sureties going in were that its Anti-Goodman, Clive Owen, had turned down the role of James Bond in Casino Royale to act in it, and that it would bring intellectual trouble. Verily, verily. It would try to suck the brains out of our heads. Which it did, and thus, it's hard to write about, forcing an examination of one's self as much as the movie.

The director of the Oscar-winning Y Tu Mama Tambien, Alfonso Cuaron, took a 1992 novel by the British writer P.D. James and turned it into a meditation on evolving United States and European Union foreign and domestic policies, and where they could lead. Cauron was the one doing the projecting, here, not me. He filmically considers the fate of his countrymen from Mexico in a North American future set in England which teems with refugee camps, sporadic resistance, general despair, rampant corporatism, blight, and horrifyingly sadistic Homeland Security. I would surmise Mr. Cauron is a highly intelligent and extremely well-read man, who has been searched in airports not a few. In his movie, immigration, racism, and salvation are not sub-plots. Rather, they serve as silver, holographic screens to catch and reflect the lights of his intended creation and give it full dimension.

The film was released on Christmas Day in North America, if that provides any clue, and is set in 2027 Britain after the world has undergone twenty years of complete infertility. Visually, the gritty, ground-breaking verisimilitudes provided by masterful 6 and 10-minute single-shot action scenes will influence film-makers everywhere. That brilliance is obvious, but the plot themes are too elusive and contemporary to easily codify. And if one thinks deeply about how the world might react to 20 straight years of infertility, his dystopic view is restrained, and simplified. It doesn't dwell on the Task Forces on Immortality such an occurrence would naturally call forth, to the breeding prizes, the international blame-storming, the superstitious potions quaffed and the rampant, reflexively irredentist violence which would ensue. Indeed, the movie begins by Clive Owen buying a latte in a Starbucks and narrowly missing its explosive demise by suicide bomber. If only Starbucks, absent new customers, could survive that long.

Practically, there are always pluses and minuses of high levels of immigration. People with no rights bring new blood, hoping to climb the ladder to a better life for their children, just as the forebears of almost all current US citizens did, just as immigrants into other countries. Many still carry the restless, adventurous gene denoted by the D4-7 allele, a perch on the genome which defines an exploratory, expansive, optimistic and sometimes transcending culture which successive waves of opportunist immigrants wrought. To quote the Bible again: "For Joseph is a fruitful bough, whose branches run over the wall." But what if this restless expansion, this heat sink of mania is stymied by suffocating foams of racism, and the optimistic expansion fizzles thereby? What if the doors of these migratory experiments are closed out of fear?

In Children of Men, the first woman to carry a child after 20 years of emptiness, Kee, is an illegal black immigrant from Africa. At the end of a heart-rending quest, the formerly privileged Clive Owens (Theo Faron) uses his body and soul to deliver and protect her baby, perhaps the savior of humanity. Having accomplished his task, Theo bleeds to death. He is glad, and it is no matter that Madonna and Son's skin tones are black as night. Having passed through roads of anarchy and cruelty, they bring hope of continuation and a chance for absolution the world has lacked.

Alfonso Cauron sees a brown future for America, a continuation of the melting pot with less and less emphasis on WASP rule. He recognizes that the transition will not go at all smoothly. Personally, being low on melatonin and easily freckled, I'm not sure how to feel about that. But my prejudices and preferences mean nothing, in the end. A mere continuance of our race should be enough for me. Human survival, should it be expressed in yellow, black, and brown, should give peaceful thoughts to even the denizens of die-off, the docents of www.savethewhitefolks.org, people like Dick and Lynne Cheney. After 20 years of barren wombs on this earth, no one would give a flying damn what skin color the first little baby had. It would be treated as a resurrected Savior, as is illustrated in the movie's final scenes, when the Baby is given safe passage and about to be picked up by a ship named Tomorrow.

Cauron's message is this: "Hey, gringos...survival should be enough for us all." At the very end of Children of Men, Kee the Black Madonna has the good grace to name her baby, her hours-old girl, after her dying Parsifal's son Dylan, who was long since lost. There are worse things than honor and memory.