Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead
The video for this song is set in a supermarket, in which people are walking through the hallways and choosing things to buy. However, the message to be transmitted is more meaningful than just that. What the lyrics express is that everything that surrounds us is fake, artificial and plastic. As the title of the song suggests, even nature, specifically trees or the human body, might also be fake. People are fake, situations are fake, this whole supermarket-like world is also fake, our reality is fake. Even though they may seem real, they are not. And that is what 'wears us out': we don't realize that our life is artificial, so we just try to move on.
The supermarket setting is mentioned in A Coney Island of the Mind and is also connected to a reality similar to an amusement park or a circus. Everything around us is artificial, but we try to have fun out of it, and that blinds us and prevents us from seeing what is actually happening to us. That is what 'wears us out'.
I really hope you can listen to the song and make your own interpretation of it and, hopefully, it will be useful for you to relate that interpretation to what Ferlinghetti is trying to say.
Well, I like this song... and the meaning it tries to give to us, because it is true, as you said here, that everything that surrounds us may be fake, but we enjoy it. Yesterday, I was talking with a teacher regarding reality shows, I mean, people continue watching them and we couldn't think of a reason to do so since Reality Shows don't have much content than being watching someone else. With other classmates we agreed that it may be because sometimes people don't want to see reality; what is actually happening outside. This could be because we are afraid of what the reality has to show, I don't know.
ResponderBorrarI would also like to leave here a link I was reading today in the evening (it is in Spanish though), but the idea is that, according the study, we are "naturally" made not to be overwhelmed by reality. Maybe we don't want to see reality because we are not completely able to understand it, so we try to cover it in some way...
http://pijamasurf.com/2014/04/desfase-de-15-segundos-en-nuestro-cerebro-evita-que-alucinemos-con-la-realidad-cotidiana/comment-page-2/#comments
I think we live in a world surrounded by artificial things everywhere. If this continues to go on, we'll end up not even knowing whether what we are eating is artificial or not. As a matter of fact, many of the things we eat are actually synthetic food ("sopa maggi" anyone? xd). I wouldn't say, though, that all people are fake or that everything that surrounds us is fake. There must be at least some people honest enough to be considered real. The problem is that perhaps, as we saw this monday in class, the concepts we use to describe reality are the problem. I personally think we are al real. At least all of us know that we are alive and that some day we will die, and that's real. Now, I would like to connect your post with mine regarding the Beat Generation, in that I think it is true that many of the things that surround us are artificial, and that as Allen Ginsberg pointed out in his poem "Death to Van Gogh's Ear," we are using Van Gogh's ear as currency, which to me at least means that we are using people's suffering and sacrifice to buy the material things we want to have. I personally believe that using Van Gogh's ear as currency means that because I read that Van Gogh cut off his ear out of depression. I may be wrong, but that's my personal interpretation.
ResponderBorrar