Nothing like coming home at 4am after a 10 hour road trip and finding a swarm of bees has invaded your living room. These were the scary bees, the Africanized ones, which are just one more example of humans mucking about with Nature and getting undesired results. I remained calm, and so did they. They were mainly interested in my lights; I’m guessing the heat or the hum or the frequency or something was firing them up. I turned off the lights, opened a window, and high tailed it upstairs. They eventually dispersed, and haven’t been back. Yet.

The “Wondershare” banner at the top of the video is the result of me having to use a converter program to read the AVCHD lite format, which is what my new Lumix LX5 uses. I don’t know who’s to blame here, Apple for not having a converter built in to iPhoto, or Panasonic for using this technology in the first place. Ever democratic, I’m going to blame them both. I will also blame the Amazon readers who failed to mention this not insignificant fact in their glowing reviews of this camera; I can’t believe they’re all on PCs. If you’re looking to buy a new camera in the “hobbyist P&S” range, I recommend the Canon S95. Not only does it shoot in a format that is native to iPhoto and most other media readers, it has an automatic lens cap, which the Lumix still does not have, despite many, many complaints about this annoying non feature. Oh, and the S95 takes great pics, too, especially in low light.

Ms Aguilera, see above: This is how it should be done.

Christina Aguilera sang the national anthem Sunday for the Super Bowl. Tragically for her, and our proud nation, she muffed some lines.  I actually thought it sounded ok, with maybe a few riffs here and there to remind us that, you know, she got soul, but overall it seemed she hit her notes and followed the standard protocol, which is for the singer to over melisma every syllable and go for broke on feel good lines like “and the rocket’s red glare…” Singing the anthem at a major sporting event is a rite of passage for the professional singer, and typically—typically—they do it by the numbers, with the only distinction between them being how many octaves they can wring out during the piece. If you can actually sing, the only real risk involved is to not fuck up the lyrics, and because poor Christina wasn’t word perfect, her performance was criticized to the point where she had to apologize the next day. Apologize. For missing a line. Really? C’mon. It wasn’t, by any means, a Roseanne Barr level cringe-fest, when we had to endure not only a poor singer, but a sneering delivery that many felt denigrated not just the song, but the whole nation. Again, I disagreed with popular opinion, and thought Barr was ridiculing the whole staid, jingoistic affair of putting your hand over your heart, removing your cap, and tunelessly chugging along, pledge of allegiance style, before you watch some guys play a game. It was subversive and darkly humorous and definitely risky, because, as it happened, pretty much nobody got the joke.
 

Roseanne Barr was a wily caricature of white trash and was never good at playing by the rules, but Christina (Christina!!)—she’s a good girl! I mean, she went through a slutty phase for “Stripped,” all those racy outfits and such, but she settled down, and everybody agrees she can sing her ass off (5 Grammies!), so no worries there, right? Sadly, she missed a word or two, which made some people feel a bit awkward, and feeling awkward is not what national anthems are about. They’re about making you feel proud of your country, and if the person singing it flubs the lines or can’t hit a note, well, you don’t feel proud, do you? You feel awkward, or worse, truly embarrassed, for them, for yourselves, for the nation, possibly even angry at God himself for putting every one in that situation, and that’s simply no way to get a great cultural event like the Super Bowl started. Hence the nervousness that pervades each prospective performance, as we trot out our finest singers and fervently pray they can get through it unscathed, letting us get on with what we came for in the first place.

With this unspoken fear hanging over any performer’s head, one can hardly hope for any real tweaking of the arrangement; it’s untenable, because the risk of awkwardness is too great. The song has been reduced to a mere exercise, and the meaning of the piece is lost in the gymnastics of the singer’s vocal chords. Deviation from the norm, much like in America itself, is strongly discouraged. No surprises, please. Just sing the lines, hit your notes, and let’s play ball.

I say this sucks. Singing our national anthem has become something you know by rote, and as such, you expect nothing from it. Hell, most people think “America The Beautiful” should be our national anthem, simply because it has more obviously colorful imagery. With its purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain, it feels more evocative to the masses, especially given that it, too, is sung in a static pattern of notes, with the artist acting only as a vehicle for a time honored interpretation of the piece. The whole anthem biz in America is a bloodless affair, and to put too much individual style into it (other than in those few lines when we’re expecting sonic fireworks of the range and volume variety), would be unseemly. Tellingly, although we say we foster the individual, maverick spirit, really we’d prefer to be subsumed by the crowd.

Unless, of course, you’re Marvin Gaye.

In 1983, Marvin Gaye sang the national anthem at the NBA All Star game. It was not, obviously, his first turn at the mic on this standard; he’d done it in 1979 at a boxing match and in that version he stuck pretty strictly to the program, just letting his pure, pure voice traipse along a well known path. Four years later, dressed in a sharp suit and wearing shades, he came out smiling from sea to shining sea, because he’d decided to say fuck it, let’s make this song jam.

Watch the video above. Listen and learn, as an artist at the height of his powers, soon to be tragically struck down by his own father, breathes new life into what is, in the right hands, a wonderful and potent song. His confidence is palpable—he knew before he stepped up to the mic, that he had figured out something amazing—and by the end of it, the crowd is clapping along to the beat (the beat! in the anthem! who even knew it had a beat??) with a rhythm not usually associated with sports fans. (Granted, it was the NBA All Star Game, and not the World Series, so the crowd likely had inherently more appreciation such things, but I think it would have killed anywhere.) Everybody there felt the magic, and, if I may be so bold, the soul of the song. Naturally, it was a black artist who had to reinvent it for the white hegemony, and by turning the song on its head, renewed its power for everybody. After all, Jimi Hendrix had done an instrumental version of the anthem before in 1969, and scared the shit out of white people in so doing. For starters—no lyrics?? Never mind the electric guitar, which was scary enough, how could you sing without words? Anybody who hears it now knows how. But Jimi did his version at his own show, at Woodstock no less, and then launched into his set. His target demographic was standing in front of him, caked in mud and high as hell. Marvin put his down in front of an unwitting and potentially far less receptive audience. Controversy was courted, but the majesty of his interpretation served the reward of his risk. And I warrant that even the most straight laced among them was moved. It was, and is, a triumph.  If you don’t get a bit teary, or at least goosebumps, I’m not just going to question your citizenship, I’m going to doubt your humanity.

So, Christina, don’t be discouraged. You took lumps for the wrong reason, really, and now that you’ve taken them, take strength in your survival. Take strength in your talent, not as a killer karaoke performer, but as a real artist. The next time you get a chance to sing it for the glass eyed masses, do something to break them out of their routine and expectations. Make the song your own, and in doing so, make art for all of us.