Batmobile

I've been listening to a lot of old Liz Phair songs recently, and this one, called 'Batmobile' in particular:

"Fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

I don't speak the language

And you gave me no real choice, you gave me no real choice

You made me see that my behaviour was an opinion

So fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

It's the mouth of the gift-horse I know

But I gave it my best shot, I gave it my best shot

I gave you the performance of a lifetime

So I hope you all will see

There just isn't a place here for me

Look around and feel like somebody must be fucking with me

I just can't take any of you seriously

And I can't keep keeping myself company

Fire up the Batmobile 'cause I gotta get out of here

Big shoulders block the view

And you can't get your money back, you can't get your money back

You can't pretend that isolation is the same as privilege.."

It's one of those kinds of songs where you don't really know what she's going on about, so you just relate it to your own life, and funnily enough, there are certain lines in this song (can you guess which ones?) that encapsulate my current predicament perfectly.  Except I don't exactly have a 'Batmobile' or indeed even a car to just run away in.  And I can't afford to run away anyhow.  Which is sort of tragically funny.  At least it means I'm definitely in the right place, because if ever a country did a good line in 'tragi-comedy' it would be the Czech Republic.  No doubt about it.  They've made film after film about this kind of amusing interpretation of despair.

I watched the film 'Samotaři' ['Loners'] the other day, which is (unsurprisingly) about a bunch of fairly isolated or, at least, lonely people, all with their ideas of what they should do, and how they're all watching the gap between where they should be and where they are in their lives, and observing it perpetually widening.  Except for the stoner guy, who has an affair with a woman who just broke up with her boyfriend, only to remember, or rather be told by his friends that he's actually got a girlfriend, it's just that she's gone away to visit relatives for a month.  

The stoner guy has the best time of all of them, because he just can't remember what he's supposed to do, and by the time he does, it doesn't really matter anyway.  All the other characters suffer and don't gain anything except more confirmation that nothing's going to improve.  Some of the bad things that happen are so bad, they become comical, but mostly it's quite a subdued and depressing film with a very odd modern-industrial electronic music soundtrack.

Maybe if they'd had a fittingly 'tell it like it is' Liz Phair soundtrack, it would have been overwhelmingly depressing.  She has her own style of tragi-comedy in her lyrics as well as the profanity and references to sex.  Some people have accused her of selling-out with her more recent work, but I think to some extent, she kind of had no choice.  She certainly had to change something.  And it's probably better to change something, knowing it's only an answer, not the answer in the hope that it might open other avenues of possibility.  Because it's better than doing nothing.  And that's why I'm here.  I still don't have the answer, only a bunch of inadequate possible answers and none of those are exactly working out well.  But you've got to do something.  And in the meantime, while that something isn't solving the problem, at least it's a little less boring.  And I can at least say 'I tried'.  Though the comfort of that declaration is perhaps overrated and I certainly feel that the reassurance I derive from it fades with every passing day.