Saturday October 24, 2020 “Crazy Life” Toad the Wet Sprocket
Empire Records is another lightweight but enjoyable film with a remarkable cast and an amazing soundtrack.
It recounts a day in the life of the employees of vinyl shop Empire Records. Except this is a day where everything comes to a head for a number of them facing personal crises - can they pull through together? And more importantly, can they keep their record store from being swallowed up by corporate greed?
The cast includes Anthony LaPaglia, Robin Tunney, Renee Zellweger, Maxwell Caulfield, Liv Tyler and Ethan Embry among others and the soundtrack is excellent.
Selected from the movie is “Crazy Life” by Toad the Wet Sprocket who took their band name from a Monty Python skit and had a number of charted hits not the least of which is “Walk on the Ocean” “Crazy Life” written by the band doesn’t really capture the teenage angst of the film but rather deals lyrically with the plight of the Native Americans.
Soapbox moment. They weren’t Native Americans and they certainly weren’t Indians; they referred to themselves as the Human Beings. It wasn’t their country because they had no sense of ownership of the land that treated them so well and they were almost mystical in the way they lived, until we came along.
One of the saddest and most memorable books that I ever read is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee which recounts the senseless massacre of 300 Lakota men, women and children by US Cavlalry four days after Christmas in 1890.
They didn’t teach us in school about the travesties that we committed against the Human Beings, the killings, the land that we stole from them and the diseases that we introduced to their pure ways of living that would ultimately kill so many of them. We have a bad history of suppressing those that we position as lesser peoples.
Stay safe and well...and hope that we can move ourselves away from more Wounded Knee moments.
