I woke this AM under a dark cloud, the kind of dark you can only find in an empty, quite house the morning after a restive sleep. A mood made darker by working on an outline of a post I'm thinking of doing on Monday that goes back to 1177 BC. It is one of those dark moments where I found myself wandering over to YouTube because I wanted to hear Peter Gabriel's version of Bowie's "Heroes."
That led to Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes."
That seemed to feed the beast I love to loath, and then in the corner of the YouTube page I saw a familiar bearded man.
"Hey, it's Michael. What's he up to?"
Six months ago they did the below interview in conjunction with the release on the 25th anniversary of its original release, a remastered "Out of Time."
REM had already "turned the corner" for me at least when that alblum came out, and that work is mostly of little interest to me.
What is of interest is how Mike Mills and Michael Stipe have embraced the march of time. Representing the early cohort of Gen-X , like many of us in comparison to men of previous generations they have avoided the excessive male vanity of the combover, the razor, knife, and chemical.
It is fun to go, "Dude ... what happened." But all that does is to point out a denial on the speakers part of their own mortality. Time waits for no one. She has her plan. We can accept her plan with dignity, or we can fight her retreating tide until we become a stretched, filled, and plasticine-smooth parody of what we are not.
Mike and Micheal - especially my favorite member of the band Mike - have got it right I think. Mike perhaps a bit more grounded than Michael - but that is normal.
The only really frustrating thing about this interview is when Michael identifies himself as a "New Yorker." He's lost a lot in the last 25-yrs, most of his Southern accent, and now it seems even his roots.
Come back to Athens Michael - we like our quirky types. I believe Mike still live there. He seems a bit happier.
Anyway, enjoy the interview.
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