Pink Floyd The Wall

NOTE:  This post is rated R for thematic content and an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

Recently, I watched “Pink Floyd The Wall” for the third time (not having seen it in decades).   I came across it in a big box of videos on loan from a friend to entertain me as I recover from a broken leg.  Inside the DVD case I found this little note:

“The Wall” well deserves to be watched multiple times, and has held up well since it came out almost thirty years ago.  Other movies from that year—even top-grossing ones like “E.T.,” “Rocky III,” and “Porkies”—arguably have not.  

In this post I describe my introduction to the band and the movie; discuss the difficulty of getting to see it again; and review the DVD extras you should check out if you rent this movie.  (In an upcoming post, I’ll analyze the movie itself and put forth what I think is an unusual perspective.)

Discovering Pink Floyd

In 1980, when I was ten, my friend David asked, “What’s your favorite band?”  I knew this was just a ploy to get me to ask him about his favorite band, and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.  He told me anyway:  “Mine’s Pink Floyd.”  He described this amazing album that had just come out, “The Wall.”  I’d never heard of the album, nor the band.  David did a sales job on me, saying, “On one of the songs it goes ‘And the worms ate into his brain!’”  I took a listen, and was immediately absorbed.  We’d listen to the album all afternoon, looking at the album art and the handwritten (and almost indecipherable) lyrics.  I got some attention at school for my rendition of a background exchange from the album, a women crying “Eeek!” and a man yelling back, “Shut up!”

In those days we grasped little of the meaning of the lyrics; singing them, we sounded many of the words out phonetically, like parrots.  One of my friends would sing “no dark sarhasm in the classroom,” not worrying about what “sarhasm” might mean.  I told him it had to be “sarcasm” but he refused to accept this.  For my part, I had no idea what “psychopathic” meant but couldn’t be bothered to look it up.  I remember arguing with my brothers about the little girl’s utterance before “Goodbye Blue Sky”—was it “there’s an airplane up in the sky,” “there’s a snow plane up in the sky,” or “there’s snow playing up in the sky”?

Around 1985, I won an art award and was invited to a ceremony in Denver to collect my prize.  My parents, recently divorced, bickered over who would drive me.  Trapped between them and their two cars, I struggled to decide.  “Come with me,” my mom said, “and you can have Pink Floyd in the car.”  My dad asked her what Pink Floyd was.  Mom, triumphant, replied, “It’s the name of a band he likes.”  Defeated, Dad snorted, “It sounds like the name of a pig.”

The movie at first viewing

My mom really grew her cool-mom cred when she agreed to take my friend John and me to the movie.  This was 1982, a couple years before VHS rentals.  I was only thirteen and it was rated R, so somebody had to take us.  Right away I knew this movie would be far more harrowing than the album.  Even before the horrific animation accompanying “Goodbye Blue Sky” I was terrified—not just by the movie, but by the prospect of my mom dragging my friend and me out of the theater (as my dad would do the following year at “Fanny & Alexander”).  But to my amazement, mere minutes into the film my mom had fallen asleep!  The sound was jacked way up in there (at many theaters the movie’s producers installed subwoofers to enhance the sound), so my mom’s falling asleep was simply bizarre.  Sleep must have been a coping mechanism, or at least an excuse for not making us leave.  I looked over periodically and throughout the movie Mom was practically catatonic in her seat, almost like Pink up on the screen.

Of course that movie completely blew my young mind.  The images were almost unbearable, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.  The first thing that struck me was the battlefield scenes:  none of the glory and excitement of typical war movies, such as what Pink watches on TV, but mostly the grim aftermath of collecting the fallen soldiers.  Of course I’d learned about WWII in history class, but in a sanitized classroom-friendly version, never like this.  And then there was the deeply disturbing animation:  those uncanny humanoid creatures with snouts like gas masks; a guy getting brained; a white cross turning red, blood flowing from it into a drain; and of course the seduction, copulation, and mantis-like devouring of one flower by another.  (Roger Ebert wrote, “This is a flower so gynecological that Georgia O’Keefe might have been appalled.”) 

From “The Wall” I got a crash course in the birds and the bees—from the flowers, from the animated version of Pink’s scorpion-like wife, and from live-action groupies.  Even more disturbing were the scenes of a fascist rally and rioting.  Coming out of the theater, I was speechless.  I don’t remember ever debriefing with my friend about it, but that movie has been drifting around in the back of my mind ever since.  (I will not let my kids watch it until they’re at least seventeen.  Maybe not even then; one imdb bulletin boarder wrote, “Maybe it’s better I waited till age 45, cause if I’d seen this at 17 I’d probably have shaved off my eyebrows or something.”)

Chasing “The Wall”

Years after seeing “The Wall” in the theater, I began to want to see it again, with the hope of understanding it better and, frankly, being able to enjoy it more since my mind wouldn’t be so completely blown.  I was torn because though I continued to enjoy the album, I somewhat feared the movie.  I had moved away from home but not yet started college, and my footing in the world was tenuous enough that I sought movies for escape, not so much to get all freaked out or depressed.  Finally, in 1988 I got my roommate to rent it with me, along with a light romantic comedy to bring our spirits back up afterward.

This didn’t go so well.  Unexpectedly, two neighbor girls came over, decided to watch with us, and we ended up passing around a big jug of Carlo Rossi red wine.  Having guests created an awkward dynamic, because one of the girls was gorgeous and my roommate and I both wanted her bad, while the other was, God forgive me, pretty homely.  It might not have mattered if nobody tried to bust a move, but the wine worked its magic and soon my roommate was hitting on the homely girl.  (There wasn’t enough wine in the world to embolden my roommate or me to hit on the hot one.)  To make matters worse, both girls were chain smokers.  Yuck.

I couldn’t focus on the movie.  The girls were talking too much, and the TV had poor, monaural sound, and I was distracted by the spectacle of the homely girl wisely and persistently shutting down my roommate (who’d have had no use for her the next day, it must be said).  The girls bailed on us toward the end, and after the trial scene my roommate and I were depressed and becoming maudlin.  We turned to our second video to cheer ourselves up, only to learn the hard way that “Sid & Nancy” is anything but a light romantic comedy.  The seemingly helpful clerk at the video store clearly had a mischievous streak.

In the intervening years I’ve wanted to rent “The Wall” again, especially after DVDs came out and I bought a large, stereo TV.  (Note to peeping-blog-toms:  it’s not a gas plasma or LCD TV and there’s a rat’s nest of cable going out the back of the entertainment center cabinet and back through, so it would be hard to steal this TV, and you’ll find a much better set at either of our neighbors’ houses.)  But watching “The Wall” would not be a good way to unwind after a workday, and I couldn’t play it loud because of the kids, so it’s never seemed like a good time to rent it.  When I got the loaner DVD, I knew I’d finally get my chance.

(On a side note, this film has developed a reputation as something best watched stoned.  The IMDb bulletin board page for “The Wall” is full of pointless posts to that effect.  Were I interested in such activity, I had a golden opportunity here, with some rock-star-grade prescription pharmaceuticals left over from the most painful days of my convalescence.  But that’s not my style.  I have only ever used painkillers as painkillers, and I want to be able to think—when I’m watching a movie and when I’m not.  Moreover, I wasn’t interested in having this film freak me out again.)

The DVD

If you’ve only rented “The Wall” on VHS, it’s time to watch it again just for the picture and sound quality.  There’s verbiage on the case about Hi Definition film transfer and digitally remastered Dolby Digital blah blah blah … suffice to say, the DVD looks and sounds great.  The menus have a lot of little gimmicks like Floyd music from other albums, interesting icons, etc. which are fun (though the icons are slow to slide into place and become click-able, which gets a bit tedious).  Note that turning on subtitles doesn’t show you the lyrics, but you can turn the lyrics on separately.  There’s not much dialogue in this movie (Pink has exactly three words), but you should turn subtitles on anyway to catch all the dialogue coming out of Pink’s TV.  You can also tune your sound system through the DVD controls, which is kind of cool.

I’m normally not a big fan of DVD extras—a good movie should speak for itself—and I’m especially wary of musicians talking about their work.  I hated Sting’s 1985 documentary “Bring On the Night,” which a one-star amateur reviewer accurately described as “self indulgent even by Sting’s standards.”  In fact, that movie kind of ruined Sting’s music for me.  This isn’t to say there aren’t great music films out there, like “Metallica:  Some Kind of Monster” and “8 Mile,” but “The Wall” is pretty heavy-handed to begin with and I didn’t want to hear a lot of blather about alienation and metaphorical walls and so forth.

Happily, nobody makes an ass of himself on the documentaries, of which there are two.  One is a documentary of the making of the film, and the other is a fairly recent retrospective.  Both are well worth watching.  There’s quite a story behind this film:  the creator of the album who wrote the screenplay, Roger Waters, fought constantly with the director, Alan Parker, each trying to shape the movie to his liking.  Neither ended up satisfied with the end product; Parker called it “the most expensive student film ever made.”

There is a certain amount of blather involved in the retrospective, but Waters and Parker are thoughtful, articulate, and frank.  For example, Rogers recounts the creative process without casting himself as some sort of sage:  “Alan Parker would ask me, ‘What’s this fucking song about?’ and I’d say, ‘You know, I’m not really sure,’ and I’d dredge up stuff from my past, or sometimes from other people’s pasts.”  Parker, when asked what the point of the movie is, does make a fairly grandiose speech about the wall as a symbol, etc., but then he seems to catch himself, chuckling, “But you’ll really have to ask Roger, it’s his deal.”

The animator, Gerald Scarfe, offers some insight too and it’s fun to see how dismissive he is of the movie as a whole.  An unexpected highlight for me is Peter Biziou, the cinematographer, who revels in his every memory, with a wide smile and a sparkle in his eye that are perfectly charming, especially given the dour reminisces of Parker and Waters.  I wish I could have Biziou for an uncle.

There’s some fun trivia to be gleaned from the documentaries.  For example, we find out why “What Shall We Do Now?” is in the movie but not on the album, which is something I’d wondered about for thirty years, ever since I first saw the lyrics on the album jacket for this nonexistent song.  (Turns out the song simply wouldn’t fit on the LP, and by the time they decided to cut it, the liner notes had already been done.)  We learn why “Hey You” was cut from the movie (more on this later).  We also get a funny story about the collect call Pink places to his wife, with the befuddled long-distance operator—“It’s a man answering, is there supposed to be someone besides your wife there to answer?”—inadvertently salting Pink’s wounds.  To get that bit of dialogue, they placed an actual call from the U.S. to England and recorded a random, unsuspecting phone operator.

Here’s one more example of the usefulness of the documentary.  I’d gotten confused, this time around, about where the big concert supposedly takes place.  Pink’s hotel room is in L.A., but so much of the movie is hallucination anyway (including the whole fascist rally sequence) that I thought Pink might have shape-shifted to London.  I based this notion on the scene in the stadium bathroom.  The sink there is clearly a British model, having separate spigots for hot and cold.  Even if one of these primitive sinks had found its way to an L.A. stadium, the security guard’s expert technique of swishing up the cold and hot water in one fluid motion clearly shows him to be a Brit:

The mystery is resolved in a single sentence from the documentary: “For the American stadium stuff we had to do, we went to Wembley Football Stadium.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a running commentary you can turn on while you watch the movie.  I didn’t check this out because frankly, this movie can become exhausting and there’s only so much of it I can take at one time.  I’ll save the commentary for next time.

Two more videos

As a kid, I was stoked when the movie included the song “What Shall We Do Now?” that was mysteriously missing from the album.  At the same time, I was bummed that my very favorite song from the album, “Hey You,” was excluded from the movie.  Good news:  you can see “Hey You” on the DVD as an extra, though the resolution isn’t very good, for complicated reasons involving lost footage.

“Hey You” is worth watching for three reasons.  First, it’s a great song.  Second, you can decide for yourself whether this number actually deserved to be cut from the movie.  (My opinion:  like most of the scenes cut from movies, it was cut for good reason.)  Third, the omission of this scene ended up changing the rest of the movie significantly.  After deciding to cut this scene, Parker had the idea to re-use most of its video content elsewhere, and he actually re-cut the entire rest of the movie to graft in the extra footage.  I think this is a major reason the movie seems so disjointed at times, with strange visions (such as the riots) that, to me, have as little to do with the movie as they did with “Hey You.”  We also get those screenfuls of writhing worms that got their original context from this song and don’t make much sense beyond it.  I wish I could see the version of the movie that came just before this odd backfilling of discarded footage.

There’s one last video on the DVD, which is the original rock video for “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”  This video is fricking lame.  It was clearly made on the cheap, with rampant recycling of footage and animation.  (Of course the footage is taken from the movie, but within the rock video the same sequences are shown again and again.)  The song itself is easily the weakest of the entire album, with its disco beat and silly lyrics, and the video takes it to new lows in tedious repetition.  But it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to fully appreciate how well-made the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall” really is.

‘This Roman Meal bakery thought you’d like to know.’dana albert blog Pink Floyd The Wall

The British Faucet Conundrum

Introduction

This post concerns the silly faucets, or “taps,” that predominate in the U.K. I will explore the possible reasons why such an inferior design persists, and what it says about British vs. American culture.

Double-taps everywhere

Consider this photo, from my UK vacation last summer:

I love the sign: “Now wash your hands.” In the U.S., of course, people (and especially customers) don’t like being told what to do, even if it’s something entirely reasonable. This is called Freedom. So the sign will say something like “Employees must wash hands” or, more likely, “Employees must wash hands before returning to work,” the implication being that if your shift is over, you can skip the hand washing. But there’s something else in the photo I want you to look at. It’s the sink. Pretty fancy, and with fancy taps. Two taps per sink. Now check out this photo, from the same trip:

Another fancy sink, but still the primitive two-tap design. This time a sign warns against scalding, which is a big risk when you try to wash your hands in such a sink. Look carefully at the round thingy at the back of the sink. I think there’s supposed to be a little chain with a rubber stopper attached there, so you can mix the hot and cold water in the basin. Since there isn’t, you have to move your hands back and forth between the taps, alternately parboiling and cooling them. And now, on to Exhibit C:

Look how short that tap is. It is impossible to run your hand under it without scraping it against the back of the sink. Is this because it’s a tiny little space-saving sink? No:

It’s a giant sink, actually. The tap is so short because, well … no reason. That’s just life. But wait, there’s more. Assuming this next sink had a stopper, would you dare mix water in its basin to try to clean your hands with?

Of course not. Now, we’ve all dealt with grody public restroom sinks (that one was in a $150 a night hotel in London). But at least in the US you can get warm water without involving the basin. Basic sanitation in the case of a grody British sink requires you to either wash your hands in cold only, or to scald/relieve/rinse/repeat.

Is this just because the sinks are really old? No, this next one looks like it’s from around the ‘70s when everything (including bathroom fixtures) became ugly:

All of the photos in this post are ones I snapped myself, of sinks I used during my summer vacation in London and Glasgow. During this trip I encountered exactly one sink offering the miracle of warm water out of a single tap. (I didn’t get a photo of it because I hadn’t yet thought up this blog post.)

Why double-taps?

In an attempt to answer this question I turned to the available literature, that being what I could easily find on the Internet. I found a number of interesting and amusing explanations for double-taps, not one of them satisfactory. Here are some highlights:

“With 2 taps on a basin, it is much better to wash and rinse off your face. With a single tap which is set in the middle of the basin, you can’t do that because you can bang your head on the tap if you tried to rinse off your face.”

“Red tape. Older British homes often have storage tanks in their attics that feed water heaters. Under certain conditions, those tanks could be contaminated–for instance, by the intrusion of a rat–and tainted hot water that flows into a mixer-tap might get sucked into a cold-water pipe leading back to the public water supply, endangering the whole neighborhood. So regulations forbid mixing of hot and cold water streams inside a tap unless the tank meets strict standards or protective valves are installed.”

“Having the choice of either hot or cold for washing hands is an incentive to get it over and done with and not waste water.”

“Because we find 2 taps more aesthetically pleasing as well as being able to wash your hands and brush your teeth at the same time.”

“As far as double-taps go, it is the best way to deal with zombies.”

“I’m British and some houses in our street have an indoor toilet. Though we don’t speak to them as they think they are better than the rest of us.”

Now, I’m not going to comment on all of these, but I must refute the bit about banging your head. Consider Exhibit G:

If you look closely in the upper right corner you see the bottom edge of a drinking class—what the Brits call a “toothbrush holder”—and if I’d framed the photo a little differently you’d also see a glass shelf. I bashed my head into that shelf multiple times. The shelf was a real danger, as it was clear and at head level. But hitting your head on a tap? Please. (I mean, have you ever done it?)

As for washing your hands and brushing your teeth at the same time, I don’t see how this would be done, nor how double-taps would facilitate it. Perhaps it’s as facetious as the zombie explanation.

Which brings us to the “red tape” business. I’m not buying it—I mean, this isn’t the Dark Ages. How many homes and buildings still have the hot water tank up in the attic? And how hard would it be to rat-proof the tank? It’s not like you ever hear about the unregulated American water supply being fouled in this way. Besides, the UK regulation clearly does not apply anymore because there are single-tap warm water faucets to be found there.

USA #1 Let’s Roll … right?

Are we to conclude that, as evidenced by our single-tap (aka “mixer-tap”) faucets, the US is just better than the UK? Of course not. We fall short in so many ways. Most of our cities don’t have a decent subway, and the Bay Area one I use is way louder than that of London. Amtrak, though very cool, is a cruel joke compared to the train systems in the UK which are cheaper, quieter, more reliable, and have far greater reach. For retail purchases, America still hasn’t adopted the chip card (more secure than our old-fashioned magstripe cards). Meanwhile, our broadband Internet access is both slower and more expensive than what Europe and the UK have, even though we fricking invented the Internet.

Even around here, when you call a taxi, it can take forever to arrive, or it won’t come at all. Getting a cab in Glasgow was an amazing experience. I dialed the number, and a computer system read my caller-ID digits, looked up my address, and instantly announced that a cab would arrive in x minutes, or I could press 1 for more options. About a minute later the phone rang and the computer voice said, “Your cab is here.” (Actually it probably had some charmingly quaint name for “cab.” In fact, I seem to recall that the computer voice had a charming Scottish brogue.)

Evil faucet – American edition

Of course it would be irresponsible to discuss the inconvenient double-taps of the UK without admitting that we have some pretty awful faucets in the U.S. Consider our modern public restroom with all its little electric eyes for the faucet, the toilet, the paper towel dispenser, even liquid soap dispensers. These might be okay if they actually worked right, but so often they don’t. My hands, which aren’t exactly small, somehow miss the faucet sensor. Or the water comes on for a second and then cuts out, and I’m doing a little hand jive down there trying to get more. Or I’ll walk by the paper towel dispenser on the way to the urinal, and it’ll spew out unwanted paper. At the urinal, I’ll shift my position and it’ll flush while I’m still peeing. Worse yet is the toilet in the stall: once I’ve carefully arranged the little paper doughnut on the seat and then turned around to sit, it thinks I’ve left and flushes, taking my paper doughnut with it.

And what I just described is the Brave New World of automated restroom fixtures. What preceded these (and are still found in older restrooms) were really awful. Think of those spring-loaded restroom faucet handles, where the flow would stop if you let go. This meant you had to wash one hand while holding the faucet handle with the other. Washing just one hand was pretty much impossible—“one hand washes the other” being more than a figure of speech—plus you had to choose between cold and hot water unless your hand was big enough to span both handles.

When you stop to think about it, the public restroom sink reflects how the owner of the restroom views his society. In the UK, the assumption seems to be that the restroom user either a) enjoys the methodical process of mixing warm water in the basin to wash with; b) is okay washing with only cold water; or, c) doesn’t mind the scald-and-relieve cycle, being a stoic Brit with a talent for resignation. In the US, it is apparently assumed that the restroom user can’t be bothered to turn off the damn water, and would blithely walk away while it was still running, wasting untold gallons.

Consumer demand

Of course we Americans have never suffered spring-loaded faucet handles in our homes, and throughout my life I’ve enjoyed mixer-taps (with the one exception of a really cool old apartment in Rockridge, which also had radiators instead of forced-air heating). I’ve already replaced both of the older mixer-tap faucets in my house (with new mixer-taps): the kitchen one because it was a piece of crap, and the bathroom one because it wouldn’t stop dripping. I hired a plumber to fix the bathroom sink, and he told me that the thing was obsolete, and the $0.04 washer we needed was no longer available, and we had to get a whole new faucet assembly. Worse yet, our sink (which looked no more than ten or fifteen years old) was outmoded and wouldn’t accept the new faucet, so I had to replace it, too. By the end of the ordeal I was out over a grand.

Did I mind? No way, man, I’m an American consumer! This is what I do! As everybody knows, we Americans are well steeped in the tradition of keeping up with the Joneses (actually, surpassing them) by buying the latest and greatest of everything. Planned obsolescence is not only tolerable, it’s something we’re complicit in. Not only do we want that new thing, we want to be the first to have it. Think of the people who lined up to get the iPhone, and before that the people who lined up to buy Windows 95.

I don’t get the impression that the British are like this. Recall that double-tap explanation I quoted earlier: “I’m British and some houses in our street have an indoor toilet. Though we don’t speak to them as they think they are better than the rest of us.” Of course it’s a joke, but I think there’s something to it. Solidarity seems to still have a place in the UK, in contrast to the American spirit of outdoing your fellow man whenever possible.

Can we learn from the British?

Look, I’m not going to say we should all try to be British. A lot of their self-imposed consumer restraint is fricking lame—like not having a microwave oven or a dishwasher or a clothes dryer. I went for years without a dishwasher and it didn’t make me a better person. And of course for an American to special-order an English-style double-tap sink would be an absurd affectation. (Meanwhile, washing your hands with cold water, as the double-tap arrangement tends to involve, is non-hygienic according to this article and this one.)

But there’s something to be said for the Brits’ “don’t-gimmick-me” approach. I’ve seen some really pointless innovations in the US: the electric can opener; oval-shaped chainrings for bikes; the motorized necktie rack; and most recently the Rabbit instant wine bottle opener. Why do we need to open a bottle of wine in three seconds flat? If we’re in such a rush, why not go all the way and swap out the cork for a spigot? (Oh, wait, we’ve done that, too.) And as if the original Rabbit weren’t bad enough, we now have the electronic Rabbit with an illuminated LCD screen showing how many cork pulls are left before the battery is dead. God forbid we should have the thing conk out unexpectedly, and have to open a bottle using a hand-powered corkscrew.

But wait, you might say, why should I hold people’s stupid gadgets against them? Isn’t that their business? No, because once the consumer gets used to being overly coddled, he gives up the old ways, and the market follows his lead, depriving people like me of traditional products. Too often, aesthetics suffer for it, as mere utility trumps all. For example, the modern ketchup bottle: just look at it, compared to its vastly superior ancestor:

It’s almost as though the plastic bottle is designed to reflect the stout physique of the modern American. Instead of having to master the subtle air-bubble-sliding technique, the consumer can now force the ketchup out as fast as he wants to speed along his feeding frenzy. The squeeze bottle even makes a fitting flatulent sound as it spews. Revolting. And yet the plastic bottle has become so popular it is now the norm, and you can’t even find a proper glass bottle in the supermarket anymore. Until recently, I had to talk waitresses into selling them to me. But guess what? It turns out you can still get the traditional glass bottle of Heinz ketchup in the supermarket—but only in the UK.

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