Fractionals

My Seconds piece on Crowded House's "Into Temptation" is up today, and I think it turned out pretty well (love the graphic, as well). The first two original paragraphs were removed, and I can understand why; they're more than a little discursive, and I don't think the editor in question made the wrong decision or anything (after all, they edit - that's what they do!). I also don't think the piece suffers from it. I'm being careful to say all that, because I want to post those two paragraphs here. Not because I'm being petulant, or because I feel as if they're so amazing they simply need to be out there, but because when I mentioned this piece here a while back I said it would connect up to some stuff I was talking about at the time (see here), and at the beginning of the article is where that connection is most apparent. So here they are:

When you're a kid, you're too exposed. Most of us, blessed by good or at least uneventful childhoods, don't have the barriers in place we'll erect later as we get our hearts broken, learn more about the world, learn to trust ourselves and others less. As with people, so with art. You don't lose the capacity to fall for art, to be surprised and betrayed and redeemed by it, but those shocks lose a certain intimacy and intensity after the first couple of times. My life has been far more effected than I'm really comfortable with by the things I saw and read and listened to as a child that didn't quite make sense, that not only were saddening and terrifying and confusing but hinted darkly (intentionally or not) that there was more to the world than I imagined growing up warm and safe and loved, and most of it wasn't pleasant.

I go back to re-read or watch or listen to those things now and they're longer so discomfiting, mostly because they are comprehensible to me as an adult in a way they never could when I was a kid, coming upon them with little context and less idea of how to grapple with them. And these songs and books and TV shows weren't all obviously weird; some of them seem to me now and probably seemed to everyone else at the time wholly innocuous.

Also, I don't tend to link to others' content on Stylus because, really, where would I stop? But Alfred Soto has written his On Second Thought on Wire's 154 at least partially in response to my vocal and oft-stated love for the album, and while I don't agree with him in the slightest I cannot think of a more cogent and elegant argument to be made for his side than what he's written. I think Stylus' content is universally pretty incredible, but this was really above and beyond the call of duty.