You Can Be Gena Rowlands

The concert was, in a word, delightful. Crowded and singing and dancing and a gorgeous pressed-tin ceiling and chandeliers and Craig Finn gesticulating like a madman and twinkling behind his glasses just like one would hope. I bossed Penn into emailing me his thoughts about various THS songs throughout the day yesterday, and I emailed him a list of the top five songs I wanted to hear, and I think most of them got played, but it actually didn’t matter at all because I would have been happy to hear really anything.

But yall, there was this moment in which things seemed weirdly manic and panicky and dark. “We gotta stay positive,” Craig Finn kept singing over and over again, the title track off of the latest album. “We gotta stay positive.” And obviously everyone was bopping around and singing along, because it’s a ridiculously fun song. But it just made me think that like it or not, “stay positive” has become the 2009 mantra, by default it seems, for lots of people I know. Difficult things keep on happening to so many folks, and there’s nothing really to do but chin up and keep a sense of perspective. Which is the right attitude to take, and really the only useful attitude to take, but what’s hard is that there is no practical response to hard times except to adopt a cheery outlook.

“Sometimes actresses get slapped,” Finn sings, as “Stay Positive” trails into my favorite track on the new album, incidentally also the last song of the set. “Sometimes fake fights turn out bad.” Which to me encapsulates the reason that “stay positive” is an absolutely inadequate response in many situations. There often seems to be so little power over one's circumstances, and during these times, what people want isn't to feel blind optimism, but some sense of control. “This isn’t me,” one might think, as one finds oneself in a new job, or a new city, or the old job or the old city or the same apartment for five years longer than planned. “This is surely happening to someone, like, in a book. Not to me,” as the weirdly unexpected occurs and out of nowhere he’s in love, or she’s lost her job, or you and your friends are suddenly dog owners or pregnant or dealing with sick relatives. Or on the other hand, now you’ve technically been an adult for a decade, but psychic wounds still smart like hell after years and years, and you still beat yourself up over awkward turns of phrase, and you have freaking pimples at age twenty-eight. “But I didn’t choose this,” you protest. Well that’s tough, Finn seems to argue. “Actresses get slapped.”

But then the song takes a turn and suddenly there’s a suggestion, not a perfect one, but at least a sense of how to handle waves of unfamiliarity and scariness and the feeling that seriously the world as we know it is disintegrating. “We’re the directors/ our hands will hold steady,” Finn reminds the audience. “Man, we make our own movies.” Do we really? Not entirely. But these lyrics are enough true that I unclench. I close my eyes and applaud wildly and start to dance to the first notes of the encore.