Earlier tonight, there I was sitting on the couch as Michelle Obama delivered her speech in Charlotte, North Carolina - my wife and I both choked up as the first lady was delivering her emotional finish. Republican or Democrat, if you weren't moved by the general message of sacrifice, family and true belief in self and country, then there's no helping you. The sense of all for one and one for all, the way that she said it - with the context that she shaped it with - is one that's been lost in the current atmosphere, when everything's hard and putting stock in faith and hoping that helps one climb out of the rut isn't top of the list. When things feel bad, there's always that sense that it's too far gone to ever get back, to rally back to even or ahead. It's easy to feel sunken and forgotten, fighting for ourselves and our struggling little nuclear unit that's been misplaced in the shuffle. It's when the loneliness creeps in and slumps down into your easy chair or hogs your bed, cleans out your fridge. It doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon.
Alex Body, an electronic artist from Iowa City, Iowa, utilizes a hypnotizingly meandering form of attack to get his fits of soloness out, to express the hardships as he sees them. The nights that he's staring into are tattered and hanging limply in the air. They are troubled and they're doubtful. They're without a ton of hope and they're happening over-top of scorched battlefields, where everything went terribly wrong. The shots were all fired and most of the allies, along with the enemies have been wiped out. The water supply's been diminished and everyone's got some form of asthma, hacking and wheezing their way into their new "quality of life." Everything's taken a serious hit and it's there where he fits his message in, where every one of us has personally done him wrong.
He sings, "The human race, we're so fucked/Everything we've done doesn't amount to much/And you're nothin'/I'm even less/Our extinction may suit us best," on "Distorted Hallways," and it's been made clear that the second chances have probably already been eaten up and no more will be given. It's a different - or similar for some - atmosphere to the one that the first lady was speaking about earlier, with tears visibly welling in her eyes. It's either one that we can believe can't be reversed or one that can be helped with faith.