Tonight I got what I am calling a well-earned massage. I don’t indulge in these often but it is an interesting and unusual experience (as well as just plain feeling good). There is a weird intimacy with someone you don’t know. You are on a table without, at the very least, most of your clothes, and you feel vulnerable. And for me, afterward, I always stare at the ceiling for a couple of minutes and take in the quiet and remember the couple of occasions when I was in the hospital—one time undergoing an emergency appendectomy, the other time b/c I had been in a car accident and had broken ribs and a collapsed lung—and I had an epiphany about the inevitable. I felt like in those hospital waiting rooms when I was in pain and surrounded by strangers I got a glimpse at what the end of life is like for most people in our culture. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
But that’s after. During the massage, I think about all sorts of things and one thing I focus on is the music (I’ve had a few without it, but sound is pretty standard). It is, of course, always new age. The style I like least is the music that is supposed to evoke some kind of peaceful Native American mysticism. I can deal with electronic stuff. Tonight, at one point, there was a new age version of Pachabel’s Canon.
Now, this piece of music has to be one of the most overplayed of all time. Seems like it’s a constant presence in commercials, on Muzak, and, even more frequently, at weddings. I first encountered it on the soundtrack to the 1980 Robert Redford film Ordinary People. It was more or less the theme music to that movie. Ordinary People is one of the first movies I ever saw that seemed “deep.” The story revolved around an upper middle class family. One son had recently died in a boating accident. The other son, played by Timothy Hutton, had tried to commit suicide after his brother’s death because he was consumed by guilt. Judd Hirsch plays his psychotherapist, who tries to get to the root of his issues with his family. The story takes place in a Chicago suburb, and something about the whole thing— the leafy burbs, the emotional distance, all the things left unsaid— felt very real and close to me.
The wife, who couldn’t forgive Timothy Hutton for living since her other son was her favorite, was played by Mary Tyler Moore. MTM was a kind of hero in my family for some reason (I’ve never used it, but my DJ name of the future is DJ Mary Richards—if a Google brought you here, you’re too late!). Maybe because The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in the Midwest. She seemed like our people. The script of Ordinary People was criticized because it demonized her character, made her seem like an evil woman who was the main cause of the family’s problems. That seems like a fair issue to raise. It was pretty one-sided.
Anyway, Pachabel’s Canon: Because I first heard it with Ordinary People, and it seemed very moving to me as a kid, it will always seem to me like the soundtrack to a very particular kind of cold, gray, distant, middle-class misery. It says “Life is pretty hopeless, even when you live in a world of comfort.” So it seems odd to me that it soundtracks things like weddings and massages.
This is a version by new age pianist George Winston from the 80s that I will bet he recorded b/c people were interested in this piece after Ordinary People.
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