Hi, this is Cristobal from the Apple+ Studio in Los Angeles. Thank you for joining me for this 52-minute guided meditation session featuring the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to the 1998 film The Big Lebowski.
Place yourself in a comfortable position. I'll be seated but you are free to choose what works best for you. If you are active, just stay in touch with your breath and any sensations or emotions that may arise.
As you meditate, thoughts may arise, perhaps thoughts about masculinity or personal agency or Steve Buscemi and all of that is all perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. I like to think of my thoughts as the ball return at a bowling alley. The thoughts come rolling towards us, often hidden beneath the lane, so we may not even be aware of them until they crest the upward slope of the rails, and appear, a fast-moving sphere of urethane, mica, and resin, now slowing and then coming to a stop against the hood, irrefutably yours and heavy as a stone. What we'll do is take that thought, consider the reality of it, and then send it away along the lane. Maybe it takes down a few pins when it reaches the end, but that isn't up to us. What we’re all about is acknowledging the thought and sending it on its way, away from us.
The first song on The Big Lebowski Soundtrack is a charming rendition of Tumbling Tumbleweeds by Sons of the Pioneers, but the soundtrack album begins with a Bob Dylan song, The Man in Me, from his 1970 album 'A New Morning.' This is a wonderful beginning to our meditation, as this is a joyous, uplifting song with gospel overtones and lyrics that explore the idea of companionship and inspiration. The song appears twice in the film, once over a montage of men bowling and then again when 'The Dude' played by Jeff Bridges, has his own meditation interrupted by an assault that renders him unconscious. Knocked out, the Dude falls into a hallucination where he imagines himself flying over the lights of twilight Los Angeles, in pursuit of a mysterious woman who flies upon the same carpet he had been sleeping upon. The hallucination ends when the Dude looks at his hand, sees that he has a bowling ball in his fingers, an attachment that renders him unable to fly. When the Dude awakes upon the floor, the music, and his rug, are gone.
The attachment Dylan sings of is ephemeral and raises us up. The Dude's vision is one of pursuit, but he is ultimately pulled down. It is no surprise that the music and the carpet both leave the Dude's life.
Like each breath, each song here is a treasure. 'Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles' by Don Vien Gliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. As with the compositions of Bob Dylan, it can be more foolish than wise to try and put to limiting meaning on the songs of Captain Beefheart, and I will say only this: that the song talks of an unattainable, impossible quality in a woman who may be a metaphor for enlightenment or even grace itself, themes that are present throughout the film as they are present in many forms in our own lives.
The third song, 'My Mood Swings', by the incomparable Sir Elvis Costello, is another enigmatic song that presents itself as one thing but upon examination proves to be another, a proper theme for both the Dude's arc and for our meditation. When Elvis, real name Declan Patrick MacManus sings the lyric 'my mood swings,' he is not using the phrase as a noun, that is, 'mood swings' are a condition or diagnosis that he possesses and which must be addressed, but rather as a moment in time. The lyrics are,
'So, speak to me, just like you should
Then we can do those wicked things
And if you want, we'll make it good
Before my mood swings'
Change is inevitable, control is an illusion, and no matter what our desires, what we want and are capable of will always change.
Revisit your breath for this next song, for breath control is paramount in the style of Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo, best known as Yma Sumac. The Dude’s story is a story about men in conflict, as I’ve already said somewhere, and all the songs so far have been performed by men. This is a story about impotency and the illusion of agency that mentions castration and unemployed men who spend all their time throwing balls away. And here is the first song performed by a woman, and the lyrics are indecipherable. Is this coincidental? Or are the concepts of the Dude's story being suggested to us on many levels at once, both directly and subtly, in ways we can only appreciate if we are open to them?
Words leave us altogether for Traffic Boom, allowing us space to return to our breath. Breathe in for three, hold for three, release for three, and hold your lungs empty for three. Don't think about Walter or Donny or Philip Moon, the actor who played Jackie Treehorn Thug #1, also known as Wu, often referred to as 'the Chinaman', in a film that is a comedy with ugliness and cruelty right beneath the surface or perhaps not even that far below.
The cruelty and emotional suffering of The Dude's journey is brought forward by Nina Simone's 'I Got It Bad', a love song written by a Jewish man and a Black man that is about loving recklessly yet never obtaining. It is about the attachment that arises unbidden with the power to ruin us should we allow it. This is a beautiful and tragic song, successfully recorded by many men, but a woman's performance was chosen here, and there is a meaning to that.
This next one is an interesting track. I would say it is arresting in its content and complexity. 'Stamping Ground', by Louis Thomas Hardin, better known as Moondog. A blind, Viking-helmed Manhattan bohemian and professor, Moondog belongs here among these innovators and iconoclasts. The spoken word passage, 'Machines were mice and men were lions once upon a time, but now that it’s the opposite, it's twice upon a time,' revisits the idea of the loss, failure, or fantasy of traditional masculinity, a theme throughout the film and the soundtrack.
As strong as Stamping Ground is, I cannot now recall the scene it was used in, and I suspect that musical director Carter Burwell used a snippet in the film then included the entire track on the soundtrack was hoping to expand our horizons by including this track.
We've reached the precipice, the moment where we step into an unreality demonstrated so powerfully in the visuals of the film and echoed here, in the backwards, channel-hopping electric guitar passage that leads us into the dirt-roads and truck dust psychedelic jam 'What Condition My Condition Was In' by Kenny Rodgers long before he became the king of contemporary radio friendly country music. All of his powers are on display here: inventive lyrics, compelling hooks and production to die for. This is the polished, slick, linestreamed facade of the chaos of the world as it is presented to us, the compromised second draft if you will. It is an escape and occurs when The Dude is drugged by gangster pornographer Jackie Treehorn, a man who treats objects like women. Here, poor The Dude has lost all agency, all intention, not in the way of enlightenment, but in the way of annihilation.
Not included in the film or soundtrack, but perhaps adjacent to the choices made by Carter Burwell, is the abominable Kenny Rodgers song, ‘Coward of the County’, written by Roger Bowling and Billy Edd Wheeler and mostly forgotten despite having been a success in 197. That song would need a trigger warning for contemporary radio play, cavalierly dealing as it does with sexual assault, and ending with the spurious wisdom ‘sometimes you got to fight when you're a man.’, a philosophy that The Dude would take issue with, but which certainly applies to the film's underlying and persistent references to the first Iraq War.
The Dude emerges from this second hallucination, where Maude wears a Viking helmet just as Moondog did, and which ends with calamity, just as his flying fantasy did earlier, in the back of a police car, being conveyed to the office of a Malibu Chief of Police played by Leon Rossum, a violent authoritarian who quickly renders the Dude unconscious yet again.
He awakes this time in the back of a cab, one of several scenes where The Dude is being driven somewhere, by a cabbie or a chauffeur, this is a film where The Dude's car is progressively demolished, perhaps representative of The Dude's own slow dissolve, as agency, ambition and influence are also lost to him. The dudes his first words upon recovering consciousness are 'I really hate the fucking eagles'
Far be it to step lightly over a song by Henry Mancini, but Lujon does not need much investigation. It is a Henry Mancini song, and is therefore fully actualized and, having been used in a dozen films, including Ron Howard's Beatles documentary, where it served as a kind of theme song for Brian Epstein, well, it was ideal for the aforementioned Jackie Treehorn scene, and indeed anytime a certain sense of sophistication could be called upon.
As our meditation approaches the end, here we are with another pinnacle of the soundtrack and the film: Hotel California as played by The Gypsy Kings, perhaps the most aggressively rhythmic song of the album, and the theme of Jesus Quintana, a minor character with far-reaching cultural and thematic significance. Few will ever forget John Turturro’s depiction of the dazzling and splendid convicted pederast and bowling rival of The Dude and his coterie. Why is he here? Why does he have this song? Does Eagles frontman and composer of Hotel California Don Henley's arrest for solicitation from an underage sex worker tie into Jesus' history of exposing himself to eight-year-olds? I don’t know.
Keep your breathing steady, let the complexity and any potential meanings of all that is or could be happening in a Coen Brother’s film scored by Carter Burwell come into your awareness and then pass out of it.
Our penultimate song, 'Technopop' is our only trifle: a Kraftwerk clone that Burwell composed to serve as a manifesto for our nihilists, the most violent and anarchist of all our players, the ones who convince Amy Maan to give up her toe for a million dollars. Walter tells us that this sacrifice wasn't even necessary, that he could have gotten a toe, with nail polish, in a few hours, an insight into the savage efficacy of capitalism that nihilists perhaps could not comprehend.
Still, no matter what course they may have taken, someone would lose a toe, and in this great tangle of right and wrong and truth and lies and cowardice and cruelty, the ultimate outcomes are, as in life, a death, and a conception. The scales are balanced, the semifinals are nigh, and The Dude abides.
Towns Van Zandt eases us out of our self-exploration with his creaky guitar cover of Dead Flowers, a country western song written by an English rock group, a song owned by former Stones manager Allen Klien, and which Klien would typically charge a filmmaker $10,0000 to use, but that upon screening the film, Klien was so overjoyed by The Dude's ejaculation 'I really hate the fucking Eagles!, that he allowed Carter and the Coens to use the song for free.
And that's it. We’ve arrived at the end of the string.
Allow your breathing to return to its natural state, experience your body at rest, mind clear. In a word-- Abide.
Thank you for joining me for this meditation. I look forward to seeing you next time, when we will check in to on what our condition may be while checking out The First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National.
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