Kids these days; or, unearned irony

Every time I see an eighth grader in a Led Zeppelin t shirt, I'm tempted to go up to him (generally it's a boy) and say, okay, hotshot, name two Led Zeppelin songs and one Led Zeppelin band member. Two things keep me from doing this: sloth and the fear of being mistaken for a pervert. Oh, and the fact that half of these kids were raised by Grand Theft Auto and are probably packing heat. So, three things. Kids these days!

My point is not about armed teens, however. I just want to raise the question of what that shirt means. At one time, wearing a Led Zeppelin shirt would have meant, "I like Led Zeppelin." Right? I don't think it means that any more. If I were wearing a t shirt with Marilyn Monroe on it (can you picture that? Because I can't) and somebody came up and asked me whether I preferred Monkey Business to Some Like It Hot, would I consider the question impertinent? I don't think so.

(The answer, of course, is yes to Monkey Business, but Niagara beats both. Mike, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. And enjoy the Wordshed bump!)

ANYhow, this gripe is not about being Houses of the Holier than thou ... because I'm not. Yes, I consider "When the Levee Breaks" to be pretty much sublime, but mine is a limited appreciation, not idolatry by any means. My gripe is about how at some point pop culture references became witticisms in and of themselves, not necessarily because they're appropriate, but because "hey, I know what you're talking about." Maybe it's Dennis Miller's fault (sorry, I was going to link to a clip, but frankly I couldn't find one I can stomach). Everybody wants to be a cognoscente. But when I see a kid laughing at some Family Guy take on an old movie or historical event without having a clue about what the scene is referring to, I think it's kind of pathetic.

Once (hah! once!) I experimented on my first year composition students, who would always laugh with appreciation at my sarcastically witty asides, no matter how self-indulgent and obscure. I tried using my sarcastically witty aside voice--you know the one I mean--to say random "things" throughout my "oratory." They ... dammit, they laughed with appreciation. They were responding to the tone of my voice the way my dog does, and for the same reasons, probably: that intoxicating mixture of fear and an eager desire to please.

Hey, I'm not knocking that mixture ... I lived on the stuff! I'll take what I can get ... but in the course of a generation or so we've gone from, "That's an apt allusion" to "I recognize that allusion" to "The tone of your voice indicates to me that you may be making an allusion, which I shall now pretend to appreciate." Ample evidence of devolution, if you ask me. I mean, we used to take pleasure in knowing things, right? Like, when somebody says, "I really like Led Zeppelin's song 'Nobody's Fault But Mine,'" it's great to be able to say, "Well, I prefer Blind Willie Johnson."

If you live in a world in which Mad magazine is over the head of the average reader, you're going to get some stupid reactions to the occasional New Yorker cover. Is I guess what I'm saying.

On being overrated

For several reasons I've been thinking lately about stuff that's been overrated, and stuff that other people think is overrated that I don't. I won't even scratch the surface on this, but here are a few things:

Roddy Doyle says Ulysses is overrated, but it's not. It's that good. Roddy Doyle might be overrated, except for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which is good enough even if he writes twenty books of crap. And he doesn't write crap, but it's not all great either.

Some people think John Banville is overrated, but I don't, not after The Untouchable and The Sea.

I'm not sure it's entirely accurate to call Indiana Jones and the Crystal Travesty overrated, but damn, there are a lot of positive reviews out there--professional reviews--of that steaming pile of crap. It's a disaster of "nucular" (listen for it ... Dr. Jones, Cold War spook, prefers the Bush pronunciation of nuclear, as Dan recently reminded me) proportions. But don't worry ... a nucular blast can be survived by hiding in the family fridge (unlike a nuclear blast, which will kill you.

Also overrated: American Beauty. Nicholas Cage. Million Dollar Baby (did I see the same movie everybody else did?).

Wanna fight about it?

Now See Here!

Hey Snuffy Smith fans!!! For a much more thoughtful meditation on color in comics, check this out.

By imaginary popular demand

I mentioned this classic Elmers song a while back, and for the sake of closure I decided to float it here. I misspelled the name intentionally in order to slip it by the censors ... but if you say "Pawn Mime" in a good Chollllston accent it sounds almost like the real title.

Nothing pawnographic here, folks ... just some anti-mime sentiment. It's important that we don't necessarily hate mimes; this could be a kind of dramatic monologue. It really could be.


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First Snow

An odd subject for July, I guess ... well, I just saw this film, and it was pretty darned good.



It's better than the trailer. Look: Guy Pierce. What else do I need to say? Oh, that's not enough? William Fichtner, baby. You know who he is whether you know it or not. Go look him up. And oh yeah--my hero, and my second choice to play me if Delroy Lindo turns down the role: J. K. Simmons (I grant you, he'd need to wear a wig).

Check this one out ... it's a film that's trying to be good and largely succeeding.

Next year's catch phrase: "Ass and a half"

As a daily reader of this great blog, I know enough to leave the making fun of the comics to the professionals. But today's Snuffy Smith really irritates me. Not the narrative content, which is typically vapid, but the coloring. See, those little Ozark scamps are talkin' about eatin' green apples, but the apples that are gittin' eaten are clearly RED. That thar's a co-nundrum, Tater!

Aside: Do you think that the strip's pervasive representation of dialect is particularly irritating to me because I actually talk that way? I wonder.

The fact that the apple is any color at all is irritating enough. Why do the comics have to be in color? They are by nature ephemera, gloriously, tragically so; are "black and white" comics necessarily inferior? Would people not read them if they weren't in color? Who raised the bar by coloring the daily comics anyhow? Who succumbed to the temptation of the colorized apple?

Even Ted Turner now knows that colorizing movies is wrong. I remember seeing a colorized, televised version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers many years ago. I don't remember the exact lines, but in one scene, one body-snatched cop is telling another something like, "Be on the lookout for a white sedan," while the protagonists are blithely driving through town in a bright RED sedan courtesy of some color technician who paid no attention to the dialogue. The movie should have ended right there, with the good guys driving off into the night in their glowing red sedan. The colorizing not only ruins the visual art of motion picture photography, but it ruins the narrative as well.

As it came to pass in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so it happens in Snuffy Smith. Of course, in the grand history of crass commercial transgressions against art (and yes, I'm keeping track), the faulty coloring of a Snuffy Smith strip is durn small spuds. But it's symptomatic of ... of ... oh, hell, I don't know what it's symptomatic of. I guess I can understand something being half-assed ... but why go to the effort of making something ass-and-a-halfed?

By this I mean, half-assedness--stupidity arising from laziness--makes sense to me. Some would say it's my M. O. But going to extra effort and expense to screw with something formerly innocuous or even good--the practice I hereby refer to as ass-and-a-halfedness--is a double affront. So there.

Finally, and digressively: perhaps it was Satan himself who made little green apples, but I like them much better than the ripe ones. They get a bad rap for causing gastric distress, but I think it's gluttony, not greenness, that is the problem. Moderation, my children, in most things.

Neutral Tones, apropos of nothing

You know I love the poem "Neutral Tones" by Thomas Hardy, and I loved teaching it in Brit Lit. I always told students they should write it by hand in a blank greeting card and give it to their boyfriend or girlfriend, because handwritten poems in greeting cards are very romantic. Heh heh heh.

I could have posted the poem here in its entirety, since it must be in the public domain, but it's a little dark, and it's not like I'm trying to send a message ... because I'm really not. I just think it's a tightly conceived poem.

Richard Brautigan has kind of been a guilty pleasure for me, but I started with his best (In Watermelon Sugar) and then read the rest. His poetry, though, is a little easy--not in terms of reading, which it is, because that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it seems to have been written too easily, which I think usually is a bad thing. It's the difference between dating easy and being easy, it seems to me. Contrast Thomas Hardy, above: he's great, but not because it came easily to him.

Still, every now and then Brautigan kind of gets at something. I like the way these two poems go together.