There’s this episode of “Seinfeld” in which Elaine introduces Jerry to
her new boyfriend, a tall, shaved-headed dude who keeps his pate bare to
make himself more streamlined for swimming competitions. When he
leaves, Jerry quips, in wink-wink sitcom fashion, “Is he from the
future?” Cue audience laughter. In the early 90’s, a shaved head was
apparently a futuristic concept, right up there with flying cars and
robots that cook spaghetti.
I chuckle every time I see the episode, and not just because I share a
hair-do with Future Man. In a way, the comment is prescient; shaved
heads may have been rare in the early ‘90’s, when the only options
available to bald guys were horseshoe-style cuts and wigs that looked
like unkempt ferrets. Now they’re all over the place. The bare head has
become the go-to do for the follically challenged, and they’ve started
to infiltrate popular culture: Howie Mandell, Bruce Willis, and Vin
Diesel all sport the gleaming bareheaded look, and not a moment too
soon. If any of them had held onto their hair for longer than was
necessary, they’d be sporting the kind of combovers typically associated
with accountants and high school guidance counselors.
It’s the latest trend in the ongoing evolution of the “do.”
I’m
currently reading an account of the life of George Washington –
apparently presidential biographies are my thing now, soon to be
followed by backgammon and tweed jackets – and despite the remarkable
life he led, some of the quirkiest passages are about his hair.
Everybody assumes that, because Washington was a right dandy sort of
fellow, he wore a wig. Not true. The weird triangle shape of his hair,
which makes him look like a wise and benevolent kite, is due to a
popular 18th Century hairstyle called a “queue,” in which the hair at
one’s temples is flared out and tied behind the back of the head in a
kind of ponytail. Washington’s hair was white because he applied powder
to it, which was another popular practice in the 1700s. Nowadays, the
effect would make it seem as though his head was being attacked by a
swarm of angry marshmallows, but in colonial Virginia, he fit right in.
One wonders what Washington would have made of the voluminous, bird-like
hair-dos of the 1970s and early 80s. I watch movies from that era and
I’m struck by how even the baldies would grow out their unruly hair in
the back and on the sides, giving them the surreal impression of having
been raised by cocaine-addicted wolves. Women in particular seemed fond
of the flared-out Farrah Fawcett-style wings on either side of their
faces. Which served a practical purpose, if you think about it: If they
were chased to the edge of a cliff by a marauding sasquatch, they could
simply take the plunge and glide safely into a ravine like a flying
squirrel. For some reason that seems like a particularly 70’s thing to
do.
One of the tantalizing mysteries of human history is how styles evolve.
In a lot of ways, biological evolution – the actual physical changes
that occur over centuries and millennia – is much less of a mystery. We
stopped swinging from trees, so we lost our tails. We learned to walk
upright, so we developed hands. It’s an easy enough concept. But popular
trends are tricky; they don’t contribute to survival, so it’s tough to
explain a pompadour in any kind of Darwinian terms. Things like
hairstyles just seem to happen. I like to think of trends as originating
from a single person – someone has to be the first to do something,
after all. The Duke of Earl gets up one morning and decides he’s tired
of his long hair getting caught in his mouth when he’s eating lamb
eyeballs and porridge. So he ties it back into a ponytail. Boom. Next
thing you know, everyone’s got a
ponytail, from the merchants to the sailors to the guy who sews
underwear for the merchants and the sailors. It’s the hair equivalent of
a modern-day Internet meme, without the cats and terrible grammar.
Not all hairstyles are as long-lasting as the ponytail, which is
near-ubiquitous for women of certain ages, and still fairly common among
men, especially hippies and owners of comic book stores. Much more
fleeting was the rat tail. When I was a wee schoolboy in the late 80’s
and early 90’s, the rat tail was all the rage; while the rest of the
hair was kept short, one long strand was grown out in the back and often
braided into a knotted sliver that looked like a whip for an
eight-inch-tall dominatrix. It was similar to the ponytail, only super
gross.
In that same era, it was popular for young boys to have shapes or words
shaved onto the sides of their heads. Lightning bolts were common. One
kid I went to school with had the Batman insignia shaved into the hair
just above the nape of his neck, which would have made him a demigod on
the playground had it not been for the rat tail directly below it, which
was frayed and long enough to choke a small horse.
Fortunately, certain hairstyles are destined to die a gradual death. I
just hope the shaved head isn’t one of them, because otherwise, I’m out
of options. Although, fashion being cyclical, I suppose I could always
bring back the queue. My contemporaries would find it utterly
ridiculous. But unlike the honest-to-a-fault Washington, they can always
lie about it.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Friday, June 21, 2013
Lost and found
Hi. I’m Jeff, and I’m a GPS addict.
And no, that’s not a hip new street drug, although frankly a hardcore drug addiction would only be incrementally more embarrassing. GPS stands for exactly what you think it does: Global Positioning System, that handy little device that tells me when I’m close to home, and when I’m about to drive off the Main Street bridge into the Saco River. Which, considering my driving habits, happens more often than you’d think.
If this was a casual, on-again, off-again romance, I’d be fine with it. Using a GPS to get somewhere isn’t an inherently shameful activity. If I want to get to someone’s house in the middle of Bar Mills, the only other way I’m getting there is if I hitch a ride on the back of a wise, talking falcon ripped from the pages of an acid-inspired Tolkien fantasy. Way more fun than GPS, but you don’t find talking falcons next to the Guitar Hero controllers at Best Buy.
Shame enters the picture due to my over-reliance on the little satellite unit, without which I’d have a hard time locating my living room. Men, traditionally, have seen themselves as Masters of Thing-Finding, gifted through years of evolution with the ability to locate stuff by an infallible inner compass; when Lewis and Clark set out for the Pacific Coast in 1804, one pictures Lewis saying, “Ask for directions? Why, you buffoonish tallywhacker! I’ve totally got this!”
This inner compass, of course, is a fiction as fanciful as unicorns and Ewoks. Boastful pride is the reason why, in the days of yore, maps were often crumpled and tossed into the backseat, forgotten amidst a sea of gas station receipts and empty two-liter bottles of Orange Crush.
What the GPS did was allow men the luxury of stress-free navigation without infringing on a misplaced sense of independence. The reason is simple: The GPS is a device. Men love devices. If you’re looking for a gift for your husband/boyfriend/parole officer/whoever, all you have to do is get him something shiny that plugs into an outlet and makes a whirring noise. Screens are a bonus, and you’ll get extra brownie points for buying a gadget that talks to him in the soothing monotone of a soul-dead Lebanese prostitute.
When GPS technology became affordable for everyday schlubs like me, it allowed the directionally-challenged to conceal their weakness, much as Donald Trump conceals his scalp by covering it with dried seaweed and pocket lint.
Good thing, too, because being lost in a strange land can be an unsettling experience. A few years ago, before the age of digital helpers, I drove to Portland with a former girlfriend to attend a high school graduation. Portland is a city in desperate need of a subway system; its webwork of one-way avenues and labyrinthine side streets is the perfect setting for a “Where’s Waldo” tableau – one in which the stripe-shirted Waldo is found weeping in an alleyway in the Old Port, half-hidden by booze-juiced college frat boys. Our journey to the Merril Auditorium was so riddled with missed turns and retraced steps that for a while it seemed like we would perish right in the heart of downtown, probably in front of a coffee shop with a name like “The Bearded Scribbler.”
You don’t want to get lost when you’re taking your girlfriend somewhere. It does not result in copious smooches. We made the best of a bad situation, and made it to the graduation with roughly a nanosecond to spare. But when we walked up to the entrance, we bore empty, gape-mouthed expressions more commonly associated with trauma victims and Pauley Shore.
Had the situation been different – if we’d had the luxury of a little pocket robot to help us out – we’d have had time to spare. And time is really the biggest benefit. With the hours I’ve saved by admitting defeat and buying a dash-mounted unit for my car, I could do something really worthwhile, like teach a child to read, or see how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth.
We often rely on technology when we shouldn’t. Math, for example. Calculators are great when we’re trying to figure out the square root of 121, but if you’re adding together two double-digit numbers, it’s probably better to just work it out in the margins of the nudie magazine you keep in your desk drawer. A little brain exercise may not be as fun as, say, eating a box of nails, but like vegetables, it’s good for you. The math, not the nails.
But it’s hard to know where to draw the line with GPS technology – it’s a convenience and a crutch. Using it to navigate a complex and unknown city like Boston qualifies as an appropriate use; I’ve talked to Vietnam vets who had experiences less traumatic than driving on Boylston after a Sox game. I, however, use it to mark the exact locations of buildings on Route 1 in towns I kinda know. That’s a bit much.
Manly thing-finding men might shake their heads at that, but at this point, I hardly care. I’ve been a rate in a maze my whole life – and it’s nice to finally find my way to the cheese.
Although I still want a talking falcon.
And no, that’s not a hip new street drug, although frankly a hardcore drug addiction would only be incrementally more embarrassing. GPS stands for exactly what you think it does: Global Positioning System, that handy little device that tells me when I’m close to home, and when I’m about to drive off the Main Street bridge into the Saco River. Which, considering my driving habits, happens more often than you’d think.
If this was a casual, on-again, off-again romance, I’d be fine with it. Using a GPS to get somewhere isn’t an inherently shameful activity. If I want to get to someone’s house in the middle of Bar Mills, the only other way I’m getting there is if I hitch a ride on the back of a wise, talking falcon ripped from the pages of an acid-inspired Tolkien fantasy. Way more fun than GPS, but you don’t find talking falcons next to the Guitar Hero controllers at Best Buy.
Shame enters the picture due to my over-reliance on the little satellite unit, without which I’d have a hard time locating my living room. Men, traditionally, have seen themselves as Masters of Thing-Finding, gifted through years of evolution with the ability to locate stuff by an infallible inner compass; when Lewis and Clark set out for the Pacific Coast in 1804, one pictures Lewis saying, “Ask for directions? Why, you buffoonish tallywhacker! I’ve totally got this!”
This inner compass, of course, is a fiction as fanciful as unicorns and Ewoks. Boastful pride is the reason why, in the days of yore, maps were often crumpled and tossed into the backseat, forgotten amidst a sea of gas station receipts and empty two-liter bottles of Orange Crush.
What the GPS did was allow men the luxury of stress-free navigation without infringing on a misplaced sense of independence. The reason is simple: The GPS is a device. Men love devices. If you’re looking for a gift for your husband/boyfriend/parole officer/whoever, all you have to do is get him something shiny that plugs into an outlet and makes a whirring noise. Screens are a bonus, and you’ll get extra brownie points for buying a gadget that talks to him in the soothing monotone of a soul-dead Lebanese prostitute.
When GPS technology became affordable for everyday schlubs like me, it allowed the directionally-challenged to conceal their weakness, much as Donald Trump conceals his scalp by covering it with dried seaweed and pocket lint.
Good thing, too, because being lost in a strange land can be an unsettling experience. A few years ago, before the age of digital helpers, I drove to Portland with a former girlfriend to attend a high school graduation. Portland is a city in desperate need of a subway system; its webwork of one-way avenues and labyrinthine side streets is the perfect setting for a “Where’s Waldo” tableau – one in which the stripe-shirted Waldo is found weeping in an alleyway in the Old Port, half-hidden by booze-juiced college frat boys. Our journey to the Merril Auditorium was so riddled with missed turns and retraced steps that for a while it seemed like we would perish right in the heart of downtown, probably in front of a coffee shop with a name like “The Bearded Scribbler.”
You don’t want to get lost when you’re taking your girlfriend somewhere. It does not result in copious smooches. We made the best of a bad situation, and made it to the graduation with roughly a nanosecond to spare. But when we walked up to the entrance, we bore empty, gape-mouthed expressions more commonly associated with trauma victims and Pauley Shore.
Had the situation been different – if we’d had the luxury of a little pocket robot to help us out – we’d have had time to spare. And time is really the biggest benefit. With the hours I’ve saved by admitting defeat and buying a dash-mounted unit for my car, I could do something really worthwhile, like teach a child to read, or see how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth.
We often rely on technology when we shouldn’t. Math, for example. Calculators are great when we’re trying to figure out the square root of 121, but if you’re adding together two double-digit numbers, it’s probably better to just work it out in the margins of the nudie magazine you keep in your desk drawer. A little brain exercise may not be as fun as, say, eating a box of nails, but like vegetables, it’s good for you. The math, not the nails.
But it’s hard to know where to draw the line with GPS technology – it’s a convenience and a crutch. Using it to navigate a complex and unknown city like Boston qualifies as an appropriate use; I’ve talked to Vietnam vets who had experiences less traumatic than driving on Boylston after a Sox game. I, however, use it to mark the exact locations of buildings on Route 1 in towns I kinda know. That’s a bit much.
Manly thing-finding men might shake their heads at that, but at this point, I hardly care. I’ve been a rate in a maze my whole life – and it’s nice to finally find my way to the cheese.
Although I still want a talking falcon.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Grad to see you
Last year I went to a graduation ceremony in Portland, where I heard a
girl belt out a rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” that could
blow the hubcaps off an armored car. And I mean that in a good way.
It definitely constituted that graduation’s “memorable moment,” although to be fair, my perspective on the whole event was fairly broad; I was there to shoot photos and write a story about it, which is an odd phenomenon when you’re at an event that holds special emotional resonance for people. It’s kind of like sitting in on a random person’s birthday party at the local bowling alley: You can watch, but no one knows why you’re there, and chances are you’re not getting any cake.
But having donned the cap and gown myself once upon a time – back when neon pants were still considered socially acceptable – I could feel myself pleasantly moved by the moment, which is a tough admission for a man to make. Men aren’t supposed to be moved by things that aren’t small children or dogs. It’s one of those unspoken Rules of Dudeness, right between “Never cry at movies” and “I can lift this heavy thing myself.”
Covering graduations can be a pain in the tookus logistically, but it’s nice to have the reminder of why people consider it an important event. If you’re not the parent of a child graduating from high school, sometimes that perspective can be lost; amidst the din of daily life, from work to social engagements to reruns of “Thunder Cats,” it’s easy to forget why you once considered it the most important day of your life.
It’s a function of time, I think, which makes jaded bastards of us all, to one extent or another. Gradually, high school graduation becomes superseded by a steady parade of increasingly important landmarks: College graduations, weddings, that time you saw Stephen King at the supermarket and he turned into a bat and flew away. You know, life. Saying goodbye to high school classmates and teachers, and oftentimes hometowns and states, starts to feel less like a watershed moment and more like something that just kinda happened to you once, like that long-ago Christmas when your uncle Earl drank too much eggnog and peed on the tree. Thanks a lot, Earl.
Being back in that environment is a bittersweet jolt of nostalgia.
Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we? Cue bloopy time-travel noises.
The year was 2000, I was wearing a cap and gown, and I had a full head of hair, all things that are no longer true. It was nearing sunset when we took our seats on the football field and started listening to speeches; it was one of those dramatic evenings when the sun starts to melt like candlewax over the treeline and stains the sky Garfield-orange. That’s a detail I remember much more clearly than the speeches themselves, which ranged in topic from “what a journey” to “can you believe we made it?” It’s tempting to criticize graduation speeches until you realize there are only so many directions they can take. Although I’d love to experience a surreal moment where a brave valedictorian dedicates an entire five minutes to the breeding habits of the African bonobo.
After an interminably long speech by former Senator Olympia Snowe, whose remarks have since been bottled and distilled into high-grade horse tranquilizer, Leslie Eastman took the stage. Eastman was a god amongst men. I took his Current World Problems class as a junior and knew I was in the presence of greatness when he finished his lecture early and let us watch episodes from the first season of “Family Guy.” I don’t remember the details of his speech – no one ever does – but I remember it was almost shockingly short. He came, he killed, and he left – much to the cheering approval of his mostly-male fan club, who couldn’t wait to be done with the ceremony so they drive around town with their windows down and make loud whooping noises. Many of them still do this.
But while a few memories remain, none stand out so vividly as that of caps being flung into the air by a knot of smiling kids, nervous and excited and unequivocally happy. The more life you live, the more moments like that get crowded out by a crush of practical realities, from paying the bills to convincing your family it’s time to start inviting Earl to Christmas again. It’s helpful to remember the importance of a high school graduation: It’s the last time we walk the tightrope with nets. The end of the innocence, as Don Henley would call it.
A line in “Don’t Stop” proclaims that “yesterday’s gone,” except that’s not exactly true, is it? While you can’t change the past, you also can’t escape it – we’re the sum of all our yesterdays, to some extent. The trick is to use the past to provide the present with context; then when the future comes you’ll know what hell to do with it. And if you followed all that, then you are entitled to a butterscotch cookie and a hearty congratulations.
Graduations are often the fulcrums on which life turns. So when a senior stands at the podium and speaks about how momentous the day is, those tempted to roll their eyes will be missing something profound: That in many ways, it’s true.
It definitely constituted that graduation’s “memorable moment,” although to be fair, my perspective on the whole event was fairly broad; I was there to shoot photos and write a story about it, which is an odd phenomenon when you’re at an event that holds special emotional resonance for people. It’s kind of like sitting in on a random person’s birthday party at the local bowling alley: You can watch, but no one knows why you’re there, and chances are you’re not getting any cake.
But having donned the cap and gown myself once upon a time – back when neon pants were still considered socially acceptable – I could feel myself pleasantly moved by the moment, which is a tough admission for a man to make. Men aren’t supposed to be moved by things that aren’t small children or dogs. It’s one of those unspoken Rules of Dudeness, right between “Never cry at movies” and “I can lift this heavy thing myself.”
Covering graduations can be a pain in the tookus logistically, but it’s nice to have the reminder of why people consider it an important event. If you’re not the parent of a child graduating from high school, sometimes that perspective can be lost; amidst the din of daily life, from work to social engagements to reruns of “Thunder Cats,” it’s easy to forget why you once considered it the most important day of your life.
It’s a function of time, I think, which makes jaded bastards of us all, to one extent or another. Gradually, high school graduation becomes superseded by a steady parade of increasingly important landmarks: College graduations, weddings, that time you saw Stephen King at the supermarket and he turned into a bat and flew away. You know, life. Saying goodbye to high school classmates and teachers, and oftentimes hometowns and states, starts to feel less like a watershed moment and more like something that just kinda happened to you once, like that long-ago Christmas when your uncle Earl drank too much eggnog and peed on the tree. Thanks a lot, Earl.
Being back in that environment is a bittersweet jolt of nostalgia.
Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we? Cue bloopy time-travel noises.
The year was 2000, I was wearing a cap and gown, and I had a full head of hair, all things that are no longer true. It was nearing sunset when we took our seats on the football field and started listening to speeches; it was one of those dramatic evenings when the sun starts to melt like candlewax over the treeline and stains the sky Garfield-orange. That’s a detail I remember much more clearly than the speeches themselves, which ranged in topic from “what a journey” to “can you believe we made it?” It’s tempting to criticize graduation speeches until you realize there are only so many directions they can take. Although I’d love to experience a surreal moment where a brave valedictorian dedicates an entire five minutes to the breeding habits of the African bonobo.
After an interminably long speech by former Senator Olympia Snowe, whose remarks have since been bottled and distilled into high-grade horse tranquilizer, Leslie Eastman took the stage. Eastman was a god amongst men. I took his Current World Problems class as a junior and knew I was in the presence of greatness when he finished his lecture early and let us watch episodes from the first season of “Family Guy.” I don’t remember the details of his speech – no one ever does – but I remember it was almost shockingly short. He came, he killed, and he left – much to the cheering approval of his mostly-male fan club, who couldn’t wait to be done with the ceremony so they drive around town with their windows down and make loud whooping noises. Many of them still do this.
But while a few memories remain, none stand out so vividly as that of caps being flung into the air by a knot of smiling kids, nervous and excited and unequivocally happy. The more life you live, the more moments like that get crowded out by a crush of practical realities, from paying the bills to convincing your family it’s time to start inviting Earl to Christmas again. It’s helpful to remember the importance of a high school graduation: It’s the last time we walk the tightrope with nets. The end of the innocence, as Don Henley would call it.
A line in “Don’t Stop” proclaims that “yesterday’s gone,” except that’s not exactly true, is it? While you can’t change the past, you also can’t escape it – we’re the sum of all our yesterdays, to some extent. The trick is to use the past to provide the present with context; then when the future comes you’ll know what hell to do with it. And if you followed all that, then you are entitled to a butterscotch cookie and a hearty congratulations.
Graduations are often the fulcrums on which life turns. So when a senior stands at the podium and speaks about how momentous the day is, those tempted to roll their eyes will be missing something profound: That in many ways, it’s true.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
What's in a name?
Maybe this is a generational thing, but whenever someone coins a unique
or musical phrase – like “bastardized hieroglyphics” – somebody under
the age of 40 will inevitably quip, “That would make a great name for a
band!”
Despite the fact that they’re joking, they’re oftentimes right. Although whether that’s due to linguistic brilliance, or a lack of decent names for contemporary bands, is anybody’s guess. Calling a cool-tempered bearded dragon a “suave lizard” might make it seem as though you’ve stumbled upon the greatest moniker this side of “Black Sabbath.” But that could be a manifestation of the better-by-comparison phenomenon; the sad reality is that “Letters to Cleo” is what passes for a name nowadays.
Yes, “Letters to Cleo” is an actual band. Oh, how I wish it wasn’t.
I guess you’d have to be a music junkie to appreciate just how awful band names have gotten in recent years. And this isn’t a stodgy, fuddy-duddy shot at a younger generation’s music; a lot of the actual tunes coming from these ill-titled artists are really pretty good. A nice example is “Of Monsters and Men.” What I’ve heard from them so far is actually pretty decent, but their name is way better suited for a fantasy novel penned by a pasty dude in suspenders and knee-high socks. In other words, me in the second grade.
Obviously, modern bands don’t have a monopoly on silly names. “Abba,” “Three Dog Night,” and “The Teenagers” are all artists of yore that sound as if they stumbled upon their titles playing word association games under the influence of government-grade psychedelic drugs. (”The Teenagers” is particularly silly given that its members now qualify for senior discounts at the cineplex.) But those have become fairly tame by today’s standards. I submit as evidence groups like “Goo Goo Dolls,” “Hootie and the Blowfish,” and “Mott the Hoople.” Apparently we’re running low on words not uttered from a baby’s crib.
While I’m tempted to suggest pretension on the part of these musicians, part of me thinks the English language is simply being drained of anything approaching respectability. There are only so many words, and so many combinations thereof. All of the good, simple, and memorable names – “The Eagles,” “Iron Maiden,” “The Cure” – have been snatched up by generations past, leaving some dictionary-deprived artists to invent nonsensical gobbledygook, like “Chumbawumbas.” Which, I’m sorry to report, is as real as a punch to the groin.
Still, that hardly seems like an excuse. If you give a million monkeys a million typewriters and let them peck away for a million years, eventually, one of them will come up with a band name less embarrassing than “Toad the Wet Sprocket.”
Perusing my own collection, I’m pained to see that some of the groups I truly love have names that would make the bassist for “Hoobastank” titter like a tickled toddler (while picking pickled peppers). Case in point: Megadeth. Now, I fully acknowledge that heavy metal is a style that appeals to only a select portion of music aficionados; most of them, myself included, think nothing of air drumming violently at stop lights, which probably explains why co-workers give us wide berths at the vending machine. But as far as the genre goes, Megadeth is one of the elite. They’re titans. One year, I went so far as to finagle my way backstage at a concert, where I was able to meet the band’s frontman, Dave Mustaine. A tall, golden-haired shredder, Mustaine is a brilliant musician – but naming his band “Megadeth” was an error in judgment almost as grievous as developing his own line of coffee. (This is absurdly true.)
To be fair, “megadeath” – with the correct spelling intact – is an actual word, hard as it is to believe. You can find it in the dictionary. But you can also crack open a Merriam-Webster’s and find such gems as “mollycoddle,” “argle-bargle,” and “snollygoster.” That doesn’t mean you should name your band after them. “Megadeth” seems like a name settled upon during a massive coke-and-heroin bender. Here it should be noted that Dave Mustaine is infamous for massive coke-and-heroin benders.
It’s a tricky business, naming a band. It’s almost easier to know what not to do than to get it right. The musical world would be a much less ridiculous place if those concocting names would follow just a few simple rules: Don’t intentionally misspell anything (”Limp Bizkit,” “‘N Sync,” “Boyz II Men”), don’t needlessly include a preposition (”Archers of Loaf,” “Fountains of Wayne,” “Apples in Stereo”), and don’t make it needlessly long (”Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts”).
Also, don’t be stupid.
That might seem obvious, but clearly, the namers of the next band were not following this last, most important rule. In all my vast research on this topic – encompassing 30-odd years of music fandom, topped with a 10-second Google search – I have never seen a name more ludicrous, more embarrassing and cringeworthy, than the following.
The 2013 Gassman Award for Band-Naming Stupidity goes to:
“Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.”
G’night, everyone.
Despite the fact that they’re joking, they’re oftentimes right. Although whether that’s due to linguistic brilliance, or a lack of decent names for contemporary bands, is anybody’s guess. Calling a cool-tempered bearded dragon a “suave lizard” might make it seem as though you’ve stumbled upon the greatest moniker this side of “Black Sabbath.” But that could be a manifestation of the better-by-comparison phenomenon; the sad reality is that “Letters to Cleo” is what passes for a name nowadays.
Yes, “Letters to Cleo” is an actual band. Oh, how I wish it wasn’t.
I guess you’d have to be a music junkie to appreciate just how awful band names have gotten in recent years. And this isn’t a stodgy, fuddy-duddy shot at a younger generation’s music; a lot of the actual tunes coming from these ill-titled artists are really pretty good. A nice example is “Of Monsters and Men.” What I’ve heard from them so far is actually pretty decent, but their name is way better suited for a fantasy novel penned by a pasty dude in suspenders and knee-high socks. In other words, me in the second grade.
Obviously, modern bands don’t have a monopoly on silly names. “Abba,” “Three Dog Night,” and “The Teenagers” are all artists of yore that sound as if they stumbled upon their titles playing word association games under the influence of government-grade psychedelic drugs. (”The Teenagers” is particularly silly given that its members now qualify for senior discounts at the cineplex.) But those have become fairly tame by today’s standards. I submit as evidence groups like “Goo Goo Dolls,” “Hootie and the Blowfish,” and “Mott the Hoople.” Apparently we’re running low on words not uttered from a baby’s crib.
While I’m tempted to suggest pretension on the part of these musicians, part of me thinks the English language is simply being drained of anything approaching respectability. There are only so many words, and so many combinations thereof. All of the good, simple, and memorable names – “The Eagles,” “Iron Maiden,” “The Cure” – have been snatched up by generations past, leaving some dictionary-deprived artists to invent nonsensical gobbledygook, like “Chumbawumbas.” Which, I’m sorry to report, is as real as a punch to the groin.
Still, that hardly seems like an excuse. If you give a million monkeys a million typewriters and let them peck away for a million years, eventually, one of them will come up with a band name less embarrassing than “Toad the Wet Sprocket.”
Perusing my own collection, I’m pained to see that some of the groups I truly love have names that would make the bassist for “Hoobastank” titter like a tickled toddler (while picking pickled peppers). Case in point: Megadeth. Now, I fully acknowledge that heavy metal is a style that appeals to only a select portion of music aficionados; most of them, myself included, think nothing of air drumming violently at stop lights, which probably explains why co-workers give us wide berths at the vending machine. But as far as the genre goes, Megadeth is one of the elite. They’re titans. One year, I went so far as to finagle my way backstage at a concert, where I was able to meet the band’s frontman, Dave Mustaine. A tall, golden-haired shredder, Mustaine is a brilliant musician – but naming his band “Megadeth” was an error in judgment almost as grievous as developing his own line of coffee. (This is absurdly true.)
To be fair, “megadeath” – with the correct spelling intact – is an actual word, hard as it is to believe. You can find it in the dictionary. But you can also crack open a Merriam-Webster’s and find such gems as “mollycoddle,” “argle-bargle,” and “snollygoster.” That doesn’t mean you should name your band after them. “Megadeth” seems like a name settled upon during a massive coke-and-heroin bender. Here it should be noted that Dave Mustaine is infamous for massive coke-and-heroin benders.
It’s a tricky business, naming a band. It’s almost easier to know what not to do than to get it right. The musical world would be a much less ridiculous place if those concocting names would follow just a few simple rules: Don’t intentionally misspell anything (”Limp Bizkit,” “‘N Sync,” “Boyz II Men”), don’t needlessly include a preposition (”Archers of Loaf,” “Fountains of Wayne,” “Apples in Stereo”), and don’t make it needlessly long (”Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts”).
Also, don’t be stupid.
That might seem obvious, but clearly, the namers of the next band were not following this last, most important rule. In all my vast research on this topic – encompassing 30-odd years of music fandom, topped with a 10-second Google search – I have never seen a name more ludicrous, more embarrassing and cringeworthy, than the following.
The 2013 Gassman Award for Band-Naming Stupidity goes to:
“Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.”
G’night, everyone.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Root root root
Okay, so first thing’s first: James Earl Jones has the greatest speaking
voice ever bestowed upon a man. There’s a reason why he was chosen to
do the voice-over work for Darth Vader. I could listen to him read the
assembly instructions for an Ikea bed frame and be completely enamored;
his robust baritone is the therapeutic equivalent of dunking a set of
eardrums into a soothing hot bath with eucalyptus bubbles. I’d stop
myself before the imagery gets too disturbing, but I think that ship has
sailed.
“Field of Dreams” would still be a good movie without him. The 1989 Kevin Costner fantasy about ghosts who haunt a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield is a classic – a strange and unsettling classic, but a classic nonetheless, tailor-made for anyone with a sense of baseball’s mysterious, almost mythical history.
But Jones is the scene-stealer, the thingamabob that stirs the whatever. Not that it’s hard to steal scenes from Kevin Costner; the man once played Robin Hood, and in two-and-a-half hours, the only word he managed to pronounce in an English accent was “sword.” It marks the only time in film history when the merry bandit sounded like he’d just stepped off the boat from Rhode Island.
Anyone who’s ever sat in a cool breeze at a minor league ballpark in May and felt completely at peace knows about Jones’ goosebump-raising soliloquy at the end of “Field of Dreams.” It’s the kind of speech that makes roughneck cowboys blubber like ninnies. Predicting that far-flung travelers will be inexplicably drawn to the spectral exhibition games played in that mysterious cornfield, Jones talks about baseball as though it had been laid at humanity’s feet by the Greek gods of Olympus. All in a voice that could melt a stick of butter.
Only baseball can inspire that kind of poetry. You don’t hear a lot of stirring odes to synchronized swimming, or intercollegiate water polo.
At this point, you’re in one of two camps: Those who can relate to baseball’s romanticism, and those who think the sport is as boring as John Kerry reading “The Iliad.” (The third camp – those who couldn’t give a rat’s patootie – have already moved on to a sudoku.)
Summoning my powers of objectivity, I can see how the uninitiated might consider baseball less than enthralling. In a lot of ways, it’s an anachronism – it has no earthly business being played in a century dominated by 30-second commercials, movies on demand, and cheeseburgers prepped so quickly they cause a ripple in spacetime. Baseball doesn’t fit into a world of instant gratification; its pleasures are slow, doled out not by the foot, but by the inch.
That’s what makes it great.
I’m reminded of this every spring, right around the time I first hear that gratifying wood-on-cowhide crack. The sound is like a pair of snapping fingers jolting me out of a state of deep hypnosis; not being much of a winter sports enthusiast, I tend to spend those frosty months actually being (gasp!) productive, which is the antithesis of what summer’s all about. Summer is a season for wasting vast stretches of time eating ice cream sandwiches while watching minor league mascots lose footraces to four-year-olds.
When I was about 10, my father gave me one of those kid-friendly books filled with factoids about the history of baseball. That history is what sets the game apart from, say, hockey, which I believe was invented by the penguins of the Arctic circle. Or football, which was created in a lab by pumping gamma rays into a petri dish filled with bull testosterone.
The story of baseball is the story of the country’s industrial revolution; it’s the story of pickup games played in the streets of Harlem in the late 1800s, of steel-jawed immigrants hitting and catching their way out of coal mines. It’s the story of the Civil Rights movement (Jackie Robinson, anybody?), and of late 20th Century excess. It’s the story of cheaters and their punishments – the story of fairness.
But why am I proselytizing? James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” character, in a speech to his friend Ray, said it far better than I could:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Insert wistful sigh here.
To truly appreciate that, maybe you had to grow up with a sock tied around your brand-new baseball glove to get just the right curve in the webbing. Or felt a tingle rush up your arms as you connected with your first fastball. Heck, maybe a vendor in the stands once pelted you in the kisser with a bag of peanuts – that would do it too, I suppose.
Whatever the reason, it’s got a grip on those of us susceptible to its charms. And yes, the clichĂ© is true: We love peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and we don’t care if we ever get back.
“Field of Dreams” would still be a good movie without him. The 1989 Kevin Costner fantasy about ghosts who haunt a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield is a classic – a strange and unsettling classic, but a classic nonetheless, tailor-made for anyone with a sense of baseball’s mysterious, almost mythical history.
But Jones is the scene-stealer, the thingamabob that stirs the whatever. Not that it’s hard to steal scenes from Kevin Costner; the man once played Robin Hood, and in two-and-a-half hours, the only word he managed to pronounce in an English accent was “sword.” It marks the only time in film history when the merry bandit sounded like he’d just stepped off the boat from Rhode Island.
Anyone who’s ever sat in a cool breeze at a minor league ballpark in May and felt completely at peace knows about Jones’ goosebump-raising soliloquy at the end of “Field of Dreams.” It’s the kind of speech that makes roughneck cowboys blubber like ninnies. Predicting that far-flung travelers will be inexplicably drawn to the spectral exhibition games played in that mysterious cornfield, Jones talks about baseball as though it had been laid at humanity’s feet by the Greek gods of Olympus. All in a voice that could melt a stick of butter.
Only baseball can inspire that kind of poetry. You don’t hear a lot of stirring odes to synchronized swimming, or intercollegiate water polo.
At this point, you’re in one of two camps: Those who can relate to baseball’s romanticism, and those who think the sport is as boring as John Kerry reading “The Iliad.” (The third camp – those who couldn’t give a rat’s patootie – have already moved on to a sudoku.)
Summoning my powers of objectivity, I can see how the uninitiated might consider baseball less than enthralling. In a lot of ways, it’s an anachronism – it has no earthly business being played in a century dominated by 30-second commercials, movies on demand, and cheeseburgers prepped so quickly they cause a ripple in spacetime. Baseball doesn’t fit into a world of instant gratification; its pleasures are slow, doled out not by the foot, but by the inch.
That’s what makes it great.
I’m reminded of this every spring, right around the time I first hear that gratifying wood-on-cowhide crack. The sound is like a pair of snapping fingers jolting me out of a state of deep hypnosis; not being much of a winter sports enthusiast, I tend to spend those frosty months actually being (gasp!) productive, which is the antithesis of what summer’s all about. Summer is a season for wasting vast stretches of time eating ice cream sandwiches while watching minor league mascots lose footraces to four-year-olds.
When I was about 10, my father gave me one of those kid-friendly books filled with factoids about the history of baseball. That history is what sets the game apart from, say, hockey, which I believe was invented by the penguins of the Arctic circle. Or football, which was created in a lab by pumping gamma rays into a petri dish filled with bull testosterone.
The story of baseball is the story of the country’s industrial revolution; it’s the story of pickup games played in the streets of Harlem in the late 1800s, of steel-jawed immigrants hitting and catching their way out of coal mines. It’s the story of the Civil Rights movement (Jackie Robinson, anybody?), and of late 20th Century excess. It’s the story of cheaters and their punishments – the story of fairness.
But why am I proselytizing? James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” character, in a speech to his friend Ray, said it far better than I could:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Insert wistful sigh here.
To truly appreciate that, maybe you had to grow up with a sock tied around your brand-new baseball glove to get just the right curve in the webbing. Or felt a tingle rush up your arms as you connected with your first fastball. Heck, maybe a vendor in the stands once pelted you in the kisser with a bag of peanuts – that would do it too, I suppose.
Whatever the reason, it’s got a grip on those of us susceptible to its charms. And yes, the clichĂ© is true: We love peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and we don’t care if we ever get back.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
The simple life
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplify, simplify, simplify!” I’m not sure how seriously I should take a
man who communed with squirrels and had a beard that looked like their
mutated cousin; but then, his Wikipedia entry is huge while mine is
nonexistent, so who am I to judge? The naturalist and author of “Walden”
may have been onto something.
Since Thoreau lived in the 1800s, it was naturally easy for him to sequester himself in the Massachusetts wilderness to subsist on a diet of wood chips and loneliness. When he submitted himself to nature to write, the big technological innovations of the day were shoe horns and breast pockets for monocles. Today’s gadgets, with their brightly-colored screens and videos of skateboarders injuring their genitals, would have made the teeth fall out of his head, and into the campfire where he cooked his badgers.
They’d also have made him question whether his call for simplicity is even possible.
I’ve been thinking about Thoreau lately, and not in a jealous, I-want-to-spoon-with-bears kind of way. Rather, impulsive technological purchases have made me think of simplifying my life – and of how difficult the task will be.
So I’m laptop shopping. (Yep. I’m going from Thoreau to computers. Strap in for a wild ride.) It’s a frustrating pursuit. Depressing as it is to admit, computers have become as much of a necessary staple as milk, or comfortable underwear. They’re wonderful inventions in a lot of ways – what else would allow me to write e-mails, watch The Daily Show, and Photoshop images of my head onto the bodies of Greek gods? – but they’ve also insinuated their way into daily life with the inextricable persistence of a benign growth. Not owning one would be as hampering to productivity as chucking my phone, or lopping off my hand with an Ottoman scimitar.
My current laptop is a joke, and not a particularly funny one. It does the basic things you would want it to – I can play music on it, and blog about my hatred of circus peanuts – but beyond that, it slogs its way through heftier applications with the plodding resignation of an arthritic dog. Even video-watching taxes the hardware on this disgraceful machine. Let’s say I want to watch the latest episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satiric jab at blowhard political pundits. The process goes something like this: Go to Colbert’s website. Click on “Full Episodes.” Select the latest video. Insert earplugs to drown out the clothes-dryer-calibur noise emitting from the overtaxed innards of the ancient beast. Sit through choppy commercials while the computer’s processor awakens from bear-like hibernation. Curse a lot. Watch episode. Kill self.
It’s an ordeal.
So the time has come for a new one, and that’s all well and good. Except, in defiance of Thoreau’s philosophy, I can’t bring myself to simplify. I expect a lot of my tired Dell’s successor.
Being enamored with video editing will do that. In college, I took an editing course in which my instructor assigned a final project seemingly designed to make the fanboy in me quiver with glee: A music video, to be shot MTV-style, and shown to the class on the semester’s final day. Since I generally consider music to be the greatest invention this side of canned cheese, I took to the assignment with relish, cobbling together enough embarrassing footage of my friends to splice together a video worthy of MTV’s heyday – back when it actually aired music videos, rather than mind-numbing reality shows starring loud-mouthed drug addicts and doughy ex-professional wrestlers.
It was a ludicrous masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of my college years and impressing my instructor, who gave me an “A” despite being visibly horrified during the screening. It set off an obsession, and soon, with a stockpile of new computer equipment and all the pretentiousness of a young Kubrick, I started dashing off projects of my own: Music videos, documentaries, YouTube-ready shtick, and in an alternate version of reality, a romantic comedy where I get to make out with Scarlett Johansson. (Physics tells us it’s possible to envision a parallel universe in which this does indeed happen. Reason number 257 why I love physics.)
As years go by, of course, priorities change. Videography took a back seat to more pressing matters, like finding employment, and mastering the Star-Spangled Banner on my plastic kazoo. But lately, the old interest is awakening, and it’s awakening to a world of Blu-Rays and high-definition and anamorphic widescreen. It’s time to chuck the steam-powered Dell and update my gear, but that in itself has entailed erroneous purchases and weeks of research that would intimidate the most diligent presidential historian. I can’t imagine Ron Chernow’s 900-page volume on Washington resulted in more gray hairs.
And for what? One last masterwork? One of the biggest problems with gadgets is there are way too many of them; each one a detail, frittering away life, bit by electronic bit.
It’s enough to make a guy want to chuck everything and go live in the wild, bathing in streams and teaching sign language to possums. As much of a video geek as I apparently am, I hear that mantra, echoing: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Since Thoreau lived in the 1800s, it was naturally easy for him to sequester himself in the Massachusetts wilderness to subsist on a diet of wood chips and loneliness. When he submitted himself to nature to write, the big technological innovations of the day were shoe horns and breast pockets for monocles. Today’s gadgets, with their brightly-colored screens and videos of skateboarders injuring their genitals, would have made the teeth fall out of his head, and into the campfire where he cooked his badgers.
They’d also have made him question whether his call for simplicity is even possible.
I’ve been thinking about Thoreau lately, and not in a jealous, I-want-to-spoon-with-bears kind of way. Rather, impulsive technological purchases have made me think of simplifying my life – and of how difficult the task will be.
So I’m laptop shopping. (Yep. I’m going from Thoreau to computers. Strap in for a wild ride.) It’s a frustrating pursuit. Depressing as it is to admit, computers have become as much of a necessary staple as milk, or comfortable underwear. They’re wonderful inventions in a lot of ways – what else would allow me to write e-mails, watch The Daily Show, and Photoshop images of my head onto the bodies of Greek gods? – but they’ve also insinuated their way into daily life with the inextricable persistence of a benign growth. Not owning one would be as hampering to productivity as chucking my phone, or lopping off my hand with an Ottoman scimitar.
My current laptop is a joke, and not a particularly funny one. It does the basic things you would want it to – I can play music on it, and blog about my hatred of circus peanuts – but beyond that, it slogs its way through heftier applications with the plodding resignation of an arthritic dog. Even video-watching taxes the hardware on this disgraceful machine. Let’s say I want to watch the latest episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satiric jab at blowhard political pundits. The process goes something like this: Go to Colbert’s website. Click on “Full Episodes.” Select the latest video. Insert earplugs to drown out the clothes-dryer-calibur noise emitting from the overtaxed innards of the ancient beast. Sit through choppy commercials while the computer’s processor awakens from bear-like hibernation. Curse a lot. Watch episode. Kill self.
It’s an ordeal.
So the time has come for a new one, and that’s all well and good. Except, in defiance of Thoreau’s philosophy, I can’t bring myself to simplify. I expect a lot of my tired Dell’s successor.
Being enamored with video editing will do that. In college, I took an editing course in which my instructor assigned a final project seemingly designed to make the fanboy in me quiver with glee: A music video, to be shot MTV-style, and shown to the class on the semester’s final day. Since I generally consider music to be the greatest invention this side of canned cheese, I took to the assignment with relish, cobbling together enough embarrassing footage of my friends to splice together a video worthy of MTV’s heyday – back when it actually aired music videos, rather than mind-numbing reality shows starring loud-mouthed drug addicts and doughy ex-professional wrestlers.
It was a ludicrous masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of my college years and impressing my instructor, who gave me an “A” despite being visibly horrified during the screening. It set off an obsession, and soon, with a stockpile of new computer equipment and all the pretentiousness of a young Kubrick, I started dashing off projects of my own: Music videos, documentaries, YouTube-ready shtick, and in an alternate version of reality, a romantic comedy where I get to make out with Scarlett Johansson. (Physics tells us it’s possible to envision a parallel universe in which this does indeed happen. Reason number 257 why I love physics.)
As years go by, of course, priorities change. Videography took a back seat to more pressing matters, like finding employment, and mastering the Star-Spangled Banner on my plastic kazoo. But lately, the old interest is awakening, and it’s awakening to a world of Blu-Rays and high-definition and anamorphic widescreen. It’s time to chuck the steam-powered Dell and update my gear, but that in itself has entailed erroneous purchases and weeks of research that would intimidate the most diligent presidential historian. I can’t imagine Ron Chernow’s 900-page volume on Washington resulted in more gray hairs.
And for what? One last masterwork? One of the biggest problems with gadgets is there are way too many of them; each one a detail, frittering away life, bit by electronic bit.
It’s enough to make a guy want to chuck everything and go live in the wild, bathing in streams and teaching sign language to possums. As much of a video geek as I apparently am, I hear that mantra, echoing: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Dimpled balls
There are people who play mini-golf professionally. This blows my mind.
Mini-golf – in case you’ve been captive in a Sri Lankan dungeon since the age of steam power – is a putting game based on the premise that people won’t become murderously enraged by having their balls swatted back to them by spinning windmill propellers. Its origins are fuzzy, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it was created by a mad scientist, probably German, whose goal was to make children cry while their families slowly went insane.
All that will sound excessively harsh in light of the revelation that I, an easily frustrated man, try to make it out to a mini-golf course at least once a summer. No clue why I put myself through the ordeal. Mini-golf is one of those slippery experiences whose negative effects evaporate from memory faster than disappearing ink. In that way, it’s very similar to my relationship with hot-dogs. Every summer, I get super excited whenever someone offers me a hot-dog, and it’s only halfway through eating one that I remember I hate them.
To be fair, I don’t outright hate mini-golf. It can be vaguely fun as long as nobody’s keeping score, which is usually what ends up happening anyway, even if it didn’t start that way.
The whole thing begins innocently. You and your golfing buddy grab your balls (oh, grow up), and a scorecard with one of those nubby eraserless pencils that are always sticky. You walk to the first hole and you think, “What’s the harm in keeping score? This first hole looks easy enough; simple straight line, piece o’ cake. We’ll be done the whole course before my ice cream starts to melt.”
Forty-five minutes later you’re on the 9th hole, listlessly whacking balls around without even looking, telling your partner, “Whatever, I’ll just take the six.”
It’s as though the game was invented so the non-checkered-hatted masses could taste a bit of the frustration of actual golf. Every once in a while I’ll tune into CBS on the odd Sunday to watch “60 Minutes,” only to find it delayed by a professional golf tournament; and while my initial reaction is usually disappointment, I’m invariably sucked into the drama of watching grown men cursing at a ball the size of a mutant grape. If mini-golf is an exercise in frustration, golf-golf has got to be the most painful ordeal this side of a Greek pan-flute concert.
In real golf, Mother Nature is the windmill, conjuring gusting winds that steer well-hit balls into tangled woods or giant kidney-shaped ponds. Even the greens, so flat-looking on TV, are riddled with dips and curves in a complex geometry that would have driven Einstein to give up math and form a barbershop quartet. The next time you’re watching TV and come upon a golf tournament accidentally (because nobody seeks it on purpose), watch the faces of the guys in third or fourth place. They look like they’re pouring over gruesome crime scene evidence.
Mini-golf is a microcosm of that reality. Its one saving grace is that when you make a lousy shot, you don’t have a ten-minute walk to the ball. You simply step over the cowboy’s outstretched boot, hop across the Hobbit-sized waterfall, and chuck your pink ball into the adjoining video arcade. There it will stay until staff comes around and digs it out from behind the dusty Pac-Man machine from 1983.
But hey, some people are gluttons for punishment. These unfortunate souls can be found playing in the World Minigolfsport Federation, and unlike the old World Wrestling Federation, where “World” is a term meaning “Gold’s Gym in Arkansas,” the mini-golf league is truly world-wide. World championships are held on odd-numbered years, while continental championships are played in even-numbered years. Divisions within the federation make space for the full scope of humanity: Men, women, the old, the young, and in all cases, the alarmingly disturbed.
All kidding aside – most kidding aside – these players have my respect. It takes a person of a certain amount of fortitude to practice whacking a piece of plastic through a clown’s eyeball until you’ve got it just right. And maybe this is just a shot in the dark, but something tells me these valiant men and women aren’t exactly pulling down Tiger Woods money; you don’t see a pro mini-golf player hawking Buicks on network television. No, I’m pretty sure these players have kept their day jobs. Which is even more impressive, since it must be hard to train for tournaments when you’re responsible for closing up shop at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
They’ll serve as inspiration the next time I subject myself to 18 holes of pure silliness. Who knows? If I master the windmill, there could be a future in it for me.
A strange, strange future.
Mini-golf – in case you’ve been captive in a Sri Lankan dungeon since the age of steam power – is a putting game based on the premise that people won’t become murderously enraged by having their balls swatted back to them by spinning windmill propellers. Its origins are fuzzy, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it was created by a mad scientist, probably German, whose goal was to make children cry while their families slowly went insane.
All that will sound excessively harsh in light of the revelation that I, an easily frustrated man, try to make it out to a mini-golf course at least once a summer. No clue why I put myself through the ordeal. Mini-golf is one of those slippery experiences whose negative effects evaporate from memory faster than disappearing ink. In that way, it’s very similar to my relationship with hot-dogs. Every summer, I get super excited whenever someone offers me a hot-dog, and it’s only halfway through eating one that I remember I hate them.
To be fair, I don’t outright hate mini-golf. It can be vaguely fun as long as nobody’s keeping score, which is usually what ends up happening anyway, even if it didn’t start that way.
The whole thing begins innocently. You and your golfing buddy grab your balls (oh, grow up), and a scorecard with one of those nubby eraserless pencils that are always sticky. You walk to the first hole and you think, “What’s the harm in keeping score? This first hole looks easy enough; simple straight line, piece o’ cake. We’ll be done the whole course before my ice cream starts to melt.”
Forty-five minutes later you’re on the 9th hole, listlessly whacking balls around without even looking, telling your partner, “Whatever, I’ll just take the six.”
It’s as though the game was invented so the non-checkered-hatted masses could taste a bit of the frustration of actual golf. Every once in a while I’ll tune into CBS on the odd Sunday to watch “60 Minutes,” only to find it delayed by a professional golf tournament; and while my initial reaction is usually disappointment, I’m invariably sucked into the drama of watching grown men cursing at a ball the size of a mutant grape. If mini-golf is an exercise in frustration, golf-golf has got to be the most painful ordeal this side of a Greek pan-flute concert.
In real golf, Mother Nature is the windmill, conjuring gusting winds that steer well-hit balls into tangled woods or giant kidney-shaped ponds. Even the greens, so flat-looking on TV, are riddled with dips and curves in a complex geometry that would have driven Einstein to give up math and form a barbershop quartet. The next time you’re watching TV and come upon a golf tournament accidentally (because nobody seeks it on purpose), watch the faces of the guys in third or fourth place. They look like they’re pouring over gruesome crime scene evidence.
Mini-golf is a microcosm of that reality. Its one saving grace is that when you make a lousy shot, you don’t have a ten-minute walk to the ball. You simply step over the cowboy’s outstretched boot, hop across the Hobbit-sized waterfall, and chuck your pink ball into the adjoining video arcade. There it will stay until staff comes around and digs it out from behind the dusty Pac-Man machine from 1983.
But hey, some people are gluttons for punishment. These unfortunate souls can be found playing in the World Minigolfsport Federation, and unlike the old World Wrestling Federation, where “World” is a term meaning “Gold’s Gym in Arkansas,” the mini-golf league is truly world-wide. World championships are held on odd-numbered years, while continental championships are played in even-numbered years. Divisions within the federation make space for the full scope of humanity: Men, women, the old, the young, and in all cases, the alarmingly disturbed.
All kidding aside – most kidding aside – these players have my respect. It takes a person of a certain amount of fortitude to practice whacking a piece of plastic through a clown’s eyeball until you’ve got it just right. And maybe this is just a shot in the dark, but something tells me these valiant men and women aren’t exactly pulling down Tiger Woods money; you don’t see a pro mini-golf player hawking Buicks on network television. No, I’m pretty sure these players have kept their day jobs. Which is even more impressive, since it must be hard to train for tournaments when you’re responsible for closing up shop at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
They’ll serve as inspiration the next time I subject myself to 18 holes of pure silliness. Who knows? If I master the windmill, there could be a future in it for me.
A strange, strange future.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Feeling a bit flush
Here’s what’s frustrating about answering nature’s call in a public restroom: It’s always a crapshoot.
Whoa! Zing!
But seriously, folks.
I got to thinking about this at a Chinese buffet. At this point, the less specifics I divulge, the better off we’ll all be. What should have happened, in a good and just world, is that I should have walked into the restroom at said buffet and been gently welcomed by the scent of Lemon Pledge. Every surface should have sparkled like the lighted interior of a South African diamond mine. My sneakers should have squeaked against well-scrubbed linoleum tiles. And – this would have been a cool bonus – a tuxedoed gentleman named Waddington should have wiped dry my freshly-cleaned hands as business adjourned.
Yeah, none of that happened.
What happened instead was so horrific they should award me the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When people do private things in public spaces, that’s just what happens, sometimes. That’s how it is for men, at least. I haven’t been inside a women’s restroom since I accidentally walked into one at an Orlando airport when I was six (sorry, Denise), so I can’t speak for the fairer sex. There’s a part of me – a very childish part – that thinks women’s restrooms are like the insides of FabergĂ© eggs. A place saturated with sunlight and rainbows, where hand towels dangle from the horns of unicorns and Sarah McLachlan plays the grand piano in a silk bathrobe. It’s possible I’m an ass.
Most men’s rooms, by contrast, could easily be mistaken for the torture room at Guantanamo Bay. It’s the place where dreams go to die.
That’s the worst case scenario, anyway.
The best a guy can hope for is a men’s room like the ones at the TD Bank Garden in Boston. I took the train there last summer, and with one too many Mountain Dews under my belt (literally), the john was destination numero uno. There’s a moment before walking into a public restroom when I steel myself for the most horrific scenario possible. I tell myself the floor tiles will be cracked and pooling with water from a busted pipe, or that the person who used the facility just before me had enjoyed a breakfast of beer and cabbage.
That way, when the room is well-maintained, as it was in Boston, it comes as a pleasant surprise. The Garden restroom seemed less like a place where people do their business than a command center for the International Space Station.
Everything gleamed. Everything. The faucets, the tiles; the throne itself. The level of cleanliness was borderline disturbing, and it’s ruined other restrooms for me.
Because it’s a roll of the dice, isn’t it? Sometimes you can make an educated guess as to the room’s condition. In the case of the Garden, it makes a certain sense that clean would be the norm – it’s a major hub in a major city, with mop-welding crews on hand to fight the good fight against seediness and grime. But take a trip to the can at a roadside Arby’s in rural Kentucky and you may be lucky to make it out alive.
It’s the uncertainty that makes it so daunting to do familiar business in a foreign land. It’s a feeling akin to receiving Christmas packages from an inconsistent gift-giver: Will this be the snazzy sweater I drooled over in the perfume-choked aisles of Macy’s, or a ten-pack of garish underwear with drawings of Snoopy on the butt cheeks? Unwrapping it is the only way to find out for sure.
In the case of the Chinese buffet, I should have been more prepared for disaster. Such establishments can be a hoot, but they generally exist to service those who are feeling gluttonous and undiscerning. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about what the restrooms might be like, but it’s more than that. With a few notable exceptions, buffets can’t even keep the buffets clean. When the trays are overflowing with gooey lo mein noodles, ignorance is bliss; there could be a silver dollar from the California gold rush era hidden at the bottom and nobody would be the wiser. But take a look at the half-empty pizza tray the next time you’re pigging out. Next to the hardened little squares of half-hearted pie will be freckle-sized clusters of crust, glued to the tray by a film of grease that could stop a bullet. It stands to reason the commode would be similarly neglected, the stuff of Stephen King novels and Vietnam flashbacks.
And what can we do about it? Not much. When nature calls, we’ve got to answer it.
Really, the best way to keep these places clean it to not dirty them up in the first place. That means treating your stall as if it were your bathroom at home, minus the ugly ceramic cat on the wall that I keep telling you to take down. It stares at me. Sell that thing on eBay, already.
The women, I have more faith in. The men? Well, let’s just say I’m a man myself. We’re pigs. And the world, it turns out, is our sty.
Whoa! Zing!
But seriously, folks.
I got to thinking about this at a Chinese buffet. At this point, the less specifics I divulge, the better off we’ll all be. What should have happened, in a good and just world, is that I should have walked into the restroom at said buffet and been gently welcomed by the scent of Lemon Pledge. Every surface should have sparkled like the lighted interior of a South African diamond mine. My sneakers should have squeaked against well-scrubbed linoleum tiles. And – this would have been a cool bonus – a tuxedoed gentleman named Waddington should have wiped dry my freshly-cleaned hands as business adjourned.
Yeah, none of that happened.
What happened instead was so horrific they should award me the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When people do private things in public spaces, that’s just what happens, sometimes. That’s how it is for men, at least. I haven’t been inside a women’s restroom since I accidentally walked into one at an Orlando airport when I was six (sorry, Denise), so I can’t speak for the fairer sex. There’s a part of me – a very childish part – that thinks women’s restrooms are like the insides of FabergĂ© eggs. A place saturated with sunlight and rainbows, where hand towels dangle from the horns of unicorns and Sarah McLachlan plays the grand piano in a silk bathrobe. It’s possible I’m an ass.
Most men’s rooms, by contrast, could easily be mistaken for the torture room at Guantanamo Bay. It’s the place where dreams go to die.
That’s the worst case scenario, anyway.
The best a guy can hope for is a men’s room like the ones at the TD Bank Garden in Boston. I took the train there last summer, and with one too many Mountain Dews under my belt (literally), the john was destination numero uno. There’s a moment before walking into a public restroom when I steel myself for the most horrific scenario possible. I tell myself the floor tiles will be cracked and pooling with water from a busted pipe, or that the person who used the facility just before me had enjoyed a breakfast of beer and cabbage.
That way, when the room is well-maintained, as it was in Boston, it comes as a pleasant surprise. The Garden restroom seemed less like a place where people do their business than a command center for the International Space Station.
Everything gleamed. Everything. The faucets, the tiles; the throne itself. The level of cleanliness was borderline disturbing, and it’s ruined other restrooms for me.
Because it’s a roll of the dice, isn’t it? Sometimes you can make an educated guess as to the room’s condition. In the case of the Garden, it makes a certain sense that clean would be the norm – it’s a major hub in a major city, with mop-welding crews on hand to fight the good fight against seediness and grime. But take a trip to the can at a roadside Arby’s in rural Kentucky and you may be lucky to make it out alive.
It’s the uncertainty that makes it so daunting to do familiar business in a foreign land. It’s a feeling akin to receiving Christmas packages from an inconsistent gift-giver: Will this be the snazzy sweater I drooled over in the perfume-choked aisles of Macy’s, or a ten-pack of garish underwear with drawings of Snoopy on the butt cheeks? Unwrapping it is the only way to find out for sure.
In the case of the Chinese buffet, I should have been more prepared for disaster. Such establishments can be a hoot, but they generally exist to service those who are feeling gluttonous and undiscerning. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about what the restrooms might be like, but it’s more than that. With a few notable exceptions, buffets can’t even keep the buffets clean. When the trays are overflowing with gooey lo mein noodles, ignorance is bliss; there could be a silver dollar from the California gold rush era hidden at the bottom and nobody would be the wiser. But take a look at the half-empty pizza tray the next time you’re pigging out. Next to the hardened little squares of half-hearted pie will be freckle-sized clusters of crust, glued to the tray by a film of grease that could stop a bullet. It stands to reason the commode would be similarly neglected, the stuff of Stephen King novels and Vietnam flashbacks.
And what can we do about it? Not much. When nature calls, we’ve got to answer it.
Really, the best way to keep these places clean it to not dirty them up in the first place. That means treating your stall as if it were your bathroom at home, minus the ugly ceramic cat on the wall that I keep telling you to take down. It stares at me. Sell that thing on eBay, already.
The women, I have more faith in. The men? Well, let’s just say I’m a man myself. We’re pigs. And the world, it turns out, is our sty.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
A real schmuckin' futz
This needs to be made clear straightaway: I usually love cats.
Usually.
That’s not the most masculine admission, of course. Gender stereotypes being what they are, it would be much more acceptable for me to proclaim a love of ugly, hard-nosed dogs named Buster or Killer – animals that chew meat and smell like armpits. And I love them, too, providing they don’t pee on my laptop. Cats, though, are almost painfully cute, low-maintenance creatures that cuddle and purr and pounce on things. A cat and a laser pointer can provide hours of entertainment, more so than a Pauley Shore movie, although that’s largely because Pauley Shore is dumb.
Every animal, unfortunately, is capable of its own evils. You’ll never see a cat threaten a nuclear strike, or force you to watch “Real Housewives of Atlanta.” But once in a while, a feline comes along that makes you glad it doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate a switchblade.
This the story of Schmucky the Cat.
That’s probably not his real name, but we all know cats only respond to the sounds of can openers and deflating balloons, so I’m just gonna go ahead and call him Schmucky. It’s a well-earned moniker. Schmucky has the temperment of an injured Iranian soccer player, combined with the glowing personality of Stalin. If Schmucky were a man, he’d have a face tattoo and massive biceps from years of arm-wrestling in dive bars.
Sadly, I can’t avoid this objectionable beast. See, my apartment is uniquely situated: There’s the apartment proper, where I can shadow-box and play air drums to Kool and the Gang in complete privacy, but in the back, there’s access to a room I share with one of my neighbors. This room basically amounts to a massive shed – a giant sawdust-smelling tinderbox that’s perfect for storing old microwaves and back issues of Nintendo magazines. I use this storage space to house dumbbells and freeweights, because I’ve convinced myself it’s not too late to transform a physique that resembles a melting lump of wax.
Trust me, I’m not trying to sound manly. I’m about as manly as a scented candle. But I mess about with my weights because it makes me feel like less of a sloppy bum. Until recently, I could do this in relative peace. That was before Schmucky – my neighbor’s orange tabby cat – commandeered the storage room and turned it into his own private bunker of hatred.
I’m usually good with cats. In fact, at a friend’s recent birthday party, I was nicknamed the Cat Whisperer, although to be fair, it was a nickname I invented myself, and no one believed me. Still, I have a way with animals. I consider it a personal failure if I haven’t earned an animal’s friendship. Or at least its respect, which it expresses by not pooping on me.
But I knew I was in for a challenge when I met Schmucky. Truth is, Schmucky’s kind of a putz. The first time I walked into the shed and saw him standing stiff-legged in front of my dumbbells, he hissed a hiss that could strip the varnish off a park bench. As I approached him slowly, cooing and trying to chill him out, he backed away but kept his teeth bare, as if daring me to make a move. Any move. Anything at all that would justify his lion’s ancestral call to go mental on my tender ankles.
Needless to say, it was a bit disconcerting. As Schmucky disappeared all ghost-like into one of the room’s hidden nooks, as felines are want to do, I started my workout routine without incident, thinking he had run off to smoke a Marlboro and cool down. Then, as I stood to do curls, a venomous hiss erupted from just above my head.
Schmucky, that crafty little ninja, had found a way up into the rafters, and squatted on one of the beams, scowling at me and threatening violence, all within a foot of my fleshy bald scalp. I whirled around to face him, as much as a man can be said to “whirl” when he’s carrying dumbbells, and beheld a face so sinister, so distorted by rage, I had to fight the urge to bolt for my kitchen in search of garlic and a wooden cross.
I sat down on my workout bench, continued curling, and locked stares with my nemesis.
There’s a scene in “Rocky IV” – undoubtedly the most ridiculous of the Rockys – in which Sylvester Stallone’s title character stands in the middle of a boxing ring prior to his big fight. His opponent is a towering Russian killing machine who looks like a ‘roided-up Dolph Lundgren, possibly because it’s a ‘roided up Dolph Lundgren. The two fighters stare each other down in the seconds before the opening bell. The Russian, with a stone face and soul-dead eyes, says to Rocky, “I must break you.” And for 15 rounds, he nearly does.
Clearly, Schmucky has seen “Rocky IV.” He’s got his Dolph Lundgren impression down to a science. And he does it every. Single. Day.
There are a number of things I could do. I could move to Switzerland and join a circus. I could become a sword-swallower and travel the world, disturbing people. Or, you know, I could talk to my neighbor about it. There’s that.
Then, perhaps, the long nightmare will be over, and I can once more regard cats as cute little fuzzballs. Non-murderous fuzzballs that won’t stuff me into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental.
Your reign of terror will soon end, Schmucky.
So go ahead. Make your move.
Usually.
That’s not the most masculine admission, of course. Gender stereotypes being what they are, it would be much more acceptable for me to proclaim a love of ugly, hard-nosed dogs named Buster or Killer – animals that chew meat and smell like armpits. And I love them, too, providing they don’t pee on my laptop. Cats, though, are almost painfully cute, low-maintenance creatures that cuddle and purr and pounce on things. A cat and a laser pointer can provide hours of entertainment, more so than a Pauley Shore movie, although that’s largely because Pauley Shore is dumb.
Every animal, unfortunately, is capable of its own evils. You’ll never see a cat threaten a nuclear strike, or force you to watch “Real Housewives of Atlanta.” But once in a while, a feline comes along that makes you glad it doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate a switchblade.
This the story of Schmucky the Cat.
That’s probably not his real name, but we all know cats only respond to the sounds of can openers and deflating balloons, so I’m just gonna go ahead and call him Schmucky. It’s a well-earned moniker. Schmucky has the temperment of an injured Iranian soccer player, combined with the glowing personality of Stalin. If Schmucky were a man, he’d have a face tattoo and massive biceps from years of arm-wrestling in dive bars.
Sadly, I can’t avoid this objectionable beast. See, my apartment is uniquely situated: There’s the apartment proper, where I can shadow-box and play air drums to Kool and the Gang in complete privacy, but in the back, there’s access to a room I share with one of my neighbors. This room basically amounts to a massive shed – a giant sawdust-smelling tinderbox that’s perfect for storing old microwaves and back issues of Nintendo magazines. I use this storage space to house dumbbells and freeweights, because I’ve convinced myself it’s not too late to transform a physique that resembles a melting lump of wax.
Trust me, I’m not trying to sound manly. I’m about as manly as a scented candle. But I mess about with my weights because it makes me feel like less of a sloppy bum. Until recently, I could do this in relative peace. That was before Schmucky – my neighbor’s orange tabby cat – commandeered the storage room and turned it into his own private bunker of hatred.
I’m usually good with cats. In fact, at a friend’s recent birthday party, I was nicknamed the Cat Whisperer, although to be fair, it was a nickname I invented myself, and no one believed me. Still, I have a way with animals. I consider it a personal failure if I haven’t earned an animal’s friendship. Or at least its respect, which it expresses by not pooping on me.
But I knew I was in for a challenge when I met Schmucky. Truth is, Schmucky’s kind of a putz. The first time I walked into the shed and saw him standing stiff-legged in front of my dumbbells, he hissed a hiss that could strip the varnish off a park bench. As I approached him slowly, cooing and trying to chill him out, he backed away but kept his teeth bare, as if daring me to make a move. Any move. Anything at all that would justify his lion’s ancestral call to go mental on my tender ankles.
Needless to say, it was a bit disconcerting. As Schmucky disappeared all ghost-like into one of the room’s hidden nooks, as felines are want to do, I started my workout routine without incident, thinking he had run off to smoke a Marlboro and cool down. Then, as I stood to do curls, a venomous hiss erupted from just above my head.
Schmucky, that crafty little ninja, had found a way up into the rafters, and squatted on one of the beams, scowling at me and threatening violence, all within a foot of my fleshy bald scalp. I whirled around to face him, as much as a man can be said to “whirl” when he’s carrying dumbbells, and beheld a face so sinister, so distorted by rage, I had to fight the urge to bolt for my kitchen in search of garlic and a wooden cross.
I sat down on my workout bench, continued curling, and locked stares with my nemesis.
There’s a scene in “Rocky IV” – undoubtedly the most ridiculous of the Rockys – in which Sylvester Stallone’s title character stands in the middle of a boxing ring prior to his big fight. His opponent is a towering Russian killing machine who looks like a ‘roided-up Dolph Lundgren, possibly because it’s a ‘roided up Dolph Lundgren. The two fighters stare each other down in the seconds before the opening bell. The Russian, with a stone face and soul-dead eyes, says to Rocky, “I must break you.” And for 15 rounds, he nearly does.
Clearly, Schmucky has seen “Rocky IV.” He’s got his Dolph Lundgren impression down to a science. And he does it every. Single. Day.
There are a number of things I could do. I could move to Switzerland and join a circus. I could become a sword-swallower and travel the world, disturbing people. Or, you know, I could talk to my neighbor about it. There’s that.
Then, perhaps, the long nightmare will be over, and I can once more regard cats as cute little fuzzballs. Non-murderous fuzzballs that won’t stuff me into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental.
Your reign of terror will soon end, Schmucky.
So go ahead. Make your move.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Banal cavities
When I open up my Internet browser, eager to waste large chunks of my
life watching YouTube videos of cats being surprised by things, the
first site that fills my screen is the home page for Yahoo. I have no
earthly idea why. Yahoo is a terrible site. It’s the kind of site I
would direct people to if I wanted them to suffer from a violent
epileptic seizure. Advertisements zip across the screen in the form of
colorful animated graphics, and often when I click on what I think is
the link to my mail, I click the ad instead and get directed to another
terrible site; usually one that promises killer financing on a sport
utility vehicle that looks like a melting plastic sculpture of
Stonehenge.
It’s an obsessive-compulsive yearning for consistency that prevents me from choosing a better site for my start-up page. What adds to the torture is the news crawl in the middle of the screen that cycles through the latest trending articles. This news crawl is a depressing, dumbed-down version of what you’d see on a traditional newspaper’s front page. A front page organizes stories by what’s important; Yahoo organizes stories by what’s popular. And there’s rarely any overlap. Occasionally an item is both important and trendy, such as a piece about the president’s State of the Union address. But that’s usually because it provides anonymous browsers with a convenient forum for racist diatribes and rants about how Hitler was a brilliant painter. The comments section of these articles is like the Ku Klux Klan subdivision of hell.
Most of the popular stories, the ones that generate the highest traffic, fall into three categories: Celebrity news, hot dating tips, and viral videos of ferrets that dance to Van Halen’s “Jump.” The Internet, which promised the world a new means of global expression, has become a digital version of Cosmopolitan magazine.
It’s the celebrity news that bothers me the most, although to be fair, that’s not really a ‘Net thing – it’s just a thing. Has been for a while now, and I’ve never understood it. Have you ever seen Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition? Hot tip: Don’t. Never before has there been such a dizzying parade of pointlessness. The idea behind celebrity journalism is that we should somehow care about a pop singer’s latest meltdown, or what fashions Best Actress nominees are sporting on the Oscars’ red carpet. As mild curiosities, these “news” items should occupy our attentions for no longer than it takes Charlie Sheen to flush a gram of coke down the toilet. Yet they now dominate headlines.
Sadly, public fixation on frivolity isn’t hard to understand. We’re all voyeurs, to an extent.
A few years ago, I was living in an apartment that towered over a shorter, squatter apartment building across a narrow driveway. As I was standing at my kitchen window, gazing out at the moon and being all writerly and deep, a flicker of movement below me caught my eye; I looked down at the apartment facing me and saw something so bizarre, I couldn’t register it at first: A man doing jumping jacks in his underwear. An extremely pale fellow (extremely pale), in tighty-whities, getting in some exercise at 10 o’clock at night. Immediately, I recognized this as a private moment that I shouldn’t linger on, and I did eventually pull my gaze away... but only eventually, because c’mon, it’s a dude doing jumping jacks in his underwear. It’s human nature to want to linger on such a weird spectacle.
That’s kind of what celebrity news is – a bizarre spectacle from which it’s hard to avert your eyes. And back when such news was limited to a half-hour of television per night, it was a simple thing to keep from getting too much of it in your diet. Just as it’s easy to not eat Snickers bars when you don’t keep any in the house, it’s easy to not give a second thought to Lindsay Lohan when she’s not constantly in your face.
And then the Internet happened. More specifically, sites like Yahoo, which figured out that candy generates more traffic than vegetables.
Like candy, a tiny bit of Hollywood gossip isn’t unforgivable. It’s easy entertainment, and has its place. That place, however, isn’t splattered across my computer screen. The fact that it’s cheap, and requires little effort on the part of the reader, has resulted in a populace that can more easily identify the Octomom than it can its own Secretary of State. This isn’t a skill I see coming in particularly handy, unless a terrorist cell captures you and tells you your release is dependent on whether you can provide her real name. (Hot tip #2: It’s Nadya Suleman. I may have just saved your life.)
It’s not wrong to have heroes. I, for example, am a huge fan of Al Pacino – but because of his acting, not because he picked his nose at a Los Angeles Starbucks. The former is art, of a kind, and is worthy of attention when properly earned. The latter?
Well, the latter is just a guy doing jumping jacks in his underwear.
It’s an obsessive-compulsive yearning for consistency that prevents me from choosing a better site for my start-up page. What adds to the torture is the news crawl in the middle of the screen that cycles through the latest trending articles. This news crawl is a depressing, dumbed-down version of what you’d see on a traditional newspaper’s front page. A front page organizes stories by what’s important; Yahoo organizes stories by what’s popular. And there’s rarely any overlap. Occasionally an item is both important and trendy, such as a piece about the president’s State of the Union address. But that’s usually because it provides anonymous browsers with a convenient forum for racist diatribes and rants about how Hitler was a brilliant painter. The comments section of these articles is like the Ku Klux Klan subdivision of hell.
Most of the popular stories, the ones that generate the highest traffic, fall into three categories: Celebrity news, hot dating tips, and viral videos of ferrets that dance to Van Halen’s “Jump.” The Internet, which promised the world a new means of global expression, has become a digital version of Cosmopolitan magazine.
It’s the celebrity news that bothers me the most, although to be fair, that’s not really a ‘Net thing – it’s just a thing. Has been for a while now, and I’ve never understood it. Have you ever seen Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition? Hot tip: Don’t. Never before has there been such a dizzying parade of pointlessness. The idea behind celebrity journalism is that we should somehow care about a pop singer’s latest meltdown, or what fashions Best Actress nominees are sporting on the Oscars’ red carpet. As mild curiosities, these “news” items should occupy our attentions for no longer than it takes Charlie Sheen to flush a gram of coke down the toilet. Yet they now dominate headlines.
Sadly, public fixation on frivolity isn’t hard to understand. We’re all voyeurs, to an extent.
A few years ago, I was living in an apartment that towered over a shorter, squatter apartment building across a narrow driveway. As I was standing at my kitchen window, gazing out at the moon and being all writerly and deep, a flicker of movement below me caught my eye; I looked down at the apartment facing me and saw something so bizarre, I couldn’t register it at first: A man doing jumping jacks in his underwear. An extremely pale fellow (extremely pale), in tighty-whities, getting in some exercise at 10 o’clock at night. Immediately, I recognized this as a private moment that I shouldn’t linger on, and I did eventually pull my gaze away... but only eventually, because c’mon, it’s a dude doing jumping jacks in his underwear. It’s human nature to want to linger on such a weird spectacle.
That’s kind of what celebrity news is – a bizarre spectacle from which it’s hard to avert your eyes. And back when such news was limited to a half-hour of television per night, it was a simple thing to keep from getting too much of it in your diet. Just as it’s easy to not eat Snickers bars when you don’t keep any in the house, it’s easy to not give a second thought to Lindsay Lohan when she’s not constantly in your face.
And then the Internet happened. More specifically, sites like Yahoo, which figured out that candy generates more traffic than vegetables.
Like candy, a tiny bit of Hollywood gossip isn’t unforgivable. It’s easy entertainment, and has its place. That place, however, isn’t splattered across my computer screen. The fact that it’s cheap, and requires little effort on the part of the reader, has resulted in a populace that can more easily identify the Octomom than it can its own Secretary of State. This isn’t a skill I see coming in particularly handy, unless a terrorist cell captures you and tells you your release is dependent on whether you can provide her real name. (Hot tip #2: It’s Nadya Suleman. I may have just saved your life.)
It’s not wrong to have heroes. I, for example, am a huge fan of Al Pacino – but because of his acting, not because he picked his nose at a Los Angeles Starbucks. The former is art, of a kind, and is worthy of attention when properly earned. The latter?
Well, the latter is just a guy doing jumping jacks in his underwear.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)