The Wides of March

Here's some advice for the counter-maga protesters:  let the maroons have their little party, while they still can. Hold your own rallies tomorrow, or next weekend, and compare attendance counts. Take photos and harass them online. Our crowd is bigger than their crowd, that sort of thing.

Better yet, show up and harass your congress-critters, let 'em know what time it is, and that you won't forget in eighteen months -- in fact, you'll organize and mobilize and be back in greater numbers at the voting booth. Trust me, they are already noticing, and they are getting worried. Keep up that momentum and diversify your protest portfolio, and watch them run. Hit 'em where it really hurts, and keep hitting.

For the life of me, I have never understood the appeal of standing around in a public place with a sign indicating my opinion, as part of a greater group of like-minded souls. It just seems so....meaningless, a theatrical act of choir-preaching. Does it convince anyone of anything, has anyone ever changed their mind on something by observing a mob in the public square agitating for something or other? I know I haven't, and I'll bet you haven't either. I don't understand the point of candlelight vigils, either, so maybe it's just me.

The Dogs of Bore

Jesus H. Christ, this is still a thing? I suppose the fact that "competitive eating" never really took off as a true professional sport (in that a significant number of people could make a decent living solely from that) is somewhat reassuring, as is the rather obvious fact that these bozos are doing substantial damage to their gastrointestinal systems.

The dopier pro-wrestling style antics have been played up in the Nathan's competition in recent years, perhaps to overshadow the possibility that there really isn't enough prize money unless you're some sort of weirdo living in mom's basement rent-free. How'd you like to be the one trying to sell your parents on this particular path to greatness?

Here's the thing about sports:  they generally involve people routinely performing feats of athletic prowess that most people cannot do, because of levels of physical conditioning. But anyone can eat several dozen hot dogs in a short amount of time, if they choose to spend weeks or months beforehand "practicing," dunking them in glasses of water to facilitate sliding down the gullet, and drinking enormous amounts of water before and after (risking water intoxication) in order to artificially distend the stomach and intestines. Not exactly the regimen of dieting, lifting weights, running, and learning playbooks undertaken by actual athletes of pretty much every real sport.

Bottom line:  not only is it disgusting and gluttonous, it's a sport in roughly the same way Groundhog Day is a holiday, or Dr. Dre is a licensed medical professional. But considering that the most play this crap gets is on Memorial Day and Independence Day, supposedly two days to at least pretend to celebrate some level of national greatness and significance, it might be more interesting to televise and report the entire proceedings -- especially the aftermath. What's the over/under on how long Stonie and Chestnut and the rest of these maroons spend squeezing out a 15-pound growler on the can later tonight?

Arrested Development

Definitely enjoyed deBoer's review of A.O. Scott's cultural critique, but I feel the urge to add another layer of meta to the proceedings. Scott's assessment of changing male TV and movie archetypes ring true enough, but his observations on music are maybe thinner than one would like:

And while Queen Bey may be the biggest, most self-contradicting, most multitude-containing force in popular music at the moment, she is hardly alone. Taylor Swift recently described how, under the influence of her friend Lena Dunham, she realized that “I’ve been taking a feminist stance without saying so,” which only confirmed what anyone who had been listening to her smart-girl power ballads already knew. And while there will continue to be hand-wringing about the ways female singers are sexualized — cue the pro and con think pieces about Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, Lady Gaga, Kesha and, of course, Madonna, the mother of them all — it is hard to argue with their assertions of power and independence. Take note of the extent and diversity of that list and feel free to add names to it. The dominant voices in pop music now, with the possible exception of rock, which is dad music anyway, belong to women. The conversations rippling under the surfaces of their songs are as often as not with other women — friends, fans, rivals and influences.

[emphasis mine]

Couple things here. First is the "rock....is dad music anyway" dismissal. In some ways it is, sure; the traditional triumvirate of vocals-drums-guitars that tethered rock music for a half-century now are, in its various incarnations intact, even static in its hipster retro iterations. But there are plenty of newer and younger fans for that kind of music. The dichotomy of rock and metal fandom, versus the AutoTuned, over-processed pap that passes for pop these days, is less age-based and more gender-based.

Just a few days ago, I chastised at great length the emptiness of Gene Simmons' contention that rock is dead, and elaborated on what a piss-poor idea it is to go into "music" as some sort of lucrative career option, like being a lawyer or plumber or criminal financier. But the flipside of that question deserves to be asked as well -- is there a way one can increase their chances of being a successful musical entrepreneur?

Reader, there is, I assure you. The best and most efficient path to huge mega-music-mogul-successmanship is simply to go down to the mall, find the Hot Topic store or the food court or anywhere 15-year-old girls are congregating, and listen to what they're listening to. Try to get about 4-6 weeks ahead of that sound if you can. Get the hang of Pro Tools, AutoTune, drum machines, beat programmers, and any other tools that the hep cats are using to make their crunk swang, yo.

And not to be sexist, I swear, but Scott's entire list of empowered pop chicks falls well into that rough categorization. It is useful to critique the products of these ladies on Scott's own terms -- both as "music," however subjectively you want to define that, and as evidentiary exhibits of cultural sea change, and then decide whether either of those things qualify as a step forward. The fact of the matter is that most of Scott's list is mallrat music.

And that's the second thing -- especially when we're younger and our musical consumption ritual is more communal, less personal, guys are more likely to throw on whatever they think the nearest nubile young women will want to hear. What we listen to at a party is obviously much different than what we'll listen to at home alone, with the headphones on. The personal versus communal experiences define how each of us, male or female, old or young, interact with our various media artifacts. Because of the brevity of the typical song, nowhere is this more true than with music.

I submit that a grown woman listening to Nicki Minaj or Iggy Azalea is precisely the same thing that Scott decries when he sees a 35-year-old woman reading a Hunger Games book. All that means is that, contra Scott's assumptions re Sandler and Apatow, both genders can be culturally infantilized with relative ease.

But what I really want to get into is deBoer's theme of cultural stultification as a barometer of demographic lassitude. That pop culture pieces become routinely more infantilized is simply a reflection of the society itself, which is as it should be.

It makes sense that comic-book franchises dominate the big screen in a society where people will sit and watch literally just about anything; where conventions of plot and narrative become less and less necessary; where people will convey idiotic opinions to random strangers about events that have zero effect on their lives, but can't be bothered to vote; where gun fetishists treat their totems both as toys and as bulwarks of self-defense against rampant crime and the jackbooted state, even though the violent crime rate continues to decline, and these are the selfsame people who, when a cop shoots an unarmed minority or kid, will reflexively jump to the defense of that same jackboot they profess to defend themselves from.

In a nation of 320 million inhabitants, one expects various niches of culture, politics, taste, etc. But these episodes of cognitive dissonance frequently come from the same niches. DeBoer's plaint about the self-appointed pop-culture aesthetes, "the aggressive nerds who police our artistic discourse like prison camp screws" (wonderful turn of phrase, that), rings true, as so much pop criticism comes pre-soaked in post-ironic "we know it's bad but it's so bad it's good" meta-commentary.

So you have a pop-culture mega-industry that produces trilogies of overlong movies based on comic-book franchises, and then remakes all three movies within a decade, a clear signal that technological advances, rather than peripheral elements such as acting and writing and such like, drive the bus. You have an industry that, so far, has made four movies totaling some eight or ten hours or so about sentient robots that turn back-and-forth into cars, planes, kitchen appliances perhaps.

I could be a smug, pretentious asshole and declaim this sort of thing as mere childishness, but the Transformers did not make sense to me when I was a child. I can't believe that that's because I had no imagination or whimsy as a child; I was steeped in sci-fi and fantasy books, and watched just about every '70s cartoon imaginable. But when people become immersed in this hacky, dopey stuff, they get used to it -- and when that's the majority of what's offered anymore, there is no longer any objective context, nothing to compare it to as a reference point. All you can do with the rebooted Spider-Man [rolls eyes] movie is compare it to its earlier rendition from a few years ago.

One of deBoer's commenters asserts glibly that "[w]e ought to be suspicious when you say you like foie gras but you are bored by birthday cake," which sounds true enough on its face, but when the majority of the menu is now birthday cake, one ought to be even more suspicious. No one in their right mind expects that the proles will suddenly set down their celebrojourno ass-sniffing periodicals in favor of Cahiers du Cinema or the Utne Reader.

But there's no balance, no real countervailing force to shitty, machine-made music promoted by manufactured personalities, or trite Hero's Journey narratives cobbled together one more blessed time, but with fresher graphics. Disposable pre-fab things that have already been manufactured before, and better. I honestly believe we are approaching a point where entire movies can and will be made without seeing a live human on the screen, they'll just create a generic, agreeable persona and hire some random ape to mo-cap the action and dub the dialogue.

There should be more salient criteria to getting a movie made than "shiny thing go boom" or "fat guy married to Salma Hayek." In a larger sense, it is an accurate reflection of a society that has given up, and is content with its CGI gruel. If the only goal of experiencing any new music or movie or teevee show is to kill an afternoon or evening, to just mark time and run down life's clock one by one until the eventual end, then what is the point?

Words With Friends

When it comes to pedantic arguments over "correct" usage of this or that word, I tend to be something of a fence-straddler. I personally know and use the right word in the right manner, because I regard them as tools with specific functions. Just as you wouldn't use a screwdriver where a wrench is called for, why would you use "literally" for an analogy that is clearly figurative, or even fantastical?

However, as a practical matter, correcting someone on their incorrect usage is off-putting, a clear dick move. They are not going to learn from your noble example. Save your time, and your reputation, and move on. I recall seeing some fluff Sunday morning show piece about a couple of guys who would go around to restaurants and "help" them correct their menus, usually over misspelled words or misused apostrophes. Life is just too short.

The "literally" thing actually makes a small bit of sense to me, because there's not really a common-usage adverb -- aside from "figuratively" itself, which might be somewhat unwieldy in a casual conversation -- that conveys the figurative nature of the exaggeration in question. We know that the speaker's head did not literally explode, and yet it's scarcely worth the trouble to point out that that word does not mean what they think it means. They know, that just happens to be the handiest word at their disposal.

Now, I'll admit that I take a breath when I see the aforementioned misspellings, and especially the misused apostrophes, because the rules on those are so simple -- possessives, not plurals. Writing "ect." (or saying "ek cetera") is another peeve, because "et cetera" has a literal meaning, an actual function. "Should of" instead of "should have", that sort of thing. Approached as tools with functions, these things are not at all complicated.

But habits -- especially bad ones -- form through inattention and lack of caring. This is what the corrective pedants, well-meaning as they are in their quest to preserve the care and feeding of our noble, evolving language, may not quite get. People use "ect." and can't get the correct "your" or "there" homophone because they don't give a shit. By definition, correcting someone who clearly couldn't care less will not correct the mistake, but merely annoy that person.

Back in the chat forum days, I had several lively discussions about this subject with professional academic linguists, people charged with the mission of identifying, classifying, and organizing the various phonemic and grammatical constructs of languages. As a kid, I was fascinated by a variety of languages, and gained at least minimal competency in most of the major European languages.

The more you learn about language -- especially one as widespread and multiply sourced as English -- the more you realize that it is never static, it's a river that flows slowly but flows nonetheless. As with political systems, the outcomes of languages are frequently a result of a large enough mass of users who don't know or care to understand the nuances of what they're engaging in. They deploy it to convey their own immediate use, and some of it will accrue habitually. The more they read and/or write, the more competent they will be in hewing to convention, as one might imagine.

And that, ironically, is where preservationist linguists fall short, imho. It's easy to understand the impulse to chronicle and archive one of the thousands of dying languages around the world, spoken only by a dwindling group of elders in a remote village. But that impulse contradicts what we've noted above, that languages evolve with use. A dying language, by definition, is no longer one that is being used. It is intellectual lepidoptery to stipulate that a language that is dying out precisely because of its lack of use and interconnectivity has any utility, beyond capturing the oral history of the remaining few who speak that language.

In the end, the pedantic attention to upholding the simpler and more obvious conventions of language comes down to cash in many instances. I've been on plenty of hiring panels, and thus reviewed hundreds of résumés over the years. And I can tell you right now, when I encounter a misspelled word or a misused apostrophe on a cover letter or résumé, I don't bother correcting jack shit. I don't have the time. It just goes straight into the round file, I won't even bother to finish reading it.

And I'm far from the only one; I have heard and read plenty of hiring managers say the exact same thing. Ultimately what it comes down to is whether or not someone can be bothered to pay attention to what they're (as opposed to their) doing, and if they can't, hiring managers won't waste their time with that stuff.

Hatesong

Why did I not know about this before? I'm just now discovering Hatesong, and there is something noteworthy about, say, David Lynch despising It's a Small World so much, he won't let the interviewer refer to it by name.

Fortunately, I'm at a point in my life where I simply don't encounter most of these awful songs. I mean, I've never heard Katy Perry's Firework, like not a single note. I've never heard more than a few seconds of My Heart Will Go On. I've never heard a Justin Bieber song, again, not so much as a single note or word or melody. Life is too short.

Still, I think we've all had jobs in the past where workplace radio is plopped onto some lowest-common-denominator shit sandwich, endless streams of commercials sandwiching three-song blocks of heavy-rotation dreck. No wonder the American worker is stressed out to the point of a breakdown.

But most of us are certainly familiar enough with some of these songs, so when you turn a fine, observant mind such as Steve Coogan on the aerosol can of cheese The Lady in Red, hijinks are bound to ensue. Yet there are still people who listen to it on purpose, there are nostalgia radio stations that play this sort dreck deliberately.

This makes me sad, really. It makes me think of a person who has been stuck in a basement or a cornfield in Kansas their entire life, with no radio or TV or internet, and so they think that the entire world is a desolate cornfield, because they've never seen anything else. Not that I expect other people to like exactly what I like; far from it.

But there are songs (and Lady in Red is a prime example) where, as Coogan points out, creativity is absent, nothing but trite greeting-card sentiments are listed. It's the musical equivalent of having sex through a hole in a bed sheet, missionary only. To enjoy -- or even to be not offended by -- inert, lifeless crap just seems to be a symptom of missing out on a whole 'nother universe of great stuff.

Most of this stuff is very fish-in-a-barrel; honestly, do you know anyone who likes a floater like Mambo No. 5? But pairing the right person with the right song is just magic in this context, as the legendary Matt Pike demonstrates in his evisceration of the Aerosmith handjob Dude (Looks Like a Lady). Pike hates not just that song, but the band with a level normally reserved for someone who you just watched run over your dog. On purpose. Fun stuff. Check it out if you haven't already.

[Update:  Also, too. Certainly a valid point here, in that someone's taste -- or lack of -- doesn't pick anyone else's pocket or break their arm, so why sweat these poor folks on their schmuckery?

Two reasons, says I:  one, it's frequently funny (and some of the commenters in the Hatesong pieces are flat-out hilarious); two, beyond the subjectivity of mere pop-culture aesthetics, the fact is that when these objets de merde are popular, however long that toxic half-life may be, it's tough to get out of range of the smell.

I've never seen so much as an episode of Survivor, American Idol, or really any reality teevee, and yet a certain amount of "informational" oxygen and media space gets taken up with coverage of this sock-drawer-sorting nonsense, so I know way more about these things than I would ever have wanted to. You can only change the channel so fast; you have to read the headline before you can choose to skip past it. This stuff becomes very difficult to completely avoid. The same can be said when it comes to music, for those poor folks who are compelled to share communal space with aficionados of said dreck.

It's one thing to posit that someone who lurves them some Mambo #5 is no worse or better than someone who knows every Beethoven string quartet by number and key; it's quite another to have the mambophile blaring their crap over the cubicle wall every day.]