Asparagus Spears

It All Comes Back to Me - Sergeant (mp3)
I'll Say I'm Sorry Now - Shawn Colvin (mp3)

Popular culture doesn't determine our opinions, but it certainly has the power of The Big Nudge. It can sway us to reconsider our views where traditional discussions with authority figures or friends cannot. It can present us a new reality -- sometimes misleading -- that creates doubt about our own (mis)conceptions. For someone like myself, who grew up scuba diving in the deep end of the pop culture pool, the power of The Big Nudge is even bigger.

What's The Big Nudge? I've previously mentioned the educational importance of Public Enemy and comic books on me, so I'll go with another one: the 1992 Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang, which among other things put the sweat-inducing Halle Berry on the map. Boomerang ain't high art, and it loses a lot of its momentum down the stretch, but some of the scenes in the film became a part of my college lexicon.

Although the plot of the film surrounds Eddie Murphy and his sexual and business prowess, issues of race flow in and out. Only in a movie could I witness three financially successful black businessmen converse in a  relaxed friendly whiteless atmosphere. Not because it wasn't true, but because it was beyond my realm. The dialogue and their conversations, much like a Spike Lee Joint or a Singletary film, were -- even if not completely true to life -- revelatory.

In one scene, a waitress is going over some menu options with them, and she refers to "asparagus spears." After she leaves, the Martin Lawrence character -- always the one eager to point out what is "racial" about our society -- unleashes his fury that she chose the word "spear." If we were white, she would have said asparagus tips, he insists.

Later, we get this awesome scene:



My best friend and I used to read sex into everything. [Sidebar. Stay with me.] We forced it into places it had no business. The more ludicrous, the more fun. We were Michael Scott that's what she said goobers back when it was even nerdier and more pathetic than it is in 2010. We're a teensy bit better about it now.

A few years ago, I was talking with a distant relative who's an avid hunter and gun collector. He was so well-versed in weaponry that every time I would ask about something -- a Colt .45? a 9mm? -- he would explain how weak and pathetic those weapons were compared to... well, I don't remember, but he could rattle off names and brands. To him, some pedestrian gun hardly deserved to be called a firearm. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, Geez, a gun is a gun is a gun.

When you can turn something as harmless as the phrase "pressure washing my deck" into kindling for sex guffaws, words lose some of their power. When every Portabella must be a phallus, symbols lose heft. When it comes to words and symbolism and power, I fear I've become like that relative. I've lost respect for the power of mere words, to my own detriment.

The playwright and screenwriter David Mamet feasts on words like early A.D. lions on the flesh of Christian babies, and his most incendiary plays have the feel of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, where sides are drawn and stances are taken, but where no one is ever completely in the right.

Although by no means a great movie, Mamet's Oleanna is a haunting portrayal of dynamics. It's about authority and education and gender and sex and the abuse of all those things. (Oh, but to have seen the play...) My point is, it's all about the power and influence of words.

In December, Mamet released the Oleanna of race relations, titled... RACE. Starring, appropriately, David Alan Grier from Boomerang. (Hear a fascinating interview with David Alan Grier on NPR.)

Here's a line from James Spader's character in RACE: "There is nothing a white person can say to a black person about race which is not both incorrect and offensive. Nothing. I know that. Race is the most incendiary topic in our history, and the moment it comes out, you cannot close the lid on that box. That may change, but not for a long, long while."

Meanwhile, in Chattanooga, there's this white guy with a big Internet soap box making use of just that issue*. And what frustrates is how his point, much of which feels right, gets clouded over by his comfort in talking about race. Everytime I try writing about any issue where race must be acknowledged, I feel equally foolish and counterproductive... just on a much smaller soap box. My reaction tends to be "Why am I even trying to express this stuff when it's invariably so charged and divisive?" You can't close the lid on that box.

Which is why I'm so very grateful to have been exposed to Stuff White People Do.

SWPD is my modern-day Boomerang. It exposes me to the frustrations and aggravations that I could not otherwise appreciate or understand. Sometimes it enrages me. Often it condemns me. I read this site the same way Jodie Foster enters Buffalo Bill's basement, blind in the darkness, my gun quaking in my hands, as I cluelessly feel around for a wall. But I feel drawn to go and deal with the demons in my own basement.

Each day I go and read that site -- and the fascinating comments it receives -- I feel like I'm learning something. I hope it's offering a vital Big Nudge.

* -- Another fight involving a loaded gun broke out again Wednesday at a predominately black school. This school, which any sane person knowledgeable of Chattanooga's public schools would acknowledge does a criminal disservice to the poor teens zoned to it, is the centerpiece of yet another controversy. The black community is upset that plans are being made to "fix" or "improve" the school. Sifting through reactions to the drama... well, it makes me think the quote from Spader's quote is all too true. I'm just too stupid to heed it.

MetaWomen and the Gawkers Who Love Them

Just - Radiohead (mp3)
The Fame - Lady GaGa (mp3)
(Links removed by request)

[Super-Special Double-Length Thanksgiving Edition!]

As the father of two girls who seem to be approaching their pre-teens at a speed approximating Warp 4, I spend a lot of free time obsessing over girl issues. As I scour various news sites for interesting stories, my eyes are always drawn to stories about women, or about the feminist movement, or about women in the focus of the pop culture lens.

• A July 30 article in The New York Times Magazine shares one mother's fascination and relief that her daughter has found Wonder Woman, the iconic female superhero, as opposed to Hannah Montana or Lindsay Lohan.
• An AP story talked about the rising concern parents with "The Princess Pedestal," our cultural fascination with convincing our daughters that they're all that and a bag o' chips.
• I get the weekly email from The Frisky.com just to sneak a peek into life on the other side, the concerns and subject matter of often horny (mostly 20something) women. Yes, I've hit the age where I'm more concerned about being in touch with my daughters when they are horny and 20something than I am about being in touch with current horny 20somethings.
  

Three women under the magnifying glass of our culture have particularly caught my eye lately, and I've linked to fascinating features on all three of them, as I ponder where a society increasingly operated by empowered women who can turn assumptions and stereotypes on their sides begin to rake in cash for doing so.

Nadya Suleman

The only contributions Nadya Suleman can make to pushing our civilization forward is as a cautionary tale. She's mentally unstable and, if not a bad mother, a completely irresponsible one. If Jon and Kate should never have made eight, then one of them alone sure as shit shouldn't have 14. And although I've never watched a minute of any of these shows, I'm almost certain that Jon and Kate are both more intelligent and at least a hair's breadth more responsible than Nadya.

Nadya Suleman has 14 children.

Please. Sit and stew on that for just a second. She is that NASCAR wreck that kills a famous driver. She is the online execution of a hostage. She stands for everything we know to be wrong about celebrity, about maternity, and about humanity all lumped into a single doe-eyed idiot, yet she and some hungry producers know full well that enough people will watch her to make a profit out of exploiting the children.

Nadya's not being exploited. Exploitation, in my mind, requires an unwillingness to participate. Her kids, for example, have no say. The world gets to witness their own odd little version of hell and giggle at the pseudo-real life that the camera creates for them. They are being exploited. And the only question left worth asking -- and strangely, it IS worth asking: is their exploitation and its financial reward better than the alternative? Even Nadya says it quite well: "People are like, 'Oh why don't you go to work?'... OK, think about the reality of the situation: I leave, I go to work, I'm away from them all day, I make -- how much? $15,000 a year? OK, I need that at least every two months So, how on earth is that going to work? That's absurd. You live in my life one day and you'll see, you'll realize: it's ludicrous."

Yes, it is, Nadya. It's ludicrous to suggest most of us could ever, ever, be living in your life.

Megan Fox

To be sure, if Megan Fox looked like Susan Boyle, she wouldn't be the focus of my interest. And while she is certainly stunning, I have to stress that Ms. Fox isn't The Hottest Woman Ever. Not by a good stretch. She's very attractive, and she oozes a kind of dangerous sultry vibe that kicks her looks up a notch.

What fascinates me is how focused she is on playing the game of being a celebrity and doing it in a very "this is just a game" way. While it's a little much to suggest Ms. Fox is "highly intelligent," she must be given tremendous credit for understanding her game. With only minimal TV and movie credits to her name, she quickly rose to become one of the most desirable magazine pin-up girls of the 21st Century, and she did it by creating a fictional version of herself that makes out with women and loves wild wanton sexual encounters. (In reality, she's been dating one guy for five years, which is practically four lifetimes for a Hollywood relationship.)

What the NYT Magazine article suggests, however, is that Ms. Fox has been too successful in her effort to sell her body and an image rather than hone her craft. She might have shot to the top so quickly that people discover, to her detriment, that "there's no 'THERE' there." So she and her handlers are working to make her more human, less sex doll. Sadly, I fear they'll discover that once our society has embraced you for your body, we don't really care to embrace your soul.

We've already got Meryl Streep for that.

Lady GaGa
If Megan Fox is attempting to manipulate the Hollywood world in order to find success by milking and manipulating stereotypes, then Lady GaGa is doing a similar job on our preconceived notions of music bimbos. Before the Slate article linked above, I'd never even heard a song of hers all the way through. But the article intrigued me, and I watched her video of "Paparazzi" as well as her performance on MTV. The claim that she is taking the career track of Britney or Christina and turning the lens back on the artificial and superficial marketing machine is impossible to deny.

She's glam, yet so over-the-top glam that it requires she be NOT glamorous. You cannot be completely wrapped up in yourself if you are so careful to never expose what you really look like, if you so clearly cartoonize yourself to make a point. (NOTE: One of the most popular Lady GaGa searches on Google: "Lady GaGa without makeup.")

While the profit motive comes first, that she's attempting to make a statement, a serious and heavy statement, even if I'm not certain I know what it is quite yet, the effort alone is worth at least a little admiration. Will I buy her albums or go to her concerts? Hell naw. But I'll admire her nonetheless.

Nadya is a moron with screwed-up values who caught lightning in a bottle in having eight babies at a time when our popular culture makes heroes out of morons. Megan is a hot crafty dame in a business that rewards hot crafty dames. She played her cards carefully and well and has been rewarded for it. Lady GaGa has done them both one better. She has taken a formula for pop fame -- flash, glitz, shock -- and turned into some kind of threeway between Madonna, Andy Warhol and Andy Kaufman.

All three, ultimately, are women who find tremendous profit in playing the game of fame. I hope the rise of the MetaWoman is a good thing. One day my daughters are going to look at these women -- or the next generation of them -- while Wonder Woman remains imprisoned in cheesy cartoons and undervalued comic book forms. Diana might have a magic lasso, but these women have the magic box. No Amazonian princess with all her skills and cunning can easily defeat such a power as that.

Billy will be taking Thursday off for turkey and giblets, but he wishes you and yours a gleeful holiday and looks forward to begging for more of your attention next week! He also figures the odds that this post survives the entire weekend are slim, because one of these people will have some lawyer who contacts my host or Blogger and yanks this thing down faster than the Hunchback of Notre Dame tugs those damn bells.

Pop Culture Disappointments On a Galactic Scale

Indie Queen - Marvelous 3 (mp3)
Disappointed - Connells (mp3)

In this wild life of ours, those of us with an unhealthy love for certain portions of popular culture are destined to be disappointed on occasion. Even those, like myself, who are very careful and selective in our obsessions can frequently find ourselves disappointed in ways and to degrees we never imagined. In stupid pop culture stuff!

So here are just a handful of disappointments that went well beyond the acceptable level:

SOUTHLAND TALES

I recently spent three torturous nights getting through Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko, a 2 1/2 hour epic film called Southland Tales. With an ensemble cast culled from every corner of the pop culture universe -- Booger from Revenge of the Nerds?? The short fat lady from Poltergeist?? Nora f*#kin' Dunn from SNL?? -- even someone as unschooled on the critical lambasting this film had received could sense that Kelly was flying towards the sun with mere wings of wax.

But Southland Tales is no run-of-the-mill failure. It takes the simple notion of box office failure, tacks on 45 minutes of head-scratching randomness, throws in a scar-faced Justin Timberlake, and comes out with something that makes Showgirls look downright Oscar-worthy. Let me put it another way. Timberlake might very well have been one of the best things about the movie.

Some critics gave it props for being "ambitious," whatever the hell that means, but last I checked, an ambitious turd is still a turd. Maybe it is to movies what Ulysses is to novels, which is to say shitty and incomprehensible but so full of geeky biographical and referential goodies that it finds a fan base sometime in the future.

PETER GABRIEL'S UP

I'm what truly obsessed Peter Gabriel fans would call a poser. Like most folks my age, I didn't discover the guy until he came out with So. But after discovering it, I went back and got a few of his previous albums and also loyally purchased his 1992 follow-up, Us. The album was thick with sound, and although it wasn't thickly morose, almost every song felt passionate, expressing some deep emotional baggage.

As I was in college in the early '90s, my technological distractions were minimal, so I could safely waste hours in my room listening to albums over and over, and this one got heavy replay. Except for the song "Steam," which felt like Peter was writing a song specifically as some kind of sequel to his two big hits from So, "Big Time" and "Sledgehammer."

When word of his next follow-up, UP, came in 2002, I'd had a decade to build up my excitement. It only took six or seven patient, start-to-finish listens to conclude I hated that damn album. What made me angrier is that, half a year before Up was released, Gabriel had come out with "When You're Falling," a song with the Afro Celt Sound System, a song I wildly adored. (Unfortunately, the song also came out shortly before 9/11, which wasn't the time for us to hear about the celebration of falling large distances.)



My point is, Up sucked. If you liked it, great. I don't mean to piss on your parade. But for me, there wasn't a damn thing redeeming about an album that required 10 years -- a decade of precious life -- being that Gawd-awful. Go buy "When You're Falling," and you own something better than anything on that album by a loooong mile.

THE SEASON ONE FINALE OF HEROES

As previously mentioned, I love comic books. I love the mythology and notion of superheroes. Anything exploring these notions is guaranteed to earn my attention if not my devotion, and I willingly give such things the benefit of the doubt.

So Heroes was virtually guaranteed to impress me. It was taking the genre seriously. It had a plan. And it had a healthy budget.

The episodes were compelling, and I was enthralled. Granted, it never quite managed to overtake my love of Lost, but that's partially because Evangeline Lilly could only be in one series at a time and partially because I felt loyal to J.J. Abrams for casting Locke from Alias and Jack from Party of Five, two beloved shows of mine.


As the series finale edged ever closer, I started getting nervous, because what had been paced so deliciously and delicately over the course of 20 episodes was starting to feel rushed and crammed. And not in the good way that the latter half of Lost's third season did. It felt like they rushed it because it was poorly planned. Maybe not planned at all. And the "epic concluding battle" between Sylar and the do-gooders was so wildly pathetic in its special effects and so underwhelming in its scope and direction that I watched it a second time just to make sure it sucked as badly as I thought it did.

It did. It totally sucked.

CHINESE DEMOCRACY BY GUNS 'N' ROSES


OK, so it never actually got released. Maybe it never got finished. But anything that carries that much hype, with the guaranteed sales of coming from a band named Guns 'n' Roses, but never makes it out of the production booth... well, it was bound to disappoint. It was a stone cold lead pipe lock for suckage. I'm frankly glad it never came out so idiots like me didn't insist on giving it a chance to kill what teensy bit of hope exists that maybe it could have been good.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES


I can't really think of more than three or four books I've read to completion that I despised. Mostly because if I'm halfway through a book and don't remotely like it, I just won't finish it.

...Dunces is one of the exceptions to this rule. I kept reading because I kept working to convince myself that maybe I was missing something in it, something essential to enjoying it. Lots of folks whose opinions I truly respect love this book. And it's supposed to be funny. And it's all based in New Orleans. These are HUGE factors and ones I kept in mind whilst pushing myself deeper into my own misery.

But the closer to the end I got, the more I was confident that I totally "got it," but didn't remotely like what I'd "gotten." Understand that one man's trash is another man's treasure, but it sure as hell wasn't my treasure, or my pleasure to read.

But at least it taught me a lesson that I continue to believe firmly: Sometimes, for reasons beyond comprehension, you ain't gonna like something most others you respect adore. It's neither a defect on your part nor a brainwashing on theirs. It's merely the mystery of taste, and it's what makes life truly worth living.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION TIME!

OK folks. Kick in on this one. Disagree with any of mine? How about offering one of your own? I'd love to know some examples in your own time of encounters with pop culture that were galactically disappointing.