"...But I Don't Like You Like You"

Tell 'Em - Sleigh Bells (mp3)
Falling Out of Love - Ivan Neville (mp3)

"I like you, but I don't like you like you."

Between fifth grade and my engagement in 1996, I heard these words or some variation, from the mouths of a dozen of girls and young women, approximately 2,454 times. (This is a rough estimate culled from my many journals over the years.) Another few hundred thought these words but never said them aloud. What these wonderful, adorable females were trying to tell me, without breaking my poor and fragile heart, was that they didn't really see much need for us to kiss or bump fuzzies. When it came to them and Billy, the Platonic notion of "like" was plenty. Plentonic, I guess.

The value of Facebook is and has always been right in that area of "like."

It's most useful in keeping up with the people you like but don't necessarily like like, and definitely not with the ones you love. It is, and has always been, to cultivate lazy friendships.

This isn't meant as an insult to Facebook. This quality is precisely what made the service so perfect, because it's an easy, harmless, lazy way to reach out to hundreds of people you don't particularly dislike. And, occasionally, it can do even more.

Guys, for example, can go looking around in the picture galleries of their female friends and jerk off, or so The Daily Beast would have you believe. If you haven't properly adjusted your privacy settings, guys you've never met and don't know can stare at you, jerk off, and then send you a private message telling you how hot you look. (Let's face it. Porn is now so easily-accessible and ubiquitous that it's blase. Men in 2010 are in a Reality-Based world! Better a clothed real normal person who lives near them than some skanky surgical oddity somewhere in the bowels of Los Angeles!)

One of the parts of my job that is both fun and a little sad is when the students who get to know me well, as they approach their final days as a student, come up to me and say, "I get to Friend you after graduation, right?" And I say, "Yup." And they say, "Oh that's so cool. Can't wait, Uncle Billy!" (Yes, that's one of my nicknames. I promise I don't let them sit on my lap or anything.)

It's fun to see that they Like me, to see their excitement of venturing into uncharted adult waters. It's depressing because they're gonna Friend me and realize that I'm not really all that entertaining in the Facebook world. And, lately, college guys don't much give a flip about Facebook.

But here's what I started to realize in the last month, as Facebook has continued to prove that it doesn't much give a shit about its users, their privacy, or the never-ending learning curve of adjusting to what seems like major changes in how they do things every other friggin' month. Here's the quick summary:

• Facebook will be fine because we don't really care about our privacy.
• You can quit Facebook without quitting.
• The Great Facebook Exodus will occur May 31.
• Another option on quitting Facebook without quitting.
• Facebook's 313th realization that its customers care more about privacy than Facebook does, followed by its 313th apology, followed by secret meetings to arrange the next unannounced expansion into your privacy.
• And don't even get me started on this "Community Page" crap, otherwise known as "more work and more headaches for school marketing idiots like me.

And you know what I'm thinking this whole time?

Facebook? I like you. You're a nice guy. But I don't like like you. And when you keep trying to stick your grimy thumb up my ass? I don't really need to put up with that. I don't care how drunk you are when you try. I'm not Arnold Babar (with two B's... just not together), and you're not my proctologist. It's not appropriate, and I haven't allowed it since that huge suppository I took when I was 24.

I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh darn it, people in the real world can like me without you.

May 31.

Think about it.

The new Sleigh Bells album Treats is the most refreshingly awesome uncategorizable new album I've heard since The Go! Team's debut album first hit my ears in 2004. It's a sonic distortion assault and utter nonsense and absolutely delicious.

Heaven Is Whenever

Your Little Hoodrat Friend - The Hold Steady (mp3)


For almost eight minutes into my introduction to The Hold Steady, way back in 2005, I was pretty sure I'd made a mistake.

I'd read a bunch of critical raves about their sophomore album, Separation Sunday, and since I'd just received a bunch of iTunes gift cards for Christmas, I decided to jump out on the limb and buy the album. Sure, :30 into the opening song, "Hornets! Hornets!" made it clear why critics loved 'em, but that song didn't call out to me specifically. It just sounded like a clever band schooled in the ancient arts of classic rock with some talky Lou Reed type on speed at the helm.

But once "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" blew into my earphones, and pretty much for the rest of the album, I felt like I'd finally found a critical darling I could love.

They've since released an additional three albums, including their newest, Heaven Is Whenever.

My suspicion is that the fan base who fell in love with Craig Finn and his G-Street Band of merry men back in 2004 or 2005 started losing their passion with 2008's Stay Positive. That album made it pretty clear that THS had maxed out their indy cred and were looking to break into something bigger. Fans who pride themselves on finding diamonds in the rough don't really get much joy in watching a diamond get polished and cut into something fit for a wedding. For those fans, I imagine Stay Positive was their sign to head for the exits.

Stay Positive was indeed that first baby step attempt at bigger things. But it was just that: a baby step. And babies don't always have a pretty gait when they learn to walk.

Heaven Is Whenever is their second step at hitting a bigger audience, moving up the ladder, becoming one of the very bands they spend all their time writing about, either in direct or indirect references. They dropped their keyboardist, which at first seemed like a foolish move, but once you hear what it does to their sound, it makes a lot of sense. Not that Franz "third-generation Roy Bittan" Nicolay wasn't awesome, 'cuz he totally was. While I can't often tolerate an organ in my rock, I can always find a spot in my rock heart for a band member willing to pound the ivories of a true percussion instrument.

So ditching that dude seemed like a risk, but if their goal was to create music that was more accessible to more people, it paid off. Heaven... is the most likable first-listen THS album ever. And if you're gonna pull in more fans, you can't go expecting people to give you three or four spins before they decide whether to like you.

Creating a friendlier rock album doesn't guarantee it being better, but for me, so far I'm enjoying this as much as their other stuff.

If you're a THS fan, I ask you to stick with them and appreciate that it's not a crime to want to hit the big leagues. Nobody faults Nuke LaLouche for wanting to go to The Show. Maybe The Hold Steady is just a Crash Davis, destined to etch their place in the minor league hall of fame, but don't blame 'em for trying. That's what any band worth its salt should aim for at one point or another.

Should they fail, I'm sure they'll dredge up some more stories about Charlemagne and Holly for you. Hell, Craig Finn might even go back to doing a shit-ton of drugs and stop singing so much. But for now, let the boy try and stay relatively sober and attempt to taste the finer things. If he keeps hanging around at keggers, he's gonna turn into one of those spooky older dudes that everyone calls "Chester the Boozer Loser Molester" when he walks away from the tap.

If you absolutely refuse to pay for an entire album, here's your best songs: "Soft In the Center," "The Smidge," and "Hurricane J." The last one is the heart of the album and the closest THS has ever gotten to arena rock. (No one should be surprised that "arena rock," coming from me, is a compliment.)

Popular Goes the Weasel

Popular - Nada Surf (mp3)

When I was a sophomore and junior in high school, I studied the movie Heathers like the Zapruder film.

Although it didn't quite tug my teen heartstrings like The Breakfast Club, watching it helped me hold my head a little bit higher and told me maybe the Unpopular Life wasn't so bad after all. Some Kind of Wonderful and Revenge of the Nerds provided similar comfort for the outcast, but in Heathers the statement had more of a "fuck you" attitude. The unpopular anti-hero in Heathers didn't want your pity or your love. He wanted your blood, like Johnny Ringo in Tombstone.

Somehow, it was possible to enjoy watching Christian Slater's character finally bite it by blowing himself up on his school's front steps, yet also find comfort in his nihilistic separatist extremism. Goobers like me, aching so much to be accepted that it sometimes seemed to cause stigmata, found that life on either side of the popular extreme seemed to be just as miserable and painful as being trapped in the middle.

Unfortunately, all these movies wrestled with a noir version of teen reality. Popular was evil, plain and simple. The queen or king bee was the Emperor, and the unpopular dork was Luke Skywalker. While this simplicity feels good for a while, it inevitably loses its grip. Which is why, as I get older, I find The Breakfast Club, where there are no purely good or purely bad people, a much more powerful and vital experience.

Recently, thanks to GLEE and the authors of NurtureShock, a more balanced version of the "Popular" tale is told, and for someone like me who longed to be more popular but hated himself for wanting it, their explanation provides tremendous comfort:

...if Mean Girls were as unrelentingly vicious as they are cracked up to be, then the Mean Girls would not be popular. Instead, they would be the hated social outcasts. The reality—which Glee captures so well—is that Mean Girls aren't just mean, after all.

Patricia Hawley, a researcher at the University of Kansas, has studied popular kids, and she's found that for each mean thing a Mean Girl does, the girl also does two really nice things.

In other words, those so-called Mean Girls are actually twice as nice as they are mean.

And while the geeks aren't as mean as the popular kids, they usually aren't as nice, either. (In Glee, Rachel may be a talented singer—but everyone agrees that she's just insufferable; there's very little pity for her outcast status, even from the other Losers.)

But what really makes teens popular isn't just a pure ratio of nicety to meanness.

Instead, Hawley has discovered that the really popular kids are what she describes as "bistrategic controllers." Popular kids intuitively understand that both kindness and cruelty can be equally effective strategies for social manipulation. And they also come to believe that the key to social dominance is in knowing when to be nice and when to be cruel.

If you, like me, were not popular but studied the popular kids in the hopes of stealing their moves and learning their mysterious ways, then you will most certainly know how very true those statements are.

The popular guys in my school were rarely out-and-out cruel. Their ratio of kind or nice moments to mean ones might even have been higher than 2:1. But they could be cruel. And when they were, it was vicious, like a saw-toothed shiv. The act left its viewing audience both starstruck and scared shitless. And their cruel moments always had an audience. Cruelty in private was pointless.

We sideline losers were just grateful to be mere witnesses and not the victim, as if life were a game of Duck Duck Goose. When you have many more moments of feeling spared than you do of feeling victimized, you feel this perverse obligation to help feed that popularity. Like, because you know just how much worse they could have made it for you. Maybe it's the same thing that happens to hostage victims when the abductors treat all but one or two of them very, very nicely.

Although high school was in many ways miserable for me, I feel extremely fortunate to have worked in this environment as an adult for more than 13 years. Contrary to pop culture's depiction, teens judge most adults -- especially those to whom they're not related -- on much kinder terms than they do one another. I'm cool and/or acceptable to most of them solely because I seem to be comfortable in my own awkward skin and, more importantly, call them out for their flaws without seeming to judge them as human beings.

The only harsh judgment teens render on adults is this: that we simply can't connect all the way to the world in which they live. And I kinda think they're right.

I just sure as hell know I wouldn't do it all over again.

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.

We'll Never Get to See Bathsheba...

Kings + Queens - Luna Halo (mp3)
Little Man Big Man - Toad the Wet Sprocket (mp3)

"If analogies didn't exist, you'd be incapable of speech or thought."

One of my former teachers and current colleagues once told me this when we were sitting in the school dining hall together. He meant it less to be cruel than to be accurate, because he's a bitter old history teacher, and that's the kind of stuff they say a lot. Usually with food crammed into their jowls.

And he's right. I walk through life in an analogous spacesuit. Everything I see, everything that filters through my eyes and then fires up in small electrical pulses into my brain, is searching for comparatives. It's looking for synonymous experiences as well as opposites. The more connections I can make between that on which I'm focused and other things from my storeroom of knowledge and experience, the more comfortable I feel, the more that focal item or event makes sense.

So, it broke my heart when I found out that a spectacular new TV show flopped with America's stupid viewers.

KINGS is NBC's noble and daring attempt to provide a modernized version of the classic Biblical story of David. It is as ambitious (and flawed) a show as I can recall on regular TV in a while that's not tongue-in-cheek absurdist (see: Pushing Daisies).

I don't particularly care how Biblically accurate it tries to be, because the minute they chose to use the story of David as a starting point, I was going to watch. Where they try to be faithful to the Biblical story and where they take gross liberties and go off on side tangents only serves to help me play the comparative sleuthing game of differentiating the two.

The fun of the analagous experience aside, it doesn't hurt that the show has one of the most captivating and powerful acting presences in the last decade of television. Ian McShane, better known to his adorers like myself as Al Swearengen from HBO's uber-vulgar western "Deadwood," has been handed yet another dream role, this time that of King Saul -- er, King Silas, ruler of a modern American-esque (but smaller) country facing war with neighboring countries and all the other crap modern countries face -- health care crises and the like.

Silas is a stone cold king with a heart the size of the Grinch's. And those who know the original story know Silas will grow increasingly unstable -- mad, if you will -- in the storyline's arc. He'll feel increasingly threatened by David's rise. Silas will resent the fact that God has deserted him in favor of a prettyboy who has nailed his daughter and quite possibly his son as well. (Oh yeah, the show's gonna have fun with the Nancyboy version of Jonathan.)



If it fails to survive a single season, its failure will only signal how great a show it could be. How could I make such a conclusion, you ask? My So-Called Life. Freaks + Geeks. Firefly. Undeclared. Profit. Wonderfalls. Briscoe County Jr. American Gothic. Invasion. All of these shows failed to survive for a second year, and while some are far better than others, all of them are vastly better than most of the tripe that makes the cut. According to Jim has managed to exist for eight seasons and counting. Violate me with a hot branding iron if anyone fondly recalls that show or even remembers it at all by 2020.

Unfortunately, the Big Four Networks have painted themselves into a corner. Shows like Mad Men or The Shield or Breaking Bad or Damages, as awesome as all of them are, would never have succeeded on a big network. These shows needed momentum and a little wiggle room for un-family friendliness. They required patience from viewers and network bosses. They needed to be on networks that weren't itching to cancel at the slightest downward turn in popularity.

Unfortunately Kings is on a major network. It was doomed before the first script was finished, because it required a willingness to suspend disbelief, a patience in figuring out the plot, and the slightest bit of interest in biblical history. To ask America to watch such a show is like asking Ann Coulter to French kiss Katy Perry on national television.

But when Kings comes out with "The Complete Series" on DVD -- sooner than later, it would seem -- I highly recommend it.

Both songs can be found on Amazon.com and iTunes.