We've been diligent about our new highbrow approach with our Friday offerings, and it's time for a respite. This week's question is a pandering, down-and-dirty, in-the-gutter troika of related questions, designed to unlock your basest need to "go negative." In the Springtime, we shall return to superlatives, but it is yet Winter (at least where we sit, our many antipodean readers notwithstanding), so let us set our frozen hearts ablaze with mean-spirited gibes.
Enjoy and tell your friends.
Please name and explain your choice of:
1. The worst popular song ever recorded.
2. The worst band ever to achieve more than momentary fame.
3. The worst vocal performance ever.
If anyone can convincingly argue for a true trifecta, of course, that would be sublime. Let's collaborate and establish the Pantheon of musical rottenness.
A rare outbreak of anticonsumer feeling spotted in generally placid Windsor Terrace.
This is going to sound at first like one of our usual rants, but there's a question at the end. I promise.
As mentioned here, PBS has recently undergone another cycle of self-censorship in response to administration punishment-- although in this case it may be anticipated punishment.
Coming as this does on the heels of the decision to yank a segment of a children's program because it included a scene with a (real) child who has lesbian parents, gotten me thinking about the current value of Public Television.
A further example: when we recently watched this Nature episode about orangutans in Indonesia, I was mesmerized by the beautiful footage and shocked by the complete lack of scientific content in the presentation. (The animals were anthropomorphized to an astonishing degree, and a great deal of narration was spent describing the personality of "Kusasi;" there was no attempt to educate viewers about anything of substance).
Add the increasing number of bland, contentless cartoons on PBS (to say nothing of vehicles for conservative moralizing), and one has to ask today's question:
Is there anything of real value left on PBS? If they have become a political football, and funding can only be spent on programming that is inoffensive and bland, why not do something else with it?
I await your wisdom on this subject....
I've been reading with interest the letters to Salon which followed Laura Miller's quasi-review of the new Library of America edition of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories (a one-volume selection, mind you, not the complete set). It's really a review of Lovecraft's reputation, and Miller doesn't exactly do a hatchet job, but her mixed verdict prompts some thoughts of my own -- some in support of her view, and some dissenting slightly. (I know, that's not a very compelling hook to get you to keep reading along, but you're already here, so why not see it through?)
No one who wrote in is apparently happy with Miller's essay, perhaps because only Lovecraft fans are writing in -- and Lovecraft has a current readership that I would say is divided into those who found his style off-putting and clunky and dismissable in the first place, and those who've taken him almost wholly to heart, warts and all. Miller, who seems to belong to the first camp, hooks her essay precisely on that whompingly heavy style, a syrup of adjectives further sweetened with the invariable additive of exotic names and references to a set of supposed arcane texts and legendary cultures. He is, she proclaims, a "bad writer," meaning that his repetetive and fevered prose style, his commitment to tell rather than show, and his endlessly telegraphed punches make him an author any intelligent reader must treat as an object of campy, rather than straightforward, appreciation.
There's something to this -- Lovecraft's prose is often more obstacle than enabler of readerly pleasure and emotional engagement. Her notion that Lovecraft is still read in an exclusively campy vein is entirely wrong-headed, but understandable in that (as with Tolkein), Lovecraft's excesses and excellences are woven together so tightly that serious admirers of the latter can still laugh at the former.
Miller goes on, more convincingly, to note that what *is* seriously disturbing in Lovecraft certainly looks to most of us like a relatively direct expression of a tightly wound character: " The kernel of Lovecraft's neurosis is a hopeless tangle of sex, race and bodily decay, fed by the tragedies and frustrations of his private life." Often sublimated into images of disgust, ooze, and lunatic disorder, sex can be hard to find in Lovecraft (although see "The Dunwich Horror" for an example of a shockingly straightforward use of a sexual abomination), but the element of race -- and Lovecraft's overwhelming xenophobia -- is everywhere.
The author's race-hatred is arguably the only really embarassing thing for many Lovecraft fans -- it's what makes you hesitate to offer up his work to a Stephen King reader who's never dipped into "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Purple prose is nothing compared to the relentless stereotyping of nonwhites as primitive and even demonic. And it doesn't sit any easier when you come to realize that in a mythos based on the terror of radical Otherness, it's not an incidental fact that he renders with loathing pretty much every ethinic subgroup from back-country Vermonters to former slaves in the Deep South, to, well...as Miller notes, it's only those of Anglo-Saxon upper-class descent that don't already come questionable in a Lovecraft tale.
Miller does hint at -- but never delves too deeply into -- the primary reason why Lovecraft still has readers despite problems like the above: the sense of coherent power -- what a critic like Harold Bloom might call a visionary power -- in the mythos which knit together almost all of his most powerful tales. Perhaps it's true that the close of a Lovecraft story often doesn't seem to carry an overpowering sting to the modern reader (though the long story "The Whisperer in the Darkness" and the short "Pickman's Model" both end with a good bang). But I'd argue that for many of us the pleasure is in the long, "dull" buildup. The uncovering of the actual crisis is stretched and stretched in many Lovecraft tales, until the atmosphere is supersaturated, not so much with dread as with a kind of fascination -- in what form will it manifest itself this time? Lovecraft's horror always seems to be at a short remove from the pure pleasures of fantasy. Each story is a version, another shadow, another window into his intriguingly haunted world. The pleasure in the reading is rarely about the what's-behind-the-door suspense -- and it only reveals itself fully, I'd argue, after you've read enough of the stories to take pleasure in spotting the connections that the characters within them aren't, necessarily, aware of.
And while the mythos might be fed by the wellsprings of an uncomfortably obvious sexual (self-?) disgust and a shameful fear of the nonwhite Other, Lovecraft successfully transforms these nasty personal discontents into something closer to the universal -- the dread of discovery that our carefully constructed narrative of personal order and meaning is just that -- a narrative woven to hide an unthinkable reality. In the case of the horror tale, that reality is one of implacably hostile cosmic forces, but isn't the blind indifference of the universe to our singular and collective fates no less arresting? The confrontation with that moment is what fuels a lot of what the 20th century called great art. I won't make the case that Lovecraft is great art, but -- no camp intended -- he's still, for some of us, great reading.
(By the way, if you like this sort of thing and haven't seen Neil Gaiman's ingenious Lovecraft/Conan Doyle pastiche, hie yourself here for "A Study in Emerald.")
Robert Burns meets Christo
Saturday morning, February 12, 2005. Central Park, NYC.
I choo-choo-choose you, faithful Friday readers, and my early Valentine consists of a momentary departure from head-scratching "questions" for a good old-fashioned exercise in pointless factoid-hunting. So, keep away from that Google toolbar and get ready to trivia-party like it's 2004!
The first of a certain kind of association to be founded in this country is said by some to have been established in New York in 1844 (and still thrives); others privilege the priority of Detroit in 1839, although the activity its association originally championed was slightly different. The devotees of this practice in Pass Christian, Mississippi, claim they have the second-oldest association of its kind in the country. Other venerable ones are in Alabama and Louisiana.
What kind of association was founded in first New York in 1844 and later Pass Christian in 1849?
First correct answer to comments wins an taped-from-the-radio cassette of John Anderson's terrifying 1980s country-crossover hit "Swingin'." No search-engining or throwing I Ching. One answer per comment, please.
(And yes, I know that prizes for last year's tournament are still...to come. I've been sick. Really.)
It may be a good day to bet on extremely unlikely events, if the fact that the Wombat was actually quoted by a sports reporter is any indication.
I realized that people at the World Trade Center were going somewhere to look at nothing, while people on the Brooklyn Bridge were going nowhere to look at something.
Check out Gavin's impressive gallery of "Flipwalks," in which a series of coin tosses dictates his pereginations around and about the vicinity of Ground Zero. The photos are nice, but the random snatches of dialogue are the real payoff:
Overheard, guy talking to girl: "I know you guys wear the same socks."
Still pinned to the mat by the mother of all head colds, we're sorry to be checking in so late in the AM.
Today's lame excuse for a question follows on The Age of Egocasting in The New Atlantis by one Christine Rosen. Some of you may have heard the author discussing her article on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and I'm certain that discussion of this has been going on in verious corners of the Web.
Our question is (because we can't help ourselves), a two-parter: To what extent does her argument about "control" apply to your own experience of television/TiVo? And is there any merit to the critique of personal music players as damaging our experience of the public sphere?
Since this is late, and requires a bit of reading, don't hesitate to post responses post-Friday.
I'm so sick of being sick, I'm kind of sick of being sick of being sick.
In other news, the President of the United States is trying to convince Americans that the only way to save social security is to dismantle it. I don't know if he'll be successful. But the audacity is breathtaking.