It's the end of June, a month that has been eventful in the greater, outside world, with the good (Cavs winning) balanced out by the bad (Orlando) and everything in between. Because all the local libraries have the nerve to be patriotic, and also because I don't have wi-fi at the casa, I will be offline at least until the Fourth, after the libs close tomorrow afternoon for the holiday weekend.
If only the Brits had won...wait, would "Brexit" have happened if we were still property of the Queen?
Anyway, I'm coming to the end of the period I like to call "no payments for student loans or medical bills due," I've already mailed off the first payment for next month for the student loans and my medical bills will be paid via an arrangement I like to call "bleeding me dry if I don't get a job soon." Speaking of which, I have applications out there, no responses as yet. But some of the jobs I've applied for in teaching, they probably are waiting for a while before calling people like myself, who are qualified to teach. I figure by this time next month, it might be time to hit the "panic" button on the lack-of-incoming-cash department. But for now, I walk.
I started up walking again over at Sertoma Field ("Sertoma" being Cherokee for "made-up word coined by white people," I suppose. Though if I Google it after posting this and it turns out to be a real word, who's the racist then?). It usually takes about forty-five minutes to do three laps (well, it takes me forty-five minutes to do three laps), and it's a good way to meet people who like to run by while also saying good morning if they can be bothered. I'm not a hat-wearer per se, but I like to go walk before I even think about taking a shower, and my bedhead is best hidden under my twenty-odd-years-old Red Sox cap (from Starter, so it's got a band in the back to accommodate my oversized head). Plus, you tend to get sweaty from all that walking. So why not save some water and walk while you already stink? Stink some more! It's fun!
I got an iPod Shuffle back in May, it was almost a full month before I got it up and running (of the two thousand songs I have, it could load maybe 250. But I can't complain about the variety too much, even when I don't want to hear Van Morrison songs one right after the other. I like to mix it up). I like to have a soundtrack while I avoid the duck shit that's all over certain parts of the walking track. At Sertoma, as in life, a lot of your time will be spent avoiding duck shit. Look it up, it's in the Bible and the Bill of Rights. Generally, I have been walking pretty regularly in the mornings, at around nine; any later and, with the way the weather is going here in SC, I'd melt before I made it completely all the way around. And I'd melt into the duck shit on the paths. Nobody wants that.
By and large, I've done a lot of reading this past month, right now I'm almost three hundred pages into Infinite Jest. I like to head down to the Cooper lib and get online, the parking pass doesn't run out until early August so why not? I do miss the daily tumult of either teaching a class or preparing to teach one the next day; even after the clusterfuck that was April, I have to say that I enjoyed every last stress-inducing minute of the final build-up to graduation. As I didn't get into any MFA programs yet, I'll have to put off my exit from the state for a year, I guess. There's a lot of uncertainty in the near future, safe to say, and I imagine a lot of my fellow grads feel something similar. I guess that's why I took up walking again, even with all the duck shit to navigate: it's something that I have some control over, even if there's duck shit involved. And did I mention how the mama and papa ducks hiss at you if you walk too close to their babies?
At any rate, I walk to lose weight (which I *think* is starting to work), I walk to get exercise, I walk to get out of the house for a little bit, and I walk because I like to listen to music. And then I walk some more...
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Friday, June 24, 2016
Isolationism Is So 1941
If you're like me and you're waking up today (or, if like me you turned it to CNN right after "@midnight" and saw the news, you went to bed) with the news that the UK has left the EU, all because of something called the "Brexit vote," you are not alone. Also, you may want to make sure you didn't have anything invested in any English businesses, because their economy is in the shitter. Literally.
I have to admit that I'm not well-versed on what Brexit means (it sounds like a synth-pop duo from the Eighties, albeit a very racist and xenophobic one). But judging from the way it's being described online, it sounds like a really, really, really fucking stupid idea. Kind of like electing Trump over here.
By the way, that sentient bag of human fecal matter tweeted some sort of nonsense about the UK "taking their country back, like we will take back America." Can he be forced to stay in Scotland for the rest of his life? They know what to do with power-hungry despots over there (hey kids, ever read "Macbeth"?).
Anywho, it seems like the more the world is becoming connected, the easier it is for people to bemoan that connection (or, assuming that they don't know the meaning of the word "bemoan," bitch and complain about it). I know it's scary, and I know that it's not always fun to have connections to the outside world. But it's time for all of us to put on our big boy(or girl) pants and admit that hey, we're all connected. And not in a pseudo-hippie bullshit kind of way, either.
Isolationism, as sold to us most recently by Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and now Donald Trump, sounds fantastic. Hey, screw the rest of the world, we don't need nobody! But ask any of the members of famous bands who went off to do their solo careers (and whose names aren't John, Paul, George, or Ringo) how that worked out. Growing up in the Southern Baptist church, I heard all the time apocalyptic warnings about "the coming one-world government." It was supposed to set the plate for a ravenous Satan to feast upon all our souls, presumably while James Taylor blasted in the background.
Seriously, does anyone actually think the Evil One gets down to heavy metal? Please, Satan is an earworm junkie. How else to explain Justin Bieber?
Like I said, going it alone sounds like a great idea, whether you're a moody teenager or a country. But you need people (and other countries) in today's world. You cannot do it alone. Even solo acts need backing musicians.
I would like to point out that all this citation of musical metaphors is meant to cover the fact that I still am not 100 percent sure of what "Brexit" is. But I do know what isolationism is; it's an outmoded, outdated, and thoroughly discredited ideology that essentially gives a middle finger to the rest of the world and then shuts itself away in its room to listen to Goth music. Britain done fucked up, and I think we should take some pause before we similarly fuck up by electing Reichsfuhrer Trump in November.
I still think "Brexit" is a fantastic name for a synth-pop duo, by the way.
I have to admit that I'm not well-versed on what Brexit means (it sounds like a synth-pop duo from the Eighties, albeit a very racist and xenophobic one). But judging from the way it's being described online, it sounds like a really, really, really fucking stupid idea. Kind of like electing Trump over here.
By the way, that sentient bag of human fecal matter tweeted some sort of nonsense about the UK "taking their country back, like we will take back America." Can he be forced to stay in Scotland for the rest of his life? They know what to do with power-hungry despots over there (hey kids, ever read "Macbeth"?).
Anywho, it seems like the more the world is becoming connected, the easier it is for people to bemoan that connection (or, assuming that they don't know the meaning of the word "bemoan," bitch and complain about it). I know it's scary, and I know that it's not always fun to have connections to the outside world. But it's time for all of us to put on our big boy(or girl) pants and admit that hey, we're all connected. And not in a pseudo-hippie bullshit kind of way, either.
Isolationism, as sold to us most recently by Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and now Donald Trump, sounds fantastic. Hey, screw the rest of the world, we don't need nobody! But ask any of the members of famous bands who went off to do their solo careers (and whose names aren't John, Paul, George, or Ringo) how that worked out. Growing up in the Southern Baptist church, I heard all the time apocalyptic warnings about "the coming one-world government." It was supposed to set the plate for a ravenous Satan to feast upon all our souls, presumably while James Taylor blasted in the background.
Seriously, does anyone actually think the Evil One gets down to heavy metal? Please, Satan is an earworm junkie. How else to explain Justin Bieber?
Like I said, going it alone sounds like a great idea, whether you're a moody teenager or a country. But you need people (and other countries) in today's world. You cannot do it alone. Even solo acts need backing musicians.
I would like to point out that all this citation of musical metaphors is meant to cover the fact that I still am not 100 percent sure of what "Brexit" is. But I do know what isolationism is; it's an outmoded, outdated, and thoroughly discredited ideology that essentially gives a middle finger to the rest of the world and then shuts itself away in its room to listen to Goth music. Britain done fucked up, and I think we should take some pause before we similarly fuck up by electing Reichsfuhrer Trump in November.
I still think "Brexit" is a fantastic name for a synth-pop duo, by the way.
Friday, June 17, 2016
No Randy Quaid, No ID4
There's a lot of incredibly serious and depressing shit going on in the world this past week, in case you haven't noticed. So let me set your mind at ease by talking about something that is far, far less substantial or important...though of course, that's what the government wants you to believe.
I was in high school when the original Independence Day (also known as ID4, in an attempt to confuse people wondering where IDs 1-3 were, or maybe that's just me being silly) came out. I *think* I saw it during its original run, but I certainly saw it during what turned out to be the last of VHS's glory days (the late Nineties) on more than one occasion, and it sure seemed awesome at the time. Shit got blow'd up real good, and when you're a hormonal teenage boy that's what you went to movies to see (well, that and naked female chests, of which ID4 was bereft). Over time, as is often the case with things that we love when we're younger and stupider, I came to view ID4 as a cynical cash-grab by two directors who were clearly of the Michael Bay school of action shit (even if they pre-dated him or even inspired him, I lumped them in with Bay's amped-up uber-manly shitfests). This is not to say that ID4 is a bad movie; it's entertaining as hell when shit's getting blow'd up real good. But it's the alien invasion movie as popcorn thrill-ride, when more substantial and lasting alien movies (like Alien or The Thing, for instance) force us to confront more "realistic" instances of aliens among us (I use quotation marks because no one really knows how "reality" would be affected by contact with an alien species. My guess: we'd lose our shit).
Part of what makes me appreciate, to some extent, my own view of the film's faults is that it has quite possibly the most overwrought death scene in the history of cinema. I speak, of course, of former walking punchline (and current walking punchline, but for different reasons) Randy Quaid's heroic sacrifice to shove his plane up the alien ship's....well, just go watch it. I can wait, it's on YouTube.
Are you back? Good. Notice anything about that scene in particular? I am not a professional screenwriter, I don't know if it's hard to craft the perfect dialogue for anally probing (or perhaps acting as a human catheter on) an alien spaceship, knowing full well that you're a goner. But I'm guessing a roomful of actual monkeys chained to typewriters would write more convincing "last hurrah" dialogue than what comes out of Mr. Quaid's mouth. Why stop at one cliché when you can use them all? Really, we're in no hurry to bring this alien craft down, have your moment, Mr. Quaid!
It is shitty filmmaking par excellence.
So while I see this generation's ID4, with Goldblum and Pullman and even, for some reason, Brent Spiner back in it (spoiler alert: I thought his character died in the original, but I'm not a Hollywood scriptwriter), I say "that's nice, but where's your Randy Quaid-esque character or moment?" By the way, I have zero interest in seeing the new one. I find that remakes or reboots or re-imaginings sometimes stretch the credibility factor and indeed rarely justify their existence (there are exceptions to this rule, of course. But they're few and far between). And while the internet (read: lonely men) was getting itself in a tizzy over an all-female Ghostbusters, nary a word seems to be said about a Quaid-less ID4 (if Spiner can come back, why not Quaid? Maybe his proctology exam of the alien ship granted him an extra life or two?). I will be that voice in the wilderness, then, that one brave soul asking the question that no one in their right mind would ask because I have a lot of time on my hands and it's stupid and pointless and less depressing to think about than our country's sick obsession with firearms.
I'll be more than happy to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom for this post, is what I'm saying.
Truly, in the history of cinema, in the history of chewing scenery, in the history of milking it for all it's worth, Randy Quaid in ID4's closing act cannot be beat. So maybe the new film won't even try. But where there's a will, there's a way. Nothing like a little elbow grease to get the job done. I'm coming, Elizabeth, and that's all she wrote. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the words of my generation, whatever...
I was in high school when the original Independence Day (also known as ID4, in an attempt to confuse people wondering where IDs 1-3 were, or maybe that's just me being silly) came out. I *think* I saw it during its original run, but I certainly saw it during what turned out to be the last of VHS's glory days (the late Nineties) on more than one occasion, and it sure seemed awesome at the time. Shit got blow'd up real good, and when you're a hormonal teenage boy that's what you went to movies to see (well, that and naked female chests, of which ID4 was bereft). Over time, as is often the case with things that we love when we're younger and stupider, I came to view ID4 as a cynical cash-grab by two directors who were clearly of the Michael Bay school of action shit (even if they pre-dated him or even inspired him, I lumped them in with Bay's amped-up uber-manly shitfests). This is not to say that ID4 is a bad movie; it's entertaining as hell when shit's getting blow'd up real good. But it's the alien invasion movie as popcorn thrill-ride, when more substantial and lasting alien movies (like Alien or The Thing, for instance) force us to confront more "realistic" instances of aliens among us (I use quotation marks because no one really knows how "reality" would be affected by contact with an alien species. My guess: we'd lose our shit).
Part of what makes me appreciate, to some extent, my own view of the film's faults is that it has quite possibly the most overwrought death scene in the history of cinema. I speak, of course, of former walking punchline (and current walking punchline, but for different reasons) Randy Quaid's heroic sacrifice to shove his plane up the alien ship's....well, just go watch it. I can wait, it's on YouTube.
Are you back? Good. Notice anything about that scene in particular? I am not a professional screenwriter, I don't know if it's hard to craft the perfect dialogue for anally probing (or perhaps acting as a human catheter on) an alien spaceship, knowing full well that you're a goner. But I'm guessing a roomful of actual monkeys chained to typewriters would write more convincing "last hurrah" dialogue than what comes out of Mr. Quaid's mouth. Why stop at one cliché when you can use them all? Really, we're in no hurry to bring this alien craft down, have your moment, Mr. Quaid!
It is shitty filmmaking par excellence.
So while I see this generation's ID4, with Goldblum and Pullman and even, for some reason, Brent Spiner back in it (spoiler alert: I thought his character died in the original, but I'm not a Hollywood scriptwriter), I say "that's nice, but where's your Randy Quaid-esque character or moment?" By the way, I have zero interest in seeing the new one. I find that remakes or reboots or re-imaginings sometimes stretch the credibility factor and indeed rarely justify their existence (there are exceptions to this rule, of course. But they're few and far between). And while the internet (read: lonely men) was getting itself in a tizzy over an all-female Ghostbusters, nary a word seems to be said about a Quaid-less ID4 (if Spiner can come back, why not Quaid? Maybe his proctology exam of the alien ship granted him an extra life or two?). I will be that voice in the wilderness, then, that one brave soul asking the question that no one in their right mind would ask because I have a lot of time on my hands and it's stupid and pointless and less depressing to think about than our country's sick obsession with firearms.
I'll be more than happy to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom for this post, is what I'm saying.
Truly, in the history of cinema, in the history of chewing scenery, in the history of milking it for all it's worth, Randy Quaid in ID4's closing act cannot be beat. So maybe the new film won't even try. But where there's a will, there's a way. Nothing like a little elbow grease to get the job done. I'm coming, Elizabeth, and that's all she wrote. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. In the words of my generation, whatever...
Friday, June 3, 2016
The Last Stand of the Heterosexual White Male (And Why That's a Good Thing)
Everywhere on the internet, it seems, people are getting angry and yelling at one another. And usually it's because of Donald Trump. I am not here to slam him any more than I already have (though have you tried buying any Trump Steaks lately?), but to point to a larger issue that I think is driving his surge to future Fuehrer-dom, if it can't be stopped. The issue I speak about, of course, is the death of political incorrectness.
Any time I hear someone say aloud "well, we all have to be politically correct now," what I really hear is "I can't call blacks/Muslims/Hispanics/Jews/fill-in-the-blank what I really want to call them anymore." This may strike some of you as unfair, but this is my blog. You want to complain about it, start your own. Anyway, it's no secret why The Great Combover One is currently leading the GOP over a cliff of non-relevance no matter what happens in November: white people be tripping, yo.
Specifically, white heterosexual males (of which I am a member, though I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it considering some of the company I have to keep).
During my TCTC days, we were told in Sociology that in twenty years, people of Mexican or Hispanic descent would be the majority in this country. Seeing as my last class at TCTC was twelve years ago, I'd say we're in the home stretch towards that goal being achieved. African-Americans may dominate our sports, music, and culture, but they're not a huge part of our overall population. And pretty soon, neither will we white folks be, at least in terms of dominance through sheer numbers.
All I can say is: thank fucking God.
For most of recorded history, people from the relatively small continent of Europe (and not even all of Europe; when was the last time thoughts of an Italian invasion stirred fear in anyone?) have kinda had the run of things, using their pale skin (from being so far from the sun, don't you know?) as some sort of indicator that they're better than anyone else (spoiler alert: we're not). From slavery to imperialism, colonialism to Colonial Williamsburg, we white men have had a lot to answer for, even if (as my family loves to remind me whenever I dare to be the only liberal in the room) some of us didn't have direct participation in ancient-history stuff (but here's the thing: that shit still has power over everything we do, and we don't acknowledge it at our peril). I think we white men have done some good things, to be sure: the Beatles, for one thing, and pizza. But that's an awful small amount of good to bring into the world when the balance is really scaled towards all the negative shit we've done, or has been done in our name. And it's not even stuff that we just did to "others." I'm pretty sure the Spanish Inquisition was more terrifying than anything Monty Python conceived of for the skit of the same name.
You'll notice I didn't say "we white people," because let's be honest: for most of history, women didn't mean shit to white men except as baby-makers and maybe mistresses when we got tired of making babies officially. Somehow giving you ladies the vote less than a hundred years ago means "we're good, right?" Considering how casually rape culture is taken by some of my fellow white men (most of them at Return of Kings), it's understandable that we are not, in fact, good.
So we (white men not named me) are scared of the coming loss of racial dominance, I guess. Tough shit, it's a thing and it's happening, and thank God for it. Someone else will be in charge now, as it should be. It might not happen this election cycle (hell, there may be enough crazy white people to elect a smooth-talking con artist to the highest office in the land; it's happened before), but it's coming, and soon. And we white men can be like Custer, kicking and screaming the whole way because our penis size is threatened. Or we can work with those communities that are rising up to dominate our country, and ensure that they know that we're allies, not enemies. This is a nation of immigrants, from all over the damn place. We white men have no special claim to being "American," not really.
But I'm guessing my friends who support Trump are going to hate this idea :-p
Any time I hear someone say aloud "well, we all have to be politically correct now," what I really hear is "I can't call blacks/Muslims/Hispanics/Jews/fill-in-the-blank what I really want to call them anymore." This may strike some of you as unfair, but this is my blog. You want to complain about it, start your own. Anyway, it's no secret why The Great Combover One is currently leading the GOP over a cliff of non-relevance no matter what happens in November: white people be tripping, yo.
Specifically, white heterosexual males (of which I am a member, though I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it considering some of the company I have to keep).
During my TCTC days, we were told in Sociology that in twenty years, people of Mexican or Hispanic descent would be the majority in this country. Seeing as my last class at TCTC was twelve years ago, I'd say we're in the home stretch towards that goal being achieved. African-Americans may dominate our sports, music, and culture, but they're not a huge part of our overall population. And pretty soon, neither will we white folks be, at least in terms of dominance through sheer numbers.
All I can say is: thank fucking God.
For most of recorded history, people from the relatively small continent of Europe (and not even all of Europe; when was the last time thoughts of an Italian invasion stirred fear in anyone?) have kinda had the run of things, using their pale skin (from being so far from the sun, don't you know?) as some sort of indicator that they're better than anyone else (spoiler alert: we're not). From slavery to imperialism, colonialism to Colonial Williamsburg, we white men have had a lot to answer for, even if (as my family loves to remind me whenever I dare to be the only liberal in the room) some of us didn't have direct participation in ancient-history stuff (but here's the thing: that shit still has power over everything we do, and we don't acknowledge it at our peril). I think we white men have done some good things, to be sure: the Beatles, for one thing, and pizza. But that's an awful small amount of good to bring into the world when the balance is really scaled towards all the negative shit we've done, or has been done in our name. And it's not even stuff that we just did to "others." I'm pretty sure the Spanish Inquisition was more terrifying than anything Monty Python conceived of for the skit of the same name.
You'll notice I didn't say "we white people," because let's be honest: for most of history, women didn't mean shit to white men except as baby-makers and maybe mistresses when we got tired of making babies officially. Somehow giving you ladies the vote less than a hundred years ago means "we're good, right?" Considering how casually rape culture is taken by some of my fellow white men (most of them at Return of Kings), it's understandable that we are not, in fact, good.
So we (white men not named me) are scared of the coming loss of racial dominance, I guess. Tough shit, it's a thing and it's happening, and thank God for it. Someone else will be in charge now, as it should be. It might not happen this election cycle (hell, there may be enough crazy white people to elect a smooth-talking con artist to the highest office in the land; it's happened before), but it's coming, and soon. And we white men can be like Custer, kicking and screaming the whole way because our penis size is threatened. Or we can work with those communities that are rising up to dominate our country, and ensure that they know that we're allies, not enemies. This is a nation of immigrants, from all over the damn place. We white men have no special claim to being "American," not really.
But I'm guessing my friends who support Trump are going to hate this idea :-p
Saturday, May 21, 2016
The Smiths, "The Queen Is Dead"
Last week I woke up one morning sure that, when I turned on the TV, the news networks would be breaking from their regular Trump coverage to announce the death of Queen Elizabeth II (or "Liza," as her friends call her). I can't explain why this certainty came over me, if it was part of some left-over dream residue or a psychic malevolency on my part. Obviously, when I did turn on the TV there was no such breaking news. But given the fact that Liza did just celebrate her 90th birthday on this planet, the odds are in my favor that such a day will occur sooner rather than later.
I don't like authority figures, especially those whose authority is just assumed and not earned (or "earned" in quotation marks). In a country where we're this close to electing a self-important billionaire (or so he says...I think Donnie's facing another bankruptcy, hence the making of America great again) or the wife of a former president (so she's had experience hanging around the White House), I seem to be in the minority of folks who feel this way. All the Bernie Bros convince me of is that they'd be liking Trump if he wasn't playing the bigot card. I don't know what to think about for the fall, I almost wish we'd lost the Revolution now.
Britain, once our landlord, is still a country that we look to with what even the most Anglophile among us would regard as a simpering inferiority complex. And why not? They've got centuries of culture to our two (though said culture is way more racist and sexist when you take a closer look at it and get past the sexy accents), they often times make better music, and nobody does tuberculosis-ridden female novelists quite like the UK. But they have an archaic and borderline stupid devotion to a family of inbreds whose only claim to legitimacy is "we have been and always will be better than you."
I remember getting up super-early in the morning on the day William and Kate got married. I am anything but a royalist, but I had a bad attack of what I later learned were gallstones, and I was up anyway writhing in pain so I figured I'd check it out. To hear the way people talk about the royal family, and the two kids born since and how they'll "inherit the throne" once Liza checks out (I guess Chuck isn't in line for it anymore? I didn't get the memo on that one), I feel like shouting "constitutional monarchy" at the top of my lungs. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Windsors are figureheads at this point. That is, they don't do anything but look pretty for the cameras and tourists. You know, Kardashians.
Maybe it's not so hard to understand why people are obsessed with them, then.
I came to loath the whole enterprise like countless American boys of my time: by reading John Lydon's autobiography Rotten. The once and future Sex Pistol unloads on the whole notion of inherited authority pretty well (my memory is hazy, but he did pen "God Save the Queen" so I feel I'm on good footing without having to refer to the memoir). What's more, about a dozen years later I stumbled across John Gardner's Grendel, which includes a paragraph that explains where royal "authority" gets off telling us mere mortals what to do (hint: it's similar to the whole "built another castle, that sank into the swamp" story from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). When it comes to the royals, there's an awful lot of wish fulfillment on the part of royal-watchers. Call it "crown envy" instead of penis envy, if you will. I don't understand it...unless, of course, I do.
You know how I mentioned the Pistols just now, and punk rock in general? That's my jam, frankly. I would love to travel back in time to around 1976 (when it was all getting started) right up to 1982 or so (Ian Curtis was dead, but punk was now "postpunk" or "New Wave" and just about to become ridiculous thanks to the New Romantics). So perhaps it's not all that weird to me how some people look to other cultures (and other timelines) to feel better about themselves. Growing up in a small town that I was convinced was devoid of culture, I looked at the world outside the confines of my town and wanted to be in that world (I was Ariel in The Little Mermaid, minus the ability to swim or the red hair). Looking at the wider world now, and how incredibly close we seem to be to some sort of apocalypse, I think maybe I was naïve back then. But I can be forgiven for it; I saw something attractive in a culture not my own and wanted to emulate it. It's not a sin (well, not until you start emulating Nazis and put people you don't like in camps, but that could never happen under any president, right?).
I thought, in my younger, more "radicalized" days, that when the Queen did throw off her mortal coil, I'd blast "The Queen Is Dead" at full volume. But the Queen is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as she is a figurehead (albeit a figurehead for a system that I still seem passionately opposed to, even though there's really no reason for me to still carry the punk-rock flag against the royals). In "The King's Speech," we even see her as a little girl, her daddy the guy who has to rally his country in the wake of Hitler's blitzkrieg. It's easy to forget that the figureheads we hate or love, at the end of the day, take a shit like the rest of us. That doesn't make our feelings any less valid, but it should regulate our behavior a little bit. So when Liza doffs her crazy hat one last time and exits stage left, I guess I'll try to take a minute to remember that she's somebody's mother/grandmother/great-grandmother. But after that moment, I still might queue up some Smiths or Sex Pistols. Because I'm human, too.
I don't like authority figures, especially those whose authority is just assumed and not earned (or "earned" in quotation marks). In a country where we're this close to electing a self-important billionaire (or so he says...I think Donnie's facing another bankruptcy, hence the making of America great again) or the wife of a former president (so she's had experience hanging around the White House), I seem to be in the minority of folks who feel this way. All the Bernie Bros convince me of is that they'd be liking Trump if he wasn't playing the bigot card. I don't know what to think about for the fall, I almost wish we'd lost the Revolution now.
Britain, once our landlord, is still a country that we look to with what even the most Anglophile among us would regard as a simpering inferiority complex. And why not? They've got centuries of culture to our two (though said culture is way more racist and sexist when you take a closer look at it and get past the sexy accents), they often times make better music, and nobody does tuberculosis-ridden female novelists quite like the UK. But they have an archaic and borderline stupid devotion to a family of inbreds whose only claim to legitimacy is "we have been and always will be better than you."
I remember getting up super-early in the morning on the day William and Kate got married. I am anything but a royalist, but I had a bad attack of what I later learned were gallstones, and I was up anyway writhing in pain so I figured I'd check it out. To hear the way people talk about the royal family, and the two kids born since and how they'll "inherit the throne" once Liza checks out (I guess Chuck isn't in line for it anymore? I didn't get the memo on that one), I feel like shouting "constitutional monarchy" at the top of my lungs. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Windsors are figureheads at this point. That is, they don't do anything but look pretty for the cameras and tourists. You know, Kardashians.
Maybe it's not so hard to understand why people are obsessed with them, then.
I came to loath the whole enterprise like countless American boys of my time: by reading John Lydon's autobiography Rotten. The once and future Sex Pistol unloads on the whole notion of inherited authority pretty well (my memory is hazy, but he did pen "God Save the Queen" so I feel I'm on good footing without having to refer to the memoir). What's more, about a dozen years later I stumbled across John Gardner's Grendel, which includes a paragraph that explains where royal "authority" gets off telling us mere mortals what to do (hint: it's similar to the whole "built another castle, that sank into the swamp" story from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). When it comes to the royals, there's an awful lot of wish fulfillment on the part of royal-watchers. Call it "crown envy" instead of penis envy, if you will. I don't understand it...unless, of course, I do.
You know how I mentioned the Pistols just now, and punk rock in general? That's my jam, frankly. I would love to travel back in time to around 1976 (when it was all getting started) right up to 1982 or so (Ian Curtis was dead, but punk was now "postpunk" or "New Wave" and just about to become ridiculous thanks to the New Romantics). So perhaps it's not all that weird to me how some people look to other cultures (and other timelines) to feel better about themselves. Growing up in a small town that I was convinced was devoid of culture, I looked at the world outside the confines of my town and wanted to be in that world (I was Ariel in The Little Mermaid, minus the ability to swim or the red hair). Looking at the wider world now, and how incredibly close we seem to be to some sort of apocalypse, I think maybe I was naïve back then. But I can be forgiven for it; I saw something attractive in a culture not my own and wanted to emulate it. It's not a sin (well, not until you start emulating Nazis and put people you don't like in camps, but that could never happen under any president, right?).
I thought, in my younger, more "radicalized" days, that when the Queen did throw off her mortal coil, I'd blast "The Queen Is Dead" at full volume. But the Queen is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as she is a figurehead (albeit a figurehead for a system that I still seem passionately opposed to, even though there's really no reason for me to still carry the punk-rock flag against the royals). In "The King's Speech," we even see her as a little girl, her daddy the guy who has to rally his country in the wake of Hitler's blitzkrieg. It's easy to forget that the figureheads we hate or love, at the end of the day, take a shit like the rest of us. That doesn't make our feelings any less valid, but it should regulate our behavior a little bit. So when Liza doffs her crazy hat one last time and exits stage left, I guess I'll try to take a minute to remember that she's somebody's mother/grandmother/great-grandmother. But after that moment, I still might queue up some Smiths or Sex Pistols. Because I'm human, too.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Conspiracy Theory: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman
Since his presidential campaign began with
an anti-Mexican soundbite that might have ended a lesser politician’s bid right
then and there, Donald Trump has baffled both the Republican establishment and
the political pundits on television who figured that this was all an elaborate
con job by the real-estate mogul to expand his brand and nothing more. So far,
the Trump hate-filled balloon has only rose higher and higher, and the oxygen
to the lungs of his critics seems increasingly thin. You’ve probably heard or
posited conspiracy theories to explain the unexplainable Trump juggernaut, so I
humbly present my own: Donald Trump is Andy Kaufman.
I’ll just pause here while those in the
reading audience who don’t know who Kaufman was look him up on Wikipedia…
Okay, when I said that about Trump being
Kaufman, there are one of two ways that you, the reader, could take it: 1.) I’m
being facetious about Trump *actually* being Kaufman, a notorious performance
artist who most assuredly passed away in 1984 from a rare form of lung cancer.
I’m merely suggesting that Trump has perhaps captured the same anarchic spirit
that Kaufman used to disrupt professional wrestling (as the “Intergender World
Champion”) and unleashed it on the modern-day GOP. Or 2.) I am sincerely suggesting
that Trump and Kaufman (who, let’s face it, you’ve never seen in the same room
together at the same time) are one and the same, and that Kaufman is playing
the obnoxious “Trump” character to perfection in his greatest role yet.
What if I told you I was leaning towards
number 2?
No, hear me out: When he allegedly “died”
in 1984 (at the height of the backlash from his Intergender Wrestling career,
mind you, having turned heel to battle Jerry “The King” Lawler and supposedly
suffered a broken neck and a public meltdown on David Letterman’s old NBC show
in the process), Kaufman had pulled so many hoaxes and performances that left
his audience’s heads scratching that no one believed it. Every few years
(especially since the evolution of the internet), rumors persist that Kaufman
is poised to “return” to the world at large after a significant time out of the
public eye. Rumors of his return were especially persistent in 1999, upon the
eve of the film Man In the Moon (a
Kaufman biopic starring fellow comedian and performance artist Jim Carrey…wait,
he was serious about that whole “anti-vaccine” thing?), and in 2004, the
twentieth anniversary of his “death.”
As a Kaufman fan, I do admit that I wanted
to believe that Kaufman perhaps had faked his death all those years ago, and
that he would indeed return. But my more rational, less conspiracy-minded self
was inclined to believe that no one would put their family through what Andy’s
family suffered (and indeed, they were skeptical about his fatal diagnosis when
it first came to light; they had put up with his fantasies and performances for
far longer than the general public had). Still, when friends posted articles
purporting to Kaufman sightings in Wal-Mart parking lots (perhaps akin to
Elvis, Kaufman’s idol, who seems to haunt Waffle Houses nearly forty years
after *his* alleged passing), I felt a twinge of “what if,” if only for a
moment.
Perhaps to better understand my conceit
that Trump and Kaufman are one in the same, it’s important to point out that
Kaufman the man was universally loved and treasured by his close associates
because, no matter how insane his antics, he was a deeply funny and warm human
being, full of kindness. No one’s ever accused Trump of having a soul, to my
knowledge. But Kaufman could go dark, for sure, whether as the wrestling heel
or as his most beloved-or-hated alter ego, Tony Clifton. In this role, Kaufman
got to play the world’s worst lounge lizard, a nightclub “entertainer” who got
to be as cruel, crass, and boorish as Kaufman was sweet and kind in real life.
Sometimes to throw the audience, Kaufman would appear onstage while Clifton was
performing, causing fans who “knew” that Clifton was Kaufman in heavy make-up
and garish Seventies garb to pause and reconsider. In those instances, it was
actually Kaufman’s best friend and partner-in-crime Bob Zmuda beneath the
distinctive Clifton wig and jowls. But the audience never knew that.
Now, I realize it’s crazy to suggest that
Donald John Trump is not a real person at all but a creation of a talented
performer whose most memorable characters either endeared themselves to the
audience (Foreign Man/Latka on “Taxi”) or drove that same audience to hiss and
boo and finally hate him (the wrestling champ, Clifton). But if you put aside
the facts for a moment (or “facts”), doesn’t it seem plausible? After all, how
do we know that Trump is who he says he is (son of a real-estate mogul, a mogul
himself, a graduate of the Wharton Business School, etc.)? Couldn’t it all be a
cleverly constructed ploy by Kaufman, long underground in the guise of this
“Trump” (doesn’t the name along suggest it’s a pun on something, or else a
too-real-to-be-real name, like that of fictional presidents in movies?) and
finally ready to re-enter the public life? Or hasn’t he been playing Trump
since 1984, if not earlier? Consider Trump’s facial appearance; you’d swear
that could be just a really poorly-rendered latex mask, if you didn’t know any
better. But what if you do know better? Why would his skin be so orange? And that
hair, it’s obviously a cheap wig, perhaps clamped in place Joe Dirt-style to
keep Kaufman/Trump’s brain from exposure to the elements?
My hypothesis (and keep in mind, like most
conspiracy theorists, I only use scientific terms to make my outlandish claims
appear legitimate): Sometime in the fall of 1983, Donald Trump as we knew of
him before then dies in a deliciously ironic way for a rich asshole (like, say,
actually trying to dive into a gold-coin pool like Scrooge McDuck and breaking
his neck), before the news gets out Andy Kaufman gets ahold of this information
somehow. Let’s say…carrier pigeon. No, Illuminati. Yes, every conspiracy
theorist’s favorite bugaboo, who control everything, they *arrange* for Trump
to die so that Kaufman (who can’t get work after the fall-out from his
wrestling-heel days) can step into a new role. It’s Tony Clifton writ large,
and he and Zmuda get to work. But they can’t have Kaufman known to inhabit the
role, so they concoct the “rare lung cancer” diagnosis so that Kaufman (who was
not a smoker) can suitably “die” with a cloud of suspicion over him to distract
fans from the sudden re-emergence of Donald J. Trump from, say, several months
of vacation in Antarctica. So when Kaufman’s “death” is announced in May 1984,
Donald Trump can slip back into American consciousness and no one bats an eye.
Over the rest of the decade, “Trump” becomes louder, more obnoxious, declares
bankruptcy (actually a front so Kaufman can finally get actual surgery to “look
like” Trump, he’s been wearing the latex mask all this time and it’s starting
to show), bounces back, has numerous public scandals, takes to social media
with the instincts of a tween Taylor Swift fan, and finally emerges in 2015,
thirty-one years after his “death,” to destroy the GOP from the inside, because
it will be the greatest Andy Kaufman performance of all time!
I suppose you have a better theory…?
Saturday, August 8, 2015
The Semester Ahead (A Plan That Will Surely Be Revised Often)
One last week between now and the start of the fall semester at the university, which means I will also be teaching Composition to the young'uns who are coming in as freshmen. I really haven't even thought about the classes I'm signed up to take, to be honest (and for some reason, I signed up for four classes, I may re-think that by drop time). No, it's been all about thinking about me standing in front of a room, telling people "I'll be your teacher for this semester, and I will not tolerate any having of fun or joke-telling. I will run this classroom with an iron fist, you hear me?"
Though in my own experience as a student, such teachers rarely were memorable or that good at their jobs. No, the teachers I liked and from whom I learned the most managed to balance out discipline and joviality. If you messed up something in their class, you didn't fear their loud yelling so much as their lack of any yelling, just a stern look of disapproval and disappointment. I hope to emulate that in my own teaching this year. But if I have to, I will lower the mother-f*&%-ing boom on those young punks.
Some things I hope to not do or not do as much:
1.) Be online - a simple look at my activity log on Facebook for any day over the past three months is enough to shame me into considering rehab...even as I type this up and plan on posting it on FB. I never said I was perfect. I did cut back on online "killing time" shit last year with my school work, and I imagine my students would prefer it if I placed their work over any time I could be spending trading jokes with friends online. It helps that I don't have internet at my place, though I do have a TV, which leads me to number 2
2.) Watch TV - this is helped by the fact that a lot of my shows are off the air or just on nights where it'd be far better for me to sleep. Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show, for one (though I for one welcome our new fake-news anchor who is also named Trevor), Colbert being on the Late Show now also. I love The Nightly Show, and @midnight, but my schedule is thus: Monday, Wednesday and Friday I got to be up and ready to go to teach at eight in the morning. So no late nights Tuesdays or Thursdays, and it wouldn't hurt me to get to bed earlier the rest of the week. Yes, there's this thing called DVR, no I don't have it. I've over-indulged on TV this summer (good and bad), there really are fewer and fewer things for me to get excited about (I refuse to watch NBC after the way they shat all over Community, for instance).
3.) Stay up late - I think if I'm "staying up late" on a night where I'm not planning on getting up at five the next morning, it had better be because I'm working on something for one of my classes or working on something I've assigned my students and which they have turned in and are expecting a grade on. Because few college students are pacified with the "sticker for participation" tactic anymore.
4.) Read for fun - I've overindulged this summer, which is good. A lot of the "reading for fun" became, either by design or by accident, reading-for-my-creative-thesis, and I've already got a pretty hefty list of things that I could say inspired me directly or indirectly with whatever shape my final thesis ends up being. I'll still need the occasional trashy cash-in book about "stupid things" like sports or celebrities behaving badly, but I hope to limit that.
5.) Eat crappy food - my waistline expanded over the first two semesters of grad school, and I was all set to start getting up early and walking around Sertoma, as well as cutting back on the obvious crap I ate. But then I forgot to set my alarm the first full day off from school, and it's been that way ever since. I hope to have time to do the bare minimum of exercise, but cutting back on terrible food (in that it's terrible for you, not terrible to eat) would help immensely.
Now, having said all that: plans tend to change once they meet reality, and I imagine many of those things will falter when confronted with whatever reality springs up. But I know this going in, and I know that I don't want to let anyone down, least of all my students who put work into their class assignments (I would hope, anyway). I volunteered for the early shift, mostly because I figured I'd have an easier time of it with parking (I hope, anyway) but also because I figure it's best to get the teaching out of the way early in the day, like going third or fourth in a speech class. I hope so, anyway. There's a whole lot of hope in this, I guess. Teaching is one of those things where you never know how you'll be at it until you try it. And I'm about to get my call-up in a little over a week's time.
Hopefully I don't break a leg literally
Though in my own experience as a student, such teachers rarely were memorable or that good at their jobs. No, the teachers I liked and from whom I learned the most managed to balance out discipline and joviality. If you messed up something in their class, you didn't fear their loud yelling so much as their lack of any yelling, just a stern look of disapproval and disappointment. I hope to emulate that in my own teaching this year. But if I have to, I will lower the mother-f*&%-ing boom on those young punks.
Some things I hope to not do or not do as much:
1.) Be online - a simple look at my activity log on Facebook for any day over the past three months is enough to shame me into considering rehab...even as I type this up and plan on posting it on FB. I never said I was perfect. I did cut back on online "killing time" shit last year with my school work, and I imagine my students would prefer it if I placed their work over any time I could be spending trading jokes with friends online. It helps that I don't have internet at my place, though I do have a TV, which leads me to number 2
2.) Watch TV - this is helped by the fact that a lot of my shows are off the air or just on nights where it'd be far better for me to sleep. Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show, for one (though I for one welcome our new fake-news anchor who is also named Trevor), Colbert being on the Late Show now also. I love The Nightly Show, and @midnight, but my schedule is thus: Monday, Wednesday and Friday I got to be up and ready to go to teach at eight in the morning. So no late nights Tuesdays or Thursdays, and it wouldn't hurt me to get to bed earlier the rest of the week. Yes, there's this thing called DVR, no I don't have it. I've over-indulged on TV this summer (good and bad), there really are fewer and fewer things for me to get excited about (I refuse to watch NBC after the way they shat all over Community, for instance).
3.) Stay up late - I think if I'm "staying up late" on a night where I'm not planning on getting up at five the next morning, it had better be because I'm working on something for one of my classes or working on something I've assigned my students and which they have turned in and are expecting a grade on. Because few college students are pacified with the "sticker for participation" tactic anymore.
4.) Read for fun - I've overindulged this summer, which is good. A lot of the "reading for fun" became, either by design or by accident, reading-for-my-creative-thesis, and I've already got a pretty hefty list of things that I could say inspired me directly or indirectly with whatever shape my final thesis ends up being. I'll still need the occasional trashy cash-in book about "stupid things" like sports or celebrities behaving badly, but I hope to limit that.
5.) Eat crappy food - my waistline expanded over the first two semesters of grad school, and I was all set to start getting up early and walking around Sertoma, as well as cutting back on the obvious crap I ate. But then I forgot to set my alarm the first full day off from school, and it's been that way ever since. I hope to have time to do the bare minimum of exercise, but cutting back on terrible food (in that it's terrible for you, not terrible to eat) would help immensely.
Now, having said all that: plans tend to change once they meet reality, and I imagine many of those things will falter when confronted with whatever reality springs up. But I know this going in, and I know that I don't want to let anyone down, least of all my students who put work into their class assignments (I would hope, anyway). I volunteered for the early shift, mostly because I figured I'd have an easier time of it with parking (I hope, anyway) but also because I figure it's best to get the teaching out of the way early in the day, like going third or fourth in a speech class. I hope so, anyway. There's a whole lot of hope in this, I guess. Teaching is one of those things where you never know how you'll be at it until you try it. And I'm about to get my call-up in a little over a week's time.
Hopefully I don't break a leg literally
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