La Catholique

Sometimes I remember my perspective from, say, a year ago, and when I do, I realize I was so incredibly stupid that I’m amazed I was able to function.  Does this ever stop? 

the older I get the more I look like a man who should be buying black market vodka in Czechoslovakia in 1983 and it’s just so depressing on a variety of levels, not least of which is I am not a dude.

The usual little insults

Listening to this week’s On The Media podcast.  Usual hosts are off, it is instead being hosted by NPR sports guy Mike Pesca.  So of course he does a few stories on the sports media. 

One of which is the baseball writers selecting the baseball hall of fame players, and how they are handling that decision in the face of steriod use. 

At one point, Pesca says that if a reported secret list of 100 steroid users becomes public in the future, and any of those users have been put into the hall of fame, how would the writers feel? 

This was not said with the kind of seriousness used to discuss, say, the disputed FL results of 2000 elections.   

But it was also not said with any kind of acknowledgement of the inherent frivolity of a) a hall of fame, b) a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living, c) a bunch of writers who write about a game selecting people for a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living, d) a bunch of writers who write about a game selecting people for a hall of fame for people who play a game for a living and who may or may not have injected themselves with drugs that make their penises smaller. 

So here’s the thing: I don’t care about sports.  It is the one topic in the universe that when I hear people talk about it, I feel no itchy need to go read some “Sports for Dummies.”  Normally, any unfamiliar proper noun in an article or podcast sends me to an internet search, but I do not Wikipedia the names mentioned in sports-related human-interest stories.  I have no idea who Poor Little Tink Tink is in real life and have, for me, a stunning complete lack of curiosity to find out.  

That said, I hold no ill will or scorn towards people who DO care about sports. I think that’s totally cool. 

I admire, in a dispassionate way, people who train their bodies and have that kind of discipline, and think being interested in it, like any hobby, is a nice way for people to focus on something besides themselves.  Beyond that, I have no positive or negative moral judgment on either liking or being disinterested in sports. 

These things are just things that exist that you like or don’t care about it and the world keeps on turning. 

So as an outsider listening to this, it suddenly struck me that this would how comic it would inherently be to have anyone talking about FASHION with this level of seriousness on this kind of program.  Not to say that there are not fashion awards and fashion shows, but the idea of a bunch of journalists wondering about the historic impact of some kind of “Best Of” list would have years down the road could only possibly play on a show like this as completely absurd. 

Because in general, outside the fashion world, fashion people are made out to be totally ridiculous when being equally serious about what they care about.  And why is that?

I mean, what are these two things but just some things human beings do?  Sports is (are?) human beings disciplining their bodies and competing with and against each other in games of strength, agility and other physical attributes.  Fashion is human beings meeting a basic need, expressing themselves through a particular form, working in creative collaboration with other human beings, and often personally developing a particular skill or craft. 

And I realize this is not particularly deep or illuminating, but listening to this, this struck me - the disparity between how interest in sports is portrayed (reverence, noble, even obsessiveness is given a sort of chuckling pass) and interest in fashion is portrayed (height of meaningless frivolity, shallowness, uselessness, idiocy) - and I JUST GOT THE USUAL AMOUNT OF MAD.

“his mastery of gesture”

from the wikipedia on Baryshnikov. 

For the past two weeks I have been completely obsessed with watching and re-watching Katt Williams’ routines.  It’s not even the content of the jokes, it’s the way he uses his body and his voice, it feels like music and dance.

Tonight on TBTL, a segment on hit songs from flop movies brought up “Say You Say Me” from “White Nights,” a favorite from childhood.  I watched the below clip and a clip of “Push Comes to Shove,” a video I watched quite a lot as a kid. (My sister was in ballet.) 

Read the wikipedia, see that phrase, lightbulb. 

I feel like this is what I need to develop as a writer.  Always the explaining with me, the detail.  They have their place, and you don’t throw out one thing just because you get a wild hair about another. 

But the gesture, right, the gesture! 

I have always loved cartoons, how much action is conveyed with the fewest of pen lines.  This is what I am responding to in Katt Williams and Baryshnikov.  The gesture!  Something to think about/work on.

the uniform lack of interest in what I produce isn’t going to stop me from producing it

Other than the secret blog (and the other secret blog)…

…I generally try to keep my Andy Rooney internet griping to a minimum because you know rantings, ramblings, musings.

But sometimes I simply cannot contain the righteous indignation and now is one of those times.  Here are some things I could do without.  The first two are related.

1. Usage of fonts that look like how people wrote on denim binders in the 1980’s.

2. The current commercial ubiquity of the musical equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Why?  Why would I care? Why on earth would anyone care?  Twee-ification, that’s why, Buddy.  It’s just so g-d twee out there lately and sometimes it just makes me want to chew tobacco.

Also when you are clearly the target market for something, but the marketers don’t get you, you can feel it.  There is a palpable disingenuousness to it, the manipulating hand is pushing a little too hard.

But it’s not just forced tweeness that is bugging me. On the opposite end of the spectrum:

3. Kneejerk vulgarity lauded as style.  I first started really noticing this when I saw Anthony Bourdain last summer. Now don’t get me wrong, I like Bourdain and I like food people, but the way the audience tittered everytime he said a swear! made me wonder if they’d been locked in an isolation tank with only NPR piped in the rest of the time. 

Anyway, after the Bourdain show, yada yada yada Baader-Meinhof, I’m seeing this more and more.  ”Fuck” as an ipso facto punchline.  (And not just where one expects it, i.e., lowest common denominator culture, where, actually, sometimes it DOES work as an actual ipso facto punchline in that context. No, I am referring specifically to people who should care about words falling prey to the same troglodytic syndrome.)

And while tweeness annoys me, nothing drives me to an immediate homicidal rage like self-satisfied laziness in writing, and nothing drives me to an immediate multiple-homicidal rage like laziness in writing being rewarded.  It’s rather Salieri of me, I realize, but I promise it annoys me even when I see it in a writer who has less of a following than I do.