Joe Simpson Has a Killer Sense of Humor

After watching Jessica Simpson "duh" her way to superstardom, I was beginning to think that she was a rare genius of Machiavellian mastery. Not only did she make people care about her entirely boring songs, but she also managed to revive the career of a fading 98 Degrees pretty boy - no insubstantial task.

Lately I've been interested (somewhat posthumously) in Ashlee Simpson's SNL debacle last fall. I watched the video and read the story, and thought, "This is too good to be true." And then it occurred to me: it isn't true! Lightning does not strike in the same place twice like that. Ashlee Simpson pretty much did the one thing that she could have done to take her out of her sister's shadow.

What is the common denominator between Ashlee and Jessica's success? Besides vapidity (which, by the way, was executed with commendable originality each time), it's Joe, their father and manager. I cannot believe that everyone in the country except the Simpson family has this deep understanding of the American public's love for travesty. Surely the manager, if anyone, has his finger on that pulse; what sets Joe apart was that he had enough of a sense of humor to capitalize on it.

At every step, Ashlee did the very the thing that would take matters to their worst possible pitch. First, she gave that Lucky interview denouncinng lip-synchers and swearing that she would never do that - a highly fortunate coincidence, in light of things. Then, when the vocal track was exposed on SNL, she did a "hoe down" and walked off stage, instead of ignoring the glitch and finishing the song she was supposed to do. Then, at the end of the show, when she didn't have to say anything at all, she pipes up and blames the band - an excuse that is both tacky and nonsensical. Her band doesn't play vocals, she does. Finally, in the aftermath, she pokes fun at herself in ways that are entirely unfunny.

Damage control in the bizarro world!

I guess it's sad that Joe is willing to make a joke out of his family for fame and fortune, but this, I think, does not cancel out his rapier wit. He must be laughing his way to the bank, even as we speak. As for Ashlee, she is now bigger than ever, and all on her own terms.

Hegemonists Just Don't Get It

I was eating dinner at Whole Foods tonight when this 54-year-old white man who works in venture capitalism/pharmaceuticals asked if he could share my table. I said sure. A little later a high school girl (white) solicited our opinion about the recent gender slur that the Harvard president made about women doing more poorly in math and sciences.

The man said he thought the faculty's response was unfortunate because it would prevent any real research in the field of genetic gender capabilities for fear of being politically incorrect. I disagreed and said that any possible outcome from such a study inevitably would lead to no good at all, at best only reinforcing crippling stereotypes. Suppose we find that women are genetically designed to be worse at math (which is itself problematic because then there's no room to say that SOME women are better at math than SOME men)? So fucking what? The solution lies in leveling the field, not in justifying why the status quo is okay even if it isn't fair. I mentioned that for hundreds of years, white people believed that black people were genetically more suited for working in the malarial conditions of the cotton fields. Does this mean that black people should go on picking cotton and contracting malaria? Of course not.

To this the pharmaceuticals man said that we have to be methological in our sciences, and pursue knowledge even if it is socially backward or politically incorrect. I said that was sheer navel gazing; the only person it would benefit is Assistant Professor X who needs to break some ground in order to get tenure, while for the rest of the world, it would accomplish nothing progressive. "You mean socially progressive?" the pharmaceuticals man scoffed. No, asswipe, it isn't intellectually progressive either, since the results are already predetermined: if one begins a study with the assumption that women are worse at math than men, chances are, one will find that women are worse at math than men.

The high-school brat then favored us with her opinion. that everything could be justified by science. Clearly, her PAHS history class hasn't gotten to the chapter on Nazi ideology and rhetoric yet.

Yes, I understand that in theory, science always sounds fine and good. But I happen to know that most Asian people don't give a rat's ass that they're supposed to be good at math and do well in school. It doesn't change the fact that they had to work hard to learn the things they did. Why appeal to "science" (assuming you accept this arbitrary and noncomprehensive gender/racial data collecting as a science) when it yields belittling and demeaning conclusions - and furthermore, when the solutions can be found more effectively elsewhere?

Moses Pounds

"Found art."

Coffee Talk - the Pastoral

Last week, I gave a presenation for my Hellenistic Poetry seminar, and I embarrassed myself by taking my editor's word on a subject that turned out to be in much dispute. The subject was this: shepherds in antiquity sang songs in a competitive forum. When my editor made this claim, I didn't bat an eyelash; I assumed he had good reason for saying it, and then I extrapolated the evidence to hypothesize that the speech-giving contest in one of Plato's dialogues might have been based on this pastoral institution.

The problem, Prof. Susan S pointed out, is that we have no way of knowing what shepherds did. Presumably, they spent all their time in ISOLATION, tending their flocks. The pastoral, after all, is in many ways an antithesis to city life. Something like Aphrodite and Anchises' encounter would be best facilitated by the shepherd being alone. Thus we have, on the one hand, the image of the lone shepherd, and on the other hand, the image of the social shepherd - the shepherd who frolicks about in the countryside in the company of many other shepherds, composing songs to be performed competitively for the prize of a silver cup or a pretty girl (whom we must believe has leisure enough to do no work all day, even in these times of substinance-level economies).

But opposing this practical conception of shepherds is the overwhelming, crosscultural testimony that shepherds were indeed singers. Hesiod, a self-identified shepherd, is the first Greek example (though he sang alone, not competitively). Shepherd-bards also figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, shepherds in Greek tragedy are rarely anti-social people. If anything, they seem to be MORE hip to what's going on, as their function usually is to relay messages.

On top of all this, we must remember that the pastoral genre, as a rule, almost never has anything to do with the reality of the countryside. Scholars today are discovering that whenever there is a romanticization of rustic life, it is usually motivated by a political statement, concerning the land being somehow threatened.

So talk among yourselves. I'll give you a topic: the idea of the singing, social shepherd was neither historically accurate nor entirely fictional. Discuss! There, I feel better now.

Mighty Aphrodite

An old favorite.

[Lenny and his five-year-old son are shooting hoops.]
Lenny: Do you ever think about what you want to be when you grow up, Max?
Max: Ummm...I don't know. Maybe an interior decorator?
Lenny [stops, takes away the ball]: What?
Max: Just kidding!

Curiosity: that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer.

Last Night at Half Moon Bay

Last night I went to Half Moon Bay to see Prof. Susanna B and Grad Student Brett R play rock n roll music. SB is what I want to be when I grow up; she looks like a rock star, she plays bass like a rock star, and her Classical scholarship is rock star.

Cameron's Pub on a Thursday night: is that what a social life means when your older? There's something depressing and disquiting and indecorous about dads acting like butterflies.

For example, there was one dad-aged man who entangled me in a conversation last night, before I even knew what hit me. He asked me if I've ever been to this town 90 miles east called L___. Before I could say Jimminy Cricket, he plunged into this long account of how that land was settled by Black Sea Cassocks: Cassocks relocated to the Black Sea by Catherine the Great to be a buffer between her and Napoleon's oncoming army (I know; WTF), and then relocated again to Dakota by Napoleon. My interlocutor's grandfather was one of these Napoleonic soldiers, he said, which would mean my interlocutor was like 160 years old. Fuckin A. Why do people tell me these stupid yarns?

I'm greatly indebted to James C for rescuing me. If he hadn't strolled by when he did, I may still be sitting there like a jerk, cursing myself.

I Knew It First

I'm not going to name names because the last thing I want is to make my blog a tabloid. Suffice to say that there is a celebrity couple that broke up recently; they've given me one bit of insight on relationships.

I knew they were going to break up long before it happened. I saw on a tabloid show a while back that for an anniversary present, the husband bought the wife cooking lessons. The tabloid crooned over how romantic that was, while I sputtered in disbelief. It was NOT romantic. The celebrity wife could definitely afford her own cooking lessons if she so wanted, so the present was more or less an insult on her cooking abilities. Whether the husband was trying to make a statement, or whether it was just a douchebag mistake, the gift presaged trouble in paradise. Utilitarian presents are risky like that.

We're a Happy Family

I'm listening to the Ramones right now, on my new Christmas present iPod. It's awesome! Its clarity of sound has allowed me to pick up on something just now that I hadn't noticed before.

During the out-tro of "We're a Happy Family," there's this pastiche of conversations, like a bunch of bitching and fighting. There's one voice that comes out more clearly than the others, the closer you get to the end: it's the classic Ramones moron "pinhead" persona, except here, I think he's supposed to be the asshole dad who lies on a sweat-stained couch all day scratching himself. Among the things he says are: "What's in it for me? Hey, where are my socks? Where are my underwear?" Well...have you noticed that one of the first things you can hear him saying is, "What is minimalism?"

Whoa! I mean, what a multi-layered character! It knocked my socks off.

Lucky Aquarius!

I like to read the Onion a lot. This is a somewhat new interest for me, but I'm enamored by it all, including the personals. A few days ago there was a Featured Personal of the Day that cracked me up. For the question, "[blank] is sexy, [blank] is sexier," this one guy responded: "Smart is sexy, smarter is sexier." Oh, mercy!

I also got a kick out of this week's horoscopes. The one for Aquarius goes: "You don't see why everyone puts such a premium on listening to others. It's obviously better to use that time to decide what you'll say next."

Very nice.

Courtly Love in Pulp Fiction

I had this thought a long, long time ago, back when I was taking George Brown's Middle English lit class, that the Mia Wallace/Vincent Vega segment of Pulp Fiction follows the courtly love paradigm. A vassal in love with his lord's lady. More universally, an ordinary dude longing for an unattainable love. Anyways, it occurred to me a while back to look up if anyone else - ie someone with more authority than me - had the same idea. It turns out that there is. Google search Pulp Fiction and courtly love, and I think the first hit you'll get is this essay by two professors, one from Wesleyan and the other from Dickinson, about how medieval this movie is. More medieval than the ass of the soon-to-be-dead hillbilly rapist.

It's a pretty interesting essay, one that makes a lot of points I hadn't even thought of: like how all of Marcellus' relationships with his thugs are knightly, and how homosocial bonds are usually stronger ties of loyalty between a lord and a vassal than, say, the courtly love bond exemplified by the Marcellus-Mia-Vincent triangle. The one point I thought was too narrowly construed was when they said that Vincent and Mia have metaphorical sex, when Vincent plunges the adrenaline shot - "dripping suggestively" - into Mia's heart - marked with a big fat red magic marker. True, but I don't think this is all. Rather, I believe this scene is a reworking of the Renaissance motif that sex and death are somehow equivalent. There's a lot that can be said about the psychological connection between sex and death, and probably said already by some Renaissance scholar; but I think this is the point that must be examined here. At the basic level, it's clear the connection is working, because the moment of intimacy and guilt for Mia and Vincent is when Mia almost dies. But why should death substitute sex? That's the really provocative question, the one that both drives me nuts and and tugs my heartstrings.

It's such a touching scene when Vincent and Mia say goodnight, and as she is walking away from him, Vincent blows her a kiss. We understand immediately that Vincent loves her more now than ever. But why? What did they just experience, and why was it so powerful? The impotent ache.

The medieval solution to the courtly love paradox, chastity and denial, never was very convincing to me. The Renaissance ending seems more fitting.

Frank Furter and the Hot Dogs

If this rock n roll group still exists, or if they were any good, I would dig them a lot. Pun, sexual innuendo, and the early sixties doo-wop vibe that drips with teenage romance and rebellion - what more could you want? I guess a teeny bit of dumbness; but Frank has that as well.

If you've ever seen my facebook profile, you'll notice that my interests are as follows: surfing, online shopping, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Andrew WK, Cheap Trick, androgynous men, and NPR.

Cheap Trick is a temporary thing. It will rotate with other hobbies, such as Luke Perry in 1992's Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, or ballet, or the OC, or whatever else. NPR is relatively new. Anyways, I warn you now because I suspect much of my blog material will be drawn from these sources.

For example, I had a dream the other night that I was married to Andrew WK. Now, I may be obsessed with the man, true; but believe me when I say that I was surprised to have that dream. I love Andrew WK for his high energy and positive attitude, not for his sexiness or anything. It never would have occurred to me to have fantasies about him. Does one fantasize about Kermit the Frog? No.

Nevertheless, the dream put an interesting spin on everything. When I woke up, I felt compelled to read his journal on andrewwk.com...and guess what? I found one of the answers I was looking for:

"The way it works is clear: love is love - and love will remain love despite loss and hardship - love will remain love when a person is born - love remains love at the moment of death and until the end of time - love remains love even in the lowest moment and the highest euphoria - love remains love through and through - regardless."

Wow! The dude's a wise man. I needed to be reminded about all that, because I was phasing into this anger and bafflement at myself for being in love with a monster in such senseless and pathetic circumstances as only a crazy person would endure. Not that I've ruled out the possibility of being mentally ill; in fact, I just made an appointment to see a therapist next week. Anyways, the point is that Andrew WK's post gave me hope that maybe it was hubristic of me to try to stop feeling the way I was feeling. Maybe it's not my fault, and maybe even it has nothing to do with me, like cosmically.

The most interesting thing that came out of this, though, is that my non-sexual crush on Andrew WK has kind of become a sexual crush.

I'm falling asleep, so I'll add one more thing before I sign out. This is actually the real reason I needed to sign up for a blog, because it fucking annoyed me. I was listening last week to a program on NPR about the prospect of negotiations between Israel and Palestine. Good program, NPR, but populated with the kind of nerds that can only be described by means of antonym: savvy. The commentator said that Abbas was being a real cool player, that he was getting in touch with his inner "Gonzo" - of course, he meant to say Fonzie, otherwise it would make no sense. Since when was GONZO the posterboy for cool?! He's a muppet! And then the commentator kind of liked his analogy, because he kept on using it over and over and OVER again. I just about lost it. I screamed at my radio, and threatened violence.