Okay, so I feel like I should have something coherent to contribute to vegetarianism discussion, seeing as how I’ve been a vegetarian since I was twelve (although I do eat fish, making my claim to vegetarianism shaky in many eyes). I’ve dealt with and contemplated many of those issues, including the strange hostility that merely saying “No thanks, I don’t eat meat,” tends to produce. However, I feel like I need to take a little more time before saying something…which segues nicely into my theme for the post, which is that I often find myself behind the times, pop-culture or literary-culture wise. I feel like my response-time functions just a little too slowly for this culture of ours sometimes.

Perhaps it’s my disinclination to seem like a bandwagon jumper, or simply laziness, or a superstitious tendency to let books and bands and movies and TV shows drift into my life, rather than taking a more pro-active approach, but I often find myself enthusing about something long after the cultural moment has peaked. Someone once pointed out that my bookshelf by my bed was full of “big books” from the 90s, as apparently I can only enjoy the literary bestsellers of 1998 in 2007.

It’s the same with music. Albums I just bought: Kanye West’s “Graduation Day”; Modest Mouse’s “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”; Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky”; Blonde Redhead’s “23.” Good choices all, according to me, but these albums have been out for awhile, and it’s long past the point where everyone was discussing and enthusing over them.

This means that when I’m in the stage of “Oh my god, have you listened to this album/read this book/seen this movie/watched this TV show it’s amazing” I often have no one to gush with, as everyone else is kind of over it. The reaction tends to be, “Oh yeah. Duh.” I just watched all of last years Oscar movies last year. I finally got around to watching the show “Extras” — a show I first heard of when it was nominated for a bunch of awards and I was like, “Extras? What the fuck is that show?”

And the truth is, the joke is more often than not on me, because the thing that everyone raves about often ends up being quite good. Sure, there’s are plenty of books/movies/albums etc. that get puffed up by hype, but my passive inclination to distrust anything that “everyone else likes” often amounts to cutting off my nose to spite my face. And weird as it sounds, I’ve decided I need to be a more active consumer of culture. Instead of reading about stuff, thinking “that sounds interesting, but I don’t want to buy it just to be up on things,” and making no further effort, I’m going to go out and track it down. More contemporary books, more live shows, more movies, more interesting television.

Oh wait…all that stuff costs money. Another factor is my cultural apathy.

But how does this tie back to Radiohead? I’ll wrap it altogether for you. As everyone else in the world knows by now, Radiohead originally released “In Rainbows” over the internet, and anyone could pay what they pleased. But this had mixed results and they released it as an album. Right? We all know this. Old news.

My dad was one of those people who downloaded the album for free and he gave me a copy for Christmas. I’ve never liked Radiohead much, so I didn’t get around to listening to it until today. Bored with all my music, I wanted something new to listen to while writing/tooling around on the internet, pretending to write.

Hey, guess what? It’s really good, guys!

What’s changed? Have I changed, and suddenly am the kind of person who likes Radiohead? Or (as has been suggested) is this album more accessible than previous efforts? I once listened to “OK Computer” while being driven through the mist on a mountain, probably the most atmospherically appropriate way to listen to that album you could get, and I still thought it was boring and grating and overwrought. Is it Radiohead that’s different, or me?

I know you all got over this album months and months ago, but any feedback would be much appreciated.

One of our larger Christmas presents this year was tickets to the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall in the city.  New York City.  Seriously. 

My parents gave the gift to us kids with about a quarter of their tongues in their cheeks, calling it a “once in a lifetime” show.  I was amused and delighted.  My brother, his girlfriend, and I trekked into the city on Christmas Eve for the event.  As is required, we wandered among the crowds, saw the tree and did some window-shopping at Tiffany’s.  Very shiny.  Finally we got in the block-long line for the show.  Walking the length of the line reminded me of cartoons where a car is driving past houses, and there are only six houses, three trees and seven clouds repeated over and over.  In this case, however, there were a lot of kids, grandparents and obvious tourists.

I have to say that Radio City Music Hall itself is fairly spectacular.  The chandelier, though not my choice of style, is magnificent, and the theatre is huge.  We worked our way up to the mezzanine and figured out how to work our star wands.  Soon the show started and the moment came.  The World Famous Rockettes sashayed their way on stage and leapt into their world famous kick line. That’s a lotta legs.  Then there was a fun 3-D sleigh ride with Santa into Manhattan followed by more legs.  I mean, the Rockettes.

To be honest, the Rockettes are really talented.  They sing, dance and tap in synchrony.  They even form these remarkable pinwheels that stay exactly straight while swinging across the stage.  They perform a ninety-minute show up to six times a day from before Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve every year.  The orchestra that accompanies them is wonderful, and all of the Christmas music fills you with the holiday spirit.  Okay, it might be a bit much, but it’s fun.

Near the end of the show, we were encouraged to wave around our lit star wands.  By then, the lady sitting next to my brother’s girlfriend had downed a couple of drinks and collected a few lit neon stirrers.  She took her lit star wands and multiple stirrers and started to wave along with the music.  Unfortunately in her fervor, she lost grip of the wands and threw them at the people in front of us.  Luckily for her, she was too drunk to be embarrassed, kept singing, and we all laughed at the situation.  Hilarious.

It was a lot of fun and a good show.  I’m not sure I’d go again next year, but as my parents said, you should see it at least “once in a lifetime.”

I discovered Fountains of Wayne when I was a freshman in high school. I loved their first, self-titled album with a fervent passion intensified by the fact that they felt like a secret club only me and my best friend, Mary, belonged to. No one had heard of Fountains of Wayne. And that had never happened to me before — I had always felt behind the curve, music-wise. I listened to the old rock music my parents liked.

But there was nothing about the band that was inaccessible — the songs on that album are guitar-heavy, middle-period-Beatles-esque pop with insanely catchy hooks and lyrics that tell small stories about weirdos (or beg a beautiful woman to leave her biker boyfriend). It seemed incredible to me that everyone in the world wasn’t humming these songs. What more could you want? How could you not listen to these funny, smart, hummable songs over and over?

It’s not that Fountains of Wayne languished in total obscurity. By the time their second album, “Utopia Parkway,” came out, a song or two regularly popped up on some TV show, causing me to squeal. They did a small tour, and while Mary drove all the way out to California to see them, I missed them playing the 400 bar in Minneapolis. It was partly the inherent logistical difficulties of being a car-less sophomore at Carleton, but I bowed to circumstances pretty easily. Here’s the thing: I’m a weird fan. Most fans obsessively collect all the information they can about the bands they love. They see them live; they learn all about their side projects and previous work. I’m not like that. When I develop an intense relationship with a band or album, it’s tricky and private. Seeing them live can spoil it: if the show sucks, if they have a bad attitude, it ruins the private world of music I’ve created in my head. This isn’t to say I avoid live music entirely, but I tend to go for: 1) Artists I like a great deal, but don’t obsessively love, so that I can enjoy the show without apprehension, and shrug it off it’s not good or 2) Artists I don’t know at all, whose show I happened to go to because I liked the venue or event they were playing.

Plus, with Fountains of Wayne, every song feels like a rich little experience, a story. In fact, their albums have been described as short story collections that happen to be written in pop format. Their music, though sometimes it feels sweet and intensely personal, isn’t a straightforward expression of the emotional state, political views, etc. of the band members. So obsessing about the people, the band members, seems oddly besides the point. If you love a short story collection, why do you care if the author is an alcoholic and can’t read his or her own work well?

It still puzzled Mary and I that Fountains of Wayne weren’t the most popular band on earth. The songs were pure pop bliss. They burrowed into your head and refused to go away. Why was one listen not enough to addict the nation? Not that we wanted everyone to share our love: we had serious, intense conversations about what would happen if Fountains of Wayne hit it big. It would be like your first crush on a boy being advertised on bulletin boards across the nation.

Then, their third album, “Welcome Interstate Managers,” came out, and “Stacy’s Mom” hit airwaves. Suddenly, Fountains of Wayne was everywhere. “Stacy’s Mom” got into everyone’s head. Instead of the band no one had heard of, suddenly they were “that band” — the one with the really annoying song. Instead of explaining them, I had to apologize for them.

This sucked, because “Welcome Interstate Managers” is a great album. It’s the most personal of all their albums, I think, though the story-telling aspect is still there. They dare to get quiet sometimes, like on “Valley Winter Song,” and they explore other genres, showing that they can work really well with country on “Hung Up on You.”

But none of this really mattered, under the blare that was “Stacy’s Mom.”

Now, I like the bands I love to eat. Really, I do. I’m happy they made some money. But it was traumatic for me. It was traumatic that they were nominated for “best new artist” (um, excuse me? Like the previous two albums counted for what?). It confirmed all my worst fears of seeing too much of something you love. “Stacy’s Mom” went from being a catchy, weird little song (with lyrics that actually undercut the supposedly straightforward idea behind it — Stacy’s Mom is actually, it is suggested, lonely and divorced, probably not the hottie in the bikini from the music video), to a lame pop-culture flash-in-the-pan. It’s not like everyone was acknowledging the brilliance of Fountains of Wayne. They were just trying to scrub the music video from “Stacy’s Mom” out of their heads. And I didn’t even have my secret club anymore.

Some time has passed, and Fountains of Wayne has a new album. They’re got a crappy first single called “Someone to Love,” with another crappy music video. And they were playing for free at the State Fair. A free show? The state fair? Despite my complicated feelings about seeing them live, the universe could not be sending me a clearer signal. With some grumbling, I checked out the new album “Traffic and Weather” and went the the show.

Most of the audience was teenagers. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was a free, all-ages show at the state fair, but it couldn’t have been just coincidence. My companion and I felt old, even though we had the company of a goodly contingent of older, dorky-looking concert-goers in glasses and t-shirts, who were clearly Fountains of Wayne hold-outs from the early days. We started discussing high-school, and what high-school had been like for us.

Then the show started. Teenagers around me screamed. A skinny, young couple in front of us went crazy. Awkwardly but enthuasiastically dancing, they sang all the songs together, mouthing “We go together, like Traffic and Weather,” to each other in an ironically sultry fashion.

The lead singer, Chris Collingwood, says very little, letting Adam Schleslinger (he of too-many-side-projects-I-have-written-for-every-movie-ever) do most of the audience schmoozing. But, as I suspected, they don’t seem to use the concert as an opportunity to express their personalities. They seem awkward, and just want to play.

It shocked me that I still knew all the words to every single song, even songs I haven’t listened to in years. The more they played, the more I forgot about feeling awkward or old. I screamed and yelled and jumped up and down.

Fountains of Wayne don’t seem to have changed much. Guitar-heavy power pop about lost souls, sitting alone in their apartments, or in line at the DMV. The new album also has a country-influenced song (again, probably one of the best songs on the album). I realized that I might be moving out of their target demographic — it’s a safe bet that songs like “Planet of Weed,” aren’t written with me in mind. I’m going to be a quarter-century tomorrow, after all.

That’s the thing. The whole show felt like a regression. Not only did it remind me of being a teenager, but there were teenagers all around me, eating up “Stacy’s Mom.”

But, is this ultimately a bad thing? Why, I thought, jumping up and down, am I such a grouch? Fountains of Wayne do what they do well. And what they do well is pop-rock, and it’s fun, and people should enjoy it as such. Maybe it doesn’t rock my world the way it used to, but who cares? The couple in front of me was having the time of their life — clearly intense fans, they called out for obscure songs like “Half a Woman.” Maybe I should have enjoyed my teenage fandom more, rather than refusing to indulge it too much, for fear of spoiling it. Maybe I should never have taken Fountains of Wayne so goddamn seriously.

If Fountains of Wayne has any sort of “position,” I think it’s the pop music doesn’t have to dumb or disposable. Pop songs can be rich and smart and funny and weird — but still catchy, still fun. Still something that makes you squeal like a teenager.

A few points have been brought up in the last few posts I’d like to expand on. Sorry for the length, and any weird formatting issues. I’m still getting the hang of this “blogging” thing.

First off, Ian made some really good points about the short story, back in his original post on Artless. I agree: short stories tend to be depressingly similar, and in part due to their length. Charles Baxter has a great essay that I think everyone in the world should read, in his book Burning down the House. The essay is called “Against Epiphanies.” Ever since James Joyce, the model of the short story has been one where the main character has some “realization” that changes his/her perspective. Joyce handles these moments subtly and well, because he’s an amazing writer. But over time, our society has latched onto the idea that short stories should provide some “useful insight” that we can package away. Barbara Kingsolver — who, despite the home-town pride factor, in that she lived in Tucson, Arizona, for many years, I have increasingly grown to loathe — has an introduction to her edition of “Best American Short Stories” in which she says that after every short story she read, she summarized what she had “learned” from the story, in a sentence. If the point was somehow uninteresting, or something she already knew, i.e., “alcoholism destroys families,” she dismissed the story.

I have many problems with this approach. For starters, most “lessons” in life are obvious, and even the most uninteresting subject matter — alcoholism destroys lives! — can be made vivid and amazing by a talented writer. And, it implies that the job of literature is to “teach you a life lesson” which I disagree with. Even were it true that the job of literature was to grant you some insight into life (which it isn’t), life is stupid and complicated. Most “insights,” most “epiphanies” that we are granted with — as Charles Baxter neatly points out — are either obvious, or dead wrong. Life lessons can be both stunningly trite — love is hard! — and incredibly difficult to accurately comprehend and convey in a work of art. And, as Ian points out, the very shortness of the short story makes it tempting to flatten and compress observations into simplified, uninteresting forms.

This, I would argue, however, is precisely why long, messy novels are worthwhile. I just wrote what is arguably the world’s worst paper on Chekhov, but in the course of my research, I ran across the work of a theater critic whose work I’ve used before, Francis Fergusson. His point is that writers like Shakespeare use multiple plots — think of all the love plots from As You Like It, or the weird sub-plots of Hamlet — to reflect around a central theme. So, your play is about “love,” and instead of one love plot that stands in for your idea of what love is like, you have, say, five love plots. And each love plot has characters from different social classes, and each love plot is different. So the play operates, not because any one of the plots is so amazing, but by “a vast and intricate web of analogies.” The audience makes connections between the different plots. Each plot illuminates a different aspect of love. The author doesn’t necessarily have to make the analogies explicit — that’s often clunky — but the audience can make their own connections. It allows for a more complex and multi-faceted whole.

So, the length and scope of a novel allows for this. Rather than having a small set of characters, one of whom comes to some aw-shucks revelation, you can have multiple characters, lots of plots. Different aspects that may or not seem at first to fit together, but they all illuminate central concerns and preoccupations. My hesitation over the novella, is the same concern I have over the short story. That short, streamlined effect can be a little too easy, lend itself a little too much to easy, reductive reading, i.e., Gatsby = America! Not to pick on Gatsby, because I do admire the book. But I do think one reason for its popularity is that you can read it in that simple, reductive way. I’m all for books and plays that illuminate life’s messy, complicated reality. And for that reason, big novels have a much chance of succeeding, because there’s literally more room to include all sorts of things, and all of these things add another perspective, keep you from reducing the point down to deceptively easy revelation.

Of course, I feel like I’m running perilously close to the mimetic fallacy, that just because life is “big” and “messy,” that novels should be big and messy. And that’s not true. I have to disagree with Colin on that — he says, of Underworld: “It is long, it is messy, it doesn’t always make linear sense. Neither did the second half of the 20th century, which is kind of the point.” Well, if you grant that, then if you’re writing about something that is boring — someone’s dull life, or dull job — it follows that it’s okay for your writing to be boring. And if you’re writing about someone who is shallow, your writing should be shallow. And if you’re writing about something impossible to completely understand — like, um, life — your writing should be impossible to understand. And all that is clearly not true. You can write coherent, readable prose about something that is complicated and non-linear. I don’t have any sort of problem with literature imposing an artificial structure on its subject matter, as long as it’s done in a subtle, artful way that is illuminating of life’s complexity.

One last word, on the investment of time. Aren’t you commiting to invest your time anytime you pick up a book? During my brief, unglorious career in publishing, this was drilled into my head many a time. You are not selling the book as object, really — the money, in many ways, isn’t the issue. Books can be expensive, but lots of things are more expensive. What you’re selling is the investment of time — the knowledge that, when someone buys a book, they’re devoting hours, days, or weeks to it. And you have to convince the audience that the time will be well spent. That investment of time is part of why we love the books we love so much and also explains why we feel so vehemently about the books we hate — you seriously expected me to devote hours and hours of time to this crap? So it’s really hard to draw the line. What’s a reasonable investment of time? An hour? Two hours? It depends on your life, your schedule, your preferences. But, it’s also why, I would argue, that writers can’t just raise their middle fingers at their potential audiences. If you pick up a book, you’re agreeing to devote a certain amount of time to it, in a thoughtful, considered way. So I think the authors’ part of that contract is to ensure — within their own vision and power — that the time is well spent, and for that reason books that seem to deliberately not give a damn about their readers can be particularly aggravating.

So, I guess I agree and disagree with both of you. How unhelpful of me. I do think writers need to be respectful of the investment of time readers put in, but, I happen to think big, messy novels are the best, and to me the most enjoyable, use of that time.

Although this post is about humor, I’m not going to attempt to make it funny. Too many people think they’re funny when they’re not. So, you must lurk elsewhere for some chuckles.

Most of the time, humor isn’t seen as an elevated art form. Obviously, where art is displayed or performed has an impact on its relative sophistication. We house Michelangelo’s masterpieces in museums, play Bach’s pieces in beautiful concert halls and keep Shakespeare’s plays in leather-bound books. Comedy is seen most often on tv, where you have to comb through a lot of crap to find the gems. However, good humor depends on brilliance and should be respected as much as any Picasso or Coltrane piece.

In college, one of my good friends and I decided on the best type of humor. Ours, of course. Our type of humor centers mostly on the deadpan. The deadpan is successful when all parties are involved and no one breaks the serious façade. My friends and I idolized Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show), which have perfected the deadpan. Guest depicts eccentric folks who speak and act in unusual ways, but never acknowledge the departure from normalcy. The situations and conversations do not have to be outrageous—often the best laughs come from subtle comments. In one a good moment from Best in Show, one of the actors describes the beautiful weather at the dog show with “You couldn’t have ordered up a nicer day.” His tone of voice combined with the absurdity of the notion that you could demand and buy nice weather is very funny. One of my favorite moments comes from Jennifer Coolidge talking about her relationship with her husband, who is at least forty years older than she. She says, “We could not talk or talk forever…and still find things to not to talk about.” The veracity of the statement is mind-boggling, and only Coolidge could deliver it.

What makes Guest’s movies so remarkable is the fact that the actors improvise the entire script. They’re given guidelines for each scene, but no actual script to read. Larry David’s television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, works on the same principles. The actors involved must be very talented to pull off humor at this level. We’ve all seen parts of Whose Line is it Anyway? that have made us cringe. This comedy form is difficult—there are few easy laughs, which seem all too bountiful in slapstick comedy.

Another hilarious deadpan artist is Stephen Colbert. He conducts his fake news show as a conservative who worships Bill O’Reilly. Never breaking his conservative perspective, he manages to deliver the news, make you laugh and point out the absurdity of some conservative political positions.

A recent cartoon in the New Yorker sums up my sense of humor. Rarely do I laugh out loud from reading literature or cartoons (major exception being David Sedaris books), but I laughed heartily when I saw this cartoon. Of course I called up my good friend from college to show her, and we agreed that it was the funniest cartoon either of us had ever seen. (Hopefully the New Yorker won’t mind that I didn’t obtain permission to use this image…)

I realize all humor is subjective. The only thing that I’ve found that everyone laughs at is the fact that during college I moved with my parents to a retirement community, where I got hit on by 80 year-old men named Vinny and Murray. Still sweethearts, though. In the meantime, while you are on your own quest for non-offensive, yet hilarious anecdotes, I urge you to respect the deadpan, and maybe even chuckle a little.