When I did a college radio show many moons ago, I always felt that the “theme show” was a bit cheesy, over-obvious, and often a cop-out. There were always a lot of bad and/or obvious theme shows, anyway. A set of songs all about colors… or girls’ names… or with goodbye or hello in the title. You get the idea.
But this morning I’ve been opening my mind to the potential of the Theme Show by listening to Meghan McKee’s WFMU show Underwater Theme Park, which I believe follows a different theme every week.
Benny Goodman and His Orchestra featuring Peggy Lee- Why Don’t You Do Right?
Jack Wyatt and the Bayou Boys- Why Did You Let Me Love You?
Johnny Cash- Why Is a Fire Engine Red?
Hank Williams- Why Should We Try Anymore?
Wayne Hancock- Why Don’t You Leave Me Alone?
Reverend Horton Heat- Generation Why
The Bartlebees- Why?
Weezer- Why Bother ?
The White Stripes- Why Can’t You Be Nicer To Me?
Slick Rick- Why, Why, Why
KRS-One- Why?
Blakroc -Why Can’t I Forget Him
Ladytron- The Reason Why
Bronski Beat- Why?
As the playlist develops, it poses a meta-question about the essential role of the question in the pop song. The pop song as question, questioning, “Questioningly” (like the Ramones song – “aren’t you someone that I used to know/ And weren’t we lovers a long time ago?”). The pop song addresses us, begs and pleads like James Brown, grabs our shirt and demands an answer. But we don’t need to answer or respond in any way, we can just listen.
I’m a fan of the New Yorker Out Loud podcast– that and Slate’s Culture Gabfest have recently moved past Fresh Air as my go-to podcasts for this kind of thing. I listened to a conversation with author Rachel Aviv about her new piece about the medicalization of pedophilia and child pornography, “The Science of Sex Abuse,” as well as “other articles she has written on socially marginalized, compromised, or despised people.” Her topic in the new piece — organized around the arrest and legal odyssey of a man charged under the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act — is the ambiguous legal status of pedophilia, which is sometimes treated as something of a “thought crime”, such that what is criminalized are certain desires as opposed to actually committed acts. Her tentative conclusion, articulated more explicitly in the podcast interview than in the piece, is that pedophilia may in fact not be a medical condition at all, but simply a crime like any other. (I actually was not entirely sure I understood why we should not judge sexual desire for children to be a medical disorder. It seems somewhat inevitable that such desires are going to be understood either as “evil” or as a medical condition, and the latter seems more palatable and manageable for any practical purposes.)
Aviv is great — a mesmerizing narrative storyteller whose pieces always probe deeply into difficult questions about those our society marginalizes or who marginalize themselves. She’s a 2004 Brown graduate and has also written for N+1, which the New Yorker seems to be treating as their development league lately.
Sounds like she’s working on a book — I’m sure it will make a splash. Here’s her website with links to articles.
I take This American Life for granted and often it can seem too familiar and predictable. Some of the more famous voices on the show grate on me, and the giggles, awkwardness and teenager-y cuteness can feel contrived; sometimes I just want them to sound like grownups. Yet, not so rarely they come through with something pretty great that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. Jogging the other day I listened to this pretty amazing piece about a few episodes of This Is Your Life from the 1950s that brought the show’s usual approach to the challenging realm of atrocity survivors. TIYL was of course a hugely popular show with an audience of many millions; it was hosted by Ralph Edwards, who also taught Sunday School and was one of those 1950s reassuring voices of a benevolent status quo.
The This American Life piece (btw, it occurs to me that the show’s name must be indebted to This is Your Life — duh, I guess) is about a couple of jaw-dropping episodes in which Edwards brought (under false pretenses — guests were almost always surprised) on the show, to be confronted by friends and associates from their past, first, a Holocaust survivor (according to This American Life host Allison Silverman, the first person to discuss her experiences in the camps on American television), second, a Hiroshima survivor. The first one:
“This is your life, Hanna Bloch Kohner.”
“Oh no!”
Oh, disturbingly, yes. In May 1953 Edwards surprised Hanna Bloch Kohner, whose apparent dismay at having her life story told could have had something to do with the fact that a lot of her life was a staggering nightmare.
“Can I say, Ms Kohner, that looking at you, it’s hard to believe that during 7 short years of a still short life, you lived a lifetime of fear, terror and tragedy. You look like a young American girl just out of college, not at all like a survivor of Hitler’s cruel purge of German Jews.”
Hanna Bloch Kohner is a Holocaust survivor, although the word Holocaust wouldn’t commonly be used for another eight years.
As Silverman goes on to explain, Kohler goes through the usual This is Your Life series of surprises, although the people she’s confronted with are not grade-school buddies or teachers but, for example, the friend with whom she went through Auschwitz. The combination of Edwards’ patriarchally plummy tones, the 50s Hollywood game-show setting, and Kohner’s descriptions of her experiences in the camps (narrated in her pronounced Czech-Jewish accent) is just surreal and incredibly bizarre, like a George Saunders story, really. Silverman’s best line is in regards to a promotional piece of jewelry presented to Kohner for appearing on the show; as Silverman quips, “it must be hard to design a Holocaust charm bracelet.”
The piece then discusses another TIYL episode, this one featuring Hiroshima survivor Kiyoshi Tanimoto. As part of his big surprise, he gets to meet… Robert Lewis, one of the co-captains of the Enola Gay, who dropped the bomb that killed on the order of 100,000+ of Tanimoto’s friends and family. Awkward, to say the least. Lewis seems like a wreck. Apparently he and Tanimoto kept in touch after the episode.
The episodes can certainly seem from our perspective to be in unbelievably poor taste, but as Silverman suggests, they were important in bringing this material to a U.S. mass audience in a sympathetic and basically respectful manner. And both Kohner and Tanimoto seemed to have been very pleased with their episodes, regularly showing visitors the 16 mm. video they were given as a memento (I believe Kohner actually toured with the film to raise awareness).
Sarah was coveting Matt and Miranda’s subscription to The World of Interiors. This is a high-end, expensive (at least $100 for the year’s subscription) British design/decoration/architecture magazine. The photography is beautiful and they somehow seem to avoid the typical design-porn cliches — it’s not just a sequence of rich person after rich person’s predictable homes.
Some articles:
BREAKING THE WAVES
His studio a fisherman’s carrelet on a jetty by the Aquitaine coast, artist Richard Texier draws inspiration from the ceaseless roll of the ocean. Catherine de Montalembert reports
EXCESS ALL AREAS
The Spanish legation once used mirrors to signal the mainland from this Tangerine dream house now owned by a bohemian design duo. Marie-France Boyer enters their prism
PARADISE RECLAIMED Combining architectural salvage with subtle erotic details – from carnal curtain rails to titillating toile – Sam Roddick’s Hampstead home sins with originality
BOMBAY MIX
Sixteen scruffy sketchbooks filled with keenly observed watercolours of Indian life shed light on a widowed Edwardian adventurer – and the colonial mindset, say Annabel Freyberg
The magazine seems to take its name seriously in that it really does focus on “interiors,” rather broadly understood, including quirky spaces like the artist’s houseboat-studio. Not really my thing, but I can appreciate it to a degree. Anyway, the reason I’m blogging about it is Sarah’s innovatively thrifty means of consuming it. Miranda mailed her the entire 2008 run, all twelve issues. She allowed herself to read January and put the rest of the top of a high shelf. On Feb. 1 she took down February 2008. So, barring weakness of will, she’ll go through the year like that. Pretty clever, although these magazines are heavy so it was probably somewhat expensive for Miranda to mail them (but hey, that was on her dime — just kidding, Miranda, we appreciate it).
Of course, Sarah’s design schemes for our house will be a year out of date, but I suspect that for us that would be a big step up.
Iron Man was fun. Iron Man is a robot, HAL, 3CPO & R2D2, and especially, I thought, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still; he’s a cyborg, part machine part man (and a techie friend of various other pet/helper robots); he’s a golem (I wonder if the Jewish golem tradition ties in any covert way into the film’s surprisingly retrograde anti-Arab depictions — though of course the movie makes efforts to protect itself from this accusation: these are just the evil WARLORD Arabs, not the good family-minded ones). He’s a self-guided weapon: there’s something amusingly retro in the idea that a supercharged suit for an individual could be a crucial military tool in 21st century geopolitics (the Terrence Howard character comments at one point about how the instincts and intelligence of a human pilot will never be beaten by robotic intelligence — yeah, right.) And most explicitly, he is the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz trying to get/find his heart.
Robert Downey Jr. was an inspired choice, of course. I thought Gwynth was charming as Pepper Potts although the gender dynamics are as pathetically pre-feminist as in most such movies; or even more so, as she is an indeterminate secretary/butler/girlfriend.
Some fun musical choices: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” blasts out over the final credits in a satisfying way. And early on Tony Starks is grooving to Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” while he tinkers with one of his gadgets. Hope those guys got a fat royalty check out of it.
Btw, A.O. Scott observed that Jeff Bridges’ character confirms the Law of the Bald Villain; Bridges also clarifies that anyone who rides a Segway in popular culture (unlike our friend Susan, who looks really cool in on her Segway and is definitely good) must be evil.
Previews were almost entirely superhero. I have to admit, the new Hulk with Edward Norton looked pretty good, a bit of Jason Bourne to him.
It’s a weird feeling to have someone you know from childhood design a t-shirt for the Gap and appear as a model for it in the ads.
Why couldn’t Barbara Kruger appear in her own ad?
I wonder if the artists are being tagged as sell-outs for this, or is that concept too late-20th-century? The t-shirts are quite nice so I myself would not really make that accusation, although doing freelance design work for the Gap might well undermine one’s credibility as a scourge of corporate capitalism, if that’s your thing. (Is there a philanthropic angle here? $ to fund developing artists, hint hint?)
My sister-in-law Vanessa is a writer for this new CBS drama Swingtown, premiering on June 5. Here’s a NY Times article about it.
Family loyalties aside, I’m looking forward to it — some writers and producers from Six Feet Under are involved and it co-stars Molly Parker, who was so good in Deadwood. Here’s a description from the profile:
WHEN the television series “Swingtown” has its premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighborhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.
Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street.
Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the watchdog group Parents Television Council, comments that “it’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society.” As my brother observed, I guess this assumes that the American family is a vampire. Or a tomato plant, maybe (what else gets a stake driven through it?)
I just came across this New York Magazine article about a Facebook scandal at an elite NY prep school. The article generated controversy and a whole lot of letters/response.
My overwhelming response is relief that I don’t have to worry about NYC private school insanity for my kids…
Stanley Fish’s column on the new book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. (Uggh, the hundreds of comments are irritating.) Also see Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed.
In “a particularly sharp-eyed chapter titled “Students and Users,”” McLemee writes, Cusset “offers an analysis of how adopting a theoretical affiliation can serve as a phase in the psychodrama of late adolescence (a phase of life with no clearly marked termination point, now). To become Deleuzian or Foucauldian, or what have you, is not necessarily a step along the way to the tenure track. It can also serve as “an alternative to the conventional world of career-oriented choices and the pursuit of top grades; it arms the student, affectively and conceptually, against the prospect of alienation that looms at graduation under the cold and abstract notions of professional ambition and the job market….This relationship with knowledge is not unlike Foucault’s definition of curiosity: ‘not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself’….””
Ironically (?), this made me think about my experience teaching “theory” in our Intro to Theory and Criticism course. I had assumed that students would find the straight theory stuff to be a difficult pill to swallow, and that the literary criticism would seem comparatively clear and straight-forward. But in fact they found, say, Vendler on Keats to be impossibly dense, allusive and insular, but if I effectively framed something like Jameson on postmodernism, or Irigaray or Judith Butler on gender, the students ate it up. One option for the final project in that class was to use theoretical models we’d encountered to analyze a work of popular culture. I remember well two wonderful papers I got on the fan cultures of anime, and about the Transformers phenomenon (specifically, the way the old Transformers toys were repurposed and marketed to a new generation in the 1990s).
My insight was that the students could really get into theory if it were presented to them as a kind of philosophy for living in postmodernity. Maybe even as “affective and conceptual” armor for the challenges (and let’s face it, the sometimes-grim prospects for a new college graduate) of life in 21st century capitalism.
