This weekend’s jam was huge when I was in high school and college, so you best believe I spent lots of time trying to dance/dance up on girls while it played. (“Eww, you like rap?”) I speak of Ginuwine’s “Pony,” from his 1996 debut Ginuwine…the Bachelor. It’s big, stupid, corny American pop; by the time I got to college, it was a grotesquely overplayed single that almost everyone without a heart of stone still loved to hear, kind of like “Satisfaction” or “Beat It.” But the video! I saw this a few times back in the day, but I didn’t remember much until it came across my digital radar yesterday. The video! I like the song at least twice as much now.
To recap, through the power of jeans, dance, song, and a tectonically catchy Timbaland beat (Virginia represent), son turns a roadside honky tonk into a multiracial sex party. A lot is going on here. Historically loaded encounters between older white men and black bar patrons. Ginuwine’s hair. The hat situation. People who aren’t villains are smoking cigarettes!
Enjoy. Pop music that stays pop is a form of high art. I believe some people have said this.
Hello, everyone. This evening, as always, the Internet holds forth its treasures, and TGR is gathering some in a big net. May they stimulate you intensely.
Why did God systematically ruin a decent, faithful man’s life after someone dared him to? This is the inflammatory question raised by the Book of Job, and as Joan Acocella demonstrates in the New Yorker, Judeo-Christian commentators have spent millennia trying to explain how a benevolent deity could also have a sadistic streak. Spoiler alert: Nobody has done much better than David Hume’s common-sense observation that God sounds like an asshole. Makes sense. Guy did let his only kid get crucified.
Whether you’re talking kindergarten or college, teachers who are good at their jobs believe fervently in the existential importance of education for its own sake—whatever economic benefits it also carries. Teachers are some of the last real humanists. But can any occupation that exists in the actual world be considered a manifestation of a radiant, quasi-spiritual impulse? Many teachers would snort at that. In a post called “Hanging Up on a Calling,” Rebecca Schuman explains that the “joy of teaching/I’d do it for free!” narrative has long been a way to justify paying teachers as though their high-skill jobs weren’t extremely complicated and difficult. Teaching is an enjoyable, salutary occupation; I’m good at it; and I hope I can keep doing it until I’m old. But fuck any calling that doesn’t come with decent wages. Educators live right where everybody else does, and you can’t pay medical bills and student-loan invoices with a Love of Knowledge. The day I can’t earn middle-class money working full-time as a teacher is the day I stop being one.
The premise of Bad Lip Reading shouldn’t be funny for more than 15 seconds; the actual practice of BLR, in the right hands, is sometimes transcendent. The weirdly articulate quality of the nonsensical “readings” is what cracks this blogger so consistently up. Here, after another shitty whimsical GEICO ad, is a tour of the contemporary National Football League and its gladiators. “Kill Dracula at once, that’s what I would do immediately.”
About 90% of the content on Jezebel strikes me as lazy, tedious, and brittle (JUDGMENT BY MALE ALERT), but this anti-profile of the perpetually slim and greasy Adam Levine, whom the author compares to “an outspoken yoga enthusiast who won’t stop trying to talk you into anal,” is vital to our culture.
Every now and then, the novelist/blogger/sports pundit/pseudo-advice columnist Drew Magary guest-edits Jezebel for like a day, but usually (thankfully) he does most of his web work for Deadspin, and his weekly “NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo” is fantastic. This week’s edition, “On Softness,” offers a representative mix of half-ironic quippery about football, masculine panic, television, fecal matters, children, and Gregg Easterbrook’s undying pomposity. Hot takes, highly recommended.
As a cultural staph infection, the, uh, rapper Macklemore is making cold hard cash (from braindead teenagers and undergraduates) and some vicious enemies (among humans who have liked hip-hop for more than six months). Given the former, I’m not sure how much Macklemore cares about the latter, but Jack Hamilton’s cruel, brilliant assessment of Seattle’s most famous white MC is required reading. Some Alexander Pope-grade knife work going on here.
Shall we end with some music? Sort of. See the next post, y’all. A YouTube video link would look wonky on this page. Preview: This week’s jam involves sex-themed R&B.
No rambling original ruminations on literature tonight, only some great links with competent commentary. Stay safe this weekend. Read too much.
From the LA Review of Books, a concise, perceptive review of the latest volume of Hemingway’s letters. Published by Cambridge University Press, this is Volume 2 (of a projected sixteen!), and according to Joshua Kotin it is beautiful even though it doesn’t “fundamentally alter our understanding of Hemingway or his art or modernism or American literature[.]” These missives “complement, rather than revise, the mythologies cultivated and analyzed by countless artifacts — novels, memoirs, films, biographies, and, of course, Hemingway’s own writing,” he argues, concluding that while “the letters are wonderful; they are not crucial.” My favorite part of the review is the end, where Kotin speculates on the possibility of a database containing all the networks of responses between cultural potentates from the Modernist era, a “complete letters of modern art.”
Historian Jill Lepore once again graces The New Yorker. This time she writes about Roger Ailes (Fox News’ begetter), William Randolph Hearst (the early-twentieth-century jingoist publishing magnate), and American tastes in news. The piece will introduce you to the fantastically named Cora Baggerly Older (Hearst’s official biographer) and her husband Fremont Older. Fremont Older!
Do hubcaps serve a purpose? No, they do not. So does my beloved forest-green 1995 Camry need to stop flowing with the mysterious black wheels? No, it does not. Thanks as always, Car Talk, for the clarity: you should have won some Pulitzers.
Pacific Standard on the continuing water horror in West Virginia. Turns out that allowing your state regulatory infrastructure to decay is a very bad idea. Read about this right now if you haven’t already done so. America gets her coal from often-incompetent companies that poison Appalachia, one of America’s treasures, and too many Appalachians, especially rich dumbasses with ties to those companies, keep helping. I grew up in a VA/West VA border town called Covington, deep in enormous tracts of National Forest land, and I knew some ghastly water there. The town sits on the Jackson River, which feeds Virginia’s freshwater mainline, the James River; and the Westvaco (now MeadWestvaco) paper millsits on Covington. As the Commonwealth of Virginia officially puts it, “There is a two mile segment, from the water treatment plant in Covington to City Park in Covington[,] that is legally navigable, but is not recommended for recreation due to heavy industry.” When I lived there in the 1990s, the mill—most people just called it “the mill”—was Covington’s biggest employer, even though it was (and still is) shrinking its workforce, thanks to progressive automation and the willingness of other nations to host paper-pulp facilities that produce incredible amounts of toxic waste. The size of the plant is staggering: as a teenager I would drive up the wide street on the bluffs across from its holding ponds and light towers, and pretend I was sneaking past the Death Star. Above Covington is some of the sweetest fly fishing in the eastern United States. Below the mill, the oily river smells like frog guts. Maybe things have gotten better since I left for college. But probably not, given Virginia’s light-regulation ethos and the fact that the Bush administration had a decade to hollow out the EPA. Please leave a comment if you have some news.
Just look at this Miller Lite TV spot from the mid-1990s. In case you miss the subtitle at the beginning, that silver-haired gentleman is Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, a satyr (according to Wikipedia he “was known for studying his playbook by the light of a nightclub jukebox and for his affinity for female fans”) who quarterbacked the Raiders to a Super Bowl win in 1977, and the guy in the comfy shirt is Dan Fouts, the most successful bearded quarterback in NFL history. (He wasn’t all that successful.) A suburban eatery? Bottled swill? Well-compensated passive-aggressive male companionship? Off-camera lady voice? Floppy shirt collars? This one has it all.
Amy Clampitt is a solid poet. Not enough people read her work. Here is a link to one of her poems, “Vacant Lot With Pokeweed.” Go there. It is brief and will make your weekend better, I promise.
Arthur takes a run at being my favorite, as does Village Green, but man, I love Muswell Hillbillies (1971). This Southern rock album about a neighborhood in North London is grimy, upbeat, and sad at the same time, like a lot of art things.
Further, the album cover’s general aesthetic structure somehow looks like the worn-out blazers and sweaters many of the people on it are wearing. Readers, riddle TGR this: Isn’t MH tony and expensive at this point? Regarding this point of contemporary demography, we could use Wikipedia (we did), but it would also help to have human input. Place comments below.
First things first: TGR will keep owning the blogosphere in 2014. Also, once I am back home in California (I’m visiting family in Appalachia now) and have access to my books, there will be a Kingsley Amis-themed post on hangovers, what with New Year’s celebrations being upon us and all. For now, the Reader gives you one of the greatest covers ever, The Slits straight neutron-bombing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in 1979. Yes, it is even better than the awesome CCR version. I knew Eastbound and Down was brilliant when they used this at the end of Season Two.
Enjoy the beats. Stay safe. Use that buddy system. Dress nice. Try not to kiss the wrong person when the ball drops. Or, you know, just drink enough that “right” and “wrong” aren’t words anymore.
Say “country music” to most Americans, especially ones under 40, and the majority will think of the fulsome garbage disgorged by Nashville’s contemporary legion of fake-accented bimbos and hunky cornballs in $500 t-shirts: they’ll think of people like <shudder> Keith Urban. That, or xenophobic losers like Toby Keith.
This is an ironic shame, because, at least in your humble critic’s opinion, American music’s finest lyric achievements come primarily from two genres: hip-hop and classic country. On the latter, think Merle Haggard, George Jones, Johnny Cash (at least he’s still hip even with people who couldn’t name more than two of his songs), Willie Nelson (just try not getting obsessed with The Red-Headed Stranger), Townes Van Zandt, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, and Gram Parsons. While modern Nashville industrial country has appropriated many of the outward themes (loneliness, boozing, heartbreak, wandering), it fails to produce the tonal affect of the old masters, the existential grime and grind. Modern country is all surface; the classic stuff is almost literary.
And there is nothing—nothing—without a man I didn’t mention above, Hank Williams. (No, not his idiot Monday Night Football son or lame “punk” grandson.) Williams is rightfully remembered as a sort of hillybilly poète maudit, dead at 29 in the backseat of a car he didn’t own, flush with a cocktail of liquor, chloryl hydrate, and morphine, and leaving behind a slim but astonishing catalog of stone-cold masterpieces. But melancholy as most of his work is, Williams also has a sense of irony. Most country masters do: see, for example, George Jones’s duet with Merle Haggard, “Must’ve Been Drunk (When We Said We’d Stop Drinking).” In “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” the last single he released during his life, which hit #1 on the Billboard Country charts just after his death, Williams plays up the voice of the sad-sack, woman-haunted loser.
However, the ironic humor does not make the song any less chilling. Williams’s irony is not the poisonous, cynical, seen-it-all posture that American culture has assumed over the past few decades, the loathsome “wit” of shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Family Guy. Rather, the irony marks an individual’s desire to find some modest humor in a genuinely terrible situation. It is irony that is heartfelt and naked and human.
So whether or not your fishin’ pole’s broke, the creek is full of sand, and your woman run off with another man, enjoy it. I’ll take Williams over a third of the hacks (cough, Ezra Pound, cough) who get taught in English classes.
I’m sure this isn’t new to any of you, but I think it’s worth revisiting the weirdness of Bob Dylan’s “Must Be Santa” song and video this holiday season. A few days ago, Slate claimed that there hasn’t been a good original Christmas song in 19 years. The article even references Dylan’s 2009 album Christmas in the Heart, yet fails to acknowledge the brilliance of this creepy gem. So, if your morning is leanin’ (or even if it’s a little dusty), this should help fix that.
As the frozen moon called North America upon which many of our readers live continues to darken, its daylight progressively emaciated and its nights positively steroidal, your cortex needs food. Here are some links. Take, eat. Stay warm.
Advertisements that use kids to sell grown-up commodities like cars and cable packages are repulsive. Just look at this and this, and try to ignore that sad, green revulsion mushrooming in your chest. “We want more, we want more.” Or don’t, and just take our word for it. An Urban Outfitters ad for cancer-style skinny jeans wouldn’t be much worse.
David Foster Wallace could be a bad TV guest, like many (maybe most) writers. If you tend to consider your words and think about whether the complicated answer you are about to give is plausible, then most TV hosts won’t know what to do with you. But when Wallace sat down with a German station in 2003 the results, which are on YouTube, were riveting. Here is the man himself talking about how pleasure within market societies can be a form of slavery; and here he is admitting how small the demand for serious writing is, compared to the immensity of the American fear of silence; and later homie gets to the paranoid wastage of the Bush years.
There is plenty more Wallace material on YouTube and for cheap on the usual book-buying sites, so do your brain a favor and stop watching Glee or reading Twitter or buying linen scarves or whatever, because as long as people read English, people will read Wallace. Chances are that reading him will make you at least a little happier. He’s consistently on the aesthetic and thematic level of his gregarious, crowd-loving forebears (e.g. Austen, Dickens, Faulkner, Pynchon, Rabelais, Dostoevsky), which is rare enough; most writers are just lucky to occasionally do something comparable to what an influential presence did. He’s one of those writers whose work gives enormous pleasure to a lot of well-read people. As such, anyone who dismisses his work outright (which is very different from saying that you don’t personally like his work*) is likely a pedant whose opinions aren’t worth listening to. Samuel Johnson is right: if a book is long esteemed, it is good, to the extent that we can ever define “good.”
Unfortunately we live in a USA where writers have to remind people that public colleges should be free for Americans prepared for college-level work. A democracy must be seriously deranged if its members have trouble with that principle, but many Americans are only OK with spending public funds on simultaneous trillion-dollar wars in multiple theaters. This means that the USA has some serious problems, given the current national acceptance of five-figure in-state tuition bills and leagues of alumni who carry five- or six-figure debt loads. But that shit has a righteous foe in Sarah Kendzior, whose work you should follow. It is great: sarahkendzior.com. American higher-education systems may have gutted their faculty (the loan racket helped), but many of the castaways are vicious writers. Have hope. TGR is roping together some logs in the ship’s wake.
High art is not always pleasant. (Just ask anyone who has looked at a Francis Bacon.) I say this because someone recently put together a file of every “YEEAH-UUH!” that Metallica’s frontman James Hetfield has ever barked, snarled, rasped, or sneered. Though conceptually beautiful, it might drive you insane after 45 seconds. Seriously, don’t listen too closely unless you are already a metalhead.
* I don’t like Austen, just as I dislike Woolf’s novels (besides Mrs. Dalloway), but I wouldn’t pretend that either isn’t worth reading for a person wanting to know more about the canon.
The General Reader 
