Comparative Education

1977:

My grade seven science teacher reached for the yardstick and asked me to come to the front of the class. He told me to bend over his lab desk. I complied and he gave me a smart swat just above my ass-cheeks, then he told me to sit down again. I no longer remember what I did to earn it, but the welt took just over a week to fade away.

Not quite as pictured...

1978:

My grade eight English teacher took my friend down to a small room behind the office, where the teacher hit him with a leather strap 16 times. My friend later wondered if this “licking” mightn't have ended sooner if he'd burst into tears earlier.

1979:

If you were a stoner or a day-dreamer in my grade nine history class it was only a matter of time before you were hoisted to your feet by the ears. And while the historical record was attended to with some competency, this adult man applied a truly energetic imagination to his verbal cataloging of an individual student's personal failings. One afternoon he spoke fondly of the Flin-Flon high school teacher who used the staff toilet to water-board a 15-year-old Bobby Clarke. In the silence that followed, he gazed at the florescent lights overhead, this image now becoming only a vague memory of the glorious days when a teacher could, with impunity, deal any manner of physical abuse to his adolescent students.

Though this was (probably) not among the damage dealt...

All three of these guys went on to retire with full benefits. I thought of them this morning when I dropped my daughters off at school. My daughters are accumulating the usual wounds of adolescence — that acidic petri dish of Social Darwinism. But, so far as I can see, their teachers aren't actively contributing to the abuse. Instead it looks to me like they're doing as much as we enable them to do to shepherd these kids through to the other side.

It's progress of a sort.

Link: It Gets Better -- for ostracized teens of any sexuality.

Rallying?

Unfortunately, I'm too agoraphobic to enjoy any sort of rally. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can enjoy this weekend's funny signs. Link via ALD.

Lonely Avenue: Ben Folds Adds Music & Melody To Nick Hornby's Words

I am not a fan of The Compact Disc. Sure, when it first came out I was as charmed as anyone by the lack of surface noise and the previously non-transferable bright end of the recording spectrum. I sold myself out to it exclusively — my first collection of stereo components did not include a turntable. But it did not take long for the honeymoon to end.

Unlike its more commanding parent, The Long Playing Record, which demands to be either stored away or put on prominent display, there is something about the physical format of the CD that prompts itself toward clutter. There is no attractive way to display these little plastic boxes (or “jewel cases” as they've been erroneously, or ironically, named). And the leaflets they protect are a scant product. What additional material do they give the listener to ponder? A photograph or two of the band, lyrics in an aloof san serif font and the usual “thank you”s — God, Gibson & Grandma. If that. Sometimes all the customer gets is a track listing. When That Corporate Digital Behemoth finally announced it had figured out a way to provide listeners with the sound and performers with a little chump change, I actually rejoiced. Perhaps now I could finally remove all that — here’s the word again — clutter from the living room and refurbish the place with the antique and ornate forms of old: books and albums. Wife permitting, of course.

But there are exceptions — three of them, in fact. That's right: three CDs I would recommend solely for the packaging.

#3: I, Flathead, Deluxe Edition by Ry Cooder (A). The “shocking full-length false memoire” (sic) enclosed is beautifully formatted, if less-than-compelling, reading. In this case, the substance of it exists as a loving vanity stand for the real material: one of the finest collections of songs to come out in the last five years.

#2: Lonely Avenue, Deluxe Edition by Ben Folds & Nick Hornby, with four stories by Hornby and photographs by Joel Meyerowitz (A). Anyone who likes Hornby’s writing can't help but be pleased with this purchase. Four stories, lyrics, liner notes and an e-mail exchange between the collaborators — for this content alone, it is money well spent. As for the music . . . more later.

#1: 10,000 Days by Tool (A). I’m pleased to see that this CD still seems to be required stock in places that still sell CDs. If you don’t yet have a copy of this, hike out to your music store as soon as possible. You should spot this pretty quickly: it is the largest and ugliest looking thing on the rack. It looks like a fat plastic wallet festooned with a pair of cheap magnifying glasses. In fact, those lenses are required for viewing the contents of the package — photos of the band members posing as alchemists, esoteric illustrations by Alex Grey — which are laid out in stereoscopic 3-D splendor. Anyone with the slightest yen for metal should dig the music, too, for its competent use of contrapuntal rhythms and lack of cookie-monster vocals. And for its sincere use of esoterica (also on display on their website). This is the kind of package that gets a guy like Erik Davis very excited, which, once upon a time, was the kind of thing that made rock ‘n’ roll a garish circus you could not take your eyes off of.

Alright: so we have a single Sony product nudging out two by the vastly more ambitious Nonesuch Records. Onward, then, to Lonely Avenue and its music.



First spin: it struck me quite forcefully, as I listened to Folds stretch a musical phrase to make room for Hornby’s syllables, just how suggestive successful pop music has to be, of necessity. And I’m not just speaking of the sexually suggestive, although a little of that goes a very long way. Successful pop music manages to evoke all manner of yearning and regret, shame and joy. The more implicit the sentiment, the more powerful the song. Unfortunately for the cognizant among us, suggestiveness can be accomplished by bluntly stupid lyrics attached to a simply constructed hook. This was made obvious to me when Steve Almond splenetically rendered the unintentional hilarity in the lyrics of Toto’s “Africa” as I read before bed. Next morning, of course, I was passionately singing the offending song as I showered.

As Folds sang Hornby’s incisive lyrics, I found myself chafing against the explicit and yearning for the implicit. Today’s “alternative” acts might be overly smitten with the nonsensical, but any performer who allows the listener to fill in the gaps — no matter how abysmal — is paying the patron the highest compliment. The first time around with this collection, I too frequently felt spoken to.

Subsequent plays, while not as off-putting, still weren’t winning me over. Folds’ music was sweeping, snappy, polished: was I to lay the fault solely at Hornby’s feet? I ruminated over the lyrics. The only song I really dislike is “Levi Johnston’s Blues” for subject matter that already lacks nuance, and which grates on me nearly as much as Johnston’s on-again/off-again mother-in-law does. As for the rest, the best of them approach the comic defeatism of Steely Dan’s “What A Shame About Me” (“Your Dogs” “Password” “Doc Pomus”) minus the reliably ironic back-beat, or unfold with Elvis Costello-like moribundity (“A Picture Window” “Claire’s Ninth”) minus the reliably personal stake that Costello has in all his songs (sorry, Ben, but that’s your department).

Ah, but don’t mind me. Odds are I’m still nursing a grudge for the less-than-glowing review Hornby gave Steely Dan ten years ago. “Steely Dan needs to loosen up a little,” wrote Hornby: “pop music is still pop music, no matter how smart you are.” Any doctor can prescribe, of course. And there is a moment on Lonely Avenue when the “loosen up” is attended to: we hear Ben Folds delivering “Belinda” with all the balls-out ardor of a younger Little Richard. It’s a hint of the sort of playing around that went on behind the scenes as he and Hornby tried to reconnoiter their way into the project, and it’s catchy as hell. Unfortunately, it’s a last-minute throw-on: the final 11 seconds of the album’s final song.

Oh well. Buy it for the package. Maybe you'll love the music, maybe you won't. Either way, you won’t be sorry.

Post-script: Metacritic tabulates a metascore of 63 for Lonely Avenue, here.

Hef, Yet Again

At 73 Hef is dating college-age twins (Sandy and Mandy) as well as another young woman (Brande) and a fourth (whose name doesn't rhyme). He starts telling us about how the twins had never been to Disneyland, then goes off on a tangent about staying in touch with the passions of youth. And for a minute — even though this is Hugh Hefner sitting here in pajama bottoms and we're surrounded by nude portraits of his estranged wife and even though we were just talking about the great group-sex parties of the '70s and the man had stopped for a second to clarify that he was “not an eccentric” and then had laughed weirdly — he seems to be channeling the spirit of Walt Disney. Quietly he asks, “What kinds of dreams did you have when you were a kid, and what's the grown-up version of that?”

This is a message of a half century of sexual wisdom. And it is oddly comforting and mesmerizing. He nearly whispers, “Hold on to your dreams and don't be confused by what everybody else tells you you ought to be doing.” There is a cuckooing of exotic birds outside, and you can almost hear Jiminy Cricket piping up: If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.

"The Road To Boobville" by Adam Sachs, GQ, December 1999. My thoughts on Hef are here. Ebert, on the other hand, is a little more smitten.

1976 by Lorrie Moore

In 1976 the media culture, newly experimenting with public talking cures, helped foster a more interesting kind of self-pity (farewell to Nixon's antique and unconvincing “I'm not a crook”). In 1976 we had Betty Ford, the outgoing First Lady who later would confess to substance abuse. And we had a new president who would confess to lust — at a time when this was unprecedented and not yet required by the attorney general's office.

Indeed, Jimmy Carter's 1976 grassroots presidential campaign brought us something new, and not just double-digit inflation and soaring interest rates. A president so deeply well intentioned — a president in denim — was something this country had never seen before. For Jimmy Carter, the denim may have been a statement, but it wasn't yet a cynical costume. For that we needed Reagan. Then Bush, then Lamar Alexander. For Bill Clinton, apparently, clothing itself was a cynical costume.

Lorrie Moore, on her favorite year, for GQ, December 1999.

The Perils of Mid-Life

“Wait a minute,” said my wife. “Did you buy the whole album?”

It was Sunday night. The girls were organizing their knapsacks for the school-week ahead, their mother and I were nursing the dregs of the evening's martini. We were all in the kitchen and music was playing through the speakers. The family has an assortment of “music file players” and we take turns plugging them into the kitchen tunes contraption. Tonight was my turn. The music seemed to catch my wife off-guard, and what she thought might be a singular lapse on my part was quickly proving to be corporate.

“Erm, CD, actually,” I said. “I bought the CD.” A double-CD, in fact — which I did not have the courage to admit. “Ease up, will you? I daresay you know the words to a few of these songs.”

“I know the words to all these songs,” she said. “I'm just not happy about it. Unlike you, apparently. What . . . possessed you?”

Nostalgia. In high school I had a buddy who took over his mother's Plymouth Duster. The car came with an eight-track cassette deck, and three eight-track cassettes. One of those was a gospel quartet, which even we could not stomach. The other two we didn't mind, and played to death. Or so I thought at the time.

I explained this to my perplexed wife.

“Well, sure,” she said. “But still: the Carpenters?”

Hm. In hindsight the other performer might have been a touch easier to explain. John Denver, anyone?

The Long, Strange Trip Is Mightier Than The Pen

I had trouble coming up with a title for this post, which is really little more than an excuse to link to Jeff Baker's erudite review of Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD & The Politics of Ecstasy by Mark Christensen. I link because the conversation turned (briefly) to those lovable hippies and their scribes: Kesey, Vonnegut, Heller, Brautigan, Robbins. Hm. All guys, and most of 'em too old to actually be hippies.

Who am I missing -- besides Erica Jong?