Call

I promise that I'm not going to make a habit of this.

Tonight I'm going to the funeral of a good friend that I should not have to go to. And that makes me angry.  He was going to teach a class for me next Tuesday on ropes and knots. That's not going to happen now, and that makes me angry too because I f*cking loved his knots class.  I've been home throwing up all afternoon because I don't know if I ever mentioned to him how much I look up to him and now I'm not going to be able to.  And now I'm angry because I honestly don't know if I should have used the past tense in that previous sentence.

If you're thinking of doing this.  Call.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline

Call 24/7

1-800-273-8255

 

That's all.

 

 

Doctor Who Saturday - The Runaway Bride

The tiniest moments of kindness save Christmas by Mike Heinrich 10/8/07
 
It's entirely possible that my entire view of The Runaway Bride was different to that of most UK viewers simply because of one simple thing. I'm an American (and let me take a moment to apologize for the entirety of our foreign policy since... I don't know... let's say 1978), and prior to The Runaway Bride I had never heard of Catherine Tate and wouldn't have known her if I had tripped over her in the street. (Although I would, of course, have stopped to apologize. I was just raised that way)

In any case, I had absolutely no preconceptions about who Catherine Tate was or the kind of things she did. Therefore, whereas most of the UK viewers seemed to watch her in this and think "Oh, Catherine Tate is doing her comedy shouty character", I didn't have that point of reference to start from and just watched her as I would any actor. I think that if you can watch The Runaway Bride without any preconceived ideas regarding "the kind of things that Catherine Tate does" than you can't help but see some incredibly touching and quiet moments. That beneath the shouty exterior that Donna (not Catherine Tate) puts up there is a woman who is sweet, and kind, and very, very alone.

I'll just say it right here and get it out of the way. I adored Donna, and I'm thrilled that we get to see her again.

The plot of TRB is... well, it ain't Shakespeare.  The Mean-Santadroids kind of mulled around looking menacing without ever really needing to be there and when you come right down to it there's really absolutely sod-all rhyme or reason behind the Christmas Tree of Death (a possible title for the Christmas special 2008?) The Santas and the Christmas Baubles are there... well, they're just decoration, aren't they?  They're pretty, and they make the kids feel all Christmas-y inside, but they aren't really what Christmas or the Christmas special is ultimately about.  When you get right down to it this episode is all about the smaller moments.  The little moments of kindness that are so easy to miss when you're distracted by knowing Catherine Tate well before you met Donna.

The story, when you come down to it is: the Doctor is lonely and alone (and yes, I know we're all sick to the teeth already of the mooning over Rose even by this point, but it's important for the heart of the story) He meets Donna, who is even lonelier and alone, even though she's about to get married and it should be the happiest day of her life.

Because you see, on some level Donna KNOWS that her chance of happily ever after is built on lies. You can see it in the scene on the roof when she relates the story of how she and Lance met. It's all self-deception and "put on a happy face and pretend it's all OK." Donna is a woman who's been very alone for a very long time and has learned to be pushy and aggressive as a way to show people that she matters. That she can take care of herself. That she's even in the fucking room, for Christ's sake (and we get SO many clear examples of how her family and friends just really, fundamentally, don't give a shit when it all comes down to it. And every time it happens you can see in Donna's eyes - thanks to Catherine Tate's performance - that SHE sees it very clearly.) Catherine Tate's performance is really very touchingly nuanced, but if the shouty side of Donna's personality is similar to a comedy shouty character that she traditionally does (I'm guessing it is; I honestly don't know) then it's easy to see how one would be so used to that character that you wouldn't even look for the details.

So yes, the incidental music is a little bit brash, and the villainess is a little bit bwa-ha-ha. And the Doctor's ultimate solution to the problem is a little bit convenient and relies entirely on a completely pointless side plot of the villainess earlier on. The pedant in me also feels the need to point out that according to Inferno the entire planet should be melting to slag well before Boxing Day... Not that that matters, but I do fully expect a novel at some point which reveals that it's really super-energized spider shit from the dawn of the Earth that turns nice scientists into ape-men as it seeps up through the ground. Actually, there might be a Big Finish script in that...

But set against all of those things that might write this one off as "lite entertainment with no real depth", you also have to remember the little moments that make the whole thing MEAN something. The little moments are what actually make life mean something, when you get right down to it.

• At Donna's darkest moment, when all the lies she's told herself to pretend she's happy and loved are stripped away (in what is really one of the cruelest scenes that Doctor Who has ever done... And the look on Donna's face as she's forced to just stand there and listen... heartbreaking) At that moment, the Doctor goes out of his way to show her a moment of kindness, and it's so easy to not even notice at the time. Certainly Donna misses it, but it's there all the same. It's right there in the words "Oh well. Maybe your way is best" as he leaves the scanner screen which has always been perfectly adequate to him and goes to the door. That moment is in no way about having a better view or a neater special effect. It's about the Doctor saying to Donna "hey, you had a really good idea earlier, and it's better than my way of doing things, and we're going to do it your way." It's pretty subtextual, but it's definitely there.
•  When Donna could very justifiably give in to anger and take a moment of schadenfreude (which I may not have spelled correctly) at the ultimate come-uppance of the one who done her wrong, she can't do it. Or more accurately, she won't do it. She's too kind and too good a person to take the moment. She tries... you can see she wants to. But instead we get a very quiet "No, he didn't" which very nearly makes me cry every single time I watch it because it's just such a beautifully selfless and self aware moment for her.
• When Donna turns down the Doctor's offer to travel with her (which isn't a spoiler as we all knew about Freema already at the time - and as a side note, wasn't Freema fabulous as well?) she gets every opportunity to sidestep a difficult conversation as the Doctor tries to brush off her refusal casually and just move on with his life. But she can't let the moment go unsaid, because she likes him, and she knows that he needs and deserves the truth. So she insists on telling him why. She isn't cruel, she seems to go out of her way to avoid hurting him as she tells him, but she respects him too much to not be honest. The range of things that she expresses just with the words "And then you make it SNOW" is just off the charts.

And my favorite small moment of them all. (And it's not the one you're expecting.)

• "If I'm lucky."

That shared moment when he smiles, and then she smiles, and you can just see that this is a woman who has probably never before had ANYBODY tell her that she was worth knowing. It just gets me every time.
It's these quiet little moments of genuine love, respect, compassion and friendship that make The Runaway Bride for me. Just as it's those same little moments that really make Christmas. And life.

The Vizsla in Question

It may not have entirely escaped attention that the Vizsla posts have been a tad... sparse... for the last few weeks.*

*On the other hand, it may have entirely escaped attention, in which case feel free to go about your business, nothing to see here.

The reason is simply that Willum, the titular (no giggling in the back) Vizsla has been undergoing some health issues lately. 

I should stress, he's OK.  He's just 14 years old (next week), which for a 70 lbs dog is a rich fair age.

But I'm not going to pretend that his age isn't, at this point, showing.  Which has made writing his column feel somewhat difficult just lately.

Again, I want to stress, he is alive and well.  Which is entirely today's point.  Willum is a great dog.  Outside of being an internationally known Internet pundit, he's loving, loyal, smart and kind.  He's the dog that people that hate dogs love.  He's one of a kind, as all dogs are, really.

And I realized that I was in a very real danger of never writing that down while he was here for me to rub his belly immediately after, and that is not OK.

Willum is a great dog, and he's alive, and we're here celebrating that today. You should take this moment to appreciate the dog that's still with you now, if you're lucky enough to have one with you now.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to rub a belly.

Tomorrow we'll return to daily frivolousness.

What Culture

As many of you might now, I've been writing articles about Doctor Who for the site WhatCulture.com for awhile now.

Well.... I've been supposed to be writing articles about Doctor Who for WhatCulture... which brings me to the point of the story.

A few days ago, I received an email from the WhatCulture editorial staffletting me know that they had shut down my account as they wanted to focus on a smaller group of more dedicated writers.

I should point out a couple things right off

1: They are absolutely correct on this one.  For a variety of reasons I've been incredibly lazy about ever submitting articles there.  For example, my most recent commission - 11 Doctor Who Stories that the Peter Capaldi era should learn from.  It's currently 6 weeks past deadline and I haven't written a word beyond the initial pitch

2: I have absolutely no ill feelings toward them about it.  Like I said in point 1- it's a totally fair call on their part.

So, all things considered, getting politely let go was hardly surprising under the circumstances.  What was surprising however was that I had absolutely no idea how I feel about it.  Which, when you spend as much time as I do inside your own head over-analyzing the crap out of everything, is not a thing you experience every day.  Or ever.

So I've spent the last couple of days trying to puzzle it out.  And after three days I've come to the conclusion that I still have no idea how I feel about it, but I probably should get off my ass and get back to posting here, since emotional confundity should really not be an excuse for being all slack-ass about things.

So... I may or may not take up the editorial staff's offer to contact them if I'd like to discuss it further.  Who knows, maybe they'd be willing to give me another chance (if I ever manage to decide whether or not I want one)  What I have decided however is that from now on Saturday's are going to be Doctor Who talk here at The 42nd Vizsla.

So... That's the news...

Amazingly, Michelle Malkin actually contributed something positive

Not that she meant to of course.

But in her own bile-filled way, Michelle Malkin has brought me to a new awareness of why exactly I hate Michelle Malkin; something I've been trying to verbalize properly for some time now.  This is significantly more than I ever expected her to contribute to the world, so - there you go.  Way to exceed my expectations, Michelle Malkin.

She does a regular(ish) column that appears, among other places, on one of the far right wing 'news' websites to which I occasionally like to go to check out the crazy.  I rarely read the opinion pieces there however, as they're really not worth wasting any of your time on.  Go straight to the comment threads - that's where the Grade-A Crazy lives.

This week however I made an exception and read her latest venom-soaked delusional rant - a piece entitled 'Dear Mr. Colbert: Me so stupid.  You so funny'*

*No, I'm not going to link to it.  You can Google it for yourself if you want, but it really isn't worth your time.

For those who haven't been following the Colbert story, the essence of it is that a short while back Stephen Colbert did a piece on his show about the Washington Redskins in which he did what he always does - takes the thing in question out of context so that you can see how ridiculous it really is.  In this case he replaced American Indian with Asian in order to make the broader point that just because you open a foundation for people that you've been stupidly racist about doesn't mean that it's OK to continue being stupidly racist about them. 

A line from this piece was sent out over Twitter where - without the context - it was simply a line of racist dialog.  Big bru-ha-ha erupted. 

Now, after the dust has largely settled and most people have gone back to the actual point  (the point being, 'Oh Yeah... why are we OK with that wildly racist team name?') Michelle Malkin has boldly stepped in to make sure that we hold on to that righteous, misinformed anger, insisting that - no, it isn't at all about the football team, gosh no.  It's all Colbert being a big bad racist and anyone who doesn't agree with her must just be trying to suck up to Colbert in order to seem cool.

And so I puzzled over this for a while.

And then it crystalized for me exactly why I hate Michelle Malkin so much.

It's because this is what she does.  And it's all she does. 

Michelle Malkin exists solely to misinform people.  She takes the world and weaponizes it, solely for the sake on making people angry. 

This, in a nutshell, is what I've always disliked about her and never quite been able to put into words-

Michelle Malkin exists to increase the sum total of hate in the world in whatever ways she can.
Whatever lies she has to tell.  Whatever deliberate distortions she has to make to the stories she's relating.  Whatever it takes. 

She is a machine that makes hate.

So, for what it's worth, thanks Michelle Malkin.  Your one positive contribution to my world is that you've finally shown me clearly why I don't like you. 

I look forward to never thinking about you again.

Then Again, Maybe I'm Just A Terrible Person

Now, I don't suppose it's going to come as a surprise to anyone that I have been occasionally known to take the moral high ground here.*

*Unless this is the first thing you've ever read here, in which case - surprise.

While I stand behind my moral superiority for the larger chunk of things (and it should as always be observed that dogs are better than people), I've recently become aware that I might be at least partially evil.

Exhibit One - as regards the ongoing grey sedan situation.

I've discovered a couple of things about myself over the course of the ongoing parking spot struggle.  Primarily, that the threat of someone else taking my parking spot is enough to get me out of bed on time and into work before 9 (A feat that nothing else has heretofore accomplished)

But more than that, I've recently become aware that just getting to my spot as god intended isn't enough for me.  Sure, I get that celebratory rush as I pull into the waiting space, my firm vehicle thrusting forward into the tremulously waiting void.  It's purchase sliding gently into the waiting effervescent... I'm sorry, what was I talking about again?  Right... The parking spot...

I've realized that I'm not completely happy about things until I slip back down to the parking ramp mid-morning and look around to make sure the grey sedan is there and parked somewhere less convenient.  After all, if not then how am I to know that the owner of the grey sedan just wasn't coming in that day, in which case I would only have won by default.  It's not enough to have my rightful spot-  I need to have made the grey sedan suffer. I need to have beaten them.

I'm not entirely proud of it, but there it is.  When I see that well scrubbed and detailed shiny grey bastard parked in that awkward spot around the corner of the elevator bay where the smokers like to lurk, it moves me inside.  Mmmmmmmmmmm.  The sweet smell of victory and stale nicotine.

Exhibit Two - As regards uplifting religious videos

The other day I came across a 3 minute long video that had been posted by some well meaning church or other that showed a guy getting in his car and driving to get coffee.  On the way we hear his internal monologue as he's inconvenienced by all manner of things; a kid on a skateboard who gets in his way while backing out, a woman who steals his parking spot*, people that cut in line at the coffee place, etc.  Then, as he sits down in frustration he's approached by that all too common character in 'post racism' film and television - the 'mystical black person'** who hands him a pair of glasses that - when worn - allows him to see in writing what every single persons greatest personal issue is.

*He has my sympathy on this one.

** In all seriousness, this is a disturbing trend in modern film (see 'The Legend of Bagger Vance' to see the phenomena I mean.)  The upshot of it is that somehow Hollywood has embraced the concept that by showing minorities as 'mystical spirit guides' to their regular crew of white protagonists that it's somehow making a bold statement about race relations.  As opposed to what it's really doing, which is continuing the tradition of presenting all minorities as only being relevant in how they affect the lives of white people.  It really is, frankly, repugnant the more you dig into it and I whole-heartedly wish that we would all stop pretending it isn't.  A good overview of the issue can be found here, although - as always - Wikipedia should never be considered an unimpeachable source.

So, armed with these glasses, the man in question sees that the guy who cut in line at the coffee shop has just 'Never know the feeling of friendship', the woman who took his parking spot is 'mourning her best friend*, and the kid on the skateboard 'Just needs someone to care'.

*NO EXCUSE

The basic point, obviously, is 'hey butthole, everybody else has problems too.  Maybe you could cut the people around you a little slack'.  But what I took away from the video was 'Man.  You could make a killing out of people if you had those glasses.  I mean, just take the 'never had friendship' guy.  You don't suppose that if you became his friend he wouldn't... say.. buy dinner...?  A new blu-ray player...?  Plane tickets to Tahiti...?   You could unquestionably clean up with a pair of magic glasses that show you the primary weaknesses of each and every person who comes into your line of sight.  No question.  And God help the kid who 'just needs someone to care' should those glasses fall into the hands of the friendly neighborhood pedophile.

Sometime after the first fifteen minutes of thinking about this I started to question how good a person I actually was.

And then I went down to the parking ramp to look for a grey sedan.

Yeah..... Still totally winning...

It's impossible to say 'Regional idiom' without sounding pretentious

Ironically, it's also difficult to say 'pretentious' without sounding pretentious, so at some point you just have to suck it up and own it.

Which brings me to Minneapolis.

Well, to a discussion of Minneapolis, that is.  I don't need to be brought to Minneapolis physically, since I've lived in its suburbs for my whole life.  Which is why I feel qualified to identify a disturbing trend in its 'regional idiom'.

Now, I don't actually know if this is just a Minnesota thing or if it's the whole Midwest, or - God help us - the planet.  Perhaps some of you out there can report back.  But the thing is - almost nobody says 'you're welcome' anymore. (and less than 1% of people use the correct form of 'you're' when they write it down, but that's another battle for another day)

Plenty of people say 'Thank You', or at least they do around these parts, but at this point in history the standard 'You're welcome' has been replaced by some variety of 'No problem'.  It's like we're ashamed, on some level of the gratitude and feel the need to deflect it.  'Oh, you don't have to thank me,' you're saying, 'I haven't put out any significant effort.  Let's all just pretend that that never happened'

I cordially dislike it (even though I'm as guilty of doing it as anyone) because it disrespects the gesture of appreciation.  And let's be honest - there are enough people already out there not bothering to thank anyone for anything.  We don't need to be working to discourage others.

On one level I suspect it's the same Midwest regional protestant humility (trademark pending) that requires one to immediately deflect all compliments by immediately responding to them by saying something self effacing to avoid any appearance of feeling good about yourself.

'Hey there, that haircut looks really good.'
'Oh, it's nothing.  Besides, I'm fat and bad at math.'*

*Seriously, this is not as much of an exaggeration as you might think.  Trying to give a Midwestern Lutheran a compliment is like trying to nail water to the wall.

Another fun thing that Midwestern people do, and that I suspect is part of the same issue - it is absolutely forbidden to ever eat the last of anything.  Because people might think you're greedy, or gluttonous, or from a coastal city.  If there is own brownie left on the plate, that brownie will remain on the plate.  Eventually someone might cut it in half so that they're still leaving something behind, but that's as far as it will go.

So I'm making a movement.  Starting a movement.  Creating a movement.  WHichever of those is the correct thing to do to make a movement happen*.  Let's all make an effort to start saying 'Thank You' again.  It's OK, I promise no one will think you're conceited because of it.

*Another good way is a lot of fiber and warm water**

**I'm sorry, I really tried to resist that...

Vizsla Flashback - Vizsla v. the Myth of High and Low Culture

Quite frequently I use Youtube as my own personal radion station.  I do this for two reasons -

-I don't understand how Spotify works

-No matter what song you're looking for, it's pretty good odds some wistful teenager has used it as a backdrop for a terribly earnest fan video about the Vampire Diaries.

So the other day I was listening to Vicodin by Terra Naomi - which is a really lovely little song about the interconnection of loneliness and addiction and totally worth a few minutes of your time - when I noticed that it is in fact a four chord song.

For those who didn't get caught up in the Axis of Awesome video that was all over the Internet a while back - the basic observation is that just about every pop song of the last 40 years is the same four chords in the same pattern (E, B, C#, A if you want to try it at home.)

Now, this is actually true.  The starting point that AoA used in their example is Don't Stop Believin' by Journey, but other notable examples include When I come Around by Green Day, Tomorrow Wendy by either Andy Preiboy or Concrete Blond, Let it Be by the Beatles, Stay Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry, and many, many others.

The only occasionally unspoken subtext behind the 4-chord song theory is that songs falling in that pattern are somehow 'cheaper' or 'less' than songs that don't.  This in turn ties into a broader belief held by a section (if not the majority) of the population that anything widely popular has less cultural merit than things that aren't.  This is the basic belief behind the notion that there is a difference between 'high' and 'low' culture.

Case in point - Shakespeare's The Tempest is 'High' culture because we were told that Shakespeare is 'Art' when we were in school, and because almost no one has ever gone to see a production of it.  On the other hand, 'Married, With Children', to pick a random example, is 'Low' culture, because it appeals to the unwashed masses and is therefore not 'art'.

This is obviously bullshit.  For one thing, Shakespeare's work was specifically written to appeal to as much of the masses as possible ever bit as much as Married, With Children was.  It's sort of how he paid for little things like food and shelter. 

The difference between the two isn't whether one is more 'art' than the other (all writing is, by definition.  The question is whether it's good art or not )  The difference is that The Tempest is very well written and Married, with Children was written incredibly lazily.  This isn't a shot at sitcom writing in general - Compare any random episode of M,wC to any random episode of Modern Family (for as Apples to Apples comparison as possible thanks to the Ed O'Neill through-line) and you'll see what a difference a talented writing staff who are actually putting in the effort can make.

To sum up -

-There is no such thing as 'High' or Low' culture.  There's only things are are done well and things that aren't.

and

-It's a mistake to ever confuse popularity with quality.  We do a pretty good job of remembering that just because something isn't popular doesn't mean it's bad, but we tend to forget that the opposite is also true.

Now go learn those four chords and start a rock band.

Priority/ies

I heard something interesting today on MPR (pretentious dog alert!).  In a relatively unrelated story about President Obama, the guest paused to give a brief history of the word 'Priority'.  Because I'm a huge linguistics geek (as many of you know) my ears immediately perked right up.

'Priority' as a noun apparently first came into usage roughly circa 1400 (which makes it More or less the latter quarter of Middle English for anyone who cares).  It derives from Latin, via French and roughly translates to 'having the state of being before'.  All of which means that the Saxons bear no blame on this issue, and are in no way responsible for arranging your workload.

The interesting point (making the assumption that I'm the only one who finds the previous paragraph interesting) is that for the first 4-500 years of its usage it was a singular noun.  Meaning you could only have one, by definition.  Much like the concept of Nemesis.  (I know.  I need to let that one go.)  Somewhere around the end of the 1900s we, as a culture, just kind of decided that it was possible to have more than one most important thing and that we'd all, individually, just have to try to work our own crap out to the best of our ability.  I suspect if we dig far enough there's a way to blame Henry Ford for it.  Call that a homework assignment.

In any case.  I think that there's a significant case for us all agreeing to let the original definition stand.

Priority:  You get one.

Which means that if you make me your priority, and I make me my priority, you are no ones' priority.

With apologies to Myrna Loy

Shortly (relatively speaking) it will have been a complete year that I've been writing this blog.  And over the course of that year I've learned some interesting things.  For example, I've come to learn that making a commitment to writing something entirely fresh every single day- when coupled with a full time day job, at least two part time side jobs and what can be colorfully described as an increasingly interesting complicated personal life- is a lot more stressful than I had anticipated. 

Side note - I'm still going to do it.  I just mention so that you'll all (both of you) appreciate the effort.

When I went into this I had two basic rules-

1:  Write something every day

2:  Don't stress about how long that something is, whether it's any good, or whether it amuses anyone but yourself. 

Side Note -- These are also actually pretty good rules to apply to any aspect of life.  Show up daily, and don't worry too much about it.

Pretty early on I abandoned the idea of writing anything new on Sunday, because on some level of my brain I needed to know that there would be regular breaks.  And that was a good decision, by and large.  It caused me to start re-posting older bits that I had been particularly amused by, and made the whole thing seem manageable.

Slightly later on I learned a valuable lesson about pictures, which I'll get back to in a moment.

A few months into the whole process (July last or thereabouts) I started playing with the widgets available to add onto your blog here and one of the first ones I added was the 'most popular posts' feature.  Pleasingly, the first post to really start getting a fair number of hits was the one about Markie Post, which seemed ontologically right on a profound level.  I suspect the picture (pilfered from the internet) of her in a bikini was in some way responsible for people finding that one.

Side Note --- Seriously.  There are no pictures out there of her wearing anything BUT a bikini.  I find that sinister.

What the most popular post counter has taught me lately is that no matter how amusing you think the current entry is, it is still going to be outviewed by some thing about leprechauns that you wrote 8 months ago, because apparently the google search engine in Denmark has decided that the picture of a leprechaun that you included in that post is the default image by which all leprechauns are judged and has taken to just sending people directly here for all their leprechaun needs.  The leprechaun picture was also snagged from some unsuspecting internet source who may or may not be aware of what the good people of Denmark and I have made of it.

Right.  The thing about the pictures.  Getting there.

Side Note ---- Side Notes are fun!

One of the other old posts from back in the picture grabbing days is one about my utter amazement at discovering that Estelle Getty had been incredibly sexy when she was young.  I used this to make a larger point about how it was nice to remember that people could be more than one thing, but let's be honest - it was really all about 'Holy Shit, Sophia was smokin' hot once!'  As illustrated by undoubtedly copyrighted photos which had been - you guessed it - picked up randomly and without permission from someplace on the internet.

I'm circling around to my point here.

Two days ago I got a comment on the Estelle Getty post from one Brittany Radcliff, who - from our extremely limited correspondence - seems pretty cool.  She pointed out that the picture of young, sexy Estelle Getty was in fact Young, Sexy Myrna Loy (my words, not hers.  She just said Myrna Loy.  But I feel like the young and sexy part deserves a shout out anyway.)

So I did a little research and discovered that Brittany (if I might be informal) was absolutely correct.  That was a picture of Myrna Loy.  In fact, the only web references to that picture being Estelle Getty all linked back directly to this very site. And while I was somewhat pleased at this reinforcement of my deep seated belief that the internet is an entirely unreliable source of information, I was less pleased at discovering that I was part of the problem.

Which brings me to my larger point about pictures.

It was pointed out to me in early August that it's actually not OK to use non-common use images on a personal blog.  Because they kind of belong to someone else.  It turns out that it's wrong to just take other peoples work and use it. (Take note, Urban Outfitters.)  And I think that this is what's always kind of bugged me about Markie Post and Denmark.  Getting views based on somebody else's images - no matter how amusingly used - isn't really a conscionable thing to do. 

And so, while I actually stopped using other peoples images back in early August, I'm going to go ahead and take the next step at this point and clear out all the ones that had been previously used, replacing them where I can with things of my own.

Side Note ----- I do actually draw myself.  I'm just incredibly lazy, and it's easier to just websearch 'leprechaun images' than it is to draw one.'

So, with apologies to the people of Denmark and Markie Post devotees, Over the next few days (OK, let's be realistic and say weeks - see above note re: the number of side jobs I currently have) I'll be updating a lot of the old posts.  Some jokes will, unfortunately, be lost.  Which is sad, but what can you do.

Many thanks to Brittany Radcliff for giving Ms. Loy her due.  Estelle was in fact also quite attractive when she was young, but I'll leave it to any interested parties to do the websearch on that themselves.

Many thanks for those of you that read these frequently apeshit crazy columns.  More to come.

Vizsla out.

Happy/Sad

I've encountered a phenomenon lately that I like to call 'Songs that lie to you by having a deceptively perky tune which causes you to not notice how depressing the lyrics are.'*

*Note to self - come up with shorter term for this.

Case in point - The song 'The Wrong Direction' by Passenger.  Now obviously Mike Rosenberg is clearly a leprechaun, thus firmly disproving several of my earlier posts (but what can you do, right?)

At one point I actually posted a link to this song on my Facebook page with a brief word about this fun little song I'd stumbled across, only to receive a couple of responses along the lines of 'Are you on crack?  Those are the most depressing lyrics ever.*'  At which point I was compelled to actually listen to the lyrics and concur that they were indeed depressing as all get out.  Which renders the nice lady enthusiastically playing the trumpet next to the wading pool somewhat inexplicable, IMHO, but there you go.

* But seriously - Have you never listened to... like.. ANYTHING by The Smiths?

I mention this because my friend Brian's father passed away last night.  Today is Brian's birthday. And because I know some extraordinarily wonderful and unusual people (and Brian would be on the upper end of the spectrum for both of those adjectives) he requested Facebook posts that combine the two sentiments ('Happy Birthday' and 'So sorry for your loss') in some sort of amusing way*

*I should mention - this is a man who once signed a condolence card to me with the words 'Grandma died because you didn't love her enough.' **

**And then realized that the card was still being passed around the office for others to sign.*** 

***In desperation he taped a small post it note with the words 'do not read' over his message so that the rest of the office wouldn't believe him to be a heartless monster.****

****I can't even begin to tell you how long I laughed about every single facet of that story.

There are somewhere along the number of 200 responses to his post with various attempts at combining the 'happy' and 'sad' messages in some way that alchemically becomes 'funny' and then 'healing'

About halfway down the list there is a response from the smartest man I know.  I'm not going to identify him here, because his head is already big enough as it is.*

*I kid, Jim.  I kid because I love.

Jim said - 'Happy sorrow...I guess that's what it's like to be an adult.'

So... maybe it's a mistake to try to separate the perky tunes from the sad words.  Maybe that's exactly where they're both supposed to be.

I'll leave you with the song that started this whole train of thought*

*But seriously - what the Hell is Nuno Bettencourt doing with his hair???

Vizsla v. the Myth of High and Low Culture

Quite frequently I use Youtube as my own personal radion station.  I do this for two reasons -

-I don't understand how Spotify works

-No matter what song you're looking for, it's pretty good odds some wistful teenager has used it as a backdrop for a terribly earnest fan video about the Vampire Diaries.

So the other day I was listening to Vicodin by Terra Naomi - which is a really lovely little song about the interconnection of loneliness and addiction and totally worth a few minutes of your time - when I noticed that it is in fact a four chord song.

For those who didn't get caught up in the Axis of Awesome video that was all over the Internet a while back - the basic observation is that just about every pop song of the last 40 years is the same four chords in the same pattern (E, B, C#, A if you want to try it at home.)

Now, this is actually true.  The starting point that AoA used in their example is Don't Stop Believin' by Journey, but other notable examples include When I come Around by Green Day, Tomorrow Wendy by either Andy Preiboy or Concrete Blond, Let it Be by the Beatles, Stay Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry, and many, many others.

The only occasionally unspoken subtext behind the 4-chord song theory is that songs falling in that pattern are somehow 'cheaper' or 'less' than songs that don't.  This in turn ties into a broader belief held by a section (if not the majority) of the population that anything widely popular has less cultural merit than things that aren't.  This is the basic belief behind the notion that there is a difference between 'high' and 'low' culture.

Case in point - Shakespeare's The Tempest is 'High' culture because we were told that Shakespeare is 'Art' when we were in school, and because almost no one has ever gone to see a production of it.  On the other hand, 'Married, With Children', to pick a random example, is 'Low' culture, because it appeals to the unwashed masses and is therefore not 'art'.

This is obviously bullshit.  For one thing, Shakespeare's work was specifically written to appeal to as much of the masses as possible ever bit as much as Married, With Children was.  It's sort of how he paid for little things like food and shelter. 

The difference between the two isn't whether one is more 'art' than the other (all writing is, by definition.  The question is whether it's good art or not )  The difference is that The Tempest is very well written and Married, with Children was written incredibly lazily.  This isn't a shot at sitcom writing in general - Compare any random episode of M,wC to any random episode of Modern Family (for as Apples to Apples comparison as possible thanks to the Ed O'Neill through-line) and you'll see what a difference a talented writing staff who are actually putting in the effort can make.

To sum up -

-There is no such thing as 'High' or Low' culture.  There's only things are are done well and things that aren't.

and

-It's a mistake to ever confuse popularity with quality.  We do a pretty good job of remembering that just because something isn't popular doesn't mean it's bad, but we tend to forget that the opposite is also true.

Now go learn those four chords and start a rock band.

For the love of God, please stop writing verses.

I've been a little obsessed for a while now with the song Desolation Row - In no small part because of my long standing obsession with the Watchmen comic book series.*

*The first issue of which was titled 'At Midnight All the Agents', which is a lyric fragment from the song.  The full verse is

At midnight, all the agents

and superhuman crew

go out and round up everyone 

that knows more than they do.

I'm tempted to copy and paste all of the lyrics here, but I'm not going to, for the exact same reason as I'm discussing the song in the first place here.

This song has 41 billion verses.

Seriously.  

It goes on for on for over 11 minutes, and not in a mid-sixties 'started a guitar solo and forgot to start singing again for a while' kind of way.  It's just verse, after verse, after verse, after verse.

(The other prime example of this phenomenon is of course Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' (aka that song that everyone pretends they liked before they heard John Cale's (admittedly excellent) cover of it on the 1st Shrek soundtrack.  Even Leonard Cohen stated on more than one occasion that he just couldn't stop writing verses and the song was way way too long, and if you're familiar with how long Leonard was willing to let things just sort of keep flowing along then you realize the enormity of that statement.)

('Hallelujah is also notable for the fact that we are now all apparently required by law to record a cover of it before we die.)

But meanwhile, back in the topic at hand...

The film version of Watchmen runs the closing credits over a cover of Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance who, perhaps wisely, chose to only do 4 of the 41 Billion verses - they stuffed the song into a 2/4 time signature and punked it up a bit, which kind of worked for them but seems to have really hocked off the Dillon purists on the internet which just goes to show that you can't please everyone, can you.

Where I was originally going with all of this is that the baton was thrown on Facebook to do a full lyrical deconstruction of the song, and I feel obligated to do so because

A:  Even though I kind of wanted to do that anyway, this still totally counts as doing David Quinn a favor

B:  A baton is a kind of stick, and anyone that's ever been around a Vizsla knows that if you throw a stick anywhere in a Vizsla's vicinity they are damn well going to retrieve it.

So... we begin at the beginning with Verse 1 (of 41 Billion.  Don't worry, I'm not going to do them all in detail, I have learned my lesson after the never-ending Catwoman article)

They’re selling postcards of the hanging  

They’re painting the passports brown  

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors  

The circus is in town

I'm assured by Wikipedia (insert the ever-increasingly predictable rant about Wikipedia's reliability as an information source) that this verse (or 'stanza', if you'd like to get all academic about it) is very likely a reference to an incident that took place in Duluth in 1920 and that a young Robert Zimmerman would almost certainly have heard of.  To whit - 3 black carnival workers were accused of raping a white woman and hanged in town.  They did indeed take a picture and sell postcards of it.

But aside from being a quick sketch of a horrifically macabre incident from a less enlightened time (we like to tell ourselves) this verse also sets up the basic imagery of the song - that of something crass and decorative applied over a decaying backdrop.  A cheap coverup overlay to draw attention away from the rot underneath.  It's a picture postcard of an atrocity, sold to amuse and distract.  That's essentially the tone set for the remainder of the song.

From that point on the lyrics are essentially a role call of characters. Some fictional (Cinderella, Romeo, the Phantom of the Opera) Some historic (Albert Einstein, Bette Davis), and some from religious folklore (Cain and Able, the Good Samaritan) whom you could either count as historic or fictional depending on your religious views (although I probably gave my view on it away when I called them 'folklore...').

And by and large the characters are... Doing nothing.  Einstein is pretending to be Robin Hood, Romeo's being politely asked to leave, Cinderella is quietly sweeping up the broken glass after the ambulances go.  They're decaying in place having no function outside of the stories we associate with them.

And on the edges - hiding in the choruses are the ambulance, and the riot squads, and the insurance men - Forces of control trying to keep the characters in their stagnation, enforcing the slow decay.

Indeed, a recurring theme is the resistance to change - the fear of letting things be finally destroyed so that something new can begin.  Dr. Filth's patients keep trying to blow up his world, but he won't let them.  Casanova is being punished for trying to get to desolation row, the insurance men are there to make sure no one gets away.  

Finally giving in to the desolation, finally admitting that the carnival being in town does not make everything ok.  That is what would free all of these people.  That is what they're being denied.  

That, in one vizsla's opinion, is what Bob was trying to get at.

Also it was 1965, so he was probably stoned.

Vizsla out