November 2007 Archives

As a guy who's spent the last decade and a half writing about pop culture in general and music in specific, I'm intimately acquainted with the concept of The List. I've written innumerable year-end lists of albums and songs and movies and characteristics of people who might like certain albums and songs and movies. They're all by and large meaningless, a bunch of stuff that I both like and consider substantial on one level or another, and I hate doing it. Unamerican as it is, I loathe competition. I like what I like and in some areas I possess the expertise to argue why some pop-culture products are more deserving of attention or accolades than others. I don't feel the need to rank shit, or to see the creative people that I respect and have enriched my life pitted against one another, or given a rank.

Now, I've gotta do that to people I know.

Did anybody read this article about Amel Samuels, a St. Pete artist who screwed up, and then instead of admitting he screwed up and moving on, told the Times he was censored, thereby letting the entire community know he's the kind of guy who can't admit it when he screws up?

Samuels missed the deadline for filing his paperwork and paying the rental fee, and as a result lost the reservation he held on a local exhibition space for his art show. That's the beginning and end of the story, but Samuels claims he lost the space because his art contains nudity, not because, you know, he flaked on the business end of things.

(Seriously, how can a real artist be expected to worry about stuff like paperwork and legal transactions when his head is so full of unique vision clamoring night and day to be manifested?)

Look, we all know creative types who are whiny and self-absorbed and feel like The Man is working to silence their distinctively genius voice. (Hell, some of us are those creative types.) Being an unsung artist is often frustrating. But this guy isn't fighting the good fight or speaking out for those who can't or won't. He's just overcompensating for his own balls-up by trying to turn it into a PR opportunity, and all it's gonna do is strengthen the average person's stereotypical image of the artist as an incompetent diva.

Maybe they should change that old adage to, "there's no such thing as bad publicity, except when it makes you look like a bitter tool with no sense of personal responsibility."

Peaches just turned me on to a new social networking site called Good Reads. Looks pretty cool at first glance, particularly because it's for a group that seems smaller and less influential with each passing year -- namely, folks who are passionate about reading those things with words that aren't magazines or websites.

But still, my initial thought was, how many freakin' social/professional networking sites do I have to belong to in order to consider myself covered, or up on things, or properly connected to The World of Tomorrow? Between Good Reads, Edit Red, LinkedIn, Facebook, That Crazy-Ass Virtual High School That Tom Built, and others, I spend the first half of my day wading through new messages and ignoring bulletins, quizzes and hacker-spawned ads.

Then I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. If social networks are still the hot new thing (and I know they're not with those kids who know about the hot new things, but there are a hell of a lot of people who aren't those kids, and they're still catching up), I should totally get on it. If I had my own social network geared toward certain interests and tastes, I could make money WHILE I ignored bulletins, quizzes and hacker-spawned ads!

My best ideas for my new business venture after the jump:  

High-school drama teachers love The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 story of madness and murder. Told in the first person, it's short enough that the kid in class with the best retention skills can memorize it, and melodramatic enough that any kid in class can solo-overact his or her way through it without looking like too much of a scenery-chewing jackass.

(I myself once rode the monologue to some performance award or other at a high-school drama competition. I even started pulling up the boards covering the stage lights during the story's climax - ACTING!)

But the truth is, it's a damn good yarn, as are several of Poe's more chilling tales. As a poet, Poe knew how to choose his words for look and specific emphasis as well as effect, and his imaginative perspectives on regular folks losing their shit still resonate today, when mothers drown their children because God told them to and people stab each other over bumper stickers.

Now, there's a cinematic "adaptation" of the story in the works. The movie is about a heart-transplant recipient being stalked by whomever murdered the person whose heart the patient received. Which, as anyone who has actually read Poe's narrative knows, has exactly nothing at all to do with The Tell-Tale Heart.

Why call it an adaptation of the Poe story at all? To draw in the thousands of ticket buyers who used to be teenaged drama geeks? To cash in on that influential cross-section of the public made up of scholars of macabre 18th century American literature? Why not just call it One-Third of the Plot of 21 Grams, Only, You Know, Scary? 

Your assumption, men, is that the engagement doesn't fundamentally change the day-to-day ins and outs of your relationship.

It's a big step, undeniably; not the first step toward marriage, really, but the first step away from non-marriage. Still and all, it's not like you're getting married tomorrow. That's what engagements are for, right? You're going to be married before too long, sure, but now you've got this time to digest this major change in your life, and get ready to not help a whole lot in planning the greatest day of her life. You made all the jokes about how you're just gonna show up on the wedding day and say "I do," and a part of you still believes it's actually gonna kind of go like that.

Oh, you poor, deluded bastards.

Yes, I guess I did.

I got engaged.

I was always one of those guys who figured he'd never get married. Actually, I thought every guy was one of those guys who figured he'd never get married. As I get older, I encounter more and more men willing to admit that they always wanted to get married, or always figured they'd get married whether they really wanted to or not.