Who is Fleetwood Mac?

One of the things about missing over a hundred years of popular culture is that every once in a while you discover that somebody actually did something worth doing. Lately I've been thinking that this musical act called Fleetwood Mac may have been on to something.

These musicians, evidently gypsies of some sort judging by their clothing, had some success in the late twentieth century. In addition to maximizing their body hair, I'm guessing that they also spent a lot of time in the opium dens. Nevertheless, they made some good tunes. I've been enjoying this one about an "old Welsh witch":



Then today I discovered another one of their songs titled "Dreams."



Turns out that it's was one of their most famous songs and a #1 hit in the 1977. On top of the fact that I'm the last person to discover this group, they are also known as "soft rock," also known as old people's music. I think the last time I was "hip" was when I had front row tickets to see Lily Langtree.

Race and Gender in Cannonball Run

I was listening to my favorite science fiction podcast when they by accident fell into a debate about whether Smokey and the Bandit was racist and whether that was more palatable than the misogyny in Cannonball Run. They kicked around the idea that Smokey was more intentional and celebratory of its racism making it less palatable, but they rejected that idea. Then, one suggested that sexism was still acceptable today making sexist depictions less offensive.

It got me thinking about the depictions of race and gender in Cannonball Run, a kinoscope from the late twentieth century. In it, contestants of many diverse backgrounds drive their horseless carriages across the continent. Quite a thrilling accomplishment for any civilization. When I was a young man and they first finished the Transcontinental Railroad, it still took a couple of weeks to travel the whole route by train. Even then you had to wonder if wild Indians would attack or bandits would steal all your money and shoot your family. But by the late 1900s, a slew of half-wits could speed from one ocean t'other, guzzling ales and smoking opiates the whole time.

Among the contestants are numerous white men, two white woman, an interracial clerical team, an Asiatic scientist and an Asiatic race car driver, three white men who kidnap a white woman, a stuttering cowboy and an ex-footballer, and a white guy and an Afro-Latino (played by the late Rick Aviles) driving a "monster" vehicle. They are all chased by an elderly white, male naturalist.

It's hard to really pick out the characters that are supposed to be flattering from those who denigrate the group they're representing. The lead protagonists are JJ and his companion Victor. JJ spends most of his time boozing and chasing after harlots while his stout sidekick suppresses some inner personality trait and drives the emergency vehicle they have apparently stolen. They kidnap a dimwitted female who loves nature and refuses to wear a brassiere. They have also hired a cross-eyed druggist who is himself addicted to opium.

Other characters in the drama include the Italian and African wastrels dressed as priests, a wealthy wastrel and a fat man who is a crossdresser, an Arabian wastrel squandering his family fortune, and the two jezebels who reveal their bosoms to officers of the law to elude arrest. The naturalist attempting to bring them to justice was a serious man but grossly incompetent.

The only team that appeared serious and sober were the Asiatics, but their bickering, pornography, and hubris were their undoing.

Cannonball Run is ultimately a tale of the decline of world civilizations that have progressed far enough to master land transport but decide to use this technological advancement merely as a backdrop for a week-long rum frolic. Picking out which character was the least flattering seems beside the point.

Best Party Album Ever

I remember when Abner used to go around telling people that "Back in Black" by the band AC/DC was the "best party album ever." He seemed so certain of himself when he would say this.

But the parties the album would accompany were rather sad affairs. Usually they were in sparsely furnished apartments with beer-soaked carpets that were worn down to nothing. There might be a table lamp with a torn shade sitting on the floor. And usually there were dirty dishes piled in the sink.

Amidst the rubble, about a dozen single guys would stand shouting to each other over the din of the rock and roll music. They would drink the cheapest beer on the market, and their conversations would revolve around what happened in the wee hours of the previous morning after last night's party. The highlights would be if one of the young men had urinated in his bed accidentally, if somebody managed to bed a young woman, or if somebody passed out on the lawn of a local church.

Abner went around saying that "Back in Black" was the best party album for years, and the parties stayed the same as well. Then, one day I realized he hadn't mentioned the album for a long time. Apparently the shine had come off the ritual of standing around like a gang of hoodlums with no place to go choking down cheap beers as well.

But it had been glorious while it lasted.

I'm a Grown-Ass Man

I have heard the expression "grown-ass man" a surprising number of times. Probably only a dozen times in my life, but that is still high considering the expression is so idiotic. I think my first reaction every time I hear it is to picture a man with a big ass, which is probably why women don't say, "I'm a grown-ass woman." It's also possible that people hear, "I'm a groan ass man," which would be just as awkward.

I think that people have started using this expression because there is no good alternative. They want to be emphatic about how they are an adult and a man at that, but you can't really say, "I'm a fucking adult man," and get the same impact. It doesn't flow very well. It's also dangerously close to "I'm fucking an adult man." Similarly, "I'm an adult-fucking-man," sounds just as strange to the ears.

So, if you abandon "fucking" as your word of emphasis, you're left with damn, shit, ass, bastard, hell, and a handful of others. None of which really fits the bill.

I think the solution is to just let your adulthood and your manhood speak for itself. When you're reduced to uttering, I'm a grown-ass man, it's usually because whatever others have done recently fails to recognize you as such. So, rather than be defensive and put the attention on yourself, why not reply with a simple, "Go fuck yourself." Or, if this is being said to a family member or a sensitive friend, perhaps a "You've underestimated me and my level of maturity" will suffice. If you want to revel in the awkwardness though, go ahead and stick with "grown-ass man."

You Had Me at Chinaman

One of my favorite blogs (that has been inactive for some time) is by the screenwriter Jane Espenson. She wrote a lot about the nuts and bolts of screenwriting, which provided great insights into the shows she worked on but also how shows get written in general. One of her common subjects was "clams," which are jokes or witticisms that have worn out their welcome. Clams usually start showing up on commercials once they've become overused on TV shows. When the wife says to the husband looking at a new sports car, "don't go there," that phrase no longer has any business being in a sit-com script.

I think that "You had me at..." should have been put to bed long ago. Jerry Maguire, a movie about a sport businessman, gave us this much parodied line in 1996, fifteen long years ago. I guess the thing about clams is that sometimes they come back as a parody of the original parody. I don't think you can ever have a parody of the parody of the parody though. I think at the third level you actually just go back to the first level.

At any rate, I think we've had enough of "you had me at squid discharge" and "you had me at naked." Every once in a while you can give a clam new life by subverting expectations, but I think instead we will have many more "you had me at [insert un-romantic phrase here]" for years to come.

Chinaman has gone the same way, I'm afraid. The Onion had some wonderful columns from the newspaper's original editor wherein he mused on whether the steam engine would ever replace the Chinaman, and so forth. You might also go back to Jack Nicholson's joke in "Chinatown" about the wife cussing the husband for screwing like a Chinaman, but I don't think that was it's heyday. Who could ever forget Walter Sobchak's outburst?: "The Chinaman is not the issue here. It is about drawing a line in the sand and saying Across This Line You Do Not!...Oh, and, Dude, I believe the preferred nomenclature is Asian American."

I think that was clearly the high water mark for Chinaman. Recently, however, the Dude played Rooster Cogburn in a movie about my time. At one point he said, "That Chinaman's been runnin' bad shells on me again."

Such a delightful line. How could he have revived this clam, I wondered. Then I realized, he was using it earnestly as part of his everyday speech and the humor came from context and not the words. Thus, it's clam status is intact. If I know my clams, I suspect car commercials will soon feature the wife saying to the husband looking at the stationwagon: "What are you, some kind of Chinaman?"

One Anxiety Dream to Rule All the Others

About a month ago, I had a week off of work, which usually means that I'll have an anxiety dream before the week is out. And so it was.

In my November anxiety dream, I found myself naked, drunk, driving a four-wheeler on a track high above the town of Chester and I wasn't wearing my glasses.

What was great about this dream was that usually my anxiety dreams have a combination of only two of those things: drunk and needing to drive a vehicle. Naked and lost. Drunk and don't have my glasses. And so forth.

Another hallmark of my anxiety dreams is not knowing how I got there. This one was a little different in that a couple of the anxiety-producing characteristics evolved organically from the situation. I did find myself drunk and naked in Chester mysteriously. But then I stole somebody's four-wheeler, thinking that I would be able to get out of the situation faster. Then I saw a wooden on-ramp for the strange elevated track and thought that if I got up on the track, nobody would see me naked.

Then, once I was up on the track, I somehow lost my glasses. It was at that point that I realized that this mysterious wooden track was too narrow and rickety for me to be driving a four-wheeler on it, let alone while drunk and not wearing my glasses.

Somehow, I was able to drive the four-wheeler back to a friend's house and get out of the situation. But as I realized it was almost dawn, the thought struck me: I'm drunk, naked, still don't know where my glasses are, and I have to be at work in less than three hours.

That's when I awoke in bed and realized that I still had about three more days of vacation before I had to be back at work.

The Vanguard of the Arcade

Here is captured video from an old arcade game named "Vanguard." I have heard tell that a small grocery & drug store in northern West Virginia had this game back in the 1980s. Young boys would queue up to pump one quarter after another into this machine. But watching this video doesn't really give you any indication why they would do that.

Apparently at the time, these were "cutting edge" graphics and sounds. And unlike most games, the screen didn't just roll right to left and your ship could shoot up, down, and backwards.

But I gather that the allure was more than that. The large black box that housed the machine emitted the smell of warm electronics. The soundtrack of the game reverberated off the walls, delighting the young people's ears. The coin slots built into the front of the machine seemed to be the very thing envisioned by the people who had first minted coins a thousand years earlier. The small room where they kept the games was pleasantly warm while outside the winter wind howled. And in the store, shoppers plodded along behind shopping carts, or "buggies" as they were known, trying to choose between competing brands of laundry detergent in a most tedious fashion while the young boys were transported to a strange space battle narrated by a robot.