Your Views on Contemporary Culture

[_AlmaBound]

I'm partial to the fugue.

[_karl61]

DCP saw In Bruges. Has he confessed?

[_Some Schmo]

Shouldn't this be in off topics?

[_Doctor Scratch]

I don't care at all about "hipness" -- a concept that should have gone out of fashion, if it didn't, back in the fifties with the beat poets.

Which is why you're griping about it now on two separate threads.

No, I'm just curious to see how the others measure up to your rather odd canon of contemporary cultural literacy.

"Canon"? I had seen these things mentioned on a blog and thought they'd make an interesting comparison with your long string of Palestrina, Bach, Camus, and whatever else. And I was right. The comparison has been most enlightening.

I mean, really.

Bat for Lashes? Why not Arvo Pärt or John Tavener or Pat Metheny?

And In Bruges? Why not Der Untergang? Or Iskandariyya Leh? Or Das Leben der Anderen? Or The Syrian Bride?

Oooh, look! DCP watches foreign films! Does he wear a beret while he does it?

You strike me, frankly, as a fairly young provincial who's rather pathetically, desperately, trying to pass himself off as . . . well, hip.

That's the first time, in all these years of your malevolence, that I've actually found your behavior somewhat poignant. Maybe you're human after all.

Ha! Thanks for the laugh, Dr. P. In all honesty, though, these posts don't do much to salvage your reputation for grim humorlessness. In either case, please go ahead and crank up the Victrola and listen to Berlioz while you thumb through your old copy of Persuasion. Ooh, wait---scratch that; Austen is a woman writer, after all! Let's make it: Jude the Obscure. Then all of us can all nod solemnly and approve of what a sharp, culturally savvy guy you are.

[_Eric]

This should definitely be moved off-topic.

[_Doctor Scratch]

Okay, if I must.... My .02 on this stuff (and yes, all of this is indeed off-topic):

1. My wife owns one of the Bat for Lashes albums. I sort of liked the creepy video of the song "What's a Girl to Do?"---it has people dressed in, like, rabbit suits riding bicycles in eerie formation at night.

2. Wray's latest, Lowboy, is about a schizophrenic kid riding the subways in NYC. It was pretty good, especially the way Wray renders the kid's odd thoughts. I didn't like the ending, though.

3. Mars Volta. Some of my siblings like their music, especially the earlier albums. I'm going to tentatively side with EA here, however, since the lyrics are often beyond dumb, and the music itself often seems to wander off into nowheresville. But, I do enjoy a listen to them here and there, and I also somewhat like their earlier efforts as a part of At the Drive-In.

4. In Bruges: a good ending. Great use of scenery. I actually liked Colin Ferrell in this film, which is probably a first (though I suppose he was tolerable in, say, Minority Report). Thought the bits w/ the dwarf were a rather nice, strange touch. I think that lots of people liked In Bruges better than I did, though.

Oh, dear.... I should have just kept my yap shut. Now I'm beginning to tremble with postmodern weltschmertz, and to fear that Cultural Doyens like DCP will think I'm trying to seem "hip." I realize, though, that if I limit my discussion to mention of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, The Beatles, Puccini, and Wagner, I'll be a-okay.

[_EAllusion]

That reminds me.

This song was At the Drive In's one significant hit.

When it was out, I was convinced that this fits the plot of Star Trek 8 well. I wasn't saying this is the intent, but I'd tell people this and they'd just look at me funny. So I'm telling ya'll. That song is fits Star Trek 8.

[_EAllusion]

For what it is worth, I do think DCP's tastes as expressed through his references run on the stodgy, broadly safe reputation side. It's like reading an AFI best films list.

There's a favorite aggregator website of mine called Arts and Letters Daily. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's weird to think about, but it hasn't changed much at all since it was my homepage a decade ago. DCP's tastes seem to fall in line with it if you carefully extract the bawdy stuff if it hasn't aged enough to dull the cultural shock value. But he's older, a Mormon, and a professor, so this isn't shocking. It's not bad taste. It's just stuffy. It's also the kind of thing projected by pretentious people with an affinity towards elitism but an underdeveloped ability to independently evaluate art and literature for themselves, but that's not his fault.

I just was mocking his tendency to write posts like, "I'd respond to this if I considered it worth my time. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to attend a lecture on the lesser works of Ezra Pound. Ego vobis valedico."

Please. After seeing it enough times, I believe this describes my reaction:

[_Bond James Bond]

I think Anchorman and Family Guy are important culturally.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time!

[_Doctor Scratch]

For what it is worth, I do think DCP's tastes as expressed through his references run on the stodgy, broadly safe reputation side. It's like reading an AFI best films list.

Lol. Yeah. Just clicking over to the A&L Daily website, I notice them discussing Bruno. Now, does this strike you as the kind of film that DCP would go and see? Ultimately, the real badge of "coolness" in Mopologetics comes when you watch The Godmakers for Family Home Evening.

On a sidenote: your old post reminded me that (I think) I've got an old vinyl of Brain Salad Surgery laying around somewhere.... Someone gave it to me as a gift a few years back. Oddly enough, I can recall an English sister reading the lyrics of "Jerusalem" in sacrament meeting one day. Yes: she was referring to the Blake poem rather than ELP, but still.