Great Albums: A Parodic Quartet
I love music, and I have a special affection for cleverly written, expertly performed, lovingly produced tunes that not only deliver the musical goods but also take a satirical jab at convention with a dry sense of humor. Fitting that bill perfectly are the songs on four very different albums that never fail to amuse me.
The Rutles was released in 1978 as the soundtrack album for Eric Idle's All You Need Is Cash, a television mockumentary that parodies the rise and fall of The Beatles. The show itself is uneven, but its incredible attention to detail is mirrored in 14 songs written and produced by Neil Innes, a founding member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Monty Python collaborator. Innes and a group of session musicians manage to emulate the Beatles as faithfully as any tribute band while slyly stretching a variety of Fab Four styles into the absurd without so much as a wink or a nod.
Altar Boys Gone Wild
There was that moment of silence just before Mass began, when the altar boys stood with lit candles behind the priest in a narrow hallway to one side of the altar, concealed from the congregation by a brick partition. I always felt a twinge of nervousness akin to waiting backstage before making a theatrical appearance, for in seconds we were to walk in procession along a side aisle to the back of the church, take a right past the baptismal font, and solemnly traverse the center aisle. After ascending some steps and placing our candles on either side of the altar, we would simultaneously bow beneath the crucifix and then take our seats on either side of throne-like chair that accommodated the priest.
As self-conscious adolescents, we were well aware of the potential for public embarrassment that was offered by participating in the ritual. All eyes were upon us, and were we to trip over our cassocks or drop a wine cruet, it would not go unnoticed. So there was always a bit of tension as we waited in the wings, just the sort of mildly anxious anticipation that inspires one to create a healthy distraction. That is the only explanation I have for why I smiled at Alberto, yanked out a hair from the top of my head, and placed it in the flame of my candle.
Art For Hoi Polloi: M.C. Escher
From 1963: Why settle for ants on a log when you can have ants on a Mobius strip?
As an aging member of Generation X, I can attest to the existence of certain rites of pop culture passage that have shaped our perception of the world. Eating Pop Rocks, for example. Acknowledging the profundity of Dark Side of the Moon. Attempting to reconcile a Rubik's Cube. Discovering the Three Stooges. And surely somewhere in there, as our brains expanded to fathom the limitless wonder of human history and the unknowable infinity of our universe, we were all exposed to prints by the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher.
You know the work, if not the name. The famous pair of hands emerging from a flat sheet of paper to draw each other. The self-portrait of the artist as seen in the reflection of a hand-held sphere. Tessellations of birds, fish, and other creatures. Impossible architecture in which columns defy logic, stairs descend endlessly within a closed loop, and strange beings walk upon every surface of a convoluted interior. All were the creation of Maurits Cornelis Escher, who was born in the Netherlands on this day in 1898.
Future Shock
My ten-year-old self would have died at the revelation that this was coming one day.
Dear Bob:
If this letter reaches you sometime around the summer of 1979, then you have already wondered what it would be like to receive a letter from your future self. Well, wonder no further, because this is it. That's right, Bob - I am you in 2011, thirty-two years in the future. As I recall, your summer days consist of reading a lot of MAD Magazine, listening to Alice Cooper, and watching as many Brady Bunch episodes as you can find on TV. They say the child is the father of the man, and in our case it's true. You'll still be enjoying those same interests in 2011. But you won't believe how things have changed.
Some of what I say may be hard for you to understand, because the technology you use is going to change so fast that whatever dazzles you in ten years will be obsolete a decade or two after that. For example, take your record collection. By the time you're in high school, most people will listen to their records less and less, preferring instead to take their music with them on portable cassette players. In college, you'll see your first compact disc, a little silver record smaller than a 45 that is read by a laser instead of a needle. The sound will be incredible, and you won't need to flip a disc over to hear the whole album anymore. What could be better than that, right? But that's nothing. In 2011, I hardly use compact discs anymore. I have an mp3 player, a little box about the size of a wallet, and it has far more music on it than you currently have in your entire collection.
Focus Study
The photograph was a surreal, black and white portrait, just the sort of clumsy stab at art that one might expect from a college student in an introductory photography course. Its subject was a young woman whose eyes were obscured by the pair of oranges she held before her face. Perhaps it was its humor that earned it a spot on the wall of Haskett Hall, where I stopped to regard my handiwork each day after class. Passers-by might have mistaken my look of concentration for the solemn focus of critique, but my motivation was shallow. The truth was that I had something of a crush for the model, and standing for a moment in front of her portrait allowed me stare at her captivating image and daydream of impossibly good things.
Making films and videos interested me far more than capturing stills, but having declared my major as Photography and Cinema, I was obligated to learn the rudiments of picture taking and photochemistry. The lecture section of my introductory class was taught by Tony Mendoza, who was known at the time for a whimsical series of black-and-white photographs featuring his cat, Ernie. His artistry was inspiring, but as I was to discover, creativity was only a fraction of what was required to produce good photographs. The technical side of it - everything from light meter readings to focal lengths to maintaining the proper temperature for photochemical solutions - was daunting. I was long on ideas but short on technique.
Off The Grounds
It took me over thirty years to become a coffee drinker. My java abstinence was an inconspicuous trait for the first eighteen years, as few of my peers cared for a cup o' joe either (although one good friend did try to pull an all-nighter by eating coffee beans). Nor did things change at college, where coffee was surely one of the least preferred beverages. Once I joined the working world, however, I grew a tad self-conscious about my aversion.
Laboring under the fluorescent lights of a windowless office environment, I was surrounded by coworkers who were preoccupied with the status of the break room coffee maker. It was tended to with great care, as an auto enthusiast might treat a prized vehicle. Occasionally someone with little competence in the areas of filter usage and serving measurement would run afoul of those who knew better and henceforth be banned from making coffee. It was serious business, second only to our actual, what-we-were-being-paid-for business. Such is the power of a communal caffeine dependency.
Deebies!
When our eldest daughter was quite young, my wife supplemented our income by providing child care in our home. Amber seemed to enjoy the company of her daily playmates, one of whom was a boy her age named Dylan. The two of them got along well, whether they were building with cardboard bricks or guiding a toy school bus through the living room. One day, however, the mood suddenly turned sour, and that's when my wife first heard it.
"Deebies!"
Was it a nonsense word, or was it simply an approximation of something one of them had heard? While its origin would remain a mystery, its meaning would not. Over the next few days, the word deebies resurfaced, sometimes arising in a moment of anger and other times sputtered in mock frustration followed by giggles. We looked at the little ones in amazement. Apparently, they had invented their very own swear word.
The Lost Art Of The Long-Form Obituary
The brothers LeProwse, circa 1922: Barzillai, Glendower and Trevelian
As relatives go, Glendower LeProwse is as distant from me as a third-generation relation could be. My mother's maternal uncle died fifty-one years before I was born. He lived his brief life across the Atlantic as a native of Cornwall, England. I know very little about him, and yet I feel a meaningful connection to Great Uncle Glen, thanks to one of the lengthiest and most detailed obituaries I have ever seen.
Born in 1913 to Phillip and Asineth LeProwse, Glendower was the youngest of three brothers. Trevelyan, known informally as Trevy, was the middle child. The eldest, with the impressive moniker of Frederick J. Barzillai LeProwse, would emigrate to the United States in 1922 and marry the woman who would become my maternal grandmother. The three siblings grew up in Ludgvan on the family farm, which was christened Bar-Tre-Glen in their honor.
Kill The Wabbit
King of the beasts.
Expectations are founded on previous experience, so when we welcomed Tony into our home, we had no reason to believe that he would behave much differently from the recently deceased Sam. Sam had been something of a Halloween miracle, an emaciated stray who appeared during Trick-or-Treat and boldly leapt onto my lap as I sat outside distributing candy. We put out some food for him, and he soon became a fixture below our front window. Plummeting temperatures eventually persuaded us to let him in one night, and with the exception of visits to the vet, Sam never left the comfort of the great indoors. For two years, he was the gentlest and most contented house cat. Then one Sunday morning, we found him inexplicably dead on the kitchen floor.
Julie and I did our best to console our young daughters, who had become accustomed to Sam's comforting presence. Not long afterward, we heard of another stray that looked similar to Sam and had been hanging around our friends' house, agitating their house cat. It sounded like taking him in would be a win-win-win situation. Little did we know that there was no such thing as "taking in" this cat, nor was his personality anything like that of his predecessor. Perhaps the fact that he hissed at us during our initial encounter should have alerted us to that fact.
Taking A Giant Step For Granted
In an age of scientific miracles and technological wonders, familiarity breeds indifference. Consider the diminished esteem of NASA and the U.S. space program. According to the 2010 Census, the median age of our population is 37.2 years, which means that a majority of our citizens have never known life before manned space exploration. It's an immense demographic wedge that has never pondered the impossibility of putting a man on the Moon, because the mission was already accomplished. For most Americans, the visage of astronauts hopping across the lunar surface is not a personal recollection but rather the stuff of history books and grainy documentaries. Given the poor performance of U.S. students in math and science, and acknowledging the lack of curricular emphasis on the history of space exploration, it's a safe assumption that most of our population does not fully appreciate the enormity of our accomplishments.
It is nearly inexplicable that our nation should invest in, develop, and implement the technology necessary for manned lunar exploration only to abandon its application a mere three years after the first moonwalk. Today's children, upon learning of the heroic feats of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, are understandably puzzled by this intuitively backwards progression. They are aware that modern technology far surpasses that of the past, which leads one to wonder why we are not doing bigger and better things on the Moon. Of course, there is an explanation, and it is primarily the issue of money and the degree to which our representative government is willing to allocate funds toward further exploration of the Moon.