Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I'm a young, cultured New Yorker who reads Gaddis and Ishiguro. But I can't stand indie rock, I love speed metal and slasher movies, and I refuse to be ashamed anymore!
Aug 28, 2003 | About one hour into "Freddy vs. Jason," my repast of sour Skittles and a depth-charge-size drum of Diet Coke long consumed, I am forced to conclude that I am ashamed of myself for dropping $10 to sit here for this. The premise is compelling, in a jackknifed-semi sort of way: Freddy Krueger has dispatched Jason Voorhees on a mass-murdering errand to 1428 Elm Street in order to resuscitate memories of the now-forgotten Freddy, thereby allowing him (Freddy) reentry into the nightmares of the young. But other than enabling me new insight into Friedrich Engels' core theory that quantity affects quality -- the profoundly unselective Jason is the proletariat, while the fussier Freddy is deeply bourgeoisified -- the film has all the charm of a machete to the clavicle. I will be seeing it again early next week.
Crammed within my bookcases and in unsteady Pisa towers around my apartment you will find Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled," "A Cynthia Ozick Reader," Martin Amis' "London Fields," William Gaddis' "A Frolic of His Own," Joan Acocella's "Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism," novels and essays by Johns Gardner and Updike and Fowles and Richards Powers and Yates and Wright. I have many hundreds of books and could go on. About this I am not shy. I am, in fact, the sort of person who complains that the biggest plot gears in, say, Quentin Tarantino's "True Romance" are "obvious" facsimiles of plot gears in Robert Stone's 1974 National Book Award-winning masterpiece "Dog Soldiers" -- and in pointing this out would in all likelihood refer to it as "Robert Stone's 1974 National Book Award-winning masterpiece." I am the sort of person who, while visiting Walt Disney World with his brother, his brother's wife, and their 3-year-old daughter, will talk at length on the Monorail ride into the park about Stanley Elkin's brilliant 1985 novel "The Magic Kingdom," which as it happens --
"Can you maybe," my brother interrupted, "not be, like, such an ass for a while?"
You know my type. Of course you do. But actually: You do not. My bookshelves may throw up great flying buttresses of erudition, but my compact discs and DVDs and videotapes, arranged in less conspicuous piles, conjure up a personality of altogether different dimensions. For instance, "Night of the Living Dead," which I have seen no fewer than 20 times. Little in life has so riveted me as director Tobe Hooper's commentary on "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" DVD. "The Shining" and "Evil Dead II" are films to which I repair whenever I feel the need for solace at its most instantaneous. I consider "Dawn of the Dead" and "Halloween" two of the greatest American motion pictures ever produced, and after a couple of drinks will go further than even that. I kind of liked "I Know What You Did Last Summer."
That is not so bad, I imagine some readers are now thinking. Horror films are more or less legitimate these days. "Scream" and what have you. A little five minutes ago, but cool. Let us get this over with. The following music has been in my own private heavy rotation for as long as my memory reaches back: Anthrax's "Among the Living," S.O.D.'s "Speak English or Die," Slayer's "Reign in Blood," Megadeth's "Peace Sells ... But Who's Buying?" My "Nevermind" is Metallica's "Ride the Lightning." This species of music -- sometimes called thrash metal, sometimes speed metal, usually obsessed with death and the occult -- is regarded by most musically literate people as the aural equivalent of smallpox. Speed metal is transubstantiated human aggression played on three chords at 4,000 miles an hour by young men whose thoughts on every topic more or less provide the informal definition of "retarded." Indeed, it is no surprise that scarier forms of speed metal dive ideologically headfirst into neo-fascism and white supremacy. Even Metallica's "Master of Puppets," commonly regarded as the "Eroica" of speed metal, sounds like what the Nazis would have blasted while invading Poland.
I do not know when or why I began to love speed metal. I just do. On top of that, I have never, to the best of my knowledge, heard a song by the Replacements or Hüsker Dü. The musical question that most bedevils me is not when R.E.M. or U2 or anyone else began to suck/got really good but rather that of why everything Metallica recorded after "... And Justice for All" is so tragically, inexplicably awful? It probably goes without saying that I sported a mullet well into the 1990s.
I consider myself, in most ways, deeply fortunate to count as friends so many literate, intelligent men and women. Except when it comes to talking about music and film. Just about all of my friends regard my love of heavy metal and horror films with a tolerant frustration that leaves me feeling a bit like I should be living under a bridge and tormenting passing goats. When one friend of mine, a book editor, told me with excitement he was editing the memoir of one Shane McGowan, I nodded with what I hoped was appropriate wonder.
He regarded me with sudden scrutiny. "You have no idea who Shane McGowan is, do you?" Sure, I said. "Who is he?" You know, I said. "The lead singer of the Pogues?" Right, I said. He sighed. "I forgot. Your taste in music sucks."
I reject this judgment on numerous grounds. First, while I do not usually quote Nora Ephron movies, I accept as true what Carrie Fisher's character says in "When Harry Met Sally ...": "Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor, but they couldn't possibly all have good taste." But I do not actually regard any of the above as representative of bad taste -- that is, when it comes to my taste. My pleas for egalitarianism go strangely quiet if I happen to be out with a young woman who tells me she loves John Grisham ("Check, please") or Nicholas Sparks ("Check, please") or Nora Roberts ("CHECK!"). Walking through an airport and having a peep at what average Americans are reading feels like some massive Tet offensive upon my entire sensibility.
Elitism was invented to make the world safe for creative excellence. I believe that, and feel safe within my book snobbery because reading is hardly a way to score social touchdowns. Elitism becomes misguided when it is used for wormy self-congratulation. Take Indie Rock Snobs. (Please.) No tribe this side of the Hindu Kush is more dismissive than these people -- which makes the preponderance of Indie Rock Snobs in my life so finally exhausting. To be in one's late 20s in a Really Big City is basically to surround oneself with such creatures. Dating, especially, becomes a kind of elaborate mental origami in which one folds oneself up in order to hide one's ignorance and protect one's attachments:
"Did you hear the Breeders are getting back together?"
"Amazing."
"What's your favorite Bikini Kill album?"
"Gosh. They're all so good."
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