Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
It's a conundrum as old as fossil fuel: In exchange for an initial connection, you leave out everything about yourself you fear may put that connection at risk. All you have done, of course, is guarantee that the eventual disclosure of your true predilections will be that much more damaging.
But how much worse to actually have to listen to indie rock! Many times I have been at a party -- the guests nicely turned out, everyone masking wine-and-Brie breath with Certs and beer, a light cirrostratus of cannabis smoke hanging in the air -- when, suddenly, things simply move past the possibilities of jazz or the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack and someone throws on an Air or Guided by Voices album. I try to like this music. I do. I even own some of it. It sits there in my CD collection like the young-adult equivalent of those never-read National Geographics my parents used to put out on the coffee table. Part of me wants to -- and sometimes even does -- canvas the room: Do you really like this stuff? Really? Then why don't I?
"Well what do you listen to?" some woman (it is always a woman) will say.
Do I tell her? Sometimes, yes, I do -- and then cry out: "I am not an animal! I am a speed metal fan!"
Of course I am not a total cretin, musically. I hold the uncontroversial opinion that the Beatles are the greatest group of all time period forever, and a long relationship with a violinist gradually led to an appreciation of music written centuries before the invention of the whammy bar. I am definitely a "Classical Thunder" sort of fellow, however. Mozart, no matter how colossal his genius, moves me about as much as Steve Winwood. The more bombastic the better: Mussorgsky, Wagner, Holst and Beethoven at their most relentless. I once tried to impress a knowledgeable, classical-music-loving friend by telling him that my favorite "symphonic work" was Ottorino Respighi's "The Pines of Rome."
"Moronic schlock," he replied, giving me the faint comfort that even when I attempt to be tasteful I am most attracted to the stuff that leads actual connoisseurs to pinch shut their noses.
Movies are on one hand a far simpler matter and on the other much, much more complicated. They are simpler because I like and admire plenty of movies commonly accepted as good. They are more complicated because of what the films you like reveal about you. If you tell someone you are digging an old Cannibal Corpse or Flotsam and Jetsam album, she is likely to laugh, but if you tell someone one of your favorite films is "The Hills Have Eyes," she is likely to file a restraining order. No matter how many foreign films I see at the Angelika, no matter how many documentaries I quite happily rent, I am forced to admit that no films engage me more than those that feature brain-eating zombies and indestructible, teenager-slashing killers. In other words, "Citizen Kane" is an amazingly innovative film and well worth repeated viewing, but it would have been a lot better with a few sequences featuring half-naked women being chased through a forest by C.H.U.D.
The zombie/slasher theme is important, for I find "horror" films such as "The Exorcist" or, Satan preserve us, "The Sixth Sense" laughably obtuse in "scare" terms. Neither demonic possession nor ghosts frighten me because demons and ghosts do not exist. Faceless men wearing fright masks and wielding weaponized ski poles and lawnmower blades might not literally exist, but they certainly could. Brain-eating zombies are frightening because dead bodies and, more to the point, death itself is the single most terrifying subject matter we have.
This love of horror films has stranded me in some discomforting social terrain. I am, for whatever reason, powerless to say anything other than exactly what I am thinking while within 30 feet of a movie theater. I have no idea how many first dates have become only dates when I looked up at the illuminated white marquee and said, "'Jeepers Creepers' looks pretty good," or "How about 'Urban Legends: The Final Cut'?" I imagine the number is not small. My appreciation for these films, I have found, affects young urban women quite a bit differently than my love of speed metal, which is mostly regarded as mysterious and pathetic. Slasher films make them angry -- or rather Angry, the rehearsal-honed and indoctrinated rage in which innumerable cultural grudges eddy and swirl. I have been called by these young urban women a misogynist and childish and sick. I have been looked upon with saddened, surprised eyes and been told, "But I thought you were --"
"I know," I have said in return. "I know." I try to tell them that I really am a peaceable sort. That cruelty in every form appalls me. That horror films -- the best ones, at least -- are always about something else. The fraudulent safety of the suburbs, for instance, or the savagery animating high-school popularity. I try to explain that "I Spit on Your Grave," the notorious, notoriously graphic 1978 gang-rape film starring Buster Keaton's granddaughter, actually has quite a lot happening in it, morally. I try to steer them toward Duke University professor Carol J. Clover's seminal "Men, Women and Chainsaws," still the best thing ever written about horror films, which advances the claim that by compelling male viewers into positions of primeval empathy with the final, prototypical "survivor" figure in horror films, almost always a young woman, they actually force the issue of transgender identification far more than any Alice Walker novel.
No one listens, of course. The young women walk away, my friends just shake their heads, and I wonder if perhaps my "bad taste" is just a reaction to something I either cannot or am unwilling to pin down. I am from a small town in the rural Midwest, twice removed from the coastal megalopolis dream machines that whip-spin culture across the North American landmass. It could be that my love of peerless literature was forged due to a desire to remove myself from what I thought to be the unliterary environment in which I grew up, and my love of horror films and speed metal, which intensified in my early 20s, after I'd moved to New York, is related to a similarly reactive inclination. Which would of course make my motives as repulsive as those of the Indie Rock Snobs I loathe.
It has also left me, at least culturally, very lonely. I attend movies alone, play my music low, step away from nonbook conversations, and generally cherish the objects of my blockheaded love in holy privacy. Some time ago, near the end of a mostly inconclusive date, the young woman accompanying me pulled me into a bar and planted me on a stool, claiming the joint had a great jukebox. She was beautiful and hip-seeming, and so I sat there with a face-lift-taut smile, watching her make her selections, anticipating a doleful blast of the Cure or God knows what else.
As she walked back over to me, however, what filled the bar's Monday-night emptiness but the feedback guitar pluck (lifted from the Beatles' "I Feel Fine") of Def Leppard's "Photograph"? The lovely young woman apologetically bared her teeth, not quite smiling. "I love Def Leppard," she said with a testing uncertainty I knew all too well. Of that night I was and remain certain of one thing. This was love.
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