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More inexplicableness: this Romper Room clip at the tvparty.com site. The end of a live children's show, 1977. The host brings up the Magic Mirror. Cloying Romper Room doggerel set to creepy, melting psyche visuals. The host calls out the names of all the children she could "see." ("Michael" is never one of them: can you see me like I see you?) The evil clown jack-in-the-box. "Pop Goes the Weasel," whines and armpit farts, performed on a synth already a decade or so out of date. "Mary Ellen McPhillips and Phyllis Haines discuss the politics and personality of Idi Amin on Straight Talk. Next on Channel Nine." Prompted by this weekend's Dexter's Laboratory, some thoughts on children's television of the 1970's. There is no sentimental apologizing for the majority of these shows. By and large, they were absolutely terrible. At every level. Not even lovable as camp. That's what struck me so forcefully when I watched Nick-at-Nite's *Pufapalooza* program back in 1995. They reeked of the cheap and cynical. It's like: who cares if the videotape looks like it was edited with dull garden shears? Or the animation's only like...what? 30 frames per minute? Bah, the kids aren't gonna notice. And the ideas behind them! Jesus. Fred and Barney Meet The Shmoo, which was this resurrected character from 'Lil Abner? With the Thing from the Fantastic Four...only without the Fantastic Four? The New Adventures of Huck Finn? Where Huck, Tom and Becky are mysteriously transported to a different land and time every episode? (It's educational.) Jabberjaw, a humanoid shark who talked like Curly Howard...and lived in an underwater future landscape...and was the drummer for a rock band? These shows are not surreal. They're beyond surreal. They're inexplicable -- grotesque juxtapositions of cultural artifacts that, unlike surrealism proper, most assuredly have no bearing whatsoever on anybody's web of unspoken desires. I didn't even these shows much when I was a kid. Compared to adult shows on prime-time, Saturday Morning shows just looked shoddier. And anyway, they were often either too scary or too full of hysteria. (Surely everyone has a story like this: I'd have to turn the sound down when the beginning of The Electric Company would come on because its hysteria, its orchestral swells and "HEY YOU GUYYYYSS!!!!" shout-outs made me squirm.) Here am I thinking that Daft Punk's "Da Funk" must use some subaltern samples of Rod Stewart's "D'Ya Think I'm Sexy?" when I realize the real model might very well be the beginning of Rick Dee's "Disco Duck." Seriously. Nicholas Johnson in 1970, on the year 2000: "The most significant trend in communications today is probably the trend toward instantaneous, ubiquitous, no-cost access to all information." He had no idea, not a clue. Imagine trying to explain to the Nicholas Johnson of 1970 such things as Google, Napster, MapQuest, the IMDB, websites geared to every sexual proclivity imaginable. There would only be two concepts that would adequate to describe them: the library and the hallucination. And I don't mean hallucination in the sense that the internet is a "consensual hallucination"; I mean that back then, only in madness, dreams, drug hallucinations and ecstatic visions could a library posesses the grandiose thickness (or completeness, if you want to get less poetic) that these quasi-libraries have. "Every song?!?!" "Not quite. The big, current stuff and a goodly selection of everything else." "All it takes is a tap of my fingers?" "And a fast connection." "A what?" "Nevermind." Or maybe the supermarket is a more generous analogue. I've heard stories about people from Eastern Bloc countries coming to America in the seventies-eighties and literally bursting into tears at the sight of an American supermarket interior: never had they seen such a wide variety of things, no shortages, unvampiric prices. More Is Always Better. Maybe they should've called not the information superhighway but the information supermarket. From the reference pages of that crankily neo-Platonist band, Pere Ubu: "As has been noted in various articles and openly confessed by us, we have a deep affection for the consumerist society. We are proud to say that More Is Always Better. There is a difference, however, in liking a beer from time to time and being an alcoholic." Pere Ubu's first two singles mean more to me than the entirety of the Rolling Stones' recorded output. "[Thom Yorke] just didn't think guitar bands were 'relevant' anymore, he told the other band members. To hold "relevancy" as an aesthetic ideal is an admission of failure. When we say an artifact is "relevant" in this broad sense, we mean that the artifact is not relevant to any particular context but relevant to the ways of the whole world, the sum of all contexts. To hold "relevancy" in this sense as an ideal is to imply that rock music cannot create its own context. It implies that an artifact can only have meaning when it has direct bearing on the way things are. In this scenario, an artifact that tries to create its own context -- stands independent of the world and is not a prisoner to it - is a pointless waste of time. To hold "relevancy" as an aesthetic ideal is to say that rock music (or art in general) can no longer play an active in role in the creation of history; at best, it can only try to keep up with the history that invariably outpaces it. The "relevant" artifact is not a revolutionary artifact. It does not change the world, but merely succumbs to it. It is an impotent mirror, helplessly reflecting the current state of affairs. I don't give a fucking damn whether or not an artifact is "relevant" or not. |
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