Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

A Slow Afternoon with Wordplay

Q. Wordplay, remember when you used to be fun? You wrote all kinds of silly stuff about little things that happened to you at home, what you were thinking about, dragonflies, colors of the day, etc. It wasn’t all this Dark Academia falderol.

A. Yes, well,  I’m trying to develop a niche here in one little corner of pop culture, if that’s OK with you.

Q. Don’t you even have any comments on larger issues in the culture? With so many serious things going on—

A. You’re quite right. There are a lot of serious things going on and plenty of people available to comment on them. Right now I prefer seeing facts unfold. A bunch of people’s opinions are well and good, but what we need most are facts.

Q. I used to love those little personal anecdotes you shared.

A. OK. Well, I got some grease on a pair of pants the other night while cooking dinner. It didn’t come out even when I dabbed it with detergent. Then I remembered that I once got a similar stain out with lemon juice and salt. Just let it sit overnight, then wash. Voila!

Q. You’re kidding me, right?

A. Pas du tout. Don’t you remember—I once wrote an entire blog post on how to get a stain out of an upholstered chair. That’s a fact. Things were slow in my life then. Another fact is, if you want to deep clean your bathroom, put bleach solution in a spray bottle, spray your shower walls and the inside of your shower liner, turn on the hot shower, close the door, and let the bathroom get really steamy. After a few minutes, you can turn the water off, but keep the door closed for a good long while. I always remove towels and other items before doing this so that they don’t get bleached. I think I read this tip in Real Simple years ago; I just wanna tell you, it works. I got rid of mildew on my bathroom ceiling one time by doing this.

Q. Now you’re being useless. I never thought I’d say this, but even Dark Academia is better than this.

A. OK, well, I just read a novel by Alex Michaelides called The Maidens. It’s set at Cambridge University and involves a series of murders among a group of female students, acolytes of a classics professor who seems to wield undue influence over them. There are atmospheric descriptions of the campus! References to Demeter and Persephone! Quotes from Euripides! One thing I got out of it is to never go to a therapist who is unable to pick up on vibes such as her late husband having been bonking her niece right under her nose for years before he died. Also that her niece has homicidal feelings toward her. Just slipped past her radar somehow. I get it that therapists are just people, but that’s a hell of a blind spot.

Q. That’s depressing.

A. Yes, well. How about some dessert tips then? If you want to make a really delicious dessert that’s kind of like tiramisu but really, really easy, make some vanilla pudding, then mix it with several cups of sweetened whipped cream. Put a layer of graham crackers on the bottom of your pan, then layer it with the filling mixture and repeat, ending with graham crackers on top. Make a simple chocolate ganache to spread over everything. You could sprinkle some espresso on the layers if you want to make it more like tiramisu. C’est delicieux! Not an every night dessert, but great for an occasional treat.

Q. OK, but I could have gotten that from the Internet.

A. I know, but you didn’t, did you?

Q. I can’t stand you when you’re in this kind of a mood.

A. Moi, je l’adore. Mais oui, on est nul.

Q. You’ve been watching Emily in Paris again, haven’t you? What does “on est nul” mean?

A. I think it’s kind of like “f**k my life.”

Q. Gotcha.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

Dresses and Queens

Last week, I sort of promised that this week I would venture into pop culture territory if nothing intervened. It's true that there are at least three hurricanes veering more or less in our direction, but since I'm not in the actual vicinity of landfall, no matter where they hit (unless it's in the middle of the continental U.S.), I can't beg off pop culture duty due to emergency weather-related status. So there's no putting off this jaunt into television land.

Therefore, I will go ahead and tell you that after hearing about Game of Thrones for years, I finally caught a few episodes on TV over the last few weeks. One minute I was innocently flipping channels and the next I was immersed in a battle involving some rather large dragons, what appeared to be an army of the undead, and a fellow with a blue face. Such was my introduction, with little knowledge of the back story, to the world of Westeros and all the rest of it. My initial thought was that it was a rather grim place, but on the whole, no worse than some other places we've all seen.

My other discovery was Say Yes to the Dress, a program I find almost compulsively watchable, in almost the same way that a box of assorted chocolates is compulsively eatable. You might think that after watching a few brides try on gowns, share stories about how they met their grooms, argue with their mothers about what's appropriate in a neckline, solicit advice, shed tears, and go for a happy ending (or not), you'd have your fill and never need to watch again. Don't all these dress tales have basically the same plot, anyway? Well, yes and no. The story of a bride-to-be and her dress turns out to have archetypal resonance: like any fairy tale, it has endless variants and an ever-evolving cast of characters, who, while filling a finite number of roles (counselor, sidekick, mother, court jester, fairy godmother), manage to make the story new and different every time.

Has anyone else managed to mention Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress in the same breath? I hope not. My apologies to fans of both shows if anyone thinks I'm denigrating either one by bringing them together in this way. If Yes to the Dress seems too frothy a confection to stand up against the epic grandeur of Thrones, and if girls just wanting to have fun resent any implication that their nuptial preparations bear any resemblance to the maneuvering of scheming queens and warring kingdoms, all I can say is, in my opinion, "It isn't, and they do."

Characters on Game of Thrones are always talking about someone else wanting them to "bend the knee," to pledge their allegiance to one ruler or another, often someone they deeply distrust, have a conflict of interest with, or despise to the bottom of their boots, and the most common way out of this appears to be talking endlessly without ever coming to terms or giving one's word without meaning to keep it. Those who stick to their principles have a hard time of it with this hard-bitten crew. In fact, the choice to "bend the knee" or not actually seems to have quite a bit in common with the decision to say "yes to the dress"--or not. In both cases, there is power in delay and approval withheld, even for someone in a vulnerable position. Saying "yes"--whether one is a courtier or a bride--amounts to a life-changing decision that sets an entire process in motion whose ends cannot be entirely foreseen by anyone. It makes little difference whether the "yes" is enthusiastic or grudging, freely given or coerced. Larger forces are at work in love and war.

Now that everyone is thrown off-guard by this metaphor-juxtaposition-conceit-or-what-have-you, I might as well deliver the coup de grace, which is: I suspect that Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress are actually the same program. Queens, dresses, what's the difference? The characters are being asked to commit to a choice that in itself is only the prelude to whatever follows, the joining of two people or the joining of two kingdoms (two or more: in Game of Thrones, the relationships may be polygamous--though none of the brides I saw on Dress seemed interested in more than one groom, which points to the limitations of this otherwise spot-on comparison).

If someone out there is complaining, "Well, there's just no end to this folderol, if Game of Thrones and Say Yes to the Dress are the same program, next you'll be telling me that Property Brothers is the same thing as the CBS Evening News"--and I'll be forced to say, "No, it isn't." Property Brothers is an enjoyable fantasy that indulges the belief that people have power because they can knock down walls and install expensive bathroom fixtures in their homes. The CBS Evening News is, I assume, a journalistic venture, and thus in a different category altogether.

Is everybody clear?