Columnists often end the year by reviewing it. We here at the Culture Club home office—hey, keep it down over there! Sorry, a little too much Indiscriminate Holiday cheer among the staff—do not sanction this sort of exercise. We would, however, like to point to our first installment of the young 2005, a dream treatment for All the President's Men II, the taking down of the Bush Administration in the unraveling of the Plame Affair. With customary wistfulness CC recalled the scene from All the President's Men in which Hugh Sloan says screw it and deals the dirt to Woodward and Bernstein. We still await a similarly principled minion of this administration to do the Sloan.
In any event, Admin has advised us that we need to clear out several one-thought wonders and orphan observations. Like our My How Times Have Changed ramble.
The setting is a Starbucks, but could be anywhere. Well, if it's a Starbucks, it is just about anywhere, but that's another point. Palm to cheekbone, a young woman prattles away, from car through doorway through ordering, and as she's waiting for her carmel macchiata she says, "But don't you want to hear about my problems?" A beat, then she resumes, leaving more than her question unanswered. Does this confirm a new Cartesian equation: I talk about myself, therefore I exist?
Underlying these queries is the closet codger's complaint, that it has become commonplace, and in no way rude, to talk to someone absent while engaged with someone present. Which is fine, new behaviors spawn new mores, times change and all that. What annoys walking relics of differently civil times, though, is precisely the id of the action. It is as if all of this—coffee shop, mall, roads, trees, people—is not good enough for you. You are in it but not of it. You must talk, too, and to someone not here. This is why, even to other wireless users, the person blithely blathering away seems so arrogant.
But this, too, shall pass.
Will more watch their iPods than listen to them? Imagine a camera centered in that touch-wheel, and you're watching Survivor, tracking stocks and talking to someone looking at you watching Survivor and tracking stocks.
Earlier this month, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott noted a fondness in recent films for reconstructing the postwar decades. "The years in question coincide with the formative years of the baby boomers, a cohort whose endless self-discovery has dominated American popular culture for as long as some of us can remember," wrote Scott, who was born in 1966. That puts him just outside the accepted end-date of that postwar-boom generation, so perhaps his peeve with his predecessors' narcissism is understandable.
But Scott notes, too, that cinematic longing for the 1950s and 1960s traces in part to the paucity of similarly large personalities, like Edward Murrow, Ray Charles or Johnny Cash, in the culture today. Yes, it's hard to imagine the inspiring story of Britney Spears, say, or Anderson Cooper, captivating audiences of handheld communication devices in future decades. Hard to imagine but not entirely unlikely.
Of course, it's worth remembering that in those halcyon days of fedoras and fox stoles and Camel straights, when pedestrians talked to each other, and titans strode the stage and read the news, a few things were askew. It wasn't Eden for African-Americans, for instance, or for otherwise voiceless people, including many women. And the news media missed or downplayed some stories. Imagine Jack Kennedy enduring Bill Clinton's travails. It's possible he had more to answer for, too, than busted land deals and cigars. He no doubt knew what is was.
It was a birthday-gift sacrifice: two tickets to Mamma Mia. Oh, the thought of dutifully standing and swaying to "Dancing Queen," or of being in the vicinity of anyone air-pianoing, was shiver material. But she said she'd like to see it, had heard good things from co-workers. So he figured, why not?
As it happened, only the lower bowl of the theater rose to sing along at the end, which included, entirely gratuitously, a rousing "Waterloo." And he had to watch only brief moments of phantom chord-playing. It came as a surprise, however, that Mamma Mia is indeed a musical comedy, with a story. A story as lame as any in musical-comedy history, but the cast gamely tried to pull it off. It has a frisson of free-love naughtiness, too—casual sex, unmarried shacking-up, single-motherhood. The night in question was the first in the National Finals Rodeo run, and many 10-gallons in the audience no doubt had made the same sacrifice, he couldn't help thinking. And he couldn't help wondering if ABBA music was the least of their worries.
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.