Pop Culture Grab Bag

There is lots on the pop culture radar these days. Rather than write an "In The Changer" or "On the Bedside Table" feature, I want to comment on a few different things that have caught my fancy of late.

Book: Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go: Yes, this is the book that I raved about after having read 70 pages a few weeks back, but I finished it, and it matched all of my expectations. Gorgeous, haunting, lyrical, devastating, brilliant, wonderful. Other adjectives. It may be impossible to write a rave review in capsule form without seeming like you are writing a blurb, but my impression a few weeks ago stands: This is my favorite work of fiction since Ian McEwen's Atonement, and if you have not read Atonement, then shame on you. Please, please, please go buy this book. A+

CD: John Cougar Mellencamp: Scarecrow: John Cougar Mellencamp (Or John Mellencamp; or John Cougar. He's the Mary Decker Pierce Slaney of the music world) is a poor man's Tom Petty, who himself is a poor man's Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. And this is not to damn with faint praise. Would that most musicians were just two steps removed from that pantheon, or one step from Petty. Mellencamp broke onto the scene with a little ditty about Jack & Diane (who were two American kids doin' the best they could) on his album American Fool. Scarecrow was, I believe, his second album, and to my mind it is superior to the first. I actually just want to discuss the title track, but my quick take on the album is that the first half is really strong, showing Mellencamp's populist bent within the framework of a rootsy rock feel. By the second half there are too many songs with what Tootle would aptly call "distractingly bad lyrics," but of 1980s album of a certain stripe (again, see Petty, Tom for other reasonable successes) this one holds up reasonably well.

But I want mostly to discuss the title song, because it is one of the few slices of pop culture that cuts so close to home it always has a powerful effect on me. My parents divorced when I was young, and within a few years, my Dad had taken to running the family farm. The early and mid 1980s were not a good time to be a family farmer in America, and especially perhaps not in the inhospitable climate of northern New England. Operating from my grandparents' land, with the quintessential new England farmhouse (the oldest house in Newport), dad milked cows (we'd have the occasional pig or turkey, I recall a brief foray with chickens, and in both the early and later years horses). We never got above, I'd guess, 80 or so head, and economies of scale being that they were, that was never enough. As an admission, I hated the farm, or at least I hated working on the farm. If I was not playing a sport or participating in another extracurricular in the afternoon I had chores to do -- they were not onerous, or at least were as not onerous as digging through a foot of accumulated cow shit over several hundred square feet can be, but I was a preteen and early teen during these years. Some days dad would come and pick me up from school with the shit truck, as we called it, which as you might guess always thrilled me to no end. When it was time to harvest corn or to cut the fields for hay, we had to be out there. Cows don't take holidays and they don't sleep in, so Christmas morning or New year's Eve or on my birthday, if I was there, I was up, lugging buckets of milk to the machines or shovelling or spreading sawdust or gathering feed or this that or the other. This lasted for a few years, years more precarious then even now I probably am aware.

Soon enough Dad simply could not do it any more. There was a usurious buyout program for farmers by this time. I was about 14 or 15, still young enough and dumb enough to be a bit embarassed by the fact that yes, I owned a pair of boots specifically for wading through cow excreta, and my dad had a shit truck that might show up to pick me up from practice, but old enough and smart enough to know under the surface the value of certain things.

I was in New York, staying with my uncle and aunt and cousins on Long Island (and as I think about it this may have been intentional) the summer that they came to take it all away. They auctioned off the equipment. They herded the cows ("The girls") into the trucks (for slaughter? For someone else to milk? I never knew.). I've heard that my Dad, a hardscrabble New England farmer, carpenter, do-anything type, the kind of man with Popeye forearms and ropey limbs that for all of my time in gyms I could never replicate, a man with a shovel and hammer and hay bale musculature, stood in the field and bawled like a baby that day.

So Mellencamp's "Scarecrow," about the loss of a family farm hits me hard, even now:

Scarecrow on a wooden cross blackbird in the barn
Four hundred empty acres that used to be my farm
I grew up like my daddy did my grandpa cleared this land
When I was five I walked the fence while grandpa held my hand

Chorus:
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
This land fed a nation this land made me proud
And son Im just sorry theres no legacy for you now
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow

The crops we grew last summer werent enough to pay the loans
Couldnt buy the seed to plant this spring and the farmers bank foreclosed
Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land
He said John its just my job and I hope you understand
Hey calling it your job ol hoss sure dont make it right
But if you want me to Ill say a prayer for your soul tonight
And grandmas on the front porch swing with a Bible in her hand
Sometimes I hear her singing take me to the promised land
When you take away a mans dignity he cant work his fields and cows

Therell be blood on the scarecrow blood on the plow
Blood on the scarecrow blood on the plow

Well theres ninety-seven crosses planted in the courthouse yard
Ninety-seven families who lost ninety-seven farms
I think about my grandpa and my neighbors and my name
And some nights I feel like dyin like that scarecrow in the rain

Chorus:
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
This land fed a nation this land made me proud
And son Im just sorry theyre just memories for you now
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow

Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
This land fed a nation this land made me so proud
And son Im just sorry theyre just memories for you now
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow
Rain on the scarecrow blood on the plow

Really hard. CD: B+ Eponymous song: A+

Movie: The Aristocrats: All of which naturally leads to one of the most unlikely movie hits of recent years. This documentary is about a joke that is legendary among comics, though you may or may not have ever heard it. It is a joke that is all about the telling. I can tell the beginning and the punch line here. Remember, they key is that each teller makes the joke his or her own.

A man walks into a talent agent and says to the man behind the desk, with his cigar clenched tight between his teeth, I have an act for you. the man behind the desk says ""Oh yeah? Tell me about it." . . . The punchline goes: "Wow. That's quite an act. What do you call it?" (Proudly) "The Aristocrats." In between, the telling recounts the most lewd, scatological, incest-laden, pornographic details imaginable. It really is up to the teller to make it his own. (I've worked up what I think is a pretty formidable telling of it myself.) The documentary is about the joke. It has dozens of comedians talking about, telling, the joke, giving their versions, making it as raunchy as possible. Trust me when I say that there has never been a more profane movie ever produced. Let's just say that the C word features prominently, and in the midst of the fisting and Dirty Sanchezes and Strawberry Shortcakes and Rusty Trombones and other grotesque carnality -- if you are at work, or if a spouse regularly shares your computer, you may not want to Google any of those terms; trust me -- one hardly notices. They discuss variations on the joke, angles one can take, philosophies. One of the remarkable aspect is the meta-humor component, the idea of the importance of the act of telling. Another is that you gain a newfound appreciation for some comedians -- Bob Saget is unreal in his appearances, if you can believe that. Ditto Drew Carey. Sarah Silverman has an absurdist take that is astounding. Gilbert Godfried became a legend as the result of a telling of the joke at the Hugh Hefner Roast (trust me, it did not make Comedy Central) in the wake of 9/11. And it goes on and on. This is not everyone's cup of tea. Even for those of you for whom it proves to be your cup of tea there will be moments that you will find spectacularly unfunny and disturbing. I have about as high a threshold as one can for this sort of thing, and there were moments when I was almost aghast. But if you are the type of person (Tom) who can see your way through this sort of thing, there are moments of sublime brilliance here that are unsurpassed. Just please, send the kids to bed. And I would not suggest watching this with a spouse, significant other or, for the love of God, an adult relative. B+

Television: The Contender: It's hokey. It's overwrought. Sugar Ray Leonard is a hoot. But this show about sixteen men who have dreams of being professional boxers is the only reality show on television that deserves that appelation. I enjoyed the version last year on NBC with Stallone and Leonard. Stallone is listed as executive producer this season and has not yet made an on-camera appearance, but if you even remotely like boxing, or if reality shows are your thing, my guess is that you will not turn the channel. I believe it airs originally on Tuesday nights on ESPN -- which is its only logical home, and thus will allow it to do much better than it did on the Peacock. Plus, any one of these guys would pound the crap out of the jokers on "Survivor." B+

Oh, and you really should be watching Entourage.