The start of the new academic school year and launch of college football season provides an interesting confluence of popular culture events.
Here are some random thoughts:
I am watching the University of South Florida stick it to Notre Dame (16-0 at the half). As usual, ND is overrated and USF is playing well in the early season. It is a hot day in South Bend, Indiana, but what is with all the USF players' helmets coming off? Given the risk of concussions among these young athletes, is is surprising that it is happening so frequently.
[Coincidently, I taught many of the USF starters while still at the school, since one of my primary assignments was to teach the large lecture course "Mass Comm and Society," which ranged from around 225 to 450 students per class, depending on the semester. B.J. Daniels, for example, now a heralded quarterback, was a thoughtful and smiling Freshman when he took the class one summer. I am glad to see him doing so well.]
One of the first NBC commercials during the telecast -- besides the annoying ever-present NBC logo in either the upper right hand or lower left of the screen -- attempts to entice viewers to watch the new show Whitney, starring comedian Whitney Cummings. I do not make my living analyzing television shows, but I would bet the meager savings I have in the bank that the show is going to tank.
The NBC website, already declares Cummings "TV's hottest new star," which is interesting, since the first show hasn't aired yet. Rather than just go with my gut on this one, I put my faith in Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter, who has seen the pilot and says, "all that forced laughter on Whitney -- canned or 'live' it makes no difference -- seems jarringly out of place." Sure, running after The Office will guarantee a sizable audience, but a show built around a smart-ass, overly sarcastic twenty-something really does not have a built in audience.
Although I have little time for "pleasure" reading, I could not pass up diving into Keith Richards' Life when I saw it on the New Book shelf at our phenomenal public library Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library. Since I read it, the book has surpassed the 1 million sales mark, establishing it as one of the best-selling rock memoirs of all time, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
Although Life is an interesting look at how a poor British kid becomes the lead guitarist of one of the greatest bands of all-time, what struck me is the amount of brazen violence Richards discusses. Throughout the memoir, he discusses flashing a knife or pulling out a gun, usually to get someone's attention. The amazing thing is not that Keith is still alive, but rather that he never accidently killed someone.
I thought that the violence, particularly for no good reason at all, might just be braggadocio, but then in Peter Wolf's essay in According to the Rolling Stones, he tells a story about Keith pulling a "bowie knife" on a DJ at a Stones party for their road crew. After the DJ played one too many disco tunes, the guitarist "walked slowly up to the DJ booth, smiled at the disc jockey, grabbed him by the neck...put it [the knife] right up to the DJ's throat and gave him his final warning" (239).
Also, in both Life and According to, Charlie Watts is depicted as settling arguments by throwing sucker punches, one at Mick Jagger and the other at Wolf. The question is why all this random violence? One line of thinking may be that once a person achieves a certain level of fame, they no longer believe that rules apply to them. If one is willing to give Richards and Watts the benefit of the doubt, then maybe these are just isolated incidents in otherwise well-lived lives.
Finally, as I sit here and obsess about popular culture, what really turns my stomach is the upbeat commercials for financial institutions that were so instrumental in sparking and promulgating the financial crisis of the past several years. Chase, for example, is pushing banking that it deems, "smarter, faster, and easier."
Try selling that message to the countless people whose credit has been destroyed when Chase cut the limit on their credit cards for no other reason than to make it seem as if they were maxed out. This financial duplicity automatically hurts a person's score, because they have less available credit overall. One person I know paid his card on time and paid down the balance, but when the balance hit a lower number, Chase dropped the maximum to that lower figure.
