Way back in November of 2007 I posted about the sordid saga of Ethan Reynolds, formerly of the model blog / community Brat Boy School (since shut down; internet wayback machine link here – caution, it loads slowly).  I’m seeing echoes of that experience in the [...]]]> [Credit to David Byrne for the post title]

Way back in November of 2007 I posted about the sordid saga of Ethan Reynolds, formerly of the model blog / community Brat Boy School (since shut down; internet wayback machine link here – caution, it loads slowly).  I’m seeing echoes of that experience in the recent downfall of “Hockey Kid Mikey,” an alleged gay high school hockey player promoted by gay web site OutSports who, after building a small empire on the web, turned out to probably be a 40-year-old gay hockey fan.

Both appear to be cases where some blogger used the magical power of the internet to pretend to be someone else.  In both cases the bloggers built an enormous base of enamored fans, and in both cases their success began to open doors outside the internet shortly before their fictitious persona fell apart.  In neither case were any actual crimes (apparently) committed, and yet in both cases the fans, once betrayed, called for blood.

As I was in 2007, I am fascinated by the response from fans.  It’s not as if this technique is old.  I’ve compared Ethan to nudie centerfolds, who always seem to find titillating answers to the same questionnaire, but the creation of a fictional persona is not limited to the vaguely pornographic.  Think of Dear Abby, or Poor Richard, or for that matter any talk-show host.  None of these people is really the person they present to the world.  Granted, that fact is disclosed to varying degrees, but I’d imagine there are many Letterman fans who would be outraged to discover the real person behind the television character he portrays.  This is, I would hazard to say, at least partly to blame for the outrage behind the most recent “Late Night Wars,” and why Jay Leno emerged as the villain while Conan’s popularity grew: cutthroat businessman is pretty far removed from the brand Jay has been selling his viewers, while  Conan’s brand is apparently not as far from his actual personality.

I understand that blogs are a personal means of expression, but the idea that one person can really connect with another via the internet is dubious.  The very nature of the internet is artificial; social networking sites are entirely based around the business of carefully crafting a personal brand.  Like the sci-fi trope of the “other-dimensional being extending into our dimension”, our online avatars represent exactly that portion of ourselves that we have decided to show to others.  Some people elect to make that portion decades younger, or more attractive, or more athletic, than the aging corporeal meat to which their consciousness is tethered.  I find it fairly depressing that so many people attach themselves emotionally to a being who is essentially just digital code, to the point where they become murderous or suicidal (as several of Mikey’s readers claimed to be) when Toto pulls back the curtain.

Not that I’m encouraging this kind of business practice.  When the actual human behind the “Hockey Kid Mikey” character started to notice his blog community growing out of control – when he started getting comments from gay teenagers who said his words saved them from suicide – that was probably the time to pull the rip-cord.  Delete the blog and vanish, or come clean about creating a false persona, rather than riding it out like George Costanza until your lies finally blow up in your face.

Ultimately, unless the writer is committing some kind of crime (and I stress here that, so far at least, there is no evidence of any crime) then the onus must be on the reader to approach everything on the internet with skepticism.  How different is emotionally attaching oneself to an invisible blogger from believing the latest chain email about how microwaved water causes cancer or Barrack Obama is planning to give Texas back to Mexico?   The internet is, more than anything else, a colossal work of collaborative fiction.  Historical fiction, perhaps, but fiction.  Anyone who approaches it otherwise is going to get burned.

For my part, I have a confession to make: I am not as smart as I come across on my blog.  The crafting of each post includes frequent visits to Wikipedia, and some sentences are even revised before publication.  Speak with me in person and you’ll quickly notice I struggle to recall the names of the most major historical figures, I confuse the dates of major events, and I giggle every time Noam Chomsky is mentioned because I get a mental image of a pac-man like monster devouring everything he sees (I call him CHOMP-sky).  I do promise, however, that I am the person I claim to be.  At least the good parts.

Yesterday I explained my personal sentimental connection to the work of Phil Collins and Genesis, and how my perspective has evolved with my musical tastes.  Even with that as background, I still feel bad for the rest of this post, so here is a disclaimer:  I love Phil Collins.  He’s one of the greatest rock [...]]]>

Yesterday I explained my personal sentimental connection to the work of Phil Collins and Genesis, and how my perspective has evolved with my musical tastes.  Even with that as background, I still feel bad for the rest of this post, so here is a disclaimer:  I love Phil Collins.  He’s one of the greatest rock drummers ever, if not the greatest.  People don’t realize this because rather than stay behind the drums, Phil has done a whole lot of other stuff, much of which he’s sucked at.  Face Value is a brilliant, artistic and personal album from beginning to end.  Phil also helped create Peter Gabriel (“melt”), another of the most brilliant albums ever recorded.  Phil brought gated reverb down from the mountain, and it revolutionized music mostly for the better.  With all that said…

To excerpt from the same article I linked to yesterday, “Coinciding with Collins’s Roseland shows, on June 17th he will receive the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s prestigious Johnny Mercer Award at the organization’s annual gala awards dinner in New York City.”

I find this the slightest bit ironic.  My friend Alex and I fairly recently realized that Phil Collins does not write lyrics so much as he strings together cliches, idioms, and figures of speech that happen to rhyme.  A couple of examples:

• From “In the Air Tonight“:  Well I was there and I saw what you did / I saw it with my own two eyes / So you can wipe off that grin / I know where you’ve been / It’s all been a pack of lies”
• Or my absolute personal favorite example, “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven”:  We had a life, we had a love / but you don’t know what you’ve got ’til you lose it / well that was then, this is now / and I want you back / How many times can I say I’m sorry?

Then, of course, there’s the album covers.  Here are the covers for Phil’s solo studio LPs to date.  See if you detect a theme:

Face Value (1981)

Hello, I Must Be Going (1982)

No Jacket Required (1985)

But Seriously (1989)

Both Sides (1993)

Dance Into the Light (1996)

Testify (2002)

A friend emailed this morning to let me know that Phil Collins has scheduled a three-night stand at the Roseland Ballroom in NYC.  Everyone has that first band that made them like music, and Genesis was mine.  ”We Can’t Dance” is the first album I ever owned.  My early explorations into music, if charted, would [...]]]>

A friend emailed this morning to let me know that Phil Collins has scheduled a three-night stand at the Roseland Ballroom in NYC.  Everyone has that first band that made them like music, and Genesis was mine.  ”We Can’t Dance” is the first album I ever owned.  My early explorations into music, if charted, would show Genesis as the central trunk from which all other bands branched, which is to say I discovered Clapton because he played on “But Seriously,” and Led Zeppelin because Phil had been their drummer at Live Aid.  I spent most of my evenings, for at least a year, haunting the Genesis discussion groups on Prodigy, and to this day I aspire to one day produce the definitive annotated version of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

As my musical tastes have matured, I’ve fallen out of love with most of what Phil has produced, and my opinion on Genesis now agrees with what most music snobs will say: once Peter Gabriel left, they quickly went to shit.  I do still find a certain nostalgic appeal in almost everything he’s been involved with, but that is solely because of connection to my personal life.  I saw Genesis at the Wachovia Center in 2007, on their “Turn It On Again” tour, only because I had never before seen them live in person, and it felt like something I should do.  I was struck by how much more enthralling I found the museum-quality replicas of 1970s Genesis shows performed by The Musical Box and daydreamed about what might have been if only Peter Gabriel wasn’t so resistant to nostalgia, or if the other guys had been patient enough to make the tour fit Peter’s schedule.

The first concert I ever attended was Phil Collins at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1994, when the memory of the Rangers’ Stanley Cup win was so fresh that the crowd twice spontaneously erupted into “Let’s Go Rangers” chants.  Since then, he’s toured several times and I barely took notice, but the prospect of seeing him at a smaller venue is slightly intriguing.  Allow me to annotate the article I found about the show (and his new album, “Going Back”) and my real-time reactions as I read it:

“Atlantic recording artist Phil Collins has announced the forthcoming release of “GOING BACK,” a deeply personal labor of love [me: Oh, that's promising.  His last "deeply personal labor of love" was an album on which he played every instrument, recorded 90% of it alone in his home studio, and produced some really interesting and high quality--though not especially catchy--music.  "Face Value" was a "deeply personal labor of love," and that's one of the greatest, most emotionally visceral records ever recorded, the artistic peak of Phil's solo career.] that finds the eight-time Grammy winner faithfully recreating the Motown and soul music that played such an influential role in his creative life.” [me: Oh.  Oh no.  This is going to be terrible.]

The article includes this quote from Phil: “My idea, though, was not to bring anything ‘new’ to these already great records, but to try to recreate the sounds and feelings that I had when I first heard them.”

So he’s doing an album of Motown standards, faithful to the original recordings.  Sigh.  Rod Stewart, meet Phil Collins.  He, too, has given up.

I finally got to see John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this weekend, and I was not disappointed.  McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic father-and-son story is one of my favorite books.  The film is extremely faithful, though sadly it leaves out the baby-eating, one of the most memorable scenes from the [...]]]>

I finally got to see John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this weekend, and I was not disappointed.  McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic father-and-son story is one of my favorite books.  The film is extremely faithful, though sadly it leaves out the baby-eating, one of the most memorable scenes from the book.  Not that we needed baby-eating.  Laid out on the screen, the depravity and desperation of humans without a society are horrifying enough.  My friend Alex, who had not read the book, cringed visibly throughout.

The Road is not a story for those seeking a happy ending.  It follows the travels of an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) after an unspecified disaster has left the world scorched and almost every living thing dead.  The plot begins long after the two have taken to walking the highways, heading to “the coast,” where the father thinks they may find some solace.  Both book and film return via flashback to the time between the disaster and their departure, when the man’s wife/boy’s mother (Charlize Theron) was still alive.  The film lingers longer in these scenes, and while they were heavy in the novel, they are heartbreaking in the film.  Theron’s performance is passable, if rote, but Mortensen brings a true emotional depth to his character.  The overwhelming weakness and fear, the resistance to accept that his world has changed, are in sharp contrast with the hardened, do-what-is-needed man he becomes once his wife is gone.

The Road reveals brilliantly how thin is the veil of society that separates human from animal, and how readily many people will revert to their animal nature when that society is removed and stress applied.  The post-apocalyptic vision is at this point a cliche in Hollywood film, but where so many films use the apocalypse as a frame for a story of epic heroism, The Road lingers in the realm of actual humans.  We never know what the apocalypse was, presumably because with no television or radio, no one in the story has that information.  Their only cause is to survive, and their most heroic action is to resist descending into cannibalism.  There are no heroes here, only desperate people fighting to eke out an existence in a world that can barely support them.

Visually, the film is beautiful in an utterly oppressive way.  What’s even more impressive is that the scenes of a desolate, dying world were not crafted in a computer like Pandora.  These are images of our actual world, many of them places ravaged by actual disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the eruption of Mount Saint Helens.  A large portion of the filming took place in Western Pennsylvania, along the Abandoned Pensylvania Turnpike and in a portion of a rural amusement park destroyed by fire.

When the movie ended, a guy behind me announced loudly, “that movie was a downer.”  That it certainly is, but it’s also beautiful and brilliant and poignant in a way few films are.  I certainly wouldn’t recommend it as a date movie, but it’s going near the top of my list of the best films of 2009.

A few examples: “For all [...]]]> Today I came across the Wikipedia entry for “eggcorn,” a recently-coined linguistic term that describes one of my ultimate pet peaves. I know I should be forgiving, but to my mind few things make a person seem stupid than the use of a term they have mis-heard or misunderstood, an “eggcorn.”

A few examples:
“For all intensive purposes”
“Once and a while”
“The spurt of the moment”
…and, of course, the eponymous “eggcorn.”

My own pet peaves aside, what was really interesting to me was the list of descriptive names for other linguistic misuses. An eggcorn, you see, is defined as a personal (as opposed to culturally shared) misuse that results when the person misunderstands the term in question through similarity. “Acorn” in many dialects sounds identical to “eggcorn,” and hence the error – which usually only shows up in written form.

Folk etymology results when a whole culture commits to an eggcorn, after which the eggcorn becomes the correct word, at least in that region. For example, in England asparagus is commonly known as “sparrow grass.” “Chaise lounge” came from “chaise longue,” literal French for “long chair.” I’m not sure if “cajun,” which comes from “Acadian,” qualifies – Wikipedia says “cajun” is something called an ‘aphetic variant,’ but I still think it should count.

A malapropism is the substitution of one actual word for another similar-sounding actual word in a common phrase. An example here is the classic “you are my density” from Back to the Future, or George W. Bush’s statement that quotas “vulcanize society.” Malapropisms are often used deliberately for comic effect, but are generally funnier when they are unintentional.

Then we have mondegreens, which is the mishearing of a phrase so that it takes on an entirely new meaning. The examples most people know best are misheard song lyrics: “There’s a bathroom on the right,” “Pick out old Jed from a lineup,” and so on.

So there, a lesson in linguistics from the Hanged Man – so that the next time someone you know makes him or herself look stupid, not only can you point it out, but you can make yourself seem smarter by using the technical term for their stupidity.

On a related note, a quick word about false etymology. This has become rather popular in America these days, thanks to urban legend chain emails. Remember how I said few things make a person seem stupid than a good eggcorn? Here’s one: sending an email that says (or worse, telling someone in person) that “rule of thumb” comes from a law regarding wife beating; that “fuck” or “shit” started as acronyms for anything; that “crap” comes from the inventor of the toilet bowl, or that “tip” and “tips” stand for “to insure [proper service/promptness].”

The only thing that beats out being a moron in person is demonstrating for all of your friends that your education comes in the form of chain e-mail.