Passwords II

A completely inaccurate merging of several conversations between Ben and me:

“Amy and I had dinner last weekend with Brad and a couple of other guys. One of them was a Buddhist who was also Elvis Costello fan and we spent some time swapping concert stories. He’d been to Madam Wong’s and had seen the Naughty Sweeties during their heyday. On the other hand, he hates Jackson Pollack.”

“It’s always a little surprising when someone who likes the same things doesn’t like all the same things.”

“Yeah, it makes the idea of ‘shared experience’ a little dicey as a way of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

“Then there’s the flip side, when people seem to like the same things, but for such completely different reasons that they might as well be from Mars.”

“Ah, sure. Welcome to my world. Except I’m the Martian.”

“Where’s the Kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth Shattering Kaboom!”

“The Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator! That creature has stolen the space modulator!”

“Speaking of Martians, what do you think of Tom Delay’s asking The Colbert Report for the clip of Colbert asking Robert Greenwald, ‘Who hates America more, you or Michael Moore.”

“I think Delay and some of his people may be brain-damaged. There are certain sorts of deficits that make people unable to comprehend irony. It’s like aphasia; they just don’t hear it.”

“Well, that’s charitable.”

“Yeah, I’m a philanthropist. But maybe that’s another way to run the password thing. Remember when we were doing IQ guessing?”

“Yeah, you were pretty good at it.”

“It’s not that hard. Most IQ tests load primarily onto verbal acuity. You can get that by just talking to someone for a few minutes. I do remember that a friend of mine in college asked me what I thought the IQ of his fiancé was. I thought about it a moment and realized that she was smarter than I’d have first thought, IQ around 135, which turned out to be an exact hit. But she’d laughed at the right places in our jokes, not a beat behind, like someone does who is following someone else’s laughter.”

“You think it would work for the sentry?”

“I don’t see why not. Guy comes up to the checkpoint and the guard says, ‘Halt, friend or foe?’ and the other guy says, ‘Friend.’ So the sentry says, 'A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…'”

Some Other Guy’s Anecdote

My high school friend Mark went off to Oberlin College in Ohio. One day his roommate came in and said, “Hey, want to go to a Simon and Garfunkel concert?”

“Sure,” said Mark.

The concert was in Denver.

So they got into the roommate’s car and drove, non-stop to Denver, saw the concert and headed back. College students do that sort of thing. It’s part of the educational experience.

In Kansas, one of them fell asleep at the wheel.

“So that,” explains Mark, “is how I wound up walking down Main Street in Russell, Kansas carrying a radiator. Did you know that Russell was home of the National Spelling Bee Champion? They had a big sign, just on the edge of town…”

Kid, don’t try this at home. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

A Joke, a Variation, then Aphorisms

Joke:

An economist and some students were walking on the campus and one of the students says, “There’s a twenty dollar bill on the ground.” The economist replies, “That’s impossible. If there were, someone would have picked it up already.”

Variation on joke:

Person #1: You know, they get health care in Canada that's just as good for less money.

Dr. Pangloss, the Doctrinaire Believer in Economics as Revealed by Someone or Another: That's impossible. If that were true, I'd have already moved to Canada.


Some Aphorisms

"The problem with people who have no vices is that they tend to have some pretty annoying virtues." -- [paraphrased] Elizabeth Taylor

“What if this weren’t a hypothetical question?” -- Unknown

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says "You're crazy" The man says "I want a second opinion!" "Okay, you're ugly too!" – Henny Youngman

There is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.

A hostage to fate -- the first time I heard that phrase, I had no idea what it meant. Now I do. Fate could call me on the phone anytime and say, "I have your granddaughter," and I'd say, "I know you do," and Fate would say, "What would you do to get her back?" and I'd say, "Anything," and Fate would say, "It doesn't work that way." – Jon Carroll

[W]hat exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety? – Jonathan Lethem

“Someone stole my identity and I feel sorry for him.” – T-Bone Burnett

“If you’re so poor, how come you’re not dumb?” – Merle Kessler

There are no atheists in foxholes; even atheists pray to the bombs overhead, that they may fall upon their fellows and not upon them.

I cried because I had no shoes, 'till I met a man who had no feet. So I said, 'You got any shoes you're not using'? – Steven Wright.

"I cut my finger. That's tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer and dies. That's comedy." Mel Brooks

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally – J. M. Keynes

The plural of anecdote is conjecture. – B. Sano

A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what is “meta” for?

Two psychiatrists meet in a hall. One psychiatrist say to the other, “Hello.” The second psychiatrist thinks to himself, “Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that?” – old joke

"'Either way is fine with me' gets me though a lot of situations." Randee of the Redwoods (Jim Turner)

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." from Jingo by Terry Pratchett

“Versatility is a curse; one-dimensional people make all the money.” – Jonathan Winters

Half empty or half full depends on whether you’re drinking or pouring.

Tough love is always about the tough, never about the love.

A coward dies a thousand deaths, but the first nine hundred and ninety nine aren’t that big a deal.

If a lizard lays an egg that hatches a chicken, is it a lizard egg or a chicken egg?

It is unfair to ask someone to save the world before they have learned to save themselves.

Ironophilic

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a thumb. Edward Teller had a hammer, and every problem he encountered, his first thought was, "How could I use a thermonuclear weapon to solve this?"

Teller once proposed to map out all the dangerous asteroids in the solar system, the ones that might someday cause major damage to Earth. He suggested that a thermonuclear explosion on the far side of the Moon could generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used as a radar pulse, with returning echoes showing even small asteroids.

In "The Day of the Dove," on Star Trek, The Original Series (as it is now known), an alien entity sets up the Enterprise as it's own personal negative emotion larder, pitting humans against Klingons in an eternal battle, meant to supply it with "negative emotions" which the alien eats. Hey, this was as good as it got on Third Season Star Trek. One interesting point in it was that the alien healed the wounds of anyone injured in the battle, making the entire endeavor a lot like the legend of Valhalla. The Klingons, at least, should have dug the setup, but apparently didn't like being manipulated, the ingrates.

If a single starship's worth of humans with negative emotions was enough for one of the creatures, imagine how many there are floating about Earth. One can only imagine what ancient atrocity sent a big enough pulse of brutality and pain out into the void, announcing our presence to that particular race.

Still, fear and anger aren't the only foodstocks, I expect. We have such a variety here. As time went on, I imagine that either the aliens developed other, more refined tastes, or different aliens, with different needs, came upon our little emotion laden treasure trove.

I'm not sure if irony is an emotion, but there is little doubt in my mind that the irony eating aliens are here. Perhaps we first came to the attention of the sarcasm lovers, sarcasm being the most fragrant form of intentional irony. I would expect that those guys showed up sometime during the height of the British Empire, the British being such masters of sarcasm. Irony, of course, is more subtle, but potentially more nutritious, if prepared correctly.

The most essential form is Unintentional Irony, of course. If we had not already come to the attention of the UI connoisseurs, I am sure that the giant pulse of it that occurred with the award of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger alerted them to the rich lands awaiting their arrival.

So, without further ado, here you go guys. Chow down.

The Zero Effect

Beetle Bailey is a well-known anachronism, its characters stuck in sort of slightly post-WWII time warp boot camp, with all the familiar Hollywood stereotypical characters, the hapless protagonist Beetle and his antagonist, Sarge, the bookworm, Plato, the lothario, Killer, the kiss ass Lieutenant, the out-of-touch General, and so on. And there’s the ignorant country bumpkin, Zero, the butt of many jokes because he takes everything literally, not knowing any better, or maybe because he’s simply stupid.

While it’s a popular strip, it’s also lame, or maybe it’s popular because it’s lame. Nevertheless, I remember one strip from many years ago that reached some sort of (possibly accidental) transcendence.

The guys are all ragging on Zero, as usual, including Sarge. Suddenly, Zero bursts out, “Hey Sarge! Are you fat, or what?”

There follows a momentary stunned silence, and Zero cracks up. “Ha!” he says. “I turned the tables on you there, boy! Ol’ Zero doesn’t do it often, but sometimes he gets a real zinger off. Ha, ha! Bet you never saw that one coming, did you, Sarge?” Or words to that effect.

And with each self-congratulatory remark, a few more of the guys leave, until finally, Sarge is also gone, leaving Zero all alone, still with a self-satisfied grin on his face. He turns and faces out at the reader and says, “They really hate it when you turn the tables on them.”

I view the entire thing as a sort of Zen fable. Did he “turn the tables on them?” Well, no, not in the sense of actually making a clever remark at their expense. So the ending is ironic; the joke is still on Zero.

Except, no, it isn’t. Many of the jokes at his expense are really no more clever than his. Moreover, they did leave the room when confronted with…what? Joyful innocence? Impenetrable obliviousness? The Fool, in the archetypical sense?

Hard to say, really. But Zero turned what was supposed to be his own humiliation into something else, and he did it by virtue of the very qualities that were the object of derision. It’s hard to see that as anything other than poetic justice.

Because we really do hate it when you turn the tables on us.

The Firesign Theater

I once remarked to a friend that for some people, myself among them, The Firesign Theater was as important phenomenon as The Beatles. A little web searching tells me that I wasn't the only one who had that idea.

When I returned home to Nashville after my freshman year at RPI, one of the first things I did was try to buy the first Firesign Theater album, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him. I was initially unsuccessful; the album was not to be had in all of Nashville, Tennessee. I then ordered it and was told that the regional distributor, in Atlanta, would have to get enough orders for a case of albums (about 25) for them to procure it and then ship it to the record store. I placed the order and finally got my hands on it about six weeks later. That is what is called being an "early adopter."

The Firesign Theater records were, in the jargon of the time, mind-blowing. They essentially invented a genre that was sometimes called "rock-n-roll comedy," and also frequently called "drug humor." But the latter label was also applied to things like Cheech and Chong, which were basically retreads of "dumb guy" humor with a stoner gloss. Firesign was not like that at all. David Ossman, one of the four members of Firesign claimed that their comedy was surrealist humor, with its most identifiable antecedent being The Goon Show, a British radio program featuring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe. I once heard Ossman speaking lovingly of a Goon Show scene being described as taking place in "An Edwardian Ditch."

The Firesign Theater were David Ossman, Peter Bergman, Phil Proctor, and Phil Austin, and their first album was produced by James William Guercio, who also produced the second Blood, Sweat, and Tears album (the one that sold a zillion copies), The Buckinghams, and the band Chicago, and directed the movie, Electra Glide in Blue. He also produced a Chad and Jeremy album that included the Firesign Theater in some backing vocals. I did not know that when I bought the album, but figured it out soon enough.

The rise of Firesign Theater coincided with the progressive radio phenomenon and would not have been possible without it. Their success spawned a gold rush in record companies searching for comedy groups with a counter-cultural sensibility that could be put onto record. So we also got The Conception Corportation, The Congress of Wonders, National Lampoon's Radio Dinner, the Ace Trucking Company, plus the aforementioned Cheech and Chong. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the success of the National Lampoon was predicated on Firesign clearing the brush, but I'm sure there were some seeds planted in the broken ground and the same audience later made Saturday Night Live a success. Monty Python also had its U.S. acceptance already insured by the pre-existing audience that Firesign had grown. Quite fitting, of course, given the Goon Show antecedent.

I had some direct contacts with members of Firesign, mostly during the faux political campaign of the National Surrealist Light Peoples Party's candidate, George Papoon, in 1976. This was mostly through a member of a group in Berkeley in the mid-seventies that got together to screw around and make stuff up and record it. That group included a former neighbor of Ossman's, and some of our screwing around became part of the local Papoon campaign.

Another friend at that time had worked for KPFA, and had a number of tapes of the "Dear Friends" radio broadcasts (TFT began as a radio show on KPFK, the Los Angeles station of the Pacifica Network, while KPFA was the Berkeley arm), which he gave me. Excerpts from the radio show made up the compilation album, "Dear Friends" but many of them were even more interesting in context.

After "Waiting for the Electrician," the glory days of Firesign include "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, When You�re Not Anywhere At All," "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers," "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus," and "Everything You Know is Wrong." After that, various dissentions split the group into three parts, each releasing a solo album, Procter and Bergman, ("TV or not TV"), Austin, ("Rollermaidens from Outer Space") and Ossman, ("How Time Flies"). I think that "TV or not TV" was the only commercially successful one of the batch.

The breakup was described by Ossman as necessary for everybody's sanity, Ossman suggesting that the level of collaboration that they'd reached was hazardous to mental health. But commerce, and the relative lack of success of each of the individual members dictated that the group reformed and toured on an intermittent basis over the next decades, also releasing albums, CDs, an occasional single or EP, and the occasional low budget film or TV project. There are a large number of Firesign fan pages on the web, plus detailed descriptions of their projects since the 1970s. A fair amount of the energy behind both is, unfortunately, counter-culture nostalgia. My own place in the matter is probably best illustrated by the fact that the only Firesign CD I have is "Boom Dot Bust," a singularly unsuccessful offering that I liked quite a bit.

Still, it's nice to know that there is still a wealth of later Firesign material that I've not seen or heard. The Firesign shows I've been to over the past thirty years refreshingly refuse to pander directly to nostalgia, bringing in fresh material and referencing the old stuff as points of departure more than slavish re-creations. If I want the old stuff, I'll put Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers on the old turntable, find a way to get properly altered, and ponder whether the title refers to Shiva, crushed beneath Kali, reweaving the ply of reality, or the poor little guy on the rolling TV set with the vertical hold knob missing, whose only hope is for us to readjust the picture using the necessary tool.

My Star Trek Novel

Back in the mid-80s, when it looked like I might have a real career in SF (a major illness took care of that fantasy), I wrote a portion-and-outline of a Star Trek novel. It’s around in my files somewhere, but I’m going to reproduce the gist of it from memory. This was, incidentally, before any of the Trek follow-ons, so it was Classic Trek.

The story opens with the Enterprise getting multiple sensor alarms from what, after some investigation, turns out to be an object moving at some ungodly warp number, but rapidly decelerating. Given such rapid slowing, it only takes Enterprise a week to reach the vessel. When they finally arrive, they find the shape of a giant Conestoga Wagon, with what looks like “Antares or Bust” painted on its side.

It turns out to be a ship with “morphing” capabilities; it can change its shape at the whim of its captain, who is the only person on the ship, in fact.

The captain’s name is Tom, and he’s a Vulcan inventor. In fact, he’s pretty much Vulcan’s only inventor, which used to puzzle him. So he looked into the matter and came to the conclusion that the Vulcan education methods for controlling emotion had become so restrictive that they were stifling curiosity, imagination, etc. Therefore, he set out to find a way to reverse the damage,

Tom devised a method using conditioning, meditation, and other things (“Drugs?” asks McCoy. “Oh yes,” says Tom. “Lots of drugs"). When it was completed, he’d increased his inventive productivity, imagination, etc. as well as gaining a sense of humor. Unfortunately, it was a somewhat compulsive and adolescent sense of humor, and, among other things, it came out as practical jokes. After he gave a hot foot to a high Vulcan official, he was prosecuted for arson and criminal insanity. He fled the planet, so now he’s on the run.

Owing to vagaries in interstellar law, he’s not under any sort of Federation warrant, (the Vulcan Authorities do not want the details of the crimes made known, as one might expect) so Kirk allows Tom to make use of the docking facilities on the Enterprise to repair his craft. Spock assists, in hopes of learning some of the new drive technology etc. Besides the Vulcan repression thing is of importance to him personally.

A few days later, a Vulcan battle cruiser shows up and begins pacing the Enterprise. They can’t demand that Tom be handed over, because he’s broken no Federation Laws. But as soon as he leaves the ship…

After repairing his ship, Tom creates a distraction: a computer generated “entertainment” in the form of an old minstrel show, with Spock as Mr. Interlocutor, and Bones as, well, Mr. Bones. There is song and dance. There are jokes. It is all quite confusing to the Vulcans who are listening in. It’s fairly confusing to the humans on the Enterprise. The minstrel show allows a discussion of historical racism on Earth, and how it’s such a good thing that We’re Past That Now.

Tom uses the distraction to launch his repaired craft from the Enterprise. The Vulcan ship gives chase and fires a phaser beam at him.

It turns out that one of Tom’s inventions is a new kind of ship's shield, an “energy sponge,” that converts attacking energy (like the phaser blast), into ship’s power and motive force. The power of the Vulcan ship’s attack refuels Tom’s craft and he disappears in a burst of warp speed. The last, lingering signal from his craft is a sound like a bottle being rapidly stoppered and unstoppered, and a single “Beep, beep.”

In the coda, Kirk learns that Tom has given Spock the recipe for de-repression. Spock does not believe he can safely use or divulge it while still a Star Fleet Officer, but he will retire someday…

My agent sent in the Portion and Outline to whoever was editing the Star Trek novels at the time. We got back a rejection letter that said that the proposed novel was contrary to absolutely everything that had ever been said about Vulcans in the series or in the tie-in novels. Apparently, for once, I hadn’t been subtle enough.

Merry Christmas, Early, but Rocket Mail is Undependable

In the spirit of the holiday season, here are a few ditties from the wonder that is the Jonathan Coulton Project:

Chiron Beta Prime



Code Monkey



RE: Your Brains

Three Jokes

#1
Rene Descartes went out for a walk on a fine Parisian spring day. The air was sweet and warm, perfumed with flowering plants and the smells of baking along the boulevards. His stroll went on for some time, and he realized that he was beginning to feel the first pangs of hunger.

But Paris in spring is bountiful, and Descartes stopped into a sidewalk café. Again, the perfection of the day asserted itself. The bread was fresh and tasty, the wine was full-bodied without impertinence, and the pate seemed to melt into his hunger with barely any need for the rigors of digestion.

His appetite nearly sated, Descartes watched the crowd passing on the boulevard, his thoughts turning to philosophy and the graphical mathematics. So lost in thought was he that he almost did not notice the waiter’s return, and he had to ask the man to repeat the question. The waiter again asked if he wished to have dessert, there was a custard of which the chef was particularly proud.

“Yes, yes,” said Descartes. “That sounds excellent.”

“And will monsieur be having coffee with that?” inquired the waiter.

“I think not,” said Rene Descartes, who then disappeared.

__________________________

This is a fairly mild example of an elitist joke, an in-joke that can be told to strangers. If you don’t know that Rene Descartes famously wrote “Cogito Ergo Sum,” “I think, therefore I am,” the joke goes right over your head.

I once told this joke at a gathering of nurses at my in-laws' house; about a third of them laughed, and when I realized the exclusionary nature of the joke, I figured that I’d been ever-so-slightly rude. But I did notice that the laughter tended to be in two parts, the first part when the person laughed, and the second part being when they realized that not everyone had laughed, and what that meant.

___________________________
#2
An airplane leaving from Poland wound up in a storm over the North Atlantic. Everyone was terrified, as the plane was pitching and yawing, and the crew feared that it would break up at any moment. But one young student stood up and called to the passengers, on the right aisle to move across the aisle. The passengers were dubious but the student insisted. “Hurry,” he said. “Our lives depend upon it.”

The passengers complied and the shaking stopped. The plane righted itself, and made its way safely to its destination. Why do you think the student’s plan worked?

Because you need all the Poles on the left side of the plane for stability.

__________________________

That’s an engineering joke. If you’ve never worked with Laplace Transforms, it is almost completely unintelligible. If you’ve sweated through control theory, it can be hilarious. Really.

I was once at a small gathering of fans at the house of a well-known fanzine Editor, and he told that joke. There were no other engineers there, and he didn’t know I was an engineer until I stepped on the punch line. I more or less blurted it out; I hadn’t meant to ruin the joke, and, for that matter I didn’t, not exactly. Because no one else laughed, and no one else was going to laugh, no matter how well the joke was told, because no one else had the background, just me and him. He’d told the joke with every expectation that it would meet with blank stares.

He and I never got along. I have no idea if that incident had anything to do with it.
_________________________

Paul Zuber was a professor of urban studies at RPI, and a little googling finds that he now has an RPI scholarship named after him (he died in 1986). I had a course from him; I think it was Urban Engineering.

One class he reminisced a little about what it was like in the early days of desegregation at the college level and he told a story about it that wasn’t a joke, because he stepped on the punch line.

___________________________
#3
Two of the first southern collegiate athletics departments that were desegregated had a long standing football rivalry. One of them had a single black running back, while the other had two defensive tackles. During the big, annual matchup game, one play had the running back going straight down the middle, where he was cut down by the two tackles.

A loud voice went up from the stands, yelling…

______________________________

Paul then threw the joke away, saying that the voice yelled something to the effect of “get your blacks off of our black.”

I muttered, not quite under my breath, “That isn’t the way I heard it.”

The actual punch line is “Get those n-----s off our colored boy!”

Paul glanced over at me with a little smile and winked.

This joke isn’t a racist joke, of course; it’s a joke about racists. Wanda Sykes has a routine where she notes that the more championships Tiger Woods wins, the less black he is. My father-in-law tells a similar joke about a black college football star, who wins so much that by the end of the season it’s “Go, Dutch, go!”

One of the things I got to think about during my Urban Engineering course was the ways in which jokes can be a means of hidden communication, and how place of origin and shared witness can sometimes trump race in making, as opposed to breaking, connections.

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, deep in the heart of the Ural Mountains, the secret Great Communist Conspiracy powers up their iinsidious Tesla Coil to send another burst of Dark Chaos at the heart of the One Nation Under God. The conspirators had already achieved their first purpose, of lulling the Western Powers into believing that Communism was dead, by pretending to relinquish control over the vast Soviet Empire. But the wiley Commies were never interested in mere empire; they required world domination. So they banked their fires in Mother Russia, and intensified their efforts to put across the Greatest Hoax of All: the Global Warming Conspiracy.

Now their plans were accelerating. Dark Prince Gore, having failed to acquire the job of President of the U.S. (only the heroic efforts of the Godly men--and woman--of the Supreme Court had managed to thwart that scheme!), forged a new alliance with Soros, that Elder of Zion, first to create a propaganda masterpiece of a movie, and then, through their Swedish dupes to steal a Nobel Prize.

Now the Tesla Coil was turned to the task of igniting fires on the West Coast of the United States. Significantly, the surreptitious heat ray was aimed at parts of the State of California that understood that the Communist Conspiracy was not dead, that its goal was to wreck the U.S. economy by a combination of air quality regulations and socialized medicine, because once those were under its insidious control, the Nation itself would soon fall....

I Have Officially Scared Myself

The folks at The World's Fair call it a meme, but it's really just a game:

...the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.

To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby! Of course, once you find your 5 statements, pass the meme on to others.

Okay, this blog I have here is not a high traffic site; I'm pretty sure I have yet to hit triple digits for a single day. But...

Killus gives my sff.net web page. But the following single words bring you here:

• trademarksism
• semi-karma
• vertkrieg
• vuutle

But wait! There's more! The following search strings, sans quotes, also come up #1 on Google:

• brittle strategies
• John Galt is a slan
• fox hollow cafe lena
• nonrepresentational art pollack
• nonrepresentational art richard powers
• creepy little smile
• death rays and disintegrators
• playing the rent
• dead catfish under the drivers seat
• rocket boys meet radioactive boy scout
• max headroom stirner
• magic market fairy dust
• phony tough crazy brave alsop
• privation morality
• tihs not typo
• dorothy slave girl of oz
• knurdly lasers
• slan a critique

These need quotes:

• "black swan bashing"
• "son of on the road"
• "moral equivalent of socialism"
• "why barry goldwater lost tennessee"

I'm giving up now. And maybe going upstairs to pull the covers over my head.

Getting Rauchenberg’s Goat

I don’t always know what I like, but I do know art.

A few years ago, Amy and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I forget exactly which exhibit we went to see. Maybe it was Paul Klee illos; maybe it was the Fluxus display. Maybe it was just a collection of “modern masters.”

Whatever. One of the pieces on display was Robert Rauchenberg’s Monogram.



Monogram is a “mixed media” piece; that's a stuffed goat halfway through an old rubber tire. In the exhibit I saw, I think the tire had a rope on it going to the ceiling, like an old tire swing. I rounded the corner into the room where it was displayed—it was right in the middle of the room—and I just cracked up. I mean, the thing is just hilarious, the silliest sexual visual pun I’ve ever seen in a museum, I’m pretty sure.

So after looking at it for a while, walking around it, checking out the collage-y thing the goat is standing on, appreciating just how apt the expression on the goat’s painted face, I began to notice the reactions of other people who came into the room.

Or, more accurately, the lack of reaction. I don’t think I saw a single other museum goer even crack a smile. Certainly no one laughed out loud. And I thought, what a pity that is. I’m sure Rauschenberg had humor in mind when he created the piece, and it’s fairly easy to find critics (oh, those much maligned critics) who reacted with amusement. But the folks trudging through SFMOMA weren’t going to give in to such an easy thing as laughter.

I understand that we’re taught to “behave” in museums, and museums, like libraries are supposed to be places where you whisper. But it’s not like the museum guards are going to kick you out for a snicker, or even a good guffaw.

Well, I think I’ve already written most of what I have in mind here in the the final paragraph from my essay, “On Non-representational Art”:

This isn't a test. There is no right answer in the back of the book. It doesn't have to be "about" anything, or about any one thing. If it looks like something, if it reminds you of something else, well and good. If not, maybe it just looks good. If you don't like the looks of any given work of art, move on to the next piece. There's plenty of all sorts of art around, enough for everyone, really.

You can laugh at it, too. Sometimes that’s what the artist had in mind. And if it wasn't, so what? What is he or she going to do, kick you out of the museum?