Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games and generally listened to oldies music while I played. A few years later, I became a music junky and started buying CDs, but at that time, radio stations that my peers were not listening to were perfect. I have some constant, nagging (too strong a word) memories. There are specific memories that stand out. One of these took place on a stormy summer night. I was listening to oldies radio and playing Batman: The Video Game , which I had rented from Park Video. I rented so many games over the years, until after high school, when I virtually stopped playing. To be fair, playing the video game is a memory that should not have stuck with me, but it is there, a fragment of more innocent times.  My memory is hazy, and I don't remember any of the songs, but I do remember bits and pieces of the game. Batman could leap from wall to wall, and one of the weapons was a batarang. It was an average sidescroller, but it was not as hard as Battletoa...

There is an age-old mixtape code that does not allow for much recopying. The tape you make for one person should not be given to another. This does not stop these tapes from being recopied if they are good, usually by the receiver of said tape without the knowledge of the author, carrying on the tradition of musical choices and adding more variety to one's musical taste. Tapes can throw a monkey wrench into the works and introduce an interesting theme that needs to be carried on, or a genre that has not been explored. One of these types of thematic tapes turned me on to power pop, and more recently music blogs have taken over some of the work of mixtapes, introducing me to older rock and country stuff that I would have missed.             Mixtape etiquette also assumes that the tape will be a labor of love. Now mixed CDs or playlists do not have to be listened to as they are made. Those old mixtapes required that the creator w...

Those who know me are familiar with my obsessive list making. Every day I make lists that are long, unwieldy, and unlikely to be completed. It is part of my mania that I separate these lists into three categories: fun items, daily teaching/writing tasks, and ongoing writing projects. I listed the fun items first on purpose because these are the most likely to be completed. Sometimes I do actually finish the daily teaching/writing tasks. If not, they roll over to the next day. The ongoing writing projects are generally tasks that I have been working on since time immemorial, and I am not I will ever finish most of them. They too are moved from list to list obsessively until I finally remove them because I can no longer be so masochistic. Andrei Codrescu, in a 1989 collection of his "All Things Considered" essays, Raised By Puppets, Only To Be Killed By Research , writes about lists in a tellingly accurate, yet humorous essay, "Today We List, Tomorrow We Fail." He...

I haven't been blogging much or doing other writing because I am currently revising my dissertation and feeling the gloom of being in school for so long with no glimmer of light at the end. I've been in a perpetual dark hallway, bumping and bouncing off the walls, feeling sicker than ever as I look for academic jobs, while trying to get published. Many days I feel like I have zero skills, zero prospects, and zero opportunities. I'm not getting any younger, and there are times when I feel like I have made some very regrettable mistakes. Yet I also know that this is what I want to do, so I'm going to finally get the dissertation done. Then I can think about paying back student loan debt and moving on into the light. Music has been my saving grace as always. Coming off of a two week sinus infection, I reloaded my MP3 player and put it on shuffle only to be hit with a barrage of old country songs, mostly of the trucker persuasion. I have been spending tons of my time li...