lolprofs

So, I'm teaching a class this semester called "Folk Literature"--great title, terrible course description: “The folk ballad, its origin, history, and literary significance.” That's it. Nothing else.

Since what I know about the Child ballads would take me all of about ten minutes to impart to students, I was a little stymied about what to do with the other hour and fifteen weeks. (Plus, as Don Yarman once brilliantly noted, "folk music is annoying," plain and simple.)

As the picture to the right illustrates, I decided to go straight for the jugular on the first day of class and implode the idea that folk literature is only about the ballad. We talked about internet fan fiction (which I believe is what I was discussing when a student snapped this photo) and "lolcat" pictures and language, among other topics.

So, as I said, the student apparently took this picture during class (unbenownst to me) and ran it through a "lolcat builder" page at mine.icanhascheezburger.com to create this image, then e-mailed it to me.

It's either the creepiest or most flattering tribute I've ever gotten from a student. (At any rate, it's way better than the lilac-scented-teddy-bear-in-a-tulip-shaped-mug that I got from a student once.) Either way, it was very reassuring: you know you're back in a real folklore class when all the wack jobs turn up. As George Bush famously said, they're my "base." Then there's the student who claims to be a traditional ballad singer. Oh yeah! And away we go...

Anyway, the student who mocked up this shot suggested that perhaps there should be a "lolprofs" website, which I think is a fabulous idea. Maybe I'll try to put together some other pics of unsuspecting colleagues and get a start on that...nah. I'm enough of a wack job as it is without going that route.

Well, that explains it

A quick follow-up to the previous post...I just read the New Yorker's review of Judd Apatow's most recent film, Walk Hard, in which male full-frontal nudity plays a prominent role. According to David Denby, the "penis [is] an organ that Apatow, in recent interviews, has vowed to bring into mainstream filmmaking."

Uh, Judd: metaphorically, it's been ALL OVER THE PLACE in your work already. Isn't that enough?

It's just not funny (by Rose)

I’m a huge fan of Freaks and Geeks, the short-lived 1999-2000 TV show produced by Judd Apatow, which treated adolescence in about the most realistic way I’ve ever seen—which is probably why it got canceled. It was at turns painful, hilarious, frustrating, and totally honest, carefully probing the all too human depths of each of its characters. The series starred Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jason Segel, and others who have turned up In later Apatow productions, becoming a sort of millennial “brat pack”—except these guys are all in their 30s or 40s.

Even if you’re not familiar with Freaks, you’ve undoubtedly seen some other Apatow production, since he’s been behind almost every successful comedy of the last several years: Walk Hard, Superbad, Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Anchorman. In most of these, you can see his trademark mix of satire, sentimentality, and a weird obsession with gender politics, especially the oddball tribalism of guys. And most of the time, it works and is funny. But recently I’ve seen both Superbad and Knocked Up on DVD, and was completely turned off by both of them—like, close-to-hitting-stop-and-ejecting-the-DVD turned off.

I wanted to like both of these films, especially Superbad, since it had the most promise to revisit the adolescent angst of Freaks and Geeks. But the sexism of both really pissed me off, and what pissed me off even more is the way both films try to justify their sexism by framing it as such—as if an ironic consciousness of sexism somehow excuses it. In both films, at least one of the main male characters is obsessed with porn; in Knocked Up, Seth Rogen’s character and friends are developing a website that will tell visitors how far into any given movie they have to fast-forward to get to the nudity, and in Superbad, the character “Seth” tries to figure out which internet porn site he can subscribe to without his parents’ finding out.

In Knocked Up, this is gotten around by having Katherine Heigl’s character join her unlikely beau in screening movies to spot the tit shot; in Superbad, Seth’s friend Evan toes the pansy “you need to respect women” party line, refusing to have sex with a girl he’s liked for years because she’s drunk. The ultimate punch line is that the girl Seth is chasing turns him down because he’s drunk, creating a lame “feminist” joke that really only underscores the film’s misogyny by showing how that kind of turnabout just emasculates Seth even further.

Now, it may well be that I’ve turned into the prototypical middle-aged prude lamenting the crassness of contemporary pop culture. But really, it’s the fact that I know Apatow is capable of dealing with issues of gender and sexuality in more complex ways that frustrates me. One of the best episodes of Freaks and Geeks revolves around the geek boys’ discovery of some old 16mm porn films, which they watch during the meeting of the projectionists’ club. One of them, Sam, is deeply disturbed by what he sees—so much so that he finds himself terrified of girls. His seeming enemy, the gym teacher, figures out what’s happened, and in a surprising turn of character, talks Sam down by demystifying porn for him. The show ends with a shot of the two of them in the teacher’s office laughing, Sam clearly relieved to have some perspective on the whole issue. It’s an insightful look at the confusion and terror of teenage sexuality, and the isolation teens feel, hearing stuff from peers but being unable to double-check things with a trusted adult.

(The 40 Year Old Virgin manages this delicate balance of crassness and emotional weightiness, too.)

So, the way in which both Knocked Up and Superbad seem to revel in the insularity of that adolescent view of sex, even to celebrate it—well, to me it seems so backhanded, like “You know we don’t really think this way, but isn’t it funny? Isn’t it?!?!?”

Not to mention the pure male fantasy of Knocked Up: would any sane woman actually keep Seth Rogen’s baby AND date him, too? (Don’t even get me started on the way that abortion is handily ruled out as an option for the sake of the plot.) And the way in which menstrual blood is both fetishized and loathed in Superbad—it’s just appalling.

Judd Apatow, what happened? I know you can do better than this. Or maybe I just need to stop watching movies with Seth Rogen in them. He is the common denominator here…hmmm.

An MLA Story (by Tom)

It seems to be the case that I was not cut out for life in a big city: it is a favorite story of Rosemary’s to describe the time when I was in downtown San Francisco, standing on the sidewalk and counting the money in my wallet. To me, there seemed to be nothing unusual about doing so, but—as she pointed out—I was a walking advertisement for a pickpocketing incident. When it didn’t happen, of course, I took it as a kind of vindication.

At the MLA convention in Chicago this winter, however, I had another big city incident. After giving my paper, Rosemary and I hurried through snowy downtown Chicago towards Rick Bayless’s restaurant Topolobampo (where we had a very nice lunch). Dressed in my MLA outfit (khakis, jacket, long woolen coat, leather shoes), once more I had no idea how much I must have looked like a prime target for the ministrations of Chicago street entrepreneurs.

Sure enough, as we were hustling along, I was stopped by a guy who quickly launched into a complicated routine about my shoes and the snow and slush, and before I could even say “no,” he had smeared some kind of oily goop on my shoes and was giving me his highly polished (and, I have to admit, entertaining) rap about taking care of shoes in the wet Chicago streets. “This will keep you from getting that line of salt around your shoes when they dry out,” he told me, as he smeared the stuff around with a polishing cloth. “Keep your feet dry, too. And let me apologize for being so aggressive in stopping you all, you know, but it’s a hard way to make a living out here.”

“How much do I owe you?" I asked with some resignation when he had finished “polishing” the shoes.

“Five dollars for the polish; the tip is up to you.”

So I gave him a five, and a George Washington dollar coin. Once burned, now, I was worried that I’d get hit with the same scam in the next block—I looked like an easy mark, obviously—so I asked him what I should tell the next guy who tried to polish my shoes.

“Tell him it was Shoe-Love,” he said.