Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Book written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Guilty pleasures! What a strange concept… The words ring with illicit activities performed in the shadows (wouldn’t any addiction come closer to the mark?), but we inevitably talk about mere diversions as guilty pleasures. They fall just outside of the spectrum of behavior that we perceive as expected of ourselves. In the end, whatever we deem thus doubtless says more about how we imagine ourselves than our actual taste. No one ever reveals an actual horrible truth with the preface “You know, one of my guilty pleasures is…”

Having filled this series of blogs with sometimes portentous works, I wanted to leaven the list with… one of my guilty pleasures: the Agent Aloysius Pendergast series. They chronicle the adventures of a bizarre FBI agent and a regular staple of characters as they investigate strange crimes that come from the far side of weird science.

The books are great fun and I don’t appear to be the only fan. The first was turned into a movie by Peter Hyams about 20 years ago. For the past decade, the collaborators have published annually. The New York Times even takes note in their weekly book reviews (well, I remember being pleasantly surprised to see it, but I can’t find it online…). None of this destines the books for posterity, but I’m not alone in the corner with another book no one has ever heard of, at least.

So, why a guilty pleasure? Austen, Cervantes, Waugh, Dickens, etc. carried off the pleasure part very well. Honestly, they had their shares of humor, so the pleasure bit was extant.

Brimstone is a good example- these are action-packed books from the get-go. The characters are well-drawn and seem more alive than half the books out there. (Brad Meltzer ticks both those boxes as well.) On the other hand, the world of these books is a cartoon of science and morality and heroics. I think it is easy to forget how seductive clarity can be. As I have gotten older, those old westerns with obvious good and bad guys no longer hold interest. But if you add in some interesting history, wacky characters, and dashing protagonists, then you have something. Dan Brown mines this vein with great success. Hours and hours of modern television follow suit.

The flip side of the guilty pleasure is the art that asks much and that we give our time. All those paperbacks in the supermarket checkout line make it hard to focus on that Anton Chekhov short story waiting on the nightstand back home. The fact is that anyone who has managed to place a bunch of words together for our edification clearly had something to say. The mistake is faulting the author(s) for digestibility. In art, there are no guilty pleasures. As a culture, we embrace certain works to pass along to future generations. Michelangelo had many, many unknown contemporaries. They have faded from the common consciousness, which may indeed speak to the quality of their work. Or it may say more about the methods of storage and communication of the times in which they lived. Serendipity is the rule with posterity.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 250 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Song written by Peter Vermeersch
Performed by Flat Earth Society

Sometimes I get lucky.

Many years ago, I went shopping for dinner with my brother and we divvied up the tasks. Among other things, I had to get the salad dressing. He looked at me with sadness in his eyes when I returned with my selection. “Why did you get this?” “I don’t know. It looked good.” “Have you ever had it before?” “No, but I thought it’d be good to try something different.” “But there are dressings that people actually like. You could have gotten one of those.” “But then we’d never know if we liked this one…” We ended up buying two salad dressings in a fit of extravagance. I liked the new one. (Bear in mind that this may not be an exact transcription of events from decades ago.) Now that we have established a penchant for trying new things…

We are fortunate to live in a small city with a great annual jazz festival, among other perks. Any brief perusal of the lineup makes it clear that too much is scheduled over eight days to see even a small percentage. While the selections vary from year to year, you are also guaranteed a bevy of acts that you have never heard of. Many groups come from abroad and most tour the world, but few are played on pop radio.

So, you have to pick and choose. Many of the acts step well outside of any resemblance to jazz music, playing variations on folk, pop, rock, funk, and soul. Even the jazz acts will skew their repertoire toward more popular tunes when they are playing the free outdoor tents. That’s all good. It goes well with the street food- artichoke french and blueberry macaroons. I did mention a penchant for something different, didn’t I?

In the picking and choosing what to see indoors, we try to mix in something billed as different or odd or unusual or unique or offbeat or wacky or pushing the boundaries- you get the idea. The truth is that once you have grown up with Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper, Philip Glass, and Eric Dolphy, among many, many others. The creatively unusual can be great, but it takes a lot to surprise.

Really, we have not had great luck with our choices. As it turns out, unusual et al can be pretty tedious and self-indulgent. Who’d’ve thunk? Five minutes of that can go a long way while an hour or more can be a rough journey for an audience. The fact is that my too-weird-to-take may be right up your alley, so these artists may well have something that I merely don’t recognize.

So, this was the fifteenth year of the festival and we have hung in there with our let’s-give-this-a-try attitude. Imagine our joy to find Flat Earth Society. Surrounded by a beautiful Lutheran church, they played their own wonderful, unexpected tunes with humor and brilliant technique, and shades of so much that came before with an energy that spoke of discovery and freedom and happiness and walking through the fire. New discoveries assure us that the future will take care of itself.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 251 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Movie directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Written by Adolph Green and Betty Comden

Unimaginable as it may seem, my parent’s generation did not take video entertainment for granted. My mother and father saw silent films when that was the only option. But, they also were born with the advent of movies. By the time they had children, they must have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of movies, building up a store of favorites. When my brothers and I were young, my parents were limited to network television and perhaps a couple independent stations if they actually wanted to expose us to something in particular. Truth be told, I don’t think it really occurred to parents back then that you could share favorite shows or films with your children. Sure, you might realize that Wizard of Oz was having its annual showing because of the TV Guide listings and suggest that the family plop down and wade through the commercials bookending every fifteen minutes, but that hardly counts as a home education in quality art. We could only imagine a world in which Casablanca would come up in conversation and actually be viewable on demand. Without serendipity, we would never see it.

Between cable, videotapes, DVD’s, and streaming services, a hint of the the slightest interest and the history of film is at our fingertips. We don’t have to just say that our child’s enjoyment of Dumb and Dumber is understandable, but they really ought to see Laurel and Hardy.

All of which is a long explanation of the popularity of the phenomenon that was That’s Entertainment and its sequels. My dad decided one afternoon to just up and take me to the movies and it was the first of these musical anthologies that MGM released, trying to capitalize on their back catalog. Naturally, I enjoyed it, but I recall some confusion as to why we were not watching something with an actual plot.

More than that, I had little need to be taught an appreciation for musicals. Any child exposed to Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain will grow up with a decent sense of humor, a generous spirit, and cleaner, brighter teeth.

Gene Kelly never did any wrong onscreen and Donald O’Connor is far more sublime than his comedic reputation allows. I suppose this may be the one film I have seen more than any other, but I might suppose erroneously (White Christmas, Wizard of Oz, and Night at the Opera are probably in the race).

Things get interesting when you start to pay attention to the story. After all, we are talking about one of the key tales in film history- the arrival of sound. In this case, the story is told through the eyes of a pompous star blessed with a voice that won’t immediately signal doom for his career. We are now further from the release of Singin’ in the Rain than the film was from the first talkies. In that time, has anything other than streaming entertainment brought about such wholesale change to any of the art forms? I had started that sentence the first time by saying nothing had, but then I remembered that sound was really just a little technical innovation, too.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 252 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.