Wednesday, June 22, 2011

talking back to everything

Eddie Murphy was blowing up, going from another SNL guy to big-ticket movie star, in the early 1980s. I went from having no idea who he was, to having seen him without knowing who he was, and then to having friends on the school bus suggest “Raw” to me.

I remember catching a few minutes of SNL between other things got me a rebuke from my mother. That stuff was dirty, she said, and shouldn’t be allowed on television. That’s why they kept it late at night, and it wasn’t something I should watch, wasn’t for children.

Eventually I saw Raw, but before that I believe he had an album called Eddie Murphy: Comedian. Either that or I’m misremembering it and I’m too lazy to go hustle up a specific answer from wikipedia. But there was a bit called “Black Movie Theaters” about how he, and any other person of similar skin pigmentation, talked back to the movie screen at the theater. And how white people didn’t do that.

I learned very young then, before fifth grade, that not only were the differences between “white” and “black” funny, but that I was either neither or both, and never only one or the other. I couldn’t dance for a damn, but I knew funk when I heard it, and felt music sometimes just listening and sometimes when I helped perform it - ripple through me and make me cry tears of pure unadulterated joy...

The slow lazy drift I’m getting at is that I talk back to The Rachel Maddow Show, I talked back to Politically Incorrect before there was a Real Time with Bill Maher, and I talked back to teevee and movies since I was a kid - when I wasn’t speaking the lines along with my favorite characters like a proto-geek oughtta should’ve.

Kevin Smith, another content producer who gets talked back, laughed with, and invited into my home everyday - recently mentioned the 1990s film Pump Up The Volume. This was probably my first big ugly gratuitous geekout. That movie inspired me in many ways - from memorizing it and repeating it like many friends did The Princess Bride, to recording myself a cassette with the soundtrack of the spoken word segments and the songs missing from the “official” soundtrack album...to the senior project I wrote for an English Teacher where I paraphrased, stole, remixed, sampled, and expanded upon the premise of that film - essentially creating my first work of fan-fiction years before I knew it existed.

I compose these words of remembrance, recollection, reflection and humor as I listen to The Rachel Maddow Show. When that’s over I’ll switch to any of the other parallel tracks that I pay any of my precious attention to. I learned from my mom and her mother that parallel processing is not an abstract but a constant and we do it everyday right here and right now with our own two hands and brainlobes.

(Maddow mentions something about Mitch McConnell speaking into a microphone and I volley my banter back at her: “Are we sure he knew it was a microphone, he’s older than everybody but Harry Reid and John McCain?!?”

And WTF is with nation-building in Afghanistan? You have some swampland, maybe a bridge or a used Edsel to sell me, too? Anybody old enough to remember the last Presidents who tried to sell that lie should be jeering as loudly as possible!

Nobody else has ever succeeded building a nation in Afghanistan, if the people there could’ve built a nation, there would’ve been one when we got there. They call it the Graveyard of Empires for a reason, dammit.

How about building up the infrastructure at HOME for a change? Otherwise the troops will come home to a pock-marked landscape, barren of life, with crumbled fallen bridges and roads so bad you’re better off on the dirt. Let’s see a President acknowledge that reality here on the ground at home right now!)

I’m sure somebody could devise a method by which we could test my retention from what I’m ostensibly “viewing” as I co-process or multi-task but I’m confident of the process and can pause, pivot, and flow around what I’m doing with variable attention to the tasks and inputs currently being accessed, processed, created or otherwise manipulated.

The way most people absorb their media, whatever they choose, may be changing. I don’t know if I’ve been ahead of the curve or behind it, and I’m sure it’s a little of both, but I can’t imagine shoveling more shit into my head. The world tries hard enough to fill it with shit. But Jackass, American Idull, So You Think You Can Shit Your Pants?, who in fuck has time for this braindead bullshit and how in fuck did it ever get popular enough to have more than one fucking episode?

Whenever my time is come, my ticket is punched, and the ending looms nigh, I’d hope that you all can put me on ice and wake me back up when my fellow Americans, humans, earthlings, whatever - they’ve all stopped embarassing themselves so frequently with devotion and attention to things which actively make people stupider.

Until then I’ll still be sitting right here, laughing with Futurama, talking back to Maddow and Colbert, writing stuff I’d be too fanboyishly ashamed to even GIVE to Doug Stanhope, or doing my own strange wobble between dialogue like Kevin Smith, prose like Garrison Keillor, hoping for the style of Piers Anthony, and generally being a premature curmudgeon concocting open-source thought-grenades from mere words and intentions.

Boo! My forked tongue and I are up here, floating about four feet off the ground in a lotus position, a megaphone in one hand, a middle finger in one hand, a sword in one hand, a fat black marker in one hand, sputtering out scrunchy sarcasm, muttering out morose memes, tweeting twisted tracts, fanning out our peacock feathers of anarchy and dissent behind us, casting a shadow over the soapbox on the sidewalk below. And we cast off billions of glowing opinionated filaments tangling in your aura, toying with your misconceptions, seducing your straight-laced-ness, and undoing the mundane wherever they come into contact with it.

I’ll write you a shelf of books, produce and design them myself, leverage a history of interesting stories, promise an almost endless procession of deep and profound conversations, and then I’ll go pick up a guitar and a keyboard (and a head full of samples) and start making half-assed music like I always imagined that someday I would. What you got? Where you at? What you doin? Hit me up...let’s take this sleepy world and spin it like a top!

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