Michael McLeod
I'd rather be safe than sorry, given that this is the only planet we have so far.
So I'll be back later with more specifics on disappearing species and climate change.
In the meantime let's change the subject to nostalgia. Here is a column I just wrote. Rollins College is a beautiful liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida, which is north of Orlando.
Ben Hudson is a newly-hired Rollins College English professor whose class is in bad taste. Not bad taste as in socks with sandals, gardens with gnomes and prison tattoos. Bad taste as a theme in his writing classes.
It’s a strategy he’s used since his days at the University of Georgia, where he taught undergraduates while earning his PhD.
He starts by assigning the works of notable arbiters of taste, from 60’s counter-culture firebrand Susan Sontag to Immanel Kant, an influential 18th century philosopher who argued that our perception of what is in good taste is utterly illogical.
In Kant’s view, when something strikes us as beautiful – a person, a painting, a view – our response is purely emotional. There’s no arguing with us. De gustibus non est disputandum, said the Romans, or as the aphorism of another era put it: There’s no accounting for taste.
But Hudson is a southern-boy contrarian at heart, and what he really wants his students to see is that Kant assumed he and his homies – namely upper-class European males – were the sole judges of taste. Yet something perceived as bad taste by the powers that be can be a good thing, maybe even a revolutionary thing, and certainly something a good writer should investigate.
So he asks students to write about something they dislike – a fad, a movie, a singer. For inspiration he has them read essays that celebrate outliers, such as a rave review of a kitschy Times Square eatery called “Senor Frog” by ordinarily snooty New York Times critic Pete Wells, who applauded its artful tackiness in decking out diners in balloon-animal headgear and featuring drinks in suggestively-shaped cups offered up by nonchalant servers outfitted with glow sticks and whistles.
On the day I visited Hudson’s classroom, at the end of an Olin Library hallway decorated with posters offering chipper grammatical warnings (“How To Use a Semicolon: The Most Feared Punctuation on Earth!”), he was discussing one of the patron saints of bad taste: John Waters, the puckish filmmaker with a pencil-thin moustache who made underground movies celebrating bizarre behavior and outlandish characters in the early 1970s.
Hudson had assigned his students to watch a somewhat tamer film Waters made later in his career: “Hairspray,” the original, 1988 production, not the 2007 John Travolta remake or the 2003 Broadway hit.
The story, set in Baltimore in 1962 against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, revolves around a television dance contest and the prejudice it generates against two teenaged contestants. One is overweight. The other is black, as are the musicians playing the songs to which all the kids, regardless of skin tone, want to dance, much to the chagrin of some parents.
It’s easy enough for anybody who came up in the 60’s to relate to the notion of a stuffy mainstream culture using musical taste as a bulwark against change. But in a classroom filled with 19-year-olds who had yet to be born when the movie, let alone its time period, came and went, Hudson’s leading questions along those lines engendered long silences and puzzled faces.
So he provided historical perspective via a black and white Youtube video from 1958. A familiar figure – well, familiar to me – appeared on the screen in the front of the classroom, his eyes wild as ever, his hair in a towering Pomade pompadour as he stood at a piano pounding a hotwire beat into its keys and howling:
LUCILLLLEEEE! Please come back where you belong!
I been good to ya baby please don’t leave me alone!
It was Little Richard, of whom John Lennon once said: “If you don’t like rock and roll, blame him.”
Lucillllleeee! I could hardly keep my feet still. After all these years it still felt like a guilty pleasure. Surely the classroom door was about to swing open and we were all going to get hauled off to detention.
But then Hudson switched to another video. Same time period. Way different music. It’s Lawrence Welk, a wunnerful, wunnerful big band leader with a heavy accent whose weekly television show featured catchy songs such as “The Beer-Barrel Polka.” He was as much a part of my childhood living room and every bit as exciting as its floral wallpaper.
For just a second there I had felt young again. So much for that. Meanwhile one of Hudson’s students squinted at Welk’s image on the screen and had a flash of recognition.
“I know who that is,” she said. “My grandmother still watches him.”
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