The recent death of Patrick Swayze gives me a good opening for a blog entry Adam invited me to write a while ago about Pop Culture Humiliation. Not the regular kind, where your kids, who have lived high on the hog off of your German recording contracts, record you attempting to eat a hamburger on the floor of your hotel room, or where your soundboard guy leaks/fakes a recording of your wife's> backing vocal, or you intentionally try out for a reality show requiring a talent you don't have.updated, 4:30p: Yeah, let's figure out a winner here. Click here to vote by checking off each of the listed works that you have seen.
I'm talking about David Lodge's game of Humiliation. In his book, Small World, partially set in a university English department, Lodge invents for his characters the game of Humiliation. "The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn't read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it." One intensely competitive junior faculty member fails to get tenure after a game in which he scored high with Hamlet. The game was invented for the book, but is played out in the real world. I have watched a crowd of drunken English grad students who are playing this, and it is not a pretty (but kind of an amusing) sight as people get pretty seriously humiliated by their own high-scoring admissions.
Anyway, in this crowd, it's not only books but music, tv, and movies. I am a pop culture devotee, but have some pretty serious holes in my education. At some point in my adulthood, I had only seen one episode of Star Trek. I was, I think the last person in the United States to> hear the song "Single Ladies," or see the video. For a long long while, the only movie I had seen with Sylvester Stallone in it was Woody Allen's Bananas. All these have since been remedied, but I have a lo> of aces up my sleeve in the pop culture Humiliation department.
So, Thingers, have at it. What pop culture bit are you totally lacking that everyone else here will boggle at? Do your best, which is to say your worst. But perhaps it starts and ends here: I never saw Dirty Dancing, Titanic or an episode of Hill Street Blues.
updated, Weds morning: We're close to a winner, but Nowhereman (Friends) can't win if he doesn't vote, because otherwise his totally is artificially boosted by having not not-voted on his own entry. We'll close voting later today.
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