all my heroes are dead

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Have I mentioned how much I hate Twilight? I probably haven’t, come to think of it, because whenever I try, I sputter into an inarticulate rage. Go read this instead, pretend that I wrote it, then come back.

See? See what unspeakable damage the Twilight phenomenon is doing to kids (and more than a few adults, but let’s be honest: if an adult is susceptible to the kind of message embedded in Twilight, he or she is already an almost lost cause).

Emblematic of the cult surrounding Twilight, and therefore convenient target for my hate, are t-shirts that feature Edward Cullen’s enormous forehead (and, more recently, Jacob whatshisname as well). I am thankful that, since I do not frequent malls or Hot Topic, I have never encountered one of these shirts in real life.  They cross my periphery thanks to the all-seeing eye of my Google Reader feeds.

When New Moon was unleashed upon the swooning masses around Thanksgiving, a comic strip from HijiNKS Ensue turned the hysteria around and created an outlet for venting geeks. Replacing Edward Cullen with another Edward, no less worthy of idolatry in the eyes of many, was genius. Click that link and go buy your own. Team Edward James Olmos is worth every penny.

Once the notion of alternative Edwards is introduced, it’s easy to imagine an army of better Edwards, locked in a meta battle with the pale and sparkly Edward Cullens of pop culture. It’s also easy to make t-shirts. It is hard, however, to top a man who starred in both Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica.

Edward Scissorhands

Evangelism is ineffective unless the audience can recognize the idols of the faith. Those who swoon over Edward Cullen are unlikely to know Edward James Olmos, but they probably know Johnny Depp, and thus Edward Scissorhands.

The internet is also full of Edward Norton photos, though unfortunately none were iconic enough for my t-shirt evangelism purposes.

I should at this point warn you of the dangers of blind web searches. I had in mind two other better Edwards, but I decided to use Google’s autocomplete search technology to discover other potential idols. Early on, I learned about the Edward Fortyhands drinking game. Disturbing, but innocuous. An indeterminate number of clicks later, however, I found the unspeakable horror that is Edward Penishands. Sometimes, the internet makes me proud.

Edward Gorey

Fans of the Edward Scissorhands aesthetic will probably appreciate the next better Edward: Edward Gorey. Gorey isn’t as widely recognized as Mr. Scissorhands, but his work is beloved by those who know it. In his self-portrait he wears a fur coat and tennis shoes.

It’s no great surprise to me that I have to explain these shirts to people. Most of the people I know have never heard of the Team Edward shirts, because they have the good sense to avoid things like that. It’s a little more disheartening, though not unexpected, that nobody recognizes Edward Gorey.

There is no excuse, however, for not knowing who Edward R. Murrow is. Even if your knowledge of World War II history is spottier than mine, even if you weren’t alive during McCarthyism, you could have watched George Clooney spoon feed you Murrow’s legacy in the film Good Night, and Good Luck. The final better Edward t-shirt is of David Strathairn, as Murrow, scowling through artfully photographed cigarette smoke. It brings to mind Murrow’s address to the Radio-Television News Directors Association:

edward r. murrow

This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.

I’ve met precisely one person who knew who Edward R. Murrow was and was also familiar with the Twilight t-shirts. (Thanks, incidentally, for preserving my faith in humanity.) The rest of you, use the box of wires and lights to which you are attached and edify yourselves.

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Reading Rainbow

When I was growing up, if you loved to read, you probably had a rough time of it, socially speaking. I don’t know what it’s like for kids today but I don’t imagine it’s much different. Granted, there are socially acceptable books now, even anointed ones, mandated tomes that have somehow become a kind of social currency themselves. But outside of the YA bubble formed by Harry Potter and strained to bursting by Twilight, if you’re young and prone to falling in love with books, my guess is that yours remains a solitary lifestyle.

Is the robust interior life that makes it so easy to open a book and pitch headlong into its pages also the thing that makes it hard for me to relate to the things that are going on outside my head? I may be socially functional now, but it was a slow-learned and hard-won skill. From the time I could read a narrative until pretty late in high school I had a lot of trouble giving a damn about anything that wasn’t happening in a book. I kept stacks of novels in my desk at school. I failed to notice when people spoke directly to me. When I learned to drive I had no idea how to navigate anywhere in my very small hometown because as a passenger my eyes had always been in a book rather than on the road.

There are few devout readers in my family, but they shine out in my memory. My mother, of whom I’ve written before, is an incurable sci-fi and fantasy addict. Her sister’s teenaged zeal and creativity were channeled into helping me learn to read and along the way learn to love words and the act of telling stories. Their father in a rocking chair of an evening with an inexhaustible supply of westerns. My own father reading only the newspaper, but reading it all the way through every time it came. His mother reading letters aloud to his father, who for reasons I don’t recall could not read them himself.

Whether for utility or leisure, each of these acts was accompanied by a hush I normally associated with church. Unlike the barely contained quiet of church (I could be a fidgety child, and wasn’t the only one), the hush of reading was a stillness, a thoughtful succumbing to the images forming in the head of the reader. Some of these were intimate moments I’d have observed in any family, but I don’t know many who had so many role models with such dedication to reading as I did.

I can’t remember anyone my own age who was enthusiastic about books. Reading is by nature a solitary act, but just as natural for me was the impulse to share what I was reading, and my excited overtures tended to fall on indifferent ears. I was a very shy child, and books were one of the few things I got excited enough about to try talking with other kids. It was easy to justify retreating back into my imagination when they failed to reciprocate. Even easier when there was mockery involved.

The reason I kept trying, though, is because I did have powerful proof that some kids were as into books as I was. When I was 6 or 7 years old, Reading Rainbow became a staple in my house. LeVar Burton became an enthusiastic tour guide through the world of books for legions of children, all of whom, like me, considered themselves part of his on-screen troupe. Even after I replaced other PBS fare with Thundercats, Tiny Toon Adventures, and Animaniacs, I’d still sneak in a bit of Reading Rainbow and revel in both the joyful explorations of wordscapes and the unabashed fun that was shown being had with books.

Butterfly Blood
Creative Commons License photo credit: nyki_m

That Reading Rainbow has recently departed the airwaves isn’t a surprise. The generations of potential benefactors raised on the show probably all found their way into low-paying careers like mine, unable to muster sustaining donations for even so potent a symbol of both literacy and, now, nostalgia. The rationale behind the lack of grant funding for the show–that it’s much more important to teach the mechanics of reading than it is to teach children to love to read–strikes me as short-sighted at best and a false dichotomy at worst.

Whatever the reasons behind Reading Rainbow’s cancellation, the result is the same: there’s a kid somewhere who loves to read so much he falls asleep still clutching his books, and now rather than learning to feel comfortable in the world as a book lover, he may instead withdraw from it further. I’ve got to find him before he’s gone. I’ve felt that loneliness and am thankful to have escaped it. Now I need to do the same for those who don’t have the “luxury” of Reading Rainbow.

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There’s a new Nanci Griffith album in the world. Every time she releases a new one I am briefly overwhelmed, taken back to 12th grade, when her music changed my life.

I haven’t always been able to tell the difference between good songs and bad, but I have always felt them deeply. I knew the words to “Folsom Prison Blues” the first time I heard it on my grandparents’ radio when I was a kid. Country music was broken by the time I started paying better attention in the 80s and 90s, though; it got reduced to platitudes, binary states. The only way to be in those “hot new country” songs was in love or in despair. Every little thing was life or death. I couldn’t help it; my fevered teenage soul took it to heart.

My senior year of high school a friend insisted that I borrow a copy of Nanci Griffith’s album Flyer, the first thing I’d ever heard that wasn’t country or pop music. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it, but I kept listening to the songs, reading the lyrics as Nanci sang. The verses were dense, there wasn’t always a chorus, and the melodies and harmonies were more complex than what I had grown up hearing. Nanci’s voice wasn’t as smooth as the ones on the radio, but its cracks and unfamiliar intonations made me believe she knew what she was singing about.

And the songs…they were full of choices, full of compromises and alternate paths and resignation. They were songs about how essential it is to acknowledge how you get to each point in your life and then to press on. What could I do but fall in love with this music?

Being a bit of a completist, I dove into Nanci’s extensive back catalog, which is about as comprehensive an introduction to folk music as you can get, thanks to an album of covers called Other Voices, Other Rooms. From that one album I learned about Kate Wolf, Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Woody Guthrie, and finally, I learned what the big deal was about Bob Dylan. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Eventually I exhausted my mental and financial reserves trying to get as much Nanci Griffith into my life as possible, which was just as well, because it wouldn’t be long until new albums came along. Like the brand new one I’ve been listening to tonight.

Unless you’re writing a Greek epic, do not under any circumstances explicitly invoke the muse. It pisses her off.

In a career spanning 19 albums, there are bound to be a few duds. Chalk it up to vanity projects, concept albums, the occasional overindulgence of sentimentality that evidently comes with age, and more vanity projects. She once recorded “From a Distance,” god help her. The last few Nanci Griffith albums haven’t seemed up to her usual standards, so this new one, The Loving Kind, had me worried, and not just because of the title.

I listened to it on lala.com, where you can listen to the whole thing, once, for free, without having to sign in or set up an account or fill out any form of any kind, because somebody in the music business finally figured out how the goddamn internet works.

First up is, unfortunately, just the kind of latter-day Nanci Griffith song that makes me stabby. It’s called “The Loving Kind” and is about Mildred and Richard Loving, who wanted to interracial marry the way folks want to gay marry these days. I’m all for using music for social commentary, which Nanci has a history of doing well. These days, though, it seems she feels the message has to be both oversimplified and very explicit. No shades of gray, no subtle metaphor, just straightforward this-is-what-I-think songwriting. It’s like turning the holocaust into a Disney cartoon and still believing you’ve delivered any kind of weighty social commentary.

Woolworth
Creative Commons License photo credit: elmada

Another song mentions “the muse” not once but twice. Perhaps worse is something called “Things I Don’t Need,” an anti-unnecessary-plastic-objects anthem. That turns into a love song. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem so bad, but consider that the same woman once prefaced a song with a 5-minute long story about the charms of Woolworth stores and the unnecessary plastic objects therein, this new song approaches scandal.

The best new material is basically just a mediocre catalog of platitudes and generalizations (see “Party Girl” and “Sing” and “Still Life” if you’re curious). When I hear something like this from someone whose music used to be so nuanced and thoughtful, I can’t tell if they can tell the difference. It would be one thing if she’s just tired of people not getting the point and decided to bust out the sledgehammer, but I can’t be the only one who’d rather chew off his own ears than be preached to.

This isn’t just a selfish wish for a new collection of amazing songs; I think of anyone out in the world today, ready to discover something that changes the way they look at the world, and worry if this is what they find. Of course, what worked for me isn’t likely the touchstone that someone else might need. This is a lesson I have trouble remembering.

What concerns me more is another possibility: what if all the old songs that woke me up are just like these, but I was young and malleable and couldn’t tell, and now through the nostalgic fog I remember them as more eloquent, insightful and inspiring than they really were. This prospect bothers me more than it should. It doesn’t really matter; I got what I needed out of those songs when I first heard them. But if I can’t evaluate them strictly on their own terms, if I can’t get outside of my own skewed perspective, that seems like a problem.

A problem Google should be able to fix with a simple tweak of their algorithm. They already collect more data on me than I can fathom, so they should be able to apply a filter to eliminate my particular shade of rose colored glasses. Click here to denude your childhood heroes.

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