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Re: RAT THE SUPERBOWL?
>intriguing. i watched a lot of lidsville and the bugaloos when i was a kid and
>you know what, it was all paid for by corporate america. and its part of why i
>like to blow things up now.
Now, having read Lucy's reply to our typically crankyAmerican responses, I see that she's cranky and brilliant herself. I think the point about corporate culture is well observed. Thank you, Lucy.
But I find myself more attuned to Matthew's vision. Because I grew up on Sid and Marty Kroft too. With Martha Raye as the cranky villainess in THE BUGALOOS, and that goddamned creepy ass flute in PUFNSTUFF and even Ruth Buzzy and Jim Nabors in LOST SAUCER. And the impact of Charles Nelson Reilly flying around in a gigantic top hat on today's theatre artists CANNOT be overstated.
I guess the point is that, for me at least, there is no clear line between "corporate trash culture" and "high art".
You know, a couple of years ago, I was working on a student translation of the ILIAD, and I was loving it. My favorite passage has to do with Apollo.
In the passage, Apollo is coming down the mountain, and he's very VERY angry. But Homer doesn't talk about Apollo's face or his voice or anything like that. The only things he mentions are the arrows in the god's quiver, rattling angrily as he strides down the mountain.
When I read that hexameter, I understood the meaning of Coleridge's phrase, "holy dread". Agamemnon, I knew, was FUCKED. I owe that to Homer, and lots of other things, too.
But as an artist, I'm as much a product of the fact that Billy Barty's firefly ass lit up on THE BUGALOOS.
That's how itt is, for many of us of a certain age on this side of the Atlantic. We're nott being flip; not on purpose at least. Your cultural language might be relatively pure. Ours is a patois, with words from Woody Guthrie and William Shakespeare and the Superbowl and Jane Austen and SIGMUND AND THE SEA MONSTERS. And we love them all.
And the cultural patrimony on THAT side of the Atlantic is not all that pure, if one thinks about it. Without you, I would never have met DOCTOR WHO and the comic books of Neil Gaiman and the novels of Jane Austen.
Where did we get this notion of cultural "purity" anyway? And how can we be rid of it, once and for all?
--Bill