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Nerd Revelation: KISS

You wanna know how I know I'm a nerd?

Last night I changed the channel from a KISS performance to catch the start of MythBusters instead.

And as I committed that seemingly treasonous act, the poignancy of it all immediately struck me. I decided that I had seen my fill of hairy, aging, make-up-wearing hedonists cavorting around on that huge stage as if they were youth and sexuality personified. In 2006, seeing KISS up there "rocking," (and hearing Paul Stanley strain for the high notes), is no different than seeing an overly glorified dinosaur act like Foghat or Steve Miller. The comparatively staid, rational discourse found on MythBusters promised much more entertainment for me.
What kind of mixed-up parallel universe am I living in? Did I really just say that watching two guys mess around with ballistics gel and poke fun at the idea of free energy devices was more entertaining than watching KISS?

Well, yeah.

Let me put this simply. The KISS phenomena, with its "army" and all manner of toys and merchandising and pyrotechnics-fueled concerts, is the biggest amount of empty hype masking a mediocre product to ever darken the doors of American pop culture. As "musicians" or "artists," (I use both terms very loosely), KISS put on display the perfect storm of style with no substance. Ever hear the phrase "polishing a turd?" I could throw a cinder block on any Friday or Saturday night and hit a bar-band with as much or more musical proficiency as the goons in KISS.

Take away all the pyro, the huge shoes, the make-up, the tongue-wagging, and the entranced women in the front row and just listen to the awful, clichéd blues-based guitar solos and Neanderthal harmonic progressions and it is just so obvious…what you are listening to is the product of highly-paid musical retards. If I was subversively presenting that level of over-hyped ineptitude to the general public, I'd hide my face with paint too.

But it's not just their musical aesthetic that is weak. They also have nothing to say, lyrically, that is beyond the abilities of your average sensitive and/or horny junior high student:

I know a thing or two about her

I know she'll only make you cry

She'll let you walk the street beside her

But when she wants she'll pass you by

Everybody says she's lookin' good

And the lady knows it's understood

Strutter

So why do people still get excited for this swill? I don't know. I'm still working on that one. Why do people get excited for all kinds of pop music putrescence that's thrown at them?

In the case of KISS, I remember as a little kid how my brothers' listening to this perverse music upset my long-suffering mother to no end. I think she honestly thought they were "devil's music," which says a lot coming from my hip and with-it mom. I'm pretty sure the "rebellious factor" secured their original audience as teenagers inhaled this stuff like so much weed. But why, thirty years hence, is there still an audience? Is it just a bunch of 40-somethings reliving their youth?

If you have gotten this far and think that I'm being a little harsh, I will concede this one point: the boys in the band at least seemed like they were in on the joke over the years. I have seen Gene Simmons talk in interviews about their lack of real musicianship and how they were the first band to really "sell out." However, the testimony of a pompous ass of the magnitude of Simmons should not be considered as definitive in any way.

The crux of the matter is that last night I had a revelation of my own nerddom. The time has come to put away childish things. Down with KISS and all that they stand for. Up with the age of rationality and science.

I'm old.

Hand Me the Clicker, Baby. Batman‘s Coming On

The literature of humanity is obviously diverse, discussing all manner of ideas: What is love? Who or what is God? How does stuff work? What is right and what is wrong? It's only been fairly recently, (probably within the last hundred and fifty years or so), that writers dared to depict humanity's future with any kind of technology. I'm thinking in particular of the works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, but there were others who wondered how technology and humans would interact.

And you can think of technology in two disparate ways: a) either the products of our scientific exploration will make our lives easier or b) the machines will take over and end life as we know it. Even though this kind of talk is usually the specialty of our own Dr. Roger Korby, I want to talk about the virtues of a specific technology that has come about within the confines of my own lifetime: the remote control.

It's an elegant idea, isn't it? I want to do something, but I want to do it from a distance. It's really hard to imagine, but there once was a time, not so long in fact, when there was no such thing as manipulation from a separate location. Control of physical things always implied proximity. Do you remember having to get up off the couch, walk over to the television set, (which was encased in rich mahogany if you were of a certain financial stratus), and change the channel? Obviously those days are long gone as I can control much more than my television remotely. In my living room, I have four different controllers for the stereo, DVD player, TV, and sound system and that's a rather modest set-up. Going to Rascal Stallion's house is like walking through a minefield of remotes. And let us not forget how we use remotes for outdoor purposes like unlocking our cars, lifting garage doors, and if we're in the movies, for detonating explosives.

But today I want to talk in particular about my television remote. Well, not just mine, but everybody's. I want to talk about the idea of television remotes and then a general principle.

Here's the deal. There is no question that my remote control is a handy device. Literally. It goes in your hand. You use your hands and fingers to manipulate it. And it does miraculous things, chief of which is that it changes the channel on the TV. I can spend a whole evening on the couch if I want to and barely have to move a muscle. Thanks to this little device, I can come this close to entering a vegetative state while searching for what's on. (Which makes me wonder-is a potato a vegetable? Only the validity of the phrase "couch potato" rests on the answer.)

So, clearly the remote control is a helpmate for mankind. Sort of like Eve in the Bible. But the principle I wanted to discuss is that of hidden influence. The development and proliferation of television remotes has had consequences that surely couldn't have been foreseen at the time of their invention, particularly in the world of advertising.

Very few people like to watch commercials. Oh, I suppose ad execs enjoy them and the Super Bowl ads are the glaring exception. But if someone was given the choice between watching a credit counseling commercial or ER, ER would win every time. And before the invention of "the clicker" people had very little choice in the matter. While we hated commercials, we hated getting off our asses even more.

Not so in the modern age. A commercial break is now a chance to "see what else is on" for about two or three minutes. We are no longer forced to watch anything we don't want to. And that must drive advertising professionals batty. I'm sure they are constantly trying to come up with ways to get our attention quickly, before we begin to "surf": using bright colors for establishing shots, screaming at us…Who knows what tricks they have these days?

Like I said before, a whole industry had to change to accommodate the residual effects from the invention of a rather simple device-the remote control. Similarly, an entire industry was changed when some dude decided that he wanted to encode the music on his CDs in a compressed file format on his computer and thus the birth of mp3s, the slow death of record companies, and the end of lockouts at large recording studios. Could anyone have seen all of these repercussions beforehand? C.S. Lewis talked about the relative merits and ill effects of science and technology in The Abolition of Man, I believe it was, and one of the big ideas stemming from Sartre's existentialism was the idea that humans are cursed to be free, in that we are free to choose, (i.e. to create and invent–or not), yet at the same time we have incomplete knowledge of the possible consequences of our actions.

And so I wonder, as I hold that little insignificant remote control in my hand, what other "little things" being made or thought about today will bring about unforeseen changes in tomorrow's future?

The Postal Service and the Past, Present and Future of Written Communication

The Postal Service is a hip musical duo that makes catchy electro pop-rock that automatically raises the “cool” quotient when included as a background for commercials for any wares you may want to sell on television. Their music is also well-suited for the emotional confessionals and montage sequences at the end of reality TV shows.

But did you know that there’s another, less well-known Postal Service? That’s right. I’m talking about the United States Postal Service.

I don’t imagine that the last ten or fifteen years have been very kind to the postal service. With the advent of various new and fancy communications technologies like fax machines and email, “snail mail,” (as it was briefly called by hipsters at the end of last century), has become the Boo Radley of the world of written messages.

There once was a time when the only way to send Aunt Marge greetings and photos of little Bobbie and Susie’s birthday parties was to put pen to paper, shove your documents into an envelope, affix proper postage, and trust that within the week, she would receive your familial messages. Yes, once upon a time, mail was king.

But since those days, the postal service has been dethroned as the de facto method for getting the word out. Now fax machines, email, and even text messaging have taken over, and rightly so, as there is simply no comparison between the immediacy of today’s digital magic and yesterday’s slow motion.

But I wonder about the changes being wrought by email and text messaging. I wonder what has changed more: a) what we communicators decide is worthy of putting in the mailbox or b) how we communicate altogether. In other words, has the ability to send the written word to Hong Kong instantaneously only changed what I write? Or has how I write been changed as well?

Is Mail Worth the Effort Anymore?

Obviously a new method of choosing what should be sent via the postal service has arisen since we now have a choice. Given the choice between simply emailing a letter with attachments and mailing a hand-written letter and printed photos, it’s a no-brainer that you would choose the method that uses the least amount of time and effort, unless the messiness of sentimentality enters the equation. Sentimentality might dictate that if messages contain anything other than the dry, emotionless prose of business correspondence, those messages might call for more permanence than an email or text message lends. (See “On Books, Libraries and Knowledge in the Information Age,” for more on this idea of permanence.) When someone, spurred on by a need to preserve memory, chooses the more difficult, time-consuming route of mailing actual physical letters, they swim against the current of where technology would take our communication. Whether this is a heroic act or foolish stubbornness is up for interpretation.

Are Actual Words Worth the Effort Anymore?

If you are of the “descriptive” persuasion when it comes to issues of grammar, you can’t ignore the fact that an emergent set of rules for the written word has sprung forward contemporaneously with the parallel emergent technologies. This emergent set of rules seems to simply reject all previous rules of punctuation, (in a way similar to Bruce Lee’s “no-style” style of fighting.) Capitalization is now arbitrary. The new grammar is minimalist and succinct. What used to be expressed via letter as “Oh, my gosh! That is so funny! I can’t tell you how clever that was. And so true!” might now be expressed as “ROTFL :-)” or “LOL!” in an email or text message.

And so I wonder, with the influx of new ways of abbreviating our common phrases, will we ever get to the point where we write exclusively in abbreviated form? And if what we say to each other is comprised entirely of understood, conventional clichés like “IMHO,” is real communication even occurring? For the typical model of communication includes at least one receptor of new information; but clichés are by their nature not new information for anybody. Or even worse, if no new information is being exchanged-is real, individual thought even occurring? What I’m describing is a strange situation: with great convenience comes intellectual atrophy.

So, as you lick those 39 cent stamps that used to cost 15 cents and fold up that hand-written letter to Grandma, remember that you are committing an act of communicative sabotage on the new machine.