This being a blog primarily dedicated to pop culture, the subject matter has strayed away from anything too personal. Obviously, all criticism and ideas are personal to an extent—I can't help but bring the baggage of history and real life into my writing. Still, as far as I can tell, this blog hasn't exactly been rife with personal anecdotes, and I'm assuming most people who read this blog and haven't met me in real life probably don't know much more about me besides my undying love for "Call Me Maybe" (P.S. "I Really Like You" is great, too).
But dad-gum, it's Father's Day, and I'm feeling sentimental, so here's a short, somewhat personal post for your reading pleasure.
It's hard to state absolutes absolutely, but I feel pretty confident in the one I'm about to say: no one has had a greater influence on my development as a pop culture consumer than my dad. When I was growing up, Dad brought home Hollywood classics from Blockbuster (remember those?); recommended books from the library; played the albums he loved (on tape and CD, of course—he's a pragmatist, not a vinylist) at home and in the car; took me and my siblings to the movies; defended edgier content from my more judicious mother (love you, Mom!); talked to me about the things I liked to read, watch, listen to. And I sucked it all in. Basically, my father laid down the foundations for my present-day tastes in movies, music, literature, television, and the way I talk and debate about all of the above. To put it more trivially: without my dad, there's a very good chance this blog may not have ever existed. That's one among many, many, many things I have to thank my dad for, but it's something that seems especially appropriate to celebrate in this venue.
So, in celebration of the man's unending influence on my artistic tastes, here are five important works of pop culture that I have Dad to thank for bringing into my life.
My father used to have this tradition—whether conscious not not, I'm not sure—of renting movies whenever my mom was gone from the house on a weekend church retreat. In fact, the two things you could always count on bookending those weekends were the rental of a movie at the beginning of the weekend and a frantic straightening up of the house at the end. These movies were often kind of forgettable family fare (I think he got Cats & Dogs once), but every once in a while, he struck gold. The richest vein he ever struck was when he brought home that white, blue, and gold rental VHS copy of Disney's one-off expedition into Looney-Tunes-esque meta-gaggery, The Emperor's New Groove. We loved it, and it soon became a family favorite. I still rank this movie among my favorite Disney features, and it's also one of my favorite animated movies ever.
Back in 2001, when Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters, it was my dad and his longtime Tolkien fandom that convinced my mom to make a family outing of seeing the movie. Growing up, I used to stare at Dad's copies of the Lord of the Rings books with a mix of curiosity and trepidation; when I was very young, I was unsure from the sketched images on the covers if these books were fiction or nonfiction, and Tolkien's impressive eyebrows on the "About the Author" picture on the back of the book looked like they were liable to swallow me whole if he looked my way. Then came the movies. We were visiting family in Maryland at the time of Fellowship's release, so my aunt, uncle, great uncle, and grandparents came, too. I have no idea what crazy multiplex we ended up going to, but it was like an hour away and decorated with a faux-ancient Egyptian chic. I remember walking by hollow-feeling pillars and the sandy, staring eyes of several sphinxes before entering the dark, relatively less unnerving sanctity of the theater. Anyway, I loved the movie and listened eagerly to my father explaining the byzantine details of Middle Earth mythology for the entire hour-long ride back to my aunt's house. It wasn't long after that that I borrowed Dad's copies of Tolkien's novels and read them on my own in the course of about a month.
Isaac Asimov
I went through this stage in early middle school where I thought that I had read all the good books there were. It wasn't arrogance or anything like that—more disappointment, actually. I had run out of Beverly Cleary and Encyclopedia Brown and Choose-Your-Own Adventure books and had read all the classics that I could understand and knew about from Wishbone. I had also had an extremely dry run at the library recently, where all I could find were these lame historical fiction novels that always tried just a little too hard to teach its readers about Victorian England or Ancient Greece and not nearly enough time on story. If you've spent any time in a children's library, you know what I mean. Enter Dad, who one day at the library hands me a short story collection by this guy named Isaac Asimov. He tells me that "The Last Question" is his favorite and points out a few others that are good, too. I go home and climbed into my bunk bed—I slept on top—and read all six-ish pages of "The Last Question" in one sitting. Bruce Springsteen talks about that single snare drum beat at the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone" kicking open the door to your mind; I can say much the same thing about Isaac Asimov in general and "The Last Question" in specifics. My father's putting that book in my hand opened my mind to not just Asimov's sprawling works but also adult fiction, science fiction, and the entire genre of the short story. It's probably the most significant turning point ever in my reading habits.
I don't think my dad has ever owned a Nirvana album (he's always been way more of a classic rock and New Wave guy—when he isn't listening to jazz or classical, that is—dude's got eclectic taste), but you could bet that whenever he caught "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or "Come As You Are" on the car radio, he'd be jamming out for the next four minutes. I later went on to be a pretty big Nirvana fan myself, and I credit that largely to the early exposure riding in Dad's car. Even so, it took me until college to realize that Dad was quoting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when he'd whistle a few bars and sing, "I found it hard, so hard..." I'd always assumed it was some rockabilly song. My father has many talents, but singing is not one of them.
One time in middle school (this was post-"The Last Question"), I asked my dad if he had any good books to recommend. He gave me his copy of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. As with Lord of the Rings, I'd always been a little weirded out by the cover when I'd seen the book on his shelf (for some reason, I found the deep grooves in the hitchhiking hand's palm to be way more unsettling that the eyeless green planet monster with the arms). To this day, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read. I laugh out loud very seldom when I'm reading, but the scene with the sperm whale gave me such an acute case of the giggles that I had to shakily set the book aside and bend over until I calmed down.
And that's just five. When I was brainstorming for this post, I came up with over ten without even trying, and that's barely scratching the surface of all the stuff my dad showed me. In the context of a lifetime, introducing someone to a good book or movie or band may seem like a relatively inconsequential action. And maybe it is. But it never felt that way. What it felt like was one person connecting with another through a shared love of art, joy, humor, wonder, mystery, angst, and complex fantasy worlds with appended histories. And that feeling of contact, of not being alone, made a big difference. So thanks, Dad. I love you lots. Happy Father's Day!
Until next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment