...who have already used this name for their own blog, I'm going to be stubborn and use it myself. I already have a professional/personal blog and a political blog, but whenever I find myself compelled to leave a comment on someone else's blog, I invariably write about things I like: animation, fantasy, gaming, golf, movies, sf, tv, and the like. So that's what this blog is going to be about. Whenever I feel like it I'll post on whatever interests me that doesn't belong on my other blogs. Why? Because the bloggers I like most to read are the ones having fun with the medium. I'm having fun with my other blogs, but I want to have a different kind of fun here. Of course, being an academic, my version of fun may not match everyone (or anyone?) else's. That's no problem to me, as easily amused as I am. And it turns out that writing on stuff that amuses me has done me well in the past.
Yes, even back in the days when listservs were relatively new (gather round, grandkids!), I found myself making silly interventions like telling a story on the postcolonial listserv about how my brother liked Batman and I liked Spider-Man when we were kids as a set-up for the devastating observation that the whole Spivak vs. Bhabha thread going on at the time reminded me of our fights over which superhero was better. Or the time in a postcolonial theory course back in grad school that I was lucky enough to be taking from Bhabha himself and I go and make a Douglas Adams/Salman Rushdie comparison out loud in class (ah, the memories!). Somehow people forgave me that post (and people in the class never held the comment against me) and eventually I got two invitations to submit essays to collections people were editing based on my activity on that listserv (only one of which ever made it to publication).
From listservs I moved on to a web site, in part because I felt that the very interesting things I was learning about in grad school were being actively ignored or completely misunderstood outside academia (and inside much of it) and in part because I felt there might be people out there who could be interested in those things if I linked them to other things that they already found interesting. So for instance I wrote a long post on the OJ Simpson case, which now you'd need to find in The Internet Archive, that also served as introduction to critical race theory. If you scroll to the right on my home page, you'll see more now-dated attempts to use new media and popular culture to bring things of academic interest to a wider public.
So blogging is a natural evolution, so to speak, from my earlier work/fun internet/web activity. And if you think I'm kidding that I enjoy popular culture and have fun writing about it, I'll now post here something that I wrote a very long time ago but which I can't bring myself to delete from my current web site. More power to you if you can find it there.
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OK, So I Like Beavis and Butt-head.... Well, Beavis, At Least
Let me explain. It's not just because of the brilliant parody of Rush Limbaugh in that episode. It's not just because of ejaculations like "Stop, in the Name of All That Which Does Not Suck," or the times they say, "Huh, huh, he said 'ejaculations.'" It's not just because many of their comments on videos make a lot of sense when you think about them (like when they had no idea what that Johnny Cash video was and Butt-head said, "It's, like, uh, gangsta rap."). It's not just because every time Butt-head says "we" Beavis says "me too, me too" because he thinks Butt-head isn't really including him (and he's right). It's not just because of that early episode where they almost drown in gym class and Mr. Buzzcut asks Butt-head if he has any consideration for his friend Beavis's life and Butt-head says "no"--and then you hear Beavis repeating quite happily, "yeah, yeah, no." It's not just because episodes like that provide a plausible reason why Beavis has become more assertive over the years (or at least passive aggressive--remember the show where Butt-head is choking on a chicken nugget and Beavis keeps getting "distracted" as he looks for help?). It's not just because of those little dots that pop up around Beavis's head when he loses it, or his sugar-high/"crappucino"-induced Cornholio episodes.
No, it's more.
Yes, as heretical as it sounds, there's more to like about the show than simply the character/plot level, as good as that often is. For instance, I love the way the show takes the notion of the "MTV generation" to such an absurd extreme. And don't think Judge doesn't know what he's doing here--remember the episode where the anthropology graduate student chooses B+B for his documentary "Generation in Crisis" and then has to pay them to do something? OK, that may be more impressive to someone like me who's quite critical of the resurgence of generation talk since Douglas Coupland's Generation X showed target marketers everywhere how to create a whole new set of identity categories, and who liked Green Day's previous album because, like B+B, it was making fun of those categories. But it may not float your boat.
How about, then, the subtle homoerotics of their relationship? No, no, I'm not saying B+B are gay (although you heard it here first if they do eventually come out); I'm saying look at some of the pictures Judge draws! (Like during that episode where Mr. Buzzcut makes them lift weights in the school gym....) So what Judge is doing is juxtaposing their dumb-ass homophobia not only with the fact that they are inseparable, but also with how they interact physically. Not in every episode. But in enough to make a recognizable pattern. Just watch for it. You'll see what I mean.
I could go on--Burger World as window into/parody of Coupland's notion of "McJobs" and all the talk (and reality) of America's new postindustrial/service economy; Cornholio as broaching Texas racial politics and Mexico/US relations (recall that what set Beavis off was the hippie teacher doing a history lesson about U.S. imperialism); B+B as representative/parodic white males and all that entails for a rethinking of whiteness; the show's playing with "political correctness" as an index of just how successful right-wing critics of academia have been at defining popular conceptions of the academy (a perspective perhaps shared widely by B+B's fans, to their loss).
But I'll stop now. Wouldn't want to take a cartoon too seriously, right?
[note: this was written circa 1996, back when MTV would play some videos; I've moved on to Daria, Dr. Katz, and South Park because they show fewer repeats (and, truth be told, they're better than B+B and the Simpsons, which once was good), but I'll always remember B+B with a mildly embarrassed smile.... (1998)]
[p.s.: this whole thing is horribly dated--Green Day's Dookie is now ancient history, for one thing, and Daria is no more--but I can't bring myself to delete it or update it; so I'll just leave it hidden here as an alternate introduction to my current website! (2002)]
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OK, so with that blast from the past now past, I'll be back here whenever. Hope you will, too.
[Update: for more on B&B, check out their playground for a link dump.]
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