Missing the Pop Culture Zeitgeist Completely (Or, a Response of Sorts to an Essay About “The Runaways”)

I haven’t seen the film The Runaways yet, but I know I’m going to like it. I’m a sucker for 70s nostalgia; I enjoyed “Dazed and Confused,” and count “Boogie Nights” as one of my all time favorite films.

I find it interesting, however, that thoughts of The Runaways turn neither Carolyn’s thoughts nor my thoughts to the 1970s. In Carolyn’s case, the band turns her thoughts to her halcyon early 1990s days in New York, specifically the Lower East Side. In my case, the band turns my thoughts to my bleak early 80s days on Long Island, specifically Great Neck.

For me, The Runaways mean Joan Jett. And for me, Joan Jett means March of 1982. Because, in March of 1982 the number one song in the nation was Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll.”

And at first I hated that song.

Specifically, I hated that song—and hated Joan Jett—because she had knocked another song off the top of the charts, a song that was on its way to a record for weeks at number one. I now must admit that at the time, I loved that song more than I loved Joan Jett, who has become an icon.

In much the same way that some teenagers must have passed up the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium for the chance to see Soupy Sales at a nondescript location, I passed Joan Jett by, and bet my passion on another song. And now, for the rest of my life, I must live with the fact that I chose this song and this band over Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

That song was “Centerfold” by the J. Geils band.

If you grew up in the 1980s going from thoughts of Joan Jett to the J. Geils Band is a bit like driving a sports car at top speed, slamming on the brakes, and whipping the steering wheel around so that the car faces in the opposite direction. The paradigm shift—particularly with the benefit of hindsight—is so dramatic, so jolting, that the brain feels as if it is spinning around in its skull case.

Time has, of course, been far kinder to Joan Jett than the J. Geils Band. Joan Jett has become an iconic symbol not just for strong independent women, but also for strong independent lesbians. This is not to say that you have to be a lesbian to be inspired by Joan Jett; as Carolyn’s essay made clear, any woman of any orientation could find her story inspiring.

This is not to take anything away from the J. Geils Band. They were a fun band that worked their way through Boston pubs, and in addition to “Centerfold,” they’re probably best known for the fun song “Love Stinks.” “Freeze Frame,” the title track from the album on which “Centerfold” appeared, which reached number four on the charts but by now faded from most people’s memory, was a catchy, upbeat tune.

But no offense, even though Peter Wolfe is a way cool guy, The J. Geils Band did not even hold a flickering candle to the force of nature that was Joan Jett. This was, after all, the woman who founded her own record label, Blackheart Records, and released the sensational album “Bad Reputation.” In addition to its scorching title song, this album also has one of the all time great album cover photographs (that's the one at the beginning of this article, where Joan is airborne).

Let me put it this way before moving on: I bypassed Joan Jett for a band that featured a harmonica player who willingly referred to himself as "Magic Dick."

So “The Runways” makes me think of Joan Jett, and Joan Jett makes me think of J. Geils. This in turn, makes me think of myself at the age of 15. And this, in turn, forces me to contemplate an inescapable truth:

God, what a pathetic little pencil-necked geek I was.

Put it this way: I know what a genuine pencil-necked geek is. I know this because of the novelty song by professional wrestling manager Freddie Blassie called, appropriately enough, “Pencil Necked Geek.” I know this because the song figured prominently on Dr. Demento, a radio show that played novelty records.

And so, while my only two friends in tenth grade listened to such bands as The Bad Brains, Stiff Little Fingers, The Sex Pistols, Public Image Limited, The Cure, The Stray Cats, The Buzzcocks, The Undertones, Ultravox, Kraftwerk, The Dead Kennedys, Squeeze, The Jam, The Specials, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, The Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmonds, Rockpile, Madness, and countless others, I was obsessively listening to “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes.

True, some the sharp musical tastes of these friends rubbed off on me, and I did indeed listen to these bands, dilettante that I was. Nonetheless, as these friends matured and I remained trapped in the immaturity that comes from listening to too much Weird Al Yankovic—not to mention being trapped in the body of an eleven year old in tenth grade—these friends outgrew me and began to drift from me. Sensing this, I switched schools, and transferred from Great Neck South to Great Neck North.

The story has a happy ending. Once at North, a group of girls took me under their wing, and I sort of became their mascot. My musical tastes blossomed, and a few years later, I was in a band with some of them.

It was sort of like how I imagine it would have been if I had been in a band with Joan Jett in high school. I like to think that if I had gone to high school with Joan Jett, she would have beaten the crap out of anyone who picked on me. I would have been proud to drum with her band, and would have felt the way Encyclopedia Brown felt when he befriended Sally Kimball.

Eventually I realized the error of my ways. I went on to listen to such great girl groups as The Pretenders, Throwing Muses, The Breeders and the Donnas. I often played with female musicians who were far more talented than I was, and felt not intimidated, but just honored that they considered me good enough to sit in with them.

So it is with bittersweet memories that watch The Runaways trailer, and it will be with bittersweet memories that I watch the film. Back then, I had little to guide me in the treacherous minefield of what is worth listening to, and what isn’t. Fortunately, I eventually had a group of strong, understanding women who knew that childlike adolescent omega males often need nothing more than a few big sisters to guide them in the right direction.

Be Glad This is Not Your Job (Or: a Trip to an Egyptian Exhibit at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Puts Things in Perspective)

I visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston yesterday, and I’m glad I’m not Qebehsenuef (pronounced keh-buh-SEH-noo-wef).

Let me get you up to speed.

Vickey and I are vacationing in Boston. Because Vickey is an artist, we’ve made it a point to visit art museums. If you’re in Boston and you want to visit art museums, you make it a point to visit The Museum of Fine Art, which is sort of the grand old museum of Boston.

It’s a great museum, full of classic works, but when we went we spent most of our time checking out an exhibit called The Secrets of Tomb 10A.

The exhibit displays the contents of the tomb of Djehutynakht (juh-HOO-tuh-nahkt), a bigwig Egyptian governor who clearly had a lot of wealth. Even though robbers cleared out most of the valuables from the tomb long ago, the plaster and wooden artifacts—such as the coffins—remained. A team of restoration experts spent a century restoring the contents of the tomb—which the robbers had thrown around when they ransacked it—and it’s a great exhibit, complete with, among other things, the restored coffins (which have extraordinary artwork on them) and 36 models of the various boats that were to carry Djehutynakht and his wife to the afterlife in style.

When we talk about Egypt and we talk about tombs, we need to talk, of course, about mummification. We know that mummification made the body’s face look like that of Osirus, the god of the dead. We know that mummification preserved the body for the perilous passage through the afterlife, one that would be either on land or sea. We know that passage on land took the soul through perilous peaks and valleys, and past The Lake of Fire of the Knife Wielders. We know that passage by sea took the soul past such monsters as Dog Face, Great Face, He of the Sharp Teeth, Protector of the Two Gods, and (my favorite) He Who is Driven off With Two Faces in the Dung.

It’s glorious stuff, this afterworld journey, and it sets the mind thinking of the pantheon of Egyptian gods. There’s Ra, god of the sun; Nut, goddess of the sky; Seth, god of the desert; Amun, god of creation; Thoth, god of writing and wisdom; Hathor, goddess of love, music and dance; and, in addition to many more, Horus, the patron god of Egypt.

And it is with Horus that we now come to Qebehsenuef.

To understand where Qebehsenuef fits into this, let’s go back to mummification for a moment.

Here’s another thing we know: when priests mummified a body, they removed the organs to aid in the preservation of the body. Each of the organs went into a container called a canopic jar. In the passage through the afterlife, various gods looked after each of these jars, making sure that the soul would have all the body parts it needed in the afterlife.

One of these jars was on display at the exhibit, and as the information placard said, this particular jar was protected by Qebehsenuef.

For this was the job of Horus’s children (and I’m sorry, but I don’t know how to pronounce their names). Imsety protected the liver. Hapi protected the lungs. Duamutef protected the stomach. Finally, Qebehsenuef protected the intestines.

When I said that I was glad I wasn’t Qebehsenuef, I wasn’t entirely accurate. What I should have said was that I’m glad I’m not any of these four guys. Let me elaborate.

If Christian theology is a good model for this kind of thing, being the child of a god is a lot like being Michael Corleone from The Godfather. Often, a parent has a career in mind for their child, and it’s usually an unpleasant job. To make things worse, the kid usually has no choice but to do whatever mom or dad tells the kid to do.

Granted, there are exceptions. Eros has a lot of fun making people jealous of each other, and Perseus did his father proud with that whole Gorgon business. Still, these are the exceptions; most of the time, the kid’s got a rough road ahead.

Which leads to my point, which is this: poor Qebehsenuef.

I mean, imagine the guy. He goes to college, probably majors in English. Maybe he writes a witty column for the school paper. People like him, and girls go out with him from time to time.

Granted, he’s not as cool as Thoth’s kids. Thoth’s kids write the kind of stuff that sparkles, and Hathor’s kids play in a band that’s going to be signed any day now. Even better, this is, for these kids, something that their parents totally support; after all, writing and making music are, for these kids, just carrying on the family business.

That’s not the case with Qebehsenuef, though, and that’s why he dreads graduating from college. Because no matter how witty those columns are, Qebehsenuef has to go into the family business. It doesn’t matter that he’d rather work at a radio station, or perhaps an alternative newspaper; once he graduates, he will, for the rest of eternity, need to guard one set of intestines after another through the afterlife.

Take a moment to imagine this. At cocktail parties, the children of Thoth discuss how they inspire poems and political manifestos. The children of Hathor discuss the music and dance that they inspire, which also, no doubt, fan the flames of passion and love.

Qebehsenuef, meanwhile, tries his best.

“You know,” he says, “it’s not just anyone who can shuttle intestines through the afterlife. It takes real skill.”

At this point, the woman he’s trying to talk up nods politely and strikes up a conversation with one of Thoth’s kids.

So think about this when you’re in your cubicle lamenting the less desirable parts of your job. You can always leave your job if it gets excruciatingly painful, but Qebehsenuef can’t. He’s stuck in that cubicle for an eternity, with a desk full of travel coupons, all of them for one underworld trip after the next.

But it doesn’t end there. Because one other thing that the exhibit made clear was that over time, mummification became something was no longer limited to the pharaohs. As Djehutynakht showed, if you had the money, you could be a mummy. This means that Qebehsenuef now had countless more intestines to shuttle through the underworld, again and again and again.

It just puts things in perpective.

Miniature Graffiti (Or: The Smart, Sharp Humor of College Students)

I'll have a longer entry later about what it must be like to be a minor god who graduates with a B.A. in English (yes, you read that right). For now, though, I just need to share this minor gem.

The above picture is a detail from the tilework in and around a urinal in the men's room at a Border's bookstore on Newbury Street in Boston. For the uninitiated, Newbury Street was, at one time, the hip happening place in Boston, kind of like Boston's answer to New's York's Lower East Side. It had cool used clothing shops, and Newbury Comics, which was sort of the jewel in that area's crown.

Alas, with the passage of time and exploding rent prices, the area is now mostly one major chain store after another, followed by one fashion boutique or mega-expensive art gallery. Of the stuff that used to be there, only a few places--such as Newbury Comics, which has become mega successful--survive.

Still, however, you get these occasional small reminders that you're visiting a college town, perhaps the most college populated city in the United States, if not the world. My friend Jeff, who grew up in the nearby suburb of Newton, once told me that there were well over 100 colleges in Boston, and that something like a third of the population of the city, at any given time, is students, which may explain why Boston feels like a ghost town during the summer months.

Any city with that many college students is bound to have subtle reminders that young people are all around, people with energy, people with wit, and, most endearingly, people with way too much time on their hands.

And so it is with this masterpiece of micrograffiti, of which the above photo is just one detail (forgive me for only one photo, but I wasn't going to stand around for a long time and take pictures; the site of a 43 year-old man photographing the walls above a urinal...I'm going to stop writing now...you get the idea). Yes, "Much Ado Agrout Nothing," written with an ultra fine pen, was charming.

But then, as I looked at the wall, the effect was much like those times you look at the ground, see a few ants, and then suddenly realize that no, there are several dozen. No, there are several hundred. No there are several thousand.

It was just like that with this graffiti, because slowly, quite wonderfully, it became clear that whoever did this has added to this cavalcade of puns, perhaps one or two a day. THE GROUT GATSBY. GROUT EXPECTATIONS. GROUT OF AFRICA. SHADOW OF A GROUT. Or perhaps it wasn't just one person; perhaps it became, over time, a communal effort.

I must admit at this point, that some of these--particularly the last one--are ones I'm just thinking up off the top of my head. I don't remember all of them--as I said, I wasn't going to stand in front of a urinal all day long and read graffiti--but I couldn't help but admire the kid who wrote all that stuff.

Because it had to be a kid. Okay, maybe a stunted adolescent such as myself would have done the same thing. I am, after all, the person who came upon a heart surgeon's car with the vanity plate GINADOC and left a note next to it that said "please God, tell me this is not the vanity plate of an OB/GYN."

No, I prefer to think this is the work of some kid, fresh out of college, working at Borders and then going home to the apartment that he shares with, I don't know 20 or 30 guys, considering the rents in any major city, and then, during his free time, writing stories, and thinking up puns to get him through another day of organizing the Romance Section.

It's small survival techniques such as this that make me happy.

It's also the type of thing that provides my mind with something to work on when I'm starting into space, which if often. Ozzy Osbourne's Grout at the Devil. Give me some men who are grout hearted men. Grouting Thomas. Schubert's Grout Quintet. The eeny weensy spider climbed up the water grout. Agrout Schmidt.

Bless that kid.

How many can you think up? I tell you, I'm slow to get on the Twitter bandwagon, but if ever there was a prime candidate for tweets, it would be this. As Vickey said, Twitter is pretty much the digital equivalent of writing on the bathroom wall.