Mark Olsen of the Village Voice puts it like this: “More than anything else, Cabin feels like the endgame of so-called fanboy culture in the way in which it is first and foremost about itself, interested only in a fundamental adherence to rules of its own devising and fenced off from the world at large.”  Boy, those fanboys sure do suck, don’t they?  They’re just into their own little worlds, up their own asses.  Kyle Smith of the New York Post, while managing to not actually use the WORD “fanboy”, talks about “cinema vampires, those ghost-faced geeks whose pallor is rarely challenged by exposure to the sun.”  For now, we’ll overlook the irony of a movie critic shitting on people for liking movies too much.  What gets me is this constant reference to “fanboys”, those socially inept nerds who like things to an uncomfortable degree.  Because being too excited about something isn’t cool.

For the record, if you do this, you're a sports geek.

We talk a lot about how geeks “rule the world”, because there are a lot of tech companies making a lot of money.  And that’s great for Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.  But the guy who can fix your computer isn’t one of those super-geek zillionaires who command respect by being richer than several small countries.  So really, if you want to make fun of the fact that he’s got a Star Trek spaceship on his desk, that’s perfectly fine.  I mean, he’s just a geek.  It’s not like he’s a real person.

Admittedly, being a geek is a whole lot easier these days than it used to be when I was growing up.  I can read comics in public without having to worry about some investment banker trying to steal my lunch money.  But if you ask a fan of the X-Men or Batman movies to read an X-Men or Batman comic, you might still run into the same stupid prejudices.  Comics are for kids, and if you’re excited by them, it’s just weird.

Getting a boner for the Lord is fine, though. Just not in a gay way.

The term “fanboy” is used to denigrate fans of geek culture.  It basically means a person whose passionate interest in some subject, be it Star Wars or ‘Firefly’, overrides any social graces the person might otherwise have.  And that does happen.  Quite a bit, actually.  Geeks are traditionally not the most socially adept people as it is, and many of us want to SHARE what we love with other people.  In some ways, that’s how we communicate, through our shared experiences.  Someone says “Battle of the Planets”, and we’re off into long reminiscences about childhood, sitting at the television on a Saturday morning watching cartoons.  It’s the benevolent flip side to the dreaded meme post.  To call someone a “fanboy” is to insult the very joy that drives their geekdom.

It also makes some assumptions about gender that don't necessarily apply.

And the geek community does it too.  We use “fanboy” as a cudgel to beat down geeks who have different opinions, or like something we hate.  “Oh, the fanboys are the only ones who like the new DC titles.”  Like fanboys are some sort of socially awkward hipster.  Then again, maybe “hipsters” are just “fanboys” for stuff you’ve never heard of.

It’s time we stopped using a term that non-geeks use to insult us all.  Fans are people too, even if they like the Star Wars prequels.  Now, I’m not saying that the over-excited fan is going to be more tolerable if we stop calling him a “fanboy.”  Behaviors that drive people away are certainly something that we could all do without.  But why do we, as geeks, have to label people who struggle with these issues?  Man, if you’re an asshole, it’s not because you speak Klingon, or because you really want to share that story about your level 50 Paladin.  It’s because you don’t listen, or you won’t stop sharing, or because no one else really cares that you’ve done a three-dimensional model of the inside of the TARDIS.

Well, okay, I care a little.  I’d like to see that.

Today, for example, someone mentioned the Dexy’s Midnight Runner’s song “Come on Eileen,” and that sent me back to my formative years in the 1980s.  I’d like to say that I listened to all the cool music like punk rock, or the New Wave bands that recorded two albums and then self-destructed (either by spontaneously exploding or switching to country).  Mostly, though, I was a child of MTV, so I got a LOT of the big hits of the day.  If you’re not old like me, you may not know that MTV played music once, and lots of it.  Okay, most likely you DO know that, but only because some crusty old person complained to you about it once.

Music in the 1980s was a little different than the 80s music CD compilations make it out to be.  For one thing, there were more than 50 songs, and many of them weren’t recorded by Michael Jackson.  Most of that stuff is either the pop music of the day, or radio-friendly New Wave, and of those, many of them only got on air because they had a video ready for MTV to show.  Today, bands like Devo or Oingo Boingo would have a tough time breaking through, as they were more clever than photogenic.

The Devo cover of “[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction” is also one of my favorite covers, as they carve up the Rolling Stones classic and put it back into a gibbering, twitching Frankenstein’s monster of a song that probably pissed off as many people as it entertained.

Before Danny Elfman would go on to become Tim Burton’s go-to guy for bouncy, disturbing movie music, he was making bouncy, disturbing rock music with Oingo Boingo.  Most people wouldn’t be able to pull off looking like a cross between a pedophile and Satan, but somehow, Elfman made it work.  Of course, most bands weren’t singing songs about the crazy, disaffected, lonely souls that populated Boingo’s music.

Thomas Dolby was my entry into the good music of the 80s.  Before that, I’d been a fan of KISS, a band that only a select few KISS Army officers would consider a particularly good band.  After that, I’d been scared off music for a while as result of my parents letting me watch a “Satanism in Rock” tv show on one of the local God channel.  “She Blinded Me With Science” hit the young Brian like a bucket full of ice-cold rational thinking, and it wasn’t too long until Dolby’s album “The Golden Age of Wireless” became the first record I ever bought with my own money.  That said, everyone’s heard that song, so here’s “Radio Silence”.

This last one I never saw on MTV.  I never heard it on the radio, either, until much later.  It seems fitting to end on Dexy’s Midnight Runners, since that’s what started all this, but I just can’t bring myself to play “Come On Eileen”.  After that song became Dexy’s only American hit, they were branded a one-hit wonder, and even before that, as the “Too Rye Ay” guys.  Hell, I don’t think the band even liked playing the song after a while.  So this is not that song.

So, basically, 80s music good, maybe not so much if you’ve got wandering brain and have stuff to do like sleep instead of blog about old bands.  But hey, now you know at least two songs by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, which is two more than most people.

Go listen to some music.

I can has dignity?

Okay, I can’t put ALL the blame on them.  I also blame you.  I mean, I firmly believe that lolcats are a demon-spawned scourge on intelligence itself, which grow spontaneously from random pools of stupidity, but someone has to spread them.  Somebody has to look at a demotivational poster or a dog doing something adorable, and think “Yeah, that’s what I really want to convey to the world,” and that would be YOU.  Bastards.

Do as I say, not as I do, unless it's funnier that way.

There was a time, long ago, in the early days of the internet, where communication was done with words alone.  People had something they called “conversations”, or “discussions”, in which words were written as though in a rush to claim them before the inkwell ran dry.  Today, your Facebook friends are passing on some regurgitated wisdom on a background of sunsets and flowers, a demotivational atheism picture with quotes from Leviticus, or something that was probably even funny the first couple of times you saw it.  That last one probably came from George Takei.

On Reddit, there are whole groups (subreddits) dedicated to demotivationals, lolcats, and other assorted memes.  It’s a rare discussion thread that doesn’t involve at least one person using a meme to substitute for their actual opinion.  Because nothing says you have a subtle and nuanced understanding of the various social and economic factors that are at play in our wars overseas like an out-of-context picture with a funny caption.

This is why I hate the war!

Look, I have nothing against pop culture references, funny captions, or even the occasional over-anthropomorphized animal picture.  But conversation is why I use social networking sites, and I lament its decline as people rely more and more on conversational shortcuts.  Just because there’s an Internet Husband or Socially Awkward Penguin that really captures the essence of what you’re feeling, doesn’t mean you need to use that instead of actually talking.  Okay, maybe the Socially Awkward Penguin does kinda mean that, but dammit, suck it up and talk anyhow!

Listen to Courage Wolf. He's a licensed therapist.

My fear is that as we rely more and more on memes and funny pictures to convey to others what we’re feeling at any given moment, we will lose our ability to communicate.  It’s bad enough that I can’t go a whole post without dropping a pop culture reference or two, but I can still at least say “I have had it with these motherfucking memes on my motherfucking internet” without having to have a picture of Samuel L Jackson saying it.  It’s like we’re creating a sort of NewSpeak, in which no actual WORDS are used.  It won’t be too long, I imagine, before whole conversations happen in exchanges of meme pics and demotivationals.  If that happens, well, there are some things that just can’t be captured in a meme.

For that, you need YouTube.

Now go say something.

I leaned against the counter, my breathing labored, lungs crackling with every breath.  I attempted a sigh, but it broke into a ragged coughing fit.  I pushed away, and slunk back to the row of hard plastic chairs.

The waiting room is dingy and yellow.  The walls were either white or yellow when they were first painted, but were a flaking dried snot color now.  The fluorescents buzzing like flies.  The flicker gives the room an unreal feeling, like a strobe in a haunted house.  The air is antiseptic hospital stink, with a hint of corruption that’s maybe in my head, not my nostrils.

I had no idea how long I had been here.  Maybe I was dead, my lungs finally drowning in whatever was festering inside me.  I could leave, I thought, as I sat down.  But then I’d never be well.  Was I ever?  I couldn’t remember.

I slumped into the chair, eyes closed against the flicker.  I told myself I could make it.  Shouldn’t be too long now.

Just another five minutes.

I’m guessing a Vintage Meat Market would contain a lot of these:

(Meatghost by Jhonen Vasquez. Click on the image to buy the Tshirt.)

The Beatles were one of the first rock groups to become so big that their very presence would cause people to lose their shit.  At first, I’m sure crowds were reasonably appreciative of their efforts,maybe even downright enthusiastic.  And then something happened.  Maybe Ringo was the key to their success, I don’t know.  But it wasn’t too much longer that “Beatlemania” would join the lexicon of musical maladies such as the Rockin’ Pneumonia, the Boogie Woogie Flu, and the odd form of ritual epilepsy known as “Voguing”.  If YouTube had been out in the 50s and 60s, there would be a hundred thousand clips of shrieking girls with the hint of a backbeat and guitars off in the distance.  At that point, it officially stops becoming about the music.  The Beatles could have put out songs about serial killers, people shooting Coca Cola, or even some guy repeating the same phrase over and over for several minutes.  After they broke up, you had a series of solo hits (McCartney and Lennon, mostly,) and of course Lennon’s ascension to rock martyr, to cement their place as official LEGENDS.

In the end, I think The Beatles became THE BEATLES because they came out at just the right time.  Rock and Roll was still figuring out what it wanted to be, and The Beatles chirpy pop sensibilities and “moptop” hair struck a chord (if you’ll pardon the expression) with British (and later world) audiences.  Ten years prior, they would have been too brash and loud.  Ten years later, well, they would have sounded like most every other band, many of whom were trying to sound like The Beatles.  People use the phrase “ahead of their time” frequently when talking about bands they like, the usually unspoken subtext being “If you people weren’t so stupid, this band would be more popular.”  Bands who hit it big, especially if they do so quickly, are inevitably compared to The Beatles.  Oasis, who made the 90s a little dumber with the Gallagher brothers’ sloppy, sodden antics, decided to take it one step further and compare THEMSELVES to The Beatles.  And in some regards, they weren’t wrong.  They, too, were an over-hyped rock band with songs that weren’t as good as their fans thought.

I’m sure we can all think of bands and artists whose fame overshadowed their actual talent.  You may feel that Elvis Presley is a far more relevant example.  You may think Nirvana changing the face of hard rock and metal was about as welcome as the Black Death changing the face of medieval Europe.  Every pop star that gets shat out of the studio system these days has a hype machine that works ten times harder than the actual artists to make their fans love the artists half as much as if they were actually good singers, which is still ten times more than they deserve.  It probably works the other way as well, hate being just as powerful an obfuscator as well.  Bands like Nickleback and Creed have “hatedoms” as srong as any fandom, and while I’ll never be the one to defend their work, it probably won’t kill your plants, sterilize your children, or lead to the downfall of society, no matter what anyone tells you.  It does make you dumber, though.  That’s just science.

I used to make my older friends feel old by asking, all faux-innocent curiosity, “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?”  Today’s youngsters are more likely to ask “You mean Paul McCartney was in a band,” if they know who he is at all.  Legends die, mythology fades (VH1 nostalgia porn notwithstanding), and eventually all that’s left is the music.  And it’s GOOD music, when you can separate how much you enjoy it from how much you think you should.

In olden days, a bad cough could be the sign of another Black Death approaching to wipe out the village, and so those people were shunned until they proved their fitness by not dying.  Renaissance Festivals sometimes honor this tradition by walling up sick guests in a disused tool shed or disliked flagon-seller’s shop. Today, people seem to actually CARE about each other’s health and well being, and sometimes inquire about it.  This has to stop.

Oh, I don’t mean that you should never ask after someone’s health if you’re seeing them after a long trip, or you know they recently overdosed on Lucky Charms.  By all means, if someone approaches you after a long absence, absolutely ask them how they’re doing.  When NOT to do that is when they are attempting to cough themselves inside out.  Do not, under any circumstances, at that moment, speak these words:

“Are you okay?”

Of course I’m not fucking okay.  I was doing my best impression of a consumptive in a Charles Dickens novel, and you’ve made me break character, you inconsiderate bastard.

I think the basic parameters of “okay” are pretty well established, and it’s fairly obvious when someone has fallen outside of that.  If I’m having trouble trying to breathe because I’m too busy coughing to actually inhale, I’m clearly NOT okay.  I’m sick.  And in pain.  And you trying to engage me in conversation at that particular moment merely adds a homicidal rage to the mix.  I will infect you if I can, and strangle you if I can’t.  Once I can breathe, of course.

Homicide, however, is rarely the best way to deal with an annoying coworker.  It may be pleasing in the short term, but it’s almost certainly going to be an HR issue later.  Sometimes, I’ll try to defuse myself by answering.  I think my politest answer was “Of course not.”  My least polite was “Clearly not. Please go away.”  What I REALLY want to say is “Let’s pretend there’s a polite way for me to tell you to fuck off, and pretend I said that instead of this.”

Look, I appreciate that you may be concerned about my well being.  Should you ask me if I’m okay after the storm has passed, I’ll even accept it in the spirit that it’s given.  If you bring me something to drink, I may even manage to be begrudgingly grateful.  Just wait.  Or if you can’t wait, bring me a damned hammer, and I’ll try to show you now not okay I really am.

Okay, okay, never mind then.  Sorry, folks, nothing to see here.  Move along.  Tattoos are no longer badass.  Why?  Well, because Mattel just drove a stake through it’s heart.

Admittedly, I am in no sense a rebel or an outlaw, and I’m about as dangerous as a pail of water.  (To answer your question: Yes, I do cause witches to melt.  And swoon, but that’s a different story.)  Still, the act of getting inked up for the first time did, in some way, make me feel like I’d entered a club that at least gave lip service to being exclusive.

Look out, Hell's Angels!

The tattoo itself, mind you, wasn’t exactly going to mark me as a hardened hoodlum.  I got a tribute to one of my favorite comics, “Tales of the Beanworld” Now, Beanworld is an deceptively intricate world, full of amazing characters so faceted that everyone gets something a little different from it. Beneath the cartoony artwork, there’s some deep, mythological storytelling going on.

But try to tell that to a guy trying to pummel in your skull during a bar fight.

I’m about as likely to get into a bar fight as I am to develop a terminal case of appreciating NASCAR, but I think you’ll agree that the hypothetical fellow attempting to cave in my headmeats probably has something a little more dangerous than beans on him.  Maybe a cat, or an angry lemur.

Tattooing got shoved into the mainstream, and not every tattoo artist was happy to come with it.  Oh, I’m sure they appreciated the business, but it’s hard to feel like a badass when you’re putting a tattoo like one you have on a 40-something soccer mom.  Shows like “LA Ink” made tattoo artist look like a cross between a celebrity and a bartender, and every piece had to have a touching story to go with it.  If you go by the show, over 40% of people who get tattoos do so because their mother died.  The rest beat cancer, a car crash, or both.

So now, tattoos are everywhere.  Angelina Jolie looks like a human-shaped Silly Putty blob that’s been rolling around in newsprint.  Miley Cyrus is introducing ink to the Disney audience.  And now, Barbie is getting into the act.  Looking like the first shot of a very odd Suicide Girl layout, they’ve given her permanent tats and a punky outfit that screams “Hot TOpic Goth.”  The predictable complaints have rolled out on the internet, with mothers worried their daughters will emulate the doll.  NOW they start worrying.  I wonder if she still says “Math is hard.”  In the end, I suspect tattooed Barbie will go the way of the gay Ken doll, and tattooing will fade away just like gay people did.

Until then, does that mean that tattoos aren’t cool anymore?  Does that mean the “Anarchtopus” on my wrist is officially mainstream?  Maybe so, but I don’t see any reason to let that stop me from getting more.

Maybe a bear with chainsaws?  That’s pretty badass, right?

Today, my friends, marks a new age.  The time is now to resurrect the Experience!  I shall rise from the ashes like a…something with fire…ah…okay, like an unsteady fire walker!  So jump on board, lash yourself to the mast, and prepare for the ride of your life.  Or, y’know, blog posts that are interesting and sometimes funny.  And if not, DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK!

Be seeing you.

Brian.

ps. All of the old posts are still there, but some of the images are gone, and some of the YouTube videos are broken.  I’ll be fixing those over the next few days.

Before he got into directing curious motion pictures like “Being John Malkovich”, Spike Jones was a big band leader who brought comedy and music together in as chaotic a way as was possible. His son, the unfortunately named Spike Jones Jr, once said “the thing people never realized about my father’s genius is that when you replace an A# with a gunshot, you have to replace it with an A# gunshot.” He then drank close to a fifth of vodka and cried himself to sleep. In the early days of television, networks starved for programming relented and gave Jones his own television show. The song “Cocktails for Two” celebrated the repeal of Prohibition. I will leave it to you to decide whether the existence of this song makes up for the creation of the mob.

Sensing a need for miscreants and lowlifes to have a role model in the music business, mathematics professor Tom Lehrer sat down at a piano one drunken afternoon and began cranking out some of the most depraved and antisocial songs that the 1950s could handle. Songs like “Masochism Tango” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” may have stood out among the more danceable numbers in his oeuvre (shut up, it’s a real word), it’s his tender love ballad “I Hold Your Hand In Mine” that really speaks to the romantic in me.

The “Axis of Awesome” are a group from Australia, which means their careers go down the drain in the opposite direction as American acts. Before they go, however, they decided to take pop music with them, spreading its dark secret like a paparazzi porn layout. Enjoy “Four Chord Songs”, and then later, see if you can ever enjoy those songs again.

Tim Minchin is ALSO from Australia, but lives in London, because that’s where his house is. I’m swiping that joke from the end of the clip I’m about to show you, but it’s really really long, so maybe you wouldn’t even know if I hadn’t told you. It is, however, one of the most subtly hilarious songs about rock, nerds, and unholy intersection of the two. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back, and then promptly forget that I know you, because it’s clear at that point that you suck.

Brett Domino was a talented young performer in a New Wave band circa 1983 when he was frozen in a tragic slushy accident. By the time the technology to defrost him was invented, music had passed him by. Undeterred, he updated to the latest, greatest old-tymey synthesizers, and threw his talent at “Britain’s Got Talent”, and YouTube. Here is his tribute to nature, and how it will inevitably kill you.

Finally, here’s Rachel Bloom, and her desire to sex up a guy in his nineties, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury”.

Oh yeah, I probably should have warned you. There may have been some salty language. That probably wasn’t safe for work.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down the musical highways and byways of comedy. And I hope that you use this information to impress your colleagues, your teachers, or your priests.

Be seeing you.
Brian.