Kurt Vonnegut Jr. used to say that he wrote novels in order to clean out all of the pop culture junk that had collected in and stuck to his brain.
Jim Salem, a professor of American studies at the University of Alabama, wrote a short essay about some of that junk, a piece he titled "The Onslaught Media."
"Unless you are living in a cave someplace in the Mohave Desert, you are soaking up an estimated 500 of these messages a day," Salem wrote. He cited not only TV commercials, print ads, radio spots and billboards, but also "more personal forms: T-shirts, bumper stickers, greeting cards, junk mail and graffiti. The Onslaught Media sell products, services, ideas, people, ways of life and feelings."
Salem wrote that essay in 1981, when I was a student in several of his classes. Now that e-mail, Twitter, the Internet, cable television with its thousand-plus channels, iPhones and Blackberrys are as commonplace in our lives as toast, I wonder how high Professor Salem would tally our daily intake of onslaught media?
Five thousand per day? More? Can most Americans go 10 even minutes, even at work, without being exposed to such onslaught messages?
One of the most curious scenes ever penned by cartoonist Art Spiegelman depicts a guy painting the Twin Towers -- New York City's World Trade Center -- engulfed in flames.
The odd, striking, disturbing thing about Spiegelman's cartoon drawing is that it appears in his book "In the Shadow of No Towers," his memoir of experiencing 9/11 four blocks from Ground Zero, the neighborhood where he still lives today.
Yes, Spiegelman told me during a phone interview last week, he and his wife and daughter actually witnessed that scene -- that artist painting the doomed towers -- on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
Spiegelman will present a free lecture on the history of comics and cartooning, and his place in it, at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23, in Elizabeth Hall on the campus of Stetson University, 421 N. Woodland Blvd., DeLand. (See my interview with Spiegelman in the My Week section in Sunday's News-Journal.)
Writer David Henry Sterry proclaims, "I was a birthday present for an 82-year-old grandmother."
That's also the title of his essay in the new anthology "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex."
Edited by Sterry and R. J. Martin Jr., the collection proudly proclaims that "the only thing the writers in this book have in common is that they've exchanged sex for money."
Except for "art-porn priest-ess" Annie Sprinkle and Xaviera Hollander (she of "Happy Hooker" fame), the voices here aren't celebrities. Instead, the contributors include Ph.D.s, soccer moms, prisoners, "$2,500-a-night call girls" and others who spill ink into memoirs, rants, confessions, journalism and poetry.
The book is available now on Amazon from Soft Skull Press.
WATCH
MTV gets 'Pranked'
Ever since Og the Neanderthal unleashed a live velociraptor in his neighbor's cave, humankind has enjoyed a good prank.
When we humans became smart enough and sophisticated enough to invent television, the practical joker side of our species wasted no time in pranking people and displaying the results on the boob tube. Boomers will recall Allen Funt's "Candid Camera," while the MTV generation embraced Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd."
Now comes "Pranked," an MTV series that collects practical jokes that were created, staged, filmed and posted online by ... um, we the people. That is, amateurs.
A promo clip of "Pranked" leans heavily on Three Stooges-type, physical jokes (lots of unexpected breaking furniture and surprise blasts of liquids).
Check out "Pranked" at 10:30 p.m. Aug. 27 on MTV to see if the series lives up to its self-proclaimed billing as showcasing "the best pranks ever caught on camera and posted online."
LISTEN
Wainwright gets loud with forgotten legend
Something sadly, poetically ironic is happening on Loudon Wainwright III's new album, which includes songs by, and originals inspired by, country singer Charlie Poole.
Loudon who? Poole who?
Exactly.
Even Wainwright's devoted cult following will admit he's far off the radar of today's music landscape, despite having penned that immortal 1973 No. 16 hit, "Dead Skunk." As for Poole, Wainwright's Web site claims he was a legendary singer and banjo picker who lived from 1892 to 1931, and that he amassed a "canon" during his time on this planet.
The evidence is on Wainwright's new album, "High Wide and Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project." The 30-track, two-CD work includes plenty of swing, acoustic blues, country, ragtime and folky-jazzy type stuff ... the forgotten singing about the forgotten -- but Wainwright makes it come alive.
Here's what my favorite Woodstock performer had to say about the event after he had performed there almost exactly 40 years ago -- on Aug. 15, 1969:
"This was a terrifying experience ... I performed in front of an audience of half a million -- an ocean of people. It was drizzling and very cold, but they were so happy in the mud. They were all stoned, of course, but they were enjoying it. It reminded me of the water buffaloes you see in India.
"Woodstock was like a big picnic party, and the music was incidental. I wish I hadn't performed there .. there was no way of communicating to the crowd. It was such a vast audience."
I was 11 years old. I didn't pay much attention to the news accounts or the photos that surfaced in Life magazine a few weeks after the festival. So what?
However, by the time of my high school years in the mid-1970s, I had become one of those millions of people who joined in the mythologizing of Woodstock even though we weren't there. "Hey, man, Woodstock isn't a place or an event -- it's a state of mind!"
Jimi Hendrix's "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- chilling and awesome. Country Joe and the Fish's "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'to-Die Rag" -- one of the most riveting, perfect moments in protest music history (along with the time Bob Dylan took a stage the night after President Kennedy's assassination and opened with "The Times They Are a-Changin'").
The mythologizing of Woodstock has been in full throttle this summer as the event's 40th anniversary approached: books and commentaries by the score, reissues of the official concert recordings, reissues of the movie on DVD.
I'm not knocking my fellow boomers who are mind-tripping back to 1969 and slathering themselves in memories of Woodstock's hippie-powered peace 'n' love vibe.
But, in the new book "Woodstock: Three Days that Rocked the World," I was amused when I discovered the ironic, dystopian, myth-busting sentiments voiced above by sitar master Ravi Shankar of India.
Ravi was no fan of hippies. Or, to be more precise -- he abhors the idea of getting high on drugs in order to experience music, or life. He says so pointedly in his two autobiographical works, "My Music, My Life" and "Raga Mala."
I'm still stirred by Jimi and Country Joe's Woodstock performances. I'll be listening to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, U2, Pearl Jam and Public Enemy until I die.
But, since discovering Shankar's classical Indian music a half-decade ago, I can't imagine a universe (or my home or car stereo) without the sounds of sitars droning like extraterrestrial crickets.
Shankar said worries plagued him at Woodstock and led to a "not a very inspired performance."
Woodstock co-organizer Michael Lang disagrees in the new book "Woodstock: The Oral History": "Ravi Shankar on stage was kind of a special moment. The vibe was intense. It may sound a little corny, but it was a very tangible feeling in the air. When those spiritual moments would happen, you could really feel them."
Decades after Woodstock, I discovered that supposed Woodstock spirit -- in the alien sounds of an alien culture a half-world away.
I wasn't too upset when my G.I. Joe's foot popped off.
I was 6 years old. Broken toys are just part of the collateral damage in a kid's world.
I got my dad's pliers and tried to surgically remove Joe's foot, which was stuck in his boot. The white plastic connector protruding from Joe's dismembered ankle looked like some grisly broken bone. No blood, of course.
My M*A*S*H surgery to save Joe's foot proved fruitless. The pliers were too big to reach deeply into the boot and grip that ankle bone.
So there, in the dusty sandlot beside our home in Los Alamos, N.M., my Joe became a war casualty.
Sure, iPods have a gazillion songs available at a touch, great sound, portability.
But, back in my younger days, we appreciated music more because we had to work to listen to it. I'm talking about, of course, the worse technology ever designed to play back recorded music -- 8-track tapes.
I was overcome with both loathing and joy last week when Cheap Trick released its new album, "The Latest," on 8-track.
In the 1970s, when I was in high school, about the only way to play recorded music in your car was 8-tracks.
Yes, I know -- those of you born after MTV are asking: "What the hell was 8-track?"
When the National Enquirer ran a photo of Michael Jackson napping in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, back in 1986, the tabloid described Jacko with the word "Bizarre."
But the Enquirer didn't write that description. Michael Jackson did.
That's according to a former Enquirer editor, who said Jackson's camp staged the photo and gave it to the Enquirer to publish -- with the stipulation that the word "bizarre" be used in the story.
Then consider the book "Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness" by J. Randy Taraborrelli, a confidante of Jackson's for over 40 years. (A revised edition is due Aug. 5).
No, I'm not talking about that stuff -- having his face sculpted from man into pixie; the arrested development that led him to follow his private Tinkerbell into his own, literal Neverland; the bizarro antics ready-made for the tabloids.
Here's why Michael Jackson was the ultimate pop music freak: He became the King of Pop in a way no one else had before, or has since.
Unlike Elvis, Sinatra or Madonna, Michael the Man-Child and his music, even his fabulous dance moves, oozed all the sexual swagger of a mollusk.
With apologies to all you fellow dads, I hereby make this confession: I've always been creeped out by the 1989 film "Field of Dreams."
Yes, I know, "Field of Dreams" is the dad movie. It's the flick that a lot of moms will prod their kids to rent on DVD this weekend, so that the youngsters can watch it with their dads on Father's Day this Sunday.
Heck, "Fields of Dreams" is only the second movie in the history of the universe at which it's OK for a grown man to cry. (The other? The 1957 Walt Disney 0flick "Old Yeller").
In 1959, the American music scene brewed such works as "The Sound of Music," Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," Johnny Horton's "The Battle of New Orleans" and Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue."
Meanwhile, Nigerian-born drummer Babatunde Olatunji had taken up residence in New York City and was crafting the first album of traditional West African drumming and chant to be recorded on this continent. His album "Drums of Passion" opened the door for so-called "world music" in the United States. Olatunji would inspire, and eventually work with, John Coltrane, Carlos Santana and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.
Six years after Olatunji's passing, his bangy, clangy, joyous "Drums of Passion" has been reissued in a 2-CD, 50th anniversary legacy edition, with bonus tracks, from Columbia Records.
The set is, as Olatunji shouts on one track, "Oyin Momo Ado" -- "sweet as honey."
