Changing tastes

Homeless sex offender living
under a bridge arrested for
failing to upgrade his address.

I have been thinking of things that I never liked and things that I once liked that I no longer like, and contemplating the reasons for them. Let me begin with motion pictures. When I was a child I loved motion pictures and I attended faithfully at least every Saturday and every other chance I could. My father didn’t like movies and virtually never attended one. I didn’t understand that at all. When I asked him about it he usually replied, “they’re just make-believe.” It didn’t bother me at the time that they were make-believe, but somehow over the years it has come to bother me. I virtually never watch movies anymore because when I try to watch one I am suddenly reminded that they are, indeed, simply make-believe. The actors involved in scenes of such passion and activity are just faking it. I can’t get that out of my head and thus movies have been more or less ruined for me. I guess I can thank my father for that. The only movies I can watch at all are either documentaries or comedies because I know that they are real or, in fact, just comedies and that is what they are meant to be. You can’t fake comedy, either it’s funny or not. I do have trouble with comedies sometimes also, because it is possible to make things funny that are not meant to be funny at all. I suspect that someone could make a funny movie about the Holocaust if they set their mind to it, you know, lots of slapstick, contradictions, funny backdrops, costumes, old people acting like children, children acting like adults, and whatever. As far as I know no one has as yet attempted this, but as I sometimes watch late night comedy I believe it might not be far off. Contemporary comedy becomes more and more raunchy, scatological, and off-color all the time. For many nowadays, dirty words are somehow funny in and of themselves. Like much of what used to be entertaining and genuinely funny has now become little more than who can become the most shocking. Perhaps the best example of this can be found in female standup routines. Whatever happened to what used to be comedy, like Jack Benny, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Buster Keaton, Carol Burnett, Jackie Gleason, and such? They didn’t have to trade on trashy routines and bad language and were certainly no less funny than out contemporary practitioners. I don’t mean to say that some of our current comedians are not funny, they are, but the nature of comedy itself has somehow changed and I don’t think necessarily for the better.

I think movies may have also ruined my appreciation for classical music, not that I ever really had much appreciation for it. First of all, I rarely heard classical music as a child, except in the movies. When I heard the William Tell Overture I thought of the Lone Ranger. When I went to the must-see Disney movies I always saw ducks and geese flying to some classical score, or played as background music to scenes of the jungle or whatever. Other movies used classical music as background music for murders, cattle rustling, hangings, love scenes, runaway trains or horses, tragedies, or robberies in progress, and so on. Now much classical music strikes me as basically funereal. I am not really happy about this but it is too late, I fear, to change it.

About the only place I can think of where changes in my life might be seen as positive have to do with food. I was a very picky eater as a child, refusing to eat egg yolks, spinach, broccoli, oatmeal, brussel sprouts, carrots, cream-of-wheat, cottage cheese, and I don’t remember what all else. Like my father I ate only meat and potatoes. My mother was beside herself trying to get us to eat properly. She was so desperate she would sometimes serve the steaks or roasts on a bed of lettuce, hoping that we might accidentally eat some. She would sprinkle my tomato slices with sugar and try to tempt me in other ways to eat what was good for me. I didn’t like milk and was uninterested in cheese. But she had no trouble at all getting me to eat ham, bacon, side pork, and pickled pigs’ feet (but no liver), which I would devour with relish. Now, of course, I eat and enjoy almost everything in the way of fruits and vegetables, as well as liver and the standby meat and potatoes (I still refuse to eat oatmeal). Maturity I guess has some rewards.

In short, I basically lacked Culture (with a capital C). I have tried to like classical music but I confess I don’t really like it much. I have never been able to stomach ballet, which in my childhood was described as toe-dancing and indulged in only by stuck-up little girls. We had no exposure to the fine arts other than once we were shown some postcards of Van Gogh and others (postcards, mind you). Poetry was forced upon us as we were made to memorize and recite it in class, the effect of which was to make us hate it, unless we could use substitute lines which were either obscene or hilarious. Reading I loved, and I did a great deal of it, but certainly not literature. Rex the Wonder Dog and The Hardy Brothers were about as deep as we went, and most of the kids didn’t even delve that deeply into reading. I grew up to be a slob but somehow I outgrew the worst of it. Still, to this day, when I hear certain music I think of birds trying to get airborne or animals dancing in the forest. I seldom watch movies unless they are either comedies or documentaries. And, I am proud to say, I developed an intense hatred of country music of any kind. I guess all is not lost.

LKBIQ:
I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
Woody Allen

TILT:
During the first World War sauerkraut was called “freedom cabbage.”