Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The War on Drivel

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: August 7, 2017 1 minute 7 comments

This David Sipress cartoon from the New Yorker has popped up a couple of times on Facebook, and it set me to trying to remember the small collection of CDs I gave my younger son when he was first out from under my roof.

I know for sure it went beyond all these begats to include "John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers," and I'm pretty sure that was also when I gave him "The Crazy World of Arthur Brown" and "In the Court of the Crimson King," but can't remember if there were more, perhaps including "Gris Gris," though I think it was a few more years before that came out on CD.

(Went to a concert in 1969 that was supposed to be Linda Ronstadt, Tim Buckley and whoever was in the Byrds that week, only WWITBTW dropped out and they swapped in Dr. John with his whole voodoo band and lights and glitter, which was not particularly congruent with what Linda and Tim were doing but certainly brightened up the evening. My date that evening dumped me for a guy who took her to see Blind Faith. So it goes.)

In any case, he was already an avid rock fan and familiar with the ancient groups the old gaffer in Sipress lists, as well as the Beatles and Stones and so forth, and extremely well-versed in what was then contemporary — Stone Temple Pilots and Pixies and such. He was ahead of the curve enough to not only catch Liz Phair in Montreal before she broke out, but to hang out with her for a little while at the stage door.

And he just revealed last week the fact that he had played hooky to score Frank Black's solo album the morning it was released, which he admits shows a great degree of fandom, since he would have been going to the music store after school anyway, given that he worked there.

All of which means that it was actually easier to buy music for him because I didn't have to start from scratch: It was a matter of figuring out the gaps and it's possible I included the Blind Faith album in that initial gifting, but then again it's hard to think he wouldn't have heard them around the house anyway.

It's a generational imperative. My mother turned me on to Artie Shaw and Ella and Benny Goodman and that whole crew, wising me up to the fact that the Andrews Sisters were simply pop stars in an era of giants, which is the sort of thing that's true in every generation. (F'rinstance, I still don't know why the purported ex-radicals in "The Big Chill" were so ecstatic over jock pop, though granted it was very good jock pop.)

Meanwhile, I sure hope some blue-collar parents or grandparents out there are explaining Hank Williams and Freddy Fender and George Reeves to their kids, because I got two hours of contemporary C&W in the dentist's office last week and today's country sure does live up to the stereotype of dental office music.

Anyway, I'm not yelling "Get off my lawn."

I'm suggesting you come up on the porch and hear what you've been missing.

Speaking of Piffle

Today's Deflocked made me laff because I've stood in the line at the grocery store and thought the same thing, looking at the teasers on Cosmo's cover. It's not just that it's drivel, but it's the same drivel in every issue.

To start with, mainstream women's magazines are as blatantly dishonest as the aliens-and-scandal tabloids on the same rack, starting with giving their cosmetic sponsors phony credits for the makeup used on their covers, and then basically playing to the insecurities of their readership and keeping them crammed into their pre-feminist niches: Magic no-effort diets, tips on how to tone your body, stories about how to thrill your man in bed.

All of them? No. Just the ones at the check out lanes. Just the ones that sell a lot of copies.

So there's one more imperative conversation I hope people are having with their young-uns.

And, as with the music, the kids will pick up a lot just by listening to what's playing in your house while they're growing up.

I know. I just said that.

If I thought she were working on a shorter time frame, I'd suspect Alex Hallatt of basing today's Arctic Circle on Thursday's blog, in which I ranted about poison pen postings on social media.

And I joked in that piece about people posting attacks on mainstream dogfood in order to push their own organic whatever, saying

Anyway, if your dog gets sick, it's probably not the Iams or Purina.
It's because you had him vaccinated.

Only to have this pop up in my Facebook feed shortly thereafter, proving that there is, indeed, no concept so utterly stupid but that someone in the world isn't taking it seriously.

And which I would find a whole lot more humorous if I'd never seen a puppy die of distemper.

That grim excess of idiocy aside, Hallatt expands on the concept by raising the question of why people push their priorities not by explaining their own benefits but by tearing down the popular alternatives. 

And I think a large part of it is that people would rather lose weight with one of Cosmo's effortless diets than by actually changing what they eat and how much exercise they get, and are more apt to listen to the 1910 Fruitgum Company than John Mayall, and would rather grab a Whopper at the drive-thru than carry a lunch bucket full of quinoa in the car.

But I also wonder if a large part of the problem is not having a firm grasp of the positives you bring, so that it's easier to focus on someone else's negatives than to actively, attractively, promote the benefits of what you offer.

Which has absolutely nothing at all to do with Matt Wuerker's latest cartoon.

Now here are several moments of zen:

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.