TO BE JUST SO POPULARLY GREAT
by Bryce Martin
Three things I just do not get: Garth Brooks, NASCAR, and pay per-view wrestling.
Now I can add another: awards shows. To be more specific, I should say televised awards shows.
Take music awards shows, please, any of them. You have people who, during the course of the year, had recordings that gained fame for those doing the recordings, adulation from fans, money, and all the big ticket add-ons. Are they not giving us all the pleasure we can stand? It seems not. After all that, they want to get together in some huge auditorium setting and pat each other on the back all evening for our viewing pleasure.
Not mine, thank you.
They are playing Big Shot.
It is not enough that these prima donnas get all the glory. They have to rub it in our faces, too.
Not mine, thank you.
I cannot imagine why anyone would watch such blatant pandering. Even worse, the same people who are labeled �artists,� are proving just the opposite by even taking part.
I have no problems with any of the entertainment groups having a private get-together to honor their own. I would encourage it. When it becomes a made-for-the-public event, it becomes forced and strained. The television awards shows are reduced to a party of self-centered swells back slapping each other into the night. At home in our living rooms we are reduced to fawning servility.
The whole shebang gives diarrhea a new egress.
How thrilling it is to watch them high-arm the trophies and thank the lesserlights for aiding their rise to fame and glory.
There amounts to a glut of these shows. The networks choose the participants for the shows, not the industry being honored. They are told what to wear, where to stand, what to sing, how long to sing it, when to clear out and go home.
The country music genre is toned down to where it is just a shadow of its true being. To appeal to the largest number of viewers, the networks take as much country as possible out of the country.
So much for honoring your own your own way.
Tell them how the weather was... -- Ernest Hemingway bryce_martin_1@Lycos.com
Friday, August 29, 2003
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Is That What You�re Learning in School?
by Bryce Martin
In 1960, a high school classmate came up with some new takes on some old Mother Goose rhymes. They were crude but too sophisticated for him to have made up on his own. I never knew where they came from. I guessed from some 78-rpm comedy album. Anyway, in my personal manner of giving all things a name, I called these bawdy little things Mother Goose-Me Rhymes:
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack burnt his ass on the candlestick.
Little Miss Muffett sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey, along came a spider, sat down beside her and said, �What�s in the bowl, bitch?�
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe; she had so many children her snatch fell off.
Some others were even less tasteless.
These are some of those in the same vein that made the rounds in the halls and classrooms I inhabited only a couple of years earlier:
�Don�t Fence Me In� By Bob Wire
�The Ruptured Chinaman� By One Hung Low
�A Race to the Outhouse� By Willie Makeit
�Under The Grandstand� By Seymour Butts
�Tiger�s Revenge� By Claude Balls
�The Constipated Chinaman� By Hung Chow
�A Hole in the Mattress� By Mr. Completely
There were sloughs of others, these book-and-author one-liners, including a title I do not remember By I.P. Freely. Others I do remember are too crude in content to publish (not that the ones selected are couth).
�
by Bryce Martin
In 1960, a high school classmate came up with some new takes on some old Mother Goose rhymes. They were crude but too sophisticated for him to have made up on his own. I never knew where they came from. I guessed from some 78-rpm comedy album. Anyway, in my personal manner of giving all things a name, I called these bawdy little things Mother Goose-Me Rhymes:
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack burnt his ass on the candlestick.
Little Miss Muffett sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey, along came a spider, sat down beside her and said, �What�s in the bowl, bitch?�
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe; she had so many children her snatch fell off.
Some others were even less tasteless.
These are some of those in the same vein that made the rounds in the halls and classrooms I inhabited only a couple of years earlier:
�Don�t Fence Me In� By Bob Wire
�The Ruptured Chinaman� By One Hung Low
�A Race to the Outhouse� By Willie Makeit
�Under The Grandstand� By Seymour Butts
�Tiger�s Revenge� By Claude Balls
�The Constipated Chinaman� By Hung Chow
�A Hole in the Mattress� By Mr. Completely
There were sloughs of others, these book-and-author one-liners, including a title I do not remember By I.P. Freely. Others I do remember are too crude in content to publish (not that the ones selected are couth).
�
Sunday, August 03, 2003
Don�t Mess With My Crayolas
by Bryce Martin
As a young kid, six years old to be exact, I loved my Crayola crayons. It was the colors that were fascinating, of course -- my favorites being burnt sienna, Prussian blue, blue violet, brick red, and flesh. I could not believe there was a color matching my skin, or that brick alone was significant enough as a shade to be a color by itself. I was learning more about colors on my own than I had ever imagined. I did not have one of those small packs of Crayolas, like all the rest of the kids in class. Actually, some of the kids had no crayons at all. The year was 1949 and my teacher was Mrs. Ditson, a kindly old woman who seemed ancient. She had given all of us several days to round up and bring in our crayons from home, and some still had none, others had new packs of the small boxes, some had worn and smashed boxes with empty spaces where crayons were missing, duplicate crayons, some with torn wrappers, and all sizes in length. I was careful with mine. I had kept the points sharp, tried to not waste too much of the waxy part when I sharpened one. I kept the wrappers intact. I kept the box they came in as new a condition as I possibly could. I had 48 crayons. It was a chevron box with a sketch on the front of the painter Rubens. It was the biggest box Crayola sold. When you flipped the lid all the way up, each row was exposed. Each row was tiered like the bleachers in a gym, each row rising higher and higher. I thought of them a little bit as being people sitting in rows of seats, each having their own personality. I liked the orderliness of the pack. If one space was empty, I would be upset. If one crayon was broken, I knew I would be upset. I used them, colored with them, but I wanted them to remain as tidy as the day I opened the box in wonderment. I liked their smell, too. I tried smelling different ones, red ones, black ones, to see if there was a difference. They all smelled the same. It was not so much that I had the largest box of crayons in the room, I sensed, I knew, actually, that my interest in colors was more than that of any of the others. My interest in the names of the crayons was a deep one. The box of crayons had opened up a new world to me, one I did not know existed. I had the crayons a good while before I started the first grade, so it was not just a novelty associated with school. I was not keen on the idea of sharing them. I only had to look at the crayons of the other kids to know they did not take care of theirs as well as I did mine. That is what my teacher was asking. Share because I had many and some had few or none. I protested but to no avail. I was assured that at the end of the class, the same exact crayons my teacher had picked out for loan would be returned. It did not happen that way of course. I became upset, not rowdy or out of control, but I made my feelings known. My teacher told me I was selfish. She told those who were raising me the same thing. They took her side. After all, she was a teacher. From then on, I heard the word selfish increasingly.
�
by Bryce Martin
As a young kid, six years old to be exact, I loved my Crayola crayons. It was the colors that were fascinating, of course -- my favorites being burnt sienna, Prussian blue, blue violet, brick red, and flesh. I could not believe there was a color matching my skin, or that brick alone was significant enough as a shade to be a color by itself. I was learning more about colors on my own than I had ever imagined. I did not have one of those small packs of Crayolas, like all the rest of the kids in class. Actually, some of the kids had no crayons at all. The year was 1949 and my teacher was Mrs. Ditson, a kindly old woman who seemed ancient. She had given all of us several days to round up and bring in our crayons from home, and some still had none, others had new packs of the small boxes, some had worn and smashed boxes with empty spaces where crayons were missing, duplicate crayons, some with torn wrappers, and all sizes in length. I was careful with mine. I had kept the points sharp, tried to not waste too much of the waxy part when I sharpened one. I kept the wrappers intact. I kept the box they came in as new a condition as I possibly could. I had 48 crayons. It was a chevron box with a sketch on the front of the painter Rubens. It was the biggest box Crayola sold. When you flipped the lid all the way up, each row was exposed. Each row was tiered like the bleachers in a gym, each row rising higher and higher. I thought of them a little bit as being people sitting in rows of seats, each having their own personality. I liked the orderliness of the pack. If one space was empty, I would be upset. If one crayon was broken, I knew I would be upset. I used them, colored with them, but I wanted them to remain as tidy as the day I opened the box in wonderment. I liked their smell, too. I tried smelling different ones, red ones, black ones, to see if there was a difference. They all smelled the same. It was not so much that I had the largest box of crayons in the room, I sensed, I knew, actually, that my interest in colors was more than that of any of the others. My interest in the names of the crayons was a deep one. The box of crayons had opened up a new world to me, one I did not know existed. I had the crayons a good while before I started the first grade, so it was not just a novelty associated with school. I was not keen on the idea of sharing them. I only had to look at the crayons of the other kids to know they did not take care of theirs as well as I did mine. That is what my teacher was asking. Share because I had many and some had few or none. I protested but to no avail. I was assured that at the end of the class, the same exact crayons my teacher had picked out for loan would be returned. It did not happen that way of course. I became upset, not rowdy or out of control, but I made my feelings known. My teacher told me I was selfish. She told those who were raising me the same thing. They took her side. After all, she was a teacher. From then on, I heard the word selfish increasingly.
�