From the Archives - Sting’s Lyrical Blunders

Introduction

About fifteen years ago, my brother emailed me a blog post by Charles Petzold about a fairly major goof in Sting’s lyrics to “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.”  The essay had to do with Sting’s allusion to the book Lolita, and the age of Vladimir Nakobov’s evil pedophile character, Humbert Humbert. Sting refers to Humbert as “the old man,” but he simply isn’t old. Petzold’s post also recounts a more widespread criticism of the song, which is Sting’s inane rhyming of “Nabokov” with “cough.”

What follows is my original response to my brother (which I’ve fleshed out a bit for this presumably larger audience). But first, some background.

Highlights of Petzold’s post

Petzold’s blog post begins by quickly recounting the botched rhyme in Sting’s lyrics:

The music magazine Blender recently cited Sting as the worst lyricist ever (story here), in part for the atrocious lyric [It’s no use, he sees her/ He starts to shake and cough/ Just like the old man in/ That book by Nabokov]. At the time the song first came out, much was made of Sting’s ridiculous pronunciation of Vladimir Nabokov’s last name, which should properly be accented on the second syllable.

Then Petzold takes Sting to task for suggesting that Nabokov’s antihero is old:

The “old man” — the narrator of [Lolita] who adopts the pseudonym Humbert Humbert — is hardly old! In May 1947, when Humbert Humbert first meets Dolores Haze, he is 36 or 37 and she is 12. He dies at the age of 42, and she dies at the age of 17. This is not a matter of “inside knowledge” or reading between the lines. Nabokov is extremely precise in the chronology of the novel, and only the most superficial reading (or, more likely in this case, none at all) could [miss] all the signposts.

My commentary, informed by my long study of Nabokov’s work and the two years of Russian I took in high school, elaborates on both gaffs.

Sting’s Lyrical Blunders – October 11, 2007

Petzold makes good points. I have long been bothered by that mispronunciation (made all the worse for its being the very last word of the song). For years, when I’d sing this (e.g., in the shower), I would change the lyrics to “just like the old man in that book by Vladimir.” This fixes the meter, in that the great writer’s name isn’t accentuated on the wrong syllable, but of course my substitution fouls up the rhyme. Not that Sting’s rhyme was exactly right to begin with; “Nabokov” is correctly pronounced “Na-BOH-kov,” with the final letter being basically a “v” sound, perhaps slightly closer to an “f” than the classic English “v” but in any event a poor match with the simple “f” sound in “cough.”

So, to fix both the meter and the rhyme, and the age while I’m at it, here’s how I will sing the last two lines from now on:

It’s no use, he sees her
He’s feeling really queer
Just like the gross man in
That book by Vladimir

I suppose I’m not on completely safe ground with “Vladimir,” since a very strict Russian pronunciation would accentuate the second syllable, which would have a bit more of an “e” sound, so the word would more properly rhyme with “redeemer.” But I think enough Americans say “VLAD-i-mere” that this is a significant improvement.

Now, in case you’re wondering if it’s fair to say Humbert Humbert felt “queer,” I think it certainly is. At one point late in the novel, when Lolita is starting to distance herself from Humbert, he describes how “I sat down on the grass with a quite monstrous pain in my chest and vomited up a torrent of browns and greens that I had never remembered eating.” That would be a pretty queer feeling indeed (and in any case I don’t remember Humbert shaking and coughing at any point in the book).

What’s arguably even lamer than the rhyme itself is Sting’s effort to defend himself. His website, sting.com, provides this quote (taken from an interview):

Okay, I can defend that. Sometimes rhymes can be so bad they can shock you into listening to them. Most good, full rhymes are just Hallmark card stuff. Moon, June, erm, balloon. But I’ve used that terrible, terrible rhyme technique a few times. Technically, it’s called a feminine rhyme—where it’s so appalling it’s almost humorous.

Okay, let me get this straight: Sting deliberately mispronounced “Nabokov,” to make it rhyme with “cough,” just to shock the listener into listening? What was the listener doing before? Zoning out? Listening to something else? Yeah, right. “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” is actually a rather good song, and this is the very end of it; if there was any need to shock the reader into listening, that would more appropriately be done closer to the beginning.

Meanwhile, the bit about “feminine rhyme” further showcases Sting’s appalling willingness to shamelessly spout bullshit without regard to the possibility that he’ll be fact-checked. “Feminine rhyme” is not characterized by being appalling or shocking. As M.H. Abrams explains in his excellent Glossary of Literary Terms, a feminine rhyme “consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable” and, “since it involves the repetition of two syllables, is also known as a double rhyme.” Examples would be feather/heather and ending/bending. Does this type of rhyme get employed in pop music? Sure! Check out these lines from Eminem:

Yo! His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already: Mom’s spaghetti

Feminine rhyme is what Sting should have employed, since “Nabokov” is a word whose final syllable is unstressed. What Sting actually made was a masculine rhyme, which “consists of a single stressed syllable” such as in bore/poor and louche/douche. If he wished to employ a feminine rhyme in order to achieve metrical accuracy, Sting should have rhymed Nabokov with “fuck off.”

A final note on the botched rhyme and Sting’s lame defense of it: twice on one page of sting.com, Nabokov is spelled “Nabakov.” This further suggests that Sting simply didn’t know how to pronounce the name; obviously, flubbing the penultimate syllable wasn’t necessary in order to achieve the single (masculine) rhyme with “cough.”

Getting to Petzold’s main point, the inaccuracy of “old man” in the final verse of that song: this hadn’t previously dawned on me, and it’s a very good observation. I suppose I’ve allowed the casting in the two Lolita movies to distort my perception of Humbert’s age (and shame on me, because I’ve read that book at least three or four times). Of course, Sting was pretty young when he wrote that song, but was he young enough to think of 36 as old? Well, we can do some rudimentary math here based on the line “this girl is half his age.” If we assume this is high school, the girl is between 14 and 18. (On his website, Sting recalls how “I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me—and me really fancying them!” Eww.) So the narrator of the song is presumably around 30. Perhaps a little kid would think 36 is old, but not a 30-year-old.

I suppose Sting could try to argue that he meant “old man” as in “father,” as Humbert was in fact Lolita’s legal stepfather for most of the book. But would he really expect all his listeners to have read the book to know that? Besides, it’d be “her old man,” not “that old man.” No dice.

As a final Hail Mary, Sting could always deny that he was talking about the book Lolita at all—after all, there are plenty of shaking and coughing old men in Nabokov’s books. This would be a weak defense, of course, given the subject matter of the song, but there’s still hope: Sting could claim that he was alluding to The Enchanter, a Nabokov novella that’s also about a pedophile (and was an early precursor to Lolita). I can’t recall the age of its awful protagonist, but at least he is described as “balding.” But from the perspective of that hypothetical defense, Sting nullified it when he recorded a new version of the song in 1986 and changed “that book by Nabokov” to “that famous book by Nabokov.” I doubt anybody would call The Enchanter a famous book. And in interviews Sting has mentioned his admiration of Lolita.

I think it’s appropriate that Sting topped the list of awful lyricists. I saw a documentary about him from 1985, and he just came off as a pompous ass. In one scene, Sting asks his drummer or somebody whether “chasm” is pronounced with a “k” sound or a “ch” sound. This makes me wonder if he really writes his own lyrics to begin with. I mean, who would use a word he doesn’t even know how to pronounce? Oh, wait ... Sting, obviously.

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Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass

Introduction

During my recent camping vacation with my family I tried to get some bike rides in.  You may have read about my Ebbetts Pass ride.  I did one other memorable ride during the trip—memorable more for my difficulties than anything else.  My goal was to head south on Highway 395 toward Lee Vining, where I’d turn west on Highway 120 (aka Great Sierra Wagon Road), which goes over Tioga Pass and into Yosemite National Park.  In addition to the pass itself, I faced several challenges:  the Nabokovian dilemma; shortage of time; shortage of water; fear; even a missing receipt.

Nabokovian dilemma

I guess “Nabokovian dilemma” isn’t a household phrase … yet.  (Quick, send everybody you know the link to this post!)  I’m referring to a memorable passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, when he describes his boyhood mania for butterfly hunting: 

oooOne of [the characteristics of butterfly hunting] was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania….  In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent  fun.  He arrived one summer night ... from a town some twenty five miles away.  His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stouthearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.
ooo On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone....  Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self  disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden   patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.

The dilemma here is simply the desire to be two places at once, in my case due to conflicting impulses to a) pursue my individual cycling mania and yet b) be with my family.  Like the young Nabokov, I sought to sneak out early.  I hoped to get in a couple hours of riding and then arrive back just in time to make pancakes on the camp stove—but I was pretty sure this wasn’t actually possible.

Normally, this conflict would barely have registered, but the campground we were at was, though very pretty, also kind of spooky.  When cruising around choosing a site we couldn’t help but notice how many of them resembled a shantytown or homeless encampment, or even an Occupy site (Occupy Eastern Sierras?).  Sagging, faded lawn chairs; ad hoc canopies; larger furniture; I could swear I even saw a car or two up on blocks (though surely this is the embroidery of memory).  One empty site was completely covered in broken glass.  Our kids were oblivious, only noting the wonderful little forest of aspen trees.  I came to realize how much I rely on nice cars, spiffy tents, and other newish REI-style gear to signify recreational campers like me as opposed to downtrodden folks who got nowheres to go.  I wasn’t sure how enthusiastic my wife would be to be abandoned in this place at dawn.  (It was obvious she shared my misgivings:  during our reconnaissance, she hummed the dueling banjo theme from “Deliverance.”)

Meanwhile, there was a fellow camper who had given us pause.  Erin first encountered him while depositing our payment in the unmanned registration box.  He wore a t-shirt that said, “If it weren’t for flashbacks I’d have no memory at all.”  He had a mean-looking dog on a leash with a choker collar.  Erin, though friendly to the guy, nonetheless cut to the chase:  “Can you assure me your pit bull won’t attack my kids?”  He denied only that the dog was a pit bull.  Later he came by our campsite and was friendly enough, describing to me in great detail a bike ride I might try the next morning.  He looked pretty much like a cyclist, but he also twitched and trembled, which made me wonder if the build of a meth addict might be fairly similar to a cyclist’s.  True, he had cycling sunglasses, sort of, but they were gas station Oakley knockoffs.  What if his suggestion of a morning ride was just a way to get me out of his hair while he robbed my family?  Of course you’re shaking your head at my paranoia, and rightly so, but I’m just not used to strangers in “flashback” t-shirts being so friendly.

Probably I’d have ignored all of this entirely had it not been for my ill-fated attempt that night to find water.  The campground map showed various locations of (albeit non-potable) water spigots.  At least we could use this to wash up and do our dishes; we didn’t have much drinking water.  I wandered all over the campground and couldn’t find a single spigot.  A pickup truck coming the other way passed me really slow and the front passenger asked what I was up to.  I explained I was looking for water.  He flashed a gap-toothed grin.  “Just keep going thataway,” he chuckled.  “You’ll find water.”

So I kept going and found myself in the campsite at the end of the line.  There was a kid of maybe sixteen sitting by the campfire.  I asked about a water spigot and he looked completely bewildered, even frightened.  “What?” he said, his voice shaky.  Suddenly two adults appeared, looking alarmed, as though I’d been harassing the boy.  At this moment I realized the kid looked exactly like Blaster, the huge scary gladiator guy from “Max Max:  Beyond Thunderdome” who, once deprived of his knight’s helmet, looks baby-faced and vulnerable.  I repeated my simple question to the grown-ups, one of whom engaged me in conversation while escorting me away from his campsite. 

He was gaunt and ponytailed and looked like a classic rock guy from the ‘70s who’s been ridden hard and put away wet one too many times.  “What site you campin’ at?” he asked casually.  Unwilling to divulge this I said, “Oh, down that way a piece.”  (My subconscious slippage into his vernacular almost had me saying, “Down thur a right fur piece.”)  He acted as though the notion of a spigot at this campground was completely absurd, but gave me elaborate instructions on finding the creek.  (Duh.)  I was afraid I’d have to take some false turns rather than lead him to my site, but eventually he stopped walking with me and headed back where he came from.  Dang.

One other thing.  According to the flashback guy, this campground had a resident bear.  This bear was normally unaggressive, but Yosemite-area bears are known to rip cars open like sardine tins to get at the food inside.  Flashback said that this particular bear could recognize a cooler.  Most of the sites had bear boxes but ours didn’t; I wasn’t about to ask a neighbor to share.  So I had to cover up our cooler in the back of the car and make sure we didn’t bring any toothpaste or deodorant into the tent.

Suffice to say, part of me thought it best to keep an all-night vigil with a large Maglite across my lap.  But the other part wanted that morning bike ride, so I went right to bed.

Shortage of time

I woke up somewhat early, but not as early as I’d hoped.  When I’m camping it takes awhile to find all my stuff, unlock my bike, etc., especially when I’m trying to be completely silent.  Plus, there was the matter of the pre-ride, uh, lightening ritual.  The outhouse was really far from our campsite.  I brought my own toilet paper, and good thing:  the outhouse had none.  Given the little aspen forest we were in, I might just as well have gone there.  As it was this outhouse offered nothing except a platform to sit on and a little privacy.  Oh, and of course graffiti to look at in lieu of a magazine.

But then, this was a special campground with special restroom graffiti:

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about ;

‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

What? you’re asking.  Are you kidding?  Of course I am.  Just making sure you’re awake.  But those lines, from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, did cross my mind for some reason.  Maybe it was the No-Doz.   Needless to say, most of the graffiti was totally unoriginal, like the old “Here I sit all broken-hearted” ditty (too vulgar for this family blog, but I could paraphrase it:  “Here I set, growing petulant, tried to defecate but was only flatulent”).  But then I came across this:

Yo momma is a myth

Atlantis is a myth

So yo momma is Atlantis

You may have guessed that I got out my pocketknife and carved below it, “This argument is not sound, because its first premise is obviously false.  Also, this argument is not valid because it commits the logical fallacy of ‘the undistributed middle.’”  But you would have guessed wrong:  I never, ever indulge in graffiti.  Besides, I couldn’t remember, that early in the morning, the name of the logical fallacy.  I could recall the logical structure the argument was surely trying to resemble—modus ponendo ponens—but what was it called when the mechanism was erroneously reversed?  Before I caught myself, I wasted a good many precious minutes pondering this matter (and related questions like “What kind of idiot thinks that’s worth carving on an outhouse wall?”).  Curses!

Shortage of water

It had been my idea to only buy only one 2.5-gallon bottle of drinking water the night before.  I’m just cheap, especially when it comes to bottled water, which always tastes uncannily like the tap water of the region (except in the Bay Area, where tap water tastes better than bottled).  In my defense, I had reasonably trusted the campground map showing water spigots.  Now, preparing for my ride, I had to decide how much water to deprive my family of.  I eventually set out with only one bottle.

No problem—I could just refill at the Mobil station at Lee Vining, where 395 meets 120, right?  Well, this gas station—perhaps because it has remarkably good food—tends to have a line at the cashier.  And a lot of motorists go through there.  What would I do if my bike got ripped off?  Walk ten miles back to the campground?  You must think I’m the most paranoid guy in the universe, but consider that along the roads near my home, there have been several recent cases of bike theft and even of cyclists getting mugged.

Plus, my bottle was just water, not energy drink, so I was relying on gels for sustenance.  Ever eat a gel without washing it down?  Didn’t think so.  It’d be easier to eat a sleeve of Saltines without water.  Of course I didn’t start pondering this until I was well underway, riding hard over an unknown distance toward Tioga Pass, a climb I’d only ever gone over in a car.  I had no idea what this ride would be like and how long it would take.

Fear

One problem with riding a road for the first time is worrying about traffic.  I had seen a pretty good shoulder on Highway 120 on the drive over on the previous day, but it only takes a short section of shoulder-less road to create a hazard.  Plus, I’d seen lots of these Cruise America rental RVs on this road.  The very idea of Rental RVs strikes me as dangerous, like discount sushi or amateur dentistry.  I recently watched a guy in a brand-new RV spend about 90 minutes backing it into his campsite.  He looked really stressed, as did his wife, standing behind it guiding him in.  She saw me looking, and to ease the embarrassment I said, “That’s a really great-looking RV.”  She replied, “Stick around … we may be selling it soon.”  Now, pedaling my way up the pass, I could just imagine a similarly hapless RV newcomer with no sense of the size of his camper whacking me without even realizing it.

If you’ve ever considered riding over Tioga Pass, I can tell you it’s just fine climbing it from the east.  There’s a generous shoulder the whole way up.  Heading the other direction (downhill towards 395), there are sections of the road where guardrails cut into the shoulder, but these are short; plus, you’re going pretty fast, so the likelihood of being passed at all is pretty low.  Even during the climb, very few vehicles passed me.  They tended to come in clumps:  half a dozen fuming SUVs stuck behind a Cruise America RV.

Another problem was the weather.  Despite having grown up in Colorado, where afternoon thunderstorms are a given, I stupidly set out without a jacket and now the clouds above were purple-black.  The air had that strange electricity you so often get at high altitude.  What is it our brains detect?  A constant shifting in barometric pressure?  The whiff of distant lightning?  A sudden increase in humidity?  The peculiar foreign wind of a storm system?  I wouldn’t say the sky darkened because it had never actually gotten very light.  A cold wind bullied me.  Here is what Tioga Pass looks like with better weather (I didn’t bring a camera on the ride; this photo and those following it I took a couple days later, during the drive home).

As I reached 8,000 and eventually 9,000 feet of elevation, all this became stronger.  I was hit with that delicious cool-rain-smell.  And of course I was suffering.  While my conscience continued to nag at me (“What might be happening to your family back at that eerie campground while you pursue your pleasure/suffering centers?”), I begin to bask in the sheer epic-ness of this ride.  I, a speck of under-fit cyclist, seemed about to be caught in a thunderstorm at 10,000 feet on a little highway in the wilderness.

Missing receipt

It costs $20 to drive to and/or through Yosemite in a car.  Your receipt gets you unlimited access to the park for seven days … if you have the receipt.  I couldn’t find it the morning of the ride and decided to plead my case using other receipts we’d gathered (a rather expensive lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel dining room, and a batch of groceries that included day-old discounted sushi, which was disgusting) that proved we’d been in the park.  All this just to get past the toll gate so I could finish the last bit of Tioga Pass and say I’d done it.  Worst case, I could pay another $10, though then I’d have nothing to buy food or water with.  And this was looking like about a fifty-mile ride.  Hmmm.

In the event, there was a long line of cars at the entrance gate and I didn’t feel like bothering with it, especially since all manner of social outcasts, possibly including a bear, were probably converging on my family at that very moment.  So I headed back down the east side of the pass. 

The descent was sublime.  My wife and kids had felt something between awe and outright fear when we’d driven down it, but I’ve been descending mountain passes since I was thirteen and can’t get enough of them.  Descending Tioga Pass is sweet.  Good road surface, very few cars (not a single one passed me on my descent), and world-class scenery.  I even outran the rain (which did finally come to pass, but later in the day). 

Epilogue:  Mono Lake

Just a few miles from the campground, at the point in the ride when I needed to eat my last gel but had no more water left, I saw the sign for the Mono Lake visitor’s center.  I headed over there.  Here’s what you need to know about Mono Lake: 

• It’s pronounced “Moe No,” not “Ma No.”
• This lake is the breeding ground for 90% of the seagulls in California, due to a vast number of tiny flies that feed on an even vaster amount of salt-loving algae.
• Those crazy crystalline formations, called tufa towers, are not made of bird dung (which is what I told my kids), nor is “tufa” the Paiute Indian word for “tofu.”  The formations are made of calcium carbonate (i.e., limestone).
• There’s a drinking fountain right outside the doors, perfect for a paranoid and parched cyclist.

When I got back to the campground, my family was just finishing up breakfast.  Nobody had bothered them, not even a bear, and they had plenty of water left.

Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

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NOTE: This post is rated R for adult themes and mild strong language.

Introduction

Nobody needs to be encouraged to embrace lowbrow entertainment. Widespread embrace of the vulgar is nothing new; in fact, the word “vulgar” derives from the Latin word “vulgus” meaning “the common people.” You’re probably thinking, especially given my last sentence there, that in comparing lowbrow vs. highbrow entertainment I would always champion the latter. Thus you may be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, that I also think it possible to embrace the highbrow too enthusiastically. In this post I will use a pair of recent entertainments to examine the question of when and how we should choose one brow height over another.

My credentials

Naturally, before you spend any time reading this, you’ll want to satisfy yourself that I’m even in a position to comment. After all, since I’m an opera-hating jeans-wearing guy without a graduate degree, who likes all pizza—even frozen pizza—and can’t help but pronounce the name “Proust” to rhyme with “oust” instead of “boost,” you may question my authority in casting aspersions on the highest cultural realms our society can achieve. On the other hand, since I often post really long essays to this blog, have a liberal arts degree, and pronounce “crêpe” to rhyme with “pep” rather than “scrape,” and since I actually bothered with the accent over the “ê” just now, you may consider me so far out of touch with the mainstream that I could never give lowbrow entertainment a fair shake. I hope to put both of these misgivings to rest.

As far as my highbrow cred, I literally do have a fairly high brow, and as I get older and my hairline recedes, it’s only getting higher. I majored in English. I have had some success reading St. Augustine, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mikhail Lermontov in the original Latin, French, and Russian, respectively, and I know how to use the word “respectively.” I have enjoyed live theater performances of “Faust,” “Volpone,” and various Shakespeare plays. I have been to a poetry reading, and I enjoyed it. I can write a sonnet.

On the lowbrow side: I can recite the entire ad copy of a Coast deodorant soap commercial from the ‘80s; I watched “Star Wars” nine or ten times in the theater when it first came out, and again as an adult; I can sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.” I avoid listening to NPR (lest I find myself playing it in my Volvo while driving through Berkeley, which would render me a human cliché) in favor of FM 107.7, The Bone. I almost snorted with derisive laughter when a realtor touted a condo in my old neighborhood as being “walking distance to the thea-tah.” I call a spade a spade when it comes to overbearing, insufferably pretentious and dull movies like “The Remains of the Day.”

In this corner…

What could be a more timely representative of the lowbrow camp than “Avatar”? I saw it recently and have much to report.


First, the bad news. Two tickets ran us $34, by far the most we’ve ever spent on a movie. Parking was another $10. My 3-D glasses were pretty grubby and I had to wonder how many filthy kids had worn them before me. Then, given the combination of 3-D and having to settle for front-row IMAX seats, I had a hard time, for the first half-hour, focusing on everything on the screen. Trying to make out the facial expression on a twenty-foot tall 3-D head, for example, made my eyeballs hurt. Thus, I had trouble getting into the trance that is the unique pleasure of a movie in the theater. And I haven’t even gotten to the plot cheese yet.

Before discussing the plot, I’ll take a moment to dismiss the more nitpicky things. The price was actually pretty economical when you compare it to other IMAX movies, like the lousy Mt. Everest thing I saw years ago that only lasted like forty minutes. Besides, “Avatar” cost like half a billion dollars to make, and it shows. (I’ve always enjoyed how the length and budget of a movie don’t affect its price.) Ultimately, $17 a pop is perfectly reasonable because from the standpoint of spectacle, “Avatar” is fricking awesome. My mind hasn’t been so satisfyingly blown by a moviegoing experience since I saw “Pink Floyd - The Wall” in 1982.

As for the plot of “Avatar,” I say if you’re going to do anything cheesy, the action or sci-fi genre is where to do it. When romance or comedy is cheesy, it’s pretty much unwatchable, as in the case of “Titanic.” The cheeseball stuff in “Avatar” isn’t actually that bad. Sure, a final man-to-man showdown was utterly predictable, and the anti-corporate message was a bit twee in the context of the most well-funded and lucrative movie ever made, but we were all braced for the cheese factor going in.

Meanwhile, Cameron gets major style points for staging a giant battle between a state-of-the-art military battalion and a bunch of natives with spears. The last time this was tried was in “Return of the Jedi,” with those damned Ewoks, and I don’t need to tell you how utterly awful that was. For anybody to repeat that kind of matchup again takes some serious cajones. And trust me, the “Avatar” battle scene is fricking glorious. I went from wondering how a bird could take down a giant military helicopter to gasping and (inwardly) cussing with delight at seeing how it’s done.

On top of delivering on pure action-chewing satisfaction, this movie makes you think—in a good way. For an action movie to make you think can of course be a bad thing; for example, if you try to sort out the time-travel nonsense in “The Terminator” or the recent “Star Trek,” you start to wonder if the movie was really that good after all. But here are some of the interesting things “Avatar” can make you ponder long after the film itself is over:

• Neytiri, the main Na’vi character, was pretty hot. The movie’s creators evidently want the audience to feel something like actual lust for a member of another species. Should we as a society be concerned about where this is headed?
• Why did I have vision problems for the first thirty minutes of the film? How is it that my brain eventually adjusted? Could this movie have actually made me smarter somehow?
• Why didn’t this movie win Best Picture at the Oscars? Is it because the Academy are a bunch of fricking idiots, as was so strongly suggested by “Chicago” winning in 2002 despite being just about the dumbest movie ever made? Or is it because “The Hurt Locker” has such a compelling name that people just want to like it, the way they like tiramisu and Hootie & the Blowfish? Or, could it be that “The Hurt Locker” is actually a better movie, to which all hundred or so people who saw it can attest?
• What does the brilliant use of 3-D in “Avatar” mean for the future of movies? Could properly executed, non-gimicky 3-D rejuvenate the theatergoing experience, at least until home theater systems catch up? Could great 3-D make it possible to revive formerly moribund movie franchises? For example, even though the “My Dinner with Andre” trilogy was never completed after its second installment, “My Dessert with Andre,” fizzled at the box office, might not “Dinner/Andre/3-D” be just the kind of shot in the arm this property needs?

And in this corner…

Against “Avatar” I pit the King Tut exhibit at the newly revamped de Young museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. On paper, this exhibit should be a fearsome contender in our highbrow vs. lowbrow face-off. The exhibit is being held at a famous museum in a legitimate world city; everybody has heard of King Tut; mummies have captured our collective imagination since we were kids; Tutankhamen reigned over Egypt when it was a massive world power; and, even in death, Tut out-pimps even the richest rap star. And, we can bring the kids! For months Erin has been telling Alexa and Lindsay how they’re going to get to see a real mummy!


As before, I’ll start with the bad news. It’s really, really expensive. As in, $27.50 for adults on weekdays, and $32.50 on the weekend. Each. Seniors over sixty-five, after working all their lives, save a whopping two dollars, and kids over age five are $16.50. That’s some serious coin. Haven’t these museum people heard about the economic meltdown? How many eggheaded liberal arts types actually make enough money to spring for such a thing?

At least we’d be getting a guided tour for our money. (When our family toured the Tower of London last summer, the tour guide was a real highlight.) But when we showed up at the appointed place at the appointed time, nobody was there. An employee told us, “Oh, when there aren’t a lot of people, we meet at the bottom of those stairs over there.”

Downstairs, we found the ticket-takers and were shown to a big pair of doors. I asked the guy there if he was the tour guide. “Oh, there’s no tour,” he said. “Unless you want the audio tour; you can get your listening device over there.” For nine dollars extra, per person, that is. No thanks; between the usurious entrance fee, the parking, and the $20 we’d blown on a quick snack in the museum cafeteria, we weren’t feeling that flush. Besides, a tour should be given by a real person, ideally a really smart, knowledgeable, and funny person who can answer questions.

But still, our spirits were high. While we waited for the doors to be opened, Erin tried to pump the kids up a bit. “Girls, this is it!” she said. “We’re finally going to get to see a real mummy!” But the doorman broke in: “Uh, actually, there’s no mummy here.” That’s right, not only is King Tut not part of the exhibit, but no other mummy is, either. The guy said the U.S. has “a mummy” but it’s over at Stanford undergoing some tests. He went on to say that we would get to see the coffins of Tut’s two stillborn daughters. That didn’t exactly cheer us up. Erin asked if the daughters were twins. The guy had no idea.

Finally we were let in. There were little things in cases—statues and stuff. One was a bust of some princess or other, with this strangely elongated head, roughly the shape an unshelled peanut. Lindsay asked me why the head was so strangely shaped, but I couldn’t tell her; oddly enough, the little plaque just said something like, “Lots of statues of the period had strangely elongated heads. The reason is not known.” Next to this was a bust of Nefertiti which was actually pretty cool. Her head wasn’t all elongated, and I like to use the phrase “bust of Nefertiti.” Good ring to it.

I guess I should have sprung for the audio tour. For those without it, I think there should be elevator music of some kind, because it’s hard to think about King Tut without getting that Steve Martin song from the “Saturday Night Live” skit stuck in your head. It gets really old after awhile.

There were ten rooms full of stuff. In the third or fourth room was a big coffin in the shape of an Egyptian. It wasn't as fancy as what Tut got, but was still pretty ornate, with the Battlestar Galactica headdress and everything. It’d have been even cooler if they’d made a full-sized wooden replica that we could climb inside, or if somebody knowledgeable could have helped me fully appreciate what I was seeing; there’s only so long you can gaze at an object and wonder about it. (Perhaps you’re thinking that, my earlier credentials notwithstanding, I’m just not cut out for museums. Not so. I have enjoyed many museums in my life, including such humble venues as the Barbed Wire Museum in LaCrosse, Kansas and the little Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and I spent three days taking in the Smithsonian.)

The coffins of the stillborn daughters were much less impressive. They were very small and looked more like the shoeboxes that the coffins might have come in. Meanwhile, the plaque told us that it isn’t actually known whether these were Tut’s daughters, or somebody else’s. Most of the plaques and things had this sort of “whatever” aura about them—the written equivalent of a guy shrugging and saying, “Who knows? It was a long time ago.” The most commonly mentioned fact was that Tut was only nineteen when he died, and he died for no known reason. This was hammered into our heads again and again. From an educational standpoint, the entire exhibit reminded me of a student paper printed in a really big fixed font, with wide margins, to meet the five-page-minimum requirement.

Probably the coolest thing we saw was the “coffinette.” Only fifteen inches tall, it was something they put some of Tut’s organs in. I wish I’d looked at it longer, but I was really looking forward to seeing Tut’s actual coffin in the final room of the exhibition. But when we got there, there was no coffin to be found: just a video showing all his coffins, nested like Russian Petrushka dolls, the largest shrouded in a pair of giant gold boxes. The cheek! All these coffins, and you couldn’t include a single one in your exhibit? There was also mention of servants who were buried in the same crypt with Tut, to help him in the afterlife. Couldn’t the museum have thrown in a servant mummy or two? Or one of the servant’s coffins at least? We’d been duped: the picture on the ads (that I included above), showing the gorgeous coffin, was actually a picture of the coffinette, shown pretty much full-scale.

Somebody needs to explain to these curators that the whole idea of a museum is that you see actual ancient objects with the naked eye. If all they have to show me is video on a TV screen anyway, why shouldn’t I just go see a movie, maybe in 3-D at an IMAX theater? I want from a museum what the best video technology cannot give me. And I want the attraction I came to see; I want to see Tut, not just some of the crap they found in his car.

In the final room, we saw what I guess was supposed to be the highlight of the exhibit: a big slab on the floor onto which a ceiling-mounted projector shone a picture of Tut’s mummified body. This photo showed the location of some of the articles (a knife, a breastplate) that were on display. For some reason, the slab they were projecting onto was black, so the image was cloudy and vague, like a ghost. (Perhaps they didn’t even have good photos of the mummy—maybe just some black-and-white ones taken in 1950?) Lindsay pointed out, “King Tut was a lot taller than you, Dana.” For a second I was tempted to reply, “Actually, people in that time were much smaller than modern man. The size of this image is completely arbitrary, as it’s based on the distance between the projector and this slab, and thus on the ceiling height of this room.” But I didn’t want to deprive my daughter of whatever sense of wonder she might be gleaning from the exhibit. So I said, “That’s right, Lindsay, Tut was a very tall man. That’s why he was king.” (Note to de Young curators: this is called showmanship. Something lowbrow entertainers have a nice grasp of.)

Synthesis

The big lesson to take from the Tut exhibit is this: highbrow entertainers shouldn’t abuse the privilege. Sure, they’ll get some mileage out of the Emperor’s New Clothes effect; some striving intelligentsia will pay a lot of money just to say, “Well, we just took in the Tutankhamen exhibit at the de Young on Sunday” (they would never just say “Tut” when they could showcase their ability to pronounce “Tutankhamen”). But if you’re going to do highbrow, you can’t do it half-assed and expect to please the more discerning members of your already limited audience.

The flip side of this is that some of the greatest entertainment is achieved by aiming for lowbrow and doing such a good job that the resulting product is vaulted past the supposed limitations of its humble category. In other words, real genius is not actually reserved for the intellectual elite.

Perhaps the most obvious aspect of this is children’s literature, which is lowbrow almost by definition. Children, after all, are too small to have high brows, and too young to follow, say, the ontological discussions of Jacques Derrida or the subtleties of a Samuel Beckett play. But great literature doesn’t require advanced vocabulary or complex literary structure; just look at books like The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White or Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Critics have long challenged the idea that Huckleberry Finn is a children’s book at all, and as for The Trumpet of the Swan, the other day my kids were playing a tape of the author reading it, and it sucked me right in.

It would be a disservice to the highbrow types to suggest that big words or complicated intellectual concepts are the only qualities of their preferred entertainment. I’m led to believe that opera lovers truly enjoy the singers’ voices, on a purely aesthetic level (in addition to the pleasure they get from ancient drama told beautifully in another language). What the opera lovers might be surprised to learn is that what they might consider opera’s musical opposite—rap—can also be enjoyed on the basis of the rapper’s voice. For example, the rapper Obie Trice has a great voice, rich and defiant and chewy, and I’d like to meet him some day and, ideally, piss him off, because to be chewed out by that guy would surely send shivers down my spine.

Rap is actually a great example of transcendent lowbrow. Rakim has said, “It’s just the beat, the beat, the beat,” but really, it isn’t. In terms of articulating teen angst in simple language, Holden Caulfield has nothing on Eminem, who raps, “That’s when you start to stare at who’s in the mirror and see your self as a kid again/ And you get embarrassed/ And I got nothing to do but make you look stupid as parents/ You fuckin’ do-gooders, too bad you couldn’t do good at marriage.”

But simple language isn’t the hallmark of rap music; the lyrics are often as complex and ingenious as classic poetry. Consider this line from Obie Trice: “Ob’ Trice rock harder than infinite horny men.” It’s funny, of course, but it’s also remarkably sophisticated. (Some literary types may bristle at the rap convention of boasting, but is Shakespeare any different when he writes “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this [poem], and this gives life to thee”?) Trice not only finds a solid metaphor to express how hard he rocks, but he also packs a second message about his virility through the implied verb “to be.” That is, he’s also saying “Ob’ Trice be rock-harder than infinite horny men.” It’s a nice grammatical twist: “rock” is a verb in one context and an adverb in the other, while “harder” does double duty as an adjective and an adverb. And that’s not all. By using “infinite” as you would a specific number, the way kids do (e.g., “My dad could beat up infinity-plus-one of your dads!”), Trice reminds us of his lack of education, thus highlighting how clever he can be without it. Not a bad bunch of layers for an eight-word sentence.

All of us English majors know how jam-packed classic poems are with allusions to literature, history, and such; it’s why there are so many footnotes to wade through. Good rap isn’t so different. When Eminem raps, “If I had one wish, I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss,” he’s alluding to (and mocking) a well-known 1971 Coke ad (“I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love”). And when he bags on his mom for his crappy childhood—“Goin’ through public housing systems, victim of Munchausen Syndrome/ My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t,/ ‘Til I grew up, now I blew up, it makes you sick to your stomach”—the attentive listener reaches for his encyclopedia. (Eminem is actually talking about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, by the way.)

I hope I’ve helped you appreciate how lowbrow entertainment can transcend the more modest ambitions of its genre. It may seem that I’m also suggesting that highbrow entertainment should try to aim a bit lower. Certainly there’s precedent for this, like how Nabokov gleefully saturates Lolita in references to ‘50s pop culture. But I’m not saying highbrow entertainment necessarily should do this; Tolstoy plays Anna Karenina completely straight and it’s a masterpiece. Dumbing down serious art is the last thing I’d recommend, but it’s tempting to say high culture should take itself less seriously. Then again, the failure of the Tut exhibit was, I think, that it didn’t take itself or its audience seriously enough. What I will conclude is that highbrow entertainment shouldn’t be afraid of enticing a larger audience even at the risk of alienating its cultural elite.

For example, I’ve witnessed firsthand how a famous museum can amuse the masses even within a serious exhibit. The Tower of London had a great name for its exhibition on the armor worn in the days of Henry VIII: “Dressed to Kill.” The irreverent British sense of humor permeated the exhibits; for example, they showed the suit of armor made for Henry VIII in his forties when he’d become quite fat, and didn’t pull punches in bagging on their famous king. I can’t remember the wording, but they went into some detail about how he’d become so dissipated and lame he never even wore the armor, begging off his tournament appearance against another king with some half-baked excuse.

Here’s another example of how simple pleasures can work within highbrow entertainment: I saw “The Last Station” recently, which is about the final months of Tolstoy’s life and the power struggle between his wife and the officers of his Tolstoyan political movement. Not exactly crowd-pleasing stuff. But early in the movie, our hero, a young man hired as Tolstoy’s new secretary, arrives at the Tolstoyan commune and sees an attractive young woman chopping wood. As soon as I saw the woman I thought, “Oh, those two are definitely going to hook up,” and I wasn’t wrong.

I don't fault the movie's creators for throwing a bone to the less bookish members of the audience; actually, for me the movie was more satisfying visually then intellectually. The apparent manipulation of Tolstoy by his acolytes seemed unrealistic, given his massive intellect, but would I have traded the scenes of the young lovers for half an hour of explanatory voice-over? I would not, and I give credit to the creators of “The Last Station” for remembering that this is a movie, after all—we came to see something. Who knows, perhaps “Remains of the Day” might have been tolerable if they’d had Anthony Hopkins slip into his Hannibal Lecter role and slaughter a few dozen Ewoks.
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