Ignoreland

June 15, 2008

Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages

There is a growing list of mainstream media story types I simply cannot read anymore, no matter who they’re written by or how important a publication they appear in.

Witness one: today’s uber-boring cover article in the NYT Mag. Wow, people in the 21st century who have children sometimes decide to split the duties involved in caring for these beings and their abode? Sometimes they fight? Sometimes it works out great? Eventually, the kids grow up and leave, and the parents look back on it all with fondness or bitterness or [insert other emotion here]? Talk about breaking news.

Other types on the list:

* Any story in which baseball or golf is the catalyst for a moment of emotion or revelation between any two men—father/son, boss/underling, celebrity profilee/profile writer, Justin Timberlake/Tiger Woods.

* Any article that attempts to codify the ways in which Marilyn Monroe was, is or will continue to be meaningful to the American zeitgeist. (It’s terrible to say, but now that Norman Mailer has passed, this bit of journalism ought to decrease markedly.)

* Any piece in which a woman of a certain age contemplates Botox/a facelift/Restylane, polls her friends, pesters her man-companion, decides in either the affirmative or negative, and learns to live, if just a tiny bit ruefully (if she didn’t do it) and/or defensively (if she did), with her decision. Over the past few months, I have had to spend a lot of time reading lady magazines in various doctors’ waiting rooms, and I’m here to say you could wallpaper the Kremlin with these articles. Stop already.

* Any story in which the writer hires a cleaning woman and experiences any kind of emotion/revelation related to that act—guilt, enlightenment, guilt followed by enlightenment, etc.

* Any essay in which a middle-aged parent (usually a dad) takes his teenaged child (usually his son) to his first concert—rock, ska, rap, punk, alternative, really anything except pure pop.

Dad has memories, dad has emotions, dad wishes he could get high or jacked or drunk or whatever mind-altering thing he used to do at concerts but no longer does, dad looks at the sexy teenaged girls and reminisces about his own sexy days past (requisite paragraph required for publication in Esquire, GQ, Details, etc.), dad looks at his fat aging self and feels insecure.

But mostly, writer dad bends over backwards to remind readers in a very low-key (and therefore cool) way how very cool he used to be.

Because the world does not need another one of these articles, not never, I’m not going to say anything about the R.E.M. concert C and I went to this weekend, his first. Way back in another century, I had the good sense to befriend Beulah, who had previously had the good sense to attend college in Athens, Ga., and hang with what would later turn out to be R.E.M.

Flash forward 25 years, and Auntie B is able to set us up with free V.I.P. tix, 15 rows back, center, in a lovely outdoor venue, plus access to the V.I.P. beer-garden-like lounge, plus (most important at this crummy car-centric stadium), V.I.P. parking that allowed us to get out of the lot in something other than the 2.5 hours it takes regular plebes.

As I rolled down the window of our pollen-encrusted Honda (the white pine is dropping its stuff this week in New England) and said to the parking girl, “Uh, I think we’re on the list for the band? We’re with Beulah?” C said, “How do you know Beulah anyhow?” You can figure out his thought process for yourselves. Fat-butt suburban mom + hipster cool Beulah = wha?????

And it’s true, B and I haven’t anything in common, except a love of words and writing and a certain bemused, mostly-but-not-always-sarcastic way of watching the world. But since those things take up 90% of my consciousness (the other 10% being divided equally between food and drink—and, oh yeah, my kids), that’s a pretty big connection.

B was happy Friday night. The evening was fine, she was looking hot, and the band played, in her honor, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” which was written for her way back when. They also played two hours of out-of-the-park faves of mine, including, astonishingly, an acoustic country version of “Let Me In,” a song I semi-obsessed on during a particular 18-month chunk of time when it felt like all I could do with any measure of success was miscarry over and over.

So yeah, did mom have emotions, standing next to her now-6-foot-tall offspring on a gorgeous summer night sneaking little sideways peeks as he rocked out to her favorite band in the world? I ain’t saying. You will not read a word about it here.

I am not going to be a loser and tell you that after the show in the beer garden we stood not 10 feet away from a certain polite, soft-spoken hipster icon, and could have met him for ourselves if only we were willing to wait for all the other mom/teen fan combos ahead of us to get their salutations out of the way. Not talking. 

I will, however, bow to convention by posting the requisite cell-phone photo. How did people ever go to stadium concerts before mobile phones were invented? Did you just, like, stand there and listen to the music? So last century.

The trio in question are in the teeny, tiny middle of the pic. I don’t care what anyone says, cell phone photos suck.