The Way You Love Me: Musings on Fandom and Faith Hill

For your information I don't like the music of Faith Hill.  This kiss, this kiss, this fucking kiss!  Okay girl we get it, now shut up.  That said, the woman's music is ubiquitous.  It has been playing in the background of my existence since what seems like forever.  Nary a year of my college life has gone by without a sort of unprompted serenade from Faith herself.  Her songs are played with tedious repetitious consistency in movie theaters, restaurants, malls, and radio stations all across mainstream America.  Like the black plague in the middle ages, her music is unpleasant and difficult to avoid.

Or at least all of this is how I once thought.  But the thing is that over the years I've developed a sort of ironic appreciation for certain aspects of Faith Hill's music and persona.  Now, I hate to use the word ironic simply because of its hipster connotations, but it's true.  On a gut level songs like "The Way You Love Me" don't make my soul soar.  OK, to be fair on a gut level I find most of Faith's stuff to be vaguely annoying at best.

But that's cool with me because, truth be told, I enjoy hating on Faith Hill's musical output.  This isn't as negative or mean-spirited as it sounds.  Look, the joy I get from bitching about the latest Faith single blasting out into the public sphere is legit.  It is pure unadulterated happiness.

And the reason why such whining is so delightful to me is, I think, because I'm a fan.  I will illustrate what I mean by way of an example.  OK, so a few years ago Faith Hill had a song entitled "All I Ever Wanted" that played at the end of a mediocre Katherine Heigl romcom called Life As We Know It.  Both the movie and the song contained within basically offended every aesthetic sensibility I had.  Everything that I held to be valuable in art and entertainment was obliterated by these crass commercial products.

And that, in its own weird way, was a great thing.  If I didn't have stuff like Faith Hill's Breathe album to mark as the enemy it would make everything I like a little less valuable.  It is commonly thought that the joy in fandom comes from heaping praises onto your favorite artifacts or creations.  But I think another, equally essential, part of fandom involves marking and embracing things that offend your sensibilities.  You can't really know what you like until you know what you dislike.

Leopard Lady: A Tribute to Chicago's Chinatown

The time was two or three years ago and the place was a seedy little shop in the heart of Chicago's Chinatown.  My friend El Lobo and I stood in front of one of the most wonderfully absurd sights I have ever seen in my life: a holographic poster of a scantily clad J-Lo lounging with two feral felines.  The poster was encased in an over sized, elaborate frame.  A handwritten card next to the picture summed up all this weirdness succinctly, "Leopard Lady - $50."  The minute my eyes skimmed over this price tag was the moment I fell in love with Chicago's Chinatown.

When or if you look up info about Chinatown on the Internet, you'll see a ton of reviews and articles praising the authentic Chinese food joints that line the streets.  And honestly the restaurants are pretty awesome.  Heaping plates of rice, shrimp, chicken, and other assorted edibles await your consumption should you choose to step foot into one of Chinatown's many dining establishments.  Also it's a fact that any fruit smoothie you purchase in this town will be killer.  So yeah, by all means you foodies should check out Chinatown.  But with that out of the way I must confess that I don't love Chinatown for its food.  No, I love Chicago's Chinatown because its multitude of small shops provide an audio and visual experience of the highest order.

On Chinatown's main road you'll find dozens of these little shops that sell everything from posters of anonymous babies to pornographic VHS tapes to Hello Kitty memorabilia.  What makes these stores great is the sheer randomness contained within them.  One store contained more anime merchandise than a 14-year old's bedroom, whilst the store's next door neighbor sold antique trinkets and handbags.  In these stores American, Chinese, and Japanese cultures seem to mix and mingle in random and delightfully illogical ways.  One store sold picture frames, but they had inserted pictures of American celebrities into the frames.  Clipped images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sat inside dusty heart-shaped frames on the shelf.  Next to these frames sat glossy Chinese language magazines.

Perhaps the most delightful culture clash I witnessed in Chinatown came from a bin of $1 "surprise" items.  These items were wrapped in newspaper and the store patrons could pick up an item, take a gamble and buy it, and then unwrap it and see what they had wasted their hard-earned dough on.  In case you can't see where this is going, I was one of the suckers who reached into the dollar bin. Ultimately I don't regret the purchase because while I discarded the contents of the package (a small, stained cloth coin purse) I kept the newspaper it came in.  The newspaper was entirely in Chinese, but contained a large picture of Susan Boyle singing.  The juxtaposition of Chinese characters with a D-list English speaking celebrity cracked me up, and I have kept that newspaper clipping to this day.

With its weird mixing of cultures and illogical store layouts, Chicago's Chinatown is a delight for those who are willing to accept its eccentricities.

Youtube Cliches Part II: When They Cry

A few weeks ago in the comments of one of my posts, frequent Zombie Baby Nursery guest star Juan del Lobo pointed me in the direction of a Youtube video that is compiled of clips of Oprah yelling out celebrity names (click here to watch).  I found the video funny, partly because Oprah's odd vocal intonations are inherently humorous ("MARIAH CARE-EEEEEEEeeee!" being one of my favorites), but also because this video exemplifies a Youtube cliche.  The cliche I speak of, my friends, is what I refer to as the "celebrity tics video".  To assemble a video of this type you need to pick a famous person, find a relatively minor but consistent thing that they do or say, and assemble a video to highlight this verbal or physical tic.  In the case of the aforementioned Oprah video, it's her habit of wildly barking out the names of her famous guests that's being put on display.  Another video edits down Natalie Portman's Oscar speech to highlight her excessive use of filler words, whilst another focuses on Juno's habit of saying "you know".

But to me the crème de la crème of the celebrity tics genre is this gem, the Julianne Moore crying video.  Three plus minutes filled with sniffing, weeping, and face contortions.  It's that kind of stupidly brilliant video that makes me say, "God, I love the Internet."

For the sake of clarity let me try to break down why I love this crap.  First off, they epitomize online culture.  While the web can indeed be a dark cultural abyss filled with such depraved human creations as lolcats, there is something genuinely funny about videos of this type.  They are one part observational humor and another part absurdity.  The existence of these videos implies a certain type of obsessiveness in both the video's creators and audience.  And this kind of obsessiveness is a big part of the appeal to me.

Horror Movies: My Take on the Genre

So I was reading this book called Shock Value by a guy named Jason Zinoman.  Said book is about the heavy hitting horror films of the 1970's and, "how a few eccentric outsiders gave us nightmares, conquered Hollywood, and invented modern horror."  It's a decent read, though it's neither as specific nor as expansive in its information as I would have liked it to be.  But that's OK because reading Shock got me thinking about horror movies I like, which got me thinking about the genre in general, which got me thinking about my friend El Lobo's blog post about horror movies.  In his post on the subject, Juan detailed the five reasons why the horror genre appeals to him.  I enjoyed Juan's post and I kinda wanted to do my own version of it.  After all, I am a child of the Internet age, broadcasting my opinions on such topics to the World Wide Web is something I can do.  So without further ado, here are the top three reasons why I love the horror genre.

1. Weird, fantastic, surreal, and grotesque imagery.  One the primary appeals of film is that it's a visual medium (duh).  Therefore, one of the greatest pleasures I get from watching horror movies is seeing what kinds of bizarro shit human beings are capable of conceiving of and visually representing on screen. Therein lies the appeal of gore for me as well.  I don't revel in gore because I'm a sadist, but rather because I enjoy seeing how people can maneuver innocuous household items to look like flesh, blood, and guts.  Plus I love how wild, loud, and vile horror film gore and imagery can be.  Subtle is nice, but sometimes you just need to unleash your imagination and revel in the excessive once in awhile.  Horror imagery isn't everybody's cup of tea, and I respect that, but my imagination flourishes in the excessive, grotesque, and oddball realms of horror film imagery and I know I'm not alone in that regard.

2.  Dark, offbeat humor.  Safe jokes don't make me laugh.  They make me smile out of politeness, but they do not genuinely engage or amuse me.  I despise most sitcoms and modern romcoms simply because they play it too safe and shoot for jokes that are cute rather than insightful.  Now I'm not going to pretend that the horror genre is always a fountain of insight, but the truth is that I simply find much of the humor in horror movies to be hard hitting and hilarious.  And yes, sometimes such humor provides satirical insight into our culture (take the undead mall patrons of Dawn of the Dead or the fake commercials of Tokyo Gore Police as examples).  But even when the humor is separated from societal commentary it often makes me laugh long and heartily.  What can I say, I just find slapstick funnier when gallons of fake blood are involved.

 3.  Iconic characters.  Sure every genre of film comes with its own recognizable stable of iconic characters and imagery, but it's the heroes, villains, and monsters of horror movies that really gain my admiration.  Part of the reason for this of course has to do with the grotesque and surreal imagery that horror films often employ in their creature design.  It's hard not to love the grotesque visual inventiveness of Hellraiser's cenobites, for example.  One also has to appreciate how iconic and instantly recognizable many horror villains (from Frankenstein to The Ring's Samara) are to modern audiences.  In today's image saturated world, the fact that people can pick Freddy Krueger's scarred visage out of a crowd speaks to how deeply integrated into our culture these movies are.