I was sorry when I heard that Dave Barry had decided to retire from the Miami Herald and quit doing his column. I was one of his biggest fans. I had a “hit parade” of favorite Dave Barry columns, as one might with popular songs. And one of my all-time favorites was a column he wrote, circa 1990, that actually displayed a dash of prophecy.
The target of his ridicule that week was Nielsen families, those lucky people chosen by the A.C. Nielsen company to keep a log of their TV viewing habits for the purpose of helping the television networks know who's watching what, and therefore, how much they might charge for advertising in this or that time slot.
Well, of course, the most obvious vein of humor Dave could mine in talking about Nielsen families was the basic dishonesty of TV viewers, their reluctance to admit what they really watch as opposed to what they want people to think they watch. Chances are, in our current age of Dancing With The Stars and American Idol, such a sense of shame has totally vanished from our culture. People nowadays watch garbage and are happy to admit they watch garbage. But it wasn’t always so. Many years ago I read an interview that the late Johnny Carson gave to TV Guide magazine. “People are hypocrites,” he remarked. “If you ask them what they want to see, they’ll tell you they want more quality programming, more documentaries. And then what do they watch? Gilligan’s Island.”
Well, precisely. And in his humor column about Nielsen families, Barry posed the logical question as to whether, if you were to see a program listed for this evening called Eat Bugs For Money, would you admit to watching it? Sure, you’d want to watch it, but would you own up to having watched it? In the little cartoon that accompanied this column, a TV viewer is enjoying Eat Bugs For Money, but over his shoulder we see him writing down “Masterpiece Theater” on his A.C. Nielsen log.
Now you see why I said this was prophetic. In 1990, the very idea that there could be such a program as Eat Bugs For Money was the stuff of major yuks. A decade or so later, the hottest thing on TV was Survivor, which was essentially Eat Bugs For Money On An Island Somewhere.
Which brings me to the subject of today’s blog posting: guilty pleasures. For some years now we’ve been hearing about these things, which supposedly we all enjoy in one form or another, our shamelessness about watching Dr. Phil notwithstanding. When the late Anna Nicole Smith returned to the airwaves after her own reality TV show had been canceled and then revived, the hype read, “America’s favorite guilty pleasure is back!” If you got a kick out of watching an overweight blonde bimbo whose main claim to fame was having married and then buried a 700 year-old oil tycoon feed pizza to her dog, well, more power to you, but (wink) we all know you probably watched the show with your living room curtains drawn. (And, if you were a Nielsen viewer, probably wrote down “The Discovery Channel” for that hour, right?)
If you’re into whips-and-chains sex, and like to surf the BDSM web sites, my guess would be that you keep CNN.com minimized at the bottom of your computer screen, so that if you hear anyone coming, (no pun intended) you can, with one quick click, switch from Mistress Jade in latex corset and hip boots, wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails as she humiliates a slave in her dungeon, to something more wholesome, such as rioting in Myanmar.
I have my guilty pleasures, believe me. How many men in their fifties do you know who still like to watch The Flintstones? Guilty. Ditto the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. (My favorite is Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties, and my favorite character in that one, the villain Snidely Whiplash. I just keep picturing Hans Conreid, who voiced that character, having the time of his life as he did so.)
But I have an even guiltier pleasure than cartoons. It involves music.
Since I was in high school, I’ve been a classical-music buff. Classical music is the closest thing I have to a hobby, although I do not, and never have, played an instrument. It was just something I kind of stumbled into. My mother played the piano, but more importantly, I had a couple of friends in high school, one of them a pianist, who were very much into Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and I picked it up by osmosis, from associating with people who liked that kind of music. By the time I was 16 I had left the Top 40 listening habits of my childhood entirely behind. My radio listening by then centered around the local classical music station, through which I was acquiring a protracted education about composers and their music. I would hear something I liked, jot down the composer’s name and the title of the piece, then scrape together a few dollars and head for the Wherehouse to see if I could find that record. My collection of classical records mushroomed. Then records were replaced by compact discs, and I went that way. By the time I’d reached middle age, I had maybe 1,200 classical LPs pre-dating the CD revolution, and then maybe 500-600 CDs on top of that. I could have started my own classical radio station, and my taste in music was one of the first things people learned about me when I made new friends. How could they not, walking into my apartment and being assaulted immediately by the strains of Arthur Rubinstein playing Beethoven’s Appassionata on his Last Concert for Israel album, or Luciano Pavarotti belting out Di quella pira from Verdi’s Il Trovatore? Well, they couldn’t. Over the years the classics have become part of who I am.
So imagine how I feel about having anyone find out that there are times when I really enjoy what used to be called Easy Listening, or sometimes, Beautiful Music? I’m not talking about the kind of stuff you hear on Easy Listening stations now, which resembles smooth jazz more than anything else. I’m talking about Easy Listening as it was defined in my own youth by pre-stereo FM. The sort of stuff my parents used to tune in at dinnertime to aid the digestion. The sort of stuff that used to be called “elevator music.” The sort of stuff that was once fodder for New Yorker cartoons: “The Homogenized Strings Present ‘Greatest Hits From The Dentist’s Office.’” Mantovani. Andre Kostelanetz.
Embarrassment be damned. I’m coming out. Sometimes I like this stuff. If I’m in the right kind of mood, (already depressed) the sound of a thousand violins sighing out Moon River can almost make me puddle up with tears. But if I’m not depressed, but merely stressed, those same violins can be the same sort of balm to the nervous system that is the main theme of the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The difference is, there’s no dark side to Mantovani, whereas Beethoven’s Ninth is a totally conceived work of art that takes you from the murky depths to the celestial heights. Sometimes, as when I’m stuck in traffic on New York Avenue in Washington, D.C. on a 95-degree summer day, with a bobtail truck in front of me obscuring my view so that I can’t even see how far the goddamn traffic jam extends, I don’t want to be mentally and spiritually taxed by great art; I just want to be sedated. The homogenized strings are good for that. The 1950s understood this, which is why the likes of Mantovani, Kostelantez and Percy Faith were so popular back then. America’s nerves were still a bit shot from World War II. Somnolent FM deejays offering up Charmaine and Autumn Leaves in arrangements for an army of strings with no brass or percussion were performing something of a public service to frazzled Levittown residents commuting back from the city, who moreover knew all too well that when they got home they were going to be bombarded with the strains of Elvis Presley singing Hound Dog emanating from 45-rpm record players in their children’s bedrooms.
For me this stuff conjures up childhood memories, such as my mother tuning in San Diego’s KITT-FM at dinnertime in the mid-1960s so that she and my father could (try to) enjoy “the music of Cloud Seven” while huddled around the kitchen table trying to have a pleasant meal in the presence of three kids aged 11, 9 and 7 respectively, at least two of whom would rather be listening to the Beatles. (FM radio trafficked largely in this kind of stuff in those days. AM was where you found popular music. This changed abruptly around 1970 when it was discovered that FM could broadcast in stereo, which AM could not. Pop music promptly began migrating to FM, where it pushed the homogenized strings off the dial and forced AM to turn to news, sports, and yakety-yak in order to survive.) There was no Internet in those days, nor was there compartmentalized cable TV or satellite radio. If my parents didn’t want to listen to Top 40 or country-western, wanted some other choice besides the Rolling Stones or Porter Wagoner, then the strains of Kostelantez on the local FM snoozer were their obvious choice. We kids rolled our eyeballs of course. We couldn’t wait to bolt the table, get back to our six-transistor sets and escape Cloud Seven in favor of Get Off My Cloud.
That was then, this is now. I’m 52 and life has beaten up on me the same as it does on everyone else. I don’t like to take Valium; it makes me depressed. But once in a while I like to take a little breather on Cloud Seven. I keep the CDs in the car. If anyone climbs in to ride with me somewhere, I quickly whisk Mantovani into the glove box and toss The Goldberg Variations or Schumann’s A minor Piano Concerto on the passenger-side seat so my guest rider can see the sort of stuff I leave carelessly strewn around. But I would never, ever write down Masterpiece Theater while watching Eat Bugs For Money. I’ll stick to Dudley Do-Right, thank you.
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