Focus, Hocus Pocus, and The Midnight Special: Myth and Reality

 

Dutch prog rock band Focus appeared on The Midnight Special on 5 October 1973 where they performed “Sylvia”, “House of the King” “Focus III” (the last song they did and which plays over the end credits of that evening’s show), and their hit “Hocus Pocus”. According to comments on the official and unofficial videos of “Hocus Pocus" on YouTube Focus was told they only had approximately five minutes to do the song, a song that clocked in at 6:42 on the album version on Moving Waves/Focus II. Focus, according to these posters, decided against trimming the song and instead played it at a faster speed. 

There may be some truth to the myth, rumour, or gossip that Focus was told they had less than five minutes to do the song and so speeded it up and speeded it up they clearly did during their performance of “Hocus Pocus" on The Midnight Special that evening. However, now that The Midnight Special has released the full version of their live performance of the show on YouTube it is clear that the full live version lasted 6:02 sans the Gladys Knight intro and outro on the unofficial video compared to 4:38 for the unofficial video copied from the VH1 rebroadcast of the show and put up on YouTube.

One can and should hypothesise about the time discrepancy here. It is possible that The Midnight Special edited down the 6:02 performance for the initial broadcast because of NBC broadcast time constraints. It is also possible that VH1 edited the performance down due to time constraints when they broadcast the show later (how much later I don’t know as I can find no information on the later VH1 broadcasts). What I do recall is that in the initial broadcasts of The Midnight Special on the show routinely ran for an hour and six, seven or eight minutes without commercial interruptions. And while I watched the show that night I can’t quite remember everything or much of anything about the performance of "Hocus Pocus” that night other than the live performance was different from the studio version, that my ears had to adjust to the different speed of the song compared to the studio version, and that I was impressed with the musicianship of the band, which was not a surprise to me since I already had a copy of Focus II/Moving Waves in my album collection that I listened to repeatedly at the time. What I do know now, thanks to the complete official video of “Hocus Pocus” The Midnight Special put up on YouTube, is that the section that includes Thijs van Leer repeating his yodel for about a minute was edited out of the VH! unofficial version that is also up on YouTube at the moment.  Another poster, he or she who runs the Unofficial Focus Band Video Archive, claims that another section, one like the first van Leer yodel we hear on The Midnight Special official video, was also edited out of the outtake as well.

The performance of “Hocus Pocus” on The Midnight Special that night is even more complicated and complex than the question of whether that specific performance of “Hocus Pocus” was whittled down because of NBC time constraints and did Focus speed up the song for that reason. By the way, Focus could have performed the US single version that lasted for 3:18 instead though by and large at that time most bands did not like the shortened versions mandated by record company suits because they wanted hits and most singles did not last during the era more than 2 to 4 minutes during the era. During the performance of “Sylvia”, for instance, Focus went into another somewhat different and much shorter performance of “Hocus Pocus” at the 3:30 mark, a brief performance that is even more speeded up than the 6:02 one. a performance that lasts until the 4:42 mark and includes some spontaneous interpolations. Additionally, Focus’s performance of “Hocus Pocus” in the long version and in the version on “Sylvia” was not the first time the band speeded up the song. Focus, for example, also speeded up their performance of “Hocus Pocus” on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1972 and varied the performance relative to the studio version of the song just as they did later on The Midnight Special performances. This suggests that Focus at least on occasion if not often sped up their performance of the song in live performances. But then bands weary of playing the same hit songs again and again in live performance did like to vary them in live performance to keep them interesting at the time.

Anyway, isn’t it fascinating how myths get started and persist even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary? The empirical evidence to the contrary? The “outtake” put up on YouTube by The Midnight Special, clearly shows that Focus played for six and a half minutes on The Midnight Special that October evening. And that, along with other empirical evidence that shows that Focus speeded up “Hocus Pocus” on other occasions, shows that the notion that Focus speeded up “Hocus Pocus” for their The Midnight Special performance in October of 1973, is a problematic hypothesis at best.

Musings on Zionism and It’s Discontents

 

Zionism, of course, as many scholars and intellectuals have noted, is the product of late 18th century, 19th century, and 20th century mostly European nationalism. Unlike constitutional nationalism, which defines national identity relative to political culture, “democracy”, for example, as in the United States and Canada, though there are wrinkles in Canadian nationalism which add complexity to notions of being Canadian, Zionism has increasingly become a form of ethnic nationalism, identity defined on the basis of certain cultural characteristics such as ethnicity or religion and the overlap between these, and soil, something one can particularly see in the right wing populist conception of Israeli Zionism and the decline of Kibbutz nationalism since the 1970s.

What a lot of people don’t want you to know and what a lot of people don’t know is that criticisms of European settler state Zionism, which are distinct from anti-Semitism or better anti-Judaicism, have been around almost as long as Zionism, religious and secular, has been around. Many Hasidic Jews of the 19th century, the era that saw the rise of political Zionism, and after, for example, saw political Zionism as a form of messianism, a form of false messianism wrought by the minds of men rather than by the will of god. They thus often saw political Zionism as heresy, as having another god before god, political Zionism.

A number of Jewish intellectuals have, over the years, been critics of Zionism. Across the twentieth century Zalman Baruch Rabinkow, who was influenced by Hasidim, Eric Fromm, who was a student of Rabinkow and who was also influenced by Hasidism, Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Albert Einstein, David Riesman, Tony Judt, Norman Finkelstein, and the Jewish Voice for Peace have criticised Zionism on both empirical and ethical grounds. Their criticism ranged from the normative, theological, or doctrinal—Zionism was a false form Judaism, that political, priestly, and theocratic Zionism undermined the humanistic and universal aspects of humanistic or prophetic Zionism--to the descriptive or empirical, pointing out the inhumane and unequal treatment of Palestinians and Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Israel given Zionism’s domination by European Jews, Israeli imperialism and colonialism (all of Judea and Samaria, the Zionist version of from the river to the sea), and the tendency of Israel to prefer force to negotiation, negotiation being incompatible with varieties of Zionist expansionism, to note a few of these criticisms. Needless to say, the Israeli use of force over negotiation since 1948 has not brought peace to the region just more anger and alienation.

None of these criticism of Zionism are “anti-Semitic” though interested parties like the Israeli government and its adjuncts around the world would have you believe that they are. Some of those who claim that any criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic, a strategy that parallels those used by nationalists, some other religous/ethnic groups, and those in power that any criticism, including empirical and theological criticism, of the US, Mormonism, and Islam, may believe their own subjective discourse or rhetoric. Others, however, demagogues, are using such claims cynically and for power purposes to marginalise,  demonise, intimidate, and silence those who offer rational, reasonable, and empirical analyses of the state of Israel, including Jews who make such criticisms of Zionist Israel. That such rhetoric seems to be working particularly with some university presidents with their retail notion of higher education and its moronic speech codes—you can’t outlaw speech any more than you can outlaw cannabis or alcohol in the long run--points up how many have bought into this rhetoric, a rhetoric that is nearly if not clearly fascist. And ain’t that, just as is the ties between Israel and Christian anti-Semites for whom the only good Jew is a converted or apocalypticised Jew, a paradox and in the final analysis pathetic! The use of force to demonise and criminalise speech will not work anymore than the use of force by Israel in the long run and will only breed more anger and alienation and perhaps even real more anti-Judaicism.

One can compellingly argue that this intellectual divide between polemicist and apologists for Israeli Zionism reflects a divide that goes back to ancient Israel and Judea between priestly Judaism, theocratic Judaism, and prophetic Judaism, the Judaism of the prophets who often criticised priestly Zionism for its breaking of the covenant with god, for its treatment of the poor, of outsiders, and for its emphasis on ritual without spirituality, for example. Fromm, for instance, saw himself as a proponent of prophetic Judaism—the “camp” I would place myself in--and regarded his empirical and spiritual and ideological critiques of Zionism as grounded in prophetic Judaism and empirical facts.

All across the modern and postmodern core world Jews continue to be divided between those who fall in the priestly and theocratic camp and who claim that any criticism of Israel and Zionist nationalism is anti-Judaicism, and those, who like the American Jews who marched for civil and human rights in places like Selma, Alabama, Jews like Abraham Joshua Heschel, for whom humanistic Judaism, prophetic Judaism, the Judaism which sympathises and even empathises with those who have been abused by the powerful, point out, just like the nevi’im did before them, that political and religious Zionism, is not living up to the covenant with god or to its own claims to be a humanistic beacon to the world. And so it goes...

A Memorial Day Message for the USPS...

It is Memorial Day so let’s honour the USPS for its service. Let’s remember that they deliver 90% plus of First Class Mail. Let’s remember that they deliver 70% plus of media mail. Let’s remember that they lose mail and parcels on a regular basis. Let’s remember that they muck up package deliveries on a regular basis sending, for example, a parcel of mine that arrived at its destination—Albany, NY-north to Lake Placid, NY and back to Springfield, Mass (north by south east) for a second time where it sits not having moved since presumably because it is Memorial Day. So let’s us remember on this Memorial Day Post Office incompetence and simple Post Office muck-ups. Praise the Lord.

A few hours after I wrote this, around 7:30 pm in fact, my parcel, which had been sitting in Springfield, Mass since 12:40 am, managed to make it back to Albany for its second visit just in time to sit there probably until Tuesday which means I won’t get something I should have gotten on Friday until Wednesday since Monday is the official day of Memorial Day, the day when some have a day off and can officially “celebrate” the state holiday by going shopping, barbecuing, resting and relaxing, and watching sports on the telly. 

Isn’t it interesting how so many of these muck-ups at the USPS seem to occur around holidays, holidays when no mail is delivered by the US Post Office? It is as though there really is a real god resideing somewhere in the heavens who is using the post office to arbitrarily and whimsically punish us at his, her, or its fancy rather like that god in that wonderful play Steambath by Bruch Jay Friedman that played off Broadway in 1970 and on PBS in 1973, well on twenty-four PBS stations since the others refused to run it presumably because of its “controversial" subject matter and the fact that in the play god is depicted as a Puerto Rican male. America, home of the not so brave undefenders of the more symbolic than real free speech. But hey, at least PBS gives us and has given us since 1989, the live broadcast of the National Memorial Day Concert from the US Capitol in Washington DC. Praise the Lord and pass the nationalist ammunition.

Remembering Walt West and Walt West Books

 

I have had a lot of jobs over my nearly seventy years of life. Beginning in the early 1970s while I was in high school and around seventeen or eighteen my job career began. I washed dishes at John’s Awful Awful for a week. Awful. Awful. I cleaned the executive offices at Bathey Industries which made bins, if I recall, for General Motors. Awful. Awful. Awful. I worked in a factory when it was the norm to go from high school to good paying, good benefit, and union represented factory work. That job was a little of this and a little of that but mostly more than a little of that. I worked as an acquisitions editor at a publisher until I was downsized during one of America’s many busts. Not a bad job all in all.  I taught part-time, something I preferred because I really can’t stand to be embedded within bureaucracies of any sort. Teaching was OK even though by that time many of America’s colleges and universities had become politically and ideologically correct slightly more rigorous than high school institutions of higher learning and their bureaucrats, who had increased dramatically in universities and colleges, thought largely in neo-liberal corporate retail terms, a meaning system that doesn’t lend itself to a liberal arts emphasis. And I worked in a bunch of bookstores.

I was a book nerd. My English Mum, who recently passed as did my Swiss Dad, made me that way. She bought me my first books when I was five and I never looked back. In junior high in Dallas I remember falling in love with Shakespeare. In high school I continued to read voraciously and teachers like Mrs. Pugh gave me more and more books than were required in the class. She even gave me book recommendations periodically so I could read even more. 

This love of books, of course, translated into a love of bookstores and for used bookstores in particular. I haunted bookstores and particularly used bookstores since after I went to university since I was one of those legions a poor university students in the many places I lived and visited over the course of my life. In fact, one of the first things I did when I moved to or visited someplace or somewhere was to go to used bookstores in the area. I visited used bookstores, to name a few, in Bloomington, in Dallas, in South Bend, (the wonderful Erasmus Books, one of my favourites), in Austin,  in Toronto,  in Calgary, in Edmonton, in Cambridge, and in Moscow in order to find sustenance and relaxation.

In 1991 I moved to Provo, Utah to study Mormonism, do research, and to teach occasionally at Brigham Young University which had a strong intellectual culture and some of the best undergraduate students I ever encountered during my years of life. As was my Kant like pattern I visited Provo’s used bookstores as soon as I could. I visited Pioneer Books which was then on Columbia near Deseret Industries. My favourite used bookstore, however, was Walt West Books which was initially on a side street east of Pioneer off Columbia.

One day when I was visiting Walt West Books Walt and his lone employee Anita were in the midst of moving from the very small bookstore on the side street to a quite large one on Columbia. I pitched in and helped move books via a grocery shopping cart as I had nothing else better to do and loved talking to Anita and Walt. 

Afterwards I visited Walt West Books once a week and became better acquainted withe both Anita and Walt. Anita and I had a lot in common. She was from, if memory served, the Toronto area and I had once lived briefly in nearby Waterloo and had gotten into the great University of Toronto once upon a time. Walt had lived in the East Bay part of the San Fransisco area. I don’t remember what he did employment wise. What I do remember is that Walt had a part-time book business. As such he knew a lot of booksellers and book buyers in the area including buyers from the legendary and sadly now shuttered Cody’s Books in Berkeley, one of the many great bookstores killed by faux bookstores like Borders, faux because books for them were units to move akin to Serta mattresses, and their ability to buy large numbers of books in bulk and sell them more cheaply than independent bookstores as a result, a practise that almost certainly was planned specifically to drive independent bookstores out of business which it far too often did.

When Anita resigned her position at Walt’s to get married and, if memory serves, to move back to the Toronto area I convinced Walt that he should hire me. It was one of the best things I ever did. I did a lot of the normal things someone who works in a used bookstore generally does. I ran the cash register. I helped customers find books they wanted. I suggested books to customers. I shelved newly acquired books. I alphabetised the books we already had in the many book sections we had in the store from literature to Mormon Studies, which was not surprisingly at the front of the store. I made runs to the Salt Lake area publishers to get Mormon Studies books including some from one of the leading Mormon fundamentalist publishers at the time. I ordered new Mormon Studies releases from publishers like the University of Illinois Press, one of the if not the leader in scholarly Mormon publications at the time. I occasionally perused Walt’s warehouse and brought in new stock including two complete sets of Dialogue, the intellectual Mormon journal. I shovelled snow from the walkway. I went over to Deseret Industries and picked up low cost books if we could resell them. I recall picking up a signed copy of a book by a well-known Mormon author whose name I no longer recall. We quickly sold it for $25 US dollars. I met other booksellers who Walt knew or who would come over to Walt’s including Curt Bench, Lynn, from Seagull books, who once brought a first edition of the Book of Mormon into the store. I met a book buyer from Cody’s in Berkeley who Walt knew well. I met Gary from Pioneer Books who I became very close to. I sold an OED and several religious books to actor Edward Herman, who I had a wonderful conversation with. Bright man who was very real. I met sociologist of religion Stephen Kent from the University of Alberta whose work I knew, and talked with him about Mormonism. I met hordes of Mormons who were not professional historians but who had an intense interest in and extensive knowledge of Mormon history and its controversies and discontents.

From the vantage point of 2024 working at Walt’s was the job I had that I liked most over the course of my life. It was an intellectually stimulating place to work and the bookstore itself was like the Garden of Eden to someone like me who loved books and the intellectual life. I got so much joy from that job that I sometimes wished afterwards that I owned my own bookstore where I could spend all of my days, a bookstore like Walt West Books. Plus by working at Walt West Books I got to meet Walt West.

Walt was a  kind of a surrogate father to me. He gave me opportunities to prove myself. He supported me when I went down to Quaker weekend at the nuclear test site near Las Vegas, Nevada to protest nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons testing, and war. As an early opponent of the war in Vietnam I became acquainted with Quakers and had a degree of respect for them despite my devotion to Groucho’s counsel never to join a group which would have me as a member. He supported me and let me take time off to help plan the Mormon weekend at the test site, the Mormon Peace Gathering. He let me and some of my companions use his computer to set up our alternative newspaper the Deseret Free Press, which barely lasted for two or three issues before it imploded. He supported me when I published opinion pieces in local Provo and Orem newspapers critical of the lack of freedom of speech and academic freedom at BYU. Walt was a gentleman, a gentle person, and one of the finest people i have ever met. I will always remember him for as long as I live.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Musings on Literalism and Fundamentalism in the Brave New Social Media

 

Literalism has a long history in “reading” cultures globally and in “reading” cultures in the United States. How long this history is, however, is an open question. 

Whether those who heard the oral tales that came to be attributed to a Homer or the tales of what would become part of the Tanakh, tales like the two creation stories,  the tale of Jacob and Esau, the story of Abraham and Isaac, or the tale of Moses in the Old Testament book of Genesis, took these tales literally or believed they were literally true is a question that cannot be answered since we don’t have the notes of readers in the margins of these books, which, of course, did not become “books” in the modern sense until late in the historical game anyway.  

There were what might be taken as notations in manuscripts copied by scribes beyond the marginalia one finds in copied manuscripts. Scholars, for instance, can find variants and mistakes in copied texts like the Bible and additions to texts, as in the works of Josephus, in which ideologically interested scribes tried to correct or harmonise textual variants to prove the veracity of the biblical tales. Mass notations in mass produced books, however, had to wait for what constituted the mass production of books after the invention of the printing press and this has led, in some cases, to the fascinating exploration of how readers read texts by scholars like Robert Darnton whose essay on the marginal notes of an Enlightenment reader of Rousseau in his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Essays in French Cultural History and the meaning Rousseau had for this member of the bourgeoisie, for example, is just one effort to define and delineate a historically sensitive social and cultural approach to how readers read texts. In the twentieth century biblical scholar Brevard Childs explored, if rather briefly how readers read parts of the biblical Book of Genesism across time and space. 

What we do know about many readers of the Bible is that many came to believe in the literal truth of the tales in the Bible over time. By the twentieth century many Americans, for example, came to believe that Adam, humankind, from adamah, those who eke out a living from the ground or the earth, and Eve, hawwah, living, the source of life, were literal people, ish, male, and ishshah, female, who literally existed and literally lived in a paradisiacal Garden of Eden. For them Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were not just metaphorical, allegorical, or symbolic, all prominent approaches to the biblical texts by elites before the twentieth century. This literalism arose, in large part, as a reactions within the American Christian community to the controversial theory of evolution—geological, human, historical—a theory that became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and throughout the Western world and as a reaction to the rise of a higher biblical criticism which claimed that the Torah was made up of various documents—J, E, P, and D, written at various times and in various spaces and hence was not written by Moses as tradition had it. 

By the twentieth century a culture of biblical literalism had developed in the United States, a culture in which many readers or hearers came to believe that what they read or heard was literally factual or true. They came to believe that Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Jacob, Jospeh, Abraham, Moses, and Joshua, for example, were really flesh and bones people who strode like giants around Israel and Judea. This literalist or fundamentalist, as polemicists and apologists of biblical literalism came to call their brand of Christianity, also led to readings which ignored contradictions in their literally true text, a text they now came to see as authored by god—a notion of authorship that was impacted by post-Enlightenment romanticism--such as the inconsistencies in the two stories of creation, the two stories of what happened to Jericho when the “chosen people’ conquered Canaan, and the multiple tales of the life of Jesus in the Christian addition to the Tanakh, the New Testament and which, as a consequence, could not be false since god was truth writ large. This belief in the literal truth of mythic tales and legends also led to decontextualisation as many came to believe that it was unnecessary to put these tales into economic, political, cultural, geographic, or demographic contexts since an all knowing god was the author of this “history”, the author of this salvation history, a history that floated fully formed outside of time and space.

This religious literalism fed into other forms of literalism as several scholars have noted. Many American Christians came to believe, as many British Israelites before them believed, for instance, that they were now god’s chosen people and that god guided America, if, of course, it and its people lived up to its part of its covenant with god as expressed in holy writ. As a consequence, many came to believe that the American Constitution, for example, was inspired, divine, part of god’s plan for his chosen country and his chosen people. In turn, many came to believe that the US Constitution had to be taken literally and that it was essential for Americans and for American judges to discern the original intent of those who authored the Constitution, a Constitution whose original author, many cane to believe, was ultimately god almighty himself who was writing through the faithful and saintly founding fathers.

One can readily find a secular version of this literalism in many reaction videos to movies and television shows on the social media site YouTube. The advent of the new digital media, of course, and the increasing number of reaction videos by reactors, most of whom react to movies, television shows, books, or current events in order to make money, something that in itself impacts how reactors react to what they are reacting to and which, in turn, raises questions about the dispassion of reactors, has made it easier for researchers, at least in some ways, to explore, how some “read” the movies or television shows they are reacting to. While researchers may not know some demographic, economic, political, cultural, and geographic facts about these readers, these reactions do reveal quite a lot about the cultural and ideological presuppositions of reactors. One of the things researchers do know about many if not most of these reactors culturally is that many if not most of them take a literal approach to the movie or TV texts they are reacting to and downplay and often ignore, for whatever reason, metaphorical, allegorical, mythological, political, economic, other cultural, and geographical approaches and aspects of the texts they “react” to. Secular fundamentalism.

One of the forms this secular reaction literalism has taken is pointed up, for example, in a reaction by the Review Crew to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "What’s My Line” I recently ran across in my ethnographic explorations of YouTube. At one point in their reaction to the second hour of this episode, for instance, some members of the three member Review Crew maintained that they hadn’t been informed by the canonical text as to why one of the characters in this season two episode of Buffy, the vampire paramour  of vampire Spike Drusilla, is ill and needs to be cured, one of the foci of the episode, and implicitly complained about it.

This need for continuity by many readers or viewers, of course, did not originate with Buffy. As I noted fundamentalist Christians came to impose continuity on inconsistent biblical texts. In some cases secular literalism with its devotion to continuity was not able, at least initially, to sweep inconsistencies under the rug. Devotees of the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, for instance, noted the inconsistencies in the canonical text as to where Doctor Watson, Holmes’s companion, was shot during his medical service in the British military during the Afghanistan war. Devotees of the British television show Doctor Who noted the many inconsistencies that appeared in that show over its sixteen year run. One episode guide to the show, in fact titled The Discontinuity Guide, even pointed out these discontinuities in its analysis of each episode celebrating this, to some extent, in the process. Devotees of The X-Files noted the inconsistencies in the mythological aspects of that TV show, something many X-Files fans are averse to doing these days and who are more than willing to attack, often with ad hominems, any one who has the “bad manners" to do so these days as comments on X-Files reactions to “negative” reactions on YouTube show. Can the criminalisation of empirically grounded critical comments on The X-Files and the categorisation of them as hate speech be far behind in these selective politically and ideologically correct looney McCarthyesque days?

As television in the UK and US changed and became more serially oriented beyond the inherently serial adaptations of classic novels by people like the Brontes, Austen, and Dickens in the seventies and eighties, however, devotees or fans of these shows became ever more concerned about perceived discontinuities in their favourite television shows. Some tried to smooth these discontinuities over imposing continuities on and over the discontinuities just as Christian fundamentalists had done before them with the Bible. In the process they ignored the fact that Conan Doyle was ambivalent about the Holmes stories and this ambivalence led to discontinuities, that Doctor Who’s personnel changed over the years and that not all of them were devoted to continuity particularly in the early years of a show when the show was not that highly regarded particularly by higher level bureaucrats at the BBC, and that the popularity of The X-Files (and Twin Peaks before it) and the fact that popularity in American television extended a shows run to that of a dead horse generally meant that a show had to be prolonged and that this prolongation wasn’t always good for what was already laid down in the canonical text and hence for continuity. 

Eventually a kind of priesthood developed, a proprietary priesthood that held those who made cultish television shows like Doctor Who responsible for maintaining continuities and simultaneously held them responsible for and accountable for what they saw as discontinuities. Many in the Doctor Who fan clubs that arose, for instance, decried the change in tone that occurred in the Graham Williams-Douglas Adams years of the show seeing them as undermining the continuity and seriousness of the show.

There are many paradoxes in this cult like devotion to continuity among movie and television show cults. While the Williams-Adams years were largely initially demonised and held by many at the time of their broadcast to be some of the worse episodes of Who ever made many now consider them some of the best ever episodes of the show. The Review Crew’s complaints about unanswered questions in “What’s My Line” miss the fact that Spike referenced an ugly mob in Prague attacking both he and Drusilla. Attention spans are always at attention. Paradoxically, in other words, many reactors to Buffy (and Angel and Firefly and the new Who miss some of the more “subtler” continuities in each show in addition to the metaphorical and allegorical dimensions or levels of the show.

There are a number of things I find interesting about the cult of continuity beyond how time can change aesthetic perceptions and how readers and watchers are not always attentive to detail, which in themselves raise questions about the cult of continuity. One of the things I find fascinating, for instance, is the apparent “need" of readers and watchers for answers from the canonical text itself about certain “facts" instead of surmising the answers from information presented in the text, logically speculating or hypothesising about details in the show and coming to conclusions about them via verification of falsification, or using common sense to grasp that in a forty minute to one hour television show decisions have to be made about what must be put in to an episode and what is not essential to be put in and thus can be left out under the assumption that readers can make the connection themselves. It is not necessary, for instance, to show Buffy going from school to home since if Buffy has arrived home after leaving school. Clearly any viewer can assume she got home in some way, shape, or form via plain logic

I find what this says about readers fascinating. It seems to confirm that most readers are not only literalists or fundamentalists but that they need those in charge to provide answers about such issues to them rather than to discern them themselves. And what this says about authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality is interesting and fascinating. Don’t question authority. Defer to Authority. Accept authority. On the other hand, what the demand for continuity from makers of films and television shows by fans says about fans and about politics is also interesting. I suppose some commentators might see fan advocacy and calls for continuity as democratic. But then one can also argue that some forms of the Protestant every person his or her own Bible interpreter is also democratic. It is also, however, at the same time ultimately anti-intellectual at least in most of its generally literalist forms.

The Books of My Life: Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class

 

The study of Popular Culture in American universities while present in small doses before 1960 is, like African American Studies, Latino and Latina Studies, and Women’s Studies, largely a product of the culture wars of the 1960s. Still even In the wake of that “bloody” culture war the study of popular film and eventually popular music and popular television in the university has been accepted only grudgingly in many quarters. 

The struggle to bring film, television, and popular music into the liberal arts curriculum thus has not been easy given the fact that for many intellectuals and academics in the 1950s and the 1960s the mass media, including film, pop music, and television, were seen as lowest common denominator opiates—which in some cases is true--that were of little interest to those who studied culture, meaning high culture, in the academy. By the time I went to university in the 1970s, however, film was comfortably ensconced in English, Comparative Literature Departments and even Film Programmes and Departments began to appear. Eventually, Popular Culture, if in a more practical and pragmatic key, was added into the curricular mix as those neo-liberals who ran and run the increasingly retail oriented bureaucracies known as universities and colleges discovered that there is students to be matriculated and monies to be made from the teaching of film, television, and pop music as a “profession”, even if they are all professions that, like professional sports, are not easy to break into.

As someone who came of age in the 1960s I grew to love film, popular music, and eventually television, once it, from my perspective, matured. By 1963 I had grown to love the Beatles and could barely wait for the next Beatles single or album release to appear at the record store, department store, or drug store down the street from my Dallas home. By 1967, thanks to the Beatles albums Rubber Soul. Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, I had increasingly come to see popular music as an art form. In this I was not alone as William Mann’s famous 1963 review of Beatles songs as art in the Times and the rise of “intelligent” rock magazines like Rolling Stone, NME, and Melody Maker make clear. By 1968 I was listening to what we would now call an alternative FM radio station in Arlington and developing a taste for progressive art rock and progressive psychedelic bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues and later on Yes, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Spirit, Kansas, Captain Beyond, and, in particular, Gentle Giant. Prog became my popular music of choice—I was already a devotee of classical music--though I continued to enjoy selectively other pop music genres in the increasingly segmented world of popular music including pop, power pop, soul, hard rock, punk, new wave, new romanticism, goth, hard rock, grunge, and even a bit of heavy metal.

Another of the bands I "got into” in those years was Rush. I first heard the Canadian rock trio in 1974 when I bought their eponymous first album. I liked it and still do. Despite this I really didn’t connect with Rush’s subsequent albums until Permanent Waves came out in 1980. I suspect this was because I was never a comic book nerd, a science fiction geek, or a fan of Ayn Rand and her cult. I was more into Hitchcock, Mark Twain, and Max Weber. Permanent Waves, however, with its, what seemed to me at the time, more progressive nature, appealed to me a lot and made me a Rush fan again. I bought every album they released afterwards save for Clockwork Angels, which I will hope to pick up at some point.

Even though I was into rock I was never an inveterate reader of rock magazines. I tended to dismiss rock "critics" because of their, what seemed to me, low level “criticism", a “criticism that seemed to me a hodgepodge of new journalistic narcissism and arrogance a la Pauline Kael blended with an inability to comprehend that beauty and value are in the eye of the beholder. What I valued was what I, for whatever cultural, economic, political, demographic, or geographic reason or reasons, liked. The fact that what I liked was not liked by most “critics” particularly at Rolling Stone, didn’t matter to me. I did not give a crap what they liked for whatever musically correct reason. I liked what I liked and that was good enough for me. After all, I was never someone to wilt before peer pressure.

When I matriculated at university I discovered that there were books on popular culture. I discovered Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock. I discovered Dick Hebdige’s book on the mods, the punks, and subcultural style. I discovered several of Simon Frith’s many early books on popular music. I discovered John Tulloch’s and Manuel Alverado’s book on Doctor Who, a show I grew up with. I discovered the publications of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and even thought of applying there for postgraduate work there. I was lucky I didn’t as I did not anticipate the devastation and destruction Margaret Thatcher left in her godzilla like wake. I even began to, if tentatively, write on popular culture when I wrote an essay on Punk Names for an Anthropology seminar on Names and Labels though it was not at the heart of what I studied in university.

Given all this it is not surprising that I would eventually get around to reading Canadian ethnomusicologist Chris McDonald’s Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). McDonald does an excellent job of bringing together textual analysis, sociology, ethnography, and history in his analysis of Rush. For McDonald Rush and its science fiction and fantasy lyrics, its dispassionate lyrics, its musical virtuosity, its musical inventiveness and experimentation, and its emphasis on hard work and professionalism, is a middle class band whose music particularly appeals to other White middle class male nerds—like myself—including middle class musician nerds—not like myself--who too feel like outsiders in the suburbs they grew up in. McDonald also does a nice job of exploring the different cultures into which White middle class male critics—many of whom act as rock’s tastemakers for many listeners--are inscribed one of which has made Rush and its progressive rock confreres virtually the spawn of a rock and roll Satan.

I did have a few problems with McDonald’s book. McDonald seems to take the position that Canada, from where Rush hails, is either like the US or converging with it while not arguing for either position. Did the US academic publisher balk at too much Canadian content? He does not inform us where those he interviewed are from. Does he think it not matters? But does it matter? Still I found Rush, Rock Music and the Middle Class: Dreaming in Middletown an excellent analysis of Rush and its contexts and recommend it to those with an intellectual interest in popular culture. Those who respond to any scholarly work on popular culture, like the aptly named Xtreme who offers a rather typical knee jerk anti-intellectual “review" of the book and the aptly named Tom Brady, who doesn’t grasp that the formulaic claim that something is “boring" tells us little about what is being reviewed and a lot about the “reader” or “listener” doing the “review", on Amazon, one of the many brave new digital world sites that has opened its coffers up to the lowest lowest common denominator, need not apply. They, after all, appear to prefer their world unexamined so they can continue to live their lives in a world where myths and fairy tales are mistaken for reality.