Among the Intellectualoids/Pop Tarts
Rabey, Steve
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS POP TARTS San Antonio Irode up the escalator with someone who looked like he might be going my way. He had long, frizzy hair, wore jeans and sneakers, and carried a...
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...that the rock group Aerosmith never got to use its $16,000 special-effects device to produce rain for their video of "Janie's Got a Gun" (which is about a sexually abused daughter who murders her dad...
...I was eating breakfast," says Sayer, "thinking about the paper I was going to present, and trying to mind my own business...
...I didn't find anything much," he said with surprising earnestness...
...Yeah...
...But I couldn't help overhearing the conversation at the table next to mine...
...He had long, frizzy hair, wore jeans and sneakers, and carried a briefcase I suspected was full of earth-shattering academic research...
...He adds, "Non-academics always—and often quite properly—make fun of academics...
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...He's angry at the intractable administrators who don't see the need for popular culture by Steve Rabey studies...
...The world is too serious for entertainment," he says...
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...He's not sure how long he's been married—he thinks it's twenty-three years—but he credits his wife with helping him keep his sanity: "Pat has been supportive and has carried at least 51 percent of the obligation...
...I didn't want to be so unkind as to laugh out loud, so I asked, "What did you find...
...I suppose most of us already know all of this," he said...
...But he surprised me...
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...Yet Browne, who has had a running battle with higher education since his undergraduate years at the University of Alabama, usually describes academics not as "we" but as "they...
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...I'm doing one on the 'Nancy' comic strip...
...Sayer, who has attended five PCA conferences, grew wistful as he thought back to last year's, which featured a paper on fish neckties, as well as a memorable incident...
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...6 6 T f there's some weird, crazy thing 1. you're interested in, you can find it here," says James Sayer, chairman of the communications department at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio...
...T he man behind the March meeting 1 in San Antonio is Ray B. Browne, founder of the PCA and chairman of the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio...
...At 69, he's warm and winsome and even something of a square...
...Sessions focused on television (" 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' as Representative of the Death of Shame"), film ("Postmodern Meditations on Who Framed Roger Rabbit"), advertising ("Aunt Jemima: 100 Years an American Symbol"), popular music ("Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in the Bed: The Bakery Trade in Popular Song"), pop print ("Seventeen Magazine: Socializing Teenage Girls in the `Right' Way to Be Beautiful and Fashionable"), sexuality ("How the Media Created the Bra-Burning Myth"), and others, including my personal favorite: "Generally Unknown and Often Misunderstood: An Introduction to People Who Fish Pay Lakes...
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...ture movement" it helped create is called Against Academia...
...Presenting a paper...
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...And he's angry at most professors, who "are generally content to sit around laterally in the cold ashes of today and yesterday rather than to build new outpost fires down the line into tomorrow...
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...This last insight we owe to a woman attending a session on "Metaphysical and New Age Concepts," who said she had researched the impact of birth trauma on reincarnated souls "during a previous life...
...Welcome to the 21st meeting of the Popular Culture Association (PCA), where thinkers gather each year to ponder "our everyday and dominant culture...
...Together we have thumbed our noses at the world—and prospered...
...some of the seminars are ludicrously small...
...Browne takes his presenters—all 1,843 of them—very seriously, although he does distinguish between the relevant and the truly flaky...
...From the songs that emerge he interprets the mood of Nancy's creator...
...Sessions proliferated on the teaching of pacifism through the Vietnam war, along with dozens of papers on gay and lesbian studies, including one called "Bugs Bunny at 50: Still Cwoss-Dwessing and Cawwot-Cwazy...
...But Browne doesn't come across as angry...
...He displays a near-monastic devotion to the cause, but he doesn't spend his free time watching "Twin Peaks" or MTV...
...Some of the subjects are more relevant than others...
...One moderator opened her session with the comment, "Well, I guess there are more people in the audience than there are people presenting papers, so that means it's time to begin...
...We academics are a national joke...
...Any letter postmarked after midnight, June 30 will be returned...
...McDonald's ads targeted at youth, blue-collar workers, and the elderly were part of a sinister divide-and-conquer strategy to create new meat-eaters...
...Here is his description of the conflict: This [movement] has been a kind of class-action suit against conventional points of view and fields of study in the Humanities . . . a confrontation between the Past and the Present, the Old and the New, the Sleepers and the Wakers, the Knowers and the Learners...
...He's angry at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the big foundations who don't give his PCA any money...
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...Ray Browne is angry, too...
...As a "Learner," I discovered that actress Jennifer Beals had had a "breast double," who stood in for the less-endowed star during key scenes in Flash-dance...
...Lights up at night, and is accurate to the 10th of a second each year...
...But I do know a guy who has a unique approach to 'Nancy.' He plots the precise location of her head in the frame and he converts these locations into musical notation...
...At the session called "Animal Rights," a dour, angry man in black lashed out against the lackeys whose "meat-mania" fueled "the techno-medieval assembly lines of death...
...One person leaned over to another and said, `Oh, I just really want to let you know how much I appreciate your work on stop signs.' I nearly coughed up my oatmeal...
...expecting to hear that he'd discovered the modern equivalent of the Holy Grail by using the latest tools of critical analysis...
...His history of the PCA and the "popular culSteve Rabey is religion writer at the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph...
...That's why we're here...
...an ad for lunch meat was said to portray "a bologna sandwich like a Eucharist—as if to eat bologna was to get a bite of the eternal truth...
...Many of the seminars employed the word "imagery" in their titles, as in "Religious Imagery on MTV" and "Imagery and Ideology in Thermometer Art" (in which the presenter said—with no indication that any pun was intended—that thermometers were "a barometer of American tastes and values...
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Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
