Some Thoughts on The Walking Dead

I actually didn't start watching The Walking Dead until a couple years ago. When the rest of the world was on Season Five, I was starting from the very beginning. By the end of that season, I had caught up with the entire series, but while I had often enjoyed it, I decided by this time that I was all done. The story was repetitive: Rick's group meets some new people, they have to figure out whether or not to trust these new people, they consider whether it's possible to hang onto their humanity in a zombie-infested post-Apocalyptic world. Rinse and repeat. The seasons, I felt, were too damn long. Game of Thrones needs ten hours per season to tell an extremely complex story populated with dozens of important characters. Does The Walking Dead really require sixteen hour-long episodes per season to tell its story? Invariably, each season has some serious lulls - maybe three dull episodes for every one great one. The characterization can also be either inconsistent (as in the case of Andrea and the Governor) or sort of one-note (Merle). Don't get me wrong - it was fun at times, and there were great individual episodes (the one where the gang sees that backpacker by the side of the road but they don't pick him up, the one where Carol and Tyreese have to take care of those two sisters, etc.). But five seasons was enough for me.

I actually haven't watched Season Six, and I hadn't even heard about the cliff-hanger at the end. But I couldn't help but hear the chatter about the bloody premier of Season Seven. At first I told myself I didn't want to know the specifics, in case I ever resumed watching. But my curiosity quickly got the better of me, and I watched the big moments on Youtube.

*Spoiler Alert*

Much ink has already been spilled in the week since we lost Glenn and Abraham. I saw this little comment on a Youtube video of their death scenes: "Violets are Blue/Roses are Red/People are triggered/Because Glenn is dead." Cute. The problem, though, is not that I'm offended or "triggered" by extreme violence. It seems doubtful to me that anyone who is "triggered" by violence - even violence as extreme as the beating Glenn took - would have made it all the way to Season Seven of this series. Hell, the violence is part of what I love about the show. Remember when the gang hoisted that fat walker out of the well and its stomach burst open? That was gross and awesome.

So accurate.

Here's the bigger problem: if you ask an audience to care about a character, it is incumbent upon you as a writer to care about that character as well. This isn't to say that nothing bad can happen to sympathetic characters: Ned Stark in Game of Thrones and Adriana la Cerva in The Sopranos both suffer horrible fates, much worse than what they deserve, and their deaths were two of the most poignant in television history. By offing Glenn in such a gratuitous, almost gleefully violent fashion, the writers disrespected a character whom many fans have grown to love, and by extension, they disrespected their audience. They gave Glenn the kind of death usually reserved for random stock teenagers in slasher flicks. This type of over-the-top gore is totally acceptable in something like Final Destination. We have no emotional attachment to any of the poor souls in those movies, who are being killed by tanning beds and staple guns. There's nothing inherently wrong with those movies. They're fun, and they feed our human curiosity and thirst for macabre spectacle. But they are low art; they aspire to be nothing more than slasher flicks.

Maybe I shouldn't be judging The Walking Dead as anything more than a mindless gore-fest. It's only a zombie show, for crying out loud. But the thing is, it certainly seems to want to be recognized as more than that. And at times, it has succeeded: some of later episodes of Season Four, for example, reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. At its best, The Walking Dead succeeded because it was, however improbably, an introspective, even philosophical show about zombies.

In a letter to TWD fans before this season's premier, Robert Kirkman, the author of the comic books and co-creator of the show, wrote: "We did want you to talk. And talk you are." Well ok - mission accomplished. You got me to talk about a show I haven't actually watched in more than a season.

But the creators need to understand that all this talk will come at the expense of TWD's being considered as a serious show. When Neegan's bat came down on Glenn's head, the show formally announced what some had suspected for a while: that it had chosen Low Art and "talk" over Higher Art and respect. I was already done with this show. Now I'm even doner.

P.S. - I reject the argument that Glenn's death was fine because it was true to the comics. Comic books play by a different set of rules. TWD was free to veer from the plot of the comic books, as they have done many times before. This reminds me of the lame defense of Matthew Crawley's death in Downton Abbey (another really disappointing tv moment), that he was leaving the show and they had to kill him off. Bad tv is bad tv - regardless of what is happening outside the world of the show.

Capp-oat-ccino

Blog Assignment #5

This entry is modeled on "Big Boy," by David Sedaris. For this one, I want you to tell a story about something odd and funny that has happened to you. Like the incident David Sedaris retells, it should be fairly mundane. Avoid a big moral of the story here. Your only job is to tell the story in an amusing way.

Your must contain at least one example of each of the following techniques: parallel structure, assonance and dialogue.

Shoot for between 650 and 750 words. (Sedaris' essay is 713.)

__________________________________________________________________________________________

This story also appears on the website 404words.com, which features "palm-sized stories" of 404 words or fewer. In order to be able to submit the story to this site, I had to trim it down so that it no longer fits my suggested word count range.

Note: The website accompanies the story with what looks to be a pleasant and appetizing latte. It's basically the polar opposite of the coffee I describe in the story. Mine looked more like this:

Capp-oat-ccino

Nick and I were driving back from a rather disappointing day in Pittsburgh. It was supposed to have been a weekend, and we were supposed to have seen a baseball game, but Mother Nature had other plans. Instead, it had been a day of wandering around in the rain, and eating everything in sight, which had its merits – but ultimately felt a little lacking without the baseball.

About halfway between Pittsburgh and D.C. we stopped in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, a trucker’s mecca with some of the best rest stops anywhere. Of particular note is the largest Sheetz gas station I’ve ever seen. Needless to say, after a two hour drive, on a dark, wet evening, a stop was in order. This Sheetz seemed likely to stock just the sort of artificial, sugary cappuccino that I seem to crave only on road trips. Sure enough: the machine inside had ten flavors of Cappuccino, each crazier than the next. It seemed unadventurous to select a flavor as mundane as French Vanilla or Hazelnut. So I pressed the button for the “Brown Sugar Raisin Oatmeal” Cappuccino. I paid at the counter and eagerly awaited my first sip.

I took that sip in the parking lot, which was a good thing – because I wasn’t expecting to find solid chunks floating in my coffee. Big solid chunks, which I spat out onto the pavement. Clearly, the milk must have been curdled. On one level, this was oddly comforting – I hadn’t previously been certain that machine cappuccino was made with genuine milk. Apparently it was. However, this didn’t override the fact that I was now trying my best not to chew on pieces of this milk. I walked back inside to demand an explanation.

“There are chunks in my coffee. The milk is all curdled,” I said to the matronly cashier, placing my cup down on the counter.

“What kind did you try sir?”

“What?”

“Did you buy the Oatmeal flavor?” she asked, in what I took to be a somewhat judgmental tone.

“Yes. Why?”

It’s Brown Sugar Raisin Capp-OAT-ccino. It has oats in it,” she said, tiredly.

“What? Why?”

“Would you like to try another flavor, sir?”

Adventure over. I chickened out and filled a new cup with some boring flavor of cappuccino. Still, no regrets. I’ve already forgotten every cup of French Vanilla I’ve ever had, but I’m unlikely to forget my first and last Capp-oat-ccino.

Best of Student Comments Vol. 1

I started teaching full time in the fall of 2006, which means that I have now amassed over a decade's worth of funny anecdotes about students. These can be broken into two major categories: Funny Things Students have Said and Funny Things Students have Written. (Both of these categories can be further broken into Intentional Humor and Unintentional Humor.) For Volume One of what may end up being a recurring series, here are a few highlights from the verbal category.

Intentional Comedy

Me: [speaking to a freshman class] There is more than one way to write effectively and everyone has their own personal preferences. So English teachers always contradict each other.
Student: [under his breath, to the kid sitting next to him] Last year, my teacher told us that English teachers never contradict each other.

Me: [talking about my grad school experience at Brown] I only spent a year there. I don't really keep in touch with any of my Brown friends.
Student: Uh, Mr. Barron. I think they prefer to be called African American.

Unintentional Comedy

Me: Don't forget - your paper is due at noon tomorrow.
Student: You mean noon as in, like, midnight noon?
Me: ... That's not a thing.

(Note to self: Midnight Noon has band name potential.)

Student: Hey Mr. Barron, I know you're Jewish and everything, but did you hear we have a new pope?

(Fair point. We do have our own Jewish newspapers and cable news outlets that don't report on that stuff.)

Student: Mr. Barron, what year were you born?
Me: 1982. Why?
Student: [disappointed] Oh. I had a question about the fifties...

(I mean, I know kids have no real concept of age. But given that I couldn't have been older than 27 at the time, could anyone - even a fourteen-year-old kid - have reasonably mistaken me for sixty-something?)

Me: Has anyone ever heard of a famous book called The Sound and the Fury?
[thirty seconds of crickets]
Student: [with a surfer/stoner inflection] I've seen The Fast and the Furious!

(In retrospect, that one's on me. Was I really expecting that this reference would mean anything to a junior remedial class?)

More to come...

PS - Rolling Stone apparently wrote their own rules of concert etiquette a few years ago, and some of them are very similar to mine. They even include a bit about "Freebird." Good to know I'm not alone.

Things Not to Do at Concerts

Last night, I went to a rock show at Ottobar, a small club in Baltimore. The band was Nada Surf, a one-hit-wonder from the 90's, who unexpectedly reinvented themselves as an indie power pop band almost ten years after their initial radio success. They're one of my favorite groups, and it was my fourth time seeing them. I enjoyed the show, but what I really want to talk about is concert etiquette. Whether I want to or not, I spend a good chunk of most concerts observing the behavior of my fellow audience-members. It's not what I pay the money for, but it's kind of unavoidable. And as much as I enjoyed watching the band last night, my experience in the audience was a role call of almost every conceivable breach of the unwritten rules of concert decorum. It got me thinking that maybe I ought to attempt to record these rules, just so we're all on the same page.

To be clear, I don't consider myself the consummate Cool Concert Guy. (Actually, I felt I had fulfilled my Coolness Quotient for the evening just by virtue of showing up.) And - who knows? - maybe during the course of my concert-going career, I've been guilty of violating one or two of these rules myself at some point. But that doesn't make them any less valid.

Here are the big ones:

DON'T sing louder than the actual singer. Everyone is very impressed that you know all the words, but they paid to hear the band and not you. By all means, sing if you know the words, but it shouldn't be your personal goal to be heard above the P.A. system.

DO have regard for other people's bodies. Yes, people are packed into close quarters at rock clubs. And yes, upbeat, loud music tends provoke people to dance and jump and flail around. And yes, alcohol exacerbates the dancing, jumping and flailing. And far be it from me to tell people not to do dance, jump and flail at a concert - but there is a way to do these things without constantly smacking, jostling and stepping on the people around you. It's the whole "Your rights end where mine begin" thing. Realize that you are not alone in your room, starring for your own imaginary episode of MTV's The Grind. There are limits to what you can and should do.

DON'T pantomime lyrics to songs. This should go without saying, because it's so unbelievably dorky and annoying. But I have gotten stuck next to a pantomime before, and it sucked. Some of his moves included pointing at the band's lead singer to illustrate the word "you," and placing his own hands on his heart for "love." When you get to the point where you have hand motions for every word of every song, is it really about you? Or are you trying to impress everyone around you? (Not only do I know every word to every song, but I have gestures to go with them. Beat that!) SNL used to have a pretty funny recurring segment about the DeMarco Brothers, played by Chris Parnell and Chris Kattan, who danced to various popular songs with really over-the-top, literalized choreography. Here's them auditioning for Britney Spears. I like their take on the line "You played with my heart." But imagine standing next to these guys for two hours...

DO make sure that your dancing, swaying or general rock out is in proportion to the song. This entry is dedicated to the dude in front of me last night, who almost never stopped furiously pumping his fist - even during mid-tempo numbers. During ballads, he settled for simply raising his hand, as though waiting for someone to call on him.

DON'T yell out a request more than twice. It's probably not going to work anyway. I understand that people like to do it, and I generally don't mind it. although some people call out the names of the most obscure songs they can think of, as if attempting to prove their superfandom. That, I could do without.

*As an addendum to this rule, don't ever yell "Freebird." This joke, which was probably never funny to begin with, has clearly run its course. At this point, the only person worse than the guy who yells "Freebird" is the guy who is still amused by the guy who yells "Freebird." You're only encouraging him, dude.

DON'T ever air guitar. Seriously, don't. It's pretty much the dorkiest thing you can do at a concert. Clearly, it had no place at the concert I went to last night, though that didn't stop the guy next to me from trying to air-shred his way though a a four-chord love song. My friend Steve suggests that air guitaring is only appropriate at the Air Guitar Championships. (Yes, it's a thing and yes, I've been to them.) But actually, I'd argue that even then, the audience should leave the air guitaring to the professionals, such as they are.

DON'T assume you can return to your spot after you've left. The unwritten rules dictate that if you leave your spot on the floor - even if you have a good reason, like needing to go to the bathroom, or get another beer - the rest of the crowd is going to push up to fill your spot. I don't make the rules: I'm just the messenger. If you disappear, your spot disappears with you, and if you try to take it back, you do so at your own risk.

DON'T overdo it with the phones. Go ahead and a take a couple pictures. Go ahead and record ten seconds of a song. But otherwise, I'm with Adele: just relax and enjoy the experience. (Here's her calling out a fan. Preach on, Adele.) It's kind of a buzzkill to look around the crowd during one of your favorite songs and see nothing but phone screens.