Some "silly" seductions

A reader of this blog remarked that it’s taken a relentlessly “high brow” tone so far. Mozart. The Mahabharata. Noh drama. Arthur Miller! Oh my! So I thought I’d get off of my high horse and talk about some “silly” seductions that I love - sometimes also known as “guilty” pleasures”.

1. Wedding pictures on Facebook of people I don’t know.

Have you ever had a Facebook friend “tagged” in a wedding photo and lose all sense of time looking at the album of shots? Well, I have – plenty of times! Even though the bride, groom, families and friends are complete unknowns, I happily peruse every shot and cluck, cluck cluck! “My how pretty she looks!” “Where did he find that tuxedo?” “Are those the most adorable bride's maids ever?” So what makes this so fascinating? Why do I start making up stories about the happy couple and their clans? Why do I speculate on if the wedding will “work?” Beats me! But I find it endlessly “seductive.”

2. Black-and-White TV Westerns

Thanks to Netflix, you can now watch just about any episode of any show from the 1950s. Hard to believe but there was a time when all of the Top 10 TV shows were Westerns. People even wrote serious essays about whether Westerns would destroy television as an “art form”…

Well, I guess we dodged that bullet! Yee, haw!

In any case, I love being seduced by my two boyhood favorites…

• First, there’s “Rawhide”. What a hoot! All those doggies getting along! Such gorgeous photography too! And there’s Clint Eastwood as the “ramrod” Rowdy Yates. Most of the time he’s just a goofy, toothy, silly young thing falling in love with every gal he meets and getting bopped on the head by no-good-niks once a show. Every blue moon, though, he shows a flash… and it’s just a flash… of the cold-blooded “Dirty Harry” to come. It’s kind of thrilling/chilling when it happens! “Go ahead, you rustlers, make my day!” Yikes!

• Next, we “Have Gun Will Travel”. That song! It’s still rumbling through my cerebellum. “A knight without armor in a savage land…” What could be better than that? I remember being so naive as a kid that I thought Paladin’s first name was “Wire.” And if you got that joke, give me a call! We’ll dress up in black and sing “dum-dum-dudda-dudda-dum” each time we hand out our business cards. And we’ll quote Shakespeare and Shelley every time we face down an evil-doer! And was there ever a craggier, grumpier, lumpier leading man than Richard Boone? Got to love him!

3. Music Videos from the 1980s

You know you’re a geezer when you remember people talking about music videos as the next great art form! Anyway, I still love the ones from the 1980s when the idea was new and people were willing to try anything. So cheesy! So low tech! So alive! The “Pop-Up Video” show is a particular silly seduction. I love it when those “thought balloons” emerge during a song with some nugget of useless information. And who knew that all the members of Duran Duran had to be resuscitated during the filming of “Hungry Like the Wolf”?

4. The World Cup

Can anything be sillier than watching grown men chasing something called a Jabulani? (That’s a ball by the way and not an exotic carnivore on the endangered species list.) Still I find myself utterly seduced. And it doesn’t matter who is playing. Paraguay? Japan? Serbia? Bring ‘em on! I’m even starting to like the buzz of those silly horns (insert angry insect simile here). I love fuming and fretting about who will win or why they lost or what will come tomorrow. Although I should know it’s all futile in the end. In the words of the immortal Gary Lineker, “Soccer is a game for 22 people that run around, play the ball, and one referee who makes a slew of mistakes, and in the end Germany always wins….”

So I’m curious…

Do you have any silly seductions to share? Anything “relentlessly” low brow?

Meanwhile, “head ‘em up and move ‘em out!”