There’s this song, “The Gift,” by the Velvet Underground. It’s John Cale reading a short story about a guy shipping himself across the country to his girlfriend, while the rest of the Velvets jam on an instrumental number that sounds like Booker T. and the MG’s from Hell.
What’s notable about the song, other than the fact that the story is panned hard left and the music is panned hard right, is that it – along with a couple after-the-fact movies about Andy Warhol (namely, “I Shot Andy Warhol”), the song includes the only instance of my favorite slang word ever – “modern,” meaning “bland and/or stuffy.”
And not necessarily “stuffy” meaning “stiffly banal,” either, but occasionally referring to humidity – at one point, a character comes inside, shakes her head, and sighs, “Ugh; it’s positively modern outside.”
It’s a fantastic way to so completely subvert the actual Modernist period, which was so focused on taking the old and making it vigorously new. I love the ideological violence in declaring the Modern flaccid.
Which is why I’m loving Neda Ulaby’s nitpicking at the use of the word “modern” in reality TV shows. They use it to mean, “new” and “current.” The problem, she reports, seems to be that the more accurate “contemporary” is viewed with the same lazy contempt that Cale’s characters uttered the word “modern.”
Confused by my words about words? Simply put, it seems that the contemporary sentiment is that “contemporary” is positively modern, so something fresh needs to be used. In the interest of vitality, they’ve dug up “modern,” a dead word about a (somewhat) dead art movement from the first part of the century.
In related news, it seems that I’ve chosen to write about a Neda Ulaby story about once a week for the last month and a half.
I wonder if its her or whoever assigns her stories who’s my journalism soulmate.
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