There's never been a better time to be an expert in something
the rest of the world finds completely trivial. Just think, slightly
more than ten years ago, the mainstream world was branding Prince
a visionary (because he can play all those instruments!) and
alienating some geeky loner snapping up Mancini lp's at garage
sales. Ten years later, Prince is reduced to staging publicity
stunts involving his name and that Mancini dork's found more
than a few outlets in which to expound and expound and expound!
Let's hear it for useless endeavors! Many of us loner loser types
have had these useless, trivial points of interest, but nowadays
we can make them pay off! We can get work writing liner notes
or articles or reviews or, at the very least, slap together a
zine. At least someone's interested now. Try talking Louis Prima
in 1982 - they'd slap you upside the head with a Joy Division
import twelve inch!
Unfortunately, competition can be mighty fierce in certain
areas. Esquivel, forget about it! Tiki culture, get in line!
It's the same as the Ed Wood phenomenon a few years ago - every
college boy who had ever seen clips of Plan 9 From Outer Space
on Late Night with David Letterman came forward as experts.
So you might have spent the last decade in studying in your chosen
area, but you never know when a book like The Encyclopedia
of Bad Taste or a mega-zine like Ben Is Dead is going
to come out with little capsule reviews of EVERY TRIVIAL THING
EVER in an attempt to control the market. But those in the know
realize that a capsule review could never sum up the history
of "Polack jokes". It's obvious that there is SO MUCH
MORE to say about "Schoolhouse Rock".
My own chosen field, The Rat Pack, has become a major area
for that competition. Much of my professional output has in some
manner related to them, and I still await the day the Encyclopedia
Britannica taps me to write THE BIG IMPORTANT RAT PACK ESSAY.
I'll calmly suggest an essay on the meaning behind Sinatra's
changing toupee styles and they'll go dig up some college grad
to write the thing. Which won't be difficult. While I have a
million observations regarding turtlen
ecks
and breasts in the Matt Helm series, the world is now
filled with those "coolitcharleyringadingding-bottleofjack"
schmendricks, infecting the world with that sort of piffle, not
thinking about the meaning behind it.
So the lesson of trivial knowledge is to choose something really, really trivial, so trivial that for every hundred Mancini dorks, there's only one of you, Mr. Ferrante and Teicher Geek. You have to be able to say "Stand aside, you Dick Dale freaks, I've got something important to say about Hugo Winterhalter, and you cannot stop me!" As for myself, I have to change my attack and realize that the Rat Pack may not have been the best of decisions. That's why I'm taking this opportunity to publicly distance myself from all that and proclaim "I call Gig Young!" Got it? I'M THE GIG YOUNG GUY! No one else. And if I catch anyone, and I mean anyone, even mentioning Gig in so much as a sentence, there's gonna' be some kind of "coolitcharleyringadingdingbottleofjack" trouble coming your way!