Popular Culture

One of America's oldest and most searing epithets -- "nigger -- is flooding into the nation's popular culture, giving rise to a bitter debate among blacks about its historically ugly power and its increasingly open use in an integrated society.Whether thoughtlessly or by design, large numbers of a post-civil rights generation of blacks have turned to a conspicuous use of "nigger" just as they have gained considerable cultural influence through rap music and related genres.Some blacks, mostly young people, argue that their open use of the word will eventually demystify it, strip it of its racist meaning.

In the aftermath of the Aurora, Colo., slaughter, the question went forth on all of the political chatter shows: "Will this reopen the debate over gun control?" That's the script. When heinous monsters kill people with guns, we tend to talk about the problem of guns. Or rather, people in Washington, New York and other big cities tend to talk about the problem of guns because they think guns are the problem. There's an irony there, of course, given that such cities tend to have the worst gun-related murder rates -- Chicago these days has the equivalent of an Aurora every month -- and they are the places where guns are hardest to come by, legally.

I t starts in kindergarten, when you trace your little hand on a piece of paper and turn it into a turkey to commemorate Thanksgiving. That's American. Then you read Melville and Hawthorne, you study Jefferson and Madison, you listen to Sousa, you leave it to Beaver and you think: That's American.Think again, the American Studies Association says.Hip-hop is American. Lesbian characters in 19th century literature are American. Eco-feminists are Americans. Crips and Bloods, New York subway graffiti writers, exotic dancers exercising self-expression, Puerto Rican transvestites -- they're all American.

There is a reason more people watched the Grammys this year than did the Oscars last year: The Oscar telecast has truly come to suck. Sunday night's 84th Annual Academy Awards was actually painful to watch. I cannot think of any major TV franchise that has become so disconnected from cultural relevancy as the Oscar telecast has in recent years. And this one with Billy Crystal was truly pathetic. As I listened to Crystal doing schtick from Las Vegas circa 1960, I wondered if in 1917 Russia the czar had a comedian like Crystal working the palace in St. Petersburg, telling tired jokes from the 19th Century to keep those inside the crumbling walls of privilege distracted from the Bolsheviks in the streets who were about the change the world.

WE HAVE come full circle. More than 100 years ago, audiences were held rapt by the first films of the French Lumiere brothers - a locomotive grinding into a station or parents feeding their baby - and by those of Thomas Alva Edison - a man sneezing or a couple robustly bussing. Simple quotidian gestures. This summer, audiences were held rapt by 16 people scavenging about a tropical island or 10 strangers trying to coexist in a California prefab. Maybe not exactly everyday life, but not high drama, either.

America is about to lose one of the last survivors of a great national literature, un-mannered, un-recognized as such, and, so far, un-replaced. "Literature" may be the wrong word, but the great radio comedians were an important part of American cultural history. George Burns is the man.Early last year, as he anticipated his 100th birthday on Jan. 20, 1996, he dismissed concerns for his mortality with, "I can't die - I'm booked." It was an appropriate way to look at it for a man who had been in show business since he was 8-years-old.

The ventriloquist's dummy sits there in Laurie Simmons' photo, a little fellow all dressed up in formal attire with a strange, Mona Lisa-like expression on his face. The mouth turns up in a slight smile, but the eyes look pensive and the eyebrows are lifted as if in -- what? Surprise? Alarm? Disapproval?You can invest a lot of time trying to figure this guy out, even though you know on one level he's just a block of wood with clothes on.But that's one of the salient qualities of Laurie Simmons' art. Through her photographed scenes -- staged with dolls, dummies, figurines and other props -- she creates a world of artifice with social and psychological implications.

Steven Johnson wants to do for popular culture what the Atkins diet did for red meat -- make it OK to enjoy something that's supposed to be bad for you. It's the "Don't eat your vegetables" approach to life: Watch The Sopranos and 24 on TV, play video games like "Grand Theft Auto," go see the new Star Wars movie and surf the Internet. Then watch your IQ rise! Johnson is dead serious, however. His new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, $23.95)

RAY BROWNE, 87 Pioneered study of popular culture Ray Browne, a former University of Maryland professor who was credited with coining the phrase "popular culture" and pioneering the study of things such as bumper stickers and cartoons, died at his Ohio home Thursday, according to his family and officials at Bowling Green State university. Dr. Browne developed the first academic department devoted to studying what he called the "people's culture" at Bowling Green in 1973. He wrote and edited more than 70 books on popular culture - including "The Guide to United States Popular Culture," published in 2001.

WASHINGTON -- Today's music, comedy and literature are doing more than reinforcing unflattering racial and sexual stereotypes, minority leaders fear.Popular culture, they say, is teaching a generation of Americans it is OK to hate.The latest evidence they cite is the release this week of an annual study by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith that shows anti-Semitic crime rose for a fourth consecutive year. It also found eight out of 10 people charged with hate crimes were under 21."

“You can learn more about a person in an hour of playing 'Call of Duty' than in a year of conversation.” -Plato, paraphrased Hello, fellow gamers. We don't know each other yet, but I need to ask: Will you co-op with me? You see, I want this blog, Game Cache, to be great. For that to happen, I need your help. Reader interaction is going to be a big part of Game Cache, from profiles and guest posts, to community efforts in critiquing and clamoring over our favorite games.

A man in black wields an enormous hollow cross packed with phony handguns while checking out Barnes & Noble's graphic-novel racks. A futuristic Marie Antoinette, in a regal gown with bared cleavage and midriff, balances a huge rectangular headpiece with impeccable hauteur while navigating the steaming crowds on Pratt Street. An urban-cowboy assassin in fringed Daisy Dukes, with hippie-like straight hair hitting the small of her back and bandoleros crisscrossing her chest, eyes a burger at Five Guys.

RAY BROWNE, 87 Pioneered study of popular culture Ray Browne, a former University of Maryland professor who was credited with coining the phrase "popular culture" and pioneering the study of things such as bumper stickers and cartoons, died at his Ohio home Thursday, according to his family and officials at Bowling Green State university. Dr. Browne developed the first academic department devoted to studying what he called the "people's culture" at Bowling Green in 1973. He wrote and edited more than 70 books on popular culture - including "The Guide to United States Popular Culture," published in 2001.

The National Organization for Women convenes its annual conference this weekend in Bethesda against the backdrop of a presidential race that, according to NOW President Kim Gandy, has been underlined not only by one woman's historic campaign but also by an extraordinary amount of sexism. Gandy, who's serving her second term at the helm of the feminist advocacy group, talked with The Sun about those and other topics. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and two daughters. Your theme for this weekend's conference is "No Capes, No Masks, No Boundaries: Feminist Super-Women Unite!"

It was a week after the 12th Day of Christmas yesterday, and Tige and Julie Young of Howard County finally began plucking ornaments off the first of their three Christmas trees and dismantling decorations that had taken a couple of weeks to put up. "I can almost fully guarantee - not only will it not be done today, it probably won't be done this weekend," said Julie Young, 39, a researcher who lives in North Laurel. "We just hadn't gotten around to take down the trees because we're really busy, and we don't really know what we're going to do with all the toys."

Tweens everywhere are texting, blogging and chatting about Friday's eagerly anticipated sequel, pondering whether it will be as totally awesome as the original. Adults without a preteen in their home may be asking, "Sequel to what?" High School Musical 2, welcome to the radar screen. The follow-up to last year's hit movie on cable TV's Disney Channel is garnering mainstream attention, more than three months after the network announced that the show would premiere Friday night. Consider that the original High School Musical was one of the biggest successes in pop culture last year.

John Cameron Swayze, one of television's first evening news anchors and the man who introduced the sentence "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" into popular culture as the voice of Timex watches, died yesterday at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 89.Mr. Swayze, whose crisp but folksy voice made him one of the first television personalities, started his career as a journalist, first as a newspaper reporter, then a radio broadcaster. He switched to television in 1949 as the host of the "Camel News Caravan" on NBC.After his news show ended in 1956, Mr. Swayze became the pitchman for Timex watches.

YOU DON'T have to be a particularly astute observer of the culture to recognize that the American people are uneasy and confused about the gulf war. That perplexity is understandable, given both the nature of war and the strict censorship the government has imposed on military news.The nation's anxiety is also being exacerbated by a phenomenon that has received only scant attention: Popular culture -- the national processor of experience -- is in a time lag, with the result that movies, television shows, and music are doing next to nothing to help us interpret the profound experience of war.The average American watches about seven hours of television a day. Outside of CNN and the news, however, there is little on the tube today that even remotely refers to what the country is going through.

Just enough science to make it believable, that's producer Tim Kring's goal. But for some fans of the hit NBC show Heroes, which Kring created and launched last year, he has been missing his mark. It started in the first episode, when genetics professor Mohinder Suresh repeats an oft-debunked myth as fact - that humans only use 10 percent of their brains - sending sci-fi fan Michael L. Kramer into a fit of self righteousness. "I thought, `Do the writers know anything about science?' " said Kramer, who's working on a visual-perception doctorate at Ohio's Miami University.

The Night Casey Was Born: The True Story Behind the Great American Ballad `Casey at the Bat' John Evangelist Walsh The Overlook Press / 220 pages / $25 Is any poem more authentically American than Casey at the Bat? By happily making fun of our national pastime, it teaches us the civic virtue of humility and the literary value of irony. It tells us not to be too proud of our past accomplishments or rewards that may come in the future: Watch that banana peel! It shows us that even a subject as solemn as baseball - the sacred American baseball!