The Oppenheimer Report 11/2/15

Last Friday night, I attended the legendary Hassard Halloween jam session in nearby Bracebridge, hosted by an accomplished keyboard player and friend Jamie Hassard, along with his significant other, Lauren Power. Regrettably, Shauna did not feel well enough to join me, but she insisted I go. Had the pleasure of listening to some excellent musicians let their hair down (half were wearing Halloween wigs) and was even invited to play a couple of my original songs. It was exhilarating to play with such accomplished musicians, who are able pick up a song melody in four bars, and  play along as if they’d rehearsed it a hundred times. Juan Barbosa is like that, but we rarely have the opportunity to play together when we are recording. It being Halloween weekend, this was, of course, a costume party, and there were some very creative attendees. My favorite costumes involved a couple doing a Breaking Bad theme. The man was dressed as the meth-producing Walter White character from the show, and the woman was a bag of crystal methamphetamine. Her costume was hilariously inspired and she handed out little plastic bags of “blue meth” candy. I love it when people get into the Halloween spirit. My last minute costume was as the ghost of a Cornell Alumnus, which consisted of my dad’s Class of ’32 Cornell reunion hat and some blackout for my eyes. Hey, at least I did something. By the way, fun fact: fake blood does not wash off so easily.

Have you ever heard of “nutscaping” ? I had not, until Shauna apprised me of the practice after seeing a post about it on Facebook. As your cultural correspondent, I feel it is my obligation to pass on this information to my readers. Nutscaping is the art of photographing one’s testicles, using a beautiful landscape as the background. Photographing one’s balls in vacation settings; now there’s a new low! Forget the wife and kids, I want a close up of my balls, with the Washington Monument in the background. I am at once amused and appalled. When I started writing this report in 1992, I was sometimes accused of exercising bad taste in the things I discussed. It used to bother my dad, the veteran humorist, because he thought I was always going for the cheap laugh. In retrospect, I guess he was right. What I find fascinating is the profound slide society seems to have taken in the bad taste department over the past four decades. Forty years ago, comedian Lenny Bruce was vilified for using obscene language in his comedy routines, and last Saturday night, I listened to comedienne Amy Schumer do an opening monologue on SNL which, albeit devoid of swear words, would have made Lenny Bruce blush. These days, the internet is the Wild West of bad taste.   

A week ago, singer / songwriter Jon Brooks did a performance in Huntsville, Ontario and he stopped in the middle of one of his gallows humor songs to embark on a funny tirade about the internet. This particular rant concerned the preponderance of internet narcissism. He was talking, among other things, about the explosion of “selfies” on Facebook and other forms of social media, and he lamented the degradation of selflessness and altruism in favor of rampant self-promotion. I am as guilty as the next Facebookworm/narcissist of posting the odd selfie, but I draw the line just short of photographing my balls in front of the Grand Canyon. Having reluctantly, and a little late, crossed over psychologically into the second half of my life, I am amazed by how culture and technology are pulling away from me on the speedway of life. Everything from the change in language and communication skills, to the (my) perceived decay of cinema, literature, and music, makes me wonder where we will be in thirty years. If I live that long, cars will most certainly all be equipped to drive themselves, a loaf of bread will cost $30, genetically modified food will be omnipresent, people will rely on technology for everything from turning on their house lights to wiping their butts, and G-d only knows how our infotainment will be “reported” (directly off a feed from Uranus, I’d imagine). If we don’t incinerate our planet in an ill-conceived nuclear war, or become extinct because of our reluctance to adapt to the inevitable changes in our environment, we will likely end up very much like those aliens from War of the Worlds, who were so advanced technologically, but whose Achilles heel was their intolerance to oxygen.

 

Have we lost the forest for the trees, and the real question, will there be a comprehensive databank of nutscape photos? I suppose a portion of every generation of elders looks to the future with the same trepidation. Sometimes I feel as if I am just another lemming about to run off the cliff. I continue to make the same mistakes, and ignore the same danger signs as do so many other people on this over-taxed planet. Collectively, this does not bode well for the future of mankind. While a little more mindful of my indiscretions than I used to be, I still largely ignore my sasquatch-like carbon footprint. I am haunted by this weekly when I take our garbage to the local dump. Now, when I look in the mirror, I see one of those grumpy old guys who grumbles about the younger generation. I am beginning to understand why my parents just shook their heads in disbelief when I was younger. Nothing really changes does it? Looking back over the past three or four generations, it does seem that, with every successive generation, the gene pool is getting a little bit more watered down. Unless I completely lose my mind, the one thing I don’t think I will ever do, no matter how much I strive to embrace the here and now, is photograph my testicles and post that picture on the internet.     

 

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2015 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED