Popular Culture

In a seminary class in Ohio, students discuss Superman comics. In another in Oklahoma, they view films such as "Star Wars" or "Blade Runner." And in Denver, students clip out magazine ads to be used as a basis for discussions. Such activities, commonplace in college and university courses in popular culture or mass communications, are increasingly turning up in theology courses in seminaries around the country.

Although white rapper Eminem did not win an American Music Award on Monday, his two nominations in that competition combined with the four Grammy nominations he received last week serve to remind us how prevalent violent misogyny has become in contemporary popular culture. Horror has been expressed about the effects of what seems almost universally to be seen as a disturbing new development that threatens to debase civilization.

It can be found everywhere: a tacky 1970s leisure suit, music of the Great Depression, dishes in a roadside diner, themes of Melville that surface in "Star Trek." American popular culture is undisciplined, colorful, noisy, artistic. It is everything that's American, the history people live every day. And it's more than the sum of its parts, many in academia say.

Re "Main Street vs. Hollywood: Money Talks," Column Right, Nov. 14: I am amazed that Cal Thomas would applaud Wal-Mart's decision to censor popular music. Certainly, movies and song lyrics tend to be more sexually explicit today than they were years ago. But Thomas doesn't seem to realize depicting sex or violence is far different than advocating it, and he is willing to judge films and songs by his values and not on their merits. Who is the "cultural dictator" here? Thomas displays a frighteningly ignorant view of popular culture when he criticizes Nirvana, possibly the most brilliant rock band of the '90s, and Oliver Stone, a two-time Academy Award winner for his Vietnam War-themed movies.

Alain Jacquet, 69, a French pop artist known for his reinterpretations of famous paintings, died Thursday of cancer at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the French Embassy said in a statement. Jacquet's work often reflected the sensibilities of Pop Art, which emerged in Britain and the United States in the 1950s and '60s and drew on advertising, comics and other pieces of popular culture. He also revisited well-known artworks from previous eras. One of his best-known paintings recasts the impressionist giant Edouard Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," which depicts a female nude picnicking with two fully clothed men. In Jacquet's version, they are replaced by a gallery owner, an art critic and a painter.

We look back on movies, cartoons, etc., from the World War II era and decry the stereotyped, racist portrayals of the Japanese and Germans that turned them all into subhuman monsters. We see how it became easy to hate entire nations and races. As I read Sneaks '91, Calendar's Jan. 20 listing of this year's films, I noticed that the practice of portraying Middle Easterners as one-dimensional, dirty, religiously fanatical, evil terrorists continues unabated. In our popular culture, these people exist only as targets for white American action-adventure heroes.

Whenever I tell friends that I am going to Moscow in a few months to finish a book on Soviet popular culture, they generally raise their eyebrows in disbelief. "Is there such a thing?" they seem to ask. "If so, why would anyone waste time on such junk?" Why indeed? The study of our own popular culture has become a minor industry in the United States. Sometimes it descends into trivia and cheap exploitation of nostalgia.

Particle board is not at all a refined material. Inexpensively made from sawdust or wood chips compressed with a resin binder, it's a somewhat flexible material useful in a variety of utilitarian projects. When Ruben Ortiz Torres paints, almost always he paints on particle board.