Our very own School of Rock

We're not the only parents out there who've had to get creative.

There are x number of hours in a child's weekday that need to be filled, and if your experience is anything like mine, the school is not cutting the mustard. Oh, I believe they're trying -- but this is a new experience for all of us, and even three weeks of planning (most of which were the school holiday period between term 1 and term 2) have not resulted in a finely honed remote learning curriculum.

But the problem really doesn't have that much to do with what the schools are doing or not doing. Even during school holidays, we had to find ways for the kids to pass the day that didn't just involve us surrendering to the temptation to give them whatever device they wanted from sunup to sundown.

Well, every little bit helps.

Which is why, for the past two weeks, I have become a professor from 4 to 4:30 most weekday afternoons, giving them rock lessons.

Not lessons on how to play, mind you. I have no clue about that. But history lessons, talking about the best bands in rock history and playing about four to five of their songs, finishing with a live performance on YouTube.

We call it School of Rock, and that's no coincidence, as it was two Saturdays ago that we watched the Richard Linklater film. That's how I got the idea.

It had actually been my wife's idea to show them School of Rock, and it had been percolating for some time. We were going to watch it on a weekend out of town back in February, but it took until quarantine for the DVD to actually make it into the player. (Actually, it was on Netflix.)

Me, I was never a huge fan of the film. I remember seeing it in the theater in 2003 and thinking it was good, but maybe ten to 20 percent less good than I thought it would be. To be fair, my expectations were pretty high. I was on a Jack Black high and I also had a great fondness for Linklater.

My kids are also on a Jack Black high, which was what made it such a natural fit for them. He's probably the actor they have encountered most in their cinematic travels so far, maybe saving only Dwayne Johnson. Both are in the two new Jumanji movies, both of which they've seen, but Black is also in the two Goosebumps movies, favorites around our house, and at least one other thing I know they've seen. Gulliver's Travels maybe? If so, they saw that one without me.

Anyway, they like Black, my wife likes the movie, so it was an easy choice for a Saturday afternoon quarantine viewing.

As it turned out, I liked the movie a lot better coming in with slightly lower expectations. It really is quite good. It's no surprise it's been an enduring modern classic in our culture, culminating in the recent stage musical with book by Andrew Lloyd Weber of all people. (Then again, you don't have to be a classic to find your way to stage these days.)

It was such a success with both me and the kids -- my wife got to sit back and say "Told you so," though she didn't -- that I decided to launch my own School of Rock for the boys, weekdays at 4 p.m. Why 4 o'clock? Well, it's late enough in the workday that I thought I could shift my attention elsewhere for a half-hour and no one would notice. Hopefully that's been true.

The marker erase board you see above gives you an idea of what we've been up to, but I'll go band by band to tell you how it's worked out.

We started with Tenacious D, probably for obvious reasons. If it's not obvious, well, Jack Black is actually in this band. Nothing like starting out with a dose of obvious relevance to get them to buy in to the new idea.

Tenacious D is a duo of Jack and character actor Kyle Gass, and they rock. They have genuine musical ability but are also predictably strong about keeping humor at the forefront of their lyrics and the handful of sketches that punctuate the album I own. I had to really be careful with the songs I selected to play them, as there's an f-bomb in at least half the songs (plus songs actually titled "Hard Fucking" and "Fuck Her Gently"), but fortunately that still allowed me to play the song "Tribute" to them, which is kind of their own version of "Devil Went Down to Georgia." (It has a "motherfucker" in it but it's sung very quickly and is hard to hear.) I also played them a skit that involves Jack ordering way too much at a drive thru which is hilarious, though I did have to edit out one f-bomb, which I did successfully.

Anyway, this has been the biggest hit of the school so far, entirely due to "Tribute." I played them the video for this (preferring it to a live show) to close out the class, and particularly my younger son loved it, as it features Jack and Kyle encountering a horned demon on a lonely highway and having a jam battle against him. (The whole video is pretty funny; the premise is that they're recording the song in one of those mall karaoke booths where you're supposed to shovel in quarters to sing "My Sharona.") They've actually made me play the video again at the end of other classes, when I'd hoped to be blowing their minds with the band du jour. Oh well, I'll take what I can get.

To immediately give them a flavor of the variability that's baked into rock 'n roll, I focused on Elton John on day two. My older son looked over my shoulder at the iTunes playlist and noted, quite pedantically (he takes after his old man), that the genre for John's songs was listed as pop, not rock. I tried to explain that the lines were blurry between these things, but then I also had "Crocodile Rock" come along to save me, when "Rocket Man" and "I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues" did not. But they weren't really convinced until an energetic live performance in Central Park of "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting," which made them Elton believers. As visual accompaniment to the music -- the need for which I was rapidly realizing -- we looked at a slide show of great John outfits from over the years.

They had a conflict on Wednesday of week 1 (a conflict! during coronavirus!) so we didn't get back to the syllabus until Thursday, at which point, I felt it was time for an unquestioned, traditional rock 'n roll giant. The Rolling Stones are not a personal favorite -- I have only a single album that I copied when I borrowed it from the library -- but I of course love any number of their famous songs. I played them "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Paint it Black," without making much of a connection, before leading up to what I thought was a surefire hit, "You Can't Always Get What You Want." But they didn't have patience for a 7:29 song, predictably. They did show some interest in looking at pictures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as well as a raucous live performance of "Satisfaction" with a massive quantity of balloons filling the arena. I also showed them the famous clip of "Let's Spend the Night Together (Some Time Together)" on Ed Sullivan. Still, in all, the Stones were a miss for them.

Week 2 (not doing the class on Fridays) began on Tuesday after a long holiday weekend. Here it was time to introduce them to one of my top five bands of all time, Pink Floyd. The visual accompaniment this time was their album covers. I had lots to choose from when it came to Floyd -- 12 albums and 104 songs, according to iTunes -- but I started with "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" because it's used in the theme song to a dystopian kids show the older one watched for a bit. He also likes the dance version of it I put on an electronica mix for him. It didn't seem to make a huge impression this time, nor did "Time" and the little bit of "Money" I played them. I had others lined up, but in scanning through their albums, the older one noticed the 23-minute song that kicks off Atom Heart Mother and wanted to listen to that -- presumably just for the novelty of its length. This he said he liked, even though it doesn't resemble a traditional song in any shape or form. I couldn't really pause to appreciate that because the younger one was getting cranky, plus I had to close with a live YouTube version of "Wish You Were Here" from the last time the band played together (including Roger Waters) some six or seven years ago. Ultimately I'd say Floyd also went over their heads, but maybe that's not a huge surprise for a six- and nine-year-old.

We got back into the hit column Wednesday with Queen. I needed to steer things back in a more populist direction and did. They knew Queen as the artist of "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions" and wanted to get to those right away. Instead I started out with "Under Pressure," as I'd recently played them "Ice Ice Baby" back-to-back with this song and they thought it was funny. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was queued up next, and that allowed me to also show them the clip from Wayne's World. I had "You're My Best Friend" set next, but I skipped over that to "Bicycle" as I thought they would find it funny. It was all a prelude to the YouTube video of WWRY/WATC at Live-Aid, which we all sung along with -- even my wife, who had wandered down to the kitchen classroom space to make a coffee. They were interested in Freddy Mercury and asked a lot of questions about his death.

The most recent class to date brought us finally to our home turf with AC/DC -- a conscious parochial choice and not a recognition of the prominence of the band within rock 'n roll history. It allowed me to play both "Thunderstruck" (which I love way out of scope with how good a song it probably is) plus the mashup of "Thunderstruck" and "Shipping Up to Boston" I created for our wedding (each song representing a home city for one of the two of us, you see). I also played "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Back in Black," plus pictures of the band and the street sign for the street in Melbourne named after them. I think I managed to convince them that Angus Young is a pretty interesting figure. Musically, they may have been least into Accadacca (as they are sometimes called here), but both got into the video I showed at the end, which was a concert performance of "Hell's Bells" from 2009 in which Brian Johnson swings on the ringer of a large bell bearing the band's name. "I gotta admit, that was great," said the older one.

Women and minorities have been highly underrepresented in the first two weeks of the class, as have they in rock 'n roll history unfortunately. I intend to correct that next week, our first full four-day week, in which I may introduce them to the likes of Heart and Prince. Let's just hope my older son doesn't see the "pop" designation next to Prince's name on iTunes.

Hey, if this quarantine goes on long enough, this could turn into School of Pop, School of Rap, School of Reggae, School of Classical, and School of Yodelling before all is said and done.

Comedic prehistory

It's Michael Cera week, for all you Michael Cera lovers out there. This is the second straight post where his face has adorned the artwork. However, you may not love what I'm going to say about him.

Comedies have been on a roll the past few years, in my humble opinion. I guess I don't have to be humble about it, because a lot of people agree with me. Ever since Judd Apatow has become the primary driving force in comedy (a post for another time -- in fact, I may time that post for the July 31st release of Funny People), there have been a lot more hits than misses among comedies loosely defined by Apatow and his interests. Namely, shlubs dealing humorously with everyday problems -- losing your virginity, going through pregnancy, surviving a bachelor party, dealing with a breakup. It's the absurdity that's built in to the normalcy that makes us connect with these movies.

So why, pray tell, would Jack Black, Michael Cera and writer/director Harold Ramis want to go back to the high concept days of Mel Brooks?

(Oh crap. I just looked at the production credits for Year One, and Apatow is a producer. Nonetheless.)

I get why they thought it would be funny, I guess. They're going to apply the quintessentially modern comic shtick of Black and Cera to the stone age, with the certainty that just saying the lines with a contemporary inflection will make them funnier. Which I simply don't think will be the case.

It's no surprise that Year One reminds a person of Mel Brooks' A History of the World Part I. That too tried to shoehorn modern vernacular/attitudes into a variety of ancient periods of history. And yeah, I laughed when one guy's using the word "Christ" in its modern sense, as the substitute for a swear word, while the actual Jesus Christ is sitting across the room, thinking he's being addressed.

But that was 1981. We filmgoers barely even knew what a parody was back then. And even that movie was more stink than fresh.

Everything that's old is new again, so 28 years later, we're probably ready for another movie like this. But then again, the comedy world has shifted in another direction. High-concept comedies just don't have the power to lure us like they once did. We don't want to see Three Amigos updated, do we?

I'm also pretty sure it's going to be the 10,000 B.C. of comedies, where time periods are haphazardly mixed together so that "everything old" can co-exist in the same movie. Are they cavemen? Are they Romans? Are they Roman cavemen? Who knows. And this doesn't matter as much in a comedy -- we're not supposed to care. But I have a feeling this might be the kind of movie that would cause me to nitpick.

And I'm a little over these two stars as well. Many comedy stars are overexposed -- I'm looking at you, Will Ferrell, and surprisingly, you already Danny McBride. And I have the feeling Year One could make us even more tired of Jack Black, and freshly tired of Michael Cera. It's hard to speak ill of Cera, because he's so essentially sweet. But his eye-contact-avoiding, nervous shy guy is starting to seem a little played out, isn't it? What's more, I'm getting a whiff of self-satisfaction from these two. I recently happened to catch a promotional bit they did on Jimmy Kimmel, where they were both caught in an elevator for the length of their appearance on the show. It left them both to relentlessly peddle what they do -- Black being outrageous and over-the-top, and Cera being the exact opposite. I felt like I needed a middle ground.

These are scattered thoughts, in part because I started writing this post several hours ago, and am now trying to finish it on the same day I started it, before going to bed.

But let's just say I greet Year One with wariness. It's the kind of throwback I don't think we need right now.

The artistic cachet of tightie-whities

Let's face it: Most guys you know wear boxers.

I'm not going to say it's a universal thing. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to find those three-packs of briefs in your local Marshalls. There are still those activities that require extra support, like being an athlete, or being in the military.

But there are other colors of briefs that can serve that purpose equally well.

And that's why in the last couple decades, the "tightie-whitie" itself has been virtually purged from the extended wardrobe of most self-respecting men. Not only are they considered gross in the same way that Speedos are considered gross -- they call Speedos "grape smugglers" for a reason -- but their white color makes them especially incapable of disguising the occasional errant stain. I'll just leave it at that.

I'd argue that popular culture is in part to blame for people turning on tightie-whities. Any loser who gets a wedgie on TV or in the movies always has tightie-whities. Any redneck drunk drowning in a pool of his own vomit is always wearing them. Anybody you're supposed to laugh at or mock or ridicule is distinguished by his white underwear.

But popular culture's portrayal of reality has yet to fully reflect the change it helped inspire, and this is because tightie-whities have oodles of artistic cachet.

You wouldn't think so, but just think about it for a minute -- it's that single article of clothing that immediately indicates that someone is a schlub. In fact, such a schlub that he hasn't even switched to boxers yet, like all the other schlubs trying to move up in the world. You might call him an uber-schlub. It's the ultimate in "real," the imagined "real" if not the "real real" -- it has a seeming genuineness, a seeming realness. You might call it uber-real. It's a stripping away of all a person's glitz, all his defenses.

I've pondered this issue before, but it occurred to me again last week as I was revisiting Margot at the Wedding in order to review it. Three different male characters in this movie are shown wearing tightie-whities, and that's not just because Noah Baumbach is obsessed with making it seem like his movies were made in the 1970s.

The first to be spied in the offending undergarment is Jack Black's Malcolm. He's examining himself in the mirror in only tightie-whities, with the back pulled down slightly to reveal half of a butt crack. (I can't remember if he's wearing socks in this scene, but that would complete the image, wouldn't it?) He's obsessing over the fact that his testicles hang lower than the rest of him. The fact that his future wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh) shares the room with him suggests that there's no vanity whatsoever in his sartorial choice. Just practicality. In fact, you could almost call it anti-vanity.

The next time the underwear appears is when Nicole Kidman is spying on their redneck neighbors. She's peering through the window and sees the mother and father engaged in some kind of unholy activity involving the carcass of a pig wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. In truth they're only preparing it for a BBQ, but the activity reaches an extra level of unholiness because the man is wearing tightie-whities -- and nothing else. As I'm watching this, I'm starting to develop a theory about Baumbach's perspective here, because carrying the dead weight of a pig carcass should at least involve a pair of pants, and quite possibly a sturdy pair of shoes.

Finally, in a far more innocent context, Kidman's son Claude (the androgynous Zane Pais) removes his pants while they're staying in a hotel room late in the movie. He's an early teenager, so there's nothing untoward here -- just a boy changing in front of his mother. Here I guess the choice of underpants is meant to remind us how young this boy really is -- something to ponder when you consider the emotional warfare he's witnessed, and been victimized by.

I don't think that Baumbach is making an overt statement by showing three male characters in white grape smugglers, but it would be a mistake to assume his wardrobe choice has no meaning either. Statistically speaking, at least one of them should have been in boxers, most likely the teenager, since teenagers are always conscious of what they need to do to fit in. Jack Black's character is a bit more quirky (he leaves an ironic moustache as a joke after he shaves his beard), and the neighbor is a kook anyway, but you'd think one of them would be boxer friendly as well.

The problem is, you can't communicate angst with boxer shorts.

It's as simple as that. Boxer shorts are way too tidy and socially presentable to express the inner torment of a character's soul.

Think about it. Tightie-whities are used precisely because they make the character more naked than he'd be if he were actually nude. They reveal all his flaws and imperfections. Why do you think neither Homer Simpson nor Peter Griffin has ever donned a single pair of boxers? Tightie-whities are the perfect way to underscore how relentlessly human they are, how much they hang out here, and sag there. To paraphrase Rob Zombie, they make you More Naked Than Naked.

I do find it slightly artificial, I guess. But it's one of those bits of artifice I feel I should accept, like how people don't say goodbye when they hang up the phone, or how they always find a parking spot without any trouble, or how they always have exact change. Each of these are narrative shortcuts to keep things moving. Tightie-whities are a narrative shortcut for saying "Here is a man who is emotionally exposed and possibly a bit sad."

Because the reverse is never true, is it? You never see tightie-whities on a stud in the movies. Studs always wear boxers, or at least briefs of a different color. Just try to imagine Clive Owen or Daniel Craig in a pair of tightie-whities. You can't, can you? You'd say "What's wrong with that guy that he's wearing tightie-whities?" You're a regular consumer of entertainment, so you know what this underwear is meant to signify. And Clive and Daniel ain't it.

Plus, it would be too sexual. Tightie-whities leave as little to the imagination as anything a man can wear, and if the man is really attractive, it confronts the heterosexual men in the audience too directly. This may be a totally subliminal thing, but it's got to be a reason you don't see matinee idols in white underwear. If they're in boxers, they're decent, and heterosexual men don't have to worry. Whereas, the men who do wear the tightie-whities -- say, Jack Black -- don't threaten us because we don't have a latent attraction to them anyway. They are, as described above, schlubs.

Please join me next week when I discuss the psychological symbolism of dressing an actress in granny panties.