Culturodynamics

I've come to the conclusion that, given the opportunity, people will always gravitate towards the lowest form of entertainment. Call it the second law of culturodynamics if you will. I started my weekend with high cultural energy. We went to New York Botanical Gardens where we enjoyed a beautiful display of orchids and other epiphytes. I even learned some new words (like epiphyte) and purchased a single flower that is impossible to grow in my apartment but costs more per ounce than Kobe beef. I was at the height of culture.

Next stop: classic cinema! Touch of Evil, he says in his best Mr. Moviefone voice, by Orsen Welles. I was with the cinematic cultural elite who, shove for shove, are worse than your average theater-goer in the seat-finding department. But they all knew their film noir, as evidenced loudly by the chattery pre-movie factoid contest. Me, I spent the entire film trying to figure out a) what side of the border they were on at that moment and b) who is that guy with the bad Mexican moustache (answer: Charlton Heston, who knew?).

I already knew I was on a cultural slide, but that didn't stop me from going to see an intelligent, witty, clever, eclectic and cultured comedy show for people who are a little more NPR than NRO. Of course, I spent the whole time chug-a-lugging as many free Sam Adams as I could and worrying that I might die of gingivitis. And that maybe I owned a few too many sweaters.

Realizing that my credentials as a well-educated and cultured Ivy Leaguer might be in jeopardy, I headed off to a gallery show on Sunday in the meat-packing district. I had strugged against culturodynamics and landed myself amongst the elitest of the elites, weathly art shoppers looking for the latest in neo-asian-contemporary-post-egalitarian-classicistic murals. Or something like that. In reality I wandered around a garrish, uninteresting and oppressively warm hotel looking at pictures and sculptures tasteful displayed on beds and in the bathrooms, all the while trying desparately to figure out who would pay $14,000 for a DVD of a young girl struggling to get out of her sweater (answer: apparently at least four people).

Feeling as though I didn't appreciate the experience enough and afraid of cultural entropy taking over I decided to finally get my hair cut, where I spent a good portion of my weekly salary on the cut and grooming products in an attempt to make it look like I don't care what my hair looks like. For a brief moment I felt as if I had staved off my desent. That was until....

Wrestlemania XX. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, professional wrestling. And you know what? I enjoyed it thoroughly. For five and half hours I watched a bunch of grown men beat the ever-living shit out of each other and grown women in panties grapple in provocative positions. Oh it was the lowest of all lows. The entire time I didn't think once about my ridiculously expensive flower.

And it was probably the best wrestling I've watched in a long time. Twelve very solid matches with very little foul play. No foreign objects, no cartoonish dirty tricks and no soap operatic bullshit as filler. Even Vince kept his involvement to a minimum.

Now, you're probably saying, how can an educated guy like me actually enjoy a sporting event that is obviously fake? I asked myself that too, in light of my cultured weekend. But isn't pro wrestling the height of post-modernism, the embodiment of the notion that there is no objective reality? No one comes out of a movie complaining that it was all staged. So the outcome of the matches is dictated from on high. So what? The acrobatics are real. The blood gushing out of Shawn Michael's forhead was certainly real. The crowd turning on both Lesner and Goldberg for being sell-outs and practically booing them out of the ring was most definitely real and most definitely not scripted. The tears of elation from Chris Benoit for finally winning the championship after 18 years were absolutely real.

Professional wrestling is well-crafted sports entertainment, on par with any other live, scripted entertainment. There are formulas and tropes like all entertainment, but there is the added complexity of the unpredictability of the audience. Wresting can trace its roots back all the way to classical Rome. Success requires physical prowess, mastery of the microphone and improvisational humor and the ability to make millions of people love your or hate you on cue.

So maybe I didn't succumb to culturodynamics. Maybe professional wrestling is actually the highest form of entertainment? Or maybe I had too much soup...