The Fredösphere

I spent last night in the venerable Michigan Theater attending a free showing of one of those tiresome, clichéd horror movies about some creepy, psychotic old man who dons a Santa Claus suit and goes on a rampage, plunging an entire city into chaos and terror.  This one was called ... Nightmare on ... no, wait ... Miracle on 34th Street.  Yes, that was it.  The most regrettable part is, I took my kids.  What a mistake.

In the last few days, I've sampled a lot (for me) of popular culture, and it has put me in a foul mood.  Monday night we watched Nanny 911, which has its own special lameness, but the commercials were what especially appalled.  All that hype devoted to the stupidest, most worthless things!  How do people stand watching TV?  Meanwhile, Miracle was hardly reassuring (it was my first time to see it).  A more innocent time ... gotta have faith ... blah, blah, blah.  Face this fact, if you can:  they made a Christmas classic out of a courtroom drama.  A courtroom drama!  If only they could have found a plot contrivance that would have sent Natalie Wood to the electric chair, the movie would have been redeemed.

On the way home from the movie, my friend Jed expressed an interest in owning a fedora, after I commented on the hats.  Can a man of this day pull of such a statement?  Dare I try wearing one?  Did poofy hair kill the hat in western culture?  These are sincere questions.

I'll wrap this up with a few random links.  Here's more on the current bad Santa epidemic.  Via A&L Daily I found this important warning to musicians:  Mozart makes you sick.  Meanwhile, my friend John sent me a Wikipedia entry packed with information about heavy metal umlauts.  It's the diacritical mark of the beast! 

The novel Zodiac (1988) by Neal Stephenson features a fictional band called Pöyzen Böyzen, which one character describes as "not bad for a two-umlaut band".

My umlaut is not intended to effect the pronunciation of the Fredösphere, but I assure you it is not purely gratuitous.  As I believe I have mentioned before, it is a reference to Teilhard de Chardin's term noösphere, from which the term blogosphere was cooked up.  Tom Wolfe's essay in Hooking Up on de Chardin is the most entertaining source of information on this topic, but not available online, so instead I'll direct you here, where they (sadly) use the convention of spelling noösphere without the umlaut.  Weenies!  The link clears up one bit of confusion:

[A] fundamental characteristic of layer 9 [i.e., the noösphere] in comparison with the former ones, is that the building element -man- doesn't lose his individuality. Socialisation is not a superindividual being as suggested by the Gaian hypothesis of e.g. Lovelock, although ultimately there is a convergence in the minds of men into a superconsciousness that Teilhard called the Omega Point.

That's a relief.  Furthermore, at the end of his life, de Chardin developed the less-well-known concept of the Christosphere, the final stage of development beyond the noösphere.  (Don't you even think of using that word for the name of your next blog!)  Nevertheless, de Chardin has a gnostic vibe going that gives me the same slippery feeling I get from reading Phillip K. Dick.  But that's a (long) topic for another day.