Why We Like What We Do

Usually when I hear the word "influence," it's preceded by the word "bad." Like the time back in Philly, when I was left to keep an eye on two nine-year-olds?my friend Derek's daughter and some neighbor kid?while Derek made another beer run. The minute the door closed behind him, I turned to the two waifs and asked, "So?would you kids like to see a neat trick?"

They both agreed that, yes, they would, so then I asked Derek's daughter, "Does your dad have a staple gun?"

I never know what to do around kids. I just try to think of the things that would've amused me when I was nine.

Well let's just say that later that night, about an hour after the neighbor kid went home, Derek's phone rang. It was, unsurprisingly, the kid's incensed mother, informing Derek that I would never again be allowed around her child without some form of responsible adult supervision. Don't see what her problem was, myself. All I did was show the kids how I could pump industrial staples into my skull. It kept them plenty amused for half an hour. Though there was a little blood involved, nobody was really hurt all that much (and the kids not at all). Hell, I could've taught them both how to do the human blockhead trick. Or the human pincushion act, for that matter.

That's all beside the point, though.

Lately, see, as I've been on my various daily constitutionals, I've been thinking about another form of influence.

One of the Big Questions that's nagged at me for as long as I can remember is simply this: Why do we like what we like? It's something neither philosophy nor science has even begun to approach. I thought I'd find an answer by studying esthetics, but I didn't. I thought the neurosciences might have something to say about it, but they don't. Not really, anyway. Esthetics tells us what we should like, and neuroscience describes how the brain reacts when we encounter something that we do. Neither one of them can (or at least hasn't) explain why one person can love, say, Italian cannibal films while another person lives for Bergman. Or why you can inhale Cap'n Crunch as a child, but come to fear it when you hit 30. Or 32. Or why some people pretend to like John Cage, while others sincerely enjoy the power-ballad artistry of Cinderella.

I certainly don't get it, and doubt I ever will. What I am beginning to understand, however, is where my love for certain cultural artifacts came from initially, which is at least a beginning. It started to occur to me last weekend, as I was watching the original King Kong.

The first movie I ever saw on the big screen was Airport, which was playing at the Skylite Drive-in. I sat in the back seat and couldn't hear much. The first movie I saw in the theater was Walt Disney's The Barefoot Executive (starring Kurt Russell, Joe Flynn, the great Wally Cox and a chimp). That, likewise, didn't make much of an impression on me. Finally, when I was eight, my parents took me to see Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and that's when I got hooked.

Perhaps seeing that I had a certain clear affinity for the great apes, my dad told me about the first movie he ever saw?which turned out to be King Kong. But he talked about King Kong with such reverence and joy, and in such detail, that it immediately became my favorite film of all time, long before I ever actually saw it. In fact, I saw plenty of other Kong films before I saw the original. Once I did see the original, though (I was probably 11 when they played it on the Late Show one night), I understood immediately what he was talking about.

The same was true with comic books. One afternoon, after noticing that I'd been reading an awful lot of the damn things, my dad said he wanted to show me something.

He went into the storage room in the basement (the one that terrified me) and, after some rustling about, came out 10 minutes later carrying a cardboard box. He opened it up, dug through some old newspapers and whatnot, reached in and pulled out a handful of yellowed, brittle issues of Jack Cole's Plastic Man. (Actually, they were old Police Comics, featuring the Spirit as well as Plastic Man, but Plastic Man was on all the covers.)

It was his favorite when he was a kid, he told me. I took the comics up to my room, and read through them all that night.

Plastic Man was funnier than either Spider-Man or that stony-faced Captain America, had a dark side that was darker than Batman's (his alter ego, Eel O'Brien, was a wanted criminal), and could do a hell of a lot more than all of them combined. In one case, he even turned himself into a rug! Though I wouldn't come to recognize it until years later, Cole's artwork was as inventive and tricky and fun as anything that has ever been done in the superhero genre. Nobody's ever topped him, with the possible exception of Will Eisner (but that's a long story there).

Hell, I still read Plastic Man (DC has released several anthologies), though of course I miss most of the details nowadays.

I was in the sixth grade just a couple years after my dad introduced me to Plastic Man, and had all but grown out of my comic book stage. The school I went to was an aging, four-story beige brick building a quarter mile up the hill from where we lived (it's an Osco drugstore now). Most all the kids I knew in that school were fanatical Monty Python geeks. The local PBS station played it every Saturday night at 10:30.

My dad, I must admit, was not a huge fan of the show. He didn't care much for all the naughty references and all those cartoon boobs. He couldn't have been happier when, for the duration of the summer of 1977, PBS replaced Monty Python with a series called The Best of Ernie Kovacs. There were only a handful of episodes, really, so each one was broadcast a few times. Now this was something he could appreciate. The Ernie Kovacs Show was something else he watched in his youth. He was a little older when it originally aired?late teens to early 20s?but still it was clear that Kovacs made an indelible impact on his sense of humor. Either that, or just happened to fit right in with what was already there.

I knew nothing about Kovacs at the time. Had never even heard of him. So my dad insisted I sit down and watch it.

It only took a few minutes?I think the first sketch I saw was his infamous "1812 Overture" music video?to realize that what Kovacs was doing so very long ago (at least it was a long time to me) fit right in with my sense of humor, too. And again, it wasn't until years later that I realized that he had been as inventive with television as Jack Cole had been with comics. We spent most every Saturday night that warm summer downstairs, me on the couch, my dad in his recliner, laughing our asses off.

Most of the kids I knew from school hated Ernie Kovacs. Well, they didn't hate him, really, so much as they were pissed that he was the reason there was no more Monty Python. Out of protest, they refused to watch.

That was fine. I was happy to keep things an in-house secret. Because despite the fact that my dad and I did a lot of things together?the traditional things, like playing catch and going to football games and whatnot?this was one of the very few things we could actually share. It didn't bother me none that nobody else wanted any part of it.

A few years ago for Christmas, I picked him up the entire "Best of" series on videotape. Then I picked up the same set for myself. Then I wrote a book about how one of the sketches in particular had a profound effect on me. At some point in the future I hope to write another Kovacs-inspired book called Rancid the Devil Horse. To this day, I can still watch those old sketches, still laugh my ass off, still be amazed and still be grateful he called my attention to it in the first place.

Sure, over the ensuing years, there were plenty of things I've discovered on my own or by other means?the weird music, the weird books?but in one way or another, all those things can be traced back to those three primary sources: King Kong, Plastic Man and Ernie Kovacs. It's not much of a stretch to move from King Kong to King Kong Escapes to Maniac Cop 2, or to slide from Kovacs' take on the "Indian Love Call" to Harry Partch?or, for that matter, to take the necessary baby steps from Plastic Man to Junky or Blaise Cendrars.

Just as I sit here typing this, I worked out the timeline?it wasn't hard. All the above cultural revelations occurred over less than four years?between 1973 and 1977. Through that small window of opportunity, I got everything I needed by essentially absorbing my father's childhood and making it my own.

I'm not sure what to think about that?but looking back at the sort of dreck I was being offered at the time, I think it all worked out for the best.