The Dauphin, age 13, in the den right this very second.
No Good Can Come From This
13 Responses to No Good Can Come From This
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jaybird says:
You’re worried about letting your kid listen to Exile on Mainstreet, but you’re letting him read Spy magazine? I mean, I loved it too back in the 80s, but I don’ t think it was appropriate for 13 year olds … Maybe my recollection is wrong, but I remember it being pretty salty…lots of f-bombs and sex-talk and the sort of all-around coarseness and casual vulgarity that you otherwise bemoan in our popular culture…
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SteveM says:
Rod, good for your Dauphin. Learning about the excesses of the “fat fingered vulgarian” and what he should do if he could time-travel: “Kill Hitler, save the dinosaurs and buy Xerox at eight and a half.”
Most people didn’t get Spy, which is why is was worth reading.
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Aaron Gross says:
Getting the latest issue of Spy in the mail was pure pleasure. The greatest magazine ever.
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EngineerScotty says:
Relax–I liked to read the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers as a youngster, and turned out all right. (My parents were generally unaware of my possession of such).
That said, did you check to make sure there wasn’t a copy of Playboy hidden inside the Spy?
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Jeffersonian says:
Next, I suppose you’ll be showing him the Dead Parrot sketch on YouTube
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Sam M says:
I share Jaybird’s curiosity. I was never a huge Spy aficionado, as I was maybe a teensy bit too young and too rural during its heyday. But I recall nude pictures of Arnold Schwarzeneggar and a cover photo of Hilary Clinton in bondage gear.
Your standard for rock music and movies was exercising our stewardship of the culture “intelligently and discerningly.” I’d argue that the Rolling Stones did that in spades–on the same level as maybe the New Yorker. I’d consider Spy something more like Van Halen: irreverent, technically sound, lots of fun, fully aware of what it was doing–even if some of its fans were not.
Interesting!
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Caroline Nina in DC says:
All I can say is, AWESOME–I remember more about articles from SPY than I do from some college seminars.
SteveM: Wasn’t it “stubby-fingered vulgarian”? Or am I misremembering?
And Rod: How do the politics of SPY fare 25 years later? I’ll bet there’s all kinds of hilarious stuff that would not be considered “appropriate” to satirize today.
It is very weird to be old enough to start thinking of the late 1980s as some kind of “more innocent time.”
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William Burns says:
Ah, it does my heart good to see a youth reading ink on paper.
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It was “short-fingered vulgarian.” And another one of those New York zillionaires was always described as “nasty, brutish and short.”
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I believe the correct phraseology was “short-fingered vulgarian.
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Peter H says:
I suppose that in response, I should post a photo of my baby girl reading Twilight.
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Thanks for the corrections, folks. I guess “stubby-fingered vulgar” was my own creation, then. I will have to use it!
Now: Can anyone tell me what the proper term for the “Pro-Am Nightlife Decathalon” was?
If anybody is interested in keeping this thread going, what is your favorite SPY essay? I loved the one about the woman who tried eating dog food.
Be afraid, Mr. Dreher. Be very afraid.
Your servant,
Lord Karth