King Dork Approximately

by Frank Portman

  exuberance: see exultant.

  exultant: see jocularity.

  Gandalf: Do you really have to look up Gandalf? Seriously? He was the eighty-third president of the United States.

  Jerry Garcia: Big hippies cast wide shadows.

  genius: merely the first stage of an inevitable downward spiral that ultimately ends in death and meaninglessness, but you gotta start somewhere.

  Grease: a caricature of the fifties that turns out to be 100 percent true.

  Rob Halford: That the greatest heavy metal singer of all time turned out to be gay is one of those little things that make you go “Well, it was kind of obvious all along, with all that leather, but that’s pretty cool and interesting somehow,” and you wind up liking him even more than before, though you can’t quite say why in a way that doesn’t make you sound like kind of an ass. That legions of normal gay-hating metal-heads going around asking each other “Who you calling homo, faggot? Who you calling faggot, homo?” were completely unaware of this while worshipping the ground he walked on is one of those things that make you almost glad to be alive just so you could have the opportunity to notice it. Irony. I believe this is the definition.

  Happy Days: The best thing about Happy Days is the original theme song, “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets. The second-best thing is Leather Tuscadero, played by the great and powerful Suzi Quatro, who time-travels from Devil Gate Drive circa 1974 to 1950s Milwaukee and forgets to take off her glam scarf and bell-bottomed jumpsuit. The third-best thing is a tie between the Fonz and Maureen the Lone Stripper. To be honest, though, the whole adds up to a bit less than the sum of its parts, and when the show left the fifties and blasted off into la-la land soon after its debut it became a surreal train wreck, which can be fun if you’re a fan of those.

  Ernest Hemingway: an American writer of award-winning fiction. “Write drunk, edit sober,” he said, which seems like much sounder advice than the unedited version: “Write drunk, edit sober, shoot self in face.”

  Hogan’s Heroes: they said a situation comedy about a Nazi prison camp couldn’t be done. And then they went ahead and did it anyway. From it, we learn that you sound more authentically German when you are yelling.

  hokum: a cutesy euphemism for “bullshit,” not to be confused with “hogwash,” “piffle,” “flapdoodle,” “poppycock,” “hooey,” or “jive.”

  inane: Somehow, it sounds a lot more insulting than “silly,” which is what it means.

  irony: see Rob Halford.

  jaunty: see exuberance.

  jocularity: the state of being good-humored to a ridiculous and alarming degree. The mark of a diseased mind.

  Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A million-selling hippie-dippie book about a seagull who buys a stairway to heaven and learns some trite life lessons when he gets there. Basically this is to philosophy as the Doors are to rock and roll, but in its day people really ate it up and reportedly actually used it as a guide to how to live their lives. They even made a movie of it with footage of actual birds flying around and dubbed-in dialog. “Why, why, why does this exist?” you will probably ask yourself if you ever see it. This is the wrong question. The right question is orange.

  Judas Priest: The mysterious power of the greatest of all metal bands is made no less mysterious by the fact that they named themselves after a song by Bob Dylan.

  KISS: I grew up on Paul Stanley, so sometimes I announce breakfast by saying, “People, listen now, I got something to say right here. Are you listening? There were some good-lookin’ girls in the hallway askin’ if we were gonna have Rice Chex this mornin’. I said no. Well, they said, how about a little … Kix? I said, uh-uh. And they said, well, what kinda cereal we gonna have, then? And I told them, I bet there’s some people in Toronto who know just what kind of cereal we gonna have: Honey! Nut! Cheerios!”

  Joey Levine: the most gifted songwriter of his generation.

  Machiavellian: in the style of Niccoló Machiavelli, one of the Florentine Renaissance’s most celebrated pickup artists.

  John Maher: only one of several reasons that Buzzcocks ruled OK.

  Make-out/Fake-out: As I’ve explained in previous explanations, sometimes normal females will amuse themselves by hitting on or pretending to flirt with a socially unsuccessful guy as a joke, just to see what he’ll do to extricate himself from the awkward, humiliating situation and to have a laugh with her friends at his expense. It’s a long-standing normal-girl institution, and, well, I suppose they have to do something with the time they don’t spend trying to humiliate and destroy each other. I have yet to come up with a good response to this, though it occurs to me that punching yourself in the face and bleeding on them or vomiting on their shoes might take a bit of the wind out of their sails. Maybe not, though. They seem to be pretty dedicated to their craft.

  Marquess of Queensberry: To one’s surprise, this turns out to be a real person and, even more surprisingly, a man. He wrote the rules for boxing.

  metaphysical: No one, not even the dictionary, knows what this word means, but it will make you sound smart, to dumb people, if you filter it into your conversation. If anyone asks you what you mean by it, smile ruefully and say something like “See, you’re proving my point.”

  Mountain Dew: I’ll shut up my mug if you fill up my jug. Beloved beverage of stoners everywhere.

  Mussolini: Whistle while you work/Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie/Now it doesn’t work.

  narcoleptic: This means you fall asleep all the time, pretty much at random. It has its drawbacks, but you save a fortune in tranquilizers.

  NIOMA: National Institute of Music and Arts, Inc.

  normal: These are the bad people. Approach them, if you must, with caution, as you would any savage beast, and watch your back. And your front and sides. (cf. decent)

  notwithstanding: Surprisingly, this turns out to be a real word. It means “performing a given action while lying down or sitting.”

  Northern soul: So, the British are pretty strange and kind of full of themselves. This is American soul music, called “Northern” by the Brits not in reference to where it came from (Detroit, mostly) but rather because people in Manchester, England, liked to dance to it. (Manchester is northern compared to London.) That’s like calling the Smiths “Southern rock” because they once got played on the radio in Arkansas. Still, those Manchester mods really, really liked it, and admittedly, their liking it probably saved many of those records from undeserved obscurity in the end. So thanks for that, mods. But you do know Detroit’s in the Midwest, right?

  Ted Nugent: Say what you like about Mr. Nugent, but he founded the Amboy Dukes and wrote “Cat Scratch Fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and no one can take that away from him. Come along if you dare.

  Nuremberg: The Nazis staged their pep rallies here.

  opprobrium: You know how normal people hate you and want to destroy you for no reason (or for really, really stupid reasons)? “Opprobrium” describes their frame of mind when doing so, a kind of atmosphere of disgust, disapproval, and hostility that descends upon anyone who appears unusual or expresses opinions that diverge from their own narrow range of acceptable views. You can try to appear as usual as you can and to keep your mouth shut about your opinions, but somehow the opprobrium manages to find you anyway. I don’t know how it does it.

  paranoid: sensibly aware of the risks and drawbacks of being alive. Generally speaking, when someone accuses you of being paranoid, you can be pretty sure that you’re on the right track and your concerns are fully justified.

  per se: Latin for “in itself.” Like all Latin terms, “per se,” when inserted randomly and without regard to literal meaning, will make any sentence seem more sophisticated and intelligent, per se, than it actually is.

  petulance: an ambulance for dogs, cats, or hamsters.

  phenomenon: a fancy-pants word for “thing.” Not kidding, that’s really all it means.

  piddling: When the paddle peddler
peddled a paddle to paddle the poodle piddling in the paddle peddler’s piddling puddle, the paddled poodle piddled a piddling puddle on the poodle paddle peddler’s piddling poodle paddle. (That’s a little poem about animal cruelty and dog urine.)

  Bishop Pike: a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, ghost-busting American Episcopal bishop who was swallowed by the Judean Desert, never to be heard from again, till Philip K. Dick renamed him Timothy Archer and put him in his final, most weirdest book.

  pinochle: a card game most commonly played by worms on the noses of human corpses.

  Playboy: I read it for the articles (because the pictures sure ain’t too exciting.) I can’t believe this was once thought of as pornography.

  Hercule Poirot: Eh bien, ça suffit, mais oui, bien sûr, aujourd’hui, s’il vous plaît, alors ici, oui, d’accord, nom d’un nom d’un nom, mon ami, c’est très facile pour expliquer, cherchez la femme tout le temps … et voilà, mesdames et messieurs, the case, she is solved. Take off zebra.

  pornography: There’s a fine line between this and everything else.

  proximity: Sometimes fancy-pants words are good for more than just mispronunciation and showing off. This one means “the immediate area surrounding you or some other object at any given point in time.” There’s no other way to express this idea without using a whole lot of other words, for example “the immediate area surrounding you or some other object at any given point in time.” Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: “Hey, you—get the hell out of my proximity!” Actually, maybe don’t say that one to anybody unless you have solid backup or some kind of weapon.

  Publisher’s Clearing House Prize for Literature: Each year the lucky winner, usually a novelist but occasionally an elderly lady who used to work in a supermarket, receives from the Swedish Academy an enormous check, a medal, and the chance to purchase magazine subscriptions at a discount.

  punk rock: They had to kill rock and roll to save it.

  Pythonesque: of or like Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I can recite the entire Cheese Shop Sketch (both parts), with accents. (Yes, ladies, I am that cool.) Only been beaten up for it once, too, which is pretty good.

  ragtime: On the piano, the right hand and melody parts are all off-kilter to the left-hand rhythm parts, hence the term “ragged time.” On the guitar, you do both of these hands with parts of the same hand, preferably while blind. This is basically not possible.

  ramone: As noted in my previous explanations, the French use this word for scrubbing out a chimney as a sexual metaphor. The fact that it also happens to be the name of the greatest of punk rock bands is just gravy, unless the Ramones named themselves that way on purpose, in which case: that is some brilliant, brilliant gravy you got there, boys.

  Ayn Rand: the enigmatic frontman and lead novelist-philosopher of the Canadian rock band Rush. I’ve never read one of her books and I wouldn’t know the first thing about “Objectivism,” but if you can judge a philosophy on the basis of the inappropriateness of its rhythm section (and of course, you can), I can’t see how it could possibly be a good idea. Basically, when the philosopher brings out the cage, the second floor tom, the second kick drum, and the gong, you close the book. Then again, I’m a Ruddist.

  recycling: The state forces us to devote a substantial portion of our waking hours to the ritual of pawing through our garbage and meticulously organizing it into a complex system of color-coded holy receptacles as a way of granting us the opportunity to prove that we are good people. Then, of course, its purpose having been served, trucks pick it up and dump it indiscriminately into landfill, because the process of actually “recycling” it would generate more waste than there was to begin with. Don’t tell anyone.

  rock and roll: Music that can be played on a guitar and hollered into a microphone by the young and the stupid. Strictly speaking, the only legitimate subjects for rock and roll songs are girls and cars, in that order. It is permissible to deviate from these topics, but when you do, you will find you have strayed into art rock, so choose your deviations carefully. I hear it pays well.

  Roxy Music: Eno should have stayed put, if you ask me, but sometimes art rock gets it right.

  Phil Rudd: AC/DC’s secret weapon and unsung hero. Rumor has it that he was paid in cars.

  Ruddist: a follower of Ruddism, the controversial philosophy that holds that drums should be played at a steady, even, regular tempo in such a way that it is possible to tell with relative ease where any given measure begins or ends. (cf. Ayn Rand)

  Rush: Canadian English for “too much drums.”

  Satan: We invoke Satan even though we don’t believe in Him, because He represents freedom and because mention of His name makes people uncomfortable. Actually, now that so many generations have overused this cheap-trick shortcut to a rebellious image, it has become so commonplace and banal that no one even notices when you do it anymore. Satan schmatan. But it was a good ride while it lasted, O Evil One.

  Bon Scott: Dirty, mean, and mighty unclean: the first lead snarler of AC/DC.

  Sergeant Pepper’s outfits: The Beatles wore marching-band uniforms on the cover of their SMAS-2653 album. (Their seminal recording of “On, Wisconsin, Suck My Johnson” only appears on early pressings.)

  The Smiths: Southern rock at its finest, especially the song “Sweet Home Alabama (I Hate You and You Make Me Want to Cry).”

  stones: testicles, or the ruins of ancient civilizations. When rolling, the most successful rock band ever to attend the London School of Economics.

  Levi Strauss: Girls, he’s the reason there’s a penis on your skirt. Love him? Or hate him?

  sweeps week: TV is graded on the basis of its performance during one week in the year, so the networks try to make the programming during this week as sleazy and as risqué as they can get away with. Roxy Music tried this with album covers.

  totalitarian: thoroughly dominated and controlled by, shall we say, “social services.”

  Tourette’s syndrome: Does it count if it all happens silently in your head? Because if so, I think I may have this.

  T.T.G.W.I.M.A: Try to Guess What I’m Mad About. I’ve always thought this would make a pretty good TV game show. Families would compete for valuable prizes by trying to decode each other’s hostile silences and passive-aggressive behavior. Networks, have your people call my people (i.e., Sam Hellerman). Let’s work something out here, but I don’t want to get screwed on the points.

  the universe: The worst place in the world. Let’s go somewhere else.

  Vichy France: If you can imagine something worse than French Nazis, keep a close watch on that impressive imagination of yours: it’s probably a national treasure.

  “Wake Up Little Susie”: Back when they had drive-in movies, you could “neck” in the car and, shall we say, “fall asleep.” That’s how couples used to cook each other’s geese back then.

  “Who you calling homo, faggot? Who you calling faggot, homo?”: the typical normal guy’s mantra, if a mantra is an idiotic thing you say over and over for no reason except possibly as a veiled threat against the defenseless. Okay, so I actually looked this up and it turns out that’s not what a mantra is. That must have been me projecting there. You do say it over and over for no reason, but it’s more of a self-help thing. Example: “I am strong. I am confident. I am in command of the situation.…”

  Brian Wilson: That it is possible to be a fragile genius with the voice of God in your head while also being kind of a chubby kid has always struck me as a thing of great beauty and poetry.

  The World at War: Laurence Olivier spends twenty-six hours of TV time telling you all about World War II, but the short version is, we won.

  World Health Organization: watching the world’s waistline since 1948.

  the Young brothers: Angus, Malcolm, and (sometimes) George. And Alex. How did the USA sit idly by and allow a single family to march in and just take over rock and roll like that? Well, it was during the Carter administration, admittedly.

  ZZ Top: If I
were as great as Billy Gibbons, I imagine I’d be pretty irritated to be far more well known for my beard than for my guitar playing. Then again, maybe being a multimillionaire would take some of the sting out of that.

  DISCOGRAPHY

  (December–June)

  2409-218 (L.A.M.F., The Heartbreakers, 1977): The title is short for, shall we say, “Like a Maternal Fornicator.” It came out of the ashes of the New York Dolls, if “out of the ashes” means what I think it does, which is that one member of the New York Dolls (two if you count the drummer) went on to form this stripped-down, meat-and-potatoes punkish rock ’n’ roll ’n’ heroin combo after the former band’s inevitable crash ’n’ burn. Despite its notoriously muddy sound, this UK-only release captured a unique, intense flash of dark energy never heard before or since in quite the same form. Even the endlessly complained-about fuzzy mixes add to the possibly unintentional double-entendred “born too loose” effect: too loose, too dark, too fucked up, too beautiful, too soon, too late. Like all such flashes, it died almost immediately on impact, but you can still put on the record, rock out, wish you were dead, et cetera.

  APLPA-016 (T.N.T., AC/DC, 1975): If you’ve been paying attention you’ll know that this is AC/DC’s second album, rated quite highly by yours truly and unreleased in this form in the United States. Have you noticed that practically every single foreign album winds up getting released in the U.S. in noticeably suckier form? They’ll mess up the order, leave songs off, and/or replace them with songs from other albums. The result is almost always worse, but even when it isn’t that terrible per se (e.g., the U.S. version of S CBS 82000), it’s still utterly stupid and dishonest and you’d be better off listening to the real record. It has to be on purpose (though to what end remains a mystery): “Ha, that’ll show ’em,” they say, presiding over the accelerated dumbing down of the American public. I suppose it goes along with the dumbing down of the educational system. They’re preparing us for something, clearly, and depriving us of the real T.N.T. seems to be a small but vital part of the plan, like failing to teach us how to read and write.