This is how at works:

If you’re anything like me, the only part of the newspaper that you really care for is the “Arts & Entertainment” section. Sure, you read the headlines, maybe skim the articles so you have something to talk about at parties in a thinly veiled attempt to make yourself seem better than everyone else in the room (as if the obscure microbrewed beer on which you sip didn’t make your vast superiority obvious enough), and maybe hold on to the Sports section to use in case your roommates forget to buy toilet paper again (4 days! FOUR DAYS!), but really, the A&E section is where it’s at. Maybe it’s because “art imitates life,” but the throbbing pulse of the world is to be found within those pages. It’s the reverberation of that beating heart of culture on which you thrive.

Too bad everything in it sucks.

Just kidding. Mostly.

For every music opinion writer who jacked off to Vampire Weekend last January and spent the fall vaguely rescinding their previous affections in favor of self-questioning rhetoric about whether or not they actually deserve the notoriety that said writer had previously pinned upon them, there’s someone else scouring eBay for a copy of Andrew WK’s mysterious third album, released only in Japan. For ever local community production of “High School Musical” that conflicts with yet-another-god-damn-touring-company of RENT, there’s a a group of artists in an abandoned warehouse doing The Muppet’s Waiting for Godot and performing for a crowd that’s smaller than the cast (and probably employs a house manager who e-mails me every 5 fucking minutes with another Aunt that she wants to Comp into the show who isn’t going to come anyway). For every “Chinese Democracy,” there’s a a sad and lonely 28-year-old male with long, greasy black hair and a dirtlip mustache masturbating while crying in his parents’ basement, trying desperately to let go of the past and justify the album’s existence, and failing miserably at both.

And for the rest of the world, there’s me. See how that didn’t really make sense but I kind of tied it together anyway, thereby justifying the tears-as-lube joke? Fucking brilliant, that.

The thing is, there is a strange divide in this world regarding “high” art and “low” art (“Capital ‘A’ Art versus lower-case ‘a’” according to a professor I had), and this distinction is made only by the proper-noun They, the self-declared authority on all things culture, a mysterious and faceless gang of gluttons that rule the world of arts and entertainment with an iron pen.

Iron paper? Iron opinion? Iron word-of-mouth? Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor, but you get the idea. The idea (in case you didn’t get it) is that it’s my turn now to declare myself an authority on all things “pop” and all things “culture” and especially on all things “Pop Culture.” The difference between me and Them is that I’ve got the credentials to back up my claim. Really what that means is, I’ve got common sense enough to look at admire (or despise) things objectively, as well as subjectively, to know how to separate the two.

So that’s what I’m here writing towards: Art versus entertainment versus art. Why whould these things be mutually exclusive? And why have They decided to brand some-often antiquated-things as “high class” or “classics,” while modern art (not Modern) pushes ahead and struggles to gain that same respect, even when it undoubtedly deserves it? Ten years ago, did anyone think that a comic book movie would have as much success as The Dark Knight? Does anyone else really hate the fact that every Rolling Stone “Best of…” list is mostly devoid of all entires after 1977 other than Guns N’ Roses, Nirvana, Beck, and Radiohead?

Let’s fuck some culture.