When I was a kid, the word "nerd" was an insult. And I heard that insult a lot.
Actually, there were several synonymous epithets that I heard as well: Teacher's pet. Brown-noser. Bookworm. Geek. But they all, along with "nerd," meant the same thing--loser.
A nerd was a person that got laughed at, tripped in the hall, tormented, shut out from normal kid society. If there was more than one nerd in a school, they tended to group together in an anxious cluster--sort of like a herd of cattle just before a severe storm. And there was always a storm coming, no matter where a nerd went to school.
My, how things change!
With the advent of home computers, the popularity of the Star Wars and Star Trek movies, and the growing importance of a college degree to a person's employability, nerdiness began to lose its stigma. Movies like Police Academy and Revenge of the Nerds, which depicted how various groups of "losers" use their unique skill sets to prove themselves in a hostile environment, broke down more barriers (the sequel to ROTN even has one of the "hostiles" joining the Lambda frat after a harrowing shared experience). When Al Gore helped fund the shift of the military Arpanet to the public sector (where it became the Internet), the change had truly come: anybody could be a nerd...and if you mastered the simple skills required, you would be!
Now, that doesn't mean there weren't still "elite" nerds; there were, and are. Those are the ones who can write code from scratch, scrub the malware out of your operating system, and program your DVR so you record "Game of Thrones" instead of the PGA tournament (or vice-versa...thanks to Tiger Woods, golf became cool, too). But the gaps between them and a garden-variety nerd like me aren't of quality, but of quantity. It's all in how much know-how you have, and it's surprisingly easy to acquire more knowledge these days, thanks to the Internet!
In short, nerds aren't losers anymore. They're just people with more knowledge. And the very words "geek" and "nerd" have become compliments instead of put-downs.
Nerds 2: The New Batch!
So yeah, it's cool to be a nerd now.
Which is why I feel totally comfortable sharing some of my own nerdy coolness with you. So here goes....
1) The Music Scene
As a nerd in high school, I listened to Rush, Yes, Pink Floyd, and the Moody Blues while everyone else (depending on their clique) was into new wave, heavy metal, and country. (There wasn't much jazz on any airwaves reachable by me, so I had to wait for college to hear Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis for the first time.)
Oh, I liked some of what was on the average AM stations; it's just that I preferred stuff with some meat on its bones. Complex musicianship, interesting lyrics, style mash-ups...give me a group that did one or more of those things, and I was happy. Groups like that have staying power, as well; there is a whole new generation of young people who hear Emerson, Lake and Palmer for the first time and wonder why the radio doesn't play bands like that anymore. Heck, I recently had the unique pleasure of introducing a young piano major to the Beatles' "A Day In The Life." When the song was over, he said he was sorry it wasn't longer! And when music hits you like that, you listen to every song you hear afterwards with an ear to finding something that matches that first time.
Yes, you're right. It is like a drug. But it's a healthy addiction.
Okay, here comes the nerdy bit: Just what was it about that music that made me so happy that to this day my best memories of my school days all have a soundtrack from "Fragile" or "The Wall" or "Moving Pictures"?
I think it boils down to one thing: I wasn't ruled by a peer group. I had no "flock" of like-feathered birds. I could count on one hand the number of nerds in my entire school, and not one of them was in my year. And although I knew them in passing, none of them shared the same interests, with me or with each other. This absence of peer input on which items were "cool" meant that I could examine everything I saw and heard without bias, and from there choose what I liked, just because I liked it.
It also helped that I came from a diverse musical family--Mom loved country and 50's rock'n'roll, and Dad liked 40's big bands and crooners. He was also interested in world music--he had tapes of traditional Mexican dance music and Bavarian yodels (no, I am not kidding!), and both my parents played guitar and sang. Somewhere out there are reel-to-reel tapes of us kids singing Christmas songs and hymns along with my parents' accompaniment.
So with that kind of input, it's no surprise that my taste in music would also be unique and diverse.
Here is a sample. Enjoy.
2) Art Imitates Dreams...
I saw my first Rene Magritte paintings in one of my grade-school reading books. It was a "fact" article on Surrealism, and along with Magritte's "Time Transfixed" and "The Castle of the Pyrenees," there was also a picture of Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory" and Yves Tanguy's "Fear." Of the three, Magritte had the most profound effect, with his photographic realism mixed with impossible juxtapositions of people, landscapes, and things (such as the floating rock in "Pyrenees"). His light was also friendlier, as a rule; in a Magritte painting, the sun was usually shining and the sky a cloud-studded blue. If it was overcast, you could see the clouds. Dali and Tanguy's paintings, by contrast, had an eerie, grayish-yellow cast, and the horizon was always fading off into darkness. It looked, in fact, like bad weather moving in. That lighting, plus the way both painters were always impaling things onto pointy sticks, put me off. So I became a permanent Magritte fan.
Here is one of my favorite Magrittes. It's called "The Banquet." (There are actually several versions of this painting, but I like this one best.)
There has been a kind of resurgence of that branch of Surrealism in the person of Canadian painter Rob Gonsalves, who sadly passed away in 2017. He was only 58 years old. His Surrealism involves a lot of things slowly morphing into other things, as well as worlds seen through the eyes of children and small spaces that become huge (room changing to sky) or vice-versa.
Here's a Gonsalves that I like--it's called "Written Worlds." As a bibliophile, I appreciate his vision!
3) Movies Off The Beaten Track
The two quintessential nerd movies are Star Wars and Star Trek. The rivalry between the two has become something of a legend.
Myself, I like both series, but there are many other nerdy films to enjoy. Here are just a few...
The Lathe of Heaven - I mentioned this one before in my post on Ursula K. Le Guin. Produced on a shoestring budget for PBS, it still holds up after almost 40 years. If you can find a DVD of it, lucky you. Whatever you do, don't mistake it for the 2002 remake, which is higher-budget but unworthy of its title.
WarGames - This is actually another nerd fave because of its depiction of hacker culture. Much, much later, a Canadian outfit did a sequel, WarGames: The Dead Code. Both worth seeing, though I consider Matthew Broderick's performance in the original rather wince-making in places.
The Thirteenth Floor - This one gets compared to The Matrix a lot, but that's mainly because of them being released within months of each other. Thirteenth is actually much older; it's based on a story called "Simulacron 3," which was written in the 1970's. Also, the plots are nothing alike, though they both take place inside computer networks.
The Time Machine - The original George Pal production, mind you. Some of the most innovative special effects for its time, and that machine is still a beauty. There was an ep of The Big Bang Theory in which Sheldon and his friends bought that original prop (it gave poor Sheldon nightmares).
Silent Running - This one gets dissed a lot for an explosion supposedly "heard" in space, but when I first saw the film, I considered it more a felt concussion - if you're on a ship, and another part of the ship gets blown up, you'd feel it even if you didn't hear it. Probably one of the major players in the eco-warning genre - the bio-habitats on the Valley Forge held the last of Earth's flora, which was considered to be unneeded by everyone else. When the main character dies, leaving the robots to care for all that plant life under artificial sunlight, and the ship to sail out of the solar system, I always hoped that long after the closing credits, humanity would realize that they missed seeing flowers and trees and would go and find the ship. Of course, knowing what we know now, we realize we can't afford to lose all that plant life...but I digress.
Soylent Green - Too many people, too little food, and we've destroyed the ecosystem to where we're reduced to (spoiler alert!) eating our dead, in the form of protein chips called Soylent Green. There is also some interesting social commentary on how the wealthy can still get "real" food, but for the most part, the only thing people remember about this movie is Charlton Heston screaming "Soylent Green is made out of people!"
Exam - A thriller that takes place all in one room. People compete for a job opening by taking an exam. There are rules they must follow...but when they turn their papers over to begin, the papers are blank! WTF?! The entire rest of the movie is about solving the mystery of the exam, plus revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly in each applicant. There are a lot of red herrings in this film, but be patient; the payoff is worth it.
Snowpiercer - You could call this a parable of poverty and privilege, set on board a train that circles the entire world once a year, in a permanent winter created by a short-sighted solution to global warming. The poor people in the back car of the train are planning a revolution to get to the engine and control the train and its resources...but not only are there dark surprises in store, the whole point of running the train may be moot. The further you move forward in the train, the more wealth and privilege you see; and the end is something of a cliffhanger.
No, I'm not done, BUT...
There's lots more I could share with you, but I'm afraid this post is getting over-long. Perhaps I can return to the subject at a later time. On the other hand, there's more than enough here to get you started in the wacky world of nerd-dom, and from what I've given you, you can find plenty more.
So welcome, young Padawan. Have fun!
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