Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil and Jordan Stokes to overthink cold war pop culture in light of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a characteristically unaccountable digression about the repatriation of antiquities to Egypt.

Tell us what you think! Leave a comment, use the contact form, email us or call 20-EAT-LOG-01—that’s (203) 285-6401.

Download Episode 71 (MP3)

Karl Marx: Even hairier than the Wolfman. Coincidence... OR IS IT!?

[I want to thank Professor David Graeber, whose anthropological dissection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and accompanying lectures) very much forms the basis of this post.]

Let’s begin with two observations. First: the Vampires that inhabit our most recent pop cultural works differ so dramatically from the classic archetype of Golden-Age Hollywood that they are are almost unrecognizable. Second: Werewolves are lame.

Or at least, compared with their undead, blood-sucking, vaguely-Carpathian cohort, werewolves of late have occupied a far less enviable position in the collective pop cultural landscape. These are not the subtle, nuanced, infinitely malleable characters vampires are–the sort capable of carrying their own novels, TV-shows, Movies and crappy Movie-Tie-In Video Games. Rather, lycanthropes end up as the stock types passively added to spice up a Vampire vehicle. Sure, some immortal genius might figure out a way to breathe new life into the old dogs, but for now, Buffy’s Oz remains a werewolf’s best case scenario. In the worst cases it’s… well… I’d rather not say.

However, there is something to be said about the sheer frequency with which werewolves pop up in Vampire works. Is your horror-story turned teen-abstinence-parable getting a bit too stale to survive a sequel? Throw in some werewolves! Is having a psychic heroine dating a vampire proving an insufficient allegory for southern race relations? Make her boss a werewolf! At least…sorta’. The point is, as the length of a Vampire epic approaches infinity, the probability that the spinning “let’s throw in a different kind of monster” wheel will stop on “Werewolf” approaches 1. And it does so far earlier than all of the other forms. As the old aphorism goes: no ghosts, witches, reanimated corpses, mer-people, vengeful pagan gods or giant, radioactive slugs before werewolves. And for heaven’s sake, NO MUMMIES.

The delicious exception that proves the rule.

Yet–and this is important–despite the number of appearances Werewolves (or the equivalent) make in predominantly Vampire (or equivalent) works, the converse is never true, because Werewolves remain lame.

But why? What is it about our culture that causes us to perpetually dwell on one classic occult figure, while paupering the other of such attention?

The answer, of course, lies in the failure of Marxism.

It's amazing, Molly. The love inside, you take it with you. See ya.

Patrick Swayze’s father was a rodeo clown, and his mother was a dance teacher. His first artistic calling was to the ballet. Is there any greater evidence in popular culture that the artist’s soul transmutes?

The arts is more than learning technique, more than honing craft – artists tune themselves as conduits for the expressions, emotions, energies, sympathies, all the quantifiable and unquantifiable good graces of human existence. By learning one, you are learning all of them – so when at some point somebody comes along, takes away your dance shoes and hands you a surfboard, or a horse to ride, a fake gun to fire, lest we forget – a microphone in a studio, or a potter’s wheel – once you figure out what to do with it, you know how to regard it; you know what it means.

And then maybe somebody gives you back your dancing shoes and a pretty girl to dance with who nobody puts in a corner – and  you become a legend. And then you leave us (sometimes in Spanish) . . .

Patrick Swayze, deeply spiritual artist, pop culture icon, star of stage and screen, has died at 57.

We had the time of our lives, Patrick. And we owe it all to you.

There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time: that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are, “Hi, I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

—Ronald Reagan, July 28, 1988

In what decade but the 1980s could an EPA inspector be a movie villain?

The Reagan Revolution of the 80s turned pop culture into a battlefield between Capitalism and Communism. Despite the fact that neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. practiced a pure version of either – hundreds of thousands were on Social Security and Medicare in the U.S., and Levi’s had already made it past the Berlin Wall – everyone knew which they preferred. America glorified Freedom (see Rocky IV, Rambo II, Iron Eagle, Red Dawn, etc); Russia glorified The State.

Compare this with movies like Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, barely two decades later. When the EPA accuses a corporation of environmental wrongdoing, we the audience immediately suspect the corporation. The cultural stage has changed.

Keep this in mind for Walter Peck’s first appearance in Ghostbusters.

Alcohol advertisers are well known for bombarding their audience with nonsensical imagery, but Stolichnaya Vodka really takes the cake with their new campaign, “The Wild Wild West Is In The East.”

This may be a New York only thing. Let me know in the comments.

Don’t worry if your immediate reaction was confusion, followed by more confusion over your confusion. Mine was too.  Stoli’s previously established practice of using overt Soviet imagery was perplexing by itself, but they’ve really taken it to a new level by invoking the American Old West and the New Russia on top of the communism.

How can we make sense of this nonsense? Read on for three different interpretations. Martinis will be served, after the jump.

Slate recently ran an article about economists and strawberry pickin’ that you all ought to take a look at.

It’s well worth reading a whole thing, but the gist of it is that if you own a strawberry farm, and you let a bunch of econ professors mess with your strawberry pickers’ incentive structure, you will increase productivity tremendously, leading to profit.

This is great!  Or at least that’s how Slate feels about it.  I am much less sure.