Matt Damon visits the "Hard-Rocking" Cafe

Safire's back from vacation and as usual, every sentence is just a bevel of shit you never cared about. Like the difference between "chief strategist" and "senior political adviser." Hint: It's entirely semantic but somehow still important, kind of like the difference between "certified bachelor on the prowl" and a plain old "registered sexual predator."

But that just left me with mild boredom rather than full-blown embarrassment. Luckily, I quickly found Still Searching, But With Darker Eyes, Manohla Dargis' review of The Bourne Ultimatum. "Jaw clenched, brow knotted, body tight as a secret, Matt Damon hurtles through 'The Bourne Ultimatum' like a missile," reads the first line, and the review proceeds accordingly, its 5th grade sycophancy finally bursting with "[The director] knows how to do his job, and there's no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene." (Italics mine.)

Like catching your Uncle Steve masturbating, you want to just back away slowly, but unfortunately, the Gray Lady just decided to go ahead and seriously print "hard-rocking" as both (1) serious criticism and (2) a hyphenate. Why?

"Hard-rocking" first graced the pages of the New York Times on September 12, 1980, describing a John Lennon recording session. It was first used in a movie review three years later, on September 23, 1983 in Janet Maslin's review of the New Jersey rock epic, Eddie and the Cruisers, which still employed the phrase in a musical context.

The phrase wasn't made completely devoid of meaning until March 4, 2001, when writer Dan Neil asserted that "It isn't hard to spot a cultural trend in the hard-rocking commercials for the Nissan Frontier," which makes Neil the first in the cultural trend of using "hard-rocking" to mean "establishmentarian" and "literally commercial."

"Hard-rocking" at the Times doesn't have to involve music and can be anything abrasive or just attempting a mysterious "cool." (e.g. "Your Uncle Steve's hard-rocking Matt Damon jag-off session.") So just go ahead and use "hard-rocking" to mean any fucking thing you want. Really, everything rock-related is going to die anyway with the coming birth of this Rosemary's baby/chupacabra creature from Nicole Richie and Emo posterboy Joel Madden. Just keep rock-harding until then. Or whatevs.

Congrats to all the BCR Contest Winners. But Backwards City isn't the only place handing out prizes these days. Why, just look at the United States and their new poet laureate in this NY Times Blog "On Paper." The article muses on the political stance of the new PL, Charles Simic, and speculates that his past public statements might make him a more vocal critic of the Bush administration. Though I have great respect for Simic's work and his political views, I think this overestimates the esteem and influence of the position of poet laureate.
There has been a serious decline in literary reading in the United States in recent years. In 2004 the National Endowment for the Arts released a survey entitled Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. The gloomy title suggests that the findings are not good. What is somewhat shocking is how bad the results actually are. Between 1982 and 2002 the United States saw a ten percent decline in readers of literature, or nearly 20 million readers. This decline occurred despite a growing population. In the current cultural climate fewer than half of Americans actually read literature.
Of this half, most are readers of short stories or novels, which were read by 45.1 percent or 93 million adults in the previous year. Poetry was read by 12.1 percent or 25 million people. With so few readers, Can Poetry Matter? To get a little Reading Rainbow about it, what do you think (5 Bonus Points to the first post "acknowledging" a Shelley quotation)?

Backwards City Review is pleased to announce the winners of its 2007 fiction and poetry contests!

POETRY

Winner
Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman, “Kimberly Cutout”

Finalists
Jill Beauchesne, “Armistice Day”
Woody Loverude, “Covenant”
Lynne Potts, “Whole Worlds Had Already Happened”

FICTION

Winner
B.J. Hollars, “Conservation Status of Least Concern”

Finalists
Joe Oestreich, “Trouble Doll”
Kelcey Parker, “Lent”
Mike Young, “Burk’s Nub”

The winners and selected finalists will appear in Backwards City #6, arriving in your mailbox this fall

Keep watching backwardscity.net for information on the winner of our second chapbook contest, as well as deadlines and addresses for next year’s writing contests!

Regular submissions reopen on Sep. 1. Thank you, as always, for your support of Backwards City.