A Snob's Guide to Culture

Culture used to be a very simple proposition. When exposed to it, all you had to do was say you didn't know much about it but you knew what you liked. It is no longer socially acceptable when speaking of culture either to know nothing about it or to know what you like. Culture has become de rigueur; and though it's still not necessary to actually be cultured, it is mandatory to look, sound and act as if you are. The following is a handy guide to building an appropriate personal image at most of the cultural events you are likely to attend.

How to go to an Underground film

Be an unemployed actor who has never driven a cab, or a part-time coffeehouse waitress, or a really bad kinetic sculptor, or a nonunion film editor who works in a union shop at night, or an account executive at J. Walter Thompson who gets his kicks wearing chambray work shirts and black knit ties on weekends. If you're a girl, don't wear underwear. If you're a guy, don't wear socks. Own a coffee-stained Burberry trench coat with all the buckles unfastened and wear it like a cape. Have a scraggly beard or a scraggly mustache--even if you're a girl. Come from a farm in South Dakota. Despise your family's wealth--or lack of it. Squint at everyone. Have an American Youth Hostel card, issued in Switzerland. Sit on floors in people's houses, drink lots of cheap chianti, chain-smoke homerolled cigarettes--lighting them with wooden kitchen matches struck on your thumbnail and flicking your ashes directly onto the carpet. Have bad teeth. Wear cheap imitation Levis and, on formal occasions, an old baggy tweed sports coat with a T-shirt. Live in a loft with past and future lovers and/or half a dozen crosseyed cats with names like Thanatopsis. OK comments on (1) Buñuel: "Scratch an iconoclast and find a romantic"; (2) Cocteau: "Think what heights he might have attained had he ever met Mr. Right."

How to go to a First-Run Foreign Film

Be a liberal-arts major in a Big Ten university who's moved out of the fraternity house but who still goes to meetings. Or be two well-dressed matrons from West-chester who always read the essays in Time. Or be a TV producer in a large ad agency and carry a fat new manila envelope instead of an attaché case. Own four Ivy suits in a tiny gray herringbone that were bought in a store located on the sixth floor of an old office building. Wear regimental-striped ties and striped buttondown shirts that don't (continued on page 214) Snob's Guide (continued from page 103) quite go together. Have cuffs on your trousers. Have The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor in a prominent spot on your bookshelf, but say you hated Giles Goat-Boy. Drive a Morgan Plus-4 with international plates and a loud muffler. Smoke Bulgarian cigarettes with gold tips. Support listener-sponsored FM radio, but never find the time to listen to it. Eat in tiny, scruffy ethnic restaurants where you heard the food was really superb but which you've found to be pretty average all 12 times you've eaten there. Know the full names of at least two cameramen from the following countries: Poland, India, Brazil and Nationalist China. Always talk about the director of the film rather than the star, unless the star is over 40 and unknown. Keep mumbling things like "Jump cut," "It's out of synch" and "Herman Weinberg." OK comments on (1) Fellini: "I love him best when he loves himself least"; (2) Antonioni: "I am becoming bored with his boredom"; (3) Resnais: "A commendable flair for the obvious."

How to go to a Classic Film That is at Least 20 Years Old

Have long hair and a nicely combed mustache. Wear four-and-a-half-inch ties with bright daffodil designs. Wear a vest and an antique pocket watch on a chain. Work at design or free-lance writing. Live in an old brownstone with bare wood floors, white walls and antique furniture that you picked up in the country or from the Salvation Army for a song and refinished yourself. Have a big antique clock on the wall with a noisy pendulum and a Roman-numeraled face that somebody once loused up with steel wool. Order bourbon neat and yell at the waiter for putting ice in it. Be able to give a detailed description--using words such as "priceless," "quintessential" and "risibility"--of at least 12 slapstick-comedy routines from obscure Ben Turpin and early Laurel and Hardy two-reelers. Never talk about Von Stroheim as anything but a director. When you sit with someone at a classic film, keep saying, "Now watch what he does with this," every five or six minutes. OK comments on (1) Garbo: "I saw her trying to cash a check last week in the A & P"; (2) Chaplin: "Great comedy transcends mere ideology"; (3) Valentino: "Scratch a Don Juan and find a latent homosexual"; (4) Bogart: "Without Bacall as a foil, he never could have attained full expression of his talents."

How to go to an Opera

Be a lady in a long dress and a summer fur and lots of diamonds, or her stuffy husband who is not in trade, or two elegant young men with perfect diction and secret smiles. Or be a gentile psychiatrist or an Italian barbershop owner. Refuse to sit anywhere but the upper balcony, on the premise that any diva worth her salt should be able to project that far. Despise Rudolph Bing and Lincoln Center. Be scornful of Italian grand opera, but admit that Verdi's music almost makes up for his contempt for the human voice. Carry a battered edition of The Victor Book of Operas and pretend to look something up--with a small pocket pen light--during the first baritone's solo. Own a collection of one-sided gramophone discs with solos by Caruso, Chaliapin, Galli-Curci, Farrar and McCormack, which you never play because they're irreplaceable. Glare at anyone who applauds an individual performer before the end of an act. Shout "Bravo!" only once--for a basso in a secondary role. OK comments: (1) "With all that power and all that presence, the question of Callas' singing ability is completely irrelevant"; (2) "The great body of Puccini's work is merely a lackluster rewrite of La Bohème"; (3) "Of course Sutherland has moments of incandescent brilliance, but nobody has come along with a better mad scene than Pons"; (4) "If they do Tosca or Bohème one more season, I'm canceling my subscription."

How to go to a Concert of Classical Music

Come an hour late. Sit with one hand supporting your head and covering your eyes and appear to be in meditation or in great pain. At piano recitals, sit on the right side, so the artist's hands won't distract you. Hunch forward thoughtfully in your chair at erratic intervals to show your familiarity with the score. Take along old sheet music with red notations in the margins. Leave early, explaining in a loud whisper to nobody in particular: "I only come for the Berlioz." Never miss a chance to explain to someone who misuses the term that "classical" properly refers only to sonata allegro music of the 18th Century. OK comments: (1) "I thought their Prokofiev lacked the proper irony"; (2) "If it hadn't been for Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russians still wouldn't know how to orchestrate"; (3) "Chopin is unquestionably a woman's composer"; (4) "Nothing valid has been added to the world's musical literature since Monteverdi"; (5) "The French will never learn to write for brass"; (6) "His Stravinsky has finally jelled, but his Shostakovich is still a little soupy"; (7) "I've stopped going to concerts--the audiences are too distracting."

How to go to a Folk-Music Concert

Be an aging teeny-bopper going to seed, or a middle-aged ex-Socialist who wears Mexican clothes. Drop names such as Blind Lemon, Bessie and Lomax. Refer to Leadbelly as "Huddie" and talk about him as though he were still alive. Speak of Joan Baez as "one of the pure ones" and reminisce about the days "at the 47 Club in Cambridge, when Joanie would sing all night for coffee money." If you're a girl, have Tom Paxton's likeness tattooed on the inside of your left thigh. In restaurants, clean your nails with a banjo pick. Have a button fly that is half open and don't give a damn. Spill paint on your best shoes and let it dry. Wear glasses with thin steel frames held together with Scotch tape or wear frames without lenses and occasionally scratch your eyelids through the holes. Know where to get great buys on at least three of the following: balalaika, koto, ukulele, dulcimer, dobro, tambourine, Norman Thomas campaign buttons and original editions of the La Guardia Report. OK comment: "When you consider that he's neither blind nor black and that he's never spent any time in jail, you have to admit he plays pretty good banjo."

How to go to a Soul-Music Concert

Be white, live in a segregated neighborhood and protest loudly about it. Or be Negro, live in a segregated neighborhood and revel in it. Be on a first-name basis with Berry Gordy and on a last-name basis with Chuck Berry. Walk like Plastic Man, wear brown-and-white wing-tipped shoes, carry a pencil-thin umbrella, snap your fingers a lot, use phrases such as "Sock it to me, baby" and call everyone "Brother" or "Sister." OK comment: "The Beatles? Sheee-it."

How to go to a Concert of Indian Music

Be three Pakistani exchange students who are never seen without a prayer mat, a compass and a teakettle. Or be a freaked-out ex-acidhead with a bad dose of the clap that you're convinced you can cure with a properly balanced macrobiotic intake of raw brown rice. Or be a latent sex criminal who is a music instructor at a small girls' school in central Connecticut. Wear an India Congress cap that you swiped when you were a soda jerk. OK comment: "Wail, baby!" Wrong comment: "Goa, man, Goa!"

How to go to a Rolling Stones Concert

Be the father of four teenagers who listen only to Garnet Mimms and The Enchanters, or be a middle-aged dowager wearing Pucci culottes and a determined look, or a squealing 14-year-old girl with eczema and a glandular disorder, or a pretty young man with an autographed photo of Brian Jones in your wallet. Snigger loudly and knowingly whenever you hear words such as "fly," "high," "make" or "taste."

How to go to an Off-Broadway Play

Be short and look pudgy, even if you're skinny. Have glasses and long, wavy hair and don't shave the nape of your neck. Own two fairly nice natural-shoulder suits, but wear them poorly. Have baggy pants and a tie that's wrinkled and dirty just below the knot and hangs off center. Look as if you haven't decided whether it's masculine to cross your legs at the knees. Date secretaries who own Keane paintings of starving children with large liquid eyes. Keep taking them to plays to make them think that their bodies aren't the only thing you're interested in; but don't feel you've convinced them enough to make a pass at them, even after the 27th play. OK comments: (1) "I've already read the script--I just came to see how the third act plays"; (2) "It has often seemed to me that LeRoi Jones is a figment of Genet's imagination."

How to go to a Serious Broadway Play

Live in the suburbs, have a large garden, a sturdy male mastiff or Labrador retriever, an expensive grand piano and three kids who play guitar, flute and drums--whom you escort around the neighborhood every Halloween on Trick-or-Treat-for-UNICEF. Raise tropical fish and dwarf cactus. If you're female, take a course in Japanese flower arrangement. Be on the mailing lists of the Museum of Modern Art, CORE, Americans for Liberal Legislation, Hull House and Friends of the Living Theater, and throw away all their literature without reading it. OK comment: "It may not be great theater, but it ought to be seen, if only for the message."

How to go to a Wednesday Matinee

Be two middle-aged ladies with hats and veils and theater-club tickets. When anyone asks you what you saw, reply: "I don't know exactly, but it was real cute."

How to go to a Successful Broadway Musical

Be a tool-and-die manufacturer from Council Bluffs. Or else be a professional person with an extensive collection of Bartók records and say you were given the tickets by someone who got mononucleosis at the last moment. OK comments if someone you know catches you having a good time: (1) "I know it's just a lot of whipped cream, but it happened to fit my mood"; (2) "It may not have any message, but it's great theater, don't you think?"

How to go to an Unsuccessful Broadway Musical

Be a tourist or an unemployed actor with comp tickets or have money in the show. OK comment: "You think it's bad now, you should have seen it in Philly."

How to go to a Satiric Musical Revue in a club with Tiny Tables and a Cover Charge

Be a guy of John Wayne proportions who played right guard at a small New England college, have a crewcut and a rumpled seersucker suit and keep saying in a big booming bass voice: "Oh, God, that's funny!" Wrong comment: "Christ, Marge, if I laugh any harder, I'm going to pee right in my pants."

How to go to a Psychodrama Demonstration

Be a slightly deaf member of a suburban adventure club or somebody who thinks he needs psychoanalysis but is chicken. Be curious about how you'd react to LSD. When asked what you think of Happenings, say: "Most interesting. Really most interesting." OK comments: (1) "I wonder whether, with the best intentions, these people don't actually cast more heat than light on one's fundamental psychic conflicts"; (2) "Anyone who's too stubborn to admit his Oedipal problems will always be at the mercy of his superego."

How to go to a Love-In

Wear one gold earring and leather Tyrolean shorts, and carry a very dirty blonde baby in a sling on your back. Or be an absolutely stacked 18-year-old blonde in tight, wide-wale corduroys from a Diggers shop who wears Make Love, not war buttons but will demonstrate a knowledge of karate if a guy makes a pass. Or be two willowy 14-year-old girls who are a little awkward now but who will grow up to be real heartbreakers, or be a 16-year-old who doesn't wear a brassiere and nobody cares, or be a fairly hip marketing trainee in gym shoes and an Army blanket whose only interest is in picking up a willowy 14-year-old girl or a 16-year-old who doesn't wear a brassiere. Carry a half-eaten loaf of French bread wrapped in a torn-out page from The Oracle. Give things to strangers. Burn your draft card with a pack of matches from the City Lights bookstore. Say that Emmett Grogan doesn't exist, and compare everything with "the old days, back in Haight."

How to go to a Museum of Modern Art

Go to the members' cafeteria, order a tuna-salad plate, complain about how awful both it and the collection have become and drop the following names of fashionable contemporary artists: Larry, Frank, Red, Roy, Jasper, Claes. OK comments: (1) "I can't afford to become involved with Guernica--I just don't have the time"; (2) "The greatest piece of pop art in America is undoubtedly Los Angeles."

How to go to a Modern-Dance Recital

Wear a Mao jacket and go with a girl who has straight, stringy, hip-length hair and wears green-striped stockings through which you can tell she doesn't shave her legs. Or be darkly handsome and beautifully tailored and, halfway through the first number, stand up and, in a heavy Hungarian accent, say: "These entire dence ees, from the initial conception, crap!" OK comment on Merce Cunningham: "A simply and eloquently consummated marriage of movement and sound, but he persists in bombarding us with tendentious social commentary."

How to go to a Poetry Reading

Be very old and poor and nod and smile at everything, or be very preppy and wealthy but tolerant and talk through your teeth as if you had tetanus, or be very grubby and wear sandals and talk dirty, or be big-boned and tanned and Jewish and wear tailored olive-green T-shirts and look like you spend every waking minute dribbling a basketball. OK comment: "Much as I admire her pretensions, Gertrude Stein simply doesn't scan." Wrong comment: "Boy, that Emily Dickinson sure writes up a storm."

How to go to an Erotic-Art Exhibit

Be a middle-aged bachelor shop teacher from the Bronx, or a topless cocktail waitress on her day off, or an IBM sales engineer who recently subscribed to Evergreen Review. Wear a cloth cap, a suede zip-front jacket and salt-and-pepper Harris-tweed slacks with leather piping around the pockets. Cultivate an enigmatic smile, to be used only when looking at the most scrofulously erotic works, which you admire in terms of "use of space," "strong color" and "visual impact." When confronted with a 20-foot, walk-in, polyester vagina, frown slightly and observe that the work seems "derivative." Discuss graffiti as found poetry and vaguely hint that you once researched a master's thesis in the closed pornography section of the Indiana University library. OK comment: "The Yellow Book was Beardsley's raison d'être, but I loathe the crass commercialization of his illustrations for Wilde's Salomé."

How to go to a Pot Party if you're Under 25

Wear Edwardian sideburns, a pre-War American Legion commander's uniform and knee-length lace-up aviator boots with heel taps. Speak of everything in terms of "my head" and "my mind." Arrive with an incredibly beautiful ash-blonde 15-year-old dropout from Grosse Pointe and don't introduce her to anybody. Occasionally refer to her as "my thing here." Look everyone straight in the eye, nodding your head in agreement and saying, "I'm hip, I'm hip"--even if no one is speaking. Play a record of the Baja Marimba Band "to see the light refractions in the air." Talk about things really not being right "until Dylan's back on his bike." When everyone is stoned, play a Dale Evans spiritual record and start talking about yourself in the third person.

How to go to a Pot Party if you're Over 25

Be excessively hairy and barrel-chested and wear a scarred leather blacksmith's apron with no shirt underneath. Roll your joints one-handed from a Bull Durham sack and smoke them in a silver-filigree roach holder whose amber mouthpiece has a fly embedded in it. Develop a Weltschmerzy I-was-doing-this-gig-20-years-ago look. Know by heart at least six authentic marching songs of the Lincoln Brigade. Reminisce about "the good old days in Taos, when nobody knew about peyote and everybody had his own little Victory garden." Tell a long story about The Bear restaurant in Chicago, "when Dylan first got turned on." Or, if you're a girl, be an attractive, 30ish Montessori teacher, dress like an Ayn Rand heroine and sit down with a group of total strangers to talk very intensely about oral-genital sex.

How to go to a Jazz Concert

Nobody goes to a jazz concert.