Snobnobbing

It is sometimes shocking to me to realize that there are people out there, many of them in fact, whose days do not consist of ingesting a vast array of cultural trivia - people who work a community college financial aid department, or unironically drive Buicks, for example, or who not only do not consider Cinderella Man “schmaltzy,” but do not even care to know what the word means. Or all three.

For those poor, sad souls with neither the time nor desire to better themselves with cultural trivia, conversing with the pop-culture culture savvy may prove difficult or tiresome – possibly even irritating. Not everyone has the intellectual stubbornness and mind-numbing perseverance required to be a culture snob. Fortunately, Vanity Fair editors David Kamp and Steven Daly have collaborated on what looks to be a series of guides to cultural arcana that aim to help the non-snob make his or her unenlightened way through the jargony discourse of young men with absurdly large record and film collections.

Their first volume, the Rock Snob’s Dictionary, is a collection of entries which seek to serve "as a primer for curious music fans who sincerely want to learn more about rock but are intimidated by unexplained, ultra-knowing references in the music press to 'Stax-y horns,' 'chiming, plangent Rickenbackers,' and 'Eno.' " Much like The Hipster Handbook, which delivered an astute, psuedo-ironic analysis of the varied hipster culture and its subgroups, the dictionary is both a winking, kitschy, self-flagellating stab at geeky pop-culture mavens and a handy reference.

Now, I am no stranger to rock snobbery, but Daly and Kamp’s next volume is even closer to my heart. That’s right – they’re working up The Film Snob’s Dictionary. It won’t be out till February of 2006, but Daly and Kamp have already released a quick preview of its cover and contents. A sample entry:

Harryhausen, Ray. Animator and visual-effects maestro (born in 1920) behind a series of terrifying films, putatively for children, that combined stop-motion animation with live action. In such films as Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), spray-tanned actors and actresses did furious battle with stiffly moving but nevertheless nightmare-inducing centaurs, minotaurs, walking statues, and other exotic predators. Though his filmography is more familiar to Kitsch Snobs than to kids, Harryhausen was awarded an honorary Oscar for his work in 1992, and was slyly namechecked in the Pixar film Monsters, Inc. (2001).