Why I'm Not a Connoisseur

Well, for one thing, "connoisseur" is a hard word to remember how to spell. It's not used very often, so it doesn't stick in my mind, and then there's the fact that for a three-syllable word, it's got a lot of extra letters that don't show up in the American pronunciation. Personally, I blame the French.

But there's a more sensible reason. See, as far as I can determine, the whole point of being a connoisseur is so that you can teach yourself to enjoy extremely expensive things while learning to hate anything that's cheap. I'll give some examples so you see what I'm talking about.

Let's start with wine, because that's where the real jerks hang out. Slate has a lot of articles about wine, where the lesson seems to be that as soon as you learn to appreciate the good stuff, you lose all ability to drink the bad stuff. Like, take this article which starts with the writer expressing amazement that anybody drinks cheap wine, continues on with his statement that if he had to drink "plonk" (i.e. wine that's not good enough for him) he'd stop drinking wine altogether, and then ends with "And inexpensive domestic wines? Sorry, none to recommend. This is a story in itself, but one that will have to wait for my next column."

Keep in mind, this is a guy who considers $10-$15 a bottle "cheap". I'm not saying he's wrong, exactly. I mean, I don't drink at all, so what's it to me? But it seems like the people happily drinking Boone's Farm wouldn't be best served by educating their palates to the point where they find their new stuff undrinkable.

The same guy (Mike Steinberger) has a Slate article called "Trophy Wine - In defense of drinking expensively". And his point seems to be that the better the wine, the stronger it is in wine buzzwords (nose, bones, that sort of thing). And again, I have no problem with someone training himself to be able to distinguish between high-level wines. But once you decide that because you're an "eno-fanatic" (his term) you no longer drink cheap stuff because you're no longer capable of enjoying it, it seems like you're not really a wine lover.

A clearer example is with audiophiles. You know those guys who say that compact discs are so inferior to vinyl that they're unlistenable? And that MP3s have so much data compression that they turn the music into mush? I believe those people have spent so much time being fans of audio that they no longer care about music. Me, I remember what it was like to hear a song coming over a tinny AM radio. In a big noisy car in the 1970s. With the windows open. And it was still cool. I have no problem with an educated ear, but if the only time you can enjoy music is when you're sitting in your scientifically-designed audio room at the correct distance from your $10,000 speakers, then in your quest for authenticity, you're having a lot less fun than someone who can walk down the street and cheer up because they heard a few notes of their favorite song being blasted by a car that drove past them.

Seriously, I've seen people say things like "compact discs are just now becoming listenable". Quiet, you.

There are examples in almost every category of human life. Like, let's say you're a gourmet, and you eat only the finest foods. And then Slate (again! Maybe my problem is that Slate is just a bunch of jerks) asks you to taste-test -- ugh! -- canned soup. Well, I never! Eat the food of the common man? Inevitably, what happens is a lot of snotty talk about how awful it is. Here are some of the quotes:

• "This is not a soup. It is a crime scene."
• "I couldn't eat a whole bowl of this."
• "If the first two soups are pasta sauce and Campbell's is ketchup, this is tomato juice. And not good tomato juice."
• "The soup has the bright, off-putting smell of starting-to-rot tomatoes. Which is, as it turns out, exactly what it tastes like. The beef bits are the usual small, chewy tidbits. The vegetables are mushy, and the pasta is overcooked and squishy, but none of the other attributes of the soup really matter because the weird taste of the soup base is just too repellant."
• "The most generous assessment I could give is that I'm certain there are less palatable foods in the supermarket. I hope never to find them."

Well! It's good that these foods are restricted to the peasant class, then! Heavens, we wouldn't want any of that swill to get near our ruffled cuffs and powdered wigs! Personally, I'm not clear why somebody who has trained himself to drink whiskey that tastes and smells like a peat bog counts as a connoisseur, but somebody who likes canned soup is a buffoon.

A more direct example, and the one that actually brought all this to my mind, is pop culture. You see a lot of people who claim to be fans of pop culture, but in the same breath, they'll sneer at American Idol and Survivor. So apparently, they only like pop culture that's not actually "pop"ular. They'll fall all over themselves for Quentin Tarantino movies and the Hong Kong movies Tarantino is "referencing", but it at the cost of watching anything that regular people watch.

What I find odd about that is that Tarantino himself is actually a fan of Friends, and when he was a guest judge on American Idol, it was clear that he watched the show. So I've got no beef with Quentin: he's a fan of a lot of different things, and he doesn't seem to reject things on the basis of their popularity. It's just that he seems to spawn this fanbase that consider themselves connoisseurs of trash culture, which inevitably turns out to mean that they only like the "right" things. Bah.

That's the sort of thinking that leads to "guilty pleasures". I watched Survivor this year, and I enjoyed it. Likewise for America's Next Top Model and The Sopranos. I see no reason to feel guilty about any of this, you know? I find entertainment where I can.