March 31, 1997
Welcome to the new home of the pedestrian, frumpish and outmodish.
In today's world of glitz and super-saturation, we have perhaps lost site of the beauty and value of the unexciting and ponderous. Yet these things have a style all their own, a style which we, of the younger generations, can not only find value and guidance from, but also hours of non-stop entertainment as well.
The publishers of this site are all between the ages of 23 and 25. All our lives we have been bombarded with media that is oversaturated, hyperintensive and vague with any true meaning. Style over substance has become the all the rage. As the bottom line becomes the top priority, more and more items of true educational or philosophical value are falling by the wayside in an attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
We accept that our generation is as much, perhaps, to blame for this as the previous ones. And we also grant that some of our personal favorite directors, designers, musicians, artists and authors are indeed culprits of this trend gone awry. Furthermore, we do not deny that great creative and artistic strides have been made, barriers have been broken, and boundaries expanded, because of the trend of aesthetic overkill.
Yet in the process much information whole schools of thought and artistic movements seem to be falling by the wayside, both within our generation and within our culture. This is especially true on the Web. A person with a casual or non-professional interest in a specific topic today will often look for more information on the Web. We ourselves are avid netizens and have taken this path frequently. Yet, even though there is an incomprehensible amount of information of the World Wide Web, we have often found, when researching topics of a stodgy nature, the information has either been non-existant or so imbibed with academic dust and dryness as to be unrewarding and oftentimes, uninformative.
These pages are an effort to both educate and entertain. Here we will look at all the stodge that is good and of true merit. We will also explore the dark side of stodginess - both stodge that has become so drenched in pretension and has lost focus of the sublime, as well as individuals and entities that have twisted stodge into a battle of ethics, giving stodgy the bad name that it currently and unfairly endures among our younger readers.
So, explore, take a look around. Perhaps you have found us while on a quest for knowledge and information about one of our topics. In that case, we are glad to help. We wholeheartedly encourage comments, contributions, information, etc. on any of the topics we cover on these pages. We also hope you will find additional topics and information that may interest you. Or perhaps you are looking at us from a cultural perspective - not focusing on any one topic, but simply looking to learn. Maybe you're at work, wishing that something would come across your screen that doesn't try your patience and intelligence. Again, we hope we can be of service.
Below you will find a Table of Contents. From here you my browse the various categories of stodge. You can also access the other pages within stodgy.com, as well as our stodgy links page.
Not only are we trying to guide and explore the world of stodginess, we also want to give due time and consideration to the subjects that we are so interested in. Therefore, beyond the common Stodgy Pages "look and feel" each page will exhibit, as well as a common navigational interface, the individual pages within www.stodgy.com will try and act as their own entity - a page full of information and discussion about the subject at hand. Perhaps it will be a challenge to keep the stodgy tongue-in-cheekiness from soaking through and tainting the discussion, but we feel that the information provided within will be of sufficient merit that this shouldn't be a problem. Also, humor is perhaps something stodginess could always use more of.
The Painful Experience of Peter Greenaway in Person
Also on Stodgy.com: