Tag: culture

The distorting lens: Internet Yearbook Funeral

On this morning’s friends list scan I saw mention of the death of someone I don’t know. He was far too young and a lot of people liked him, and it’s a sad mess. Looking around to see what kind of person he was, I got to a thread on his local web forum.

Most of it was either just “oh god that’s awful” on some level, or memories of the guy that made me wish I’d met him, which I’m sure was the intent. Also some good pictures of him, and some references to how difficult his life had been in some ways. So all of that was ordinary and appropriate, and I certainly got an appreciation for him.

The odd part was that, since it was on one of these typical phpbb type forums, everyone had their wacky .sig files with graphics and catchlines still included. So there was the expected and very sad “Oh God no I wish I had seen you before” stuff and then a .sig like “rm -Rf . The world is 98% full, delete anyone you can”.

I’ve seen threads like this before and found them equally jarring, with things like explicitly Christian wishes for a happy afterlife with Jesus right above gothy sex vampire graphics, etc. I found them both very “Internet” and somehow familiar, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint why until I’d thought a bit.

It’s the teenager funeral. You know, some poor kid crashes her car or commits suicide and it’s just awful, and then at the service her friends all show up in club gear or gang attire, and they want to play her favorite Revolting Cocks song or pour out some peppermint schnapps on the ground, and the older people are outraged or just completely puzzled. Sometimes the “kids” have their own wake for the departed, often unfortunately engaging in the same behavior that offed their friend. And there’s frequently a memorial shrine of some kind now, and not just if the kid has perished in a road accident. Going by high schools and colleges I occasionally see a small mountain of flowers with sad notes and a photo on it, but almost always also some chunks of pop culture like CDs or lifestyle stuff like a bottle of booze or a pack of Marlboros.

When my friend L. died at 27 of a brain tumor, the service had this huge divide. All the “straights” were there, and her family was very straight: Orange County Republican, engineer dad, lawyer mom, engineer brother, lots of wealthy white people in tasteful black. And her friends were there: an art mob of gay men, media Jews, art atheists, and rebel esthetes. Her parents and their friends eulogized her in a conventional way, talking about her singing talent and how strong she was in death, both of which were true and moving. And her friends got up and told a comic story about shoplifting with her and almost getting caught by the cops. The straights were enraged and horrified, because L.’s cheerfully sociopathic personality and her campy, rebellious friends weren’t respectable.

The Internet message board memorial is a young person’s place right now. So, it’s the teenaged roadside memorial and wake, full of slangy pop culture and kid lifestyle references like the ball cap at the gangsta funeral. I wonder what it will be in ten years? The question to me is whether Teenage Nation will just keep being teenaged, or whether we’ll start memorializing our friends in more conventional ways even in this medium.

In some ways it’s touching and appropriate to see the “kids” talking about how they’ll miss their friend while wearing Stripper Nouveau outfits, and seeing them lovingly put 50 Cent CDs and bongs around the makeshift shrine. It reminds us that when young people die, they die unformed and childish, and it’s terribly sad. We have a problem in this country with staying teenaged, though. It’ll be an awfully odd thing if we’re still posting our goodbyes on the forums of the future with yearbook-style catch phrases and fan graphics attached.

Mainly, though, I’m sad this guy killed himself. It looks like he was damn cool, and it’s a terrible shame.

The Big Kids

I grew up in Southern California suburbia in the 1970s. It was an ideal place to be a kid. I was sheltered from the worst of life but not insulated from reality. There was always something to do, and the weather was always good. I had good schools to go to. And the neighborhood was full of kids, so I always had someone to play with when I ran out the door to find adventure. We had glorious dirt clod wars, made bombs, created entire Tonka truck empires, dug pits, and everything else that was fun.

Like most little kids, I was fascinated by the big kids. Starting at about seven or eight years older than me, they were gods of suburbia: large, loud, rough, authoritative, and frightening. They had long hair, and the older ones rode dirt bikes. They listened to crazy heavy metal music. They knew all the bad words, always had fireworks, wore cool surf clothes, and were big and tan and imposing.

The most impressive part about the Big Kids was that they were all apparently insane. For example, they’d get up on the roof of someone’s house with the heavy metal music blasting and scream at the sky repeatedly. In the middle of the night they would ride their dirt bikes up and down the street in nothing but swim shorts, also screaming at the sky. One time, some of the Big Kids stole another little kid’s bike and leaned it against the tree in front of their house. When he showed up to get it, they shot him a bunch of times with a BB Gun from their window while he sobbed and writhed and ran. I watched from my own window across the street, fascinated and terrified.

The death rate for Big Kids amazed me. The next door neighbors lost two of them, the family three doors down lost one, and I can remember three more just from our street during my childhood. Two others ended up permanently and severely handicapped.

The society of Big Kids was very masculine. The Big Kid girls were mousy and wide-eyed, long hair parted in the center. They were nice to me but totally alien in their teenage world. I remember one girl in particular who had an entirely purple bedroom: carpet, bedspread, walls, even a fuzzy purple toilet seat cover. I was at their house with my parents once staring in awe at her purple den. One of the Big Girls died too.

Not all of them were rough tough crazies. Two of the Big Kids I remember mostly for their cars. One was a paraplegic older brother of a friend’s. He had a ’60s Mustang California Special modified with hand controls that was the coolest thing ever, and he gave me a ride in it so I could see how it worked. Another guy had a VW bug full of CBC radio equipment and drove around talking to people in the bug, which I found ultimately awesome. And three identical tow-headed surfer boys down the street were in a locally famous rock band, and I got to watch them practice in their garage. They were rock gods, and one of them had a Van Halen sticker on his VW squareback.

The Big Kids’ music was dark and scary and fascinating itself. I remember looking at the window display in a Licorice Pizza record store for Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune, all weird imagery and craziness, and wondering what it was all about. The screaming sex noises of Led Zeppelin and Van Halen confused and attracted me. To this day my reaction to 70s heavy metal and hard rock is a flashback to those kids with their long hair and work shirts and corduroy pants with the comb stuck in back, howling along to Alice Cooper or something.

Since I was a sheltered little kid, I was unaware of what bound together the big kid craziness, the screaming on rooftops, the shirtless midnight motorcycle rides, the caterwauling music, and the deaths. They were of course all high on hard drugs, mostly heroin and hallucinogens, and drunk. All the time. Of the two kids next door, one died in a DUI motorcycle crash and the other OD’d on heroin and died in the snow in the mountains. The kid at the end of the street flipped his VW fastback on the S-curves under the influence. The girl who died had mixed her heroin wrong that day. Of the Big Kids who died on my street, only one that I remember didn’t die from drink or drugs; he got cancer. All of these things I found out years later.

Looking back on it, those kids were generationally doomed. They were all born within a couple of years of 1960 probably, and hit their adolescence just when the 1970s drugs ‘n’ sex culture was at full blast. At 14 it’s not easy to handle free-flowing hard drugs, no-consequences sex, and pop culture that celebrates total hedonism. Like me, they felt safe and insulated in suburbia. But they’d let in an assortment of incubi and succubi they couldn’t resist.

Victoria Williams wrote a great song for them, because she was one of the Big Kids. It’s called “Summer of Drugs”. When I hear that song I think about those stoner surfer kids shooting up and blasting their 70s rock, and dying.

We were too young to be hippies
We missed out on the love
Born to be teens in the late 70s
In the summer of drugs…

Leaving the Aquarium

When I was a churchgoer, I recall hearing a quote which was variously attributed, to the effect of: “Those called to be fishers of men have become instead keepers of the aquarium.”

I think about that quote a lot. Today I ran across the second Christian Mime Ministry website in as many months, and this week I also saw a Mario Brothers themed religious t-shirt. One sees avowedly “Christian” versions of fashion shows, first-person shooter video games, amusement parks, martial arts schools, and just about every sub-sub-genre of the arts. It’s a running joke among my friends, Christian or otherwise, to find yet another “Christian” version of something improbable.

American evangelical Christians are loath to leave their aquarium. For many of these people, any activity that is not explicitly “Christian” is suspect. But they’re unwilling to be Amish and withdraw into a cloistered world without television, pop music, and luxury cars. The call to be “a people set apart”, to reject the World and take up the Cross, is as difficult for them as it has been for anyone in the last 2000 years. The resulting conflict is tragicomic.

Why is this important to me?

In the last thirty years the word “Christian” has come to mean a culture of white Protestant lower middle class rural Americans, and people who want to be them. “Contemporary Christian Music”, for example, is a style of smooth 70s pop-rock with choral elements that would only be enjoyed by middle-aged white people from small towns if not for its presence in the subculture. Almost all the music one finds in a Christian bookstore has been filtered and flattened into something milder, cleaner, sweeter, and less troubling. There’s an entire sub-industry of Christian pop music artists who tail the musical trends of youth by about five years and turn out churchier clones of the most popular acts. One group in particular, DC Talk, has reliably walked behind the top 40 parade with a broom for two decades.

The aquarium isn’t just musical. Evangelical culture demands fiction, so there are complete lines of romances, mysteries, Westerns, and two unique genres: the spiritual thriller and the comforting small-town tale. Lewis’ science fiction triology and Little House on the Prairie have a million imitators, including the wildly successful “Left Behind” books and several popular series of heartwarming romantic novels set in small towns. A sub-industry of film produces prophetic thrillers on the same themes as the End Times novels, using down-on-their-luck Hollywood stars, and is distributed by DVD and church screening.

The list of “x plus Jesus” items is endless: a first-person shooter Quake-like video game in which the player battles sin with weapons of righteousness; non-rastafarian reggae; lifestyle stores that provide clothing and accessories for youth on the Hot Topic model; even an evangelical version of “American Idol” without the offending noun. If you’re not in the culture — or even if you are — it gets hilarious pretty quickly.

It’s way too easy to begin snickering at this point and never stop. All of this stuff is crap. Not just crap as in Sturgeon’s Law, but entire genres that are crap. “Christian” culture is derivative, cheap, poorly executed, and doubly pathetic in its pandering to pop trends and its failure to pander well. Most of the exceptions to this rule are fifty years old; The Screwtape Letters is currently on the CBA bestseller list. But I’ll take a moment to point out that talented and worthy artists do exist in the aquarium. In my churchgoing years I did encounter some. Mostly, though, the talented ones escape the aquarium or never entered it. Not only do you make less money in that world, but everyone is judged about as thoroughly as a pastor is for theological correctness.

The fatal flaw of aquarium culture is that it is not fundamentally or necessarily spiritual. Everyone who participates is Christian and all of the art refers to and promotes Christianity, of course. But that’s not the unifying factor. Aquarium culture is a communally shared expression of a particular kind of American Protestant cultural conservatism. It’s not enough to believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in salvation by irresistible grace through faith, or even in the literal interpretation of the King James Bible. To fit in socially, evangelicals are supposed to reject mainstream culture as completely as possible and purchase their entire lifestyle at the Christian “bookstore”, which nowadays is loaded with multimedia and gift items. Aquarium culture is a consolation prize. What they want is what all Americans want: the latest fun movies, the trendy musical styles, the TV shows everyone talks about at the office. What they get are cheap off-brand imitations of the pleasures of the World, sanitized and rewritten for an impossibly ideal mid-sized Midwestern town from a 1940s movie. To participate it’s necessary to be white (if in spirit only), distrustful of cities and intellectuals, politically conservative, and enthusiastic about some very bland material. If the scene or the hobby or the style of art you’re into is un-“Christian”, you must either drop it or make it Christian. The world behind the aquarium walls is deadly, literally ruled by demons, and one can’t be too enthusiastic about any of the amusement or education to be found there.

When I was a believer and a churchgoer this caused me no end of problems. Not only did I not give up my worldly art, culture, and politics, but my Christian artists were not from the approved list. I liked the music of T-Bone Burnett, Victoria Williams, Van Morrison, Mahalia Jackson. I liked Duvall’s film The Apostle. I read widely and included scholarly analyses and critical works as well as “inspirational” books. And I couldn’t stand the aquarium crap. In short I was a cultural and political liberal, an overeducated urban elitist, and a postmodern appreciator of cultural diversity. As much as my new friends were friendly and generous and accepting of me personally, I was the enemy and I knew it.

I left Christianity thoroughly and finally last year. Most of the reasons were essentially political. There was one permitted evangelical position: right-wing Republican, pro-war, pro-wealth, anti-intellectual, and socially intolerant. There weren’t any grey areas or places for discussion any longer. I sincerely felt that evangelicals had traded grace for wealth and love for power, and that my community was in a state of sin worthy of the rage of prophets. My conclusion was that a belief in eternal life turns people into murderous hypocrites, and I went back to my agnostic roots.

Looking back on it, I should have known from the beginning. I didn’t belong in the aquarium. It’s a place for people who are frightened, angry, greedy, hypocritical, and ignorant. I might not be an agnostic today if I had taken a different path to spirituality. I tried really hard to make my world and theirs meet, but you can’t do that with people who are deliberately inflexible. The evangelical subculture I tried to make my peace with wasn’t just full of crummy pop music and romance novels. It was also shot through with evil. The heaven these people want to inhabit is the lily-white eternal Smallville of their grandparents’ generation where everyone goes to church on Sunday in a big shiny car, no one swears, there is one child per sex act, the music is arranged for organ and choir, and Mom has just put a turkey dinner on the table with all the trimmings and three kinds of bread. It’s paid for by raining bombs on other people’s children and choking the life out of doomed slaves who do the hard work. Anyone who doesn’t fit is shunned, jailed, or killed. And no one has to take up his cross and die. Instead, they get a cheap, diluted, hand-me-down mockery of modern American life. The rest of humanity is outside their aquarium, distorted and discolored, seen through a glass darkly. I preferred to see face to face.

Goin’ back to Carvel

Miscellaneous Hip-Hop Guy from 1992 showed up last night. Black guy in his twenties somewhere in red sports jersey, baggy pants, really big athletic shoes, red bandanna with sideways red athletic cap, swagger, radio Walkman permanently attached to head. He looked like he’d just answered a casting call for a movie about the life of Tupac Shakur.

He made a beeline for the ice cream store, which had just closed, and banged on the glass door, hard. He alternated doing that with doing the tough guy gangsta swagger walk in circles for a few minutes. I tried to differentiate between “kinda eccentric guy in the wrong neighborhood” and “total loon”.

Finally the ice cream store guy came to the door. This was D.P., who is a classic Newport Beach preppy wimp: polo with popped collar, curled short hair, weak chin, very clean athletic shoes. People who went to high school with him describe him as a Drama Dork.

D.P. popped open the door and greeted LL Fool J, and they proceeded to carry out a complex Hip-Hop Guy handshake with lots of knuckle bumping and finger gestures. They then departed into the back of the ice cream store.

Cookie Dough Nation (first attempt)

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 1 Cor 11

Nick and I talked about culture tonight. I was still thinking about the conversation about Chuck Klosterman I’d had with threepunchstuff and we were on a similar topic: what the hell happened to culture in the last 20 years, and why are we assholes for not liking it?

I don’t like:

  • Junk pop culture
  • “Retro” nostalgia for previous junk pop culture
  • New junk pop culture made by pasting together previous junk pop culture
  • Ironic references to junk pop culture made in order to at once enjoy crap and pretend you’re superior to it
  • The last 20 years of culture being in spasm remaking versions of itself, so that junk pop culture is now all slightly worse versions of earlier junk pop culture
  • The glorification of junk pop culture as the new high art

I do like:

  • High culture: Mozart, Zen gardens, Dante, Egyptian sculpture, gamelan.
  • Disruptive modernist high culture: Marcel Duchamp, Jorge Luis Borges, Erik Satie, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Jarry.
  • Disruptive pop culture: Bebop, Punk, New Wave film, DIY publishing, psychedelia, culture jamming, hip hop, graphic novels.

I am frustrated by a cultural environment in which many people do not want to grow up. The rallying cry of “we won’t eat our vegetables!” is awfully sad. Partly because grown-ups eat their vegetables as a matter of course, but mostly because vegetables taste good if you take the trouble to try them. The Klostermans of this world hate any well-made thing, anything that demands full attention for more than a minute, anything that isn’t sweet on the tongue, anything unfamiliar or challenging.

It’s fine to drink chocolate milk sometimes, or put a Star Wars figurine on your desk, or listen to the horrible record you bought when you were 10. As your life’s entire culture it lacks.

Last night I saw a woman of about 40 purchase cookie dough at the supermarket, eat about half of it in line, and then as we both left get into a bright yellow Tonka truck and drive away listening to A Flock of Seagulls on her car stereo. Chuck Klosterman, the post-modern irony crew, and her friends all think that’s cool. I think she could do better and enjoy life more.

Note: I may continue to bore on this topic or even just rewrite this thing a few more times, because I’m not quite there. Sorry in advance.

This heaven gives me migraine

Waiting for my mother at the doctor’s office just now I picked up a magazine called “Organic Style”, thinking “this should be good!”

It does not disappoint. A more descriptive name would be “The magazine for women who need to be so healthy and virtuous and beautiful that they are all hot yoga adepts and Jane Goodall and Susan Sarandon at once”.

Ads for Shell Oil face editorials decrying Arctic drilling. A product sidebar touts a $249 “earth/peace scapulare” that makes a statement in 14k “recycled gold”. There are many, many skin moisturizers and breakfast cereals. One is commanded to indulge everything, always.

The best part was a Dove ad. It was actually an ad for an advertising campaign (!). Dove wishes to celebrate “real beauty” of “women with curves” who are not size 2 models. They laud their own ad campaign, in which they stand firm for real women and unretouched photographs and celebrating… Anyway the women in the ad for the ad are impossibly hot twenty year olds with perfect everything laughing in their underwear. I guess it’s okay to be a size 4 catalog model now, gals! Size 0 is no longer mandatory!

The Theory of the Leisure Suit Class

Living in Newport Beach has always been strange, and has always been getting stranger. Satire fails us, as daily life teems with situations and images that are so outrageously perfect, they seem to have been dreamed up by a particularly unsubtle socialist film maker to hammer in some point. Welcome to Michael Moore’s Real World Newport Beach. Some recent examples:

  • Driving past one of the local high-class night clubs, I see that among the stretch Hummer limos and AMG Mercedes, someone has backed out his $250,000 Lamborghini and is revving and clutch-popping hopelessly, trying to get his thoroughbred Italian supercar to go into first gear. I stop and watch as our hero wrestles with his prancing bull. Finally he achieves traction and hurtles out onto the boulevard in a cloud of tire smoke.
  • At a street corner, a cop is handcuffing a middle-aged Mexican man whose bicycle lies on the ground next to him. Behind them, another middle-aged Mexican man is holding up a sign that says INDULGE YOURSELF LUXURY APTS with an arrow on it, and waving the sign at passing cars.
  • At the local shopping mall, it is Tuesday at 3 pm, and the place is full of young marrieds without employment buying everything that glitters. One thirtyish man in a $2000 suit, sculpted hair and spray-on tan, is saying loudly into his cellphone “Yes. It has to be on a yacht, that’s where we’re making the sale. The presentation is on a yacht, and I don’t know the dress code yet, but you are going to be there.”
  • At Target. A small, nervous man dressed in a $200 Aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and a very shiny pair of Timberland hiking boots is gazing at a barbecue that is eight feet long and costs as much as a used car. His wife comes up behind him and says “Do the utensils match?” and he says “Of course! OF COURSE!”

My mom is sick. It’s just some digestive bug but when someone is 76 it makes me nervous, plus she never gets these. There’s something about the illness or weakness of parents that’s still very psychologically undermining even in adulthood; it shouldn’t happen.