30 April 2011

Why not?  Three songs from an album I made when I was fifteen.  The images come from the liner notes.

“We Are Sorry For Not Doing Our Best”

I worked for a spell as a substitute teacher.  It was a joy bringing drama to seventh graders, English to sixth-graders, music to fifth-graders, et cetera.  I only once experienced the substitute’s nightmare scenario of completely losing control of a classroom:  it was when I had been given the Herculean task of leading twenty kindergartners in a drum circle (with just eight drums to go around).  The kids quickly whipped themselves into a frenzy, running across the room to bang a classmate’s drum, dancing wildly – giggling off into a corner.  When their homeroom teacher came to retrieve them after their period of anarchy, she looked at me with a knowing pity.  Later in the day, while I was teaching guitar chords to a less deranged group of fifth-graders, one of the better-behaved kindergartners from earlier turned up at the classroom door, sheepishly holding out a stack of papers.  I went and took a look.  They were twenty apology letters, illustrated in crayon, and all bearing the same message:

We are sorry for not doing our best

The heart seen above is hanging on my apartment wall.  I keep it there not to remind me of a group of kindergartners, but because that simple message – We are sorry for not doing our best – carries a wider significance.  It could be the epitaph for humanity.

I have that phrase in mind this Wednesday morning, as BP prepares its last-ditch “top kill” effort to stop the unstoppable bleeding at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.  Pray to a saint; write a song; hug your husband.  The situation is more dire than the media has let on.  I’ve had my time as a doomsayer – I taught a class on peak oil theory at Oberlin’s Experimental College, and I wrote a 15-song opus on the death of the United States.  I don’t want to go back there.  But Deepwater Horizon may be a crisis that we simply cannot fix, even now, even doing out best.

Erosion of the Will: Video Games

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.

-Seneca, from “On the Shortness of Life”

I once had a profound, or at least a fanatical, appreciation for video games. My summer of 1994 was spent in pained anticipation of the Super Nintendo release of Mortal Kombat II, mowing lawns for cash and practicing every character’s special moves on an unplugged controller. By the time I could actually touch the game, I was deadly. I wept after beating Lavos in Chrono Trigger, as I watched the game’s generous ten-minute credit sequence unfold before me. In sixth grade, I gained notoriety for playing two days of hookie after the Nintendo 64 hit store shelves, but the truth of the matter was worse than that: I had willed myself into a genuine illness so I could stay home and explore Princess Peach’s 3D castle.

Today, I regard video games as a profound threat to the maturation process of my fellow young men.

“I Won’t Leave You ‘Fine’”

Under normal circumstances, I would not have seen Twilight, but I’m glad I did.   It’s good to leave one’s cultural comfort zone (and it doesn’t take a trip around the world to do so).  Originally published at Empire of Doubt:

This age has tried without success to shut down the romantic.  We claim to value human life, despite poisoning and firebombing it on an epic scale, and perhaps we really are quite fond of having it around.  But do we exalt it?  Do we tremble before human accomplishment? Do we believe our own species can navigate these historical waters, not by transcending or abandoning humanity, but by tapping into humanity’s very strengths – its ingenuity, devotion, and discipline?  No, our society tells the youngster that there is no frontier of the human heart, that victory is external, that the best one can do is to score in the 99th percentile or become President.  This dull, corporatist definition of human accomplishment has dominated for decades and decades, since at least the reign of World War I’s droll rats.  What a relief, then, to see romanticism bubbling rightly back to the surface with the success of films like Twilight.

Twilight is a film enthralled with its characters, be they vampires or everyday folks. Their humanity fills the frame, and it is enough. This naturally appeals to teenage girls, who understand, for example, that high school events are a huge deal and can shape one’s destiny;  it will leave cold those wishing to see the “fate of the world” decided by a well-choreographed boat chase (for the action here is poorly executed and irrelevant).  Like any decent fiction, Twilight asks what makes for the good life, and offers a compelling answer.

How would you live if you were to live interminably?  You might read the canon, compose music, love passionately, be steadfast to your family, dress stylishly and take care of your body.  This is how the Cullens, the Übermensch vampire family at the center of the movie, choose to live.  Questions of mortality (or immortality) focus the mind on priorities, and so these characters embody romantic author Stephenie Meyer’s values.

These heroic vampires are portrayed not as aberrant but as more fully human than their small-town counterparts.  They are more loyal, they appreciate art more deeply, and their jokes are more inventive.  While they have stronger animalistic urges as well, their self-restraint is more than up to the task.  Frivolity and self-deprecation may be foreign to them, but for the romantic such token weaknesses are not defining human traits.  The romantic work portrays an ideal and declares it possible; mediocrity-fanning slogans like “dude, where’s my car?” and “I think I love my wife” are impossible in such a world.

It may look at first a dour landscape, this world of Forks, Washington (home to the events of Twilight and my father’s side of my family).  Where’s the ironic detachment?  Where’s the academic indecision?  This aesthetic seduces with a rare aroma: sincerity.  Sincerity is not always serious. The scene in which heart-throbs Bella Swan and Edward Cullen meet in a biology classroom is hilariously overwrought – brimming with sleazy guitar solos, windswept hairdo’s and bit lips – but these effects are not detached kitsch.  The scene is funny because the director is brazenly showing how these teens in heat really do feel.

This generation is sick and tired of heroes who are sick and tired.  It’s seen what the neurotic, over-psychoanalyzed boomers left us – cities choked in the haze of entropy.  Twilight is one example of a broader aesthetic on the wax, one that values excellence, not inside jokes; lasting beauty, not the Pitchfork rating system; bravery and not apologetic slackerism.  Romanticism belongs to no medium or era, so long as its philosophy inspires.  Meaningfully, the three artists featured most prominently in Twilight’s soundtrack are Claude Debussy, Radiohead and Muse – all, to some degree, musical romantics.

Am I saying that Twilight is a great film?  No.  But has it deserved to be panned in the cynical way it has been panned by cynical writers who can’t get past the “teenage vampire” thing? Certainly not.

“And History Is in Their Heads”

What have you learned today from someone older than you?

Skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat, but let the record show that I talked to my dad on the phone for twenty minutes today and learned the following:  what an L.O.I. is, how a pod of orcas acts when it’s hunting, that his annual physical went fine, that 7-Eleven stores used to owned by the Southland Corporation, that an almost unheard-of group of three bald eagles landed near my parents’ yard yesterday, what kind of real estate deal generally requires a broker, that the 6th annual West Seattle Huling Bowl was accidentally announced this year as the 16th annual West Seattle Huling Bowl, some details of what my sister and brother-in-law’s new apartment in California looks like, and that Washington State used to have a law that required the owners of a proposed liquor-selling venue to obtain approval from the leaders of any religious establishment within 150 yards, before the law was thrown out by the Washington Supreme Court for violating the first amendment.

I could have learned more in twenty minutes from Wikipedia, but how much of that free-floating trivia would I be able to recall a week from now?   Casual conversation are centered on known places and cared-for people.  That’s why their facts stick.  They provide back stories to the roads we actually travel and the buildings we actually inhabit.  Ahead of even the blogosphere, they form the first draft of history.

A 2004 study by researchers at Leicester and Coventry Universities found that, for the first time, sports and pop celebrities had become a greater influence on British young people than their own friends and family.  One of the men behind the study said that “star-struck youngsters are treating their famous role models as ‘pseudo friends’”.  Even though a noticeable chunk of my generation has made the choice to stop watching TV and seek out more fulfilling media (a poetry slam, a book passed amongst friends, a classical music performance, an art walk), the fact remains that we grew up surrounded by these media “psuedo friends.”  And where are they now?  I’m not asking “where is Bob Sagat now?”  I’m asking “where is Danny Tanner now?”   Can I remember a shred of what this TV father taught me, now that the screen’s died?

Culture is a process. Culture is a process by which values, information, and aesthetics are communicated between individuals, particularly between individuals of different generations.  There is no such thing as youth culture.  Of course, young people have always been the discoverers, the inventors, the avant-garde. But today’s old were young once.  Never before in history have the young been isolated, glorified, set aside, and target marketed just for being young.  Each pseudo-revolutionary generation, conditioned to distrust “anyone over thirty,” is left in a savage, barren state to reinvent the wheel.  Humanity stagnates.  This is not how progress happens.  When you think progress, don’t think revolution – think apprenticeship.   Progress is not the result of revolution; revolution is the result of progress.

Today I have a void where Danny Tanner once stood, wisecracking, because he and I were never in fact that close – we were never engaged in the process of culture.   He was beamed into my home in 30-minute waves, which held my attentions in a fuzzy blue glow… and then he blinked out.  Every sitcom offers its own phantom household, a parallel world of growth and excitement.  Meanwhile, in the one real life, we sit static – no one’s apprentice, the conqueror of nothing.  To destroy a culture, simply destroy the process of culture.  Distract the youth until the old are dead.