It’s World Cup season and you know what that means. Right, it’s time for us who know nothing about soccer, sorry, football, to watch carefully and cheer when everyone else does so as to appear cultured. Seriously though, I think soccer is sweet. But the viewer has to learn how to watch it, not just the rules, and Spanish announcers (serious World Cup fans watch Telemundo), the viewer has to adjust to the giant field. S/he must learn to focus on the tiny little man and the intricate movements of his feet. That’s where the excitement is…apparently. I still expect a goal from every posession, and as such, I am consistently disappointed, but I’m learning.
Jesse: So everyone’s cheering for Ecuador right?
Owen: Ecuador’s not playing in this game.
Jesse: Yeah, but for the whole thing.
Beau: No way, man. Brazil.
Jesse: Ecuador can beat Brazil.
Beau: Do you know how many Brazilians will die if Brazil doesn’t win?
Jesse: How many?
Beau: Like, a brazilian Brazilians. Do you have any idea how many a brazilian is?
Owen: I wish I had a brazilian dollars.
Jesse: Who plays at nine thousand feet? Ecuador.
Beau: Yeah, but they also play at zero degrees latitude. Germany’s gotta be at like forty or forty-five latitude. It’s a whole different ball game there.
Alright, maybe I was a little harsh back on June 7th…okay, I was apocalyptic. Sometimes I get that way when it comes to culture, and rock music in particular. But are the current trends in rock really the signposts on the way to cultural implosion? Maybe not. Here’s a link to a CD review of the Eagles of Death Metal album by Ken Tucker from NPR last week. Tucker insists that the representatives of the new “classic rock” genre are not joke bands. Rather, they harken back to the days of the Stones, James Brown, and T.Rex not to walk around the corpse of a dead era (Weekend at Bernies, anyone?), but to remind us why we liked it so damn much. Because it f’ing rocks.
Even though rock has been dangerously toeing the line between tradition and irony, between clever and stupid, I’ll still rock out to the Eagles of Death Metal (the name refuses to be truncated into a viable nickname) and sing along shamelessly to the Darkness. In all truth, rock has been kinda boring for a long time, now we’ve got something we can dance to that’s not a Joy Division knock-off.
The demonstration filled the room with gleeful
Expressions, the tiny crystal orbs danced
Across the chestnut fabric on their way to the floor,
The ephemeral embrace of absorbing carpet.
But suddenly the blood from his face dropped too,
Rushing to the places where blood must hide,
He tried not to let the rest of the room
Know his horror, slowly turning away to pre-
vent them from seeing the change in his face.
They had worked too hard
today, they needed to believe.
But it was too late for him, the thought
Had come crashing through
Darkening his countenance.
The question echoed in a cruel eternal return,
How could he ever wash pants
That repelled water?
Tom: This play sucks.
Katie: Why?
Tom: Because it uses dialogue to introduce characters with absolutely no subtlety. Like, a guy comes out on the stage and says, “I’m a manic-depressive smoker who likes bicycles and has no regard for other people’s feelings, but that’ll change soon.”
Katie: And I suppose you like films that feign cleverness by having the wise character decry the predictability of identity in modern life by listing off every character and pronouncing their title? “The smart girl who sucks up to everyone, the emo kid who pretends to be a loser to get sympathetic girls, the dumb kid who everyone thinks is cool because he never says anything. Isn’t it terrible how identities are prepackaged!”–cheap character development cloaked in tired social commentary?
Tom: Well, not anymore.
http://www.slate.com/id/2142987/
These people bring up interesting points about our relationship to technology; I’ve never studied much of trans- or post-humanism, but here’s where I have to object:
Transhumanism, apparently, is too parochial. It’s too focused on humans, too narrow for the “mindfiles,” “mindware,” and “virtuality” into which we’re going to upload ourselves. According to the speaker—picture Willie Nelson with a shave—our identities can be broken down into units called bemes, in the same way that culture can be broken down into memes. These, in turn, can be “bemed up” and preserved in media outside our bodies. As examples, she suggested your smile, how lasagna tastes to you, and your memory of your first bike ride. The idea of extracting such plainly body-dependent things is ridiculous. But her basic point is right: Bemes, not genes, are what capture and preserve our essence.
Uh…okay, so maybe bemes are the basic building blocks which our mind uses to make up a celebrity identity, but a real identity is an emergent property of all these things. In other words, the sum is greater than its parts. Sure, you can upload Willie Nelson’s beard, Texas accent, and laid-back attitude and maybe I’ll have a conversation with it, but it’s not the real thing. Who of us gets to see Willie when he’s all alone? when he’s taking a dump? Is that a beme? Identity emerges out of an indefinite series of flows, moments that can only be described as ‘nows’ as they pass, not discrete packets of data. Screw bemes.
She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the fisrt of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.
–from Don DeLillio’s White Noise.
I think this paragraph is nice little allegory for American culture these days. Tradition is seen as a needless trifle and so we look back on it and assert our position outside and above it with irony. See the Darkness, the Eagles of Death Metal, The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky and Hutch movies. See I Love the 70s/80s/90s. See the swarms on Sixth Street brandishing new clothes that look to have been salvaged from the sets of cheesy teenage love comedies from 1985.
Why have we become so amused by mocking ourselves? Did our cultural tradition fail to deliver some time in the 90s? Why didn’t we just reject it and create the 00s? Didn’t the punks arise out of the barren dusty fields of the abandoned hippie communes? Wasn’t grunge a simultaneous rejection of 80s consumerism and half-baked anarchist schemes? a fear of AIDS? Has it culminated in a rejection of rejection, a resignation of cultural tradition? AIDS doesn’t matter anymore, we can afford the pills. Sincerity is dead. The factory has closed, leaving a marketing team to rearrange the artifacts of what was disowned so it could be possessed new. It is not pastiche, the clever critical dissonance that encourages action. It’s masturbation, for contemplation only.
Here’s a three-minute clip from NPR that makes sense of our latest xenophobic panic strategy: the national language.
The speaker, Geoff Nunberg, is a linguist and has written some great stuff about language and politics.
Beau: We’re under attack from the gays apparently.
Sam: I agree, this is stupid.
Beau: Good.
Sam: This decision should be left to the states.
Beau: What? No, it’s just stupid. There’s no reason why gays shouldn’t be allowed to be married. No logic to it whatsoever. The only logical argument they can offer up is that once we let gays marry then we’ll have to let my uncle marry a dog.
Owen: Your uncle wants to marry sheep, not dogs!
Beau: It’s a completely stupid argument, I think we could allow gays to marry without sinking into relativism. I think we need to admit that it’s okay for gays to marry and seriously examine why it’s not okay to marry dogs.
Owen: Sheep!
Beau: That way we’ll know for sure instead of basing our values on what Falwell tells us. There’s just no thinking to it at all.
Sam: Faith should always back up rationality.
Beau: Faith has nothing to do with rationality. Kierkegaard said so.
Sam: No, dogma must back up all values.
Beau: That’s ridiculous! That’s why society seems to crumble, we killed God and now we have no grounds for our values, but we never stopped to use our minds–maybe not rationality, but ourselves–to find new grounds for new values.
Owen: I think it should be okay to marry dogs…tomorrow’s six-six-oh-six.
Beau: A meteor’s gonna hit Orlando.