When I was in high school, I lived liked a rock star: booze, drugs, sex, fearless frolic. Mind you, I did quite well academically. These things were not mutually exclusive. I knew I'd get into college; in fact, I applied to only one school knowing I'd get in. Adolescence was a time to explore and live well.
High school, it seems, has changed. It has become competitive. Young men and women — 13 to 18 years old — must work more or less tirelessly to ensure their spot at a college deemed worthy to them and their families. So rather than living their adolescent lives — lives brimming with desires and vitality, with vim, vigor, and brewing lust — these kids are working at old age homes, cramming for tests, popping Adderall just to make the literal and proverbial grade.
And for what? So they can go to a school that puts them in debt for the rest of their lives. School has become a great vehicle of capitalism: it quashes the revolution implicit in adolescence while simultaneously fomenting perpetual indebtedness. (It does other things, as well, and needless to say not all of our youth seek a higher education — but that's out of my purview for now.)
Adolescence is so beautiful, even if awkward and insane — and perhaps precisely because of that. The world today with its blistering speed and global consumption has no place for this madness, this careening. And so kids are put on the straight and narrow, their demented energy harnessed by, and into, the capitalist engine (yes, the matrix).
What, then, of these brimming desires? Ah, we "sexualize" the pre-teens. We dress them up, clown-like, in mini skirts and make up, tube tops and glitter. But it's a false sexuality, a false stage. Pre-pubescents may wreak havoc but they will never be able to harness the havoc of their later years and those adolescent hormones. By pushing sexuality back to a non-sexual phase of development, we eliminate the inefficiencies of emergent libido.
And it makes me want to weep.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Why "The Wire"
Because it is relentlessly smart, never condescending, simplifying, reductive. On the contrary, it follows the proliferation, the entwining, the vast network of capitalist effect. And it does so with the basic stuff of art: affect. Rarely didactic, it gives us the exquisite timbre and tone of a humanity writhing and struggling amidst its own decay.
No one wins and everything is beautiful, hilarious, and depressing.
Stringer, going to MBA night school, approaching his drug business as any other business. Stringer, trying to make it in the straight game and being taken shameless advantage of and there's not a thing he can do about it. His partner, Avon, sticking to his gangster ways and getting fucked that way, too.
Omar Little, perhaps the greatest contribution to the American pantheon: his impossible but true ethics, his homosexuality, an outlaw from the law and the criminals alike, he is distinctly American in the tradition of Burroughs' Kim Carsons.
The ubiquity of the bureaucratic stupidity that reigns over everything — police, school, politics.
The pathos: oh, the pathos, so complex and so palpable, of the boys on the street, at the periphery of the game.
Cedric Daniels' cool fucking body and voice and posture.
The endless boozing, the only way to quiet the madness.
Kima's "marital" problems once she breeds are enough to eviscerate me. Oh, Kima.
The futility of Colvin's all-too-obvious wisdom and heart.
Bubbles: Jesus, Bubbles — the plucky junky who is had every which way and who is dying while we watch.
The ironic thing, perhaps, is that the very fact that The Wire was made — that something this smart and this well written and this critical could ever come to fruition — gives me the hope that is conpsicuously absent in the show itself.
To wit:
No one wins and everything is beautiful, hilarious, and depressing.
Stringer, going to MBA night school, approaching his drug business as any other business. Stringer, trying to make it in the straight game and being taken shameless advantage of and there's not a thing he can do about it. His partner, Avon, sticking to his gangster ways and getting fucked that way, too.
Omar Little, perhaps the greatest contribution to the American pantheon: his impossible but true ethics, his homosexuality, an outlaw from the law and the criminals alike, he is distinctly American in the tradition of Burroughs' Kim Carsons.
The ubiquity of the bureaucratic stupidity that reigns over everything — police, school, politics.
The pathos: oh, the pathos, so complex and so palpable, of the boys on the street, at the periphery of the game.
Cedric Daniels' cool fucking body and voice and posture.
The endless boozing, the only way to quiet the madness.
Kima's "marital" problems once she breeds are enough to eviscerate me. Oh, Kima.
The futility of Colvin's all-too-obvious wisdom and heart.
Bubbles: Jesus, Bubbles — the plucky junky who is had every which way and who is dying while we watch.
The ironic thing, perhaps, is that the very fact that The Wire was made — that something this smart and this well written and this critical could ever come to fruition — gives me the hope that is conpsicuously absent in the show itself.
To wit:
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Speed of New Publishing vs. The Speed of Me
The newest publishing platforms — text messaging and Twitter — are remarkably swift. Their speed is made for an information culture that seems always on the move. This is a fancy way of saying that texting and Tweeting are really built for information on the fly: "I'll be at the bar at 7," "Wanna get dinner?," "Listen to this/see this/go to this site."
These pithy missives hedge moving lives — move here, go here, do this — and are immediately forgotten. This is disposable, if useful, language.
I am not really a guy on the move. I have very few friends, even fewer of whom are local, and even fewer of those whom I ever see. No one is inviting me to dinner; I'm not meeting anyone at the bar. And as an increasingly old-fashioned nitwit, I tend to want my words to linger, to resonate, to reverberate.
None of this is a criticism of texting, tweeting, or the way people use them. No, this is only to say that I come to these media platforms from a slightly different angle. Blogging makes sense to me: I consider my words, I write many of them and publish when I'm good and ready. But texting and tweeting are of another order entirely. And yet I still approach them as the same old media: when I text, I want my words to provoke. And so I find myself sitting in front of my phone or Twitter, fingers poised. But nothing comes as I sit there, thinking. And then, finally, some incisive phrase occurs to me and in a mad rush I type it — only it's very slow going as I am still on a phone keyboard — hit send and, for a moment, I think: gold!
And then the poor recipient's phone buzzes. In their no doubt fast paced life, they check the message assuming it will drive them this way or that — to a party, an event, a cocktail. But, no, it's just some obtuse, poorly punctuated abbreviated rant from Coffeen.
Nevertheless, I enjoy this subtle and unintentional jamming of the information media flow.
(It's funny how, sometimes, applying the old methods to the new media can, in a way, be creative — a thought for McLuhan.)
These pithy missives hedge moving lives — move here, go here, do this — and are immediately forgotten. This is disposable, if useful, language.
I am not really a guy on the move. I have very few friends, even fewer of whom are local, and even fewer of those whom I ever see. No one is inviting me to dinner; I'm not meeting anyone at the bar. And as an increasingly old-fashioned nitwit, I tend to want my words to linger, to resonate, to reverberate.
None of this is a criticism of texting, tweeting, or the way people use them. No, this is only to say that I come to these media platforms from a slightly different angle. Blogging makes sense to me: I consider my words, I write many of them and publish when I'm good and ready. But texting and tweeting are of another order entirely. And yet I still approach them as the same old media: when I text, I want my words to provoke. And so I find myself sitting in front of my phone or Twitter, fingers poised. But nothing comes as I sit there, thinking. And then, finally, some incisive phrase occurs to me and in a mad rush I type it — only it's very slow going as I am still on a phone keyboard — hit send and, for a moment, I think: gold!
And then the poor recipient's phone buzzes. In their no doubt fast paced life, they check the message assuming it will drive them this way or that — to a party, an event, a cocktail. But, no, it's just some obtuse, poorly punctuated abbreviated rant from Coffeen.
Nevertheless, I enjoy this subtle and unintentional jamming of the information media flow.
(It's funny how, sometimes, applying the old methods to the new media can, in a way, be creative — a thought for McLuhan.)
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