Jeremiad

LA

I moved to LA a bit over a month ago.  I can say with great certainty that it is unlike any other place I have ever lived.

So far, I have found the social atmosphere here liberating.  I should note that the liberation of which I speak is not the personal kind of liberation, but rather, a more general and powerful brand of liberation.

I have indeed found that there is a great emphasis on the superficial here.  Long before I moved here, I knew that I would not be able to truly understand this element until I had fully experienced it.

As of today, I would say that I have still not fully experienced it.  But what I can say with some certainty is that the emphasis on the superficial—for clarity’s sake, let’s identify this as the impression one makes upon another human within the first 5 seconds of meeting them—easily functions as a force for freedom rather than the oppression that so many identify with SoCal’s fixation on the superficial.

Please don’t misunderstand me—I am not saying that there is much liberation in being judged upon those qualities (mostly physical) that supposedly don’t mean much when compared with a person’s inner being.  Rather, the liberation comes from what follows.

This city’s fixation upon one’s public presentation of himself often functions as a Catch 22.  Let me explain my thinking: we are judged by qualities that can be identified as superficial no mater where we go.  The difference being—for most of the US anyway—that we do so with no pride.  In fact, many of us are ashamed by superficiality (our own and, by osmosis, the standards with which we judge others). We often try to deny ourselves this quality in an attempt to reach something in both others and in ourselves that is more authentic.  And yet, the power of a first impression—and more generally, of all that could be regarded as superficial—cannot be denied.

What often results from our attempts to not identify with the superficial can be the exact opposite.  Without a clear space for such expression and judgment, our superficiality is sublimated (yet still very much present).  In this, we give the superficial the power to control more interior parts of our perception, and here it seems to have a greater potential for control over our overall outlook.

In contrast, people in LA seem to fetishize their attachment to the superficial.  They seem to give it more credence than it should ever have.  But the superficial—by virtue of its most intrinsic qualities—is a limited means of understanding anything.  Humans seem to naturally understand this.  The result, then? Identity is fetishized to the point of meaninglessness.  Clothing and appearance cease functioning as false windows into our souls.  In its place, two distinct modes of interaction form: the first being of only the emptiest in nature, the second being one that is far more humanizing than it ever could have been without the first.

In LA, I see so many fewer instances of people walking around in what appears to be a beloved old sweater or leaving the house with their hair in a mess.  Instead, most people here seem to be styled in a manner that is purely delineated by the demands of trends and public perception. Why, one might wonder, would anyone ever want to live in a place that is so bereft of apparent meaning, and so fascistic in its standards? My answer: with these objectivising standards comes the kind of liberation that can only accompany non-meaning.

The result of all this sign-without-true-signification: in my view, it is a return to the personal.  LA cuts through the superficial with its very fetishization of it, and as a result, the freedom that comes with unattached ideas and feelings—of true perception rather than inextricable association—comes alive.  How this functions more specifically, I cannot say certainly.  I think this may be because once the superficial has been ‘cut through’, an almost unidentifiable form of freedom appears in its place.  This semi-realization is proving to me that we must grant the superficial the power that it so obviously has, or we will be faced with dealing with it in many other, less palatable forms.

As I write this, I should note that this all inspires wistful feelings in me for a youthful idealism that I feel has already passed, or is in the process of passing, or is at least entering a new stage for me.

Indeed, a huge part of what drew me to New York in the first place was my sense that the people there achieved a sort of wholeness of self.  Rather than being slaves to the superficial, I believed (and still do believe to a certain extent) that individual identity on the East Coast in general is more organic and connected to history than the role that an individual’s identity plays in California.

It should also be noted that I do believe that LA’s obsession with the surface of all things certainly does create an environment where the general social emphasis is less concerned with authenticity and more concerned with status.  This is obviously the most common criticism of the place.  And in this criticism, I see the negation of a distinctly American quality that has been very present in all of the other places I have ever lived (New York City, the Hudson Valley, and San Francisco).  

After all, our nation’s complicated relationship with individual identity reaches to the very core of our society in many respects.  We, as a nation, tend to prize the authentic over the superficial in many regards in the name of feeling as if our virtue remains intact.  Here, questions of virtue seem far less present.  I have found myself using the word shameless to describe LA on more than one occasion.  As such, the liberation I describe does negate much of the moral complexity that I have always loved about this nation.  After all, most people in this country seem to have a general appreciation for the role authenticity plays in the US. 

Below you will find a great example of LA’s cultural shamelessness.  It is a promo that plays on Fox in LA quite often for their local news programming.  If you watch it, you will see that its shamelessness needs no explanation on my part.

The 00’s

Over the past few months I have been at a loss when it comes to figuring out how this past decade will be remembered.  I do not exactly mean what it will be remembered for, but literally, the way in which history will be able to place it into a linear, easily understood narrative for those who did not experience it first hand (and, I suppose, for those who did too).

It goes without saying that the way we remember the past decade will be almost completely reliant upon the future.  But, if I am speaking of my own inability to fully understand the social evolution of the past decade, I think it may have something to do with the fact that surprisingly few people have any interest in attempting to do so in the first place right now.  Suddenly—after living through a decade that looked to the past for inspiration for so many popular trends and social models—American culture seems utterly disinterested in canonizing recent history.

This was made obvious for me when I began bringing up the fact that the decade was coming to a close around last September.  Many people, some of whom I consider deeply insightful, had no idea that the decade was about to end.  They were literally shocked when I told them the news.  And yet, some instinct I had at the time had already told me that people weren’t tuned into the end of the decade.

Not only were people not paying attention to the moment in which we were living, but they were also not paying too much attention to past moments either.  I suppose that to a certain extent, this new brand of non-linear history is nothing new.  After all, for all of the last decade’s aestheticized reverence for past moments from the 1970’s and 80’s, it had little interest in the 90’s.  Unlike the 1990’s, which was so uncomfortable owning up to the 1980’s that it ridiculed the previous decade with mawkish parodies—think The Wedding Singer, Romey and Michele’s High School Reunion, A Night at the Roxbury, American Psycho (OK—2000), The Last Days of Disco, 54, etc—the 00’s were more interested in forgetting the 90’s.  Indeed, so much had changed that they seemed irrelevant.

It all makes me think of an N+1 panel that was held some months ago: “The 90’s v. The 90’s”.  At the beginning of the panel, they asked each speaker to identify when they felt the 90’s had truly begun and ended.  Admittedly, I found their answers deeply arbitrary (as is to be expected of such a question).  At the time, I found the practice itself problematic, if not outright dangerous, because it seemed as if its entire purpose was to exclude that which the members of the panel wanted to forget about the 90’s.  I recall one panel member saying that 1998 was the last year of the 90’s for her because it was the beginning of Sex and the City and, as such, was the beginning of a new brand of a woman-owned vision of feminine frivolity, and the social ideals that followed.  This incensed me because I felt as if the beginning of such a movement was very intuitively connected to what had occurred in the 90’s.  To treat such a movement as if it was some kind of foreign, invasive species that was eating away at a more pure form of feminism that had come before was idiotic in my mind.  In other words, I had a hard time believing that social change does not occur for an intuitive reason most (if not all) of the time.  Normally, social change is motivated by genuine desire among those who follow such “new” movements.  I felt as if the panelist in question was simply excluding that which she did not like about the 90’s, and I found this very troublesome.

But now, as I write this, I really do feel as if this decade may have begun with the election of Barack Obama.  I think that if I were serving on a panel, I would probably mark it with November 2008—right around when Obama won the election and the stock market nearly collapsed.  This was a definitively identifiable moment of changing social attitudes in most people’s minds.  So, here I am, already excluding those parts of the past decade that I have a difficult time placing in a historical trajectory.  This is not to say that I cannot understand the events that transpired in the past decade, it is only to say that they seem tonally off in relation to my greater impression of the decade as a whole.  This speaks more to the problematic nature of macro reduction of an arbitrary period of history than it does with how the actual events that occurred in recent years logically transpired.

But really, what I feel I am seeing now is a new disinterest in the recent past.  I can make some easy connections to this moment and the early Clinton 90’s.  However, this moment feels like a more intense version of that period, with greater historical implications.  That may have something to do with the fact that so many of the leading ideologies of the past decade—from music, to politics, to social values—have been deemed weak if not completely incorrect.  After a decade that staked such a huge claim on impossibly high moral standards right after 9/11, and then in turn found great comfort in a kind of all-consuming social transgression with its overt decadence ideals, greedy wars, reality TV, and generally poor social models which idealized an overall non-communal, self-serving kind of cultural arrogance, we have come to see these values as simply wrong.  Most things that evoke these kinds of transgressive attitudes from the 00’s are coming to be read as cheap and sleazy to our contemporary popular culture.  In fact, they may have always been read that way, the only difference now being that it feels inappropriate.

I imagine that as this new decade wears on, we will see a reaction to the 00’s that is much more like that of the 90’s to the 80’s rather than the 00’s to the 90’s. For, as most of us readily accept, the 90’s simply appeared to be naive during the last decade (at least when we considered what followed).  There was nothing transgressive about remembering the period because we all basically understood that many of its naive social values may have actually led to so many of the debacles occurred in the 00’s.  The link between the past and present was intuitive, and as a result, dull.

I can imagine, however, that as this decade wears on we might ridicule the 00’s as we ridiculed the 80’s in the 90’s.  And, on that same token, I can imagine a fetishized, idealized memory of the 00’s in the 2020’s and the 2030’s as a wonderfully transgressive period.  But for now, American culture as a whole seems to be uneasily waiting for something meatier than positive social movement and greater social ideals to attach itself to.  In short, we are all waiting to feel as if we are a part of something more complex again.

Outrage

During the opening of The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), we see a number of exaggerated, indicting examples of modern life circa 1995. The yuppies, the consumerism, the cell phones, the charmless take-out, the leaf blowers, the blase influence of Gen-X as a general state of existence (implicitly). This somewhat popular, stylish vision of the times had a kind of natural appeal, as it characterized a period that seemed at a loss for universal elements of daily life. This vague outrage, which was present through much of the decade in various forms of media, seemed to be a kind of understated rejection of a world we had all necessarily chosen for ourselves.

Just look at the examples of modern life in the opening of The Brady Bunch Movie—traffic, cappuccino, cell phones, yuppies, gang crime. These were all problems of our own making. As such, the film’s hostility is cast back at the audience. It asks us to reflect on the quietly fowl times we are living in, and thus, to consider the campy, unrealistic virtue that a family like the Brady’s can offer its audience for the next hundred minutes.

For the first half of the 90’s, I would say, this kind of vague outrage was relatively popular in mass media. It was attractively naive, in a way, and empowered us to feel above the (supposedly) shallow values of the time we were living in. With so many hideous examples of humanity being used as the punchlines for mass-appeal comedy, we safely decided that we, the viewers, were not like these people. Instead, in actuality, such extreme examples of the morally depraved times we were living in were probably necessary to maintain the acceptability of these criticisms. In a time that promoted and exhibited—in actuality—pretty modest and understated modes of existence in terms of personal presentation, most of us felt safely outside the reach of such popular criticisms.

When I think of the human ideals of the time, I think of earnestness and an obsession with authenticity. These notions seemed to be widely accepted during the n+1 panel, “The 90’s vs The 90’s”, which attempted to investigate varying impressions of the 90’s. But something that I don’t believe was touched on during the lecture was the 90’s inherently evasive qualities.

In fact, I think many people during the time liked to believe that their lives generally avoided typecasting. Most people hoped, insecurely it seems, that their lives had a value which negated such criticisms. This was not the case with Gen-Y (those being raised during the 90’s, that is). Gen-Y seemed more attracted to such visions of moral depravity more than anything else at the time (think of the earnest appreciation among Gen-Y during the 90’s for movies like Clueless, Billy Madison, and countless others which were intended to offer a broad criticism of a class of people, but just had plain appeal for my generation at the time). But that’s really getting off the point.

As a kid in the 90’s, I was obsessed with cell phones. As such, I would ask adults why they kept them. Most often, such a question would make them uncomfortable. They would feel somehow judged, and explain that it was for work or just for emergencies. Sometimes they would even just say they hated them, and that they wished they did not exist. Now mind you, such statements were made during a time when having cell phones was most often not required by most professions. I believe that their general popularity grew because of their obvious convenience.

This experience reveals a kind of passive distaste among (some of) the masses for an increasingly modern world that seemed to be inevitably growing around us. Indeed, this is not an unpopular view of modern life today either. But I do believe that such disapproval of modern existence among the 20-somethings of the time (and the popular culture that they impacted) may have been the first of this brand of passive disapproval for a world that many felt had little influence over. In short, it was a world that no one seemed to want to own up to.

The passion and the the pride that 9/11 brought to the surface—and, notably, the distaste for the vague and disjointed America that so many had come to find problematic—led to a decade of an ownership of identity, both personal and cultural, that had not been seen in over a decade at the time. This is not a new or original idea, of course. But I do believe that as time goes on, we will have to take a look at that vague decade, the 1990’s, for its strange predilection towards treating the present as if it were the past.

Essence

I am in California right now and it has me thinking a lot about the quality of essence.  More specifically, I find myself amazed by my home state’s fraught relationship with essence in general.

I just returned from a very pleasant few days in Santa Barbara.  While there, I was deeply struck by the empty, overtly dishonest, and seemingly oblivious aesthetics of the architecture itself.  Nearly everything in the town, old and new alike, is built in the Hacienda style (rough-hewn timber, pastel stucco, red tile roofs, oversized wrought iron hinges and hardware).  On State Street, Santa Barbara’s upscale shopping boulevard, the town requires that all signs be hanging and carved out of wood.  Further, these signs apparently must be approved by Santa Barbara’s town leaders as well.

One would imagine that such a prizing of this kind of mellow, pastoral Spanish-style of architecture would create a beautiful, cohesive environment for its residents.  And yet, I found it to be just the opposite upon closer inspection.

Instead, it seems that Santa Barbara has set an impossibly high standard for itself with all of its fastidiousness.  These wooden hanging signs may be charming in themselves, but all one has to do is read the text on the signs themselves in order to see the extent to which they parody themselves.  One wooden sign on State Street reads “The Adult Store”, countless others promise quality low-fat frozen yogurt.  Another particularly beautiful sign reads “The Artificial Kidney Center of Santa Barbara”.

If the College Board had to write a word relation for Santa Barbara, it might be this: “Enya: essence in music” as “Santa Barbara: essence of place”.  Like Enya, the town is consumed with crafting and perfecting its essence.  But also like Enya, such aestheticzation is so clearly its primary operative to the point that that the sense of place (i.e. essence) that the town is striving for is rendered impotent by way of the fixation itself.  The end result is often inappropriate, and at times even vulgar.  In short, the result of this aesthetic control is more like a parody of essence than the embodiment of it.  It is as if all of these little regional affectations are only in place to distract you from the gaping nothingness that is bubbling just beneath the surface in Santa Barbara.

To those who might respond, “But the Spanish style of architecture in Santa Barbara is deeply rooted in the town’s original history as a Mission, silly,” I would respond by saying that such a history has long been buried by the far more prevalent post-modern realities that most American towns face today.  It goes without saying that the charm of Spanish architecture is both lost and trivialized when it is used in a shopping center that houses Costco, Best Buy, and Sports Authority.

But the feebleness and absence of true values and principles that such architecture portends is not what interests me.  Rather, I am more interested in the motivations for this striving for essence itself in the first place.

I should note, now, that I do not identify this lack of essence to be particular to Santa Barbara.  Rather, I think that this is an issue that affects much of California.  Much like Santa Barbara, my home neighborhood of Noe Valley in San Francisco requires that most buildings be built in the Victorian style.  Further, the neighborhood has ordinances that call for a restricted number of restaurants and coffee shops, for fear that the neighborhood will somehow lose its charm.  This has contributed to an endless number of vacancies along the neighborhood’s main shopping corridor, 24th Street.

I identify all of this control as a kind of mass cultural terror that is felt throughout much of California, as it seems as if the state is constantly attempting to hide its glaring lack of substance.  Many of California’s greatest services and products do, in fact, serve to distract America (and the world, for that matter) from the more serious parts of life.  Movies, television, video games, Facebook, Google, porn.  Most of these things are made primarily here in the Golden State.  Given all of this, one can easily see the connection between the Gold Rush and the state as it exists today.  California thrives on indulgence, decadence, distraction, and potential (real or imagined, as was proven with the dot com bust just a decade ago).

The aesthetics of the place strive for a hilariously unsupported sense of charm and grandeur, and yet I imagine few people here believe that these are the state’s greatest offerings.  Rather, it is the state’s natural beauty, paired with a distinctly warm, uncritical vibe on the streets that leave 38 million people and counting wanting more.  It is this “Make it happen, and there you are” mentality that best characterizes California’s ethos for me.

And it all comes with great benefits, too.  Where else in America is Puritanism so reduced to an aesthetic fixation that it becomes irrelevant?  There is an unparalleled sense of freedom here that I am awed by when I come back from the hardscrabble realities of the Northeast.  It almost makes me want to move back, when I think of it in this light.  If only it were not for the gnawing questions that exist just beneath the surface of a California existence: “Is it enough?”

“Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare”

The above was the text on a BQE Billboard for The CW’s Gossip Girl last fall. It was (obviously) intended to provoke interest in American youth by way advertising the show’s transgressive qualities. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is what, in particular, makes the above headline true.

The film Cruel Intentions received similarly horrified responses from parents. And indeed, their responses had just cause. For Cruel Intentions was not just disturbing in a run-of-the-mill, “inappropriate language”—check, “sexual content”—check, kind of way. It was these aspects, paired with the film’s display of the imaginary moral depravity behind America’s most well pampered youth (an idea that had gained great popularity in the 1980’s, seemed to fall off for much of the 90’s, then returned slowly but surely with the release of Cruel Intentions in 1999).

Here was a film that showed spoiled high schooler’s doing hard drugs, being promiscuous, and doing so all without regard for consequence. But this alone was not the real problem—the real problem is revealed in the title itself. As they do all of these things, their “intentions” are “cruel”. They offered what was seen as the worst kind of social model: one that shed light on the notion that, when given every opportunity to succeed in our society, some people may still be inclined to go astray and wreak havoc on their elegant, privileged worlds like a snake in the Garden of Eden.

The most scandalizing part of Cruel Intentions was the way in which it offered such sexy, contemporary, concrete examples of these values in action. That the film ends on a moralistic note wasn’t enough for concerned parents. People were upset by the very fact that it made such behavior seem possible (read: replicable) in the first place.

Now Gossip Girl has followed the same model, except that it’s on TV and, thus, cannot include overly graphic language, violence, or sex. But the people at the CW caught on the decade-long evolution of Cruel Intentions’s appeal. It’s now no longer about seeing the sex, or hearing the curse words: all that matters is that the subject matter be juicily transgressive for its audience.

In general, when compared with ten years ago, the TV and film industries have seem to decide that long, drawn-out, graphic sex scenes are distracting and uneccesary. This statement may seem like a surprise at first. But before you make up your mind, I beg that you please look back to the late 90’s. During this period, virtually all narrative media was obsessed with the sex act. With discussing it, with revealing everything about it, with fleshing it out, with celebrating it. From intensely romantic scenes like the one in Titanic, to goofy explorations of sex in sitcoms like Friends, Dharma & Greg, and Seinfeld, to more raunchy interpretations in Austin Powers, There’s Something About Mary, and all of the American Pie movies. The list of pieces that took part in this discourse within the context of late 90’s narrative media is virtually endless.

Yet, somehow, raunchy media no longer wastes so much time on it. For instance, in the very raunchy hit summer comedy The Hangover, the film’s creators gloss right over the actual transgressive acts that occurred. Instead, the narrative has to punch it up with a bit of mystery as the pack of party animals retrace their steps. Then, at the end (if you waited through the closing credits), you were rewarded with a brief bunch of incredibly raunchy pics. Or in hit films like Watchmen: here, there was a long, drawn out sex scene. But instead of taking an earnest approach, it was bizarre and supernatural. It had sexual images that were so bizarre that they had never been seen before and, by virtue of this, were rendered interesting to viewers.

Why this lack of interest in the sex act has occurred: I really don’t know. My best explanation is to say that it got to a point where even the most graphic, drawn-out sex began to seem too suggestive without substance, too familiar, and even just passé. Our earnest interest in it seemed to grow into interest in more complex narrative structure. And, on this, I congratulate the industry.

A Very Important VW Ad

Unfortunately embedding for this link was disabled by youtube, but I still implore you to follow this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJtBWXG6o0g

It is a VW ad from 1997 that raises some very important questions about the time in which it was made.

The ad touts “Generation Passat” as the generation whose liberal values will implicitly change the world. It aligns itself with the environmental movement and the civil rights movement by using upsetting recreated images of both. A VW Passat stoically rolls past scenes of social unrest in silence. Somehow, the ad is attempting to imply that the new Passat is a vehicle for change, despite the fact that the Passat does nothing to aleviate the problems it identifies.

It’s a truly bizzare ad, and it confirms some suspicions I have had for a while now: that the green movement as it exists today, the popularity of the Prius, and even Obama’s presidential win, all should have occured more than ten years ago given that period’s supposed moral center (the same one in the ad, that is).

Bizzarely, this new age of change that we are all bearing witness to seems more aligned with the world we knew twelve years ago than the world that we knew two or three years ago.

However, this ad highlights one very important difference between the two times. In 1997, such values were largely just a matter of good taste for a well-heeled liberal class. They did not suppose any actual change (i.e. driving a Passat does nothing to aleviate obstructions to civil rights or aide the environmental movement). Rather, such values were considered to be a move in the right direction. But, as this ad makes painfully clear, we were not expected to actually do anything about such social scourges. Rather, we were supposed to believe that the world was somehow getting better on it’s own, as the song croons that “these times, they are a changin’”. Nevermind the fact that just three short years later Bush would be elected into office for two terms. We weren’t thinking about such possibilities back then. Instead, we just assumed that the world was moving in the right direction without our help.

Now, when I show this video to people, they cringe. There is something vulgar about the ad…its impossible empathy, its celebration of white, self-satisfied postgrads (see hippie in the forest scene for more details). It’s all about what we ‘value(d)’ on a theoretical level, and its smugness is revolting in today’s light. But after all, this naive lack of self-awareness exemplifies one of the most illuminating cultural artifacts that I have ever found from that fateful year, 1997.

Comparing Jeep Ads

Below you will find two ads. One is for Jeep during the holiday season in 2007. The second was played often during the holiday season in 2008.

Here, we see obvious differences between the two. The 2008 ad is a screaming-announcer type ad that does not consider lifestyle in the least, and is mainly advertising great deals on Jeeps. The second only advertises lifestyle and says nothing regarding the price or value of Jeeps. However, if we look beyond the elements of the ads that focus purely upon the economic necessities of the market, we will find two entirely different messages of our friends at Jeep.

The 2007 ad’s song talk about it being a “time to let go” and having “the time of our lives”. Such a campaign only made sense, as it should have been the time of our lives. But, at the same time, everyone felt the sense of impending doom with the economy and culture in general. Thus, the ad posits the time of our lives as a question, in a sense. It is advertising the time of our lives, but it does not suggest that such times are upon us. Rather, it tells potential Jeep buyers to hold on to something from the earlier part of the decade—a decadent kind of passivity that felt so good to so many of us.

The second ad tells us to “move it”. It uses the ESPN song to energize America to buy their vehicles. Will you have a great time in a Jeep? Who knows? Do you want a good deal on last year’s status symbol? Absolutey.

The 2008 Jeep ad focuses on the personal. ‘Remember what Jeep was?’ the ad asks. ‘Why does it have to be over? Get great savings by purchasing yesterday’s ideal…bring that old social ideal back to life America!’