Send My Regards to Broad Street

Okay...

I hesitate to do this because I actually do think this is a sweet and well-intentioned convention, but I'm no longer going to be obligated to pass along "your best" to whomever you designate if I talk to you on the phone. If you really wanted to give your best greetings to someone, wouldn't it be better if you actually took the effort to provide them? In our contemporary age in which communication is so vaunted by wireless companies and the like, I just can't take such delegating gestures seriously anymore.

Next time you want me to pass along your best to someone we both know, do it your damn self.

12 Angry (YOUNG) Men

Who is Nick Stahl?

Not many people could identify him, but Nick Stahl (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Carnivale, Sin City) is a young actor who has garnered a modest amount of buzz for his performances.

Why should you care?

Perhaps you DON’T care, but Nick Stahl is emblematic of what is becoming an endangered species: the angry young man. I first noticed him in the third Terminator film, which I caught on cable a few months ago. I didn’t have particularly high expectations for the movie but enjoyed it and did so, in large part, due to Stahl’s performance. In what has now become a habit of mine, as the credits rolled, I pulled up the film’s info on imdb (the internet movie database; www.imdb.com). Perusing the “trivia” section, I was struck by some of the other actors who were considered for the role of the protagonist: Chris Klein and Ben Curtis (“The Dell Dude.”) The Dell Dude?! I had a similar reaction to Chris Klein, who I am content to lump together with some other young actors like Tobey Maguire who never seem to show any emotion, raise their voice above a mumble or do any of that stuff..oh, what’s the word…acting. It was in comparison to these hypothetical action movie heroes that I realized why I so responded to Stahl’s performance: he was full of passion.

I only have to see a few milliseconds of a preview of Sin City or a few minutes of HBO’s Carnivale (which my wife won’t permit me to watch, as it’s “too scary”) to see that Nick Stahl is a guy with fire in his eyes that he pours into his art. To consider his unrestrained and daring performances, however, I am prompted to ask about what happened to angry, young men today. We’ve come a long way since Pete Townshend sang: “Hope I die before I get old” (those of us familiar with Townshend’s solo work tend to agree with the sentiment, musicwise). In this day, the subversive mantle of boldly enjoying youth has fallen primarily upon the most famous people under thirty: pop stars. Sadly, though, the message of “My Generation” has been radically paraphrased, quite literally. Hillary Duff’s recent cover of the Townshend song emasculated the lyric to read, “Hope I DON’T die before I get old” while Britney Spears’s cover of The Rolling Stones landmark (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction changed the lines: “When I'm watchin' my tv/and that man comes on to tell me/how white my shirts can be./Well he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke/the same cigarettes as me” to “When I'm watchin' my tv/and that GIRL comes on to tell me/how tight my SKIRTS should be/well SHE CAN’T TELL ME WHO TO BE/CAUSE I’VE GOT MY OWN IDENTITY.” Her own identity…really? If we consider that Britney, in the most calculated way imaginable, became a sex symbol while simultaneously claiming a virginal status, it is no surprise that ten co-collaborators can write songs for teen pop idols with lyrics about “keeping it real” and “still being from the street.” If they, the pinnacle of popularity among this age bracket, are so detached from their “art,” why should we be surprised at anyone else in their twenties phoning it in amidst the cultural, business and academic worlds we inhabit?

Obviously, I’m talking now about more than portrayals of young adults in the mass media. I’m talking about how we ourselves mirror and mimic these stereotypes. What has happened to angry young men? They’ve been replaced by Tobey Maguire’s dull expression or the calculated spirit of “rebellion” espoused by Ashlee Simpson (she has dark hair and wears dark clothing so she’s allegedly the darker side of sister Jessica’s bubble gum image, instead of merely a less honest brand of doublemint). As long as we’re talking about music and movies, however, I feel compelled to mention Zach Braff’s stunning directorial debut in the film Garden State. In it, a twentysomething who is overmedicated by so much lithium that he fails to realize that he drives off with the gas pump dangling out of his tank gradually undergoes a process of reawakening and begins to experience love, regret, anger and—well, anything—for the first time in a long time. Is it important enough for the young adults of today to break our dependence upon a kind of societal lithium that has similarly anesthetized us? I would argue that we are entitled to remember, that though we are indeed now adults, we’re still young.

Toilet Humor

Pardon the breach of the topic, but toilet humor has been a fascinating subject for me lately. I suppose this curiosity began when I read an article about scholars who are beginning to inject more of their own autobiography into their academic writing. This has long been considered anathema in formal writing in which the writer becomes invisible for the purpose of concentrating on the work itself. Of course, this avoidance of personal detail was also linked for a long while with notions of objectivity: one can escape from his or her own experience, presuppositions and commitments in order to communicate truths that become true for all persons regardless of their experience, it was thought. What many have realized somewhat recently (amongst our postmodern condition), however, is that we can never truly escape these things, so any attempt to do so will simply distort our own observations to the extent that we fail to appreciate how we just cannot escape from our subjectivity. In any case, the interesting aspect of these autobiographical trends that I seized on is how these personal disclosures almost always seem to be self-deprecating.

To highlight one curious tendency I noticed among these examples of autobiographical critical writing that I read in scholarly journals, there was quite a bit of talk about genitalia. There was also a healthy amount of “toilet humor,” which prompted one frequent reader of this kind of material to make a remark about how interesting it is to find such toilet humor in academic writing, as many married couples manage to tiptoe around the subject for the course of a whole marriage. Okay, I suppose I can’t write an entry about all these autobiographical flourishes without offering at least one about me. Being married myself, I will reluctantly admit that I keep no secrets from my wife about bodily functions. We maintain an open-door policy on the bathroom…Don’t get the idea that we love to focus attention on the subject; this decision is incidental to our communication as a married couple, as we seem content to talk to each other at nearly all times, despite the activities in which we might be otherwise engaged. Though even I hate to admit it, bathroom behavior (in much the same way as sexual behavior) reveals quite a bit of who we truly are underneath social conventions. In a relationship, coming face-to-face with your partner’s toilet tendencies could be considered the height of intimacy, a pinnacle many refuse to scale.

Similarly, I recently watched a documentary about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in which he was asked what he found interesting about the biographies of renowned philosophers. He replied that he would be interested in their sex lives, though this information was almost always carefully protected. Though Derrida is one who is easy to oversimplify, I imagine he was drawing attention to how “private” aspects of our personality such as our sex lives are so revealing about who we really are. We offer autobiographical details in nearly everything we do, but when we consciously choose to reveal certain things about ourselves, we usually elect to highlight either our grandest triumphs (naturally) or our most human qualities. Our resumes beam our accomplishments, but we prove we are “down to earth” by telling stories on ourselves that highlight our occasional dimwittedness and peccadilloes. Ultimately, it’s often a rhetorical strategy to disclose our toilet behavior because it reminds whoever’s listening that we’re real people, too, despite our carefully constructed personas that observe social conventions and etiquette. We have to go to the toilet, though. We can’t help it that we are, in fact, real people. So, let’s put aside the myth of objectivity for a second to take a bathroom break.

The Self-Contained Universe?

I admit, though with reservation, that I am a frequent player of the latest Grand Theft Auto videogame. This pixilated distraction is emblematic of the trouble so many young men of the Nintendo generation that now find themselves in due to their reliance upon virtual violence as a source of entertaining input. No, this is not a journal to vindicate alarmist critics of media that supposedly incite tendencies toward ultraviolence amongst youth culture (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/); this first entry in this journal merely draws attention to a influence that is more subtle but seems to be present throughout many forms of media: the notion of a self-contained universe.

I recently realized something viewing the ABC show Lost a couple of months ago (http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index.html). If you’re not familiar with the show, it tells the story of the survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island. I should note at the outset that Lost is one of a few shows currently on television (Fox’s 24 among them) that is highly episodic in its style: cliffhangers at the end of nearly every show link episodes together in a grand unraveling of a “mythology” (to use parlance associated with rabid fans of the now-defunct The X-Files). This narrative approach underscores the concept of this deserted island itself, as the characters on the show cannot leave the island by its very design. To give one example, when one of the leaders of the survivors is faced with the problem of protecting the camp from other mysterious inhabitants of the island, he remembers firearms in a briefcase carried by a marshal on the plane. He had buried the marshal, however, after he died from injuries sustained in the crash. To open the briefcase, he must then exhume the marshal’s body, retrieve the key from around his neck and only then can he access the guns for defensive purposes. This kind of process struck me as a familiar one, but it took me awhile to recognize where I had seen this kind of process before; finally, I remembered my gaming experience.

Role-playing games do stimulate the imagination, but only to the extent that the designers of the game are capable of providing an imaginative space. As you walk from screen to screen in a game, you cannot walk into an area that has not already been created. Rare glitches offer new corners for exploration, but these areas too are but extensions of a self-contained universe that has already been fixed and figured out, its gravities and logics always and immutably set. We empathize with our digital daimons for the same reason we enjoy Lost: the playing field is leveled when we are bound alongside the characters inside a universe that is self-contained, in which guns cannot be manufactured, only found as they already exist. Reading some of the work of Slavoj Zizek recently (his contribution to the On Belief: Thinking in Action series, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415255325/qid=1110750995/sr=1-22/ref=sr_1_22/103-5169284-2356632?v=glance&s=books), I am convinced that we seek refuge in the digital world not to escape our material bodies and suspend our identities, but we come here looking for new ones. Paradoxically, I christen my first foray into the blogosphere with an attempt to discover myself (an attempt that is counterintuitive in a world in which the invention of a persona and re-creation is standard) and also to explore different facets of my personality that are not so easily classifiable (hence this blog’s esoteric name). This is indeed a self-contained universe: all that will nourish or destroy me is already here, but that we already knew. The exploration is the part that makes for good television.