Tasty Tacos

(Since no one else seems to be posting much, I’ll post three in a row. This isn’t “Chad’s Blog, though.)

“Vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue, vogue…”—Madonna

My suggestion would be, yes, Jenny, renew that Vogue subscription!

There are so many different factors at work here (I’ll attempt to diagram these factors next time), so let me begin with a tangent (I love these, if you haven’t noticed thus far). I know I said I wouldn’t rate movies, but I saw The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen last week and it really, really sucked. I left the theater angry at the movie for wasting so much of my time. Now I hear echoes of Billy Graham’s statement…don’t watch so much TV…

Still, it was fun to go to the theater with my friends; I love the way even a bad movie in a dark theater where you can’t really talk can still be a fun—and almost social—experience. Even though the movie angered me, it was fun to discuss how bad it was after the fact. So do I consider it a waste of time or a worthwhile experience? Both…and neither.

Sometimes we have to make choices, and we really have no way to know which choice is best, especially when it comes to entertainment. Jenny says that TV and fashion mags and other types of entertainment can lull one into a stupor, and she considers that a bad thing (pleasant, yes, but still bad). She says life is too short. I say the same thing as argument for that kind of entertainment! Sometimes, I need silly entertainment. Life’s too short to be serious all the time. As long as I know what I’m watching is mindless, then it ceases to be mindless because I have transcended it, figured it out, realized the cheesiness, or unreality of it. I used to hate The Brady Bunch, for example, but now I enjoy it, because it works in two different paradoxical ways for me. On the one hand, it’s so dumb that it’s fun, pleasant, stupor-inducing. On the other hand, I know it’s this way, so I can thus read it as something different, not exactly analyzing it, but at least actively watching it.

And I think that’s the point. When I have kids (insert laughter here), I plan on letting them watch, listen to, read whatever they want (after much fighting with my wife…)—provided that they always do it actively. As long as they see Marilyn Manson, for example, as the conniving entertainer who plays up everything for shock (and schlock!) value, then I don’t see a problem with it. As long as they read Vogue and know that it plays into and helps to define women as beauty objects, then I think it’s fine. Even if they pleasantly enjoy it, their brains are still working, doing foreground or background analysis.

So Jenny, I don’t really think you should renew your Vogue subscription. You have other reasons for giving up fashion mags, too. Sometimes, though, you want to be lulled into a stupor. Sometimes life seems to beat us up, and we need a release. Sometimes pure enjoyment is key. And you know it’s messing with your sense of self by saying that you should look a certain way, own certain clothes, use lots of makeup. Then enjoy the occasional vege.

I might watch a movie as bad as League again sometime, and I might leave the theater angered by its stupidity. But as long as I leave the theater feeling that way, then I know I have transcended it; I haven’t just bought it whole and watched it as an automaton, a slave to Hollywood.

So vogue.

P.S. Where I am torn is that so many people don’t read/watch/listen to entertainment actively, knowing what it’s trying to do to them. Are we thus helping to support this industry that produces crap because we, too, buy the crap? hmm…

One Last One?

Here is the promised entry on “what to do with an old curmudgeon (like Harold Bloom).” I hope I am not just treading over the same territory I have already covered, but this issue is really important to the people on this blog, as our posts and conversations over various beverages attest.

I used to love Harold Bloom. His early criticism was radical, revising the way I thought about literature. Coming from a New Critical background (that’s where you read a text just as a text—contextual information is beside the point; it’s the complexities of the text that really count), Harold Bloom’s work on the romantic poets was startling to me. He said that the author was important again: complex texts stem from complex minds. And he then applied this idea to the entire Western tradition by describing the “anxiety of influence,” where an author is torn by anxiety to be as good as but not to imitate the authors that came before him. Basically, Bloom was what I called a Freudian Deconstructionist.

And then I came across his 1990 book The Western Canon, which argued that some literature is better than others, thus, the reason and necessity of a canon. It seemed to argue that the gatekeepers of culture were a good thing: they keep the “riffraff” out, stuff like Harry Potter. I loved it when I first came across it. Yes, I agreed, Stephen King isn’t good enough. Now I read Bloom’s article on Harry Potter and wonder what the hell was I thinking when I agreed with this man. What happened in my thinking to make me see that the guardians of culture were arbitrary and politically motivated?

In the Bloom interview that Jenny suggested (which is really insightful, by the way, especially his ideas on Hamlet), Bloom says that literature should be valued because it is good and not because of the race or nationality or gender of the author--that’s how he characterizes “multiculturalism.” And he has said this before, in other interviews and articles. The mistake of multiculturalism is that it argues that a black author is just as good or as deserving of a place in the Western canon as Shakespeare is (or as Dickens is, to use a less loaded example). Never mind trying to pinpoint what “good” means.”

It’s that mischaracterization of multiculturalism that is a grave misstep in my book. The point of multicultural studies, most people will tell you—a feminist, an African, an Indian—is not that this other literature is good because it’s written by a female, African, or Indian, but that it isn’t automatically bad because of that same fact! Why did so many female authors write under male pseudonyms in the 18th and 19th centuries? Because they wouldn’t be respected as women novelists; they would be labeled as Hawthorne characterized them, a mass of scribbling women. Why was the former slave girl subjected to a grueling test after a book of her poetry was published? Because an African could never write the kind of poetry she did.

This canon of high culture is not innocent. It does not make up the best that has been thought and said in the world. It simply excludes too much. Often, it excludes things for political and/or arbitrary reasons, as well as aesthetic ones.

I learned all this when I read T.S. Eliot’s review of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. I had always loved John Donne, and, wonderful, Eliot agreed with me. But wait, the metaphysicals sat through 300 years of neglect? Why? No reason. Just because literary taste didn’t quite like him. I learned this when I started researching lesser-known works of the nineteenth century. I read H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines and was blown away by them. (Haggard is the guy who created the character Allan Quartermain, from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.) These are smart books that do something really interesting with narrative and realism. Why aren’t they read anymore? Because someone long ago (an arbiter of culture, a guy something like, say, T.S. Eliot, or even, umm, Harold Bloom…) said Haggard was junk.

Now, did I say in my last post that 28 Days Later was good for a specific reason? Yes, because it teaches us something about the inner workings of the human psyche. Did I argue that it was good because, say, it’s directed by a European? Or because it’s about zombies? Or because it features a strong black female character? No. I didn’t. But it shouldn’t be excluded for any of those reasons, either.

It doesn’t mean some things aren’t just bad, though…

P.S. I’m going to try to move away from this topic. But there’s still so much: Harry Potter, League of X Gentlemen, Vogue…

28 Days Later and the Meanings of Culture

I have two new things to discuss, but I will have to delve into them later. Expect future postings on "what to do with a movie that just plain sucks" and "what to do with an old curmudgeon (like Harold Bloom)."

The reason for my discussions of culture was to lead into what a movie such as 28 Days Later teaches us about society. The way to really break down the division between high and low culture is to show that even pop culture can teach us something valuable.

28 Days Later is nothing if not a visual masterpiece (ah, the allusion!). The grainy photography is proof that form can equal content in a productive and entertaining way, adding to the content without being overbearing. Consider the plot—a virus turns the population of Britain into a group of raging beasts. Isn’t a photography that seems always a little out-of-focus the most appropriate?

What do we classify this movie as? Is it science fiction or horror? Well, the divisions and definitions are really varied here. Search the Internet to see all of the different kinds—they’re all over the place. I agree with Stephen King that horror movies act as catharsis—they help us get rid of our rage without us actually killing anyone. More than this, they act as controlled fear, kind of like the way a roller coaster is scary as hell, even though it’s completely (almost!) safe. Not many people get killed in movie theaters, eh? Scream 2 was right to place the beginning death in a movie theater, though. Isn’t that really the whole point? Scare people even where they think they’re safe?

What are the good horror movies of the past few years? I can only think of a few—The Ring, The Blair Witch Project, Scream, and Scream 2. At least three of those movies were attempting to either spoof or completely redefine the horror genre. They try to take it out of the controlled scare to the place where it invades everything, kind of like what A Nightmare on Elm Street did to dreams. Oh, to be a dream warrior.

Science fiction, on the other hand, doesn’t generally offer this kind of controlled scare. It may be scary, but for a different reason, because it may offer a future that is bleak and hopeless.

I think at its fundamental core science fiction is parable, allegory, a sustained metaphor. Think about the function of these devices: they attempt to say something so provocative that they must hide their statements behind the “veil of allegory.” Jesus’s message, for example, attempts to so completely revise the prevailing culture that he veils it in parables. Either the people get it and believe, don’t get it at all, or they get it and get so mad that they want Him dead. That’s a message that needs the veil.

Science fiction does something similar, I think, unlike the general horror movie, which seems to exist only on one level. If a horror film does transcend its literal level, it’s generally brief, not sustained metaphor. 28 Days Later is science fiction, then. Sure, it may be startling, but it presents a world that is not our own. The future that occurs after the virus spreads is not our world, but it could be. The very beginning sets up the allegory: what are the monkeys infected with? Rage, the scientist says. Rage, not some virus that is containable in anything but metaphor. Rage is emotion, feelings, metaphor. Thus, the activists don’t believe him and unknowingly start the end of the world. How could a monkey be infected with something so amorphous or metaphorical as rage?

Yet that’s what it is, isn’t it? 28 Days Later plays with our world by exaggerating our society. All I could think of was the rage I see on the road every day (a cliché, I know, but still an apt one), the double murder that happened across the street from a friend’s house because an ex-girlfriend was pregnant with her new boyfriend’s baby, the woman who runs over her husband, more than once. The list is endless. Rage.

And what happens to those zombies who are infected with rage? They eventually starve to death because the rage consumes them entirely. It takes control, and they care about nothing else, not even surviving.

Yes, this is a movie that is about us. This world could be our world. It tells a story about the rage in our society that will destroy us. It is allegory, a parable in grainy film. And it’s also a heck of a lot of fun. Who knew pop culture--a zombie film no less--could teach us something? Down with the laws of culture. It’s all about fun (and, heck, learning...).

The Function of Culture at the Present Time, THE END!
This entry will be a bit of a departure from my usual discussion--prompted, of course, by Mark’s entry on Monday. He urges me to ignore his provocations, all the while knowing that I can’t. It figures.

Fundamentally, I agree with Mark. Part of my project here in my own pieces that appear more like pedagogy than ranting, I’m afraid, is to break down that barrier between high culture and low culture. I agree that high culture doesn’t exist, but for a different reason—I think it never actually existed! Where I disagree with Mark is in his suggestion that the divide between high and low culture has something to do with intelligence or education. If anything, I think it’s more of a class issue. Class and education are tied in together, of course—I realize that. But who goes to the opera? Only people who can afford it. If someone didn’t have much money, they may save to go to the opera because they really value it, but the truth is that most people can’t do it. They don’t value it because they have never been exposed to it.

But who watches movies? Everyone. Either they go to see them at the theater, wait for the dollar theater, or rent them later on. This is mass culture, popular culture. Mark says that there is no high culture, and I disagree with him. It’s not just there for people like us to piss on, either. Isn’t that position the one normally reserved for popular culture?

What I want to do here is to argue that pop culture and high culture are fundamentally valuable for similar reasons. In other words, the reason the divide between the two doesn’t exist, I think, is because there is no divide. There is no fundamental difference. They can each be intelligent pieces that provoke us to think. Shakespeare makes me think about my inner urges; it asks me to be a better person. When I read Hamlet, I think about sin and salvation. When I watch The Ring, Pitch Black (uh oh! science fiction again!), or The Sopranos, I think about the same things. In fact, Eminem’s “Without Me” makes me contemplate identity, censorship, and the place of music in society—a lot more than any piece of “classical” music does.

So the barriers between these two things is completely arbitrary. Is high culture there for us to deconstruct? Yeah! But so is low culture. One of the major advances of the poststructuralist movement is the proposition that hierarchies are always arbitrary. When we say that high culture is much more valuable than pop culture, it’s only so because the people in power decided it was to be so, because they liked it more, considered it superior for whatever reason. Heck, look at Charles Dickens! He was a pulp writer, the Stephen King of his day, and now who reads him? People who are forced to in boring English classes, that’s who.

But anyone can, of course. He’s no more difficult than any other author; he’s only more boring. I believe that we shouldn’t separate high from low culture, from either end. I know people who pride themselves on never having read a book—and not because they can’t read. They think they’re snooty and boring. I know others who wouldn’t go see a popcorn movie because it’s beneath them, or wouldn’t read a Tom Clancy book for the same reason. And I say do all of it. Why not? We can learn from everything, not only from the stuff our teachers said were valuable. It all is. And I think the average Joe realizes that, even if unconsciously. What I want to do is make it conscious.

So, I’m gonna make myself a cocktail and enjoy a popcorn movie like The Mummy Returns. Then I’ll make another and read #100 on the Modern Library’s Great Books—Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons. Both teach me about racism, heroism, and love. And they’re both a lot of fun.

The Function of Culture at the Present Time, Part II
In this installment I want to give a brief look at the culture debates. Next time, I will turn to how this fits into genres. Then I will look at the genres of horror and science fiction to see what we should do with a movie like 28 Days Later.

So, what we now call the culture debates can be traced back to the beginnings of philosophy with the debates between Aristotle and Plato as to the place of poetry in society. On the one hand, we have Plato banishing all “pop culture” stuff like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey from his ideal Republic. (I love the way this stuff works. Just imagine it—even before the creation of the esteemed television mini-series, Homer was considered pop stuff, too light to be taken seriously. Now he’s considered “high culture,” read mostly by stuffy academics.) According to Plato, poets should be removed for two main reasons: 1) they are too far removed from reality. Plato, being the good Platonist that he was, believed that an ideal realm existed beyond this one. Our creations are mere copies of that ideal realm. Poets, who tried to copy nature (mimesis), were really only copying a copy of that ideal world. Therefore, get rid of ‘em. 2) Poets told lewd stories about the gods, and so shouldn’t be trusted. The gods couldn’t have done all of those bad things Homer said they did, so they should be banished. On the other hand, we have Plato’s student Aristotle who, for simplicity’s sake, disagreed. Poetry had a place to rouse great emotions in people and could even be used to build up national pride and purge those bad emotions like anger.

The debate has continued through the nineteenth century when Matthew Arnold made the now famous quote that has become the mantra of high culture—culture is “the best that has been thought and said.”

And now there is the complete divorce between high and low cultures, as if the lesser view taken of high culture has something to do with the state of American society (generally seen as in decline--morally, spiritually, artistically). Someone once told me that Allan Bloom (that guy who wrote The Closing of the American Mind back in the 80s) got ticked when his students weren’t really paying attention to him anymore. Something changed in the 60s when he was teaching, and he found himself unable to relate to his students. So he needed someone to blame. Instead of blaming his teaching methods or something about himself, he chose to blame his students. They had changed obviously for the worse, and it is his job to try to reel them back in. (Interestingly enough, he seems to blame Mick Jagger for a lot of society’s ills. According to Bloom, Jagger gives kids sex before they’re ready, thus making them turn to easy pleasures instead of intellectual stimuli. I always felt that Jagger would approve of being the anti-Christ…)

So my question is really this: where do science fiction and horror fit into all of this?
What do we consider these things? Are they high or low culture, and why do we think in these terms? Do we speak of these as merely fun? Do we find ourselves apologizing for reading Stephen King or liking Terminator 3? Why? What is it about those genres that automatically places them in that pop culture category?

Don’t worry: I’ll tie it all together next time…

The Function of Culture at the Present Time, Part I

Mark’s discussion of aristocracy, democracy, and Internet media is probably one of the most pertinent things we can debate on these Blogs. The internet’s function, as Mark has said, is a means to allow everyone with access to a library or friend’s terminal the right and privilege to publish something in a public arena.

Before the Internet, who of us had that opportunity? Either a writer was good enough (or had enough influential friends) to get them published, or, like some famous writers, they owned (or were married to people who owned) printing presses. Sometimes, people even paid to have their stuff published. Now, anyone can do it! A Blog may not have the same credibility as a novel or magazine or other types of media (or so most of us admit grudgingly!), but it still allows voices to be heard.

Where does the term “culture” fit into all of this? The word has gone through a lot of different meanings and carried with it either positive or negative associations, depending on to whom one was speaking.

What are your associations with the term today? Mine are two-fold. I think of Madonna (yes, I’m a child of the 80s) or Nelly or The Fast and the Furious. This is culture as pop culture, culture as democracy, or the things we do in our spare time, what our 9th graders like to do (and me, too), what we admit to at some parties to make us seem hip and what we admit to grudgingly at others with that apologetic tone—yes, I listen to Limp Bizkit…and please don’t think any less of me.

Why would anyone think less of you? Because of culture’s second definition—culture as “high” culture. The symphony would be a part of this, as would Shakespeare’s plays (or any plays for that matter—what percentage of the general population actually enjoys going to plays?), or those thing so many of us consider boring—opera, ballet, watching the four tenors perform on PBS (or almost anything on PBS!).

All of this is, of course, tied into ethnicity. In fact, our definitions of the term culture are often interchangeable with what we call ethnicity, also called one’s “cultural heritage.” I want to dismiss with that point for right now because it gets really messy, and I actually want to talk about my main topics before I end this first section.

Notice that my title for this is a conglomeration of two of Matthew Arnold’s famous works—“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” an essay first published in 1865, and Culture and Anarchy, his major work of non-fiction, first published in 1869. You may remember Matthew Arnold from his poetry like “Dover Beach,” you know, “where ignorant armies clash by night.” But Matthew Arnold is often invoked now because of his entrance into what we now call the “culture debates.”

In my next installment (expect it in a few days or so), I will give a brief history of the culture debates—In this corner, Lynne Cheney and William Bennett tag-teaming against, in this corner, Cary Nelson and Michael Berube (or insert any left-wing academic here)!

What I really want to talk about, however, is the movie 28 Days Later, believe it or not! I want to challenge our notions of culture by looking at the purpose of “genres” such as science fiction and horror. We’ll even have to discuss whether genres even exist! And whether or not culture is just an outmoded way of viewing the world. Will Chad agree that etiquette is a part of pop culture? Where does irony come in? And politics? Can we have pop culture that is political? Does it cease to be pop culture at that point?

These questions and more will be…Screw it. Now I have to ponder whether it’s acceptable to quote from soap operas in an essay about high culture…

What is this BLOG?

This is really just the first of many such projects, or what I'm dreaming of as the Houston Institute for Culture Studies. We need a better acronym, I know. If what we want is a think tank to ponder subjects such as "culture," than I guess we just have to do it ourselves. That's what this is, then, a DIY think tank, dedicated, no, not to the delectable taco, but to all things about our culture (at least that's the way I see it right now).

What can you expect? I can only speak for myself, but you can expect movie reviews that will attempt to analyze movies and not merely rate them. For example, there may be an upcoming entry on 28 Days's revisions to the horror genre. Or on X-Men 2's anti-war sentiments. Or how about an examination of the identity crisis of Eminem?

Basically, there are no limits here. The point is to engage in a way that is always provocative. New ideas, new points of view, new takes on old subjects, old takes on new subjects. A Freudian analysis of surfer girls in Blue Crush? Why not? The homo-eroticism of street racing? Yes! Hopefully, all of these things will happen here. And the point is not to teach anyone anything; it is instead for us to learn.

We won't have anything like assignments, but we will post as things strike us. And other blogs may strike us, too! If one of us says something that another disagrees with, we have the right and obligation to challenge or attempt to revise their ideas. It's all in the name of provocation...

Until the first real posting, tada.

Chad