via boingboing “Come get this goddam cat”

boinboing.net reports on the centenial of the first air-to-ground radio communique.

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Daddy Issues are our generation’s World War II

My wife and are are one disc into the 2nd season of our generations epic, LOST.

Now, obviously many of you are hip to the happening of the next seasons, but from our current perspective of the unfolding events, the entire fate of the survivors seems to pivot on some character or other’s daddy issues. Sawyer, Jack, Walt; they all have serious problems with their fathers.

I’ve heard it said that J.J. Abrhams (mastermind behind LOST, the recent Star Trek movie, Fox Network’s FRINGE, and the Godzilla Witch Project a.k.a Cloverfield) is constantly drawn to stories laden with the struggles between father and son. Star Trek certainly portrayed Kirk as living in his father’s shadow. FRINGE is a daddy issue tour de force between Joshua Jackson’s character and his slightly insane and absent father. And, as mentioned, LOST certainly seems to be shaping up in the same mold.

As I contemplated this, I started to look for a pattern in modern film. Thing’s started to suddenly make sense.

Our generation’s great event was not a war, music festival, or economic depression. Our generation’s great event was paternal abandonment.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s start with “Luke, I am your father.”

I believe this single, iconic piece of dialogue set off a shockwave of creative concentration on the issue of “Dad”. George Lucas continues the pattern by adding Sean Connery to the last installment in what I’ll refer to as the true Indian Jones trilogy. After following Henry Jones Jr. through a gauntlet of exotic dangers, we suddenly find that the genesis of his adventuring was an attempt to gain the approval of his father’s unmeetable expectations. The high jinx that unfold throughout the film are a light-hearted, action-packed reunion between a son and absentee father. However, the serious subject matter still resonates.

But it’s not just Mr. Lucas who’s writing about this…how about our old friend John Hughes. The Breakfast Club (surely a film that defined a generation) was so addled with paternal discord that it made me wish I hated my dad so I could be a badass like Bender. The two powerful monologs in which Bender describes his Christmas and Andrew talks about his father’s heartless pressing to “WIN” are not just notable scenes in the film, but passionately written and acted words that echo throughout our generational conciousness.

Fight Club, another favorite to the children of the 80’s and 90’s, was laden with daddy issues both in it’s novel form AND in it’s theatrical manifestation. Observe exhibit “A” from the film’s script:

TYLER:
If you could fight anyone… one on
one, whoever you wanted, who would
you fight?

JACK:
Anyone?

TYLER:
Anyone.

Jack thinks.

JACK:
My boss, probably.
(pause)
Who would you fight?

TYLER:
My dad.  No question.

A long pause as Jack studies Tyler’s face.

JACK:
Oh, yeah.
(nodding)
I didn’t know my dad.  Well, I knew
him, till I was six.  He went and
married another woman, had more kids.
Every six years or so he’d do it
again — new city, new family.

TYLER:
He was setting up franchises.  My
father never went to college, so it
was really important that I go.

JACK:
I know that.

TYLER:
After I graduated, I called him long
distance and asked, “Now what?”  He
said, “Get a job.”  When I turned
twenty-five, I called him and asked,
“Now what?”  He said, “I don’t know.
Get married.”

JACK:
Same here.

TYLER:
A generation of men raised by women.
I’m wondering if another woman is the
answer we really need.

I could go on and on and so could you. Christopher Nolan played up Bruce Wayne’s father/son relationship in Batman Begins. Jack Bauer eventually battles his heartless father in 24. HBO’s critically-acclaimed series Six Feet Under was entirely about the Fischer family’s relationship with their dead father/husband. The list runs as long as you have time to add to it. If everything in our parent’s cinema tied back to the A-bomb and the war, everything in our’s ties back to our Dad’s.

It’s not necessarily that these issues are new, it’s just that we as a species are just getting around to dealing with them en mass. Does it have to do with a sky-rocketing divorce rate? Maybe. Is it because we have nothing more pressing to mull over? I don’t think so.

Whatever the reason, I challenge you to contemplate this and even add to or detract from the list of pop-culture and art that is centered around the ominous figure of Dad. You may find comfort in numbers, knowing that you’re not the only one with an uncomfortable third Sunday in June. Or, at best, you’ll be glad that you’re stagnated creatively by your healthy paternal interactions.

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Reality (TV) Bites

Over at RVAnews, some folks get pretty lippy about Richmonder Rozlyn Papa and her seemingly scandalous appearance on ABC’s reality television hit “The Bachelor”.

See the story and comments here.

And here is my response:

If you are willingly place yourself in the realm of celebrity you enter into an unspoken agreement that your person-hood is going to be subverted. People that go on the internet and try to defend television personalities (especially of the “reality show” ilk, where the person knowingly seeks celebrity) are completely moot.

I once got lambasted on this blog for saying something speculative about Heath Ledger’s demise (during which I was lauding on his acting ability). Someone got so in a huff about it they wrote a small essay in response (see Grace Murphy’s response on RVAnews).

I guess my what I’m trying to say is that there’s no point in arguing about this because everyone knows that reality TV is the knew professional wrestling, and we all remember what kind of folks argue about pro wrestling’s validity and foundation in reality.

And if you don’t remember, click here.

Positive Straight Edge News Coverage

It’s nice to get some even-handed press every once in awhile…weird that it’s by a FOX affiliate who’ve bashed Straight Edge so often in the past.

Check out a non-reactionary article on Boston Straight Edge here.

I particularly like the opening quote:

“If you walked into a club and heard the music, you might turn right around. But you’d let one of these kids babysit your children and you’d probably be psyched if your daughter brought one home.”

My evening in an alternate reality

Every once in a great while the moon is in the 7th house, Mars aligns with Uranus, and I have a really weird night. Tonight was one of those nights that, if I didn’t have pictures and witnesses, no one would believe occurred.

It began with my hearing tell that major label rock act Motion City Soundtrack was playing a guerilla set in Shafer Court at 8pm. This is an incredibly unremarkable part of campus and when I arrived to my 5:30 class I found no stage or fanfare which would lead me to believe that this surprise appearance was not real.

However, sure as your born, at 8pm sharp the singer from the band showed up with an acoustic guitar, pulled it out, and started playing to me, some friends, and 2 of the most excited high school girls who ever where. So, after watching someone I’d only seen on TV play in the middle of a gigantic, cement compass for 30 minutes I went home, grabbed my own guitar, and headed off to host the Open Mic Night at Bogart’s in the Fan.

There I saw this:

This is, as it appears to be, a bearded man in his late fifties playing a ukulele, shirtless. And (I kid you not) the song he chose to play at this time (around 11pm on a Tuesday) was “If I Only Had A Brain” from the Wizard of Oz. I would say that this was awesome, but in discussing the gentleman’s sound needs before his set I got the distinct feeling that he and an adoptive family of like-minded psychopaths probably have cheerleaders hanging in their back shed, stripped of skin and screaming for death.

This was a weird night.

iPhone (my precious).

So my wife and I finally got iPhones. We have been saving our change for almost 2 years for something special and finally decided that the special thing was what I affectionately refer to as the “Wizard Cube”. I always called the I-phone as such due to my propensity to take a page from the Puritans’ book and deem anything I don’t understand as “witchcraft and/or wizardry”. Thus things like molecular science, math, the female orgasm, and most technology is simply recognized by myself as “witchy”.

This had always been a joke, but since I clicked on that little touch screen wonder for the first time I’ve felt a victim of my own snarky commentary. I’ve found, over the course of a week with the wizard cube, that I’m very suspicious of it. Being raised in a family of Luddites (my father hated/feared the computer at his core) I consistently find myself suspicious of new technology. Either I expect it to do something that it doesn’t, or I simply don’t have a use for what it does.

All that being said, the iPhone shocks me because it seemingly executes all the things I expect it to while simultaneously providing me with no more then I require*. When I’m fingering through facebook updates or deciding what Tom Waits album to listen to, I cast a slash-eyed glance at the screen and think “how did you do that, little box?”

I am generally leery of the iPhone, I feel like it’s going to wake me up in the night and demand something of me (more than the $160 we pay monthly). This must have been how Bilbo felt in his formative years of possessing the One Ring (NERD ALERT). He must have slipped it on and thought “this can’t be so easy. There must be some price to pay?”

What I’m slowly getting to, ladies and gentlemen, is that I love this little piece of tech that helps me organize my life and listen to my music. However, I think that one day I’ll have to embark on a dark pilgrimage to a malevolent land where I can cast my phone into a volcano.

*I use “need” and “require” the in most shamefully first world sense. In reality, one needs food, shelter, and love; not a glowing box that allows them to look up Gary Busey’s entire body of work at 2am.

Great Moments in Middle School Graffiti

With the use of my new i-phone (a separate post on this later) I am going to start documenting some of the goings-on in my classroom of miscreants. One thing that is prevalent is the use of artless graffiti to…well I’m not really sure why. The middle school mind (more a muscle flooded with hormones than anything) continues to be a puzzle and the adult mind boggles.

Our first piece is a classic profanity with a modernist take:

Next we have the creative representation of a group or “crew” who creates mischief together:

and lastly we have another “crew tag”. This is my personal favorite because, if I had a gang of my own, this would certainly be it’s name. Truth be told, I’m actually a little jealous:

For more, read my wife’s blog here.

World Series Weigh-In

This is going to be less about the actual World Series with it’s Yank victory, and more about the World Series as a great example why I don’t like baseball.

It may have once been “America’s Pass time”, but now it’s something played all over the globe. That being said, MLB teams (like the Yankees) can just shop the world and dish out the money to buy whatever talent they can dig up. It’s less about the team, and more about how much money the club has to throw around.

American Football, however, is ridiculous to every other country in the world but us! Thus, all the miraculous talent (coughTimTebowcough) is born and bred from a national pool and then courted and drafted accordingly. It’s not that I hate on people from other countries playing sports (I am an NHL fan) but the Yanks win last night just seemed bogus, especially with Matsui making such a difference (and only being a hitter).

I don’t know, this post is really just content filler, I don’t know much about/like baseball. This was just my initial reaction after watching innings 5 & 6 and then waking up this morning to the news of NY winning.

xCorrectionx

If you look at my “About” page you may notice that I changed something. It used to say that I “lived a straight edge lifestyle”, however, after seeing the documentary Edge at the Byrd Theater I decided to change the wording and my subsequent ideas on the subject.

The flow and production of above mentioned film was sophomoric and boring. There, get the harsh negativity out of the way first. That being said, the interviews and ideas expressed in the film were (to me) pretty mind blowing. It says something about a piece of work when it effectively challenges the choir instead of preaching to it.

To summarize my change of ideas, I’ll paraphrase an interview with Minor Threat/Fugazi member Ian MacKaye. MacKaye coined the phrase “straight edge” in a song of same name and has passively stood by and watched the term ignite a movement ever since.

Previously I saw straight edge as both a “lifestyle” and a “movement” but some things said by guys who were there for the term’s inception really flipped the script on how I thought of my own choices and the way I label them.

I see Straight Edge as being tightly bound to humanitarianism. I’m not necessarily of the mind that “this is for me and that is for you”. I believe in Straight Edge as an idea because I believe that through abstaining from drugs and alcohol I am standing for and in solidarity with the millions of people effected by the use and abuse of these substances. With that in mind, I’m beginning to reject this idea as a “movement” because a movement tends to become it’s own thing and disregards the needs and hurts of the individual. So, since I believe that I am sraight edge because of the individual, I then tend to steer away from anything resembling a movement in-and-of itself.

Further, something MacKaye said about the term “lifestyle” really effected me. He said that when he heard of the “straight edge lifestyle” it didn’t make sense to him. If anything, the constant use, search of, and conversation about drugs/alcohol is a lifestyle. Not engaging in this narrative isn’t a life”style”, it’s just life. Partying is a lifestyle. Bar culture promotes a lifestyle. Straight Edge is just indulging in the life that happens when you aren’t talking about/searching for/or partaking in alcohol and/or drugs.

So there you go, I hope for all the harping I do on this thing it can’t be said that I never reevaluate my own thoughts and actions on the subject.