culture: September 2005 Archives

Fanzines, fan sites, fan films... One of the characteristics of geeks that best defines us and distinguishes us from society as a whole is that we are active consumers of pop culture. Geeks don’t veg out in front of the boob tube, at least not as a way of life -- for us, the experiences of TV, film, books, graphic novels, and games are not merely receptive. Even if we don’t produce fan fiction, for instance, we watch and rewatch our favorite shows and analyze them, hash over the plotlines and the character interactions either on our own or with other fans. We refuse to be force-fed pop culture -- we may eat it, but we do so in full awareness of what we’re consuming. We challenge what we consume, turn it around and upside down and attempt to figure out what it’s all about, or at the very least, why we think it’s cool enough to even warrant so much attention in the first place.

Which makes Charles Ross something of an übergeek. His stage show, One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, is the ultimate expression of the geeky experience of pop culture. The New York Times, in its review of the show, exudes the mix of cluelessness and condescension that has lately typified its discussion of anything remotely geeky (which is ironic, because the paper is allegedly attempting to reach the very audience it regularly disdains). The Times derides Ross’s audience as "composed largely of very intense-looking overgrown boys wearing Coke-bottle glasses and Darth Vader jerseys" in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the crowd at an NFL game as "a bunch of morons courting pneumonia by appearing shirtless and painted in team colors in below-freezing temperatures." It pointlessly insults Ross himself -- "who reportedly has a girlfriend, although she may be the victim of a Jedi mind trick" -- in the same way that it never, ever characterizes the performers of an off-Broadway production as "a bunch of theater nerds who mistake overenunciation for acting and bland prettiness for presence."

But most egregiously, the Times reviewer misses the point of Ross’s performance entirely:

The energetic Mr. Ross, who cannot be faulted for lack of effort, is a mediocre performer, especially when compared with the many brilliant quick-change artists in the crowded field of multicharacter solo shows. There's not a trace of smooth Billy Dee Williams in his Lando Calrissian, and his Princess Leia could be confused with a man. No one expects him to have the baritone of James Earl Jones, but there were a couple of potheads in my freshman dorm who did a better Darth Vader.

As I point out in my review of the show at FlickFilosopher.com:

This isn't about perfect impersonation of famous actors; it's emphatically not about watching Ross and seeing Sir Alec Guinness or Mark Hamill; it's about watching Ross and seeing ourselves. Ross holds up a mirror to our own geekitude and shows us how silly and how wonderful a healthy grownup playfulness can be.

Naturally, I have a lot more to say about the show. Check it out.

If the fogey editors of The New York Times think they’re going to attract younger Xer/geek readers by adding a "comics page" down up all high-toned by graphic novelists, they’re deluding themselves. But it’s cute they’re trying.

So, I’m putting together a list of movers and shakers of Generation X, which I’ll share soon and will continue adding to forever. Prior to last week, Anderson Cooper of CNN would not have been on the list -- I’ve always found him infuriatingly shallow, and not in that people-are-misinterpreting-GenX way, but as in actual infuriating shallowness. But last week, in his on-the-scene coverage of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, Cooper (Xer, born 1967) was a new man:

On September 1, during a live, on-air interview with a water carrier for the Bush administration, Cooper had this to say:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap -- you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Now, the point really isn’t to whom Cooper was talking or even what he was so angry about -- what knocked me off my feet (I was watching this as it happened) was how dramatic and sudden the paradigm shift was: We went from "journalists" who’d drunk the Kool-Aid -- whatever the Kool-Aid of the moment was -- toeing the party line -- whoever the party was -- to, well, actual, genuine, human anger, like we haven’t seen in my memory. We’ve seen decades of bullshit from the rich and powerful go, for the most part, unchallenged, even uncommented on, by the people whose jobs it’s supposed to be to do those very things, and now, literally overnight, they’ve found their backbone. Even 9/11 didn’t have this affect. As a commentary essay on BBC News noted, "last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow..." (Jack Shafer at Slate has a nice rundown of the wakeup.)

CNN’s Miles O’Brien has also noticeably awakened from his coma -- he’s definitely a geek and may be an Xer; I haven’t been able to learn his date of birth, and I’m terrible at guessing people’s ages, but he looks like could be on the Boomer/Xer cusp.

It’s too early to say if this sudden reappearance of a vigorous watchdog press will endure to amount to anything useful, but if it does, we may look back at Katrina as the moment when Xers reached the kind of cultural maturity needed to begin really shaping the next era of American (and global) history. (Which isn’t to say that other older journalists weren’t getting plenty pissed and not letting corporate HQ shut them up; Jack Cafferty on CNN and Geraldo Rivera on Fox have been downright quivering with indignation) Anderson Cooper, we may then recognize, will have been one of the standard bearers.

The comments on this post have rather devolved into a "my god is better than your atheism" tedium, so I just have to share this awesome little graphic:

My too-cool brother Ken, who is also "unrelenting in his atheism," sent me this, which appeared in some comment thread on Fark.

Geeks are so clever.

I missed my chance to party at Mardi Gras. I never listened to jazz on Bourbon Street. I never saw the French Quarter. And now I never will.

I feel very much like I did after 9/11. New York is my heart and home, but I never even visited New Orleans... and yet I feel the same sense of helplessness combined with an itch to do something useful (without there being much I could usefully do) and an overwhelming dread that this is only the beginning of Very Dark Times.

GasPriceWatch is on the job: Highest price in the nation? $4.50 a gallon in Georgia. A real steal? $2.35 in Wyoming, the lowest price in the U.S.