culture: June 2006 Archives

Item: My hair is driving me crazy. It’s way too long, way longer than it was when that photo over on the right was taken back in November 2005. I’m half tempted to have it all shaved off. The other half is tempted to get some wild punky haircut. (I’m edging toward the wild and punky, sorta a modern shag with lots of chunky layers.)

Item: I recently bought the coolest new pair of PF Flyers sneakers. I know I really could use a pair of actual, grownup shoes, but whenever I go into a shoe store, I’m just drawn to all the way-neat sneakers on display.

Item: Just this afternoon I walked down to the post office and the grocery store in my pajamas. Not in a bathrobe (though I bet someone geeky enough and cool enough could pull off an Arthur Dent look) but in my wacky pajama pants and a T-shirt. You know, like all the kids are wearing. (Turning pajamas into streetwear is the only good thing Millennial kids have given us so far.)

New York magazine has a word for people like me -- people like a huge swath of Generation X: grups. Like from Star Trek. Which is a pretty geeky thing to do, dub a social trend after something Kirk and Spock and Bones argued about. Even if it doesn’t quite fit, since the grups were the dead grownups, not the old kids with the slowed-down aging process who took forever to grow up. But whatever.

• The American Southwest is on fire.

• Mister Softee theme echoing through neighborhood.

• Wrist rests on the iBook suddenly feel really hot.

• First chance to take the iBook to Bryant Park and use the free wifi.

• Lazy cats lying where they can catch a breeze from the ceiling fan.

• Gotta carry the umbrella every day -- never know when one of those late-afternoon thunderstorms will pop up.

• I saw the first lightning bugs of the season last night!

The lightning bugs are pretty much when I feel like summer has arrived... they make me think of warm carefree evenings when you could stay up late because there was no school the next day and wouldn’t be for months. When it either wasn’t actually as hot as it gets today or it just felt that way because you were a little kid and getting all sweaty just wasn’t as uncomfortable as it is when you’re a grownup.

And I saw the first fireflies on the solstice this year, which is kinda cool. I’m not a Wiccan, but the cloest I get to any kind of religious observance is acknowledging the change of seasons, and I’d have loved to be at Stonehenge last year -- as yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day depicted -- when it was open to the public and a group gathered to watch the sun rise over the stones on the solstice.

This is how it works. No one may be actually literally thinking, Damn, we really screwed up with those Xer kids, better get this new batch right. Because the “we” is us. It’s Xers having the babies now and looking back, maybe, at our own childhoods and the societal crap we’ve dealt with throughout out lives and saying, You know what? No kid of mine is gonna have to put up with that kind of shit. And probably no one is thinking that in a literal and absolute way, either -- it’s just how stuff starts to feel, as we look around at the world and see the mess that has resulted from everything that’s been going on for the last 30 years or so.

That kind of feeling started to build slowly in the 80s, of course, as the oldest Xers were entering late adolescence/early adulthood and were horrifying their elders with their extreme sports and their cynical attitudes -- that was when older generations took stock of Xers and started to wonder if baby-rearing couldn’t be done differently, and better, than they’d done with us. That was when we started seeing “Baby on Board” signs on cars, for instance, replacing, say, the “devil baby” movies of a decade earlier.

If that was the beginning of the pendulum swing, then the pendulum is reaching the far side of the swing now. It’s as if our entire culture is crying out as one, “Think of the children!”

Examples:

I was so galvanized by the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth (my review is here) that I felt compelled to, a few days later, snatch up one of the last tickets available to Al Gore’s town hall-style discussion at New York’s Town Hall (the theater in Times Square, not the seat of local government). That was on May 25th, and since then, I’ve been watching how astonishingly well the film has been doing in limited release -- at the moment its per-screen average is better than The Break-Up’s and second only to the surprising smash hit, for an unusual midweek release, of The Omen; one commenter at Atrios’s blog recently complained that, where he lives, he could see the idiotic “comedy” RV in an almost empty theater but there was no sign of Truth in his area yet, which is truly bizarre from a pure business perspective if nothing else. And I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action.

How’s your 666 day going? I’ve just been working all day, no sign of the Devil at all, unless you count the hours I spent writing up my review the new remake of The Omen, which I think is a hoot, and not just because my boy Liev Schreiber is in it. But how weird is it that Liev will be starring in, ahem, the curse’d Scottish play, the one you’re not supposed to mention by name inside a theater but which many theater folk -- of which I am one, having been a willing community-theater slave for many years -- will not name at all, anywhere, even if we’re not generally superstitious? (It’s just tradition, you know, to call it “the Scottish play.”) Anyway, after seeing Liev in Henry V in Central Park a couple years ago and having my devotion to him thus cemented, his brilliance and geeky Xer adorableness being at that instance so obvious, I plan on getting on line veeeery early one morning soon for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. I hope he appreciates it.