Why Are We Marching Hand In Hand
I’ve written before about the fact that the first album I bought for myself was Flood by They Might Be Giants, when I was the kind of 15-year-old who loved “Birdhouse in Your Soul” when I heard it on the radio and thought, they sound weird in a way that made my head buzz. Every 15-year-old thinks they’re weird to some degree, I think — I hope — but I was one of the 15-year-olds who thought that they were weird in that inexplicable sense of not knowing if I fit in, or who I was supposed to be. They Might Be Giants, even just from “Birdhouse in Your Soul” alone, sounded cartoonish and unrealistic and clumsy and angular, and something about all of that made me feel seen, although I didn’t think of things in those terms back then. Instead, I just wanted to hear more. So: I bought Flood.
There was something revelatory about the album, as soon as it started. The first track on the album is “Theme From Flood,” a short little tongue-in-cheek introduction that blew my mind for the most minor reason; the song ends with a literal introduction that goes, “It’s a brand new record/for 1990/They Might Be Giants’ brand new album/Flood,” and when I heard that, I remember being shocked: they were saying the year and it was the actual year I was listenng to it. It felt like magic.
Looking back — and especially from this vantage point of the digital era with its surprise drops of albums and music and a turnaround between creation and release that can be essentially instantaneous — it’s a genuinely silly reason to feel actual surprise or awe, but I really did feel both about the album being actually contemporary. I hadn’t put it together by that point, but I bought the album on vinyl and played it on my parents’ old record player, and up to that point, that had been home to music that was decades old even by that point. Even the idea of a vinyl record felt like a historical artifact in and of itself, a document of record that stood the test of time and most likely predated my very existence. That I could have bought one with my own money, and then have it identify itself as coming from that very year, felt dreamlike.
For some reason, I’ve been listening to They Might Be Giants a lot recently; it reminds me of a time when even the mundane has magic to it. I think that might have been what they were wanting to do all along, in their way.
Nature is Healing (Fall Edition)
Behind The Scenes at the Big Show
I wrote, for work — I won’t link it here because separation of church and state, and I don’t want them to check referral traffic, not that anyone does that anymore — about the kid going to PAX West this year and having what could, honestly, be described as something close to a religious experience. What I didn’t write about for work was the reaction of those I was working with to his experience.
The short version of what you need to know about his visit: it was his second convention ever, and his first video game convention. That last part’s very important, because he’s a gamer and it’s something that I worry sets him aside from a lot of people in his day-to-day life. Sure, there are people he can game with online (and he does), but I don’t get the feeling that many of his peers are into the same things he is in the same way he is, and I think sometimes it can be a little lonely for him that not everyone gets (or cares about) his favorite games, references, whatever. Within minutes of being at PAX and walking out onto the expo floor — with its massive booths promoting specific games, or tech, or merch, all of which he’s familiar with ot at least understands the architecture of — he turned to me and said, entirely seriously, “I have found my people.”
The rest of his visit just reinforced that: all the vendors he spoke to got what he was about and talked to him as an equal (ignoring me in the process, wonderfully). He got to wander around and try new tech and, in the strangest way, find new parts of his gamer identity and therefore who he is, and it just felt like this really intense, wonderful experience for him.
By the time he left (asking if he could do it again next year, asking if he could do more than one day), I was pretty emotional; I felt like I’d been able to help him have this amazing experience, and I went back to the show office feeling all kinds of verklempt. A handful of friends who were responsible for organizing the show clearly saw that I was feeling stuff, and asked what had happened and how the kid’s visit was, and I relayed a longer version of what I just wrote, feeling the sting of maybe I’m about to cry during the whole thing. I just felt full of feeling.
Cut to the next day, and one of the friends in the show office pulled me aside to say that she’d shared how much my kid loved the show to co-workers at dinner the night before, and they’d started crying. “This is actually why we do the show,” she said, “so that people can feel like he did.” Another told me, without any sarcasm, that even if I wasn’t working the show next year, they’d make sure the kid got passes to the entire thing.
I think part of what made me feel so emotional about the whole thing was realizing that the kid was having an experience like I had when I got to my first comic show — the excitement of these people get it and also feeling less isolated for liking shit that no-one around me seemed to be able to more than tolerate on my behalf. But, honestly, part of it also became how genuinely touched the people behind the scenes were that a stranger had been so thrilled and excited and fulfilled by something they’d been partially responsible for. I really like PAX West; it feels like such a kind and welcoming space, even to me as a non-gamer. After this year and all of this, that feeling only got so much bigger.
The Story of My Life
Upon discovering my current favorite “new” podcast First Thirst — in which guests talk about their first celebrity crushes, and what if anything that says about who they are today — I found myself thinking back to the various media figures kid me had a crush on, and wondering if there was a through line. (Spoilers: there’s not, I don’t think.)
What was more surprising than anything, I think, was trying to think back to childhood celebrity crushes and struggling to think of any before when I was, say, 12 or so. I can think of precisely one — Marmalade Atkins as played by Charlotte Coleman, whom I just found out died astonishingly young at age 33, which I find surprisingly sad for someone I hadn’t given any thought to in literally decades. I daren’t look back at any video of the old Marmalade Atkins TV shows for fear of utter embarrassment and shame at whatever was going on in my 7- and 8-year-old brain at the time.
At least Marmalade was flesh-and-blood, as opposed to so many of my latter “celebrity” crushes, the majority of whom weren’t just fictional, but comic book characters: I’m enough of a cliche that of course I fell for the charms of the X-Men’s Rogue, all faux Southern accent and a bashful personality matched with bombastic body and unrealistic hair that demanded the eye’s attention whenever she appeared on the page. (I was shy too, and wished I had someone like that was real, and would notice me! Ah, the embarrassing mindset of the pubescent mess I was.) My crush on Lois Lane probably started around here, too, and that one has persisted on and off for decades; those who know why, know.
I picked up my first issue of Deadline in 1989, aged 14, and almost immediately had a crush on Pippa from Wired World, a fact that Chloe — who not only looks like Pippa but holds her up as an inspiration in multiple ways — finds endlessly amusing to this day.
In amongst all of this, though, were the non-celebrity crushes, the people I ran into in real life and pined for silently. Far more than any fictional or televisual crush, these were the figures that shaped me and my desires entirely unknowing, because I never ever came out and told them how much I liked them. To do so was to risk rejection and embarrassment, as I was all too aware of at the time. (Especially as I was far from the most charming or attractive child on the playground; some things never change.) Perhaps I should have paid more attention to all the unreal crush potential in my world at the time. They would never have rejected me; they didn’t even know I existed, after all.
And Wonders
Cooked, etc.
I’ve been thinking about this essay since I read it last week, and turning over and over in my head quite why it feels so dystopian. It’s not that the overall subject matter isn’t dystopian by itself — my first reaction to hearing that Charlie Kirk had been shot, even before it emerged that he’d been killed, was a sense of dread that basically went along the lines of, oh fuck, no matter who is responsible, the Administration and all its supporters are definitely going to blame this on trans folk, and oh fucking look I was right. (One of the few things I like about that NY Post link I just posted is that it misspells “Biden” in the URL.)
(I wasn’t psychic, by the way, when I thought that they were going to blame the trans community; I was just thinking about the fact that, just a week before, the Trump administration was reportedly looking at how to take guns away from trans people and this felt like too obvious of a set up, in multiple senses of the term.) (That attempt to take guns away from people led to the unexpected moment where the NRA accidentally ended up on the right side of history for once.)
That essay, though. For those who don’t have the stomach to read it, the takeaway is that all signs point to the fact that Charlie Kirk’s shooter wasn’t necessarily politically motivated as much as they were… internet troll motivated…? “As easy as it is to point to these costumes as proof that Robinson was a far-right extremist radicalized online by 4chan posts, it’s just as likely that he was a teenage boy dressing up as memes he saw online. This kind of content is basically the water young people swim in now,” it reads at one point. “It’s also possible Robinson genuinely believes in antifascist principles. But his alleged use of random internet brainrot is notable.”
It ends, “We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”
The reason it sticks in my head is… I can’t find a counterargument that I really believe in. I think this is the nihilistic worldview that kids (a holdall term I’ll use to include, honestly, anyone through their mid-20s if not their 30s) are immersed in and using as a primary lens through which to look at the world. I joke, at times, about how frustrated I find the “roast” and “troll” cultures to be in general online, but the truth is, it’s not “online” anymore; it’s everywhere. The last election proved it, and this last week proved it even more.
I’m not sure I know where we go from here, even beyond surviving the fascistic reign of the next few years. (Do you remember that Trump only took office again less than a year ago?) There are times I’m not sure I necessarily want to know, either.
Get Lost
The thought occurred to me, as I was walking to the hotel in Seattle the other day, that I might have forgotten what it’s like to actually visit a city, as opposed to work in it.
This isn’t a new thought by any means; I had a similar feeling when I was in San Francisco earlier this summer, my first non-work-related, non-family-related trip in a decade or so, for one thing, and I’ve repeatedly thought as I head into a work trip what it would be like to go somewhere and not have to rush to a hotel and immediately to work. This Seattle situation felt different, however, simply because of how I’d ended up there.
Traditionally, when I’ve arrived in the city, I’ve jumped in a cab from the train station and gone straight to the hotel; this time around, there was such a line for cabs and such a traffic jam surrounding the area, I thought, fuck it, I’ll walk. It’s not that far. In retrospect, this was a bad idea because I didn’t realize (a) it was all uphill, (b) it was about 30 minutes walk, and (c) I really didn’t know the neighborhood as well as I believed. That last part ended up being a plus, however; it meant that I walked through neighborhoods I haven’t seen in Seattle in more than a decade, and remembered that, hey, I actually like this city a bunch.
The problem had become, I realized, that I go to Seattle at least a couple of times each year now, and it’s always for work and it’s always staying in the same hotel in the same area as the convention center, so Seattle had shrunk down to a five block radius and a car ride to and from the train station. It was as if the rest of the city didn’t even exist, with the exception of the pizza place I always make a point of hitting up when I’m there — I love their potato pizza, what can I say? — and the Work Seattle that I’d created was… well, somewhere that was just filled with work and the related stress. I’d started to dislike Seattle because I couldn’t relax there.
The same is true of New York, where I go every October just for New York Comic Con — a city as amazing as New York shrinking to the area between the hotel and the convention center — and San Diego, too, although in my defense, I’ve always thought that San Diego was a pretty shitty city.
The year I spent a bunch of time in the UK between conventions, I gave myself a day to explore London for the first time in close to 20 years without any agenda or destination. It was a lovely day, and one that reminded me why I really do like that place after all. Maybe I need to start adding buffers to go explore aimlessly into every work trip, before my world gets so small I forget that I like it, deep down and after all.
And She Says That The Scene Isn’t What It’s Been
Next Gen
I’ve been thinking about generations more lately, inspired both by Jeff Lester talking about how Generation X is only ever going to have one U.S. President it produced — Barack Obama, because everyone that followed was from the Boomer generation, and once they’re gone, the next wave will likely be Millennials — and reading a piece about Millennials and their lack of cultural footprint in the grand scheme of things.
I remember reading Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Copeland when I was in my first year of art school. At the time, even back then, it felt as if I was catching up on some big cultural touchstone that wasn’t about me and mine, but instead a historical document about That Which Had Come Before. That was back in 1993, when the book was just two years old, but the fact remains: Generation X, as a concept, felt like something that was for people older than me.
I’ve struggled with that in the years since. I get that I’m officially Generation X — I was born in 1974, and according to the internet, Generation X encompasses people born between 1965 and 1980 — but I’ve always secretly believed that I was part of some secret mid-generation that came of age in the mid-1990s and belongs between Gen X and Millennials. Is this because I’m British and Britpop ruined my cultural sensibilities to that heavy a degree? Potentially; Copeland’s Generation X feels such a particularly American book that the entire name feels like it belongs to Americans who listened to Nirvana and Pavement and not gangly, awkward British folk who liked Pulp and Blur and owned a Northern Uproar single or two. (A depressing aside: if there was that secret mid-generation for British folk my age, we’d almost certainly be called the Oasis Generation or something like that. Insert a heavy sigh here.)
I feel as if, despite talk of Gen X and Boomers, it wasn’t until Millennials started having a cultural voice that the idea of generational shift became mainstream — all of which makes it more ironic to see the argument that Millennials are the first generation to lack a cultural identity that’s unique to them, or to create music or literature or art that is wholly original and not a remix of what came before. The piece I was reading about this argued that American Millennials’ most memorable aesthetic should be described as “Lumberjackcore,” which feels at once fitting — the mustaches! The obsession with authenticity as an attainable concept that can be adopted! — and the most cruel put-down.
Generation X, by contrast, gave the world techno and raves and… is that it? Perhaps when you look at everything in this manner, it’s the finest perspective to have to fight off the common wisdom: everyone might think the Boomers were squares who ruined it for everyone else, but they were the hippies and the punks. You don’t get hip-hop if it wasn’t for the Boomers, either. Food for thought, perhaps.