Responsibilities of a Generation?

4/11/2010

A generation is a construct that sheds more heat than light.

We spend our lives in a thick cognitive soup cooked up by the interplay of our expectations and yearnings with the mass media culture that has evolved, with our full complicity, over the past two hundred years. I'm dating it earlier than many would, because the earliest evidence I have seen of the behavior I'm talking about is described by Thoreau in Walden. In his pithy description, the head monkey in Paris puts on a hat or something, and all the imitative apes in Boston obediently put their hats on too.

Of course newspapers had been around for a bit longer than that, and fashion had been a cultural force in metropolitan areas since the renaissance. But that was mostly a local phenomenon. If you were to study the social groups as systems you would draw the system boundaries on a relatively small geographical scale, such as Paris, or Rome, or London. But when Thoreau was grousing about hats the system's boundaries had expanded across the Atlantic, and the mass media culture had already started to be a global entity.

During our lives there is no question that we've been interacting with a social system of global scope. We are affected by ideas expressed by people we have not dreamed about, in languages we will never hear, about topics we will never know. So our cognitive reactions are primed by forces we somehow know are real without ever having thought carefully about them. If we were born between 1946 and 1966 then of course we're baby boomers, and we act a certain way, and think some things and not others, and we somehow understand one another and are able to communicate as members of a tremendously important and savvy in-crowd. Younger people, and older ones (the few who are still around), describe us in collective terms, and presuppose that we share certain attributes by virtue of this obvious membership. And as they expect us to behave, so we will, answering a primeval call to meet and act upon those expectations as though we had all learnt the same script and knew our parts by heart.

The head monkey at Columbia occupied a dean's office during an anti-war protest, and tens of thousands of people our age stepped up promptly to follow suit, whether we'd thought very clearly about it or not. And just as many people the same age stepped back from the mess and behaved in ways that were directly opposed to the directions in the generational script, out of resentment, or personal grief, or because of membership in some other group that was pulling more strongly than the generational one. Whether one's behavior was compliant or rebellious, nearly every one of the people in our age group behaved in ways that were dictated by the ideology that was part of the packet of meaning delivered by that head monkey at Columbia.

energy healing

4/11/2011

Tonight one of the massage therapists I see regularly gave me a gift of a healing session. She's enrolled in the fifth level of the energy healing course which I think is inspired by the venerable Barbara Brennan and Hands of Light. I'm going to have to find out more about what she's studying. She's very very good at what she does.

If you have not yet learned how to understand the energy that's flowing through your body continuously from the start of your life to it's end, it's time you start trying. Just as with the great novels of Henry James, you don't know what you're missing!

new music I heard tonight

3/8/2009

Songs I heard on the radio tonight:
- Hey Jealousy, by the Gin Blossoms
- Sex on Fire, by Kings of Leon **
- Interstate Love Song, by STP
- Get on your Boots, by U2
- Cars, by Gary Numan
- No Sleep Till Brooklyn, by the Beastie Boys
- You Found Me, by Fray
- Standing Outside a Broken..., by Primitive Radio Gods **
- If you could only see, by Tonic
- Kristy Are You Doin Okay, by Offspring
- Hey There Delilah, by Plain White Tees
- Human, by the Killers **
- Heart Shaped Box, by Nirvana
- Creep, by Radiohead
- Starlight, by Muse **
- Bring Me to Life, by Evanescence
- Rock the Casbah, by Clash
- The Man Who Sold the World, Nirvana
- Santeria, by Sublime **
- Buddy Holly, by Weezer
- Gives you Hell, by All American Rejects
- Young Folks, by Peter Bjorn and John**
- Mr Jones, Counting Crows **
- Lightning Crashes, by Live

I don't keep notes every day but as I get older it gets harder for me to remember the names of the songs and the bands. When I was in my teens and 20s and most of the people I knew were listening to the same music it was easier to remember because it was so much a part of one's daily culture. But here I am, pushing 60, and the people I still know who are my age are still moaning that rock & roll ended whenever, after Born to Run, or after Led Zeppelin III, or after the Beatles broke up.

Meanwhile band after band of humanity is born and as each passes through the late teens and twenties genius flows out of the best of them as an almost accidental byproduct of living. My wife marvels that I could find delight and inspiration in music made by someone the age of my kids (range from 19-24 this year, 2009) and I can only shrug. The cognitive dissonance is there, all right, but what were we thinking when we were their age?

Think of it! Yeah. Right.

"No Sad Songs for Me" (1950)

3/8/2009

Saw this on TCM early one morning last week.

It's an illustration of how much we've changed, and how much we've failed to change, in the way we deal with death in our society. It's the story of how a young wife finds out she's terminally ill and quickly dies over a matter of months. The doctor tells her. That was pretty advanced for the 1950s.

My five sibs and I were never told our mother was dying until the night before it happened. We were at home on Sunday of labor day weekend 1962. She was up in the Sacred Heart hospital in Allentown Pa. Our baby sitter was a young postulant of the Carmelites, whose services were obtained courtesy of a family member. We were roughhousing, my brothers and I, and this girl was getting frantic. She wanted us to quiet down so she could watch Bonanza. Her frustration came to a head and she screamed at us: "you kids should be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like this when your mother is lying in the hospital dying!"

The quiet that came over us was a sudden chill. I think my big brother and I, the two eldest (10 and 12), had sort of known, but tacitly. She'd brought it out in the open. Our youngest sister was 6. She started crying and ran to her bed. The rest of us slowly put our stuff away and never made eye contact with her again. She went downstairs. We went to bed.

The next morning my father came home about 6 AM. "Your mother's dead" he said to Patrick and me. "Kev, put gas in the car for me." He tossed me the keys.

Wordlessly we rode into Quakertown and went to mass, and wordlessly went to our customary Sunday morning breakfast at Myers Restaurant on Route 309. I had a nickel, and I played a song about "Big Bad John" on the jukebox. My father sat over at the counter, away from us, and quietly talked to my mother's good friend, wife of the owner of the joint. Then he paid the bill and asked everyone to finish. Still wordless, we got in the car, and began the long process of letting our lives disintegrate, out into the sunshine of the late Pennsylvania summer.

We never knew in time to say goodbye to her, or she to us. I think we're all still -- 47 years later -- a little out of breath because of that.

-30-

Two Women (Sophia Loren, 1960)

2/24/2009

Saw this movie on Turner Classic Movies this morning.

Sophia Loren won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1962 for this film. That was the first time a so-called foreign language film was honored in that way.

Loren's beauty would have been enough to carry most any story, but this story is a masterpiece. This tragedy of a mother and daughter struggling in wartime Italy will rip the guts out of any parent who has ever made a fool of himself trying to protect his kids from the ubiquitous, banal evil of the world.

Check out the entry in IMDB.

(TCM alone is worth the monthly tab for cable TV, it seems to me!)

Welcome to the Ficelle's Blog

3/8/2009

What's a ficelle?

Think of Maria Gostrey of The Ambassadors, who seduces Strether into a state in which he attains integrated knowledge of himself and the world. She's the one who knows. HJ said he borrowed her from French theater as a dramatic device to take the place of the omniscient narrative blowhard (think of practically any novel written before 1895 or so). She's the reader's confidant, as well as Strether's. I fell in love with her 40 years ago. She's been the model for a few of the deepest and most satisfying friendships I've ever had.

What was that? Didn't read The Ambassadors? Hmm. Get busy. You can't imagine what you're missing.