I got a that dog. shirt from some radio promotion off buying Retreat From The Sun one high school summer and this one gf in college saw it and was like “!!! I thought no one else had heard of them!” but as far as I can tell no one else did
Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.
National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.
And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.
“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.
You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.
(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)
I just told you that her trick is appearing to everyone like they want her to and that I see her as a supergenius shapeshifter world-conquerer with my particular field of interest who’s my superior who uses people as means to her own ends, did you think that through? Hands up, who didn’t think that through?
People talking about Taylor Swift “punching down” at poor rural conservatives – her original fan base! – need to remember that “being a heinous bitch” has always been part of the Tayswift brand.
Like, in 2011 she had a single about how terribly mean someone else is that just goes on about how they’re a pathetic unloveable loser who’ll never amount to anything in life while she’s gonna be famous
It was off an album where the title track was about stealing someone’s man at their wedding!
Like, she built her entire public persona on turning on her exes and shit-talking them in public!
And she was lampshading this! You remember how the whole concept of the You Belong With Me video, her mainstream breakout moment, was that the cute down-home girl next door and the bitchy popular cheerleader were both Taylor Swift?
And that even taking the perspective of the down-home girl, it’s a story about a girl who can change her appearance to fit any scene to get what she wants set to a song about shit-talking people as trashy to convince you how she deserves to take things from them?
Like, you realize that’s at the core of my thing about Taylor Swift, that she’s a female version of me as a psycho bitch.
Like, she grew up in Southeast Pennsylvania as the child of a professional father that left her as petty gentry, like she fixedly studied the flow of American culture as expressed in places like social media and genres like country. She builds a following by telling this story back to the public in densely self-referential but playful texts, while maintaining a semi-approachable persona on tumblr. She’s very intelligent and a good writer, boosted by the fact that she’s intelligent enough to productively channel a significant pool of her crazy into her work.
Like, I’m bipolar, and in hypomanic periods like now I have a lot of high-quality output at once, and that tends to be the stuff that really makes my reputation. She is clearly Cluster B, or, you know, “psycho bitch”, she has an obsessive need for attention and validation and she’s developed a personality and social skills to serve it, of being a heinous user of other people while maintaining a pose as an innocent put-upon romantic who intensely cares about your interiority.
Which, like, we all know that girl, but she does it at scale, so good at it she has succeeded in capturing a nontrivial share of the entire American culture’s libidinal economy of attention and validation. She is living the dream!
You realize the joke about You Belong With Me and Fifteen is she didn’t have the all-American high school experience of being in the marching band and losing your virginity to a dreamy upperclassman who’s really using you and going to prom with the boy next door.
She home-studied as a Nashville stage kid while plotting an ascent to celebrityhood! Where she lost her virginity to and had her puppy-love relationships with celebrities, the exact guys who are on the covers of magazines for normie all-American high school girls to fantasize about! And she was absolutely using them!
And like, she is not only one of the most famous people in the world, but the highest-paid celebrity at $200mil/yr. And like, her dad was a finance guy, her recording sessions and tours are clearly scheduled as a way to maintain legal residence in no-tax Tennessee, she clearly knows what she’s doing with the money. As you see with her feuding with Spotify and now trying to stir stuff about her master recordings, she is obsessed with maintaining 100% stem-to-stern control of her brand, her funding and publication channels, her empire. She writes and produces stuff for other people now, have you noticed that? And she’s always trying to add other celebrities to her stable. She is possibly the only fully autonomous wildcard acting within American culture.
And God help us, she’s starting to get into politics. I am not joking when I say it is entirely possible she will end up as Empress of America, at least to Eva Peron levels, God help us.
And it’s not like she was disguising the fact that she’s a shapeshifting manipulator who treats other people as things to be used and discarded to feed an obsessive need to be valued that will not be satisfied until she dominates the world while putting up a perfectly calculated facade! She has risen this far by creating and performing works of art that are directly about that in subtext, metatext, AND just straight text!
She is the only writer and public intellectual – and I do first and foremost consider Taylor Swift a writer and public intellectual – that I consider my clear superior, honestly it kind of scares me that only people at my level even seem to notice this. Sady Doyle sure fucking noticed it.
I’ve seen the psycho bitch version of me, she’s on her way to taking over the world, and it’s awesomely terrifying.
On a similar note, listening to Rilo Kiley kind of gave me a crush on Jenny Lewis, like everyone (for some reason almost all my celebrity crushes and none of my meatspace ones have been on redheads) which was mostly just “pretty girl… singing pretty words!”
And what dispelled that was first, living around Echo Park for a while I’d occasionally run across Jenny and Blake in normal life, and you realize they’re both kind of plain, it’s just for shows and shoots she pretties herself up and he uglies himself up
(also I used the bathroom after her once at, what, Casbah Cafe?, and oh god she stunk the place up, that’s a cute way to have someone humanized for you)
And second, listening to their side (well, by that time main I guess) projects - The Elected and Jenny’s stuff with The Watson Twins and realizing, from experiencing their songwriting styles in isolation, the Jenny lyrics I really loved had actually been Blake lyrics
(that’s something, looking back at it you realize that a lot of their songs were one of them singing the other one’s words about their shortcomings as lovers, that must have been a strain - they really were our generation’s Fleetwood Mac)
Also: the current Swedish wave as a revival of the producer-auteur pop tradition that was eclipsed by the one-two combo of The Beatles and singer-songwriter folk-gone-electric, blah blah rockist cult of authenticity blah blah Phil Spector, blah blah Motown, I can’t be arsed to write it out
Had a dream where someone said Trent Reznor must be the buffest goth ever and I was like “Nah man, The Undertaker. Every year he tops the list in Bulking & Cutting.”
And then I woke up like holy shit.
One of the cool things about being a good storyteller is my dreams (which are part of my mind telling a story to the other part) get absolutely ridiculous.
This frames itself as “there’s so much good stuff I should waaatch! I miss vegging out on crap because it was what’s on!”
And that’s not wrong per se, but I’m thinking beyond that to the effect on the whole-culture that we shared this pre-internet experience in common, of taking in media that was not very optimized for us because it was around, and consequently having a lot of cultural background we were very lightly invested in, in common with the rest of the country, and that enabled us to build increasing elaborations on the culture while maintaining coherence
Like, there might have been a lot of webcomics, but honestly, there were a lot of newspaper comics. Like, on any given day I might read 18 of them cause they were just there. And we’d have that in common, like, not just the good stuff like Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side, we’d all recognize the Family Circle dotted-line meandering travel paths. And so someone could reference that and we’d all be like “ahh”. Or Dennis the Menace’s slingshot. That Liz Lemon “chocolate, chocolate, chocolate! ACK” cutaway works because everyone, including people who didn’t or still don’t care about the experience of unmarried single women approaching middle age, would have read enough Cathy to instantly place the reference and further, to process the twist, that yeah, it was awfully mannered and ritualized for a “relatable” comic. Garfield without Garfield works because we’ve all seen it with Garfield.
Part of your contemporary social/identity/representation/ownership fights is just rehashing the 80s “Canon Wars”. What is authentic American culture, these works long held up for praise but dismissible as product of an old order and old demographics? These new works by and about the non-dominant that don’t even try and engage with the first tradition?
And that never resolved so much in either direction as all High Culture was deprecated in favor of a new American Canon of Pop Culture. One that could skip normative questions of merit entirely by being a descriptive canon of what the masscult Broadcast Era left us.
Like, The Brady Bunch wasn’t in the canon because it was smart, or well-acted, or well-shot, or had something interesting to say about society in the period where blended families and domestic servants were each at the edges of “normal”. (If it was that, lesser Norman Lear like Maude would be). No, the Brady Bunch was in the canon because it was ubiquitous. Everyone had seen it at some point, if you were Generation X there was a good chance you had seen any given episode at some point.
And this still represented a diversification. This new canon had a lot more “white ethnic” and particularly Jewish pillars, and blacks certainly had more pride of place in 20th century “pop” than “high” culture.
(This leaves Jazz and Blues in the interesting position of having been significantly intellectualized to “fit” the old High Culture paradigm before the new one came in, leaving them somewhat overlooked)
And with this stuff established as the New Authentic America you could appeal to it. With Rock as the National Genre, not just kids’ stuff, you could say that thru Blues and Motown the culture owed black artists more respect. (Where no one really thinks of contemporary American pop as Swedish-indebted).
Feminist and queer scholars pored over Hollywood camp, subtext, old “Pre-Code” work aiming to prove that gender variance and homosexual desire had always been an authentic part of American culture.
(I def. remember on multiple occasions apropos of I forget what the tale of “Fatty” Arbuckle trotted out as a moral condemnation and warning of the unscrupulous young women and tabloid press that for money and attention would peddle baseless rape accusations to a public of vulgar moralists, which today hm)
And past those knock-on effects on social health, the cultural output itself was great. I think that’s the defining factor of Long 90s culture, not only that it built off a shared canon but its creators and audiences recognized it as working from a shared background with traits and forms that could be played with, the meta-awareness of it all.
Xena: Warrior Princess, a syndicated swords-and-sandals actioneer spin-off attracting an ecology of academic conferences and journals by mashing up all of ancient mythology, Mediterranean history, and knowing Hollywood encoded/subtextual queerness.
Kevin Williamson deconstructing and rebuiding the slasher genre with the Scream series. And then, honestly, doing the same with the teen relationship drama with Dawson’s Creek, where the principals were always talking through what their character developments meant, seeing them through a cinematic lens in heavily referential dialogue
Joss Whedon and Rob Thomas (of Veronica Mars) wielding their audience’s genre-savviness against them, setting up scenarios that would “have” to end some predictable way that resolved everything by the conventions of five-act episodic TV with recurring stars and plotlines, and then just not.
In comics hitting earlier in the 80s, Crisis on Infinite Earths as a recognition at the core of the capes-and-powers mainstream that these disposable entertainments had congealed into mythology, proceeding by in-metaverse acknowledgement of extranarrative structure.
In more far-out stuff Morrison, Moore, Gaiman, and Miller going meta as hell, all “what if comics were myths, what if comics were real, what if reality was comics, what if reality was myth.” DKR as “if Batman was real, he’d be pretty fucked up”. Watchmen as “if Golden/Silver/Bronze ages were real, superheroes would be just as fucked up and unmoored by the 80s as we all are”. Sandman was “what if every human story and mythology was part of the same meta shared universe”
Even Star Trek:TNG was an attempt to realize the coherent universe that the fandom had mostly projected onto an original series that were really a stock cast and setting adaptable to filming any SF short story of the week. (Lurking in the background is the 70s-80s realization from Star Wars that coherent universes increase audience stickiness, and are a well you can go back to)
Then Ron Moore took his project of trying to give Star Trek coherence and weight to an even less respectable space opera reboot, and made the fact of an IP-driven rehash (“all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again”) a load-bearing religious theme of eternal recurrence.
Family Guy, the conceit of half the jokes was they invoked 70s-80s pop culture just the right amount of obscure so you constantly surprised yourself that you even knew enough to get them.
SeaLab 2021 repurposing a piece of establishment futurism to underscore how absurd the concept seemed by then was despite how nostalgic the aesthetic was, Venture Brothers pastiching postwar boys’ adventure fantasies to highlight their complete disconnect from any actual process of becoming a man.
I miss that, you know. That overlapped/kept going with the Early Internet, so I thought it would continue through and we’d just keep building on it.
I guess that’s what really sticks in the craw re: “cancel culture”, millennial insouciance, wevs. The blithe dismissal of a rich, elaborated, mutually supportive canon with nothing to replace it.
Also realizing you’re now the kind of person to levy that critique at The Youngs, I guess that sticks too.
I dunno, maybe that was because the Early Internet was full of people who got acculturated pre-Internet and carried that with.
Maybe it’s cause I’m not getting particularly acculturated anymore - I accept Pokémon and Spongebob memes and reaction images in their own right, maybe if I saw the underlying properties - or whatever comes after - I’d appreciate them more.
Maybe that shared culture was an artifact of suburban retrenchment and then the Early Internet narrowing the cultural/economic/political American subject to a narrow white UMC and adjacent band and allowing a generation of us to mistake ourselves for America entire
Maybe it was product of a bottlenecking that was still negative on net. Like, basic cable had more channels than the plain 3 network broadcast era, but in 1950 they were competing with like, the bowling league, the pool hall, the Elks club, the Masons, the ladies’ charity, the socialist meeting, the dinner show club, the Mafia nightclub, the gay Mafia nightclub, any of the 4 bars between your work and home, the “whatever’s playing this week” double-feature movie theater…
(And even then, more diversity between examples. If you started going to shows in like “the Washington punk scene” in 1989, that was probably a lot of hardcore if you meant “comma, D.C.” and twee and proto-grunge if you meant “Olympia, comma”)
When you talk about “Rockefeller Republicans”, I don’t know how many people today even have an idea of who the Rockefeller family were, I’m not sure how much information that name carries.
So, uh, think of the Wayne family. Bruce and his late parents. “Wayne Republicans”. Basically the same thing - urban-based dreams of social uplift through monumental programs overseen by men born into more money than God. Vague social liberalism that disdains bourgeois morality from an aristocratic direction, anti-corruption, pro-Establishment to the extent the Police Commissioner always takes their calls.
That was a big part of the Republicans during the post-War period - the conservatives were just one faction, and often a losing one. Wasn’t just titanic heirs but small businessmen (maybe equivalent city fathers to their small towns, though) and professionals - the Republicans were the party of the postgraduate educated.
The Republicans were opposed to national health care all along, Ronald Reagan dropped a spoken word album about it in 1961. Part of that was green eyeshade deficit hawkery (that was a big part of their brand, the later pivot away from this to tax cutting was understood through the framework of “Two Santa Claus Theory”, which is an actual and very important thing in postwar American politics, “Two Santa Claus Theory”). And part of it was “grr, socialism boo”. But really, a lot of it wasn’t in resistance to what this would mean for taxpayers, or patients, or even the country, so much as doctors, who were a big Republican constituency.
Because doctors were professionals – by guild understandings that predated the United States, they owned their own practices, regulated and judged each other, were granted a degree of authority over those who came to them needing something important they were not qualified to provide themselves. They resisted the thought of themselves as merchants, and loathed the thought of themselves as employees or civil servants.
A lot of the “disappointingly moderate” Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices over the years actually fit fine with the Wayne Republican tradition. Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the court, put there as a payoff from Reagan to the moderate faction - the Republicans arguably the feminist party, albeit a “Lean In” type. After all, if you saw a woman in an executive role before the ‘70s, it was probably in the Daughters of the American Revolution or some society gala-type charity NGO. And those “first woman to go to X school”, well, the families that would think to send a daughter off to law or medical school were a subset of the families that would think to send a child at all.
Hell, for a while, the Republicans were even the more abortion-friendly party. The Democrats were the Catholic party after all. The Republicans were the Protestant-as-humanistic-heritage-charity ones, the ones who eugenically spaced their three children two years apart unlike those grubby Papists, the ones with mistresses, the ones with bourgeois life courses to even be diverted from. Not to mention the doctors who cleaned up after amateur abortions or offered black-market ones themselves.
(But not like legalization was priority one, c’mon, Bruce Wayne’s dad was a surgeon, you think he doesn’t know a guy?)
Anyway this was what Goldwater (with his base of ideologues and country & western extractive industry - for most of the 20th century the white military middle-class paradise of California was an anchor of conservative Republicanism) was fighting against, what Reagan (California Über Alles) eventually defeated. The Wayne Republican tradition still stumbled along until let’s say Dole/Kemp ’96, that was the last hurrah and the ticket’s total failure to generate any enthusiasm whatsoever (two years after Newt Gingrich’s Congressional “Republican Revolution” breakthrough with conservative southern and suburban whites) heralded its end.
Well, you could maybe see the administrations of the two Bushes as an intermediate form, an attempt to graft the old money social uplift tradition to the religious base the Republicans cultivated in the 1980s in search of a sort of Christian Democracy. “Thousand Points of Light”, “Compassionate Conservatism”, New World Order and nation-building abroad, the ADA, NCLB, environmental laws and Medicare Part D at home.
But the bipartisan abandonment of Bush the Younger and the coalitional realignments through Obama and Trump seem to have rendered even this a dead end. As things stand in 2017, “progressive social programs paid for by taxation, sensitive to the economic interests of professionals and capital-holders” is thoroughly Democratic territory.
Might be the newest entry in the kontextmaschine canon
through the years realized that through whatever blind groping the ‘90s-ass “edgelords” were desperately trying to save us from this, through proper gatekeeping and filtering
and at first I’d thought it was gratuitous and supported it being relaxed, maybe not shaming everyone who publicly mourned a suicide, mea culpa, mea culpa, I have debts to pay
Twice today tried to google something I’d googled before and couldn’t find it
First, this classic comic on 90s net furry culture which in row 3 column 2 invokes the old concept of “furry gay” (as distinct from gender dysphoria, r1c2)
The 90s had a richer concept of pansexuality as, ah, undiscrimination
ANYWAY, the second was that Richard Seymour attempt to schism the SWP with Laurie Penny (and China Mieville, thus their faction were the “Sino-Seymourists”)
A World Where Established Orders Were Rendered Superfluous, and In the Absence Of Coordinating Forces, A Congenial Culture Arose From The Free Interplay Of All the World’s Diverse Peoples
What It Was, Apparently:
A World So Hegemonically Dominated by People In a Similar Class and Cultural Position That Our Interests Were Simply Uncritically Adopted as Local Cultural Norms, Which Could Then Be Misread as the Sensibility of the World Entire
So uh I guess it was that second one I was fond of the whole time and saw as our salvation from a broken world?
The Partisan Leader; A Tale of The Future is a political novel by the antebellumVirginia author and jurist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. A two-volume work published in 1836 in New York City and in 1837 in Washington, D.C. under the pen-name “Edward William Sydney,”[1] the novel is set thirteen years into the future, in 1849, and imagines a world where the American states south of Virginia have seceded from the Union. The story traces the formation of a band of Virginia insurgents who seek to free their state from federal control and adjoin it to the independent Southern Confederacy.
• Christ is born and HE is savior! (Levant, 00-100)
• The day of his birth is a holiday called Christmas (Rome, 300s)
• Nicholas is sainted in his name (Anatolia, 400-500)
• St. Nicholas is “Santa Claus”, bringer of presents! (Dutch-American legend, NYC, USA, early 19th cen.)
• Santa Claus fills stockings riding a sleigh pulled by 8 reindeer (Clement Clarke Moore, USA, 1823)
• Christmas is a day where capitalist magnates are inspired away from profit-maximization by popular sentiment (Charles Dickens, London, UK, 1843)
• Christmas is a holiday where you erect a lit pine tree and trade store-bought presents (mid-late 19th cen., German lands)
• Santa Claus wears a red cap and suit (Coca-Cola and others, USA, 1930s)
• Santa has a 9th reindeer, a pathetic runt named Rudolph (Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward, Chicago, USA, 1939)
• Christmas is a day where people erect evergreen trees and exchange presents but a fuzzy green monster representing capitalism wears a red suit and teams with an ersatz runt reindeer to undermine it, but popular sentiment inspires him away (Theodore Geisel as “Dr. Seuss”, La Jolla California, USA, 1957)
