Glad to be back in the land of Culture

It's related to popular culture, anyway, or at least regional paradigms.

We're freshly back from Springfield, Missouri, and our heads are still reeling.

I can't pinpoint it exactly. Perhaps it's because Winter is there already, cold, bleak and deathlike. Maybe there's a disgruntled political atmosphere after the country had the audacity to elect a black man for President (MO went for McCain). Maybe it's because we haven't had a vacation in a long time, and our tolerance was low.

Of course, waiting for a table at Lambert's in Ozark, just a few miles from the Arkansas border, and being the only interracial couple in a racially homogeneous room, might have had something to do with it. We felt... alien. More than usual. The evangelist-wife beehive mullets were out in force, as was the flannel and the camouflage trucker caps and the beer-sponsored racing event t-shirts. Bianca and I didn't hold hands the entire time we were in the state.

I was asked by a girl there "how is California different from here?" I had a hard time figuring out what to say, where to start. There are some similarities: Chain restaurants. Too many SUVs. Starbucks. Most of California isn't much different from Missouri. Cows, tractor supply, Wal-Mart, highways, homophobia.

But the differences--when speaking of Los Angeles--are vast. L.A. has sidewalks. Springfield's roads slope into ditches because of the rain. In L.A. you can stand in line at a bank and run out of fingers counting ethnicities. Springfield is overwhelmingly white. From L.A. you can drive 275 miles to Las Vegas. From Springfield you can drive 40 miles to Branson. L.A. has earthquakes and wildfires. Springfield has tornado warnings, heavy rainfall and hail. L.A. has parking for ten bucks, advertised by flashlight-waving men in red vests. Springfield has no lack of parking, including 60-foot spaces for 18-wheelers. L.A. has mountains and sometimes an ocean within view. Springfield has an open sky.

How do I explain the utter joy of the taco truck, silhouettes of palm trees in front of phone lines, the brute-force wizardry of shuttle bus drivers weaving through traffic? Techno music, Mini Coopers, thin women with large sunglasses and tiny dogs, goth-industrial clubs, reading books at vegan cafes, Dodger Dogs, homeless veterans at freeway offramps? Celebrity sightings, smog, the Sunset Strip, tattoo & piercing parlors, the Santa Monica Pier, graffiti? The Hollywood sign, the Walk of Fame, gang signs, West Hollywood, sushi bars, Pink's, the Melrose shopping district, police helicopters? Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Thai Town, Little Armenia, Olvera Street? I couldn't say much to her.

I usually regard Randy Newman's music with the correct amount of revulsion, but the song holds absolutely true for us. We love L.A. And we're glad to be back.

The Final Essay as Ugly Metaphor

I am busy corralling my theoretical horses, marshalling my scholarly forces, and engaging in other horrible examples of metaphor in the pursuit of a "Final Paper" concept.

Popular Culture. Mass Media. Post-Modernism. Theorists. Needlessly long Sociological words meant to convey intent.

My final paper is a solar system yet in the accretion disk phase, slowly swirling around until gravity pulls it into understandable, more spheroid shapes. My planets will have great names: Baudrillard, Marx, Barker, Reggio, pulled helplessly into elliptical orbits around my central thesis sun. Sorry, McDonald, you've been shattered into an asteroid field somewhere along.

It's still fairly large until I get my head around the argument I want. I hope I can pull it off.

Sex and the Classroom

Barker mentions that the "socio-cultural world is spatially organized into a range of places in which different kinds of social activity occur" (374).

Fiske channels this into television as medium, in that the usage of camera angle, costume, dialogue, etc., has a "complexity and subtlety" that "has a powerful effect on the audience" (1095).

The episode of "Sex and the City" supports Barker, both in the sense of socio-cultural activity (the activities in which the characters engage) and of television viewer understanding (cutting to another setting to indicate passage of time or change of character focus). It also agrees with Fiske, in that makers of modern television know their formulae. The women in the show bolster their relationships in a common setting, an indiscriminate eatery, both as a "neutral" location and as a "reset" button for the viewer. The eatery is where the characters--and the viewer--gather their thoughts until the next, constrasting scene, often in a bedroom.

The mannerisms of each character are subtle indications of mood: a woman's hand wipes away a cup stain on a table, and wipes away her past and relationship at the same time. Her new boyfriend stripping her floor and repairing her home suggests a similar internal cleansing.

This episode, despite the straightforward, open conversation between women regarding sex--a departure from earlier texts in that sex is openly discussed and that women discuss it--yet holds to a societal discomfort with sex. Scenes with openly-discussed sexual conversation also contain the highest level of humor, as if jokes are meant to disarm the subject, to relax the viewer's sense of cultural intrusion. Gag after gag (no pun intended, considering the subject of fellatio) appears during the "gossip" scenes in the neutral eatery location.

Music also plays a part in suggesting a cultural paradigm. The interstitial music for Sex and the City is salsa music, chosen perhaps to convey celebration and hedonism. The use of "cha-cha" is also used, perhaps to indicate the social back-and-forth, the urban dance, in which the characters participate.

As a side note, my eyebrow raised a bit at the main character's internal musing: I always thought that the right brain (controlling the left hand) was the emotional side, the artistic side. The left controls the logical side. The episode's script, however, like the character herself, might have confused itself on this point.



Works Cited:

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.

Fiske, John. "Television Culture." (Posted on WebCT)

Commence the Dumbing

In reading Barker's chapters on television culture and Fiske's essay, I've thought of something that constantly comes up when I'm debating people online.

This tends to apply to movies more than to television, but one unfortunate way in which ideology is forced onto public consciousness is an undermining of learned authority. There are a number of movies (disaster movies, horror movies, thrillers, political movies) in which the "expert" in a field is shown to be wrong while the young protagonist, the kid, or the hero with common-sense know-how is shown to be right.

From that kind of representation, it adds to an all-too-prevalent viewpoint that knowledge is something to shun, that university professors are "liberal elitists," and that scientists are one wrong, bumbling monolithic entity, and we can't trust them. The public learns to sneer at "so-called experts" when those experts present an issue backed by scientific evidence.

Take for example the movie Arachnophobia, where the expert in arachnid biology is "punished for his arrogant knowledge" by being killed, while the everyman hero exterminator wins in the end. Consider also the difficulty of getting the public to take climate change seriously. Consider also the fact that many people still, in 2008, think that the Theory of Evolution is a matter of "debate."

Yet oddly enough, any political side will trot out its experts in the field when it needs to back up its political maneuverings. News media still interviews experts when discussing (in its ridiculous, shortsighted manner) a current issue. We still as students need those scholarly articles culled from databases. We still helplessly visit our doctors when we need to know what's wrong with us.

We need our highly educated experts, our scientists, our elite erudition. This whole sense--that our "American common sense" outweighs what some stuffy old professor or arrogant scientist says--is the entire reason why other countries are lapping us in the education department.

Television Culture

Many television programs reinforce the dominant ideology.

I always kinda felt that was fairly obvious, but hadn't taken the time to explicate the reasons for it. Fiske successfully highlights it with a number of forehead-clapping observations.

Characters are "encodings of ideology" (Fiske 1092). The man is the source of knowledge, therefore superior. The woman is subtly submissive and refers to domestic activity even when not engaged in it. The heroes emanate more class and cooperation than the villains, even to the point of makeup and dress differences (Fiske mentions the application of lipstick specifically). Even the set decoration and the camera lens are used to portray characters in a certain light. I imagine movies do this same thing, but movies seem more likely to break through barriers than television series.

This raises the question of what happens when movies or television resist the typical portraying of characters in this manner. Does it "feel wrong" if the villain is seen as classy and sensible and the hero is inferior? I do not mean blatant examples of this, but the subtle clues mentioned above: camera distance, male/female verbal intercourse, dress and makeup.

Works Cited: Fiske, John. "Television Culture." (From posted PDF article)