SLACK'D

Back in 2003, I was living at home, wearing purple eyeliner to my boring service industry job and spending most of my time collaging. I had a fresh driver's license and the thrill of rolling around in my mom's car at night listening to the Raveonettes and using her Hollywood Video rental card to check out Marlon Brando movies was unparalleled. The guy at the counter was a plump ginger with a long ponytail under his Hollywood Video-issued baseball hat who I suspected had a crush on me since I was the only teen coming in without my kid and buying the king size pack of jujufruits. I ignored his halting glances since I didn't really start talking to boys until I was about 20, even ones I had no interest in.
One day, I checked out Slacker, because the case looked weird and I had just recently discovered that I was cooler than anyone I knew, having been educated at a prep school in which my peers' interests ranged from the fall j. crew catalog to the spring j. crew catalog. I got home, popped in the VHS (earnestly) and got to work stenciling "London Calling" lyrics onto t-shirts I'd just picked up at the Gap on sale for $9.99.
Slacker was weird, I couldn't really make sense of the characters and the lack of plot line got lost in my intense stenciling session-- I later moved onto Bowie lyrics.
Eight (!!!!11) years later, my life is eerily (depressingly?) similar to that of my eighteen year old self. The only element that's different today from the scene described above is that I use my mom's Netflix account. And I know how to talk to boys now, but that's a different story entirely. Tonight as I was sitting around making record cover journals, feeling inexplicably attracted to Ted Nugent, I decided to scroll through the Netflix collection, and Slacker caught my eye once again.
The film that I watched tonight, of course, is the same as the VHS I rented a thousand beers ago, but oh how my perception of it has changed. What once seemed like dreamy esoterica has since become the soundtrack to my own life; the characters, once just that, are now people I have met over and over, comprising my own anchor to post-collegiate reality. While I was completely engrossed in the film and finding myself in conversation with these people, a thought entered into my head: Is this movie making fun of us? Is Richard Linklater looking at 20-somethings who sit around drinking beer, talking about their lives and the world, politics and their relationships, with their friends and roommates and strangers, and deeming it all a waste of time? The film is called Slacker. Is the film's thesis that we're aimless, rootless, wasting our time and our potential to fulfill that great American myth of "making something of ourselves"?

As anyone with a hundred thousand dollar degree in Why The World Sucks and a barista job to prove it knows, "Our Generation" is the topic of a thousand porch/bar/breakfast PBR 30-packs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "slacker" as "a person regarded as one of a large group or generation of young people (especially in the early to mid 1990s) characterized by apathy, aimlessness, and lack of ambition". They may have to alter the era included in their definition. Is it not "Our Generation," the children of those hardworking model Americans, the baby boomers, that has been called out on a hilariously frequent number of occasions by the New York Times for being lazy, ego-driven, sext-crazed narcissists? Slackers, in the truest sense of the word? Intra-generational hand wringing abounds at the NYT as their op-ed columnists tell us to stay out of restaurants and save our money. In preparation for footing the bill for "Their Generation's" gross mistakes, of course.

Every conversation over porch beers at noon on a Tuesday illicits the same conclusion: we're not unmotivated, the ones pushing papers and paying their bills are. We're the ones who are looking for something more, the ones who refuse to settle for what we've been given. We're taking the path of least resistance, fighting with ourselves and everyone else for answers instead of with the TV over Dancing With the Stars.


And it turns out Linklater agrees: “Slackers might look like the left-behinds of society, but they are actually one step ahead, rejecting most of society and the social hierarchy before it rejects them. The dictionary defines slackers as people who evade duties and responsibilities. A more modern notion would be people who are ultimately being responsible to themselves and not wasting their time in a realm of activity that has nothing to do with who they are or what they might be ultimately striving for.”



Slack on, "our generation."


also posted at l337blog.

Dear Leaders of Tomorrow,

I just received an email from students from my high school, a venue in which the students are encouraged to believe they are the most important people in the world who will be running shit in a few years. Most of them will be, after they get into Georgetown despite failing Math for Fucktards Who Can't Do Long Division because their father sits on the board. While being encouraged to walk around with their heads up their asses and learn to hold everyone who didn't attend a prep school in contempt, the students use their parents credit card numbers to order from the J. Crew catalog on a regular enough basis to not miss out on the newest collection and thus be the laughingstock of the dorm hall and blackballed from the varsity lacrosse team.
The email in question from these wide-eyed, precocious and doomed youths was sent in the spirit of soliciting alumni opinions on the dress code and if it "is important in our preparation for our future careers." I almost ignored the entire thing but the line "The link below will take you to a brief survey regarding your current profession and the expectations for professional dress" was too delicious to pass up. I rarely miss a chance to throw the median of a statistical study.

Unfortunately the survey didn't give adequate space in which to detail one's current employment (or lack thereof) and how the school and its dress code did nothing to prepare this alumna for much of anything besides my forthcoming memoir. However, I did draft an addendum to my survey results:

"Dear Bobby [Redacted] '11,
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in your survey regarding the dress code. I took part with gusto as the dress code was a constant source of woe for me during my secondary school years, as I had an aversion to nylons and a penchant for wanting to piss of Mrs. [redacted]. The reason I really wanted to respond, however, was the hilariously misguided concept of said dress code preparing high school students for "future professional careers." After you leave high school, you will go to college, forget everything you learned in Mr. [redacted]'s history class, as he was stoned the whole time and wrong about almost everything. In college, you will wear sweats to the classes you actually attend and put on an ever-more-snug polo shirt to parties where you will attempt to get laid. It might even work! You don't think I know you, Bobby, but I do.
When you leave college, you may spend the summer drunk in Europe and then you will most likely walk onto an entry-level position in "finance," where you will spend your day playing Farmville and no one will care. No one will be checking to see if you're wearing socks or if the top button of your oxford is buttoned. I may be a wrench in the median of your survey results, but in almost everything I have done to earn money since leaving college (surely the premise under which one attends the school that we did: to embark on a long, fulfilling life of grabbing the largest piece of the pie and fucking as many people over as possible on the way to Goldman Sachs VP), including selling art on the street and making lattes, my profits have increased directly in correlation to the zaniness of my earrings and ridiculousness of my t-shirt.
So, no, the dress code did not prepare me for a professional career.

Good luck, I hear Wall Street is rough these days.

Sincerely,
Emily [redacted], '03

Franzen.

The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.

Let's get topical.

Here's what I don't get about this whole "Don't Ask Don't Tell" debacle: should gays, or anyone else for that matter, really be fighting so hard to go die for no real reason? Why do "liberals" who ostensibly don't support the war(s) care so much about giving gays the right to go fight in them?

OH NO!

You know what makes America great? Our cars. The prosperity of our nation is founded on our love of dependency on foreign petroleum and our unrivaled adeptness at causing massive oil spills. Sadly, the sun is setting on the Greatest Nation In The World:

YOUNG AMERICANS DON'T SEE CARS AS A STATUS OR SEX SYMBOL! THIS WILL SURELY MEAN THE END OF AMERICA.

Dear America,

We haven't chatted in a while and I just wanted to say hi. I've been thinking about you because it's your birthday. I know we've had our differences in the past, because sometimes you're incredibly stupid (Blackwater, WMDs, 2000-2008, THE CURRENT OIL SPILL AND THE INABILITY TO DEAL WITH IT, Us Weekly culture, Leonard Peltier, SARAH PALIN, good christ I could go on forever).

But. Since we've separated, I've learned that you do have a few things going for you. Clean water from the faucet is nice. And, um, the idea of "democracy" is also pretty cool, if it's used correctly and effectively, ie to actually give power to the people.

I've always thought, though, that the greatest thing America has ever produced is its dissidents. The true mark of an evolved society is letting its citizens, or those a nation ostensibly exists for, change it and improve it. Anyone who takes the time to tell America how bad it's fucking up does so only because they believe it could do so much better. Abbie Hoffman, Hunter S. Thompson, et al believed that America could be the world's freest democracy, providing its citizens with the most liberties, and were only disappointed that their country was falling so short of its defined goals. Since being away, I guess I've realized the fact that I'm allowed to say "America, you're really fucking up" is pretty awesome, although I obviously wish I didn't have to say that at all. How great would it be to say "I love America! We have clean energy, awesome health care and a great education system! There's no discrimination or gun violence, and we're not sending (poor) 19 year olds to the other side of the world to die. We don't only elect fat, rich, old, racist white men to office, and instead we have elected officials of every race, gender and economic background to serve the interests of the people. Americans enjoy life and there's a high value placed on the arts. WE DON'T IMPOSE SEXIST BELIEFS ON WOMEN AND ASSUME OWNERSHIP OVER THEIR BODIES. America doesn't really subscribe to a religious doctrine and people are pretty much allowed to do what they want as far as that's concerned. America doesn't sell a lot of useless shit because we know that doesn't provide happiness. There is no show called 'Two And A Half Men' and people don't watch that much TV anyway, they spend a lot of time with their friends instead."

Today, we should all remember that America was founded by dissidents who didn't feel like taking shit from anyone because they wanted to have power over their own individual lives (people who quote the constitution these days seem to be only balding white dudes trying their hardest to make sure poor/brown people don't have health care/citizenship so I'll stop short of that).

Shouldn't the goal of any nation in the modern world be to provide it's citizens with the highest quality of life possible? And I'm not talking about cheap shit from Wal-Mart that will make your life easier. Quality of life can be truly determined by health, personal freedoms and yes, the ability toward the pursuit of happiness.

On my birthday, I like to think about what I could do better in the coming year; how I could be a better friend, sister, daughter, person. So America, on your birthday, put down the credit card, have a beer, appreciate what you have and think about how you could become the country you should be.

Love,
your friend.

PS: I just read that Obama is putting $2 Billion dollars into solar energy! Which will create jobs and help to liberate us from oil dependency. I can't think of a better birthday present.

Independent Woman gets dumped, wonders why

Why is Beyonce, who has probably never gotten dumped, pandering to normal women, i.e. those who aren't married to the "Black Bill Gates"? More importantly, why did her handlers chose a Bettie Page style reference when that hasn't been interesting or "edgy" since 1994?

More on the evolution of Beyonce and the American pop cultural landscape here.

Xtina: Dangerously Boring Sexual Politics

Christina Aguilera just released a new album or something and here's the first video that attempts to polish its turd of a song with shiny bondage wear:



Observations:
1)This seems like a parody of something "totally outrageous." She's Marilyn! She's a dominatrix! She's fucking a chick!
2) Wish all the of last decade would have died...
3) but maybe Gaga will have her henchmen stuff this pale imitation into a sack and throw it back into 2002 from whence it came.

Like the less popular girl in 10th grade, Christina has always relied on giving blowjobs in the locker room to best her prettier rivals.
First, Britney won the last decade with her more accessible features and less desperate (hard to believe, but in comparison) attempts at maintaining a fan base of sixth grade girls and old pedophiles. Lady Gaga opened the second decade of the 21st century miles ahead of any other popular performer: she's accepted by the mainstream and embraced by critics. In 2010, Christina once again finds herself a bridesmaid, and resorts to the same tactics employed in 2002's "Dirrty": shouting for her father's (um, fans?) attention while writhing in a leather thong.

Which is all fine. Christina could have sex with a walrus in a mosque in her next video and I really wouldn't care.

The truly disappointing element of this entire venture is its thesis: a return to the shrouded sexual politics of the last decade, which was borrowing them from the 50s and MTV pretended to make them "new."

Christina is pushing thirty but remains a faithful TRL mascot, which she (or her middle-aged male svengalis pulling the strings of her midriff) helped define with "Genie In a Bottle": the virginal whore. "I might have sex with you, but I also might not. You can look, but don't touch. Maybe. Unless I say so. Also, 'no' might mean yes."

The name of the song is "Not Myself Tonight"; the theme of it's video is what in America is called "sexual deviance." Since Christina's "not herself tonight", she will take you home and tie you up. She will do anything you ask her to, because she's not herself tonight. And you can't blame her in the morning. She's a woman who is unable to take accountability for her actions, which may not fit within the expectations of the men she's looking to please. But it's ok because she's "not herself tonight."

After ten years of this though, Christina may want to take a moment to ask what "herself" actually is.