A night with Black Flag

“Wanna see Black Flag?”

When a beautiful goth woman asked me if I wanted to see a show featuring a band I loved, I found myself in nirvana.  I was just starting to stretch my wings and become a real boy, and this person was spectacular, far out of my league but not beyond hope. We had hung out casually before, and I was desperately, absolutely sure that she was the one.  If only I could somehow speak with her, I knew that my good guyness and wit would help her recognize the truth as well.

As usual, that sort of longing made me stupid…in reality, she was working for a record label (layers and layers of coolness), got tickets to the punk rock show at the last minute, and knew I would be available and interested. This knowledge didn’t prevent me from thinking that the gods had spoken, and I was finally to find true love. I thought that perhaps tonight, this very night, I might work up the courage to make my feelings known.

But the band was Black Flag!  I wasn’t quite as big a fan since Henry Rollins had joined them, but still…they were fucking legends. They had toured the midwest before, but I was too young to see them. This was my chance, and I had been invited by the most transcendent woman I had ever been able to work up the courage to talk to. What could possibly go wrong?

Ever-eager as always, I arrived much too early in the punk uniform of the day – combat boots, beat-up jeans, torn-up t-shirt of ironic intent (it was actually my midget football league jersey, sans shoulder pads), and flannel shirt. I had briefly considered going a bit more goth to match her, but the image of being hung by my tie by my friends at the club quickly made me realize that that was a horrible idea. She wasn’t ready, but her apartment smelled and looked exotic – clean, as alien as that was, full of glass surfaces and actual furniture, a couch with the goth standard of strange woven blankets and puff pillows with the names of indie bands on them. She had recently had a graffiti party, and the walls were marked full of interesting and not-so-interesting slogans and drawings of rude boys and girls.

I had been there before, but not in this context, and I was already sweating.  Hyper-conscious of not being a perv, I sat on the couch while all kinds of mysterious hairsprays and makeup were applied in the bedroom.  I tried to nurse my beer, mostly because I had to make the six pack last the night.  I was paying for everything beside the ticket, and that threatened to wipe out my meager refereeing paycheck.

She had peaked out a couple of times, but when she finally appeared she was a vision. Elvis and the Misfits had been alternately playing on her bedroom boombox, but she looked exactly like Siouxsie when she came out, and my vision immediately went into fuzz mode as a surfeit of chemicals laced into my brain. I tried to swallow the beer I had in my mouth but instead sort of spit it up, and she had a chance to go into punk mom mode, offering me a paper towel (who had those in their apartment?) and even wiping some of the beer off my shirt. I had no idea what to do with hands, my feet wouldn’t work, and I just went into smile-and-try-to-look-only-mildly-like-an-idiot mode. I think I pulled that off.

She even had a car, which meant that she drove and I tried to help her find a place to park. Not having a car meant that that concept (parking in a city) was completely foreign to me, so I just making noises and pointing in the hopes that I would vaguely locate a general area where something like parking occurred.  We found a spot, parked, and ducked the cold to head in.

Of course, she was immediately recognized, and had to go through the ritual of chaste hugs and kisses that marked us as an early safe sex generation.  We had arrived fashionably late, which meant that the first band (A2’s own Destroy All Monsters, who I loved) had finished, and the place was a thousand degrees even in January, resulting in even more sweat from me and a pristine coolness from her.

I was itching to dive into the mosh. Seeing bunches of people I knew already bleeding and scratched-up and thrashing around started my head bobbing, my feet jerking and my arms flailing, but I had to try at least to be calm. I bought the first round of drinks (receiving no checks from the bartender because of the company I was in) and we headed upstairs.

Upstairs?  What the fuck?  I never went upstairs to these shows; I’m not even sure I knew that there were stairs, and that they went up. Still, I was still in thrall, and there was no place else I could possibly go. She led the way, and I tried to be a gentleman and not stare, without much success. We found a table and sat down.

This was all impossibly adult, and I felt ridiculous. The record label folks kept parading to our table and paying court, and I kept up my idiot smile, feeling like a small child as they talked about people they knew. They weren’t assholes, which was the common narrative about music industry people (even indies) in my circle of trust, and they seemed to both know and genuinely care about the same music that I did. The cognitive dissonance caused by this disjunction was overwhelming, further threatening my overstimulated equilibrium. By this point I had stood up – Black Flag was walking on stage, and I was being magnetically drawn over the railing, possibly fatally. Fortunately, I woke up and stepped back, but by then a couple of my friends below had seen me. They looked up with puzzled expressions, and then start frantically waving me down, assuming, I’m guessing that I had somehow gotten so drunk that I had forgotten concepts like ‘up’ and ‘down’ and, most importantly, ‘mosh’.

I stared at her desperately. She gave a knowing smirk: “you want to go in the pit, don’t you?”  I stared back, fetchingly, blankly, begging for the release that would somehow come from getting my nose bashed with a hundred other young dumb asses. She grinned again, took a drag off her cigarette, and sent me on my way.

The advantage to entering the pit from upstairs, I discovered, was that I could plunge in at full speed, wrecking already formed circles and managing to be even more annoying than usual. I was distracted, however, by some commotion near the door of the club, left open despite the frigid temperatures outside to allow at least some air to circulate.  A guy not much older than me had wandered in, wearing a light blue three-piece suit, in the hopes I guess of both buying a beer and being entertained.

As he was finding out, this was a mistake. Those closest to him had pulled him into the mosh, and he was getting shoved from one set of arms to another, with shouts of ‘fuck yeah’ and ‘fuck him up’ rising over the music. He looked afraid, and already a couple of near-fights had broken out as those who didn’t think that subjecting a stranger to a pummeling was a very punk rock thing to do clashed with the fascists in the crowd. Because I’m not very smart, I had started to move toward the melee, but all of a sudden the music just stopped (I hadn’t noticed that Rollins hadn’t growled for at least a couple of minutes), and I saw a furrow start to appear, with bodies flying in a style that would later be appropriated by a million Hollywood comic book epics.

I had to see this, so I climbed up onto a pillar and watched. Henry Rollins had somehow parted the red sea that was the mosh pit and had grabbed the guy, causing the aforementioned furrow because he was so short that none of us could see him. For a delirious, impossible second I thought he might actually rip the guy’s head off and use it as a beach ball in the pit-overindulgence in steroids will do that to a person-but instead he picked the guy up, carried him to the bar, theatrically brushed off his clothes, and signaled the bartender for a beer.  *We* all knew something was up, because Rollins was straight edge before it existed, but he gave the guy the beer and then stood there, waiting for him to take a swig and I guess recover.

The place was silent, except for Rollins, who was shouting incoherently. Suddenly, he whirled and stomped back to the stage, where he grabbed the mike. The band had no idea what to do, but that didn’t matter: Rollins lectured us for twenty minutes on how un-punk rock that behavior had been, and then announced that the show was over.

That announcement set up a howl, and from my vantage point I could see that folks were pissed. No one was going to challenged Rollins, but the shouting was getting louder, and more frightening, and way more exciting. Just as suddenly, however, the noise stopped. The house lights went on, and the crowd started to break up.

I had no idea what I had just witnessed. Was that truly un-punk rock? As a genre I always felt that we obsessively tried to define ourselves, but I had no idea that our heroes (who insisted that we should not have heroes) felt the same way – I had grown up in the seventies, with rock stars who were dumb as rocks. It truly was a minority who had grabbed the guy, and the mosh looked like it was going to enforce the no-tourists rule and get him out of there, safely if a bit roughly, anyway, but Rollins had taken it upon himself to end the guy’s pain.  I suddenly realized that I hadn’t checked on three-piece-suit guy, but he was gone, either through the club’s security people or his own volition. Club-goers were either filtering out or drinking more cheap beer, but the anger, and energy, and potential madness, had dissipated.

My own cloud also must have broken up, because I remembered that I had left a beautiful woman upstairs. I went vaulting up, mostly to ask if she had seen that, now capable of speech that seemed nearly poetic. All I saw at the top was an empty bar stool, with a note addressed to me. My despair abated a touch, and I grabbed the cocktail napkin.

“Darling, I had to leave – I hope you find a ride home.  XXOOXX, me.”

I wandered home, breath frosting in front of me, sweat freezing on my skin, curious if this had been the best night of my life, or the worst.

 

 

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Digging in…

More work that needs to be done on the Internet (and that we can do) comes from linguistics. While most of us rend our garments and tear our hair out at the atrocities that the Internet seems to instigate and enable on language, there are a few folks who are simply studying it. One of those people is a linguist named Gretchen McCulloch, who argues that many of the linguistic oddities that have arisen on the Intertoobz come from

“stylized verbal incoherence mirroring emotional incoherence”.

In my mind looking at this type of ‘verbal incoherence’ through a linguistic lens makes tons of sense, and at the very least it’s an argument that we can investigate (and of course it matches nicely with my own obsessions about our fascination with screen culture and what that fascination does to our own ability to develop emotionally solid relationships with each other). We do lots of writing these days, as there is some evidence that many of us prefer it to talking face-to-face or even on the phone, and language will morph as we continue to use it in and on this medium. McCulloch has already identified a difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 in the migration from lolcats to doge, and more of this kind of research and study can be done, especially by groups of young ones who are interested in these types of questions. For instance, does this deliberate play with grammar manifest itself in formal writing, writing that by definition is probably far less emotionally-driven?  There were gazillions of anecdotal horror stories about students (and others)  being unable to spell because of the Web – are the anecdotes about grammar failures as prevalent? Can we step out of the grammar mistakes we make (often deliberately) in screen culture when we need to? I think that organizing studies about this type of concern would be incredibly useful.

After all, the changing of language is an interesting phenomenon, eh? Stephen Fry says it much better than I…

Black Mirror

A friend who knows film inside and out recommend Black Mirror to me, and although I’m only two episodes in I’m hooked. The series condemns our culture about as much as I think any video production does or can. I won’t describe it to you, because I’m guessing that there is a fairly limited audience for this kind of chicanery, but wow, as we noted in a text exchange, the series glorifies in just how much our culture is willing to debase itself (and we’re willing to debase ourselves) for fame and/or glory.

The easy narrative about this series, though, is the one I described. Certainly, mocking us for our noted taste for watching humiliation and mocking those weaker than us is not hard to do. That’s not what strikes me about this series though, at least not mainly. What I find most interesting is just how much time the camera spends watching us watch us, or at least watch the action on the screen. That action in at least the first two episodes doesn’t feature stars (at least of the sort we usually associate with films, as the American Idol stand-ins are who we think they are), and the camera watches us watching in ways that are humbling and honest and realistic and also argue that perhaps we don’t necessarily want the train wreck that is our television watching. Camera shot after camera shot pans across various audiences, watching some nasty stuff, and folks are fascinated but horrified and disgusted (and act as if they can’t turn away).

I wonder if these first two episodes say as much about the gradual accumulation of training that brings us to the point where we think these types of texts are what we deserve. Why do folks watch reality tv shows like Survivor and American Idol anyway? My guess is that the heyday of those types of shows is gone, but the everyone-can-be a-star theme that they promote can’t be one that we actually buy (or bought) – and even though the shows featured mocking bad performances, those mocked sometimes became the object of fan affection as well. William Hung, anyone?

I know that I’m in Bourdieu’s territory here, and that I’m being ridiculously idealistic (a quick Google search of ‘worst American Idol auditions’ got over 21 million hits). But there’s a reason why in my mind the most poignant moments of these first two episodes are the ones in which audiences at pubs and offices and hospitals are horrified at having to watch the Prime Minister fulfill the kidnapper’s demands, and the naive and unguarded reactions to Abi’s and Bing’s performances point to the connections we (have been trained to) feel with those on the screen.

boyd redux

(This is part 2 of my discussion of boyd’s book.  Part 1 is here). 

For me, part of the joy of reading boyd’s work is her comfort with both grand theory (she cites Foucault and Bourdieu, as well as a million other psychology and business texts) and data (she does extensive case studies and puts together interesting qualitative reads on the material).  That said, I’ve made a few notes about some of the most striking components of her work…

• she notes how difficult maintaining privacy can be for teens, and so she argues that teens often hide things in plain site. She notes the larger structures that make privacy difficult to attain for any of us when she argues that
  

  Achieving privacy requires more than simply having the levers to control information, access, or visibility. Instead, achieving privacy requires the ability to control the social situation by navigating complex contextual cues, technical affordances, and social dynamics. Achieving privacy is an ongoing process because social situations are never static. Especially in networked publics, the persistent, searchable nature of interactions complicates any temporal boundaries. (60)

  She argues that since teens can’t control access to their lives, they control access to meaning (76), in ways that help them attain one of the few attainable forms of privacy that they can.

• Contrary to the criticism that some have offered her, she does not claim that there is no such thing as Internet addiction. She does, however, argue that this language is incapable of helping us understand what’s actually going on online:
  

  the language of addiction sensationalizes teens’ engagement with technology and suggests that mere participation leads to pathology. This language also suggests that technologies alone will determine social outcomes. (78)

  This type of language is typical of her approach (or methodology): she constantly complicates narratives in ways that are both productive and frustrating (because she won’t accept one-size-fits-all solutions).

• She also nicely acknowledges points that need acknowledging – for instance, she decries Nicholas Carr’s attacks on the Internet and its effects on our brains by noting that our brains are always changing, and that acknowledging such is not worth much: “what’s at stake is not whether teens’ brains are changing – they are always changing – but what growing up with mediated sociality means for teens and for society generally” (93).
• Again, unlike the online criticism, I felt her arguments grew stronger as she continued. She takes on the ways that public spaces are denied to teens, for instance.
• Her overall agenda appears a little over half-way through, when she argues that “fear is not the solution; empathy is” (127).
• She would make Andrew Feenberg proud with her critique of the ways in which technology is not apolitical, and she also neatly describes how technologies both intentionally and unintentionally reflect the biases and prejudices of their designers, often with no malignant intentions.
• An interesting point about digital literacy: “in a world where information is easily available, strong personal networks and access to helpful people often matter more than access to the information itself” (172).
• She has a beautiful critique of the digital natives take, including a defense of Prensky’s intention while also decrying the effects. She argues that the digital divide is not monolithic, and that Prensky’s point about celebrating teens has backfired, “justifying passivity among adults” (197).

Yes, I think this book is a beautiful attempt to let data, in combination with a thorough understanding of the concepts at stake, rule.

danah boyd – It’s Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens

(This is part 1 of my discussion of boyd’s book. Part 2 is here).

boyd’s latest book is It’s Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens, and it made me think, a lot. She has put together a veritable fuckton of research that looks at just how teens interact online.

   As with most of boyd’s work, this argument is data driven, but it also offers some incredibly rich and nuanced ways to look at some of our most cherished cultural narratives. Her main focus is that simplistic looks at how any of us function in our highly technologically mediated culture are at best useful and at worst harmful, and she uses our standard tropes about how this generation is all screwed up as a benchmark to examine what really goes on in teen digital (and real) life.

She builds off Sherri Turkle’s work (which I blogged about here), which she references directly. She shares Turkle’s concern for the millennial generation, but she doesn’t share her pessimism.  Instead, boyd puts out a call to arms that challenges all of us to think beyond cliches:

Growing up in and being a part of networked publics is complicated. The realities that youth face do not fit into neat utopian or dystopian frames, nor will eliminating technology solve the problems they [teens] encounter. Networked publics are here to stay. Rather than resisting technology or fearing what might happen if youth embrace social media, adults should help youth develop the skills and perspective to productively navigate the complications brought about by living in networked publics. Collaboratively, adults and youth can help create a networked world that we all want to live in. (212)

Again, this sort of call I think opens space for universities to partner with 7-12 grade programs to look at what young people need. boyd (like Turkle) is careful not to assume that she knows that answers, but she asks lots of questions, and great ones, that get to the root of the inadequacies of our current ways of thinking about digital culture.

I’ll talk more about these inadequacies in a subsequent post, but I’ll finish this one with a term that she coins that is a useful beginning point: context collapse. Although she doesn’t take full credit (as she discusses in her own blog here), her writing is the first place where I saw someone attempt to describe the ways that digital culture enhances contextual cognitive dissonance:

A context collapse occurs when people are forced to grapple simultaneously with otherwise unrelated social contexts that are rooted in different norms and seemingly demand different social responses. (31)

In particular she identifies the myriad of locations in social media where this type of collapse can occur, especially for young people who are looking for a public space that they can share with friends (since, as she documents, many other physical public spaces have been denied them). This negotiation of contexts is tricky at best (some business colleagues and I just published a chapter in a book on digital discourse that identifies how even adults fail to make these moves successfully), and teens in particular will struggle. boyd doesn’t blame teens for this, however; instead, she notes (in a beautifully Birmingham-school way) how teens are actually often pretty smart at moving between contexts, and adults often don’t understand just what and why teens did and do.

Because, yes, we often fail to see what they did there…