Aisle 17: The Artsy Fartsy Aisle.
Ah good old aisle 17. Look at it. Glorious isn't it? We've got all the makings of an uber art snob right down here. Fresh indie music, plucked from the finest commercial air waves, popular underground books that scream out the ideas of by gone thinkers (just with Atari games and 80's cartoons instead of Greek Mythology), art work that dares the viewer into even questioning its relevance in today's society. And the theater... wait... the theater? It's got to be some where in this aisle right? I mean it's an art form. Is it by the biased documentary films? Nope. Hmm, could it be by the politically charged comic books? No, not there. How about by the waffles? Huh? Anything?
GAH!
Ok so yes, we have come into one of those periods of an age where politics and art collide and for the most part this is a good thing. Art changes it's gears and goes from showing us what is beautiful to showing us what is absolutely horrid about our society. This is an important thing. Oh course not all art is created equal. (I'll get back to the theater thing in a bit, just indulge me for a second, as it's rare that I delve into politics)
Back in, oh I believe it was the summer of 2003, I was working as a music director for a small college radio station (
WSiN) and I recieved the new album by the Suicide Machines. Ok maybe I should have known intrinsicly that the album was going to blow, but I love their break through album "Destruction by Definition" and I hoped that they decided to go back to their old ways and not embrace the vapid, evil that is pop punk. "A Match and Some Gasoline," this is the title of the album I recieved. It's... political, overtly political. Which again, can be fine. "Destruction" had some political songs on it. The video for
No Face had a message (aside from that Punk's Not Dead, which it sadly is). So this new album could be just what the world needed.
It wasn't. Oh boy. No. It said exactly what every one was thinking at the time. But not only that, it said exactly what every one was already saying. War is wrong. Bush is a jerk. My girlfriend is a douche, but I miss her so. No new slant, no inovation, just paroting what they knew the crowds would be saying if for some reason at the keg party some one decided to talk politics.
I'm sure that the guys in the Suicide Machines, had the best of intentions. But the whole album just felt like one long complaint, which is what our country pretty much was doing all the time. Complaining but not acting. What I wanted on that album was a call to arms! I wanted some lyrics that didn't just say "This sucks!" but rather "This sucks and this is how we can make things better!" God even the hippies had a plan. The HIPPIES!! Well the old school hippies, not the new school ones, as they really aren't hippies. It's like if I decided to get a leather jacket, some braces, boots and grease my hair up I still wouldn't be a teddy boy, I'd be a charicature and nothing else.
For all the anti-hippy ideology that gets tossed around these days you have to give them credit for what they did. Hippies were the movers and shakers of their generation. They were the rebles, the punks. Yeah the stereo typical hippy was all happy and free love and drugged up, but when are stereo types ever valid? There were hippies of all types. There were the drugged up, sex bunny hippies that just wanted to be happy and make daisy chains, but there were also the hippies that were pissed off about how rotten the world was at the time. And despite not even being a twinkle in either of my parents' eyes I realize that back then, things were pretty rotten. People were being forced to fight a war they didn't believe in, women were still pretty much treated like crap, minorities of all types were treated worse than the women (who, again were treated like crap) and the atari was still several decades in the making.
All this crap, and they still managed to be happy. It's amazing, or it's a precursor to their children's bitter apathy (ah gen x, how I sort of wish I was one of you). But the thing was, and I hear this from all burnt out, institutionalized ex-hippies, is that they believed in a cause and fought for it. Litterally fought and bled for their ideals to be excepted. Some took this fight to the extremes (the weathermen, Black Panthers, and the yippies [not to be confused with yuppies], etc.) others were content with just taking over a university and causing a ruccus to get their voices heard.
Are things any different now? Not too much really. I mean the atari has been invented and subsequently abandoned for better platforms, but life still has its down sides. We're sort of are being forced to fight a war, many of us don't bvelieve in. I say "sort of" because as of now the draft has only been threatened to be used. Still, we have no actual control over how this war is handled, ah autocracy. Now there have been protests, there have been messages of dissent screaming across the air waves and internet. Yet we are still fighting the same old fight against an unknowable foe, and some more knowable foes while we are at it who may or may not be aiding this invisible threat.
The government has its mind set on this war and there is little to do about it. Sort of. See if every one actually was pissed off about the war, and the horrors that have incured since it's start then explain to me why these people who complain just sit around and not do anything productive? I'll answer because I'm one of these lazy asses. I'll admit that I haven't lead a cou. I haven't marched to Washington and demanded we start acting civilized. I personally haven't done anything because I personally have no clout in the political world. But at least I'm not making things worse. For example I'm not going around and getting into an argument about what political party one person leans towards. Fuck parties. Do you really need to be labled as either a democrat or a republican? How does fighting with some one with a slightly different mindset make things better? Just grow the fuck up, except that one party thinks one way and the other thinks another way and use these two perspectives to come up with a compromisable plan on making things a bit better. Actually you do know that there are more parties than just the two? Have a forum.
I'm not a liberal, and I'm not a conservative. I have no ties with republicans or democrats. I know plenty of each and I both like them and am annoyed by them equally. Deep down they are good people, fun to hang out with, funny as a 70's porno. But the constant pushing of political ideas they parrot from their smart role modles just annoys the hell out of me. I was an anarchist, but got fed up with the whole idea behind it, meaning I actually started to read anarchist literature and was like, um... this makes no sense, humans need leaders, because we are all assholes. For lack of a better term I could be called a humanist, which is fancy talk for hippie with out long hair and takes baths. I just want people to get along and treat people like they were people, and not something sub human. In the past I have stayed out of political debates because I saw quickly that they weren't going any where. Both parties will argue till they were blue in the face and both would leave with the same mindset. Nothing changes. It's stagnant. We live in a political swamp land. It's more likely that we will sink deeper and deeper into our own sludge than pull ourselves out of it all.
This all seems very bleak doesn't it? Like I'm a very negative person. I'm not. I think things will get better. I think once we get people motivated enough to start making art that isn't about proving hw political we think we are but is more about showing how life is and how it might get better, THEN we might see some improvements.
I am a theater junkie. I believe that theater has the power to make people think. I think the same about many art forms. Music is possibly the most powerful art out there, but I am not musical. I am theatrical. So I put all my beans into theater and hope something will pull the populace out of the muck that surrounds us.
Brecht made political theater. He made darn good political theater. I dislike Brecht's methods, but I still admit that his theater fucking rocked on a political base. While the Suicide Machines just kind of spouted out what they knew their listeners wanted to hear, Brecht put on stage humanity. And riots broke out. Same thing happened with Artuard, with Jarry, with the absurdists. Riots. Because people were forced to think, and when you force people to think, they tend to get angry. Angry because for the most part the thinking is done for us. By teachers, politicians, the media, our parents, friends and partners. We find something that sounds like it makes sense and we latch onto it making it our own. No struggle at all. But present something that shows life at it's worse and you upset people, because they now have to figure out why they are upset. In twenty years or less, the plays that started riots will be taught to bored high school and college students, and there will be no riots in the class rooms. There will be no riots because hopefully the issues that brought about the riots will have ended.
Are we as a society mad? Yeah. Are we mad enough? No.
In the words of Alfred Jarry, "Merde."
Sorry about the long diatribe, by the way. Will never happen again, maybe.
