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fuzzy human interest
Wednesday, April 21 1999
Kurt Cobain's suicide. Consider all the pop-culture that grew out of that event (which happened a little over five years ago). Courtney Love, the Smashing Pumpkins, Bush and probably even Nine Inch Nails would all still be wallowing in semi-obscurity on the fringes of pop culture had not Kurt stepped out of the way with a blast of his shotgun. For the past week or more at work, I've been listening non-stop to another guy who owes much to Kurt Cobain: Dave Grohl and his Fu Fighters. It's a guilty pleasure, nothing that I would admit to casually amongst mixed company. You see, even more than with Courtney Love, there's a widespread perception that David Grohl is some sort of marketing construct, sculpted and positioned specifically to benefit from the huge installed base of Nirvana fans. That may be true, but he sure does write some great songs. They are among the very best of post-alternative pop. I'd heard most of The Colour and the Shape on the radio, so I'm already well-acquainted with the music. With the exception of the annoying slow songs written to placate girlfriends, it's a non-stop rock and roll holiday. Interestingly, though it's all fast and strong, it's got an unusual warm quality, like a summer day back in the yellow-tinged seventies. And the lyrics have a delicously sweet quality, like raw naïve genius. I'm content to be swindled by marketers if this is what I get in return. By the way, Kim picked this CD up for me on her recent trip to Ann Arbor (after I admitted to my "guilty pleasure").
Our friend Eric the Defense Engineer came over in the evening wanting to use my scanner to scan some of his snapshots. These were mostly pictures of Eric posing in the Tucson desert with his motorcycle, though there were also photos of sorority girls gone fat and other images amusing to vocally caption. Unfortunately, my computer was misbehaving, refusing to communicate with the scanner. It's times like this when the very worst of Eric's personality manifests itself. Being an overpaid computer engineer with experience running Crays having 128 Gigabytes of RAM, he's terribly conceited about his technical knowledge. Seeing me struggle with what he regards as an inferior operating system gave him numerous opportunities to critique both my computer and my skills. Occasionally he'd even offer to help, as though he really knew more about my computer than I did. He was like a chicken relentlessly picking at my wounds. It's the worst possible personality type for dealing with a person like me. I wanted to strangle him; I absolutely loathed his presence. Kim's wasn't being especially helpful either, but at least she had a clue that I was upset with the situation, and eventually she managed to get Eric out into the living room, where they discussed Ann Arbor at length. Eric, you see, was just in Ann Arbor to interview for a job.
My scanner mercifully began working after I went into the motherboard setup and changed the printer port type to "ECP," which stands for something like "Extended Capacity Port." Eric sat at my elbow as I scanned, cropped and adjusted his images. His sense of me and my equipment's boundless inferiority was such that he ended up being rather impressed by the things I could do in Photoshop. "Oh yeah, Photoshop is the defacto image editing standard," I said, "It's where all all the images in magazines come from." I think he'd been under the assumption that some command line Unix program was superior to Photoshop.
After all the effort, here's some of the results:
Kim and I fooling around on the couch with Sophie. My haircut is looking kind of "gay" (as Eric might say) in this picture.
Eric the Defense Engineer with his motorcycle in Laguna Pass.
Eric wanted to watch Star Trek: Voyager on our teevee, and we grudgingly allowed him. I'd forgotten how bad the Star Trek series really is. I think the main problem with it is the conspicuous absence of humour. It's so unbearably dry I wonder what its appeal could possibly be. And the supposedly "futuristic" equipment is uniformly laughable; what is supposed to look like the navigation deck of an intergalactic space cruiser looks to my eye a lot more like an early-80s video arcade.
After Eric left, Kim and I sat around watching the latest reportage about the massacre at that high school in Littleton, Colorado. In case I read this in the future, it's important for me to mention that this is the time where two disaffected youths dressed in trench coats ("the trench coat mafia") marched into their high school and started shooting people, especially minorities and "jocks." Somehow these two lads also had lots of homemade explosives, which they detonated randomly as they went. Eventually they turned the guns on themselves. In the end sixteen people lay dead. That's a hell of a death toll for a simple shooting spree, never mind that it was carried out by high schoolers.
In Charlottesville, there was a group of high-school-aged kids who hung out on the Downtown Mall wearing trenchcoats all year long. It seemed to me that these kids were the losers in their high schools; the girlfriends they had were all fat and ugly, and I got the impression they spent a lot of their time engaged in various role-playing games. Before I started hating Chaz, I once saw that little fucker walk up and punch one of the skinny trench coat guys. It was an awful thing to see. If I'd been that trench coat guy, I might well have started making bombs that very day. Not that Chaz was a jock, mind you. In those days, Chaz was trying to prove to the kids of the Mall what a tough skinhead he was.
There's really not to much that needs to be said about the suicidal killers in Littleton Colorado. They were nerdy, intelligent, bottom-of-the-totem-pole types with an accumulation of rage and an unexpected capacity for depravity. Their lives were unimportant when weighed against the glory of perpetual infamy. Evidently for his timeless bad-boy image, they respected Hitler, and went down in a similar, though much smaller, way.
Our society isn't content when the crime and the killer come to an end at the same time. We want someone living we can blame, and we want some distinctly other type of person as a demographic scapegoat to hold accountable. It's the same inclination that leads to racism, homophobia, and other useless prejudices. It's a shamelessly simple way out, but here in the 90s, this sort of blame is still alive and well. Because these "trench coat mafia" guys supposedly looked sort of goth in their dress, the media has seized on what Sam Donaldson and others are calling "the Gothic Movement." ABC interviewed some guy who works to get kids out of gangs, and he said that the goths are about as bad as any urban street gang. The conclusion any typically ignorant parent would draw from such reportage is that goths are up to no good. They're not content just to wear black and face makeup, but they're violent Hitler-loving racists too.
According to the rules of our society, the blame-placing can't stop here, it has to find a single person behind it all, controlling the minds of our children and making them into bad people. But goths are a disorganized lot, mostly confined to the underground, hanging out alone smoking clove cigarettes and trying to master French so they can read bad French translations of Edgar Allan Poe. There is, however, someone in pop culture who closely resembles a goth. Perhaps he is the mastermind of all that is evil in gothdom. (Cut to an especially energetic and weird Marilyn Manson stage performance.) Sure enough, searching the Marilyn Manson archives turns up interviews where he speaks of shooting BB guns at jocks. Well there you have it. The fact that Marilyn Manson is neither a racist nor a Hitler worshipper is conveniently ignored. He's bad enough (as demonstrated by his stage performances) to make up for those little lapses of evil.
It's really strange to hear goths suddenly being demonized in such a transparently knee-jerk way by the nation's media. My idea of a goth is a shy, sophisticated girl in a high school drama department. Maybe she's a little overweight, maybe she just doesn't like conventional football-based high school culture. She would have been my friend, my lover, if only she'd been in my high school. But us weirdoes were so far to the backs of our closets in those days, we never even found out we existed. It's embarrassing for me to reflect on the selling-out I did in those oppressive days.
I suspect the biggest lesson our country will learn from the trajedy in Colorado is that trench coats and non-conformist behaviours should be outlawed.
My place of employment, being an online community for young people, seized on the trajedy as a great public-relations opportunity. We had a local teevee station come in to document all the things we'd done to provide an internet outlet for emotion and dialogue. The resultant televised fluff-piece had the desired effect: it showed us to be the good side of the internet. While there are some sites out there showing people how to make bombs and distrust their elders, there are others, chock full of commercials, where a kid can fly straight and aim high, and fucking click here now for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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