Creepy New Town

"Crap, honey, I forgot which house was ours again"

So there's this development in St. Charles, MO, a large suburb of St. Louis called New Town. A few of my friends live in Hazelwood and Florissant, which are quite close by.

"However, the family envisioned more … they wanted to build a way of life – neighborhoods complete with fabulous on-site amenities that families could use, enjoy and make a part of their daily routine."

"And in 2004, Greg Whittaker, president of Whittaker Homes, decided to take this sense of community one step further with New Town at St. Charles. This traditional town is designed to accommodate a wide range of homes and businesses alike. New Town combines old with new, ultimately creating a town reminiscent of the past where children can ride their bikes to the general store and residents can walk to the local coffee shop. At New Town, the garages are in the back, streets are conducive to walking and biking, and people can live, work and play within the comfort of their own neighborhood."

So, basically, instead of trusting a community to build itself organically, New Town is a development that takes all that relationship-building into its own hands. Pre-fab life, pre-fab neighborhood. Creepy.

take a look at the houses (here)

Re-shirt

check this out: "Reinventing the idea of the worn-in t-shirt, re-shirt collects tees with special memories (a shirt worn while making out with a hottie), cleans them, and sells them with an identifying serial number." (re-shirt.net)
GOOD magazine, Mar/Apr 2008

I don't even know where to start on this. Is this the commodification of experience, or what? Meaning is put into these objects by someone else's experience and then you appreciate the experience by buying their tshirt. What? This is completely bizarre.

Here's a story from a shirt that was sold recently:
"Die Sterne" are one of my favourite German bands. I like the saying of this shirt which means "all is so sweet and sugary" . But I don´t like the cut. Hope it fits you better and gives you a sweet look."

It's kind of interesting that people are looking for a more personalized shopping experience. They're longing for community and a story everywhere. There's another social shopping site called This Next, where you can watch what other people are looking at around the world and kind of shop along side them.

Culture Matters

I'm reading this book called Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
which was a recommendation from David Brooks in this article. It's awesome.

In my two classes with Prof. Gilles, Social Change and Trends and now Global Perspectives and Realities, we have talked about why certain countries "succeed" and why some "fail" through multiple examples. We read the book Collapse by Jared Diamond for the Social Change class, which was fascinating.

However, there's an issue here. I'm feeling very postmodern by saying this, but, who defines success? Where one ethnic group or country might be very industrious and have a strong economy, another ethnic group or country might have a strong value for the family and community. Which is better or more desirable (because, often, they tend to be mutually exclusive)?

Here's a paragraph from Culture Matters:

"...it is first necessary to define our terms. By the term "human progress" in the subtitle of this book we mean movement toward economic development and material well-being, social-economic equity, and political democracy. The term "culture," of course, has had multiple meanings in different disciplines and different contexts. It is often used to refer to the intellectual, musical, artistic, and literary products of a society, its "high culture." Anthropologists, perhaps most notably Clifford Geertz, have emphasized culture as "thick description" and used it to refer to the entire way of life of a society: its values, practices, symbols, institutions, and human relationships. In this book, however, we are interested in how culture affects societal development; if culture includes everything, it explains nothing. Hence we define culture in purely subjective terms as the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientation, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society." (xv)

So, a culture, as used here, is the worldview, the zeitgeist, the what-makes-us-different-from-them.

Of course, some cultures can have more healthy traits than others and can love honesty, integrity, and charity more than other countries or groups. But most cultures tend to be a mixed bag. Is globalization (by the definition I learned from Thomas L. Friedman - free economies, free business trade - free, not necessarily fair) really the best thing for everyone? The guys in Culture Matters say yes, if it provides better health care and overall well-being for everyone. Of course, it is kind of undeniable that a group or country with the least deaths from preventable diseases wins. I don't know...

Capitalism: Root of All Evil

In my never-ending and constantly evolving journey to figure out what is wrong with the world (besides the obvious Sin), I'm beginning to look to Capitalism.

When my brother Steve was in college (or just out) we were talking about something like American culture around the dinner table (I can still remember where he was sitting) and I said something or other that I thought was a pretty original idea about American culture and he said "Well, that's because American culture is completely formed by Capitalism." I had never heard of this idea before and only had a vague notion of what Capitalism was in the first place and so just became quiet and still thought I was right.

Well, it turns out that I think Steve's right. At least I think so. I'm not completely sure, but here's a oft-quoted passage from Marx and Engel's The Communist Manifesto:

"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

The last part is bolded for effect; mostly because it's so dang powerful. I think what is so relevant is the phrase "...all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify." I think it speaks to the sense of temporariness in our current culture - especially in personal relationships.

So maybe our culture has just come out of our relationship with money. After all, that is where our hearts are. Jesus said: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Also, in the process of figuring out all of this I have seen more and more in my life how I actively participate in capitalism/postmodernism/etc.. What is this? Is it bad? Understandable? More on this later, but I've begun to read a book my mom gave to me a year ago while they were visiting me at L'Abri in England called Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God's Transforming Presence and which I haven't had an interest in picking up until last night. In the introduction it talks briefly about how part of taking a break from the world is to engage in Spiritual Discipline because it aligns ourselves with a different style of living. Interesting.

Postmodernism Doesn't Exist

...or, rather, it's not what I thought it was. This idea has been slowly forming in my mind for the last three weeks. While I was at L'Abri Stefan Lindholm (I think), a worker, gave a talk on the Emerging Church and how it was interacting with postmodernism and he mentioned that postmodernism was just the logical next step to modernism.

However, in my hated Postmodern Poetry class all my professor talks about is how postmodern poetry was created in a reaction to the 'High Modernist' poetic ideals of the first half of the 20th century. Maybe all these small-scale rebellions and reactions are battles in the larger war of Modernism.

Because, as far as I can tell through studying the early part of the century and the beginnings of the modernist movement (which was in reaction to the Victorian/realist era), they had very similar characteristics to whatever is going on now. There was a lot of disjointed thought, self-focus, and an overall sense of futility.

The book I'm reading right now for my 'Cultural and Intellectual History since the Civil War' class is 1919 by John Dos Passos. It's fascinating. Just like the disjointed postmodernist literature he has these little vignettes and interjects little two page almost-poems in between them that are little more than gibberish. The characters all seem lost and ultimately self-centered in their search for meaning or love or something. Sound familiar?

"Intimacy and Belonging" by David Brooks

I hardly ever read magazines. The two I do read aren't typical magazines: Lucky (a glorified catalogue), and the New Yorker (more short stories than anything). But I had to buy two at the bookstore for a Postmodernism class collage project. It's fascinating. I bought Adbusters and Flaunt.

In Adbusters they had a reprint of a David Brooks article. I love him. I liked Bobos in Paradise a lot and love his other articles. It talks about three songs that were on the radio this summer: "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood, "U + Ur Hand" by Pink, and "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne.

..."If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song ten, let alone 30 years ago. This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She's like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She's disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16. This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups...When Americans face something that's psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner (I'm learning about this in my Victorian class too - the close of the Frontier made everyone freak out like there was no danger or real life left, just tamed cities). Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't' get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They've been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of 'friends.' that only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.
Young people still need intimacy and belonging more than anything else. But the pose is the product of something real - a response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces...We imagine we can overcome the anxieties of society by posing as romantic lone wolves. The angry young women on the radio these days are not the first pop stars to romanticize independence for audiences desperate for companionship."
(See the full article)

High Tea

High Tea

While I was a L'Abri in England, every Sunday night we would have High Tea where one of the workers would make a light meal and we would all sit around and share some kind of art. Usually it was a piano piece or poetry read aloud. It was one of my favorite things of the week there. A guy named Justin read a poem aloud one night that I adored. I asked him what it was and immediately forgot. Today in my Postmodern Poetry class we studied it. Here it is:


A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

James Wright

Greatham, England

Victorianism vs. Postmodernism

One of the classes I'm taking is called 'Cultural and Intellectual History of the US post civil war' and we've been studying the Victorian age since the semester started. Admittedly, before this class, the most I knew about the Victorian era was from the Samantha books that went along with the American Girl dolls (I had Kirsten).

Something that I've noticed is that in the Victorian age, the main objective of the cultural movement was to socially pressure people into being virtuous. All the heroes from the age are praised because of their abstinence from things. The typical hero story is where someone came from the country and moved to the city and resisted the temptations of the big bad city and through hard work and virtue succeeded in life. It's so different from the narratives of success for postmodernism.

However, I was thinking about the similarites between the two because I'm also taking a class on postmodernism. Aren't the two kind of doing the same thing? Postmodernism is trying to get people to be skeptical and open-minded. Both cultural movements kind of are trying to get people to have better character in specific areas.

The Victorian age crashed when people realized that they were faking all the time, trying to value things that they didn't (see The Awakening by Kate Chopin). Maybe the postmodern age will go out in a similar fashion, when people realize that they need metanarratives, no matter how flawed they are.

Also, around the time that the Victorians were beginning to crack, America was getting richer and "a rising standard of living was endangering self-denial" (Screening out the Past, Larry May). Maybe the opposite effect will end postmodernism. Everyone needs to consume less world-wide because of environmental issues. Perhaps it will be the introduction of self-denial that will make postmodernism begin to crack.

My Major

So I tell people that my major in college is Cultural Studies because that's the best way I can describe it. It's kind of a new field, and a thoroughly postmodern one at that. When I was working at a camp after my freshman year in college, my brother sent this article to me: "All Cultures are Not Equal" by David Brooks for the New York Times (read it here). In it, Brooks told me to "Go into the field that barely exists: cultural geography. Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them." So I did.

However, a more descriptive definition of cultural studies (in this context as a Literary theory) came my way in a book assigned for class, Texts and Contexts: Writing about Literature with Critical Theory:

"Cultural studies is indeed so open in terms of what it studies and the methods that are employed, that even its adherents are not entirely clear (or united) regarding what cultural studies is. People who say they are "doing" cultural studies share, one could argue, a commitment to a radical or alternative political stance. That is, they seem to be exposing how culture works from an antagonistic or at least questioning perspective." (26)

Ha. Well, that's what my major turned into, at least. Now that I'm in upper-level sociology classes I'm beginning to question my major. Like every reasonable student with senioritis, everything is starting to seem absurd and far-fetched. It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't have the energy to radically shift my worldview anymore.

I'm starting to think that maybe social-psychology might have been the field for me, studying more about the individual needs of people and how they try to fulfill them in society. That sounds more like the cultural studies I was shooting for. Alas. There's always grad school.

Sin and Salvation in Advertising

In my Critical Theory class we were talking about sin and salvation concepts in advertising. It's from the book How to Watch TV News by Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death) and Steve Powers.

"The Seven Deadly Sins, in other words, are problems to be solved through chemistry and technology. On commercials, there are no intimations of the conventional roads to spiritual redemption. But there is Original Sin, and it consists of our having been ignorant of a product that offers happiness. We may achieve a state of grace by attending to the good news about it, which will appear every six or seven minutes. It follows from this that he or she is most devout who knows of the largest array of products; they are heretics who willfully ignore what is there to be used." (125)

Shoot! For some of my classes, I've had to write papers on postmodern consumerism and I've talked about how the old metanarratives of society (nationalism, religion, etc.) which is what people used to find meaning for their lives and events within, have gone away. To replace them, capitalism has come in and created a type of religion for consumers.

For instance, there are little cults around different stores. In high school, it meant something very definite if you shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch vs. Aeropostale. Why? Because there was this whole narrative and meaning surrounding the brands that people wanted to be a part of, to identify with.

The same thing with Starbucks. People are die-hard fans. They love sitting there, the community found there, the music, the caffeine, everything. But it is also an image that has been carefully constructed by Starbucks. They give us something that we want, and it's almost a spiritual experience (ritual) going there and taking part in it. But, at the end of the day, it's just COFFEE. or is it?

St. Louis' place in History

"The starting point for much of the debate about postmodern issues in the twentieth century has been architecture. It has even been suggested that the transition from the modern to the era of the postmodern can be specified as 3:32 p.m. on 15 July 1972. This is the time when a prize-winning example of modern housing -- the Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis -- was blown up because it was considered unsuitable for human habitation even by those on a low income. Modern architecture was characterized by the principles of architects such as Le Corbusier who was at his most influential in the 1920s, though his ideas are typified by the high-rise flats which came to dominate our cities in the 1960s." (p.41 - Routledge Companion to Postmodernism)

Grammar and Poststructuralism

Who knew? While studying postmodernism and the theories of deconstructionalism and poststructuralism, I have found that they both come back to a book on grammar. This is from my Routledge Companion to Postmodernism:

"Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who revolutionized the study of linguistics in his posthumously published Course in General Linguistics (1916). Saussure's major point about language is that it was above all a system: a system with rules and regulations (or internal grammar) that governed how the various elements of language interacted...The linguistic model set up by Saussure formed the basis of structuralist analysis, which applied it to systems in general, making the assumption that every system had an internal grammar that governed its operations. The point of structuralist analysis was to uncover this grammar...Ultimately, what poststructuralists object to is the overall tidiness of the structuralist enterprise, where there are no loose ends and everything falls neatly into place."

BUT, grammar is not neat and tidy. Things to do not always fall into place. There are always "irregular verbs" and exceptions to every rule. There is no way I am the first one to make this connection. What went wrong?

Finally a response to Postmodernism

I've been reluctant so far to feed the arguments in my head against Postmodernism and its ideas that I'm hearing in class because I find that the more I argue against what I'm hearing in class the more I get angry at my teachers and the less I learn.

However, I have a paper due Monday on all of this and so I have to start formulating my opinions on what I think about Postmodernism.

It seems like the more I read about it, and based on what I know about the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the more I start thinking that this movement is a reaction by the Sensors in the world against the Intuitive Modernists. (I recognize that there is a lot more going on with this, but stick with me).

If it is like this, then this also feeds into the cyclical view of history, which I'm very interested in. Based on what (very little) I know and have observed, it makes a lot of sense that each generation reacts in a lot of ways against the one before it. This is a beautiful way for human kind to balance itself out. However, things start going sour when one side claims to hold their view (intuition vs. sensing, judging vs. perceiving, etc.) as the more perfect than the other and goes to the extreme to prove their point.

My theory is that a lot of postmodernism is rejecting the intuitive way of thinking in favor of the sensing. "Intuitive" on the Myers-Briggs can be characterized by a more big-picture way of thinking about things and its weakness is to create all-encompassing theories that leave out a lot of important facts. "Sensing," in contrast, is more detail oriented but can ignore larger life patterns that can be very helpful.

A quote from my Teach Yourself Postmodernism sounded like it was from a Myers-Briggs Sensor description: "As you know, postmodern thought tends to reject the idea of things having a single, basic meaning. Instead, it embraces fragmentation, conflict and discontinuity in matters of history, identity and culture. It is suspicious of any attempt to provide all-embracing, total theories. And it rejects the view that any cultural phenomenon can be explained as the effect of one objectively existing, fundamental cause" (101)

Thinking of postmodernism this way, as the natural and necessary counterbalance to the highly intuitive modernism, is extremely helpful. As you might be able to tell, I am on the intuitive side, and so have solved my problem with a broad theory. However, deconstruction and cynicism are extremely valuable, especially when tyrants come in with their (intuitive) broad social theories (like communism) and try to make everyone fit into their theory.

Something Interesting from Class Today...

In my 20th C. American Lit. class we are reading the Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, which is super interesting because it is a bunch of essays on how Postmodernism affects philosophy, politics, feminism, you name it. It's great. However, the book that I accidentally bought instead was even more interesting because it gave the ideas from the source, with articles by Lyotard and Derrida, among others.
But I'm not being graded on that book so it will have to wait. Here's something interesting from the book I was actually assigned:

"Our experiences are now rooted in the processes of consumption rather than production...The people were miners, shipbuilders, or mill workers and the basis of social life was for these men and women their relationship with the process of production" (36-37)

I think this is really interesting because it seems to be true that people's identities used to be tied more to their work and production, as can be seen in the surnames of Baker, Smith, Schomaker, etc. Pretty cool.