Public discussions of generations lately most often only focus on two generations–the boomers (1946-1965?) and millennials (1985-2000?). Yet many in our culture do not identify with either. One such group, Gen X, represents a midpoint between the two. And it’s a cohort that exerts more cultural influence than is generally understood.¹ Once dubbed “slackers”, for a while Gen X elicited the concern common in our discourse since the 1950s (when “teens” as a social and consumer category were born²). Those who were born from the late 60s into the early 1980s qualify, around 80 million people by some estimates.³ But we rarely hear about the social and cultural contributions made by Gen Xers to the modern cultural landscape, despite the current surge in 80s nostalgia (such as Stranger Things, which is so full 80s nostalgia that they even brought back New Coke for a season 3 promotion!)⁴.

Despite the lack of attention from the major media outlets, several Gen X themed thinkpieces have been published in various venues across the web. They center on pop cultural phenomenon, generally speaking. Youth is also part of the prism, another unsurprising facet to these works. It is hard to ignore experiencing history in part through our relationship to pop culture in the postwar age or to fail to note how that shaped people (individually and collectively) during their teenage years. But these thinkpieces on Generation X rarely explore groundshaking events in the same way that discourses on boomers or millennials do, through events like the war in Vietnam and the anti-war movement for boomers or the 2008 economic crisis and the still ongoing student debt crisis for millennials. Nor do they seem to recognize the role Gen X played in shaping the modern subcultural landscape, which signals a deep politicization of popular culture. Gen X embraced subcultures readily, and carried that on into building the modern internet age.

As a cultural historian myself, I embrace the focus on pop culture in defining generational cohorts to a certain extent. After all, in the postwar consumerist world where young people had an increasing share of the buying power, cultural experiences helped define a generation’s cohesiveness – think of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Beyonce’s Lemonade album. But under closer inspection, those generational moments often break down. Read more »

by Liam Heneghan

The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to.

Our lot is to amass and assemble; the universe responds, dispassionately, with decay and dispersion. Millennia of creative effort crumble away. Walk through any decent sized art museum and behold the craquelure of old oils, the loss of patina in the watercolors, the splintering of carved wood, dents in metalwork, and the extremities snapped off old stonework. Can there be a pleasure in art that is completely unhinged from the intimations of loss ? The sense of loss that decay evokes may intensify pleasure if you incline to morbidity. Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

In 1998 I was a co-author of a book called Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: For and Against. I was for; Sissela Bok was against. The point to note here is that the title used the concepts of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Euthanasia is no longer invoked by proponents of medically-assisted dying (hereafter abbreviated as AD) as all such measures explicitly prohibit the physician from administering the drug which causes death. Assisted-suicide is currently banned from their vocabulary by all groups advocating for AD.  

I have been an advocate, and an activist, for passing legislation implementing AD in California (successful) and Illinois (on the political agenda). But I have some problems with the idea that AD should be excluded from the category of suicide. This is my topic today.

Advocates of AD have two reasons for their  linguistic avoidance. 

The first is a purely tactical matter. We are trying to get a social policy enacted and many people who might be won over have personal and religious objections to the very idea of suicide. They may believe that our lives belong to God. They may believe that there is a social stigma attached to suicide no matter how justified, in some cases, it may be. They may feel that the many cases in which suicide is committed by persons who are clearly psychologically disturbed and not capable of making rational decisions will be , mistakenly, extended to what they think are reasonable cases. They may fear that the idea that all suicides are sinful or irrational or cowardly will be applied to their loved ones if they commit suicide.

Since all these, in my view mistaken, attitudes will make it harder to get political support for legalising AD, I see this linguistic choice as a reasonable tactical proposal. Read more »

Eye to Spirit

every year I’m given the gift of her garden
which she sweats over and in

which is all color, lush, side by side
soil to buds, roots to blossoms

edge to edge
eye to spirit

beginning
to end
.
Jim Culleny
7/17/19

by Eric J. Weiner

From Saint Pélagie Prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue wrote The Right to Be Lazy, an anti-capitalist polemic that challenged the hegemony of the “right to work” discourse. The focus of his outrage was the liberal elite as well as the proletarians. His central argument is summed up in this quote:

Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema the flesh of the laborer; its ideal is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks.

Quite a bit has changed since he wrote his polemic, yet I think there are some important insights that still resonate in the 21st century. Unlike the industrialism that informed Lafargue’s critique of the bourgeoisie’s work fetish, time at work in the 21st century is no longer primarily experienced in the factory or small brick-and-mortar business. In today’s knowledge economy, we celebrate a form of “uber” work where workers “enjoy” the flexible benefits of constant connectivity, borderless geographies of work/time, and schedules unconstrained by days-of-week or time-of-day. Workdays blend into work-nights which slide into work-mornings without beginning or end. Not unlike techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that leverage the power of time to (dis)orient, in our current historical juncture time is erased leaving workers without a sense of place; there is nothing to distinguish Wednesday from Sunday, Monday from Friday. In this new timeless workscape, the old adage TGIF is meaningless, an artifact as quaint as the vinyl record or paper road maps. Within this environment, workers struggle to adapt to this new model. For example, people still claim to need more time, yet in the 21st century postmodern workscape, time no longer has a meaningful referent. It simply floats above labor signaling neither a beginning nor end. Clocks likewise have become a quaint, antiquated technology of a mechanical era, yet they are still ubiquitous in most work-spaces. In this new workscape, clocks don’t measure time in order to determine the value of one’s labor on an hourly, weekly, or annual calendar. For uber-workers, the clock never gets punched because it doesn’t really exist in the context of their flexible workscapes. At most, they can orient workers to meet up for lunch or for that rare occasion when a body-to-body meeting is desired (it rarely is). They also, in the form of a wrist watch, can represent a kind of retro-cool, a form of cultural capital, especially when the watch is an “automatic”!

Uber workers are “free” to take a break yet no one can or actually does because “taking a break” requires one to be at work somewhere, anywhere. Today’s uber-workforce has no indigenous location, no point of reference in time and space and therefore no recognizable beginning or end. Without this geography of labor, workers are always “on,” and never “off.” This constant state of work is then described as a form of freedom. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, was born and raised in a traditionally German-speaking region of Romania. When she moved to what was then the German Federal Republic in 1987, she was eagerly asked by strangers hearing a Latinate inflection in her German whether she was French. When she told them that she was in fact Romanian, she recounts, she would watch as the expectant glow faded from their eyes.

There is a similar case of mistaken identity in Greta, a new film by Neil Jordan, in which the phenomenon is a deliberate plot point: apparent French nationality masks a lowlier, positively sinister Eastern European provenance. Jordan also made The Crying Game in 1992, a film notorious for a certain gasp-provoking reveal, whereby gender ambiguity and assumed identity serve as an allegory of the Anglo-Irish relations that are on the political periphery of what is otherwise a picaresque romantic comedy. In Greta, an assumed French identity is merely one of several burlesque symptoms of mental illness, as the film out-camps serial-killer forebears like Psycho and The Vanishing to produce a solid genre flick. But the certainty with which Jordan deploys presumed Frenchness as a lure and a lull to an Occidental sensibility on guard against the Iron-Curtained Orient is a reminder of the role France and French culture have long played in the Western imaginary: that of a reliable signifier of elegance, glamour, and sophistication, and an apotropaic talisman wielded against the less presentable elements of the Europe family.

This last propensity of Frenchness was a source of confusion for me when, a prepubescent visiting Paris in the early 1970s, I attempted to assimilate the evident grandeur of the métropole, and the globally intimidating power of its culture, with the French world I had been familiar with to date, namely the Montreal of my birth: a city divided on linguistic lines, whose francophone majority seemed to me edentulous and impoverished, quietly wracked with resentment at anglophone overlords who had long since forfeited bragging rights won two centuries earlier on the Plains of Abraham and were in the process of being outnumbered by an ascendant starving class still practicing a “revanche des berceaux”, or revenge of the cradle, initiated in the 18^th century. Read more »

Nobuo Sekine. Phase of Nothingness, 1969-70. 

More here and here.

by Brooks Riley

by Robert Fay

Kit Moresby, the enigmatic heroine of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky sits in a café in a French colonial city in North Africa. It’s 1949 (or thereabouts) and on the terrace Arab men wearing fezzes drink mineral water and swat flies. Kit and her American companions have just arrived by freighter and they sip Pernod and discuss their initial impressions. They are planning on traveling into the Bled, the vast interior, where they hope to find lands and people untouched by the war and the contaminates of European civilization.

These three are the opposite of the “ugly American” stereotype of the post-war era. They are pessimistic, worldly and bored with America. If anything, their Americanness is revealed in their unwillingness to accept that life and suffering could possibly be synonymous. They are world-weary Bohemians who recognize the America of the 1950s will be a consumer-orientated project. These characters are, in a certain sense, proto-Beats, and in fact the actual Beat writers, men like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac admired Bowles and eventually befriended him.

“It seems as though there might be some place in the world they could have left alone,” Kit says. She is a woman of omens. A person of great strength, yet because of the restraints of the era, must admit “other people rule my life.” She wants to truly live, to push aside the veil separating her from raw experiences, but she is fearful and superstitious. “The people of each country get more like the people of every other country,” she says. “They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture—nothing, nothing.” Read more »

In January of this year I was walking along the main road in the small village of Klerant up in the mountains above Brixen, in the Südtirol, when I heard a rooster crowing loudly. I looked up to see these two posing perfectly for a portrait in this window. One can also see part of the steeple of the village church in the reflection in the window.

by R. Passov

Johnny spoke softly in a voice just past the threshold of manhood. His smile, mistaken for charm, was longing. I could see the pentimento of the child still in him.

One day I watched a conversation that confirmed my suspicions. Johnny had returned from somewhere Big Greg had sent him. He danced as he spoke, swinging a long arm up over his head, around and down.

“The dude’s wife’s right there. I grab his guitar and bust it all up. Broke that shit right in front of em. Yeah, I said, this is what I mean.”

He had tried to be violent but in the retelling I could see his heart wasn’t in it. “Davy doesn’t play guitar,” Big Greg said. “Where the hell did you go?”

To the wrong house.

He was tall but thin. Black, but feline. Not black like the men he hosted when he had his apartment. Men who turned the living room into a weight room, sitting on benches all day doing curls, out of prison but still in. Johnny wasn’t like that.

Though I didn’t know of Lou Reed, didn’t have a radio, or a stereo or even a record, Johnny belonged in a Lou Reed song. He wanted to be a colored girl.

I know that now. Then I spied his gentleness, his out of place-ness, his role playing, that he lived between lives. Someone with you and somewhere else at the same time. Something children see but not adults.

He and Big Greg wore their green shirts, sleeves cut off, Alexander and Diles marked in black over their hearts. I decided to believe their experience in war freed them of law. Read more »

by Bill Murray

What you pay attention to depends on where you are.

“In an old city, a tourist hears the rumble of wheels over cobblestones that the native does not and notices sound bouncing differently between walls more tightly constructed than in spacious American cities.” – Alexandra Horowitz

She’s right. With the clatter of hoofs from horse-drawn carriages-for -hire in the tourist-center of Dresden a couple of weeks ago, you could see it; the locals plodded on; the tourists perked up and searched out their source.

With sound, personal space is different in different places, too. On the 13th floor of a 21-floor building in Ho Chi Minh City in April, we might as well have been invited guests in the skybar above us. Live Viet Pop invaded our personal earspace the same way a plane flies over your house’s airspace. With utter impunity.

Something else about listening: silence is a sound of its own. After a month in Vietnam, the silence of the Finnish lakeshore, where we are now, is music I was overdue to hear.

Not that it’s entirely silent. Birch leaves rustle like fresh linen sheets. Gulls shriek and shriek at constant calamities. Is there a more easily affronted creature?

On our waterfront this year we have three flocks of ducks, a grebe with an astonishing trail of a dozen babies, and a swan couple with a brood of five. They are doing what they do, growing kids each day, adults teaching kids how to be water birds. Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the common good; it’s instead a constrained, but nevertheless ruthless, struggle for power. Notice, however, that hardly anyone embraces this condition. When people describe democracy in such terms, they are most often complaining. But notice that lamentations over the cut-throat nature of politics make sense as criticisms only against the backdrop of an aspirational alternative. Our forthcoming book, Democracy in a Divided World, develops a democratic ideal worth aspiring to. According to that ideal, democracy is a system where political equals govern together by means of well-run political argument.

This ideal is admittedly distant, but it hasn’t been plucked from thin air. Despite the condition of our democracy, citizens and officials alike hold one another to high standards of civil conduct. When the President characterizes those he perceives to be his critics as “very dishonest people,” he appeals to the public virtue of honesty. Charges of bias uphold the related public virtue of evenhandedness. When one criticizes a news organization for being slanted, one is insisting upon a public virtue of fairness. Note, too, that it is common now for the word “partisanship” to be used as a criticism; when one official charges another with being “partisan,” she is claiming that the other is dogmatically committed to a party line. Such charges uphold the ideal of proper argumentation. The fact is that real world politics, warts and all, is still animated with the aspiration to democracy as a system of well-run argumentation.

This occasions a puzzle. We all embrace the same democratic ideal of well-run argument and joint governance. And no one wholeheartedly approves of the political status quo. So why is our democracy so dysfunctional? Call this the debasement puzzle. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

It does not take long for history to repeat itself. It was only a little over a decade ago that overzealous lending, lax underwriting standards, unrealistic collateral valuations, borrowers not understanding loan terms, an exploding derivative securities market–and a dozen or so other factors–led to a massive crash in the housing market. Today in the United States we have outstanding student loan debt of $1.5 trillion. Average debt per student is $37,000, and over 44 million Americans have student loan debt. Default rates are rising. The situation is unsustainable on a grand scale, and on a personal scale is causing millions of people untold stress. At the same time, the prospect of debt cancellation seems too good to be true.

There are some interesting parallels to the housing market of last decade and some key differences. (This is a non-economist’s view from someone who has worked on litigation arising from defective mortgage-backed securities.) One parallel is that demand has pushed the costs of college higher and higher, just as it did in the housing market–and another similarity is that easy credit has pushed costs higher. Financing creates a sort of reality gap between cost of the goods and ability to repay. If you have to save for school in advance, you will be keenly focused on rising costs of your end goal. If costs rise too quickly, you will never be able to save enough, and you won’t be able to go. If costs rise quickly but you will get financing for whatever part you can’t afford, you are not necessarily so focused on the ultimate cost. Whatever it is, you will be attending the school. Some observers have blamed the federal government for guaranteeing almost all student loan debt, thus making lending to students a very attractive proposition. It is painfully similar to the government’s magnanimous emphasis on expanding homeownership. Read more »