Category: Religion & Philosophy (sorta)

5 things best left in the ‘90s

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To cap off what’s been a surprisingly successful series on the ‘90s, I want to impart some wisdom that could very well save our culture. Not everything from the ‘90s is worth hanging on to. So when we plan our revival, let’s carefully curate the things we revisit and leave these duds behind.

1. The laugh track

No, it wasn’t invented in the ‘90s, but near the end of the ‘90s, good writing started to phase it out. Shows like Dream on, Ally McBeal and Sex and the City proved that people could laugh in all the right places without taking cues from a phantom audience. Sure, the ‘90s gave us Seinfeld and Frasier, but they were also responsible for Caroline in the City, Just Shoot Me and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. When you look back at some of these, it’s staggering how un-funny they are. Such punchline-driven cheap shots. Such meaningless catch phrases (or in the case of The Nanny, a series of grating groans). So will someone please send Two and a Half Men back to 1995 where it belongs? We’ve got 30 Rock and The Office now. We’ll just take it from here.

2. Dimestore spirituality

Though I’m not the biggest fan of self-help, some of it speaks on a tangible, grounded level. Unfortunately, the ‘90s wanted to balance that out with a new brand of New Age, and it was never very clear what doctrine a person was following. Oprah’s “Remembering your Spirit” segment invited guests to describe their calming rituals, like drawing a bath or, in the case of Martha Stewart, berating the help. Books like The Celestine Prophecy became hugely popular, and despite being a work of fiction, some still adhered to some of its proposed “insights.” And TV producers played fast and loose with Christian dogmas to make Touched by an Angel and Seventh Heaven more mainstream. The ensuing melting pot didn’t use the best ingredients, just the most popular.

3. Whiny pop that tried so, so hard to sound like alterno

Grunge did something to the music industry. It opened up a whole new market. But true-blue grunge artists cared a lot more about the music than their labels did. So labels started working with musicians who were willing to follow orders. That’s how we ended up with the radio-friendly, easy-listening drivel of the Goo Goo Dolls, the Gin Blossoms and that Friends band. There’s still some of that going around today. You have the Stereos, who are just enough emo to bellyache through each song, just enough rock to distort their guitars, and just enough hip-hop to sing every note on auto-tune. It’s just awful. And hopefully it’ll move back in with its mother Cher, circa “Believe.”

4. Khakis

Despite one very enticing Gap ad campaign, khakis just don’t look as good on people who aren’t professional dancers or models. They seem so promising because they’re classic, but that doesn’t translate into staying power when the trend resurfaces. So this time around, if the khaki comes back, let’s just act like we don’t know it.

5. Will Smith

He and I were cool until he became a Scientologist.

I actually liked the Fresh Prince in Six Degrees of Separation. Why didn't he go all Stockard Channing instead of Tom Cruise?

5 things we’ve kept from the ‘90s

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Oh, how we loved poking fun at the ‘80s! But when the things we hated most about them were brought back by American Apparel and possibly Marc Jacobs, old was new again. So I’m convinced that we’ll come to a similar conclusion about the ‘90s because they really weren’t so bad, and, if we want to get all sentimental about it, they helped us build the new millennium. Plus, good or bad, we actually held on to some ‘90s stuff. Here’s proof.

1. The a-ha! ending

What do The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense have in common? An unexpected, what the?, second-viewing-required ending. If anything, these movies improved the suspense genre. Alfred Hitchcock was a strong enough storyteller to tell you who the killer was right away and make you itch in discomfort until they got caught. But replicating that experience has been a challenge. And then writers realized they just had to be more clever to build a better mystery. The best example is probably Memento, but the tradition carries on with pictures like The Machinist and Shutter Island.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

2. Here, queer & (getting) used to it

There’s nothing pretty about it: right up until the ’90s, gay and lesbian characters in movies or novels were often crazy, obsessed with the object of their affection, and/or just plain evil. AIDS gave people one more thing to blame on homosexuality, but when hetero women started contracting the disease, we couldn’t generalize these things any longer. That’s when we had to acknowledge the LGBT community, its budding voice and its rights. Then, on the heels of pop artist Keith Haring’s death, Madonna went into public service. She commented on religiously-backed bigotry and sexism in “Like a Prayer,” encouraged women to demand an orgasm in “Express Yourself,” celebrated/stole a gay club dance trend with “Vogue,” and hired mostly queer dancers for her Blond Ambition tour, as documented in Truth or Dare. That’s how the ‘90s started, and those sensibilities about the LGBT community remained in our consciousness. Though homophobia is still present and marring equality to the tune of Proposition 8, it didn’t quell Ellen’s eventual coming-out or the popularity of Will & Grace and The L Word. Today, we’ve replaced the term “lifestyle choice” with “orientation” (but we could still do better), and more people accept that sexuality, in all its forms, is biologically assigned. Maybe it’s because we dealt with so many LGBT issues in the ‘90s and part of the 2Ks that Lady Gaga’s butch-on-girl kiss in “Telephone” is a relative non-issue now.  Certainly compared to how people reacted to “Justify my Love” in 1991. There’s still a whole lot of progress to be made. But we’re lightyears away from 1989, thank goodness.

3. Political correctness

Having hoorayed for gays, it must be said that the ‘90s also introduced a whole slew of new terms to replace old words that were borne of racism, chauvinism and general power structures that no longer reflected our new equal & empowered reality. I’m not saying it was a bad thing, and I couldn’t because I’m a woman. I personally benefitted from these changes. Still, the double-edged sword of political correctness is that it essentially masks old views instead of replacing them. A word can alter your language about an issue, and that’s certainly important. But it takes conviction – not just vocabulary – to create a revolution. That’s why words like “tolerance” have always irked me. It means putting up with something you don’t like, when, especially in the case of discrimination, it’s the dislike that needs to change.

4. “I’ve never been to me”

This is probably one of my least favourite ‘90s hangers-on, but it’s so popular that I have to address it. From John Gray to Alanis Morissette, if there’s one thing the ‘90s taught us, it’s that people in the westernized world have the luxury of spending a lot of time on their own problems. Enter Self-Help, which has its own bookstore section, right in between “Psychology” and “Cooking.” It taught us phrases like “scarred for life” and “you can’t love others until you love yourself.” Since the ‘90s, this trend has gotten bigger and, I would argue, more dangerous. Case in point: The Secret is still riding high on Oprah’s endorsement, and it teaches little more than you will get rich just by sitting on your ass and thinking positive thoughts. Why? Because the universe owes you. Which is exactly like saying that children toiling in sweat shops could change their fate if only they thought of bunnies and flowers instead of, you know, eating.

5. The Internet

Okay, so the Internet, as a technology, has actually been around since the ‘60s, but it wasn’t used by the public until 1991, and it only became commercialized and widespread in the mid-‘90s. If Twitter’s taught us anything, it’s that the way people interact with your invention is often more important than the invention itself. Although the Internet has all but replaced the library, abbreviated your TV and usurped the Associated Press, its most considerable achievement, I believe, was to make Playboy kind of soft core.

Laugh if you will, but back in the day, this machine was the shizzle.

Coming up: things the ‘90s can bloody well keep to themselves!

The Me-Me-Me syndrome

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During one of this weekend’s several Easter dinners, the popular topic of relationships came up. The truth is, we’re all trying to figure it out. Reconciling relationships is more complicated than excelling at one’s career. And few will argue that.

Then my friend made a comment that struck a chord, probably because I’ve been saying something like it for a long time: we’re so bloody self-absorbed! What he means, specifically, is that there’s this idea that we can’t love others unless we love ourselves first, and he thinks that’s hogwash.

I agree with him, at least in part. To be clear, I recognize the importance of loving ourselves, but is it necessary for loving others in a healthy way? Not really. Some people live their whole lives loving others more than they love themselves. And I’m not talking about Mother Teresa types. I mean those with low self-esteem or self-sacrificing, nurturing people. To say that these folks are not fit for romantic relationships is unfair, not to mention untrue. It really depends on the kind of person their partner is. When a mothering sort ends up with the sort that likes mothering, it’s usually a match made in heaven. It might not be my idea of heaven, but it’s not my relationship either. Besides, there really is no formula for this kind of thing. Just a bunch of silly ideals.

Minus the relationship angle, I’m very interested in this “self-absorbed” business. We see it a lot in daytime television formats. In fact, Dr. Phil is its prime champion, else he wouldn’t have a show. But I have to wonder, to what extent is it beneficial to zero in our problems, at length, in the name of self-improvement? The process of self-help often involves DIY psychology, focusing on the blueprint set by our childhood, and confrontational purges that add up to unnecessarily reliving painful incidents.

It wouldn’t mean a thing to me if I didn’t see so many people getting hooked on the improvement habit, while alienating us non-addicts. Some people so easily subscribe new “growth and awareness” strategies, and a surprising number of my friends lost their common sense to The Secret. The unfortunate thing about the Church of Self is that it can validate the worst behaviour in its practitioners. When faced with genuine conflicts that require sincere resolutions, the self-afflicted respond with empty catchphrases, like, “I have to work on myself right now, or I won’t be able to follow my personal path.”

I’m all for working on oneself, but not if it’s to the detriment of facing life. More often, I’ve seen it justify unapologetic behaviour (“I am who I am and it’s not my fault if you can’t accept that”), an utter lack of responsibility (“As long as I think positive, it’ll happen”), and blaming one’s parents to the bitter end (“I’m like this because my father once insulted me when I was 5”). What if, for a moment, we stopped trying to rationalize our flaws and just learned to say “sorry.” The fact is, we seldom mean to hurt someone else’s feelings, so where’s the harm in just saying so.

More importantly, the self-help path is arrogant. The fact that we can even entertain so many self-help strategies is a direct by-product of living in such a prosperous environment. If our lives were spent struggling to eat and live, would we spend any time pondering how our parents messed up our childhood? Of course we wouldn’t, because thinking about these things is a luxury, and many people on this planet can’t afford it. So when people in my family started going on about The Secret, and claimed that if we have problems, it’s because we’re not “thinking positive,” I asked them if that’s why women were getting raped and mutilated in the Congo. Was that unfair? Perhaps, but I would argue that The Secret is unfair to those women in the Congo.

Life is complex stuff. I can understand why anyone would want to escape it and convince themselves that they’re not the ones with the problem. But we have to live here with other people, whether we like it or not. Our lives have to accommodate our own core beliefs as well as the people who share our many spaces. It’s not an easy balance to maintain. Nevertheless, that harmony is everyone’s responsibility.

Haven’t the blues always been existential?

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If people like this actually existed (and I suppose some do), they’d be murderous. But I’m still fascinated with characters who think in maths like Dr. Manhattan.

I can’t say for sure if his character is written realistically, but I love the fact that someone’s bothered to imagine how anyone who exists outside of linear time would experience reality. They would certainly become detached, and as The Watchmen suggests, a little bored. Which begs the question, how interesting are our lives, anyway?

I’m not saying our lives are insignificant, but I do enjoy those real-life moments when I’m suddenly humbled by the awesome largess or excellence of something else. I often get that feeling when flying over the Rockies, or more recently, when I saw the Grand Canyon. Of course my life matters, as does everybody else’s, but life is also randomly unfair and nature is utterly imbalanced. The odds of surviving should be nil, but here we are. That’s certainly meaningful, but the fact that we all have the ability to die suddenly, and in a second, also makes it all seem so arbitrary.

And if we occupied ourselves with that sort of thinking all the time, wouldn’t we turn blue as well?

If you have trouble getting back up on that horse, use a bigger ladder

Posted in Life & Work Stuff, Religion & Philosophy (sorta)Tagged , , 3 Comments

A few months ago, I started a new job and people have often asked me how it’s going. Here’s the answer.

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The learning curve is huge. I took a break from journalism for three years, struggled in advertising, and now I’m struggling with something I wanted to do to begin with. It’s anything but easy, and part of the reason is that for the first time – ever – I’m surrounded by a bunch of people who are really good at what they do. Actually, that’s a lie. I was surrounded by the same kind of people at Cossette, but once I got there, I realized I didn’t really want to work in advertising, so it didn’t seem to count. It really should have. These are not the kinds of things we should only realize in retrospect.

Anyhow, despite the difficulty, I’ve decided that only arrogance would prevent me from giving this my bestest shot. So I’m just swallowing it, learning, working harder than I ever have, and turning the other cheek to all manner of criticism. After all, this is exactly what studying music is like: laborious, unforgiving, but so satisfying when you nail that crazy-ass cadenza.

Along the way, I’ve made mental notes on how to maintain stability. Here’s how I’m keeping afloat.

  1. It’s incredibly important to remember what you’re good at. Find as many opportunities as you can to make it surface. It’s a wonderful exercise to do something confidently.
  2. If someone else notices your strength and praises you for it, that’s gravy, but don’t seek praise and don’t dwell on it. Focus on the work.
  3. It’s incredibly important to know what you’re not so good at. If you don’t know and someone else tells you, and you trust the source, take it seriously. The truth is, there are only a handful of people who revel in putting others down. The rest are actually trying to help.
  4. Get better at everything. Get better at what you’re good at and what you’re not. Being great doesn’t last. You always have to do one better.
  5. Practice, practice, practice. If you can, spend more time practicing than you do working. Practicing will inform your work, and it’ll show.
  6. Give yourself a day or two to not worry about any of this. During that time, be lazy. Relish in recupe time.
  7. Don’t take your frustrations out on other people. If you have to criticize someone else’s work while yours is going through the ringer, remember the awesome responsibility of helping them grow. It’s so easy to be driven by bitterness, but it’s much more effective when you’re not. Also, people can always smell bitterness, and it’ll cut your credibility in half if you don’t stow it somewhere where it can’t emerge.
  8. When things get tough, find a figure who seems to have it together, and ask yourself what they would do. For me, it’s Scarlett O’Hara. I’m not sure Scarlett would do any of the things I’ve asked her to do so far, but projection is a good exercise. It takes you out of yourself for a moment and makes the difficulty seem feasible.
  9. There’s no way to medicate the problem. Like physio, it’s hard, it’s rough, it’s painful, but it’s the only way to get well. So savour the small victories.
  10. Remember, jockeys are about a quarter of the size of the horse, but ultimately it’s the rider that wins the race.

Maybe it sounds like I’m not happy, but it’s actually quite the contrary. This has been the most satisfying period of my life. Then again, I love a challenge.

How’d they come to that conclusion?

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In the right hands, sermons can be brilliant essays.

As a young girl, I forced my then-godless mother to come with me to church. At age 7, I’d gotten baptized because the rest of the kids in my class were going to get their first communion, and I was left out of the activities. Like hell I was gonna sit in a faraway pew and watch my best friends Melanie and Marcelle wear pretty dresses as they rehearsed to receive their first host! So, I promptly got myself baptized, got a beautiful tartan dress for the first communion, and started attending church with Mumzie.

The nice thing about a Catholic service (compared to certain Protestant Sundays, which I would experience as a teenager out of curiosity) is that it only lasts an hour. Most of it is spent making gestures with your hands, kneeling, getting up, sitting, kneeling again, and giving the priests your memorized responses on cue. As a reward for enduring the first, unchanging half-hour, you’re then treated to the priest’s homily. The sermon portion of our program takes a good 15-20 minutes, and I usually don’t care for any of it. As a child, my eyes would wander around the room, looking for stories to make up about people, or just for other children secretly misbehaving. As an adolescent, when I attended Protestant churches, I took this time to exchange notes with my friend James. We spent one sermon debating whether or not Basic Instinct deserved an R or X rating. If his preacher-man dad only knew…

Obviously, I didn’t pay much attention to the content of the sermons. I did try, though, and while I was usually lost at about the 7-minute mark, I did grasp one constant that fascinated me. How do priests and ministers take an every-day issue (like, waiting in line at the grocery store to buy milk) and bring it back to god?

These days, I’m the one who’s godless, and my mother returned to the Catholic church (on her own, with no terminal disease to help her). Just the same, I can appreciate a well-constructed point, and that’s what a sermon is supposed to be. Granted, some do it better than others. One minister that I recall only had one answer for everything: god. Anything that didn’t fit into the god mould had to be of the devil, and that was about that. I didn’t care so much that I got bored of his sermons, though I was concerned about the people who believed any of it. They must live in a scary world.

The other night, I watched the movie Doubt, about a priest who’s suspected of molesting boys. The film begins with a sermon, and later on, the priest takes notes for his next homily, saying he gets ideas all the time, from all sorts of things. And I wondered how some of them do get their ideas. I also thought about how it can’t be easy to have to think of yet another way to tie everything to god, in a compelling way, for 15 or more minutes every week.

I don’t know what everybody’s process is, but my friend’s brother is a Presbyterian minister, and he took to the web. To develop the ideas for his sermons, he spends time blogging of vlogging about different issues that face modern  faith. Though he’s a Christian through and through, I find him progressive. He really wants to immerse Christianity in a thoughtful, intellectual dialogue. So he jams it out online. I particularly enjoy the way he wants to eliminate fear from faith, and other types of silliness that believers can sometimes all too easily adhere to.

Check out his blog, and this video, one of my favourites.