Americans are worried about narcissism. There have been numerous studies that show narcissism on the rise in young people over the past few years. And today, Utne Reader tweeted a pair of articles from their latest issue dealing with the issue of narcissism in the Millennial generation.

The trouble with citing a psychological disorder as a social epidemic is that it’s an attempt to square two types of analysis that are each notoriously difficult to determine and quantify in their own right. And that makes it even harder to write about them. The author whose work is reproduced in the Utne Reader, David Sirota, creates a timeline from the 1980s to the present that uses a series of social indicators as diverse as Nike ad campaigns and Glenn Beck to show that narcissism has been on the rise over the past three decades, culminating in a contemporary state of narcissistic emergency. But the proliferation of information sources, the disappearance of the “grand narrative,” and the emergence of pluralism, all of which have taken place on a global scale since the 1980s, make it difficult to track a single line of influence on a contemporary social trend with any credibility. This leaves his argument open to criticism–the counterpoint author, Claire Gordon, dismisses Sirota’s concern as “finger-wagging.”

All narrative difficulties aside, it’s clear that something must be going on–otherwise, people wouldn’t be writing about it, right? Not necessarily.  Every generation has one existential crisis or another–a widespread human failing that threatens the downfall of civilization as we know it, and a challenge the headiest thinkers of the time rise to meet, pen in hand. In the nineteenth century it was philistinism–the discarding of the high and noble sentiments of art by those too shallow, materialistic, and stupid to appreciate them. In the eighteenth century, it was superstition–the willingness to accept truth-claims on faith, without any evidence to support them. And so on. Did these crises destroy civilization? No. Did these traits of human nature go away? No.

But were thinkers of the past just jumping on a popular bandwagon, or were these social issues real? The criticism of superstition in the eighteenth century led, in part, to the Enlightenment, which led, in part, to the French Revolution and other political movements that ultimately led, in part, to modern democracy. The criticism of philistinism in the nineteenth century contributed to the sociopolitical atmosphere of the day, which encouraged wealthy philanthropists to fund public institutions that support the arts and education. Many of them did–which is why places like the Carnegie-Mellon Institute and many public universities exist today. So were the social critics right after all? Probably–although it’s debatable whether the issues they wrote about were “crises” or simply annoying but perennial aspects of the human condition.

All of that aside, I have seen enough writing about narcissism over the past few years to suggest that there are a lot of people who are thinking a lot about it. That’s enough to suggest to me that there’s something there. But it’s helpful to consider a historical view here as well.

Back in 1996, in my freshman year of college, I took a fantastic sociology class in which we read a book I’ve quoted many times over the years: Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah et al. It is a cross-sectional, historical analysis of American society that attempts to make sense of the often dichotomous cultural narratives people employ in their social and political life. As it turns out, the “it’s all about me” narrative (rugged individualism) is just as old as the “we’re all in this together” narrative (communitarianism). Both philosophies pre-date the country, but each view has spawned social movements for the past 300 or so years–some considered progressive, some conservative.

It may be that our nation has been in a particularly rugged-individualist upswing for the past century. But so has the rest of the world, or at least the Western world. The rise of individualism is reflected in a lot of modern art and literature from the US and Europe, which features rugged individualists as protagonists. Andre Gide’s The Immoralist, published in 1902, features Michel, who becomes ill with tuberculosis. After he miraculously recovers, he experiences a “rebirth” in which he obsessively seeks his own physical and aesthetic pleasure, neglecting the needs of his wife Marceline, who eventually contracts tuberculosis herself (having cared for him during his illness) and dies. He justifies her death because, in his mind, he is strong but she was weak. In The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, Jay Gatsby’s grandiosity and sense of entitlement lead eventually to his downfall. Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead features Howard Roark, a self-made man and architectural genius,  who lashes out in increasingly violent ways against anyone he considers “beneath” him who dares to seek his support, respect, or love. Today, there are numerous examples of narcissists in today’s films and television–Michael Scott, Dr. Gregory House, Don Draper, Aldous Snow, and Dexter Morgan are a few well-known examples. There are also a handful of relatively recent biographies and works of historical fiction about famous narcissists and their equally famous meltdowns–the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Napoleon, Howard Hughes, Truman Capote, Jim Morrison (okay, a VERY long list of rock stars). It’s never clear whether the authors of these works intend to celebrate these characters’ radical self-involvement in a “misunderstood genius vs. the world” structure or if they are simply trying to illustrate the way such selfishness damages people’s lives.

But does any of this mean we’re more narcissistic than ever, or that twentysomethings are more narcissistic than anyone has ever been? In my view, these aren’t questions worth answering. Even if the answer was “yes,” what would we do about it? Narcissism thrives both with and without the support of families, communities, business, and government. Psychologists say that true narcissism is one of the most difficult to understand and difficult to treat mental illnesses–it is a problem that lies outside of time and circumstance, as mysterious in nature as it is malignant.

There is one thing I know from personal experience–anti-intellectualism seems to spawn narcissistic attitudes. What do I mean by that? Many people I have gotten to know personally over the years–people I have been very close to–were highly intelligent children who were mercilessly bullied at school. In some cases, teachers condoned or even joined in the mistreatment. The worse the abuse, the more inward these individuals turned. From the way they tell it, they were victimized for being smart.  A recent Minnesota report on bullying confirms such stories–and, even worse, points out that the state is turning a blind eye to the issue.  So how did these individuals cope? Rather than see themselves in the cruel and belittling ways their schoolmates saw them, they constructed alternative identities for themselves as “misunderstood geniuses.” They devoured books and films about other “misunderstood geniuses” in history and fiction and compared themselves, and their struggles, to the stories’ protagonists–always framing the issue as them versus the world, genius versus stupidity, the sensitive intellectual versus the ham-handed plebes. They copped superior attitudes and became difficult to relate to–thus sparking a cycle of attack-and-retreat in personal relationships that made them increasingly bitter over time. The more friends and lovers they drove away, the more bitter and self-involved they became, and the more they inflated their images of themselves and belittled those around them. And so on. I’m not a professional psychologist or sociologist by any means–it’s just something I’ve observed over the past 15 years or so. As someone who was severely mistreated for a number of years in school myself, I’ve come dangerously close to the edge of bitterness and self-involvement many times. But I’ve always managed to pull myself back, with the help of my loved ones and a healthy reality check.

That’s why I’ve started thinking that maybe the best thing to do is to simply be aware of it–in our families, social circles, communities, and yes, in ourselves. I would venture to guess that we have all been betrayed by friends, lovers, and family members who crave admiration from others, including strangers, but who have no admiration for anyone else; who take whenever they can and give little or nothing in return; who routinely lie to and manipulate those they consider “weak” in order to get what they want; and who have discarded us when they have no further use for us. So I suggest that those who worry about narcissism’s presence in their lives do everything they can to discourage narcissistic behavior. If you have a friend who manipulates, toys with, and “uses up” lovers and sexual partners, don’t reward him or her with compliments about how “cool” they are. It isn’t cool–it’s sick. You might even consider whether or not said person is actually a friend–or if s/he is merely using you to maintain her/his idealized self-image. Does this “friend” do any of the following: Talk in grandiose terms about her/his activities and interests but belittle yours? Portray themselves as “saints” at every possible opportunity, despite your knowledge that s/he hardly lifts a finger to help anyone? Talk constantly about how brilliant/accomplished/well liked s/he is but downplay your achievements at every turn? Hurt or torment people or animals for no reason? If so, call him or her on it. Do you have a family member or lover who is more interested in how others perceive them than in how they treat you? Or who always makes huge demands on your time, energy, or resources–to a degree that takes a toll on you–but is either recalcitrant or offended every time you ask them for the tiniest favor? Or who is always talking about themselves but acts bored or disinterested whenever you tell them what you’re up to or how you feel? If so, confront them on these behaviors. These friends, lovers, and family members may not be narcissists, but they are certainly engaging in narcissistic behaviors. And now, take a long, hard look at yourself–do you engage in any of these behaviors? If so, stop doing them. Such actions wouldn’t take a blue-ribbon committee to implement, and they might actually make a difference in your life and in the lives of those around you–whether there’s a narcissism epidemic or not.

Photo credit: Bart van Damme, Flickr.com

We all dream of doing important things when we’re kids. We collect rocks and sticks and shells, or capture tadpoles and caterpillars to watch them transform, and we are scientists. We bang on pots and pans, and we are drummers. We send away for secret decoder rings and we are spies. We make helmets of ice-cream buckets and spacecraft of refrigerator boxes and we are astronauts. We twirl for hours in the sun and we are dancers. We learn first aid and we are doctors.

And all along the way, those who are older and wiser remind us, again and again, like the genie in the bottle, “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”

(That’s if we’re lucky enough to have parents and families and communities that don’t undermine our ability to dream of anything that isn’t in The Script we’re supposed to inherit. But even those poor souls can manage to dream–some of them, quite beautifully. )

If we are very lucky, we get to live our dreams. And that is when the words of the genie come back to us. “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” Along with the dream comes hours and hours of thankless tasks. Begging for funding. Competing with colleagues. Hours of practice. And, always, mounds and mounds of paperwork. And that’s if everything goes right.

But nothing goes right all the time. Hypotheses are wrong. Musical tastes change. The intelligence is bad. Space shuttles crash. Accidents leave us paralyzed. Patients die.

We have to make sense of both why we succeed and why we fail–otherwise, we can’t live with ourselves.

And that’s where writers come in. They’re the ones who’ve been observing us as we go about our daily business. They’re pretty detached as friends, family members, colleagues, lovers. They don’t pitch in much. That’s why they often come across as unfriendly, unlikeable, even self-involved. They’re often penniless and seem not only lazy, but arrogant, as they ask us for help, again and again, in sustaining their meager existences.

But one day we’re going to stop all that activity and start looking for the meaning in what we accomplished. And that’s when the writer finally gets to do her or his job. All the while we thought s/he was detached and unavailable, s/he was listening carefully to every word we said, watching everything we did. S/he cared about our daily struggles all along, found meaning in the activities we considered boring or routine, and knew we were too busy with our daily lives to pause and reflect on the significance of it all. So s/he wrote it all down for us. And now, to help us find our way through our confusion and our search for answers, s/he holds up the magic mirror that shows us everything.

Behind that mirror, the writer disappears. And all that’s left is a mirror image of us, all of us, in our struggle to achieve and to know and, finally, to understand.

Photo credit: tomato umlaut, Flickr.com

I’ve done one story already, and am working on a second, that relates to art therapy. The first was about an innovative theater company that works with young people to address real issues teens face. This program started in a long term care facility for teens with behavioral problems and mental health issues. According to Adam Arnold, the counselor who started the program, the ability for these troubled teens to develop their creativity through an acting class had a transformational effect on their lives.  The second, which I am working on now, is a story about Minneapolis artist Amy Rice, who has been an advocate for artists with mental health issues for a number of years. She used to work in a day program for people with disabilities. Under her direction, the people in the program went from making macaroni art to drawing, painting, and other fine arts. Again, the ability to truly express themselves creatively became an important part of the participants’ emotional well-being.

Both Arnold and Rice told an almost identical story–that the participants in the programs they directed started out identifying themselves with their illness (“Hi, I’m Dave, and I have __ disorder”) and eventually came to identify as artists (“Hi, I’m Dave, and I’m an artist”). It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out how such a change in self-identification could help people discover self-esteem, hope, and a better quality of life for the first time in their lives.

But both Arnold and Rice said that these programs were defunded–state funds dried up, or a more corporate care center bought out the smaller care center and phased out the art therapy. And in these times where the primary mode of discourse we hear over and over again is that of scarcity, it’s not too hard for me to imagine the derision with which something called “art therapy” would be treated in a congressional budget review. I’ve personally been a fly on the wall in political settings where state and federal programs with far clearer, more quantifiable benefits were sneered at.  The trouble is, figuring out what the benefits of art therapy are would require not just research and number-crunching, but actually listening to the mentally ill and taking them at their word–believing them when they talk about something that has helped them and changed their lives in profound ways, and caring enough to do something about it. And political reality is so far removed right now from the reality of everyday life that I have a hard time imagining such a conversation between politicians and disabled artists ever taking place. Maybe I’m wrong, though. It’s definitely worth thinking about–I will write more on this subject later.

Photo credit: Zen Sutherland, Flickr.com

A lot of vampire fiction plays with the issues of power struggles, social class, and sexuality. But Shiki bypasses them all, zeroing in on one existential question: in lives ruled by obedience to tradition and authority, is it possible for people to truly recognize and accept one another’s humanity? And is tragedy the necessary result when two seemingly incommensurate worlds collide?

For the residents of Shotoba—the ultra-traditional small town where Shiki is set—survival isn’t really the subject of rigorous examination because their lives have a daily rhythm. They do what it takes to get by, maintaining a certain level of order and stability through a higher authority. In Shotoba, those authority figures are science and religion—represented by the Junior Doctor of the Ozaki Clinic and the Junior Monk of the temple.

But the representatives of higher offices don’t have any greater certainty than the people they lead. We see officials who have just inherited their positions from their predecessors displaying false confidence in public and deep uncertainty in private. Both are clearly exhausted by this subterfuge—Ozaki is a chain smoker, while the Junior Monk, Seishin, publishes dark novels about Shotoba—novels the townspeople don’t seem to have read—that describes a village “abandoned by God.”

And although Ozaki and Seishin are close—they’ve been friends since childhood—there’s a clear hierarchy between the two. Science trumps religion in both their minds, and in the minds of the people in the village. People begin to die in rapid succession, and as Ozaki works to deduce the cause of death, it becomes clear that the villagers want reassurance from him—not answers. As the days pass, there is an abundance of evidence that something extraordinary is going on—but, because of people’s blind faith in a rational world where the supernatural doesn’t exist, they are willing to overlook the evidence in order to maintain their belief in a world where everything is safe, explainable, and under control.

About halfway through the series, we begin to see things from the vampires’ point of view. As it turns out, their lives aren’t all that different than the lives of humans—they, too, have an unquestioning belief in their own right to survive. And in order to survive, they must follow a strict social order set for them by Tatsuma who, like Ozaki and Seishin, is only a second in command—the agent of a higher authority. But unlike them, his obedience is unquestioning. It is his mistress who, in her heart of hearts, harbors existential doubts. Do vampires really have the right to survive at all costs? Does anyone? And what happens when the price of survival is your humanity?

In the absence of an omniscient being that guides our every action, each of us must choose what is right. And the right choice is never clear—nor is it the same for everyone.

What we can always do, regardless of the situation, is try to understand it.

It is the refusal of all parties to let go of their traditional worldviews that ultimately makes Shiki a modern tragedy. In the ancient world, suffering is the result of fate. Modernity claims that suffering is avoidable because it arises from prejudice, misunderstanding, and unwavering adherence to “the way things have always been done.” But Shiki shows that the problem of irrational traditionalism and rigid thinking runs deeper than mere belief in the supernatural. People who don’t understand the scientific method don’t know that science is about observation, not belief—they “believe in science” and use it to dismiss their own experience. Treating science as a religion doesn’t eliminate prejudices and rigid social structures—it creates new ones which, as it turns out, closely mirror the old ones. These new prejudices create new barriers to accepting others—and tragedy ensues. The Shiki writers carefully outline a scenario in which coexistence of human and vampire is possible. Vampires can drink human blood without killing them; they choose not to. Humans can accept the existence of beings that must drink their blood to survive; they choose not to.

Perhaps this is something we all know in our sleep by now, but it bears repeating: The Enlightenment ideals of pure reason and a hundred years of modernity, industrialization, and post-industrialization did not eliminate human suffering from the world. It did not even eliminate prejudice and rigidity—it simply displaced them.

Perhaps it goes without saying that a show called “Corpse Demon” will haunt you. But it bears repeating—if only as encouragement to see it on Hulu for free. Considering that I’d call it not only one of the best animes out there today, but some of the smartest and most relevant storytelling I’ve ever seen, period—I’d say it’s well worth your time. You definitely get more than you bargained for.

Image credit: FUNimation USA

Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy II) is teaming up with Nick Cave (of the Bad Seeds and Grinderman) to do justice to a dark fairy tale we mostly know in its Disney-mangled form: Pinocchio. In Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century novel, Pinocchio kills the Talking Cricket (not Jiminy Cricket)  by the third chapter, and it’s all downhill from there. Safe to say, in Collodi’s novel, Pinocchio really has to earn his redemption on his own, without being shepherded along by quasi-religious guardians. And I, for one, can’t wait to see how the tale fares in the hands of Cave and del Toro. Details here.

Another musician-filmmaker partnership, Spike Jonze and The Arcade Fire, sounds promising. “Scenes from the Suburbs” is a coming-of-age tale that slips in and out of reality–a detail owed, at least in part, to the influence of fellow collaborator Terry Gilliam. I’m intrigued.

Tantalizing hints from Studio Ghibli, according to Anime News Network, suggest that Hayao Miyazaki is currently working on his masterpiece, his summum bonum. And for this blogger, the post on Anime News Network contains even more tantalizing tidbits: anime adaptations of two of my favorite childhood books. Ghibli released The Borrower Arrietty last year (adapted from the children’s series The Borrowers), and will be releasing the second film from Miyazaki’s son later this year. Even though Goro Miyazaki’s debut, Tales from Earthsea (an adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy, another childhood favorite of mine), was roundly declared a stinker, I’m tempted to see it anyway.

And finally, Isabella Rosselini (The Saddest Music in the World) and Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting) will join a panel of curators at the annual Edinburgh International Film Festival. Great talents in a gorgeous Gothic city. What would it take to get Green Glass Door there? Oh, that’s right…a press pass and several thousand dollars. Sigh.

That’s a lot to look forward to. And it’s still only February.

Photo credit: Zoltán Kelemen, Flickr.com

[Cue Tori Amos’ “Winter.”]

How many of us felt a deep and abiding sadness when we were young? And does it ever really go away?

January is a time of reflection for me. Other people have told me they feel the same way as well. Maybe it has to do with the way a new year makes us takes stock of life, resolutions and all—coming off of a season of parties and celebration, the cold sets in, and all of a sudden we’ve got more down time than we know what to do with. So I’ve been in a kind of reverie for the last few weeks, a sea of inchoate ideas, no islands of concrete thought in sight.

Then, the last week of January, my mom called. “Your father has a blood clot and I’m taking him to the hospital.”

Snap. Suddenly the important things are back in sharp focus. Life and death.

“Okay,” I say. “Call me when you’re home. I’ll come over.”

Dad’s all right, fortunately—thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, people with blood clots don’t have to lie in hospital with IV drips anymore. They just have to inject themselves with medication once a day for a week, followed by a regimen of pills. I guess that’s an improvement.

I arrive at my parents at about five. My brother and sister-in-law show up a few minutes later. We all give each other hugs, then suddenly the drama’s over. It’s dinner time. Dad doesn’t have to worry about fatty foods—oddly enough, the only food he has to avoid in the near term is broccoli, kale, grapefruit, healthy stuff—so we order Indian take-out and watch the new BBC Sherlock Holmes series on Netflix. My folks have been crazy about BBC since I was little: Doctor Who, Are You Being Served, Monty Python, and of course BBC News. This is a familiar rhythm for us—the kind of night my family has spent together since my brother and I were kids. I can tell it’s still a bit weird for my sister-in-law—but I suppose that’s just what it’s like, being married. A family creates its own little rituals and customs, but then it has to make room for new people. We are never really comfortable with this arrangement. But we’re still grateful for it.

Dinner’s over, the movie’s over, and it’s late. I decide to spend the night in my old room—a place I haven’t spent quality time in for nearly fifteen years. My parents turn in for the night—they’re early to bed, early to rise. I’m not. Again, this is all too familiar. My eyes skim the flower-print wallpaper, the antique bed frame, the delicate ceramic lamp, the frilly pillows. Not my taste—not anymore. How does a sense of taste develop anyway? I wonder. Was this ever really my taste? I don’t know. When we’re little kids, we adopt our parents’ ideas, their sense of style, out of a desire to please. But then something happens. We meet other people, discover ideas that were never talked about at home, meet people who have different aesthetic sensibilities than our parents—dress, décor, speech, everything. Suddenly the whole world shifts. Nothing looks the same anymore, even when we want it to. There’s always an odd discomfort, an elephant in the room. And nobody can say what it is.

You can never go home again, not really.

My brother has been asking me to help him clear some of our old things out of the basement to give Dad a hand. He says I still have a lot of stuff there—art portfolios from high school, college, the post-college years when I moved back and forth from school to home to cheap apartment to home. Out of curiosity and boredom, I poke around in my old closet. Sure enough, there’s a stash—college binders and notebooks, boxes of photos and notes and letters. Life before Facebook and Twitter.

There’s a lot of melancholy in those youthful writings, a lot of sadness in the eyes of the young woman I used to be. I always felt as though my life was missing something intangible, something I could never reach. At times, yearning became desperation and desperation became despair. I tried to take my own life a few times. I still don’t really know why.

Nowadays, I’m constantly busy: working, doing laundry and dishes, vacuuming, taking care of the cat, hauling out the recycling, scrubbing the tub, and in between, trying to keep in touch with family and friends. It’s easier now that all the photos and letters are digital. They take up less time. I don’t even have to think about it.

But I do miss thinking about it. I miss thinking about a lot of things. Maybe that’s why January is my most important down time. My fifteen-year-old self, the one who produced those piles of stories and journal entries, the one who wrote and received all those hand-written letters had a lot of time to herself. She was introspective and curious, had a heightened self-awareness. I’m sort of jealous of my fifteen-year-old self, even though she suffered from troubles I don’t have today. Here’s something she wrote:

“There was a long period during the spring of my sophomore year that I barely found the strength to get through every day. What kept me going from day to day was making trips up to the Maplewood water tower near Target, just a short walk from my house. It is up on a high hill that overlooks much of Maplewood and offers a spectacular view of sunsets. I would lie on my back and gaze up at its hugeness and feel tiny in comparison. It is odd that this should make a depressed person feel better, but in a sense I felt that the tower was a special place where no one could hurt me; I’d never gotten that sense from church. In fact, my experience with church and religion caused me to have feelings of dread and inadequacy. The enormous water tower was just there, not imposing any threats on anyone, simply existing in its incredible size. Maybe it gave me comfort to think that something of incredible power would have no desire to hurt one insignificant little fifteen-year-old girl.

“I also made a kind of covenant with the sunsets. I would find great peace in watching the beautiful colors change, like a painting in motion, and feel like a part of nature. It filled me with the sense of the awesome power in the universe when everything is at harmony with everything else. I know that I am one fragment in the immeasurable immensity of the universe, and yet at the same time I know that each part is quintessential to the whole, and must live my life accordingly.”

Sadly, I don’t think I could phrase it better today. Maybe that’s what made me so melancholy. I knew I would lose that introspection as an adult—that heightened awareness of everything, without judging or naming or claiming. Making snap judgments is essential for survival—the focus and clarity of knowing what needs to be done. But when we train our minds for functionality in the busy everyday world, we train it out of the capacity for deep reflection.

When I was fifteen, I took a lot of long walks with Dad on the state trail. We spent hours watching the seasons change, talking about the things that were important: appreciating people, understanding situations, finding that inner place of serenity. I think those walks and talks are the most important contributor to the person I am today. I can’t always find that tranquil place inside me, but I’m always looking. It’ll be a while before Dad and I can take another long walk, but I’m hoping we’ll get to do it soon. Maybe when the weather is warm again, it’ll give us an excuse to slow down, put off a few of those things that seem so important but really aren’t, and have a good look around. I know why we don’t do it anymore. It’s not that we don’t have time. It’s that we’re out of the habit and the prospect of retraining our minds to think and feel that deeply seems too painful. When you’re struggling to maintain normalcy, noticing those little things that are out of sync, those elephants in the room, those fundamental differences, those things that bother you that you can’t quite put your finger on, makes you feel like you’re one step away from chaos. But you’ve got to stop looking away, no matter how much it hurts. You have to face what’s right in front of you, really look at it, and try to understand. It might be the thing that destroys you. But it might also be the thing that saves you. You never know until you try.

Image credit: “Dreams of a Winter Night,” by Geraldine Pilgrim. Photo by Susan McKeon, Flickr.com.

GGD: When did you first start making music, and what did you play?

CB: When I was seventeen, I started playing electric bass. My dad is a guitarist. He had just picked up a fifty dollar bass, and it was sitting around the house. So I started listening to music, and I started playing along with some Cranes songs.

GGD: You grew up in Northfield, a small college town in southern Minnesota. How would you say these surroundings affected your mental landscape and aesthetic sensibilities?

CB: It kept me isolated form a lot of music, and without a whole lot of entertainment going on in town on a regular basis. My friends and I became fairly resourceful with what we did in our spare time. We climbed the buildings downtown, went into the woods, shot bottles with slingshots. To hear the kind of music we wanted to hear, we had to book our own shows at the local youth center—I guess I should say the Northfield Union of Youth, not the local youth center, because that makes it sound like a dumb thing run by adults. But there weren’t a whole lot of shows going on.

I don’t think Northfield shaped me that much as an artist, but I had different perceptions of things that I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d grown up in, say, Minneapolis. I was really excited to discover punk music—I didn’t know anybody who even listened to The Clash in ’98. And I had two friends who liked Rancid and that made them automatically the other punks in town. Otherwise, I didn’t like the other music scenes that were big at that time—rave culture, or jam bands. There was a definite hippie scene in Northfield. But I wasn’t interested in any of those scenes, and there wasn’t any sort of punk music being made. I would go to a lot of punk shows in Minneapolis when I still lived in Northfield. But then when I moved up here, the scene became less appealing at first because it seemed very limited. Since then I’ve widened my perception of punk and see it as encompassing lots of different things. There’s a studded leather jacket scene which doesn’t branch out a whole lot, but there are many other things going on under the umbrella of what could be called punk that are pretty creative.

GGD: Your father is a musician. What effect would you say that relationship has had on your life as a musician? To further clarify: what ways did he help shape you and in what ways did you choose to differentiate yourself?

CB: I’d say it delayed my development as a musician for a long time. He’s also helped me a lot. When I was growing up, my father was always playing guitar and piano in the house, and he had a big record collection. He and my sisters and my mom all had different musical tastes. We were in a small house with thin walls and everybody was always listening to music, and my dad was always playing music, and it drove me nuts. There was always noise going on. So I had some comedy tapes and Weird Al records, but I had no interest in listening to music, especially music with lyrics. I couldn’t understand how somebody could resonate with somebody else’s emotions and somebody else’s lyrics. I couldn’t see how somebody else’s situation could be applicable to me. I also felt very self-conscious listening to music, like I didn’t want somebody to walk past and hear me listening to lyrics that might be sappy. So I was really uncomfortable with music for a long time. When I was sixteen or seventeen, my sister made me a mix tape, because I liked her music more than what the other people in my family listened to. I finally told her that there were some songs that I liked, and I asked her if she could put them on a tape for me. She did, and added a whole bunch of other stuff besides. So I had this 90-minute cassette that I listened to a lot, and then when she was back in town visiting a few months later I asked if she had any more music I should listen to. She gave me a Cranes CD, Forever, and I listened to that all the time. They became my first favorite band. And then she left her record collection, when she was between apartments, at our old house in Northfield for a few weeks. There was a whole box with all of her CDs, and I started listening to Rancid. I had heard her listening to Rancid’s Out Come the Wolves and Let’s Go, when she had still lived at home, and it drove me crazy. I really hated it. Songs like “Junkie Man” and Tim Armstrong’s vocals just drove me nuts. But listening to it, six, twelve months later, I liked the attitude and the aggressiveness to the music. So the Cranes and Rancid became my two favorite bands. I had a sad band and a more aggressive band, and that set my musical tastes. Back to my father—when I finally did start playing music, a lot of it took shape from things he left around. He knew a student selling a bass guitar and that’s how I got my first real electric bass. So instruments and old equipment he hasn’t wanted have ended up in my hands over the years. And he’s shown me some things, but we never really got working or playing together. Trying to be instructed by him was never very successful. His style of teaching didn’t work for me and I would get frustrated. And I would say my style of music is a lot different than his, but I really have a lot of respect for him as a musician now, and he helped me write a couple of my first songs.

GGD: Tell me a little bit about the different bands that you’ve been in, and how each project evolved out of the last, if there was any sort of continuum between them.

CB: My first band was a punk band in Northfield and we went through about five different names—every time we picked a name, a month later or so we’d look on the internet and realize it was already a band. And that was raw punk music. We had a UK Subs cover and a Black Flag cover and a Clash cover, if that puts it in the ballpark. So that lasted about a year and ten shows. Then there was Cock Pliers. I was living with Rex Weaver and Justin Plank in downtown Northfield—Rex is now in Team Robespierre in Brooklyn and Justin is in Gospel Gossip and Tailchaser. We were all in the same apartment complex, upstairs above the bank where Jesse James was defeated. Rex had always been a guitar player, and he started experimenting. He got a drum machine and a computer and he started making drumbeats, and then he would go back with Midi and add more layers until it just became a wall of blastbeats. He would tell me to come listen, and it would get so ridiculous by the end of the minute that I would laugh and walk out of the room. He started playing guitar along with this and writing songs, so I became the live bass player and his brother was the singer. I wasn’t that good on bass and his brother was going to school, and so I took over on singing for the next three years, but it was always a kind of on-and-off project. Whenever Rex was in town from college, for winter break or the summer, he would bring in a few more songs. Justin wrote some songs too. I started writing lyrics, and we’d record a few things and released three EPs on CD-Rs and sold twenty of each of them, and bought a couple of cases of beer with the money. So that was Cock Pliers. Then about a year or so after the last Cock Pliers show, I stopped drinking and started playing music again with the Blackthorns, which had already formed and recorded a demo. Christian Petty had started the band, who’s in Poor Weather Club now, but they didn’t have a bass player, so I started playing with them, and that lasted about two and a half years. After the Blackthorns broke up, I was going to school for sound arts, and I started making some ambient, industrial soundscapes. I had a sampler, and I got a four track tape machine, and started learning how to work with sound on computers. So I made some spooky sound effect pieces. But there wasn’t really any playing out or live shows going on. I played with Luc the Drifter, which went on to become the Chickadee Mountain Martyrs, for a little bit, and I played with Helena Thompson of Purest Spiritual Pigs—she does industrial music. I also played with Matt Lily from Woodcat, a band who’d shared the Blackthorns practice space, who plays an MPC drum machine sample. A mutual friend said he and I should play some music for her birthday, so the two of us started playing together. We did one show and attempted to do another one and had terrible technical problems. We kind of got scared after that. Then six months later, Christian and I talked about playing music again, and started sitting around with our bass and guitar and writing songs, and we got Matt into the band two or three months after that, and started playing as Poor Weather Club.

GGD: How would you say that your work has changed over time, and what have you learned from each thing you’ve done that you carry through?

CB: I’ve heard a few different authors and artists and musicians I admire say something along the lines of, “I’m always saying the same thing.” And I think that makes sense. Most people tend to go through life repeating the same message in one form or another. And that’s been the case for me. I’ve recently started to experiment with major chords, and maybe that’s a change. I’ve learned more about music theory as I’ve gone along and that‘s given me a different way to think about things. It’s interesting to me that Poor Weather Club still gets an Americana label on the review of Escondido in the City Pages—the terms “folk” and “Americana” were tossed around and I don’t think it makes a lot of sense. I can maybe see it in that it’s not really rock music in the sense of stuff that gets played in bars, and it’s not a big distorted guitar sound, and it doesn’t really sound like rock guitar, so maybe that’s evocative of folk music.

GGD: What is the songwriting process for Poor Weather Club? How do you start and finish a song?

CB: There have been two models. For most of the songs it starts with either a guitar riff Christian has or a riff that we spontaneously start playing together, and then we spend six months hashing through it and making it into a song. Some of the songs on Escondido were based around sounds I had. Track #4, the title track “Escondido,” and “Time Schedule,” were based along simple parameters I had. Christian added some stuff on top of that. Matt didn’t play on Track #4. Escondido was already a finished song. Since the album there have been two more songs like that, but mostly it starts with a riff or two that Christian and I have, and we spend a long time making it into a song.

GGD: What sort of feelings or musical sensibilities were you trying to achieve with this album?

CB: Musical sensibility is something sort of different, something new. I wanted a range of feelings. The albums I’ve enjoyed the most cover a spectrum of human emotion, and records that I get bored with tend to have songs that all sound the same. So I wanted an album where not all of the songs are created equal, and there’s a mix of emotions and feelings. I wanted a lot of variety, to make sure the songs weren’t all in the same key, that there was a mix of tempos to some extent—of durations of the songs, short songs and long songs and an emotional mix. We were pretty successful in achieving that. There are big dramatic songs, some that are rockers, some that are more retrospective and melancholy, and songs that are short interludes and aren’t trying to steal the spotlight and play a leading role, that are content to connect one piece to another and form a progression that makes the album work as a whole. The last consideration in making the album is that it really is designed as one whole unit. Four of the songs blend together, one song into the next, and it’s not really made for an iPod to put on Shuffle. So there was a lot of thought put into the sequencing of it.

GGD: What would you like to do next?

CB: The first thing that sprang to my mind is to react a bit to this Americana label. I don’t want to be radically shaped by a comment that somebody else made. I just want, maybe for the first song of the next record, to have something that could in no way be construed as Americana or folk music—like a track of pounding metal, or something bluesy or industrial or punk. Something that has nothing to do with the pretentious baggage that sometimes comes with a lot of music, not just folk and Americana.

GGD: And finally…you seem to have an extreme distaste for something called Uggs. What are they, and why do you hate them so?

CB: It’s more than just Uggs. There are a number of brands of fuzzy boots out there. I know Sketchers makes one too. Over the last few years there have been a lot of shapeless fuzzy boots worn in the colder months by females, and I think they look like shapeless footbags. Since they’re fuzzy and tan, they look terrible when they get dirty, and they don’t have any sort of heel or any shape or any interesting sole, so they look like people just put their foot in a paper bag and walked out the door. But we seemed to have reached a point where they’re finally catching some flack. I know the VitaMN had them in a Worst Trends thing. So I think their three or four year reign is coming to an end. Now it’s all summer dresses and skirts and cowboy boots or harness boots, or laceless boots of different sorts. Those have been all over the place the last two summers. Uggs are just a symptom of a larger problem. I get uncomfortable when I see whole crowds of people wearing the same thing, whether it’s frat guys in white baseball hats or forty punks in identical studded jackets. And it makes me question why people would choose to fall in line like that.

What does this mean for the Broader Implications of Culture? Comic book authors are now considered literary luminaries, even when they’re not in Springfield, hanging around the Android’s Dungeon. Gaiman and Spiegelman haven won all kinds of awards usually meant for the authors of books that don’t have a lot of pictures–meaning that the gatekeepers of High Culture have admitted them to the inner circle of Intelligentsia. (That’s good news for the rest of us who have loved comic books for years but feared being “out” about our obsession, lest we be labeled “non-readers”…more on that later.) Gaiman got a Newberry Medal of Honor and Spiegelman has a Pulitzer. So what kind of honor does a Simpsons appearance bestow? For one, the respect of a noted social satirist with excellent taste in literature–Matt Groening. If you divide the world neatly into readers and non-readers as a personality type, and I would argue that you can, Groening falls pretty squarely into the “reader” category. But the other, more important reason, is that the Simpsons is a great show with smart writing that reaches billions of people every week, as it has for the past twenty-four years. This means millions of people are exposed, from time to time, to the names of writers living today who are writing interesting and important books. So, in a way, The Simpsons is kind of like an Oprah Book Club for people who are way too cool for Oprah…and that means more to non-readers than Newberrys and Pulitzers. Hence…billions more potential readers. So for those who want to prevent that dreaded “death of literature” people keep talking about, an appearance on the Simpsons may be the most prized award of all.

For all those reasons, I am looking forward to seeing Neil Gaiman in yellow, arguing with Homer about…well, anything, really. For me, it’s quite simple: I love the Simpsons. I love the work of Neil Gaiman. They go great together. End of story.

Photo credit: 3ammo, Flickr.com.

Back in my college days, I took a tutorial on art and activism, trying to look at ways that one could be, or approximate, or even just inform the other. Now, thirteen years later, I have done both. Based on my experiences, I have concluded that art and activism require two very different kinds of thought-processes. In some ways they are opposites. To be an effective activist means looking for specific opportunities where a specific change could be made–getting higher wages for poor people, more pay and resources for teachers, cleaner energy, recognition of the rights of same-sex couples, organic food in schools and hospitals, keeping information free and accessible on the internet, et cetera–and creating a targeted campaign with measurable milestones along the way. The reason is that having specific goals achieves specific results. You feel like you’re actually getting somewhere as opposed to just talking about the problem all the time. But being an artist means that you have to look at the big picture–ask not just how, but why, and perhaps more importantly, why not. There are several reasons for this. One is that it’s easy to forget, as an artist (or, for that matter, as an activist), that what you’re doing is ultimately for the benefit of all people–not just the ones who are a part of your circle, people who “get” you intuitively. You also have to reach people who are quite different from you. Otherwise you are just talking to yourself. And while it helps for activists to remember this, even if it’s not always necessary (again, because of the specifics involved), it is absolutely critical for artists to remember this. I don’t know how many times I’ve been surprised by someone’s tastes (“I didn’t know Harold Bloom was the kind of guy who reads Thomas Pynchon!” or “Wow! That stuffy old English professor digs on the Ramones!” et cetera) but it’s been often enough that I began to think after a while, “Why does this stuff even surprise me anymore? Am I not giving people the benefit of the doubt?”

I think it really clicked for me today when I was looking through a photo series on FB, posted by a friend of a friend. They were gorgeous, naturally–she’s an MFA candidate at the U of M. Then I happened to see a quote on her quote list that really made the gears start to turn: something to the effect of, “we don’t ever really know anybody else.” And it was a poignant reminder to me of just how complicated all of us really are. While this is kind of a no-brainer for most artists, it’s been a difficult concept for me to comprehend and articulate as an activist. Complicated beings are capable of wanting not just something that’s good and righteous, but its exact opposite as well…they might even want both at the same time. We all know the easy examples–radical feminists who secretly want to wear lipstick and high heels, vegans who long for a slice of bacon. (Never mind the even more obvious example of the committed couple with the straying eyes. Or the committed swinging single who, much to her or his dismay, falls in love.) But what about democracy-loving activists with secret power complexes? Anti-corporate activists who are so sick of poverty that a well-hidden part of them hopes they’ll  be hired by the very corporations they’re fighting? People often think that these contradictions undermine the ideals, and that if we pursue this line of inquiry, then the logical conclusion is nihilism. So they either start tamping themselves down and becoming as rigid and extreme as possible so that there’sno possible way they could ever give in to those secret, forbidden desires…or they throw their hands up in the air and become jaded cynics who make fun of the people who still bother to care about anything. But maybe there’s a third way. Maybe all that’s required is a little intellectual honesty, and some creativity, and God forbid, a sense of humor.

We’re bundles of contradictions. And not everything we want in life can be translated easily into a political campaign with specific and measurable goals. But it’s the job of art, and of artists, to reflect the whole spectrum of human existence. Art and activism inspire one another, maybe even require one another, and that’s something I’ve managed to take from my years in both pursuits. But I’ve also learned that one is not substitutable for the other. In activism, right and wrong are clearly defined. They have to be in order to achieve a goal. But in art, there really isn’t a distinction between the two. If you have activism, or activists, who don’t have a clear sense of right and wrong, then you get nothing done. If you have artists who have too clear a sense of right and wrong, then you get propaganda. Neither one achieves its intended purpose. There’s volumes more I could write about this, and in order to really do the topic justice, I’d have to write a book, not a blog posting. But that’s probably the quick and dirty synopsis of about ten years of work and reflection…and a good enough note to end on.  (For now, anyway.)

Photo credit: MPLS55408

One thought I’ve had is that sound travels farther at night due to a lack of interfering noise. The difference between night and day is especially noticeable in the city, where the constant traffic provides a white noise during the day that we tune out because our brains are used to hearing it. In fact, 35W runs through South Minneapolis, and even if you can’t differentiate the sounds of individual cars, it’s always there in the background. At night, when there is almost no traffic, there is almost no interfering noise and sound can travel farther. Besides that, the cooler and denser air at night is a better medium for sound to travel in–something you can read more about here.

To my ear, the sound is almost like that of two large pieces of metal hitting each other, which led me initially to think that maybe it was a river barge docking, or hitting another barge–something that makes sense given the what the first blogger said about the sound occurring at regular times. Or maybe it’s train cars coupling and decoupling, as suggested by someone on the Twin Cities Daily Planet blog.

Or, maybe, it’s none of the above.