Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Forty Years Later
Last week, the Cultural Discerners delved into U.S. film archives to re-consider (or, for many of us, consider for the first time) the classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, featuring Katherine Hepburn, Sydney Poitier and Spencer Tracy. Though the film was ahead of its time in 1967, and may still convict a lot of white folks who ardently claim they’re not racist, the overall conclusion of the group was that the film generally did not stand the test of time. We found ourselves having to forgive too many conventional flaws--overacting, flat characters, a stilted plot. Even these things can be overlooked as leftovers from stage convention that made their way into many films at the time, but the film also seems to be ideologically flawed, then and now. Though many, including some people of color, have tried on color-blindness as a solution to racism, the film is ultimately a film written by rich, white liberals for rich, white liberals. Sydney Poitier says his classic line to his character’s father like he really means it: “You think of yourself as a colored man! I think of myself as a man.” But the emerging black power movement, and even those viewers of color who simply saw some kind of value in claiming their identities, must have been cringing in their seats. The ultimate message--that love conquers everything, so let’s just ignore our racial differences--chafes against those who realize that addressing the problem of racism just isn’t that simple. When white people promote the message that color doesn’t matter, they necessarily dismiss those for whom color does matter very much every day, whether they want it to or not. Colorblindness is an advantage only the privileged can claim. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner certainly opens up many venues of conversation, but viewers should be prepared to receive the film’s messages with a critical mind.
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
GR Press: Over the Rhine review
John Sinkevics from the Grand Rapids Press positively reviewed the recent Over the Rhine show at the Fine Arts Center. We agree, drummer Mickey Graham’s impromptu version of “Sleigh Bells” in the middle of his drum solo was a highlight!
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Cool vs. Cool Industry
Each Wednesday night, the staff in our office meets with a group of students called the Cultural Discerners. These students are responsible for faith and pop culture programming on campus, as well as engaging in study themselves in order to be prepared for discussion and have at least the beginnings of a theology of the relationship between faith and popular culture.
Last night’s meeting a discussion about relevance, with an assignment to check out one of the following resources beforehand:
Kate Bowman Johnston on The Cult of Cool
Relevance discussion on Arts & Faith
Relevance discussion on Andy Whitman’s blog
Kevin Erickson’s ffm 2007 workshop
Adam Smith’s ffm 2007 workshop
We ended up talking mostly about the idea of ‘cool’: who determines what’s cool? what does that word even mean? what’s good and bad about it? what is the difference between cool and the cool industry?
I went home and my thoughts were moving to fast for me to sleep, so I picked up Wendell Berry’s Home Economics, and this particular passage seemed to have a striking connection related to the concept of cool vs. the cool industry, or culture vs. the culture industry. Berry is talking about the value of community by looking at the practices of an Amish couple, David and Elsie Kline. There are many theological differences between the practices we teach at Calvin and the practices of the Amish community, but I think this passage provides a helpful understanding of what we were seeking to critique in using the term “industry”:
David once attended a conference on the subject of community. What is community, the conferees were asking, and how can we have it? At some point, late in the proceedings, they asked David what community meant to him. He said that when he and his son were plowing in the spring he could look around him and see seventeen teams at work on the neighboring farms. He knew those teams and the men driving them, and he knew that if he were hurt or sick, those men and those teams would be at work on his farm.
Conditioned as we all are now by industrial assumptions, we must be careful not to miss or to underestimate the point of David’s reply: It is a practical description of a spiritual condition. With the Amish, economy is not merely a function of community; the community and the economy are virtually the same. We might, indeed, call an Amish community a loving economy, for it is based on the love of neighbors, of creatures, and of places. The community accomplishes the productive work that is necessary to any economy; the economy supports and preserves the land and the people. The economy cannot prey on the community because it is not alienated from the community; it is the community. We should notice, too, that David has described the economic helpfulness, the charity, that is natural to the life of a community--and free the members--that has been replaced, among most of the rest of us, by the insurance industry.
Certainly, there are advantages to ‘industry’--widespread availability of art and goods, division of labor, the potential for national and global conversations… But industry necessitates abstraction and it’s nearly impossible to use any currency of value other than money to determine whether the industry is ‘working’ or not. The value of love, humility, generosity--these things just don’t register with shareholders as a measure of ‘success’. This is a stark contrast to the Kingdom of God:
In contrast to the coldhearted bottom line of profit margins and market shares, Paul envisions a community that places something as inefficient and unprofitable as kindness at its heart. In stark antithesis to the self-assured bravado of the modernist or postmodernist self-constructed ego, this community values meekness--replacing the clenched fist of self-protection with an open hand of welcome and service. It abandons the arrogance of cybernetic mastery and global economic dominance for the humility of people who recognize that the fruit of creation is received as a gift from the hand of the Creator. Only in such humility is there the possibility of wisdom that can never be achieved through mere accumulation of information. The immediate gratification of insatiable desire has no hold on a community that is suffused with patience. We are here for the long haul, we measure time in terms of eternity, and our hope is for the restoration of all of creation. And since we know who finally accomplishes such a restoration, we can afford to be patient--waiting in hope. (from Colossians Re-Mixed by Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh)
I don’t necessarily like the idea of an ‘upside down’ Kingdom because it grants the dominant culture ‘right-side up’ status, but the Kingdom of God does indeed seem a significant transformation from today’s status quo.
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Monday, October 01, 2007
The Cult of Cool: Rejecting Relevance and Pursuing Faithfulness
[this article was previously published by Kate Bowman Johnston in Koinoinia, the magazine of the Association for Christian Student Development.]
In the PBS Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool, journalist Douglas Rushkoff takes us inside a research facility that tracks trends via “cool hunting.” We see marketers performing an interactive exercise with a group of young boys. They show the teenagers corporate logos and celebrity photos and ask them to comment on the perception and reputation of each among their friends. After silently verifying agreement amongst themselves, the boys deem each “cool” or “uncool.”
When I speak to Christian audiences, whether students or professionals, I use the same exercise with a twist. I project images of Christians who are in the public eye, and I ask the audience to tell me whether these people are “cool” or “uncool.” The responses are eerily universal. Bono: cool. Pat Robertson: uncool. Switchfoot: cool. Carman: So uncool that he’s cool. Ned Flanders: a toss-up, since Flanders himself is not cool, but The Simpsons is.
After this battery of images, we assess what our responses actually mean. What do the “cool” Christians have in common? Usually non-conformity, edginess, a slight air of rebellion against the evangelical subculture. What do the “uncool” Christians have in common? They’re boring, they’re often corporate, they play by the rules and never deviate.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate that Christians are just as susceptible to the lure of coolness as anyone else. Consciously or not, we identify ourselves with what we consider to be cool while differentiating ourselves from that which we consider uncool. But we tend to make a mistake in addition to this. Because “cool” is today’s currency for attention and acclaim, we have convinced ourselves that being cool can make the world pay attention to our message.
In recent years, cool has become something of an idol for many evangelicals, especially young ones like our students, as well as for older people who think an aura of cool can help them tap into a particular demographic. By way of example, perhaps those of us in Student Development found the youth pastor in the recent hit movie Saved! to be an all-too-familiar archetype of what happens when you try too hard to be cool…?
In a slim book called In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen describes the three temptations of Jesus as the temptations to be relevant, to be powerful, and to be spectacular. These are our temptations, too. There is a great deal of pressure in churches today to be “effective,” which we mistakenly believe can only be done with relevance, power, and spectacular displays of both. And what is “cool” if not relevant, powerful, and spectacular?
I think this is a problem – not because the traits and behaviors we consider cool are bad in and of themselves, but because ultimately cool is an illusion. It is a smoke and mirrors trick, an unattainable unreality.
I’ve been using the word “cool” a lot so far, but what does it actually mean? What is cool, anyway?
When I last gave this talk, we were coincidentally just a few miles away from the geographic birthplace of cool: James Dean was born in Fairmount, Indiana, in 1931. But it wasn’t until 1955, when Rebel Without a Cause came out, that cool was truly born. When that movie hit the cinemas, youth culture exploded into middle-class white America, and so did the concept of cool.
In Dean and his contemporaries, cool was embodied by the very same characteristics we attributed earlier to prominent evangelicals today. Dean was dangerous, edgy, rebellious, a loner, misunderstood, a rugged individual. He played by no one’s rules but his own.
To flesh out why these traits and actions became synonymous with cool, I want to turn to Thomas Frank’s helpful discussion of it. Frank is a cultural critic whose most recent book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, was highly sought after following the 2004 election. In an earlier volume, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and Hip Consumerism, he theorizes that “cool” emerged as a consequence of the 1950s boom in mass production and technology-driven mass culture. With those developments came the fear of becoming a cog in a machine, unrecognizable, disposable, assimilated into the Borg. Conformity was simultaneously championed and feared, and Frank says its evils “are most conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness: sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and smiling white people standing in line to go to church” (p. )
By the 1960s, this fear of conformity had been transformed, through advertising and media, into what Frank calls “the countercultural idea: a bleak picture of repressive, homogeneous society and a prescription of transgression, rebellion, and liberation of desire as the solution.” Advertisers began to use themes of individuality, rebellion, and nonconformity as selling points, because they played on the anxiety of the public – and anxiety, more than anything else, moves product.
Advertisers today still know this, so anxiety about one’s coolness has only changed by degree. Obviously, mass culture has become so mass that it is global. It is everywhere. We literally cannot escape advertising. Douglas Rushkoff calls it “a world made of marketing,” and goes on to point out that the typical American teenager will encounter and process over 3,000 discreet advertisements per day—and 10 million by the time they’re 18. (This figure, by the way, was drawn from a study done very early in this new century, just as the Internet was hitting its stride. By now, the number of ads has grown exponentially.) Beyond blatant ads, television, films, and the Internet all feature integrated elements designed to sell “cool.”
Today, the “world made of marketing” still stars the rebel who is cooler than cool. But there is a problem: by and large, cool is communicated to us through the very institutions against which we are meant to be rebelling. Here’s how Frank puts it:
Today there are few things more beloved of our mass media than the figure of the cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates of the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out in a mohawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by his own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, … a soldier of fortune with explosive bow and arrow, a long-haired alienated cowboy gunning down square cowboys, or a rock star in leather jacket and sunglasses, he has become the paramount cliché of our popular entertainment, the preeminent symbol of the system he is supposed to be subverting. (p. 227 - 228)
These days, who is it that makes the rules about what’s cool? Advertisers and corporations have formed a symbiotic relationship with teenagers and college students. Rushkoff calls it “an enclosed feedback loop.” The deal goes something like this, according to cultural critic Marc Crispin Miller:
The MTV machine does listen very carefully to children. In rather the same way--if I can put it controversially--as Dr. Goebbels, [Hitler’s] ministry of propaganda, listened to the German people. Propagandists have to listen to their audience very, very closely. When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen, you have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they’re thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have. Now that’s an important distinction. The MTV machine doesn’t listen to the young so that it can make the young happier. It doesn’t listen to the young so it can come up with startling new kinds of music, for example. The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell to those kids. Now the young tend to be presented always and everywhere with what is in a way the most seductive thing there is, and that’s a mirror. There’s a mirror held up to them all the time. It’s the mirror as constructed by advertising and TV, but it’s the mirror that tells you that you are all there is to be, or you could be, if you bought what we have to sell. (The Merchants of Cool)
Obviously, cool has come a long and troubling way since James Dean was branded as its first representative. It is a commodity, and we buy it like it’s going out of style – which, of course, it is. That’s how cool works. Like all other commodities, the underlying premise is that you can never have enough or be enough. Cool is constantly changing, and so to keep up with it, you always have to buy more, although as soon as you do, the trends change again and leave you in the dust. You have to become a hip consumer.
By the way, do not be fooled into believing that because you are no longer a teenager or a student, you’re exempt from the world made of marketing. It is so pervasive that none of us can escape it. Examining these issues is crucial to your role not only as a Student Development professional but as a Christian, because this is the world that we live in as well. It is our responsibility to discern it and learn to navigate it and inhabit it well, so that we can equip students to go and do likewise. No more sticking our heads in the sand!
See, it was once possible for Christians to entertain the illusion that we didn’t have to deal with such worldly concerns as advertising and coolness. (Of course, that was always an illusion, but it was a tenable one for a long time.) Did God care whether or not you were cool? Of course not, God wanted good Christian boys and girls to behave themselves and definitely not resist authority or listen to rock music or wear Mohawks. I’m sure any of you reading this could testify that among your students, this is certainly not true today – at least not the part about rock music and wearing a Mohawk.
So what changed? When did evangelical Christians get the idea that it was important to care about being cool, and even that coolness can be a virtue?
The fact is, Christians changed right along with everyone else, just in our own self-imposed alternate universe. Because despite the stereotype, evangelicals are not exactly the squares we’re made out to be – at least not when it comes to technology. Stephen Prothero’s Washington Post review of Heather Hendershot’s book Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, points out:
Far from Luddites, evangelicals were early adopters of the holy trinity of 20th-century technologies: radio, television and the Internet.” (2004, p. B9). And here, Hendershot argues that, despite their reputation as anti-modern rubes, evangelicals have actually embraced for decades “any ‘modern’ means that could be used to spread the Gospel."” (2004, p. B9)
So it’s not the technologies Christians are afraid of – it’s the content. Technology itself is considered neutral – a mere vehicle for a message that can be either positive or negative, holy or sinful. Mainstream culture is sin-infested, evangelicals supposed, so why not create a holy alternative?
This accounts for the Contemporary Christian Music movement that began in the 1960s and still thrives today. Rock and roll was no longer devil music, it was a means to an end. Evangelicalism is its own culture industry, pumping out as many imitations of general market consumer products as the mainstream. Same medium, different message.
It seems inevitable, then, that the same kind of “hip consumerism” that infects the mainstream would eventually appear among Christians, as well. It started, I think, because there is so very much about American evangelical Christianity that is, in the eyes of the general public, tragically un-hip. If you have ever been a teenager, you know what this feels like. It is totally embarrassing. How many of us have yelled at a right-wing televangelist’s flickering televised image, “PLEASE SHUT UP! YOU’RE MAKING US LOOK BAD!”
And so, young Christians try to distance ourselves from such raving fundamentalists. We know that our friends, our non-Christian ones (or at least the ones we imagine ourselves making) won’t take us seriously – won’t take Jesus seriously – if we don’t differentiate ourselves from the way our elders have traditionally expressed their faith.
So we try to loosen up. But because of the elusive nature of cool, we experience the same anxiety as everyone else – only with an additional twist. Here’s how a young author named Patton Dodd, author of My Faith So Far, describes this:
Evangelical Christians can be an anxious lot. We—especially those of us who grew up with two social circles (church youth group, and public school friends)—are fantastically worried about our status as cultural outsiders. We want to be in. We want to be relevant. But we know we are out. We fear we are irrelevant. We feel we have been given a terrible choice: either Michael Landon and Highway to Heaven orAngus Young and Highway to Hell. For us, Coolness and Goodness are completely polarized. All of the high school and college social terror that exists in the mind of every teenager is compounded for evangelicals. Do we have the right taste? Are our t-shirts hip? Is our hair long enough? We drink socially, if moderately. We read novels. We watch all the independent films. We’re trying, really. (p. 1)
This is that nature of our double anxiety as Christians. We want to be cool, because being cool means being taken seriously. But we also want to be good, because being good means taking God seriously. Can we do both, we wonder? We can’t be cool by being good – remember our rebel consumer? Goodness is definitely not cool. But maybe, we think, we can be good by trying to be cool.
That’s where Relevant magazine comes in.
There is a lot that’s great and necessary about Relevant, a “lifestyle magazine” for evangelicals aged 18-34 that focuses on the latest in music, technology, movies, and popular culture in general. However, it is the most prominent example of the phenomenon I’m trying to illustrate, so that’s why I’m focusing on it—Relevant is a microcosm of cool. It functions as a lens to examine more closely some of the forces at work in American evangelicalism.
I have known Relevant’s editor for a long time, and I actually helped launch this magazine as an intern. I got involved with it because like so many, I was trying to resolve the tension between wanting to be a faithful Christian, while yearning to participate in popular culture.
That tension is a good tension. It is a necessary tension. For us today, it is the essence of figuring out what it means to be in the world, but not of it.
But Relevant tries to resolve that tension for us, by positioning itself squarely between the evangelical Christian subculture and mainstream culture, one foot in each. It fuses evangelical doctrine, traditional evangelical political perspectives, and a few select elements of Christian popular culture with slick, cutting-edge graphics; snarky, ironic humor; genuine celebrity interviews and endorsements; and reviews of all the latest gadgets, albums, and movies.
By all appearances, Relevant is just what young evangelicals are looking for. The reader maintains a sense of fidelity to Christian values without having to pass on being a hip consumer of popular culture. But there’s that phrase again – “hip consumer.”
Virtually the only thing Relevant does differently than other Christian publications is that it makes a more effective use of the language of hip consumerism. It contains basically the same content that Christian lifestyle publishing has been producing for years – treacle advice about romantic relationships, superficial reviews of albums. But in Relevant, that content is wrapped in hip package – the same strategy that today dominates mainstream mass culture, making us think we can control our anxiety by purchasing the latest representation of what we’re told is cool.
Thomas Frank puts it this way: “Hip consumerism recognizes the alienation, boredom and disgust engendered by the demands of modern consumer society, but it makes of those sentiments powerful imperatives of brand loyalty and accelerated consumption.” (p. 231) Similarly, Relevant recognizes the alienation, boredom, and disgust that young people often experience in evangelical subculture, but it transforms them into powerful persuasions for the Relevant brand and the products it promotes. It gives us a way to attempt coolness, but not at the expense of goodness, or so we think. Relevant eases our double anxiety.
But as usual, that means you have to pay to be cool.
So the pressure is on: Get the right t-shirt to show that you understand the irony of church legalism. “Bible thumper,” maybe, or “holy roller.” Maybe one that openly states, with boldness and a whiff of desperation, “I AM RELEVANT.” They look just like something from Urban Outfitters.
Buy the right albums to demonstrate that although you may have spent your youth jamming to Carman, you now recognize the pre-eminent brilliance that is Sigur Ros. Oh, you haven’t heard of them? Well, they’re kind of obscure. (Because remember, the more obscure the band, the cooler you look.)
Display your sensitivity and compassion and non-partisan nature by wearing a ONE campaign bracelet or slapping a bumper sticker on your car that declares, ambiguously, “Love wins.”
Pop in those white iPod earbuds so others will know you’re up to the minute with technology. So others will know that you’re no square. That you’re not one of those Christians.
Now, this is not to say that it’s innately bad to have an iPod or support the ONE campaign. But to believe that these things will somehow buy you social capital, make people take you and your message more seriously, is a lie. It is buying into the mistaken belief that relevance, power, and spectacular displays of both will make your Christian witness more effective, will help you “impact the world for Christ,” as the popular saying goes. But the quest for cool is a proverbial chasing after the wind. Next month, next year, it won’t be iPods, it’ll be something else. And you can never, ever be cool enough.
The question now is, what choice do we have? How do we break the cycle of consumption and the tyranny of cool? How do we resist the temptation to be relevant, to be powerful, to be spectacular?
Is our only choice to go back to the old ways – burning our “secular” CDs and wearing tidy outfits in order to demonstrate our fidelity to Christ?
No, I don’t think so. Others might suggest it – in fact, a recent issue of Relevant features an editorial that seems to critique readers for, ironically, being too much like the world. But “being in the world but not of the world” is not a binary endeavor. It is a both/and proposition.
That is why it is imperative that we develop a worldview that makes a home for movies and music and literature and fashion—things that are often seen as the embodiments of cool, but in reality are so much more. They are part of being human. Which, by the way, is a good thing.
Christians do not have a good track record when it comes to thoughtfully sifting through and discerning popular culture, because we tend to make it about easily compartmentalized choices. It is a lie that sin is “out there,” in the world, and that holiness is only found in the church. Every human being is sinful, and every human being is made in the image of God. Everything that human beings create contains both good and evil, because that is our nature, and so there is nothing that we can cast aside.
So as Christians, we must not cast aside what popular culture has to offer without a second glance. Some evangelicals are making great progress in this area; Taylor University, for instance, along with schools like Calvin and Messiah, are engaging with music and movies head-on, inviting mainstream artists to perform on their stages and discussing movies on their own terms, within the context of a biblical worldview. Following the ACSD conference in June this year, there seemed to be a great excitement growing among other Student Development workers to take up this mandate at their own schools.
But they’re not doing it to be cool. In that sense, we also must not embrace pop culture unequivocally as a badge of relevance, as an assurance that we are cool, especially because of the modern demands of being “hip consumers.” The truth lies somewhere in the middle, as we separate the wheat from the chaff. Cool is an illusion. The truth is so much bigger and more exciting than cool.
References
Dretzin, R. (Writer and Producer), Goodman, B. (Director and Producer), & Rushkoff, D. (Correspondent and Producer). (2001). The merchants of cool [Motion picture]. (Available from Public Broadcasting Service).
Frank, T., (1998). The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and hip consumerism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hendershot, H., (2004). Shaking the world for Jesus: Media and conservative evangelical culture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Prothero, S. (2004, April 18). Marketing the messiah. The Washigton Post, p. B9.
Dodd, P., (2004). My faith so far: A story of conversion and confusion. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Dodd, P. (2004, November 17). God’s awful music pure and clean.
The Revealer. Retrieved from http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timeless_
001230.php
Kate Bowman Johnston just finished her three-year tenure as the Student Activities Coordinator at Calvin College. She now resides in Philadelphia, PA, where she is working towards a Masters in Library and Information Science.
I want to acknowledge my debt to Kevin Erickson, a student at Whitman College, who wrote his senior thesis about Frank, coolness, and Relevant magazine. He allowed me to use his research and observations in my talks about coolness. I have only begun to touch on his wisdom and insights here. Look for a general-market magazine article from Kevin in the next year, where he explores the phenomenon in greater depth!
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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Red with NV
At first, I thought she was holding a bottle of the newest star-branded perfume. But what Carmen Electra is hawking in the relatively new Saatchi and Saatchi ad campaign is not something you spray on to smell pretty, but something you ingest to lose weight. ”I don’t do it for men. I don’t do it for women. I don’t do it for cameras or red carpets. I take NV for me.” Ah, the sound of the noble, independent woman. But is Electra really promoting a pure liberation from the critical eyes of men, women and the paparazzi? We have only to look as far as the name on the slick packaging to realize: no, no she’s not. NV is all about the perceptions of others, but only in as much as others can potentially boost our fragile egos with their delirious “NV”. Even the web address is shamelessly transparent: be-desired.com.
Saatchi and Saatchi is doing what ad agencies do best by crafting this thorough campaign, which was kicked off by a party featuring “a packed house of beautiful people.” The play by play of the party’s photo slideshow narrates the event: “Our stunning hostess makes her entrance. The press goes wild. Carmen Electra strikes her NV pose.” (This is news? And can a pose can be branded?) Complementing the hyped-up fluff surrounding the campaign, is a revolutionary way of packaging the product. This is not the infomercialized garish packaging of the suspicious diet pills consumers have come to expect, but the sleek, feminine look of a so-called “beauty pill” that promises not only weight loss, but beautiful hair, flawless skin and stronger nails. It’s a diet pill coming out of the shadows of the supplement store and into the bright lights of trusted “progressive retailers” like Wal-Mart, Target and Meijer.
If, as the film The Persuaders argues, the job of today’s ad agencies is to create an impenetrable culture around a product, S&S is doing a fantastic job, from the red lighting at the kick-off event to the list of helpful tips on the site and in the box such as standing up straight and focusing on your achievements rather than your failures. NV even served as the “official promotional partner” of the 2006 Mrs. America competition, giving a $2,500 cash award and a year’s supply of their product to top weight-loser, Mrs. Michigan (aka Jody Bernhardt) who lost 13 pounds in 12 weeks to come in at a competition weight of 115 pounds. “I like NV,” Bernhardt says on the site. “It doesn’t make me jittery like other diet pills I have used.” NV is, it appears, a culture within a culture in which diet pills are the norm.
For most of us, we’ll be seeing red with righteous anger, rather than “NV” as Electra frisks through the ocean on our television screens. But the fact remains that NV has doubled its profits every year since its introduction in 2000 and it stood to realize over 100 million in sales in 2006. Perhaps Electra is telling the truth after all about taking NV purely for herself. Ultimately, this campaign is about making an idol of how others perceive us, commanding that that perception be one of consuming envy and lust that is completely focused on our desirability. And we’re just not being true to ourselves if we’re not more desirable than everyone else in the room. With overtones of domination, competition and greed, the NV world stands in stark contrast to viewing others as the image of Christ and being a model of Christ in sacrificial love.
Perhaps the way of the cross wouldn’t stand up against the way of the pill in today’s marketing clutter, but there lurks a truth in the shadow of the cross more deeply fulfilling than, “Being an object of desire means feeling every bit as great as you look.” And that’s the fact that there’s never been a moment in the history of the universe when any one of us has not been desired by the Creator of all beauty.
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Monday, January 08, 2007
Eating like a man
In Issue One of Uncompressed, Brian Wuest observes and critiques the increasingly pervasive television advertisements that equate “manliness” with eating poorly (among other things). For example:
From Brian’s article:
The first message these commercials communicate to us is that it is manly to eat in an unhealthy way. In these we see manly men and manly meals, and a clear association between the two. Burger King presents us with two fine examples of such. First, this summer’s BK Stacker ad campaign: the BK Stacker is a sandwich that includes only bread, meat, cheese, bacon, and special sauce. It’s called the “Stacker” because you can choose if you want a Double, a Triple, or a Quad Stacker, the latter of which contains four beef patties, as the name suggests, and 68 grams of fat. The most interesting thing about this sandwich is the rhetoric used to advertise it. First, the advertisements emphasize the absence of any vegetables on the sandwich. “Hold the produce,” one paper ad read; “No vegetables,” a radio ad reported and a television ad included a boss yelling at a worker for trying to add a tomato to the sandwich. The paper and radio ad are especially interesting because they use the absence of vegetables as a selling point. No lettuce here, please; just the multiple beef patties.
A Burger King television commercial from earlier last year showed men running rampant through city streets in celebration of the Texas Double Whopper (two beef patties, bacon, cheese, vegetables, jalapeños). The riot is set off by one man’s decision to no longer eat “chick food.” Men begin crowding the streets, breaking cement blocks with their heads, punching each other in the gut, and eating “until my innie turns into an outtie.” “I AM MAN,” they triumphantly declare.
The Dairy Queen Chili Meltdown GrillBurger takes food’s gender-defining power to a more literal level. This burger’s commercial shows a male-female couple sitting on the couch, watching a weepy melodrama. The man is eating a DQ burger, and then woman asks for a bite. After tasting the burger, she nods appreciatively, then undergoes a transformation. She slides down in her seat, spreads her legs, places her hand in her pants, and switches the TV to a sports game. “Dude – pull my finger,” she says. As a result of such a manly burger, she’s becoming masculine (or the commercial’s perception thereof) in her behavior. And to eliminate any possible remaining ambiguity, the commercial ends with “It’ll make a man out of you.”
The message is clear: if you’re a real man, you’ll eat like a real man. “Stack it high, tough guy,” one Burger King add suggests. Men eat a lot, and preferably a lot of meat.It follows logically that the first message would give way to a second: as eating this food makes you a man, eating healthily makes you less of a man. Take a recent Hummer commercial. A man is standing at the supermarket while the cashier rings up his purchases: tofu, a large collection of vegetables, etc. Another man comes up and starts unloading his items, which must include half a cow of red meat. The two men’s eyes meet, and the vegetable man looks away sheepishly. The meat man has clearly proven his alpha status in the interaction. The vegetable man must go purchase a Hummer in order to reclaim his manhood.
I encourage you to read the rest.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Making light of popular film?
The past two issues of Chimes have contained articles questioning the value of film and popular culture. In “Remembering September 11” (9/8/06), Michael Lynn Hannink responds to the showing of the film United 93, suggesting that “to turn [September 11] into a big screen production for us to watch with a bucket of popcorn in our laps is more than disturbing…like we’re turning the pain of others into our evening entertainment.” One week later, Bethany Duemler published an article ("Art battles pop culture” 9/15/06), using the concurrent activities of a Pirates of the Caribbean film showing and the presentation of Juliet, a one-woman play about communist prison camps, as a means of exploring an apparent conflict between theatre and film. Duemler states that while ”Pirates of the Caribbean was created to provide viewers with the thrill and enjoyment of watching an action movie...[Juliet] needs no cultural discerners to create meaning as it will foster deep thinking without external aid.”
I affirm both of these writers for asking critical questions about how Calvin students spend their leisure time. Hannink rightly questions the tension between a commercial effort and a memorial of a tragic event, something students who attended the showing of United 93 were also encouraged to do. Duemler recognizes the unique value of live performance, a value the Student Activities Office promotes by encouraging students to experience live concert performances in addition to listening to music in solitude.
However, there are common threads in the arguments of these two articles that need to be addressed, particularly relating to the value of film and the tendency to elevate “high” art while denigrating “low” art, or popular culture. In terms of artistic value, the play Juliet may indeed have been more significant and a better choice for some students on Saturday evening. That said, it is possible to affirm the value of both Juliet and Pirates of the Caribbean for Calvin students without belittling either.
An approach to art that assumes a high/low culture dualism, making high art good and low art (popular culture) bad, encourages people to be flippantly dismissive about popular culture and carelessly accepting of so-called high art. To imply that a popular film does not require discernment is dangerous. All films, no matter how popular or “entertaining”, are packed with meaning and therefore in need of a discerning approach—that is, detecting meanings and sorting them out. Duemler’s assertion that discerning viewers “create meaning” is a common misconception regarding discernment. Discernment involves identifying the meaning that is embedded in the text of the art and we do well, at both summer blockbusters and intimate plays, to be aware of what the creators are attempting to communicate. Even art that naturally “fosters deep thinking” requires discernment and the creators of Juliet would welcome “external aid” for encouraging critical thought about the work.
Both Hannink and Duemler allude to a scorn for popular film as mere “entertainment”. Entertainment is neither the sole purpose of film, nor is it an invalid objective. Films rightfully entertain to varying degrees, but they also create space for shared suffering, education, conversation and transformation, depending on the subject matter and the intent of the creators. Film is one valid art form for negotiating our feelings following the events of September 11. Film also provides a means of engaging ideas in community.
Calvin College embodies the belief that all things matter to Christ and His Kingdom, including popular culture, and therefore all things ought to matter to Christians. Whether a particular student is called on a Saturday evening to be a part of a packed house in the Fine Arts Center or an intimate group in the Gezon Auditorium, each one has a responsibility to affirm the light of redemption and condemn the darkness of ruination.
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Friday, June 02, 2006
Body piercing saved my life.
Journalist Andrew Beaujon has published an excellent, detailed exploration of the underbelly of Christian music and evangelical subculture. We’d recommend this book anyway, because it is a meticulous, generous, and often funny treatment of a subject that usually garners a lot of pointing and laughing but not much in the way of substantive research. But we also recommend it because it devotes an entire chapter to Beaujon’s experience at 2005’s Festival of Faith and Music. Student Activities guru Ken Heffner is quoted extensively, and the chapter’s conclusion is poignant and challenging. Check out passages like this one:
It was too easy, I decided, to look down on Christians struggling with whether to engage the world outside. If you were raised, as David Bazan was for example, in a Christian culture where you had to twist yourself into intellectual knots trying to figure out a way to enjoy non-church-sanctioned music that nonetheless spoke to you, it’s a radical idea to allow yourself to look for God in the work of, say, Lil’ Flip. ...
Surely there must be limits to this approach. Is the divine revealed in John Waters films? Okay, bad joke. But what about in porn? In music explicitly hostile to religion? And are kids who’ve grown up experiencing every innovation in music, every film, every television show through the filter of evangelical Christianity, with its insistence on absolute truth, really going to have the tools to be as discerning as Ken Heffner wants them to become?
That, of course, is exactly why we’re doing the stuff we’re trying to do at Calvin, and I’m thankful that Beaujon got a glimpse into a different side of the Christian subculture.
This post already contains far too many fawning adjectives, so go ahead and pick up Beaujon’s ably-written study. You can also check out his blog, Body Piercing Saved My Life, which is already packed with interviews and reviews. (I recommend his personal blog for regular reading and sharp music criticism as well.)
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Nickel Creek reviewed.
In his review for the Grand Rapids Press, John Sinkevics had this to say of Nickel’s Creek’s energetic show at Calvin earlier this week:
Nickel Creek mandolin whiz Chris Thile has a theory about performing live, about making the trio’s time on stage something extraordinary to set it apart from the rest of the day.
“You try to elevate two hours out of the 24, make them totally different ... a more transcendent experience,” he told some Calvin College students Tuesday in a preconcert chat.
Mission accomplished.
You can hear aforementioned preconcert chat at our website. The mp3 is 29.8MB and 50 minutes long.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Behind the music.
Last weekend, Calvin hosted its biggest concert of the last 15 years. And that’s not just hyperbole. Between crews working around the clock (9am on Saturday to 5am on Sunday) to set up the Fine Arts Center and the opportunity to host this particular band at the height of its popularity, the Sigur Rós concert was historic in its technical scope and cultural significance.
If you were at either of the shows, you experienced this scope and significance firsthand. Now we want to fill in the gaps with some behind-the-scenes reflections. For instance, you might be interested to know that the front of house engineer noted afterwards that the 11pm show was the best of the Sigur Rós and Amina’s last 100 shows—thanks, in part, to the fact that the band had an opportunity to get to know some of its audience beforehand.
Calvin writers on…
Relevant magazine online featured two articles by Calvin folks (one current student and one alum) this week. Check ‘em out!
Sigur Ros concert review by Cara Daining
The Dark Side of the iPod Age by Phil Mollenkof
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Sigur Ros, Live at Calvin.
See more photos from this historic show at our gallery, and don’t forget to listen to the conversation with the band.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Speaking in tongues.
Paste magazine senior writer Andy Whitman went to see Icelandic band Sigur Ros in Columbus, Ohio, this week. His review is a foretaste of what’s in store for us at Calvin this coming Saturday:
Lead singer/cherub Jonsi played his electric guitar with a bow, like a mutant cello, and made unearthly sounds with his voice. “Eeeeeuuuuu Syyyyyy Ohhhhhh” he sang on at least six songs, his falsetto soaring impossibly upward. It’s Hopelandic, a made-up language based on nonsense syllables and his native Icelandic, but I’d prefer to think of it as the angelic dialect of the heart. That mysterious phrase, repeated many times, sounded at various times like longing, yearning, grief, sorrow, joy, the unanswerable questions you hurl at God when your best friend dies of cancer, the wordless cry of joy when you witness the birth of your child, a thousand other moments of spiritual combustibility and incandescence that cannot be contained by cognitive knowledge and understanding. If it sounds trippy, it is. The gauze curtain that the band sometimes played behind, accenting shimmering shadows and spectral shapes, and the late ‘60s Pink Floyd freakout lightshow, only added to that impression. But that’s the territory explored by this band. It has nothing to do with objective communication, and everything to do with hotwiring the soul to the ineffable and the sublime.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Waiting on the docks.
Waiting on the docks
by Kate Bowman Johnston
Network television is the bastard child of popular culture criticism—especially in Christian circles. While evangelical critics are, at long last, receiving film and contemporary music as important works of art, we are still trailing when it comes to engaging and assessing the small screen.
Read the rest of this article (including my top ten favorite television programs) at *catapult magazine.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Troubles.
Thanks to the miracle of Internet radio, you can hear our own Ken Heffner on Steve Stockman’s radio program (or should I say programme?), “Rhythm and Soul,” which broadcasts every Sunday on BBC Radio Ulster. Just click the “listen on demand” link to hear the January 8 show.
Ken is in Northern Ireland this month with his wife Gail, where they’re leading a gaggle of Calvin students through the intricacies of “the Troubles.” Their guides are Stocki himself, a great friend of our office and a celebrated author, and Justin Zoradi, who interned here in SAO last year and currently works with Steve at Queens University in Belfast. The group is learning about the difficult, fragile process of reconciliation and peacebuilding in a country that remains divided, and those on the trip are blogging about it daily.