symbols, rotten with perfection

i blogged about the role of emerging media in shaping a discourse in a a blog a few days ago...

tonight i wanted to briefly offer part two.

in this particular case, the "emerging cool alternative" wannabes are linked to a pretty widespread, but still pretty diffuse and developmental, movement which is most often being called "emergent" -- for some emergent church, for others emergent culture.

obviously i could spend a lot of time talking about the implications of *this* term EMERGENT -- but that is SO not the point that I want to focus on. What I think is interesting is something that happens in this cycle, but it happens so often and in so many ways that it seems worth commenting on --

the term itself -- emergent -- is not a neccessary or fated term that was needed or arrived upon as the ONLY or BEST term to use to bind together a group of people. It did, for whatever reason, though, become a term that "fit" just the right number of people with interests in common AND that gave *leeway* to just enough people who disagreed that it became a touchstone for this particular social movement.

But what's interesting to me is that its already in this position (in the case of this blog entry) where it is being used as a code to ingroup and outgroup. In other words, the term is starting to rigidify. Names have to do that, don't they? Because if they actually just stand for agreements -- implicit contracts (as opposed to articulating some kind of implicit unequivocal nature) -- then they have to bind in some way. And its particularly ironic in this case -- or in any case where a social movement wants to be positioned as counter- or radical or revolutionary. Because as soon as you find a symbol that will do for the job you have in mind, you've already started to define the death of your own movement. What was fringe is becoming central....

Russ commented on thrifting being co-opted by the preps (after this blog entry -- when will Russ get a blog?! He's such a natural! And while I'm at it -- where's the best music list for this year, Russ?). Merchants of Cool articulates the practice of coolhunting -- which is the same sociological phenomenon, only its being run by big corporations.

My blog title emerges from the writings of one of my critical forbearers -- Kenneth Burke. He loved this idea that all symbols are shot through with a future arc. That they don't just act as contracts about the way things are between us -- but that they're prophecies about the future that will be worked out between us, too.

There was a radio station in my hometown when I was going to high school that was bought out by a national chain and changed their identity to the NEW sunny fm. Only they were the NEW sunny fm for at least four years. I remember that we would debate about where they got their sense of legitimacy to maintain the term -- was it because no local stations were newer? Because the top 40 hits they played were constantly (re)fresh(ed)?

So the contract that anyone ever wanted to have with Sunny FM had expired -- long before the station did -- because the symbol that they chose to employ to constitute a public -- went rotten.

The thing is -- this is related to my musings about liminal identity, too.

I've usually tried to resist being pulled into the centre of discourse in most of the institutions that I've been a part of. I try to craft a position that's deliberately liminal -- that allows for the chaos. Such a neither/nor position is a position that doesn't risk investment in a symbol. And if you don't risk investing yourself with a symbol (like Emergent or New or Liberal or whatever...) your relevance won't fade with the insitution.

But the kicker is -- neither will you have fully established contracts with anyone -- or at least not with any "public." You're doomed to a dogma of the American Individualist -- always open to the possibility of personal reinvention, but irrelevant to what's happening on a larger scale...

Sorry to blather on...

No more theory for a few days, eh?

Peace~

wobbly teeth * celebrity dreams

Tonight we were riding home from the grocery store when suddenly a LONG profound silence from Jaelyn pooled in the back seat. I turned around and turned on the overhead light.

Have I told you before that my daughter who has the biggest, most beautiful brown eyes in the universe also has an uncanny ability to spill buckets of tears from those eyes at will?

I’m not talking about crying. I’m talking about a unique ability to sit silently, wide eyed and cry tears so violently that her face is soaking within a minute?

The moisture is building in her eyes.

ME: What is it Jaelyn?

Niagra Falls.

JAELYN: I almost broke my tooth.

ME: You what?

Have I told you before that my daughter has the most astonishing oral fixation yet documented (in my somewhat limited experience with such things) in a four-year-old? That she not only chews her fingernails and hangnails and dolls feet and hands and teddy bear paws, but also the sleeves of all of her shirts. And what’s more – tonight, she decided to chew – to pull violently – to … I don’t know what she was doing…snapping her elastic black pants with her teeth?

And sure enough, one of her front lower teeth is loose.

It was such an interesting moment, because the flood of her tears came to feel like Eden lost...they were genuinely pentitent, but neither she nor I could do nothing to reverse the angels at the gates with the flaming swords.

Everythingteeth.com (or something like that) assured us that four year olds are the right age to lose their teeth (even if mother nature gets a bit of help).

I cuddled her on the couch as she sobbed after I explained that the tooth would probably fall out, and though she would have a hole in her smile, a new tooth would eventually grow. Its amazing and horrible to feel the weight of a four year old dealing with the profound understanding that a choice she has made is undoable.

Is it true that in general, as a child, you get used to the idea that the world is not so much fixed as it is routine? That all that happens may well be purged and cleansed by the next time around? New Years doesn’t matter because years aren’t picking up speed and there's no great loss if you miss an opportunity this time, because it doesn't affect all the future opportunities you'll ever have....?

Freudian psychologists say that if you dream that your teeth are falling out – you’re fearing your own mortality. I don’t dream my teeth falling out, but I have been dreaming ALL THE TIME of being on trips – to far away places – amalgams of places I’ve lived and places I’d like to go. In every case, I run into old friends, and together we spend time with more recent friends. And I know that something is about to happen in these dreams.

Oddly enough (this is very strange for me), I’ve had celebrity dreams twice in the last week. Last night I was hanging with a bunch of friends (Burt, Brenda, Brendon, Natalie & Lynn) in a library that overlooked the Santa Monica Beach. And what’ya know….guess who was there? Jennifer Anniston! She engaged me in some banter about the note I had sent Brad. She’s been so funny about pretending that I’m really the snooty one to get to know – and people accuse HER of it! Imagine!

Two nights before that an old family friend that Lynn and I share – who just happened to be a dignitary in Iran before the Shah fell, asked Lynn and I to take Sheryl Crow to lunch at the local casino. He wanted to get our opinion of her before he asked her to sing at a fundraising lunch he was having. She was also very funny, really joking around and everything with us.

I’m not the guy who’s a star-f*$#er. I really have very few parasocial relationships with media figures, and I’m only interested in the phenomenon of celebrity in a very distant objective way.

So what do these dreams mean?

Will Jaelyn’s tooth fall out?

Stay tuned in 2004

for answers to these questions…

…and more.

peace~

Happy New Years

Do you make new years resolutions?

For the first five years of my adulthood I asked everyone I knew and met that question when this time of the year rolled around. I needed to figure out who I wanted to be in regard to this particular ritual.

There’s so much I like about New Years Resolutions – but over and over again – I’ve made them and failed to keep them. Occasionally one or two (out of ten or eleven) have stuck, but enough failures have governed my expeience of the new years resolution that every few years I swear them off altogether.

This year – they seem like an embodiment of hope. You know, the endless possibility that we’ll manage to do something better.

One thing is for sure – I’m going to always stay devoted to my new tradition (sorta new anyway) New Years Reflection.

Today I glanced back through a bunch of journaling that I did during the summertime, all my old blogs (something like 100 pages in word – I guess I’ve written a book), some of my tenure documents, my perennially amended “List of Thirty Things I Want to do Before I Die” and other scraps of reflection from previous years. I sewed them all together in a 25 page document in order to spare YOU, dear reader, from reading all the things I’m thinking about in regard to myself, the world, and change (because that’s what New Years is about right?).

In the end, I ended up with QUESTIONS instead of RESOLUTIONS. I really like this idea. It’s more my groove.

1. How can I increasingly faithfully tell stories to the audiences I have? How can I faithfully tell stories in a way that will develop my voice?
2. How can I bring SHALOM and JUSTICE to the people who live around me?
3. How can I sustain an identity comfortable in the interstices & devoted to the margins while still participating in the life of the institutions with which I’m engaged?
4. (to those around me) What do you want next? What do you want most?

I love this last one. It’s a question that welled up in a journal on my birthday last year.

I think I’ve failed more profoundly with that one than all the others (perhaps because it’s the one that I’m best equipped to do) these last five or six months – but that’s a different list. Not for the blog. You thought my sincerity posting “ouch” from a few weeks ago was painful – just imagine the tasteless solipsism of being subjected to a list of GREATEST FAILURES FROM THIS YEAR. But I have hope. Loads of it.

Hope you’re off to a good start thus far in 2004. Been thinking of you lots lately (unless I don’t know you, in which case, I speculate about you a lot.)

peace~

Oops.

i've got a three post running cycle of one word title postings.

remember how i liked the idea that i was frozen in a kind of long-term ugh....

while i was driving (far from connectibility) and opening presents and hanging with the fam -- I decided that I *didn't* like being frozen in a long term "ouch".

I still love _Blankets_ and i still feel scarred by fundamentalism -- but the idea of being in a position of "genuine" emotional pain for however-many-days-that-post-has-topped-my-blog seems embarrassing to me.

like i'm a guy who's just constantly "put upon by the the world, and nobody 'gets' him..." to quote a favorite movie (_the good girl_) from this year...

and again my meta-analytical thinking is about the nature of speech in different mediums. The way that writing / text / archives FREEZE the different inflections and gestures and poses that together compose our wholeness...feels a bit dangerous. Because if the wrong inflection gets frozen for too long, then it becomes the definitive one.

But aren't we always doing that as we think about our relationships with people? They become more and less of this or that as we think about them more in terms of their THIS and less in terms of their THAT.

Anyone else exhausted by holiday cheer? spreading Christmas across days and miles and families takes so much intention...

tonight should be fun -- we're following family tradition -- for the third year in a row -- traipsing off to see Return of the King -- I'm excited...haven't been this excited for a movie since the anticipation of schoolhouse rock (love R. Linklater + love M. White= will overlook J. Black). I'm officially disappointed by the movie (upon consideration, Ryan & Josh, if you're reading)....tho' I think its a fine rental for anyone who wants an entertaining movie....Just not what I'd expect from a collaboration between Linklater and White....

peace~