In an effort to escape the regime of thinking, my and some friends headed over to Karl's to kill the night with Tee Vee. We watched the brilliantly pointless Aqua Teen Hunger Force (seriously one of the best things going), and then a couple of episodes of Northern Exposure.
Northern Exposure was a successful attempt to make an intelligent offbeat sit-com, in the truest sense of all those words. Ultimately, it fell to Romantic Nationalism but not intentionally so, it reminded me of an article I have yet to read,
James Miller's "inventing the 'found' object" that contends that
"mainstream or popular ethnography in the 1930s (despite its often explicit interest in critiquing or challenging commercial modernity) came to underwrite a particular and highly over determined narrative of corporate-capitalist 'progress.' " For all it's well-intentioned jingoism, it did have one particularly short exchange between Chris the philosophy Spouting DJ and Ed the taciturn Indian Filmmaker that I thought mirrored in three minutes the history of folklore.
Chris begins to tell Ed all about the wonders of Democracy, in fact he had just stepped outside to "breathe the air of democracy" -
there's yer Romantic Nationalism. Then he says, "The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment."
yup, that's performance theory (it'll take all semester to learn this but everything between Grimm and Ben-Amos is basically BS) and finally the metaphoric nod to postmodernist theory comes when Ed asked Chris who he's gonna vote for; Chris says, "I'm a convicted felon Ed, I can't vote."
Afterwards, and even more enlightening, we watched Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" supposedly a "watershed movie" of Allen's. It is terribly shallow, solipsistic and self-referential; this last aspect appears in multiple levels. It is in many ways "postmodern" self aware and little more than a regime of surfaces. But it didn't ring true, because it didn't meld to aesthetic of postmodernity. Which only begs deeper questions: there's an aesthetic to postmodernity? And does a lack meaning actually imply deeper meaning? Or worse, meaning in its absence? Like the old Ayn Rand saying (via Neil Peart of course) "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice", similarly if you've chosen not to say anything, what does
that choice say? As opposed to Allen’s movie, which very self-consciously says nothing, saying nothing says something. Doubly so if self-consciously so. Are you following me? It gets complicated and unnecessarily deep in some quickly, but drives a deeper point is there and aesthetic (which implies meaning) to postmodern veneer? Which -by the way- is decidedly NOT Michael Ann's take of Pomo-Ethno...but you'll learn that soon enough my pretties.
In any case, a perfectly good thoughtless evening has been thwarted.
