X Marks...The Chicken?

(2000-04-15)

So it's like, what, my fifth or sixth entry or something. One thing I've found out about this diaryland thing? It's like, me and eleventy-five thousand teenagers writing from that Zaphod Beeblebrox place. You know the one. Whereupon entry into the Total Perspective Vortex, powered by a piece of angel food cake wired to a Brownian Motion Sensor (say a nice hot cup of tea) you can see yourself in relation to the universe...and once and for all understand-- hey, it DOES revolve around you!

I'm not in that place anymore, if ever I was, but I know *I* can't discern that from the previous drivel with which I've been glopping up bandwidth. I apologize, because if any of you found me here by looking at my Profile, you were probably expecting something more pithy, or at least more interesting than the dial-tone-like crap I've been writing. Nah, don't click on it, here's the Profile:

"My name is Lexi. I'm hurling like bullet through a fastball towards my 30th year on this planet, and I'm just trying to figure out what to do with the next 30. I am but one humble, cocky representative of the 75 million unsung, glorified, starry-eyed non-romantics; the silent screaming generation; that TV-bred, tuned-out charitable self-centered zealous apathetic generation known simply as...X."

Yeah. A study in opposites we twenty-somethings are, a hotbed of red, white, and (black and) blue American talk-show fodder bound by one contstant: our incontrovertible LACK of definition. And our mostly-good hair days.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm an art history and literature buff. (Buff. Worst word ever to describe "scholar" or, I dunno, "dweeb." And yet I use it.) The coolest thing about the "art" produced by each generation, society, culture, or era is what the work of art shows us about that time/people. I like to consider the "great questions" of 'Who Am I?' and 'What Is My Place In The World?' and look to the art created by a certain sub-group of history to find how they'd answer 'em.

For a simple example that we all learned in 7th grade, take the early classical period of Athens, like 400 bc. Ask those two questions of young Nerdicles (I dunno, I made him up) while he's on a break from the Parthenon construction crew , and he'd likely say "I am a man, a mere servant of the gods" and "I am here to honor the gods and avoid Their terrible wrath,see this here temple we're building?" then he'd explain to you about the delicate balance between the city-state and the "individual," and how one single "man" better not get too big for his fig leaf or be struck down by Nike. A couple generations later, and Nerd's grandkids will answer you differently, talking about Socrates' new, rather more self-centered advice, summed up in our history books simply as "Know thyself." Euripedes' plays are all about "the individual," and the generation gap there is played out between his and Aristophanes' good ol' classical god-focused subject matter, with Plato and Aristotle adding fuel to the humanism fire with new doctrines of "reason" and "logic." Let the gods show the way? Pshaw! Suddenly sculpture and painting weren't depicting the gods, but celebrating real men-- athletes and soldiers and rulers.

And so it goes, belief systems and traditions and LIFE spiraling downward and onward through time, ebbing and flowing and coming right back to the starting point, over and over. Pick a time, pick a place, pick a people, learn through their art what they were all about. I went to Paris a few years ago, and found, with a warm and connected-ness feeling, that in cities much older than anyplace in this country, the art isn't in a museum. It's the library you walk into. It's the bridge you just drove over. It's the church where people go to mass. It's the crepe you got from the crepe-guy on the street.

Now look around you right now. Got some slices of culture around ya do ya? Close your eyes and take silent inventory. Whadja get in your in-box? I got a Planet of the Apes postcard, a Carrie (Stephen King) postcard, South Park, Pink Floyd, a Beanie Baby, three Beatles dolls, Snoopy and Woodstock, three guitars I can't play, a keyboard I can't play, two dead plants, an A-Team lunchbox, hundreds of CDs, hundreds of music magazines, all the characters in Winnie The Pooh rendered in hard, colorful rubber, black and white framed photos of Jim Carrey, Clint Eastwood, Lucille Ball, and the dog from "Mad About You." And a white, fluffy chicken called "Cornelius" who has an on/off switch in his ass which causes him to bob and sway to "The Chicken Dance" polka.

Just think how the history books will sum US up.