That's So American
part 1 of an occasional series
Middlespace Cadet Philly Gabe asked me to do something this year based upon the following theme: That's So American. On the quick, and on the surface, images of fat, white, inferior-ly educated, and ignorantly privileged people do come to mind. The Ugly American tourist is the icon I offer; here and abroad. I have my prototypes.
I've been thinking about this for a few days though because I have the cognitive space and I enjoy pondering. It's a very good topic. I thank Philly Gabe (for this gift from G-d) and I welcome topic input and critique (from you, the Middlespace Cadet Corps).
What is so American? Football. Guns. God. War. Beer. Cars. Television is so American. The fact that people are obsessed with television, live for television, and only have very close lifelong friends based upon similarities in TeeVee preference is so very American. The program COPS may very well be the epitome of "American." For example.
Over the fabled American Winter Holiday break and after we got back from central New York state "we went to do the bowling" as my kid said. Now obviously bowling is a fabled American pastime too. Everybody knows bowling is American. Nothing new about bowling being American, suffice it to say (I always wanted to typewrite, "suffice it to say").
In fact, millions of fat, white, inferior-ly educated, and ignorantly privileged TeeVee watching Americans do the bowling all the time. But fun bowling has changed since my graduate school Santa Cruz Surf Bowl days of the early '90s. Back in the day, bowling was still fairly working class, smokey, unsober, and was scored by hand. Perhaps we were the ironic hipsters for our time because we had our own shirts, bowling balls, and shoes and were easily--in our early 20s--the youngest people on league night. Graduate school dorks. Drunk on cheap domestic beer and tequila, sloppy loud, lousy with swear words, and bowling like a motherfucker every week.
So over the Christmas/New Year's school break we took the kids to what used to be an old, smokey, working class bowling alley that has been rehabbed, no reIMAGINED, into this thing called 300 Bowling; "an indoor recreational experience." WTF, right? In fact, "The ultimate bowling entertainment destination." No shit.
300 Bowling is faux-upscale-suburban wonderment. 300 is the bowling analog to Starbucks, Whole Foods, and Nordstrom; commerce that portends to be exclusive and haughty but is as mainstream as DuDos, Safeway, and Target. 300 Bowling is very American in that all-inclusive, no-think, ADD kind of grift that is the beauty of capitalism. It's bowling's Club Med, I suppose. I won't even get into a social psychological analysis of 300 Bowling because it's just too plainly obvious...at least it should be. And it is as fucking genius as it is blasphemous to what was cooly ironic about bowling. The place was packed even in these economic times; packed with adult and child-sized humans (white) being served and helped by adult-sized humans (black).
The main feature of 300 Bowling (aside from the bowling) is it has continuous large screen video programming and very loud and non-stop pop music; hip-hop lite, bubblegum fawning, and the golden oldies. The video presentation is about 70 percent flashy, quick-edit entertainment programming, ten percent self-promotion (in the old-school subliminal suggestion kind of way), and about 20 percent straight advertising. The six of us dropped nearly $200 for two games.
But my So American moment came when a song called (I looked it up), Cha Cha Slide, came on. One would have almost predicted that after a few minutes in 300 Bowling most customers would so acclimate to the sites and sounds that any one song would just blend into the white noise that is the ambiance. But when this Cha Cha Slide started, I swear about 80 percent of the customers joined in. It was so fucked, I could have died. It was so beautifully American, I now feel ashamed for being so annoyed at the time instead of savoring what it was. It was a magical transformation before me like a gentle rain of diamonds upon my shoulders.
Cha Cha Slide is a hip hop line dance song that's like a dozen years-old. But apparently everybody except for me and my high-falutin', ivory tower, elitist, soap box, high horse dork bowling guests knows this song because everyone, it seems, "danced" it. In fact, the woman in the lane next to ours who's buzz-phrase, "Oh yeah," was so incessant (I'm still mimicking it), it could only be described as a tic, exclaimed, "Oh yeah!!" for real. Oh yeah!
If there's one thing I dislike, it's line dancing. I fucking hate line dancing so much. I hate everything about it. I hate it blindly. I hate it so blindly I have no words so here's what the wiki says:
A line dance is choreographed dance with a repeated sequence of steps in which a group of people dance in one or more lines or rows without regard for the gender of the individuals, all facing the same direction, and executing the steps at the same time. Line dancers are not in physical contact with each other. Older "line dances" have lines in which the dancers face each other, or the "line" is a circle, or all dancers in the "line" follow a leader around the dance floor; while holding the hand of the dancers beside them.
Line dancing is all about conformity, crowd-hiding, and spoon-fed simplicity in my opinion. It's easy and everyone can do it. People love that shit, too. And that's the problem. All of it. All the turn and spin and clap idiocy.
What I hate about line dancing is that it is so goddamn American, yet I love America and being an American. And I love bowling. So there is much cognitive dissonance with line dancing for me. Line dancing is Sarah Palin. And what is more American than Governor Sarah? Nothing, I tell you. Nothing!
---------------------------------That's So American thread [clicky]
WTF? Contact: ty[at]middlespace[dot]net
That's So American photography by ty.
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