The Dead Generation
November 18th, 2008by N.L. Belardes
BAKERSFIELD, CA-
I’m wondering if writers in my Generation X age group who contribute their talents to various sites and newspapers, and yet don’t feel like they’re a part of a literary movement, might feel a kinship to this particular piece that I have never shared publicly until now. The Dead Generation is an excerpt from chapter 9 of Citrus Girl, about a third of that chapter, and was written sometime between 1996 and 1998. Could all be drivel. It’s up to you to decide…
It’s 1996 and I’m thinking about Malcolm Cowley, one of the ‘lost’. There he was back in America and in the early 1930s writing of ‘mansions in the air’ and ‘blue juniata’, you know, contemplating future generations. Because back in America he realized an entire lost generation would eventually come back home to the cities, hillsides, countrysides to where innocence escaped them, to where in America, “somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood.” Those literary enclaves—the lost generation—the beat generation—any generation, generations inspiring non-writers and non-literary minded to become just as lost, or just as beat. After a while someone probably said, “You don’t have to be a beat writer or bop musician, or to have known any of the famous beats to be one” —and soon a generation having already took root, expanded, appeared in pop culture, subculture, counterculture, mainstream culture until all they had to do was just look like a beatnik, act like what they thought was a beatnik…
And now today’s dead generation—lost, but never forever lost and never completely forgotten—where are their slacker rebel origins? In Generation X literature? Do they create? Where were their childhoods? They were everywhere. Who writes about them? They aren’t so exciting. That’s me anyways. Where’ve the dead gone? —nowhere—yet somewhere, here in the cosmos. They creep out from behind their dark walls, don’t they? Like weeds as they reappear, return from where they’ve gone—to college, to travel, to their computers, to odd jobs, or no jobs, to corn-like cobs of rock bands, or just hidden deep within cities: isolationists. Find me—I say—reincarnated—enlightened—non-business-like—poets, writers and literary-minded young fools—where are you? Still gone? No. Rexroth once wrote: our murdered youth? Murdered: doing nothing and yet, they’re poor and exhausted—that’s their crime. I see them leaning or squatting against walls and smoking their dry cigarettes and contemplating themselves in reality and non-reality. I see them like me, in solitude—I am no Fresno poet—I scream from Southern Central California alone—I have yet to meet any poet. I am dead and alone in my valley… And I am part of it, and part of my generation. They come back you know, the intellectuals, the non-intellectuals and crawl back out of the big blue holes of life they’ve fallen into; even if they are gone, were gone, in all of their imperfectness, their wonderful imperfections of dress and crude sex, computers, drugs and malaise, to someplace I call, here, in the downtown city.
It could be any city…
And Cowley, he wrote that maybe the young writers of his age weren’t young or foolish enough. He wrote that they would “settle down too safely to earning a sensible living.” And how I agree with him—prophetic him—and live a life of poverty and deadness years later. He was a critic and a prophet. And Steve Delani—dead generation case study for the 1990s who wrote, but never enough, and never anything that left the confines of his smelly bedroom into the world, until he wrote his most devastating song. He picked up and motivated himself after years of living in trash heaps of homes and survived a wrecked marriage to finally go back to college, to become one of the intellectuals in my group of friends that had intellectuals, nothings, and pseudo-nothings in it. Then after a year of law school in Malibu, he said: “All I know now, is that after I get outta here I better be making shitloads of money…” And Steve Delani—not really a writer—never would be as he hung out with other dead generation guys, and those girls: slacks hanging from their hips in bar-haze glee and tattoos marking them Christ-like down to their feet. The dead are pretentious. They sit around and listen to music. They are intelligent and corny, and only go for the ones who don’t really want them—oh so romantic and American, why? Because that’s what we often do—and most often are poor and crude, and eventually, hopefully wallow up through the mud of life bursting with all the anxiety and push of a maelstrom to self-murderously throw ourselves into the world. Where are the dead? Cowley was talking about ex-patriates, the writers, and then the next generation of literary laborers. And Steve, he was never a writer though he was and is like me, a part of something and nothing, with no one to tell him that he is among the dead generation who should have stood around and said: “Look how dead we are. We don’t do a damn thing.” We should have united and had a vision of our dead selves but never could because of our lazy nature.
In the first half of the 1990s, Steve was in a constant state of: “I’ve gotta divorce my crack-smoking wife.” She was one of the ‘nothings,’ the white and trashy kind people around here that some stereotype as “north of the river,” “north of the tracks,” or, “Dalians,” —any of the uncouth, un-intellectuals, the brash and overly dramatic; out of style and unkempt; violent and screaming about money, their husbands and everyone else they don’t like. Those Dalians who could never find the spiritual, meaningful, or intellectual in anything literary. He was married to her while I studied history and toiled away in those same 1990s at something peculiarly American in my mind.
He finished divorcing his wife a year after he met a girl I like to think of as Cholera at a downtown bar. It was a similar meeting to how he met his soon-to-be former wife at one of the constant parties raging at a house party somewhere in Bakersfield. “So, you want to go do it, or what?” he said. She did and two kids later—he had two girls nearly the same age as my two boys—he found himself living with her noose around his neck, and her smoking crack, then hooked on pot, and both of them getting fat off biscuits and gravy and greasy burgers and each filling out at a whopping three-hundred pounds. And him wearing the same tie-dyed shirt and cut-off sweats everyday, even when he started school, and even when transferring out to the University many here call “Dartmouth of the Dust.”
While married he was bored. While separated he was a depressed dead soul. He played guitar in his bedroom, spent countless hours programming his synthesizer, making songs so complex you couldn’t make them even five years before, let alone in a tiny bedroom in Bakersfield without having had lots and lots of cash—and here was Steve doing nothing with them. We had gone to watch the increasingly popular band, Korn, at the local Casa Royale, an old Basque restaurant dive on Union Avenue—that hardened artery of now dead motels and restaurants of old Highway 99, where Frank Sinatra, the Three Stooges, and anyone who was anyone in the 1950s came to gorge on the food of old Basque sheepherders, or to sing and play to a Bakersfield crowd. Casa Royale had a banquet room where high schools had proms and bands came to play. There were two bars, a big floor and a balcony. It was a good venue. The stage had been set high off the floor for everyone to see. On it, an effigy of a cop hung broken and bent in the darkness under the brightening stage lights. It was the BPD, the notorious Bakersfield Police Department who never let a bank robber come to town without escorting such a low life back out of city limits in a long narrow box. The police effigy hung while bagpipes played to a moshing crowd that seethed as if about to digest the effigy. The crowd moved in rhythm and flung themselves at one another. Those were the days of Jonathan Davis returning to his begotten youth.
I wandered to the balcony listening to a voice from the stage scream, “Fuck this! Fuck you!” and walked to where friends of the band hung out. They hung over the railings and drank beer and watched and drank more beer. I could see others down below—people who all wanted to know that something in Bakersfield was going somewhere, that some part of it was being exported rather than imported like that old Okie migration. People wanted to know that something went out to the world from here other than fruits and vegetables, cotton and oil. Here was the dark side of Bakersfield-influenced music, moving outward, having just toured Europe, having radiated somewhere distant, with funky hard-driving beats that now pounded into Steve that he might go somewhere too, that he was a part of something expanding from his own backyard. Steve lost himself in the crowd, while Pedro, wearing his usual backpack, came wandering over and smiled. Drumsticks poked from his backpack. “We were going to open for them. But it just didn’t work out. I need a beer!” Pedro yelled. I didn’t know if he was lying to me or not. Like Steve, Pedro always wanted to be a rock star.
The music poured into the large room. Women and men, girls and boys—they all moved against each other in the crowd beneath the stage. Voiced ripped and fragmented the air in angry seething moments, musical moments, despairing rises of rhythm bass jams that pulled stalking drum beats into line, and then cast them off over the crowd like a net, pulling them together, making them more maniacal, desperate, and frenzied as everyone in the room began to feel their little city rupture and spill into popular music myth.
In Steve’s spare time he practiced basketball. During our Friday night games at the park we all stood amazed when he contorted his huge pot-bellied frame into performing his amazing spinorama finger-roll lay-up. We played every week for several years until he wrenched one of his knees one rainy basketball evening. That ended his park-B-ball stardom. He was a basketball addict, and ravenously ate up Lakers games and drove to LA—whenever he had a car—so he could watch Magic Johnson “Do his thing!” He wouldn’t work much. A job here or there popped his way. He worked at the local prison, then sold real estate for a few months, got money from his work-a-holic mother. He moved from apartment to apartment, even once into a house just off Oleander Street—one of the mid-city streets with big houses, gas lamps on street corners, tall trees, and a big park where summer concerts attracted families who would go and sprawl blankets and sip sparkling cider, sodas, wine and cold tea as they listened to the sweating orchestras of the hundred-degree Bakersfield summers.
His house at that time was a run-down pad along a park on Palm Street. It had hardwood floors and needed work done on it that he wouldn’t do because when he was home he ate lots of food, had sex, laid on the couch and watched TV or played with his kids. I was married at the time and my wife hated him. “That guy’s just a do-nothing and he hates me.” She thought everyone hated her and I would go to his house anyway and tell him to “write some music. Just create, man. You’ve got a symphony in your head waiting to come out. You want it to come out don’t you?” or I’d tell him to go back to school because at one time he attended college but flunked out for not going, like my friend Ska T Boy, a self-declared physics major. Ska T was ten years older than the students, but got so bored with what he calls “simple physics and chemistry classes” that he inevitably flunked out and ended up on probation. “I never did homework in high school,” he said. “So I refuse to do it in college.”
During the long eighteen-week semesters, Steve would sleep in, fiddle on his computer or hang out with friends. It’s a cycle of the dead. But not one that is always and forever unbroken. For this, I always held hope for Steve and Ska T because I knew they might get a vision of the world that we dead can sometimes glimpse outside of physical and cultural boundaries of Bakersfield. Weltanschauung—a dead generation intellectual can exist for many years like Steve, not alive, and without world vision or worldview—without a glimpse toward the world outside of Bakersfield. There was no World War to do that for them. The world did its monotonous spinning under Steve Delani. And he just sat upon it until he was twenty-seven, waiting to be explored, feared, loathed. He in front of his television, next to his nagging crack-head wife, and watching Magic “Do his thing,” and Beavis and Butthead do theirs.
The dead and Steve Delani. I like to explain them as this: a postmodern culture of Bohemians, the evolving counterculture of the Eighties and Nineties, akin somehow to the Hippies, Beats and Lost Exiles who were so literary, creative, rebellious and mad. This dead generation of slackers that blossom so late, never having had a war to experience, to unify their generation, never having experienced what it is to see the world, what it is to see death, what it is to fall in love in strange lands with women overseas to conquer and lose—to drift the world. Unlike Hemingway, or E.E. Cummings, or Malcolm Cowley, or even Kerouac, we never learned the extravagance of life, or fatalism, virtues of life and war, and so we never learned to “fear boredom more than death.” Boredom and the resulting malaise became our sanctity. Like Cowley said for his fellow lost: “all the divergent forces that would direct the history of our generation were already in action…We were reading, dancing, preparing for college entrance exams, and, in our spare time, arguing about ourselves, ourselves and life, ourselves as artists, as lovers, the sublimation of sex and what we could possibly write about that was new.”
And what do we write about that is new? What are the historical forces directing our dead generation? Our MTV-sucked rebellious youth. We learned to not pay attention to anything. The lust for boredom was sanctimonious—us seeking holiness, our claim to malaise: Just know your town, your city, your street, your mall, your MTV, your video games, where you have your favorite bowl of rice, your favorite bed, and where you experience life by ‘doing’ life. It was not like being a spender—one of the plastic plunderers who storm inside a mall, never breaking ranks—just spend and move on to the next holiday. It was all a holiday to us.
But sometimes we are or become mobile. Some of us glimpse a greater world around us and have become disgusted with things. James Jones: one of the previous generation of disgusted. He returned from war, a disgusted military man and writer—an exile from his hometown and returned as a writer seeking in the very same spot where his childhood vomited him into adulthood. We never returned from war. We returned from the world in ourselves and some of us came out with visions. Self-exiles. Kerouac—even he went crazy in the Merchant Marines, or pretended to, returned a self-exile, saw the world was beat, dead in the little towns really, or really alive with it. Are we more beat than him? Cummings, Cowley, Hemingway, Jones… They were seeking and they had cash. Kerouac had the GI Bill. We aren’t motivated to work, to join anything. But eventually some of us have our visions. The dead can do that—even though boredom is sanctity, harmonious, lustrous. We have yet to rebel, yet we do rebel, by not paying attention to people, to government, to action—our generation skipped a rebellion, skipped war, skipped over being called the ‘uprooted’ angry youth. We were just a slacker subculture—angry about love and music—our techno-music gadgets and headphones that we used to escape the world—and life in general, and never exiled, just self-exiled, unmotivated—never lost, and—never alive to the world—just unmotivated. Weltanschauung. I found the virtues of life in Lipton’s “poverty as a virtue” and through firsthand experience of starvation. ‘War’: the looking-glass for other generations, the uprooting generation-tearing centrifuge of history that we missed. People want to capture something; writers want to capture something new, with a new lens, a new angle. And how so? Maybe through the simple love story that unwinds in the relative comfort of a hometown. Think of a modern day movie—see it??—a downtown, groups of slackers, all guys, or all girls talking about love, a few neon-lit blue-smoke hazy bars, an apartment, a loud talk at dinner, and drugs and drinking and tragedy, and someone dies, and stars in everyone’s eyes because they don’t care. They don’t dare care. And many don’t. It’s all a love story. It’s mad. It’s mad and terrifying but simple: Get money. Get lazy. Go to the convenience store. Meet girls. Meet boys. Get drugs. Go to fast food joints. Play Sega. And eventually, somehow, find love if you can.
Steve Delani found love in a bar. He hadn’t found a more sanitary practice of picking up women since the days of courting his wife with offers of mutual hedonism on the vinyl backseat of a bug. It’s where he always looked; wandering downtown, in the one alley you could always find him in or near—the alley cat alley—where the same young crowds still flocked every Friday and Saturday night: girls in their tight clothes passing like cats themselves beneath the blinking neon cat whose tail darts side-to-side in green-and-yellow flashes; past the ghost of Steve; the deep blue Steve who once leaned against the wall outside the bar like an ocean had run him up against it; him having downed four or five beers, eyes black in his sharp head and eager to meet any young girl who would talk to him so he could forget about depression, about suicide, about loneliness and his haggard wife. For a time you could find him there any weekend. In the musty dust-filled summer months, when sweat dripped from his sloping forehead. Those heat waves of August made him look like a nervous, sick man. In Autumn he slumped against the wall with a cool night breeze on his face. And in winter he slumped further, with his hands in his empty pockets, still sweating in the frigid Tule air. The drifting fog of dead winter seeped into the alleyway and under his skin, with the neon above his weary body looking like a yellow-lit bright blinking sun…
Read more from Citrus Girl:
A Man With Underwear Over His Head Attacked By Mosquitoes, Eating Oatmeal Pie, And Sleeping On A Yellow School Bus In A New Mexico Desert
What Is The Citrus Girl? Memoir, Fiction, Or Just A Shelved American Dream-Girl?
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N.L. BELARDES is a journalist and videographer. His work has appeared on the homepage of CNN.com and other news sites all over America. You can purchase Lords: Part One, which describes the infamous Lords of Bakersfield. They still creep the city long after they and a 1977 Central California dust storm ravaged the area. N.L. welcomes humorous notes and news tips to his MySpace or Twitter.
Tags: Autumn Johnston, Bakersfield writer, California literature, Central Valley author, citrus girl, counterculture, generation X, Kerouac, literary enclave, literary movement, motivation, N.L. Belardes, road trips, slackers, travel narrative, writer's collectives, writers
NL, You just wear me out! I’m exhausted just from reading it and taking it in. Can you ever sleep with your mind moving like that?
I wrote it 10-12 years ago. So I didn’t lose too much sleep. Just thought I would get it out there to spark a discussion. It might. It might not. People might not care about literary generations and how they’re defined anymore. Let’s see if there’s any reaction here.
A single name came to mind after reading your brilliant post. Roberto Gonzalez Born 1970 in Bakersfield California to migrant farm workers. He is this year’s winner of “The Frost Place” Resident Poet Fellowship! If you are not familiar with his works, he has published a memoir under the title: “Butterfly Boy” You may be able to find a copy online.
This piece inspires me to write. There is so much truth to it about our generation - this so-called “dead” generation. I often think of it as a “disengaged” generation - so many things available to us as an escape: TV, movies, music, the Internet, drugs… Disengaged. Dead. Our generation - where the most common form of conversation is to rehash dialogue from our favorite movies and televisions shows. Complete with the voices. We play video games and get to be the avatar we’ve always wanted to be. We can play Rock Band and be an instant rock god. All social events lead to YouTube. Escape, escape, escape. We’re around somewhere - just perhaps more there than here.
So how do we define ourselves as a literary generation? I suppose it’s up to us to do it, unless we want the next one to do the job for us…which would be just a little *too* appropriate.
We’re angry, but we don’t know why.
We seek escape from our boring lives.
We want to be the heroes of our own worlds.
We believe we are the heroes of our own worlds.
Mama and Papa *told* us we were the heroes of our own worlds (dammit!).
When we realize we are not heroes of other people’s world, too, we:
a) get pissy and/or depressed, or
b) turn to a life of video/computer games (to become our inner avatar), or
c) develop an obsession with our health (to look the part of our inner avatar), or
d) give up trying and go home every night and watch television or surf the Internet for porn.
Life is boring, so we turn to entertainment to fuel us.
Entertainment is king.
Entertainers are our idols.
Their words are our words.
They are clever so we don’t have to be.
Established religion does not hold answers, so we define religion for ourselves.
We’re not religious, we’re spiritual.
We are a generation of Martin Luthers (if we still care enough, that is).
We are always tolerant of others.
When people are not tolerant of us, we become inflamed.
We are intolerant of people who are not tolerant.
We’re angry, but we don’t know why.
We seek escape from our boring lives.
There’s just something dead, dislocated, disconnected and disengaged and irresponsible in Generation X…
We want to be connected. The plug was pulled since our youth. Not even the War on Terrorism seems to pull us together…
I only posted 9 pages of a 31-page chapter. But I think you just said everything I was trying to say in a handy little “Dancing With The Stars” half-hour handbook version.
I wonder if other Generation X writers feel the same way. It’s been a decade since I wrote those words and I still feel the same. The only thing missing for me was the group of like-minded novelists and poets exploring the same topic, writing about each other, and somehow exploring Best Buys, caves, video game stores and sitcom sets together.
Imagine such writers clawing their way across Disneyland and utopian strip malls. What would such people write about? How would they describe each other and such spirituality?
Each literary enclave has been somewhat polite in their rebellion against the former. They don’t seem to waste time bashing on past movements, but spend positive energy defining theirs, or what might be theirs to grab ahold of.
I’ve been working on a novel on and off for a while now about a Gen Xer who is disconnected with his world. He could be so much more connected if he just tried. He’s in the middle of big events but feels like he’s looking from the outside in… I use my own life as a model… He is the epitome of Gen X and eventually has to transform. The world forces him to…
The novel concept sounds cool. We witness the world through the aid of the chrome-framed screen - is it any wonder we feel a disconnect? Life through a filter. Huh.
And I think you’re right about the desire to be connected. This is the ultimate disconnect: we’re only connected when we’re plugged in. Literally. But we can’t fool our psyches - none of it’s real nourishment and we know it somewhere deep within. It’s a sugar-filled feeding tube. Is it any wonder we’re a generation of media hypoglycemics?
Maybe that’s why I became a media guy through nontraditional means…
Always interesting to read about souls that seem lost and disconnected yearning to find a place to belong.
I’m curious to see how your comments end up on here regarding transformation, evolvement and a possible creation of a new movement.
Oh I don’t know about creating a movement out of one post. Maybe the generational tics are already there. Maybe it’s just collecting and defining a group of unpublished writings. I don’t know. We’ll see if any other writers chime in. They may say, “Nick, you’re seeing stars again. Tattooed stars. Christmas stars. Paper stars. Hollywood sidewalk stars…Quit seeing so many stars…”
Chapter nine of the your novel the Citrus Girl has always been my favorite! I have the advantage of having read the chapter in its entirety several times, but even in this shortened excerpt what I love about this discussion of the dead generation is the movement and energy of the writing that literally jumps off the page as your reading it. There’s more movement and emotion in your writing than in the entire “dead generation”.
I’m a product of the dead generation that you describe and there are times when I still feel lost. I’m 40 and I don’t have anything figured out in my life like parents generation did. But there is that sense of being lost, or of disconnection for sure.
Do you think the dead generation as a whole can ever change their dead ways? Take Steve Delani for instance, who would have thought that he’d end up being my divorce lawyer!
I think if the dead generation exists it does change its ways. Doesn’t mean traits don’t still exist. People are people, you know? We can only try to become better and more successful while dealing with who we are…
Great piece, Nick!
“Always interesting to read about souls that seem lost and disconnected yearning to find a place to belong” -from Chingpea, above. Totally describes me. An aspiring writer/poet (the next great, American-Mexican-Irish poet, as I like to call myself), wanting to share my soul with the world, but I never go out and live in it. And I’m a Gen-Xer to top it off.
Thanks to Nick, though, I am taking baby-steps in to the outside. I’ve actually mingled!
Though every time I make it to the outside, proud of my slight accomplishment, I quickly go back inside to celebrate, by myself, with a beer and a bowl and have to start all over again (just kidding, I don’t do that stuff, regularly at least).
And, yeah, is slacking a disorder? I may have an affliction…
Me too, cuz. Me too.
Hey N.L.:
You raise an interesting point when you say:
“We have yet to rebel, yet we do rebel, by not paying attention to people, to government, to action—our generation skipped a rebellion, skipped war, skipped over being called the ‘uprooted’ angry youth.”
I’ve known people (and perhaps I’ve done it from time to time myself) that have rebelled by disengaging from politics and other social activities because they felt their actions wouldn’t amount to anything. And while in some cases I can see what they were getting at, in other cases I think it was just plain laziness. This current generation, however, has proven conclusively that we must take an active role in the world around us. After all, it’s this generation that has helped to put Obama in office. And to them all I say ‘bless you.’
Interesting points, Rich. Notice war is the generation-making political force you speak of. People really rallied around anti-war sentiment.
I wonder when you say “this generation” if you mean Generation X, Generation Y, or what. Future historians will certainly determine whether Generation X put Obama in the White House, or whether it was baby boomer influence over Generation Y, or X. I have no idea.
But this all gets overly political. And I would hate to think any possible future or existing literary movement swirls around politics. I’m really talking about literature and memoirists of course, and what determines a literary group or enclave. War and politics are just a backdrop. Like my “Thick White Crust” pieces under a backdrop of 9/11 under Bush. Or this “Dead Generation” piece under a backdrop of counterculture mobility beneath the more prosperous economic Clinton era.
Storytelling, memoirs, confessionalism…these are the tools of the possible Generation X literary collective I am talking about. If today’s great writers are all determined as a group by how they write about elections, then where has storytelling gone? I can understand if people are aids to elected officials, live in Washington, D.C., or in state capitals. Then political officials would be a part of the storytelling. But all this writing from a distance is just political posturing as writers try to influence each other’s votes.
I did like that Brad Listi wrote some about politics from the DNC. But he still wrote from more of a distance. And I like my characters close up.
I’ll never meet Obama. So he and his political machine are never going to be at the center of what I write about.
If politics determines a Gen X literary enclave then I failed miserably except as a journalist. But I look at journalism as secondary to my literature and memoir writing…
Maybe I’m just in a counterculture Gen X literary group and there’s another Gen X political writer group out there. There’s room for lots of writing enclaves that’s for sure.
I do think Gen Xers are lazy in how they approach certain aspects of life. That’s part of the point.
Just food for thought.
Great writing! You’ve certainly captured a segment of society that many don’t even know about.
Because I’m about 2000 years old, I’ve seen a lot–I’m mother and grandmother to the generations you’re talking about and it makes me sad.
Fortunately, some of those young people you wrote about leave all of that behind. Some don’t.
We raised a grandson and during his teen years a gang of kids stayed overnight, ate dinner with us, and so on. Some of those kids are now in jail because of the life-style you so aptly described.
Back to your writing–it’s powerful and you should do something more with it than sharing it on a blog.
Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com
As a journalist I have written lots that does not appear on blogs. At the same time, media blogs, lit blogs, MySpace and Twitter.com, have helped me to connect with many people through writing. Of course, as this piece points out, shared writing needs to be at a deeper level. People need to congregate, meet, share, write about each other, help each other get published, get published together…all of these things that make a writing enclave work and succeed. A national audience for such writers helps too.
Makes me wonder what is next for writers like me. Do we fade away on blogs that eventually die out? Or do we increasingly get our work onto higher platforms?
I’m hoping for the better. I was recently featured in the print and online editions of the Christian Science Monitor for my innovative Twitter novel, “Small Places.” It’s a direct result of my love of blogs and use of social networking platforms. And I’m hopefully signing a contract for a book deal this week…
It all works together if it’s done right… (Not that I know what “right” means come to think of it).
I don’t know how great a piece this is since it’s hard to read. As a Generation OD’er I don’t really get a lot of the Gen X or Gen Y (Y-me?) business. I mean, it’s well-written and all, don’t get me wrong, but as I read it I tend to drift into that cotton candy fog where words become sounds and sound becomes a big whooshing noise like air suddenly escaping from a container.
I used to see the sad Gen X’ers sitting outside Sacred Grounds in San Pedro, on the same bench, wearing the same outfits and the same dull looks and I used to think, “poor babies. the disappointment of growing up in the shade of the mushroom cloud, expecting to be cinders before you hit thirty, only to discover that you have wasted your youth and now must join corporate America and find your way in the new millinea of college-trained minimum wage slaves.”
This won’t win me any friends, but sometimes friends are vastly overrated…
You won my friendship. Your observation hits home on many levels. One of my favorite movies is a Gen X flick based on a Nick Hornby novel about record store geeks and love affairs. I admit I was one of those sad sack record store geeks. I definitely think Gen X swirled around music culture in its early years and less so now. I mean, if we’re still hanging around record stores where we ever going to get in life?
This was me as a troubled Gen X youth that you describe so well, “…expecting to be cinders before you hit thirty, only to discover that you have wasted your youth and now must join corporate America and find your way in the new millinea of college-trained minimum wage slaves.” That definitely describes my Citrus Girl counterculture novel. A sort of trapsing around the country in malaise, pre-Millennial style and fearing the wage-slave life.
But it’s never too late as Matildakay says. Transform and change. Make your voice heard. We can write about new unifying themes…
Gen X isn’t dead. It’s perhaps awakening later than past literary generations…
Brilliant. makes me want to write again…
Still lost… ever hoping… always waiting…
Jen
Gen Xers didn’t get Obama in the White House. Also, the stupid appellations like Gen X and Gen Y are confusing as balls. Gen Xers are in their forties now. Which would make Gen Yers in their thirties? So the generation that came after, the one that I’m a part of, and I refuse to use the term Gen Z, helped elect Barack to the highest office in the country. Eighteen to twenty-five year olds.
You can’t say that it won’t be affected by politics because everything is affected by politics, directly or indirectly.
Every major counterculture movement, literary or otherwise, came about because of disenfranchised youth reacting after a major war.
Lost Generation, WWI, Beat Generation, WWII, Hippies, Vietnam.
Gen X already had your chance. It came and went my friend. You sitting around, gazing at your navel will do you no good at this point. Unfair or not, movements are started by youth. By the time you hit your thirties, you are a walking relic. Move on. I didn’t say it was fair.
Also, due to Hollywood or other outlets wanting to brand things, even if a sincere movement were to come about, they’d over advertise it to death and the kids would fall away en masse. Look at the Beats and Hippies both.
When you talk about things like the John Cusack movie it already sounds horribly dated. You might as well talk about the time you trudged twenty miles in the snow to chop firewood. Eyes glaze over.
Again, I’m not saying it’s fair, but it is what it is. What I think is great is that you’re having these discussions and mulling about these sorts of ideals and ideas but unfortunately it’s the young’ns that lead or breed these things.
And for those that have no faith in the future, I’ve been to cities across the country where youth rally for art, for combating diseases, for finding cures. The media and others can lambast the youth and say, oh my God! they’re lazy and do everything online. That’s very true to an extent but I know kids these days who go out and do the whole picket and wheat paste act as well. Also, the internet got Barack into office. Have faith.
Gen X is defined as those born btwn 65 and 81…
Gen Y is 82 to 2001
(depending on the source, of course)
Whatever the case, they are not in their 30s. I’m in my 30s and am a solid GenXer.
It is good that Gen Y is so active. Good for them.
Rive: Once again you’re feeding me a crock of shit. For one, not all Gen Xers are in their 40s. Another, most of the writers on this site are in their 30s, and close to the Gen X age group. So, wrong again. Why are you reading a Gen X site?
It’s never too late to do anything as well. Whether it’s going to college at 80, starting a lit movement at 40 or becoming a great painter. Doesn’t matter. That’s just cocky youth talking from your perspective.
The beat generation wasn’t popular until ten years after Kerouac wrote “On The Road.” He wrote it in 1947. It was published in 1957. So really, me talking about a Dead Generation is right on the mark, ten years after I first wrote about and had my experiences.
Your perspectives are skewed because you can’t shake some kind of weird Kerouac filter from how you look at my writings. Shake the know-it-all perspective and grow a little and wake up. Maybe slap yourself in front of the mirror? I don’t know what to tell you.
I could just as easily talk about “Superbad.” But that wasn’t the point of the discussion, which you missed as usual.
What do you have to offer, Rive? Are you a writer? Are you a doer? You don’t act like the kind of person I would want on my journalism crew or championship dodgeball team (kidding there I like hockey!) because you seem so complacent, a quitter of sorts.
I hope you find a writing niche that fits you and your goals and people who will support you and your dreams…
Also Rive, you need to read what I wrote again. You wrote: “You can’t say that it won’t be affected by politics because everything is affected by politics, directly or indirectly.” I never said writing couldn’t be affected by politics… that was kind of weird for you to write.
When I taught history I wasn’t a political historian. Sure, I still taught some political history. But my focus was elsewhere…
Once again, my “focus” was elsewhere.
Same in literature/memoirs. The backdrop may be political. Heck, part of a storyline could be. But I’m not centering my stories/memoirs on politics.
I hate to say you’re off the mark. But you’re off the mark, again.
N.L.
wait? this is a gen X website? whoa. better take my ass elsewhere. i’m not the one mentioning kerouac all the time buddy. it is never too late to do things like write a book or go to college but you’re talking COUNTERCULTURAL MOVEMENTS and name one that was started by someone in their forties or eighties. they take root in youth. youth younger than myself, even i’m barely on the cusp. i’m not saying it’s fair or right, i’m just saying it is what it is.
kerouac might’ve published ‘on the road’ in ‘57 but people who read it thought he was a young guy, still in his twenties. people showed up on his doorstep to hang out w/ sal paradise. youth doesn’t matter? then why do writers STILL in this day have pictures on their dust jackets of them that barely get updated?
i’m both a writer and doer and i wouldn’t want to be on your shit ass journalism crew or dodgeball team. you seem to assume a lot about me as A PERSON while i’ve only criticized your writing. you need to grow some balls and realize that discourse over work or subject matter isn’t discourse about a person. trust me friend, i’m twenty-seven but i’ve probably done three times what you’ve done up till now.
stay angry over your blog posts.
“better take my ass elsewhere.” by rive
You damn right you need to take your ass elsewhere. No one here wants to read your rants and whining. Quit being such a bitch and move on. If you don’t like what you’re reading, why don’t you stop and just take your ass elsewhere like you said?!
You sound so arrogant, egotistical and full of shit! Take your High School Musical-I want to belong to a hip circle-attitude somewhere where people will care…
PEACE.
I like you, Chingpea.
She got a little ghetto…
Ghetto?! Well… he deserved it!
Rive: It’s people like you who don’t get picked and who sulk angrily in a corner, yelling, “I didn’t wanna play anyway!”
I believe you’re the angry one there, partner. Can’t take what’s dished back at you I see. Pretentious people like you are like that. Hate to burst your ego bubble, but most people posting on this site are in their 30s. Gen X. There are some younger and older.
In the meantime, please go read someone else’s pieces. Further comments from you will be deleted. You’re just a tad too trollish.
As Harrison Ford is told in an outdated 1980s flick: “Have a better one.”
Rive - I could be wrong, but it looks like you’re a GenXer - or at the very least at the tail end of it. ( :
Sorry you and Belardes are conflicting, but you were riding him pretty hard.
I think Belardes is well within his rights to define GenX literature as a movement - or even to look at some of the shifts happening within this generation.
By saying that once you hit 30 you’re washed up and are a has been, this kind of takes out most of the major literary writers of the modern era. Morrison? Rushdie? Kingsolver? I’m just confused by this comment. I don’t think it “is what it is” at all. Did these people not have major contributions which influenced style and, yes, literary movements?
And yes, most of the writers on this site are GenXers. Sorry if this bugs you.
Also, if I remember correctly, you’re the one who brought up the name “Kerouac” first - in his last post. As in “Kerouac hard-on.” I only bring this up because you accused Belardes of bringing up Kerouac all the time.
You’ve done three times what Nick has done at age 27? Wow. Impressive. You might want to Google “NL Belardes.” Just saying.
When you bite first, don’t be surprised to get growled at.
Another great post Nick. What CAN’T you write about, anyways? You can even make 300 lb crack addicts look sexy (in the literary sense).
Like alot of people, I spend plenty of time wondering how and why our generation derailed.
I personally think that it’s probably a good thing, the way our generation has stopped to question the very point of existence. All of the institutions that used to provide us with “reasons” to perpetuate the cycle have been fully exposed as evil, self serving frauds (religion, government, etc..). Traditional motivations such as, “God needs more company in heaven”, or “we need to out-breed the commies”, don’t really hold water anymore….
Generation X’ers may not be the most motivated crowd, but at least (and most importantly, in my book) they’re not breeding like horny zombie rabbits, like every generation that came before us. We are the collective breath that stops to say “what the #*@# are we all even doing here?!?”…
Who’s to say if our relative lethargy is a bad thing….we could be just like our grandparents…. more focused, filled with a blind faith in government, industry and religion…but in the end all we would have to show for it is an even more grossly overpopulated world. Which would just bring us back to where we are now, but with even more people wandering around aimlessly. I won’t even touch on the horrific implications of another baby boom generation (in my opinion, the most despicable by far).
Lethargy is only a “negative” concept until you stop believing in a grand purpose…
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to my video games and wait aimlessly for more e-mails to come in….
Maybe that’s it. Maybe we’re the 300-pound crack addict to the literary world! haha…
I think you really hit on something though. The idea of “We are the collective breath that stops to say ‘what the #*@# are we all even doing here?!?’” Is a great point. I mean, we were at least asking that while standing at 7-11s dumping quarters into Galaga. Like, we knew we could be eating nachos with those quarters. But why when we could save the universe with those same quarters??
One of Rive’s points was that young people only showed up to Kerouac’s party. I guess they couldn’t look at his bio? But anyway, doesn’t matter who showed up, young, old, invalid or whatever (And Kerouac didn’t coin the word “beat” anyway. Another argument). But his work helped move a counterculture 10 years later. Which really means, he had a viable product and people bought his books. He didn’t make much, but pop culture took advantage too.
Viable products. Does Generation X still have viable products left in them? They already are selling literary products by the bushel load. But is there or should there be a new movement to ever help define that? I don’t know.
Depends what John B. and all those whippersnappers half his age would associate with. Because apparently that’s what happened with Kerouac’s work. Didn’t matter that he trapsed the country 10 years before. People associated with it in 1957.
On a side note. Anyone seen Uche??
Ouch Rive…..that comment about “i’m twenty-seven but i’ve probably done three times what you’ve done up till now” really makes you look….childish and delusional.
Try not to post or write e-mails when you’re feeling angry…you’ll have less to feel embarrassed about later. We’ve all been there bro…
This piece definitely spawned discussion that’s for sure. But all this talk of Gen X vs. Gen Y sounds like one being jealous of the other. I think it’s way off the mark for Rive to claim to have done more or written more than NL has, at 27! Not only should Rive google NL as Erika suggested but NL also has an arsenal of novels under his belt!
Rive to me sounds like a Kerouac hater who thinks literary movements are only for the young. When in fact anyone can start a literary movement at any point in their life, at any age. A literary movement doesn’t stem from youth, it stems from passion!
Instead of picking on NL on a point you’re not going to win, why don’t you go write your own shit!
NL,
The idea of a movement sounds attractive. Do you think there’s enough of an interest out there with artists who have the same beliefs and desire to connect, belong and grow?
Just wondering…
I think writers are connecting, are growing. Do they always help each other and are we hearing about all the unique ways writers are doing this? No. Jason Rice just lent his voice to the discussion and I think it’s worth a read from anyone interested in this piece. I really like what he has to say.
I do think writers need to congregate more and conspire to help one another. You know, meet face to face, cause a ruckus, and do so at least yearly…
Another great post Nick. And it seems you got Rive all hot and bothered.
As what I would consider a fairly (emphasis on fairly)well adjusted gen Xer, I am more worries about Gen Y to be frank. Minds turning to jello as they zone out on MTV reality shows and get hard over the newest Grand Theft Auto video game, holding their parents hostage for the newest I-Phone…until the next incarnation comes a long. Deuce Bigalow is a ‘classic’ movie.
I worry about their benign disengagement from things that matter…
and the irony is, I will be working for one of them soon enough. Some 2.0 start up. Getting them lattes as they make their first million!
Oh man, is that my kids you’re talking about? I hope they become millionaires. More like rock and roll gods though. No matter. I will still bring them their damn coffees and beg them to let me watch late night news while I am old and crotchety and still complaining about my shorts being on too tight…
See? You’re another Gen X writer. A great one. I’ve read some of your words behind the scenes. And I’m hungry for more. We have yet to storm through L.A. like we own the damn place. Let’s do it soon! Yes, yes, and yes! The veggie plates and adventures are calling…
See you at the corner of 6th! We’ll have veggie wraps on the sidewalk as our toes get sheered clean off by a toked up skateboarder of the afore mentioned generation.
hahaha… those bastards. I’ll tackle them like a crazed Gen Xer. We’re crazy, you know. I mean, look at us. We’re the leftovers that the latter part of the punk movement and the early goths didn’t even acknowledge… we were the ones reading books until all hours, plotting our riches in unrealistic ways. I mean, at least the punks and goths got out there and made music…
Hey, did someone call?
I’ve heard Erika express similar thoughts, but I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not sure, I have…a…rather…dissolute…sense of what I should consider my generation.
First of all, I have no common sense of which whom I identify with. I’m clearly the New Nigeria generation, born during or in the immediate aftermath of the war (see I think I’ve already mentioned that poxy war 3 times in my time here, so I guess it is to a large extent emblematic for me). I’m clearly the Commonwealth generation of the American tilt, raised to play Scrabble with Chamber’s dictionary, and then having to figure out that crazy American Official. And of course, I’m Hip-Hop Gen One, bonding with peers from five continents by righteous arguments as to whether MC Solaar (of France) or KRU (of Malaysia) best held down the spirit of the Native Tongues.
There is no way I can make a label stick to all that slop, so I’m not sure what I’d call my generations. I definitely don’t attach any sense of dissolution or disillusionment thereto, so “lost”, “dead” and “slacker” don’t work for me in the least. On the contrary, I carry the feeling that socially, culturally and in literature my generations are accomplishing as much as any others in history, and certainly a lot more than the soi-disant “baby boomers”. To take literature, I’ve lived my life in a sort of explosion of word and language, to the extent that even when, as now, I’m not surrounded by huddled, buzzing peers, I carry too much left-over energy for any sense of disconnection.
But you’ve really opened up an interesting line of contemplation and discussion. I’m fighting a bit of flu, but as soon as I’m up for it, I think I’ll expand on what I’ve said.
You are the Ghandi of the multi-generational literary world. You are a man of many coats, much 80s movie trivia and hats. I appoint thou mystic leader of the literary everywhere…
Flu over here, too. BLAH - I will infect you all! Mwahahaha!
Uche - You are the everyman. No, that’s not right. Jack of all trades, master of all. No, seriously, you are the only person I know who can spout Feynman, Tennyson and Eminem at the word go. I wish I had half your energy. Wonder Twin power activate?
For anyone who hasn’t read Jason Rice’s piece, “Confessions Of A Don’t Know It All” there are some great follow-ups. Jason discusses the idea that maybe it’s every man for himself. He talks about how he thought there might be a movement after his university days. Here’s a comment I posted in regards to his post after Gina Frangello her must-read analysis of Gen X and cyber movements:
Right on, Gina! That’s a great analysis and follow up… I think you’re spot on about what the generation has become. This blog is an example of a movement of sorts. Will the publishing world recognize it? What can be done with it? How can writers become more involved, help each other, connect to each other, contribute in more ways to a collective and expand from the bogosphere? Or is it really like Jason says, every man and woman for themselves? So much to ponder…
Once again, is a cyber movement enough and post-college groups enough? Has Gen X done all it can? Is there a multi-generational movement out there that can be made? What’s the next big collective. Are we it? Is it somewhere else? What can be done? I don’t have all the answers. Just posing questions…
And thank God somebody found Uche!
Oh you crazy kids…ha ha I just wanted to post another poem to clarify my take on this:
Children of a Loser God
Growing up to face the millennium
after being threatened with
the glories of impending doom
these children must now make a future
out of the moral rot and decay
that remains after a
decade and a half of
ETHICAL CLEANSING
conducted on behalf
(ours and theirs)
and with our silent blessing
by the major
economic powers.
The children of the
“LOVE” generation
of Hippies
Abbie Hoffman and Donovan
Janis and Jerry and Jim and Jimmie and Joan
under the protective wing of
Generation X(cess)
turning their faces towards
the hydrogen light bulb
praying for a death ray to
lobotomize them and
make them into
ZOMBIES!
TRULY,
FOREVER
AND
A DAY
These children of Generation
Why?
Me?
dead- ‘Beats’
a contra- band
lovers of:
black leather, black hair, black lipstick, black finger-nail polish
black widow spider tattoos, black jackboots,
black “Goths” and “Vampires”
They’re lost
futureless
disrespected
always hungry
never, ever fulfilled
never satisfied
You hear the agony
of their disappointment
in every word
see it in every look.
They could be models for
Rodin’s The Burgers of Calais
or a Bosch interpretation of Dante’s
Stages of Hell.
And Yet
by the light of day
they go to school
and work the nameless jobs
competing with the Mexicans
for the almighty dollar.
Still
they struggle ahead
smiling at dumb luck
and the sheer magnitude of
the days as
fate tosses the dice
Heroically battling the odds
these lost
milkcarton children.
Searching for a Never-Never Land
that no one thought
ever existed
Searching for a world
to get lost in
Looking for a way out
(but not forever)
These are
the Children
of a loser God.
Yow, that one line about the crest of a hill side or curve in a road revealing your childhood struck home with me. Two weeks earlier, my brother and I drove up to the house we grew up in many years ago. It was a house isolated in the country with a long and winding dirt driveway and as we drove up it, the bend of the driveway, a curve I’d all but forgotten, triggered a host of memories. So it was spooky to come across that quote, it was obviously a true one for me. Thanks for a fine posting, it was full of vitamins.
Just another thought about all you gen Xer’s. I’m watching a documentary on the assignation of JFK and LHO. This was a seminal event in my life, one that would shape my entire life-plan. After Kennedy’s death, the whole country went to hell in a handbasket. MLK, Bobby Kennedy, Malcom X, it seemed like the answer to every problem was coming from the barrel of a gun…riots, Watts, Detroit, Kent State, Viet Nam, Chicago…the streets were awash in blood and mainstream America wanted to turn it’s back on it all. And the heroes/pop icons of the day were dying in droves, too. We tried to make sense of it all and tried to find a way to keep true to our ideals. And to my great embarrassment, my generation was quick to abandon ship, when it came to grabbing a piece of the pie. A few of us tried to keep true to the way, but we were brushed aside by the stampede of “I’m gonna get mine while the getting is good!” The great wheel of greed picked most of us up and propelled us towards OZ and the yellow brick road. It is the source of a great sadness in me. We had such potential, but lost our way in the land of easy pickings.
And for that I am eternally sorry.
assassination
As a new kid on the block, I’m responding belatedly to some of what’s been posted before my arrival, but I can’t help but want to remark that much of what you write about here is the subject of a novel I’m soon to publish. In fact, there was so much in the book about life and death — not in a literal way, but in a generational sense as presented here — that I ended up drawing on that theme for the title (”Banned for Life”).
But I don’t say this by way of a plug; I say it simply because it’s interesting to see another writer’s approach to the same — or in any case related — subject. I’d be curious to know what, six months after posting it, you think of the piece now — that is, if the reaction you got at TNB has in any way influenced your opinion. I, for one (and I’m obviously far from the only one), am floored by the prose — the compound sentences and long paragraphs and rush of thoughts.
D.R.: For a long time this novel was a big part of my life. It’s since been more tangential. Heck, I finished the first draft back in 1998. And then it started sitting on a shelf. And it needs a good editing. It’s 384 pages of counterculture in the city and in the desert. Occasionally I dust some of it off and put it on TNB just to see what reaction I get from people.
With that said, and having just reread it, I think it’s good that it sat in the most popular category for so many months here on TNB. It made me proud that this strange piece about Generation X could interest readers. I saw it there, but I wouldn’t reread it. And so your comment sat for so long being unanswered.
I think that maybe, like a lot of writers might do, I sort of sat back, hoping someone would suddenly send me a message and say: “Your philosophy works! Let’s publish this thing!” Historian John Arthur Maynard, author of “Venice West” about the LA beats edited the thing. He used to let me look through unpublished beat writings and ask me what I thought. “Read this, Nick. Then tell me what you think.” He knew I lived a counterculture life.
Now that I have read “Banned for Life” I feel like I do need to dust off the novel, that the 90s are far enough behind us that it does seem like reading literary history rather than reading about something that may have happened last week. Sort of gives it more value. History does that. So, your work has inspired. We sort of inspired each other.
The 1990s are a weird beast. Even more weird is Generation X. Have people forgotten about us? That was sort of my point by posting the Dead Generation. To see if we were forgotten, or if we’re still some kind of cruel novelty. Generation X shouldn’t be looked at through the filter of dead rock stars like Kurt Cobain. But oh how music shaped our generation. The line I pull from this piece that defines our generation and this book is “MTV-sucked rebellious youth…” We were rebelling against something, but we often didn’t know what. Look at Peewee in your book. He’s so angry and acted so smart. But he contradicted himself a lot. He was just angry, raw Gen X youth. And that’s a lot of Gen X. No need for a war. We did enough damage to ourselves without that.
If I really helped to inspire you to dust off the book, I will already have accomplished one good thing by writing “Banned for Life.”
I think youthful rebellion is often — even usually — generalized rather than specific. I mean, one problem I always had with psychoanalysis was that it attempted to trace angst to biographical events — “Daddy hit me” or whatever — when there’s ample reason to feel angry or sad simply by being alive. It reminds me of the classic exchange in “The Wild One”: a woman in a bar saying to Marlon Brando, “What are YOU rebelling against?” and Brando replying, “Waddya got?” Indeed!
It’s an embarrassing thing to say about oneself, but I absolutely see myself as a rebel, as I didn’t for much of my life. My parents certainly saw me that way, but I thought of myself, as a teenager, as being pretty typical for my age, albeit a bit more angry. And why was I angry? Mostly because I was bored. I think a lot of American kids were and are bored, without usually knowing just how deep it runs. That’s what happens when you’re moored to a screen of one kind or another. With me it was TV, which I’d watch for at least five hours a day — even though I hated TV! I was always complaining about it, yet I couldn’t resist the temptation, because it was momentarily entertaining, and because I was spoiled by being spoon-fed what I was too lazy to seek out in a more enriching form. And so it continues for a great many kids, who are over-stimulated in some ways, with a constant barrage of electric light and sensational images being flashed at them, while at the same time they’re under-stimulated emotionally and intellectually and aesthetically — and, I think, socially. The smart ones, like Peewee, not only realize what’s happening to them, but they sooner or later do something about it, seeking out the good stuff — the nourishing stuff — and banding with like-minded others. The music underground is and always was largely comprised of such kids. Meantime the kids who aren’t so smart, or in any case have never had the right guidance, go on absorbing all of this gunk, which leaves them angry and depressed in ways they can’t articulate, and it emerges in fucked-up behavior, mostly of the passive-aggressive sort. I have my fair share of faults, but passive-aggression isn’t one of them. And it took me a long time to realize that I didn’t think and behave and live like anyone else of my wide acquaintance, and that that did, finally, make me a rebel.
It’s funny that you mention war, because the absence of one after Vietnam may have been another factor in Gen X angst. I think, unfortunately, war-making is programmed into us, or at least it is in males, and if there’s no outlet for what I regard as our natural aggression, it can and does turn inward. Again, the word “passive” comes to mind. You want to see a movie? Whatever. You want to order Chinese? Whatever. What do you think of the situation in Washington? Whatever. I’m leaving you. Whatever. That was famously the Gen X slogan – “whatever” – and I always took it to mean that one thing doesn’t have any more value than the next, and that action is futile, because this was a generation that barely knew what action was. It was psychically castrated. Also, it may have been defining itself against the Boomers, who were famously active and who also, as far as I’m concerned, failed miserably, like kids in an old movie who steal a car and go for a joyride and, once they’re stopped by a cop, instantly become law-abiding citizens. Gen X was very attuned to the failures of the Boomers, I think, and resentful of Boomer hypocrisy, and somewhere a collective decision was made to take a different path.
Of course, this has all been said before, and said, I’m sure, better. It’s hard to word myself well when I’m pressed for time. Then, too, it’s a very complicated discussion, and it’s so easy to reach for clichés and generalizations. I suppose there’s plenty of both in “Banned,” but it’s in the dialogue and not, I hope, in the characters themselves. I mean, I certainly wasn’t trying to make Peewee a Gex X archetype, though maybe in the end that’s what he amounts to. It’s impossible to extricate him from his time and ours.
Peewee and Jason are both Gen X archetypes, really. Jason slacked a lot. There were times he just milled around NYC, hanging out with the hard-working stiffs. I associate more with Jason. I’m a late-blooming rebel. Back in my high school days people will remember me as likely funny, injured (for a year with a busted up leg) and a joke-making troublesome do-nothing. I didn’t do anything but watch MTV for hours and hang out playing video games at the local arcades. I mostly listened to New Wave, but was on the edge of the punk scene. And those punks I’m still acquainted with years later. I even wrote the only news article about the first punk ever in Bakersfield. He hung out with the Germs back in the day and brought it all back to Bakersfield. Then I descended into the counterculture–because to the rest of the world it’s a descent–though I look at it as an intellectually rebellious uprising in ourselves.
Your Jason is my Rick Molotovos even so. Both surviving by the seat of their pants, enamored with a girl that’s like some boddhisaatva (sp.?) goddess. I have scenes in citrus girl (dead generation) where the main female character is like Artemis walking through the desert. And she’s the citrus girl because deep inside she’s filled with vitriol, acid, because, really we all had to be burning inside to get through those years.
I agree with what you have to say and really appreciate that Banned for Life captures some 1980s subculture. While mine is 1990s subculture, our stories overlap in amazing ways. Some publisher should package them together so we can all make bazillions and influence new subculture to explode within their scenes and communities… or just within themselves and their self-identities.
Immensely enjoyed your post and the ensuing comment stream. I’m 43–an early Gen Xer and feel so defined by this generation. I remember sitting in high school and wanting to scream at the Baby Boomer teacher in his Birkenstocks–what did you guys accomplish anyway? I still have a chip on my shoulder for Baby Boomers, although I count many among my best friends. It started when I read the book Generations and recognized myself, and then later laughed through Doug Coupland’s Gen X book and Microserfs. In the nineties I watched as one by one my friends and I lost jobs in the last economic downturn and so I returned to school. Spent way too much time in the early nineties hanging out in coffee shops and playing PC games. I woke up with a degree and entered the tech world just as the dot com boom started. I literaly lived the Microserfs book in reverse and somehow got my act together and ended up with a “successful” career, marriage, mortgage and child as did all of my former slacker friends. I really still believe we are all just latebloomers. Personally, I wouldn’t go back and change any of my experiences.
9/11 deeply affected me. Reading the NY Times obits–reading about so many people who were exactly or close to my age and thinking about what they will never live to accomplish. Lately I’ve been reading stories about things our Gen is doing–for example take a look at John Wood, founder of Room to Read as an example. I think we are responsible along with BB and GenY for putting Obama in the White House. There are many in our generation still sitting in a haze of pot smoke on a couch somewhere, but I also see a lot of us gettin’ stuff done.
Have you listened to Green Day’s new album 21st Century Breakdown? I am now obsessed with this album like none other in a while. I feel this is an anthem for GenX and describees so much of what I’ve felt over the last decade.
Hi Juliana,
In Green Day’s early moments, they played to about six people in Bakersfield. My punk friends always laugh about it. I just felt like telling you that and now I have to go check out their new album. While I hate admitting this since D.R. is watching, I’m still a big fan of Lloyd Cole. Only he’s turned so grey. What’s happening to us??
I loved what you wrote about Gen Xers all being late bloomers. It’s true. Strangely, all this video game talk lately makes me want to start playing them again. I’ve been in a drought and happily stay away from them, sort of. It’s like quitting smoking I’m thinking.
I think 9/11 affected us all but I never thought about how it affected our generation. Maybe that’s the missing element or theme in a book of which I serialized about 1/3 here on TheNervousBreakdown. The theme might be there and I don’t even realize it! It’s in my archives and called Thick White Crust. It might me worth a read. It’s also a dual-ethnic piece on Latino culture. I’ve been thinking of posting more of it.
Did Gen X play a big role in Obama getting elected? I agree with you there. In fact, for us being slackers, I’m guessing as a generation we’ve accomplished a lot. What all of that is, I’m still not sure yet. hahaha
Thanks again for your words of wisdom. I need to go read Microserfs.