Tangles of Pop Culture

There is no popular culture in general. Even if we could hold the word to one of the several things we tend to mean by "popular" (well liked, "low," tawdry, insincere, bodily), we would still be describing the eddying movements of a mob that evades generalization. If we assert that there is some popular culture, we acknowledge the power of the Horde to stand as at least equal with Empire.

But, of course, in the hot swirl of tawdry, bodily, well liked things, we will not find consistency, even in the acknowledgment of complexity. Popular culture always follows the logic of the state in places. Consider how the Jumpman/Daisy//Kong triad continues to present a patriarchal gender dyad (boy saves girl) within a human/animal dyad (man tames beast, culture captures nature) even in all of its new guises. Once the Super Nintendo offered it, Donkey Kong took the human mask onto his animal face, pressing the boundary of the dyad back to a place between the warm blooded and the reptilian, making himself and his children human enough ("there is no society," Thatcher says, "only individuals," then adds as an afterthought, "and their families").

Today I am encouraged by three pieces of popular culture which loudly affirm complexity. I needed them.

1) It turns out that the first piece of reportage on video games (1972) was a piece of mind blowing journalistic poetry by an LSD pioneer: "Something basic is going on."

2) Pink's new music video in which she fucks a nun, dances with impolite joy at a school dance, beats up Capitalism, and kills a matador made me laughcry so hard.

3) The Queer activists at http://www.putthisonthemap.org/ have issued a PSA wherein teenagers (their educators and spokespeople are all very young) say things that proudly step beyond fighting for the state logic of marriage. Things I needed to know were speakable by the wonderfully young:

‎"This is about how my identities cannot be summed up in letters."