R.I.P. Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess snuffed it, O my bratties. A cruel mesto this world is. The cancers he craved gave him the like-eemyaed disease. Irony, that. The rest is, like, silence.

Education Shmeducation

Education performs three basic functions:

A) The transmission of culture.
B) The transmission of knowledge.
C). Babysitting.

Needless to say these divisions are arbitrary.

By (A) I mean, basically, that besides from teaching "facts," schools, to some degree, exist to turn "kids" into adults. You can expand this to mean "American adults who can function in a democracy" and include saluting the flag, the four freedoms, etc—but the bottom line is your basic culturalization stuff. Standing in line, waiting your turn...people learning to live with people in a group.


Damned if I've ever seen anybody else write about this, but it seems like one of the big problems in schools is the fact that the students already have their own culture. The kids are their own tribe. They want to raise hell, hang out, party, etc. On the other hand...these boring adult types are droning on about chemistry, geography, history and all the crap.
Schools exist to turn kids into adults. 
There is a powerful kid subculture that works against that.


I've talked to a lot of people who've told me basically this: "Life sucks. I'm never going to get a good job. I'm never going to own my own home, own a decent car. Once I get out of high school/college...that's it. My life is over. I'm going to spend the rest of my live slaving away in some shit job. This is the last chance to enjoy myself I'm ever going to have so screw it, why should I study, why should I learn anything--I'm going to have fun while I can."


There's a war going on right now about what exactly our culture is. The left says the educational system has been a cunning ploy by rich white males to dupe the suffering masses into submission. 

But at the same time the legitimacy of school as a cultural-transmission institution is under attack, the institutions in our society that normally transmit culture (church, family, neighborhoods, etc) are failing. The teacher is given a raging mob of disaffected rebels and told to teach them "values."
Who's values? The values of the "dominant culture"...gasp!
Fascist decrees like "raise your hand to speak"

This puts teachers in a double bind. They're given a responsibility without the authority.

(B) By B) I mean both practical and abstract knowledge.
Thinking, of course, is really practical knowledge. Thinking is something to do, a series of skills that can be learned.
Our culture is anti-analytical. 

Skills. The big problem here is that most people come out of the educational system not knowing how to do anything. The curriculum is dumped on students in isolated, abstract chunks of facts. Here, says the school system, learn these facts, these facts are good for you. What's the point, says the average student...

So a mass of unemployables is continually being ejected into our culture--with destablizing results. Strictly speaking, no one is really responsible for teaching job skills. It isn't the employer's responsibility. The employer wants to hire somebody who already knows something and can already do something that will help him/her make money. Justly so. It isn't the government's responsibility. The educational system exits to teach insolated chunks of facts! We want to teach the joy of learning as a thing in itself...the pure Platonic joy of knowing facts-as-facts. All triangles have 180 degrees. How beautiful. How pure.

Vocational education is a joke.
The government's vocational education is pathetically underfunded and behind the times.
Vocational education is the private sector is largely the work of con artists.
What's left?
Well...get a job that you're not really qualified for and desperately try to figure out what you're doing and hope you don't get fired before you finally figure out what you're doing. 
There is also prison.

C) Babysitting. This is the absolute bare minimum of what the educational system actually has to do. Keep young bodies in buildings, off the streets, out of peoples' hair, and try to make sure they come out in one piece at the end of the day. It will take a helluva lot of educational cuts until this function starts to fail...but we're getting there. 

Looking backwards

I’m a writer and a cartoonist. IMHO, I’m damned good at both. But I’d rather be musician. As Zappa once said, music is the best. Nothing gets into the soul like music, cuts right straight through, right past the traffic cop/censor at the center of your head.

I remember, around 1970 or so, hearing this profound, new, weird, deep, honest, clean sound. Think it was at some trip to USF with Jeff Scarbrough to see “Easy Rider.” In that Brutalist concrete building, I heard a fragment of a Crosby Stills and Nash tune on somebody’s radio. File-not-found as to title, but a weird, trippy, flowing thing. (Heard it again on a cassette tape that got mobius-stripped –- it sounded just as good backwards.)

 

Later on, got more tastes of that new sound.

Graham Nash’s “Please Come to Chicago.” 

That bizarre backwards guitar riff Hendrix plays on “Are You Experienced.”

Santana shredding into "Black Magic Woman," not the chorus, but the bubbling, noodling improv parts that the Stones seemed to copy in “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

And Clapton. “Sunshine of Your Love.” “White Room.” As the graffito said, “Eric Clapton is God.” That’s taking it a bit too far. But not that far. Goddamn, this was something new! Hey, the music was a revolution! Hearing that music, it was easy to believe there’d be a revolution. This music was going to CREATE a revolution. Rock would save our fucking souls.

A few years later, it was all Disco Duck and fucking John Travolta.

Two years from now, I'll be 40. Ain't that a laff?

Now, with the objectivity and equanimity of incipient decrepitude, I can see that de gustibus non disputandum est, and that so many hopping, bopping young folk had a jolly time to the metronomic, robotic, cocaine-inflected shiny, plastic disco beat.

But I hated the 70s like Napoleon hated Elba. There I was, exiled at the University of Virginity where the spirit of the 60s had fled, at least from where I stood. Feeling cheated, like the snotnose punk I was. The party was over, dude. You missed it, by just a few years. Now we’re all clean-cut preppies wearing Izod Lacoste polo shirts and Sperry Topsider shoes and we talk for hours about the joys of onion soup and THINGS, all the nice stuff we’re going to buy when we move into positions of power in the Beltway just like our parents. If you took a shot of tequila every time one of these fuckers mentioned a brand name, you’d be puking blood in 15 minutes.

But punk was a rearguard action. Punk gave me hope.

By the mid-1980s, there were glimmers of light in the hairband darkness. The early 90s has been pretty fucking cool.

Goddamnit, I love grunge.

Ain't no revolution yet. Not much chance of that. I know that now.

But at least there's some cool tunes.

What this is

Wake up, wake up. The culture is on fire.

Actually, it's not. It's more like a dry, old cereal box, allowing for some settling of contents. All the desicated flakes have settled towards the bottom. Occasionally, some shmuck comes along and rattles the box, creating the illusion of movement. Me? I'm the government-approved percentage of rodent hairs and feces. Where was I?

OK, a statement of intent. It may all seem very random at first. Actually ...

This blog contains:

1) Cultural commentary and reviews.

2) Sketch comedy.

3) Thoughts and ripped-off content about science fiction, technology and the future in general.

4) Random shit.

OK, it is pretty random. This blog resembles nothing so much as the contents of my brain, God help me. Much of it has been reposted from the droppings I've deposited on the AOL forums, reinserting, heheheh, the eff-word where appropriate. It's not that I wanna be a potty mouth but, y'know, the right word for the right job.

Props where props due

Props to Fred Glass for the term "New Bad Future." All credit where credit is due.

Coming Attraction

So, you’re sitting in a darkened movie theater. Watching the credits. Here comes the Paranoid Pictures logo. Then: “Welcome to the not-too-distant future, a brutal world of chaos, anarchy and high-tech terror. Only one man …” Blah-blah. You get the idea.

It occurs to me we’re living in that grim, not-too-distant future now.

Soon, we may all be Devo.

No, my friends. We are all Devo. Now.

So, welcome to my blog. Sit back and enjoy the movie. Let this cautionary tale be a warning to us all.