Tire Swing

For like a summer and a half I embraced this lifestyle that didn't elevate anything above anything else. Consider the following lyric from Juno which illustrates what I mean:

Joey never met a bike that he didn't wanna ride
And I never met a Toby that I didn't like
Scotty liked all of the books that I recommended
Even if he didn't I wouldn't be offended

The author of the song charms the listener by describing her day through a lens that doesn't apply an overall arch or expectation. She goes on to list the events of her day: check my email, write a song, and make a few phone calls mashing all of the events together without defining any of them more significance than the others.

The reason I like this song is that it frees me from the risk of embracing a personal narrative that may set me up for disappointment, or failure, or disillusionment. I'll probably sound like some kind of McCartheist but this type of song/sub-culture although light and appealing on the outside is also malicious to some extent.

A postmodern generation is bruised, wounded and disillusioned with modernity by definition. It reacts to the baby-boomers attachement to materialism and image-centered values in a new movement that avoids the common entrapments of a modern world and embraces a "flat" existential worldview. That is, we would say that writing a song is just a "spiritual" or sacred as writing e-mails.

The intent is well placed. Garden State, another prominent postmod hipster flick, features a hamster funeral that the protagonist comes of age to find value in. American Beauty, as early as '99, finds its message in realizing the beauty of a plastic bag in the wind.

These, I think, are symptoms of our aforementioned disillusionment; our sophmoric attitudes follow a distaste for the negative sides of our parent's lifestyles - their tendancy to be judgemental, hypocrytical, or exclusive. Without standard of truth, we are free from the problems that a very standard driven society has come to terms with in recent decades.

I'll just end by saying that I once agreed but now disagree with these contentions. To me, there are just some things that are black and white. And that's ok, our mind and soul need that. I think its pretty clear that if everything was true right and beautiful and nothing was wrong than we wouldn't have ground to be wounded and counter-culture in the first place. In other words, there is a significant arch to our lives whether we acknowledge it or not. If we are honest with ourselves we can't avoid this. Humans need purpose.