Silly Authority, Power is Meant to be Subversive...
I was thinking yesterday, as I walked through Barnes & Noble to spend money I don't have on copies of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Transmetropolitan, and V for Vendetta (yes, thank you credit card), about how my parents would regulate my purchases as a child. I may have mentioned before that my household was a bit of a strict one. I wasn't allowed movies that may have had any semblance of violence or sex in them, for starters. In fact, I remember my first R-Rated movie that I watched with their permission: I was 13 and watched Speed, starring Keanu Reeves. Terrible, terrible introduction to popular culture -- no wonder I was never much of a movie person. The first R-Rated movie I actually saw, to my knowledge, was Alien, with Sigourdney Weaver, when I was seven -- which, along with Star Wars, cemented in me an early love of science fiction. My father had actually called the cable company when I was in fifth grade or so and demanded that our house not recieve MTV, because he felt that no good could come of it. In a sense he was very right: MTV in my view is singlehandedly responsible for destroying music as I knew it. That fact, however, doesn't account for the actual effect on a child of censorship and restriction from an early age. He wasn't after all, blocking it because he didn't like the music. He believed that Beavis and Butthead would warp my fragile childish mind. It is interesting to consider, however, the effects on a child of knowing that they are being censored in a way separate from their peers.
It is around this time that, both out of necessity and out of choice, I detached myself from the majority of popular culture and began finding my entertainment increasingly in the obscure. Music became huge for me as I entered high school. After the MTV thing, I didn't take much interest in it for a while, until I got a radio for christmas one year. Always the insomniac I started listening to it after my parents went to bed. Without even mentioning the effects of programming such as Loveline or Mistress Carrie's show on WAAF back when she still did nights on a boy just hitting puberty, I began to find an unexpected connection with music. My parents were very careful about what Iwas able to purchase, no rap was allowed. Period. And when, once, I recieved a copy of the Offspring's Americana for my birthday, it was taken away for a year and a half because it had mention of getting tattoo's. (I don't even think they made it to the title track, otherwise all would've been lost). The first Cd I really got past them was Rammstein's Sensucht, and that's because it was entirely in German, and I remember convincing them to let me buy Nine Inch Nails' the Fragile by playing them tracks such as La Mer, The Fragile, and Just Like You Imagined which were, at the very least, indicative of but a small portion of that CD. As I moved through high school, however, and they saw music becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life, they eased up their restrictions it. Although to this day there are some CDs to which I have hidden the cases, and which I never play when my parents are home.
Books. It was books in which I was never restricted. After all, what harm can a book do? I mean, granted, it all started innocently enough, Hardy Boys, Star Wars books, and all that other printed piss and vinegar -- I think I was 13 when I first read Crime and Punishment. 14 when I read both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 (I remember especially liking the latter, although as time's passed I've now read 1984 some five or six times as well), and that really started it, I think. books were never censored for me, and I think that's perhaps because, well, at least I was reading, firstly, and secondly, my parents didn't realize just how subversive they could be to the image I was being crafted in. That's a good word to describe much of my childhood, molding and crafting -- I didn't quite shatter the statue until I went away to school: discovered Sologub, Biely, Nabokov, Ginsberg, Vonnegut, and so many others...
I'm not blaming or incriminating my parents here: they raised me in the classical image of how a good child should be raised. But there is one thing that classical images can't account for, and that's what happens when the golem awakens to the fact that he is another's construct (see: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). All of this has certainly played a hand in shaping the person I've become, for better or worse. I can't really complain; I like who I am. I'm a dark, sometimes morose, and often cynical bastard who writes and contemplates and toys with madness, and really, if I were, "normal," I sort of feel like that that sort of complacency would be simply far too boring. I'm going to age wonderfully I know it ;)
Oy, just another half rant, half analysis, as I continue to try and figure out who I really am and how I really got here. I don't know why I still gravitate to this journal Happy Thursday.
~Pawel
(P.S. My father walked by room as I was writing this, and commented "What the hell are you listening to? I like music but that man's oice sounds like he's had his throat slit." Hahaha, oh well, I'm not particularly going to expect them to appreciate Mr. Reznor anytime soon...
It is around this time that, both out of necessity and out of choice, I detached myself from the majority of popular culture and began finding my entertainment increasingly in the obscure. Music became huge for me as I entered high school. After the MTV thing, I didn't take much interest in it for a while, until I got a radio for christmas one year. Always the insomniac I started listening to it after my parents went to bed. Without even mentioning the effects of programming such as Loveline or Mistress Carrie's show on WAAF back when she still did nights on a boy just hitting puberty, I began to find an unexpected connection with music. My parents were very careful about what Iwas able to purchase, no rap was allowed. Period. And when, once, I recieved a copy of the Offspring's Americana for my birthday, it was taken away for a year and a half because it had mention of getting tattoo's. (I don't even think they made it to the title track, otherwise all would've been lost). The first Cd I really got past them was Rammstein's Sensucht, and that's because it was entirely in German, and I remember convincing them to let me buy Nine Inch Nails' the Fragile by playing them tracks such as La Mer, The Fragile, and Just Like You Imagined which were, at the very least, indicative of but a small portion of that CD. As I moved through high school, however, and they saw music becoming a bigger and bigger part of my life, they eased up their restrictions it. Although to this day there are some CDs to which I have hidden the cases, and which I never play when my parents are home.
Books. It was books in which I was never restricted. After all, what harm can a book do? I mean, granted, it all started innocently enough, Hardy Boys, Star Wars books, and all that other printed piss and vinegar -- I think I was 13 when I first read Crime and Punishment. 14 when I read both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 (I remember especially liking the latter, although as time's passed I've now read 1984 some five or six times as well), and that really started it, I think. books were never censored for me, and I think that's perhaps because, well, at least I was reading, firstly, and secondly, my parents didn't realize just how subversive they could be to the image I was being crafted in. That's a good word to describe much of my childhood, molding and crafting -- I didn't quite shatter the statue until I went away to school: discovered Sologub, Biely, Nabokov, Ginsberg, Vonnegut, and so many others...
I'm not blaming or incriminating my parents here: they raised me in the classical image of how a good child should be raised. But there is one thing that classical images can't account for, and that's what happens when the golem awakens to the fact that he is another's construct (see: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). All of this has certainly played a hand in shaping the person I've become, for better or worse. I can't really complain; I like who I am. I'm a dark, sometimes morose, and often cynical bastard who writes and contemplates and toys with madness, and really, if I were, "normal," I sort of feel like that that sort of complacency would be simply far too boring. I'm going to age wonderfully I know it ;)
Oy, just another half rant, half analysis, as I continue to try and figure out who I really am and how I really got here. I don't know why I still gravitate to this journal Happy Thursday.
~Pawel
(P.S. My father walked by room as I was writing this, and commented "What the hell are you listening to? I like music but that man's oice sounds like he's had his throat slit." Hahaha, oh well, I'm not particularly going to expect them to appreciate Mr. Reznor anytime soon...