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Sep. 12th, 2016 12:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2c5h0DU:buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “dotsandfoxes replied to your post “i just looked up linda ronstadt…”
I had a similar educated sort-of-poor upbringing, except with more science and less history (my dad is a math and computer science professor). plus my parents weren’t so anti-tv. my lack of pop culture knowledge is mostly my own fault.
LOL Poor Nerd solidarity! My point about that, though, is like– yeah, I grew up pretty seriously poor, but I am so deeply aware that that’s the kind of poverty it was, back then, relatively easy to escape. My parents entered into it knowingly, and had an escape plan and sure enough, as soon as my baby sister was in school full time, Mom got a full-time actual-career job with benefits and a pension, and we were almost instantly catapulted into the middle class. [Worth mentioning, that wouldn’t happen today and barely happened then; she only got the pension because she was already in the system from having worked fifteen years previous; new hires at that time could not get into the system anymore.] It wasn’t that it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t that there was no stress or struggle, but it was absolutely not the grinding rural poverty that we were surrounded by, that so many of my elementary school classmates were dealing with. My parents had so many tools available to them, and so we were never on the knife-edge; there was always enough to eat and clean clothes to wear and an emergency never became a disaster, nothing was ever repossessed and in the greatest extremity, we still had a good family network. We never really wanted for anything, we just didn’t have much.
I absolutely could have sought out a lot more pop culture than I did. My older sister, nerd that she is, did a very careful and deliberate self-education in pop music to figure out what she’d missed. Baby sister got super into the neo-punk of the day, and listened to Operation Ivy’s sole CD (two EPs together) literally every morning as she got dressed to the point that she and her cat both had the whole thing memorized. Middle-little kind of turned the dial up and broke it off; she now is the type who has a television on “just for the noise” 24/7 and talks constantly about popular media figures like the rest of us are going to have any idea what any of that is. She brought up some Kanye And Kim drama over a family dinner once and we all stared at her and I was the only one who even knew who those people were, let alone why anyone would talk about them. (I’ve never heard Kim Kardashian’s voice, I only know her from gifsets and mentions, but from what I understand that’s no great loss.)
In college I had a professor who among other things taught me Photoshop, which remains the single most useful skill I learned in four years of exorbitant tuition. I forget what the rest of the class was even *about*, but he frequently talked about things like, you know, unplugging from media, thinking for yourself, escaping the casual immersion in a really warped culture that perverts all our minds, etcetera– I mean, standard stuff, and he was sort of refreshingly honest about this not being in any way original. But.
I would say three-quarters of his lectures consisted of Simpsons references. I had never really seen the show. It took me a long time to pick up on them. This was before you could Google stuff, really (it was 2000 or 2001), so I actually had to ask my classmates what he was talking about in a couple of instances. [I think when it crystallized for me was sometime after he’d done the Worst. [blank]. Everrrr line and I was like what the fuck does that even mean and the kid next to me was like duh the Simpsons, and I was like, that’s a TV show right? and we looked at each other in the way in which characters on the Office look into the camera nowadays, I don’t know what we’d’ve called it back then and I’ve never seen the Office but I’ve seen the reference.]
Finally I asked him, you know, if it’s so important to unplug from popular culture, then how do you know so much about the Simpsons?
And it kind of embarrassed him, but in retrospect he was a pretty smart guy. He said, the thing is, you really don’t have to be exposed to much of it to pick up on stuff like that. You can absorb some of the stuff you like and use it, you know? It’s just. It’s actually impossible not to absorb *anything* from popular culture.
Mm-hmm, I said.
It’s a good lesson, I guess. But mostly the lesson is that any purists are usually just letting their personal tastes dictate what’s worthwhile and what’s reprehensible, so keep that in mind.
I had a similar educated sort-of-poor upbringing, except with more science and less history (my dad is a math and computer science professor). plus my parents weren’t so anti-tv. my lack of pop culture knowledge is mostly my own fault.
LOL Poor Nerd solidarity! My point about that, though, is like– yeah, I grew up pretty seriously poor, but I am so deeply aware that that’s the kind of poverty it was, back then, relatively easy to escape. My parents entered into it knowingly, and had an escape plan and sure enough, as soon as my baby sister was in school full time, Mom got a full-time actual-career job with benefits and a pension, and we were almost instantly catapulted into the middle class. [Worth mentioning, that wouldn’t happen today and barely happened then; she only got the pension because she was already in the system from having worked fifteen years previous; new hires at that time could not get into the system anymore.] It wasn’t that it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t that there was no stress or struggle, but it was absolutely not the grinding rural poverty that we were surrounded by, that so many of my elementary school classmates were dealing with. My parents had so many tools available to them, and so we were never on the knife-edge; there was always enough to eat and clean clothes to wear and an emergency never became a disaster, nothing was ever repossessed and in the greatest extremity, we still had a good family network. We never really wanted for anything, we just didn’t have much.
I absolutely could have sought out a lot more pop culture than I did. My older sister, nerd that she is, did a very careful and deliberate self-education in pop music to figure out what she’d missed. Baby sister got super into the neo-punk of the day, and listened to Operation Ivy’s sole CD (two EPs together) literally every morning as she got dressed to the point that she and her cat both had the whole thing memorized. Middle-little kind of turned the dial up and broke it off; she now is the type who has a television on “just for the noise” 24/7 and talks constantly about popular media figures like the rest of us are going to have any idea what any of that is. She brought up some Kanye And Kim drama over a family dinner once and we all stared at her and I was the only one who even knew who those people were, let alone why anyone would talk about them. (I’ve never heard Kim Kardashian’s voice, I only know her from gifsets and mentions, but from what I understand that’s no great loss.)
In college I had a professor who among other things taught me Photoshop, which remains the single most useful skill I learned in four years of exorbitant tuition. I forget what the rest of the class was even *about*, but he frequently talked about things like, you know, unplugging from media, thinking for yourself, escaping the casual immersion in a really warped culture that perverts all our minds, etcetera– I mean, standard stuff, and he was sort of refreshingly honest about this not being in any way original. But.
I would say three-quarters of his lectures consisted of Simpsons references. I had never really seen the show. It took me a long time to pick up on them. This was before you could Google stuff, really (it was 2000 or 2001), so I actually had to ask my classmates what he was talking about in a couple of instances. [I think when it crystallized for me was sometime after he’d done the Worst. [blank]. Everrrr line and I was like what the fuck does that even mean and the kid next to me was like duh the Simpsons, and I was like, that’s a TV show right? and we looked at each other in the way in which characters on the Office look into the camera nowadays, I don’t know what we’d’ve called it back then and I’ve never seen the Office but I’ve seen the reference.]
Finally I asked him, you know, if it’s so important to unplug from popular culture, then how do you know so much about the Simpsons?
And it kind of embarrassed him, but in retrospect he was a pretty smart guy. He said, the thing is, you really don’t have to be exposed to much of it to pick up on stuff like that. You can absorb some of the stuff you like and use it, you know? It’s just. It’s actually impossible not to absorb *anything* from popular culture.
Mm-hmm, I said.
It’s a good lesson, I guess. But mostly the lesson is that any purists are usually just letting their personal tastes dictate what’s worthwhile and what’s reprehensible, so keep that in mind.
