yankee doodle dandy

In the late summer of 2007, I came back to school after more than three years of life in the "real world." In this interim I had been an assistant manager at the Country Kitchen (home cookin' at its finest), an English teacher in South Korea, and a waiter at Red Lobster. I was excited yet nervous to begin my master's degree in Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. I came to visit the school that spring, and I had the chance to sit in on a class. I was there, studiously taking notes on 3 x 5 index cards. What kinds of things did they talk about? Am I smart enough to handle this? Am I made of the proper stuff to actually contribute something in the world of academics? What are the big names? What dense theories should I attempt to get my meat hooks into first? I pondered these questions and many more as I sat in the corner, trying not to get in the way as the big kids volleyed strange and titillating words and phrases to and fro like so many shuttlecocks of worldly prestige. Then I saw something incredible. The bespectacled gentleman across the way, the one with the faintly aristocratic air, whom had been huddled over his notebook scribbling furiously, was not documenting a flurry of insights into our socio-cultural psyche. He was not even taking notes. He was doodling! Ahhh... doodles! I hadn't realized that I missed you so much! When was the last time I had the chance to doodle? Sure, I drew in my notebook, but that's not doodling is it? That is drawing. Doodling is what you do absent-mindedly while you should be doing something else. It is the mind cleverly slipping out the fire exit while your body is left to make pleasant conversation with Aunt Myrtle over watery punch and Ritz crackers. I realized that I hadn't doodled in over three years. The full implications of a doodle-rich life flooded over me. It was like re-discovering an oddly familiar name in the phone-book, calling the number on a whim, and re-igniting a wildfire affair with a woman you haven't thought of since high school. And it's not just that you haven't thought of her, you haven't even thought that the thought of her could still exist. She was wiped from your mind cleanly in a machete stroke of adult responsibilities. But now, my lips are full with blood and I'm driving my 1984 Chevy Celebrity over to her parent's house (who are both away "up north" at the cabin) and it's 9:30pm and I've got a movie on the passenger seat and $15 bucks for a pizza and nothing but time on my hands. For the first time since my tour of the school late that spring, I felt that I was home. I am a student. This is who I am now. This is what I do. The prospect of sitting in class and doodling brought that reality home for me, and it was profound. This is odd of course, because we think of doodling at the exact opposite of serious business. People doodle when they're bored, and these doodles are trivial by nature. When Jerry Lundegard needs to dull a pencil in the movie Fargo, he repetitiously doodles on his notepad. A figure of historical value like Kurt Cobain or Adolf Hitler can raise the doodle to some degree of prestige, but it is still, at best, treated with the due respect one might pay a casually flatulent professor.

But doodles are important; they mean something. And they are meaningful in a number of ways. First, they offer a reflection of both the individual mind, and the socio-culturally mind which "produced" the doodle. When I was teaching English in South Korea, I was very interested in the doodles my students made in their books. Observe the same page doodled on by two different students from two different classes. At left, we have the work of a seven year old girl, at right, a seven year old boy. The girl has transformed our kitchen tools into an army of cartoonish friends. The boy has constructed a more dangerous world, one filled with sharp points and deep slashing lines. Viewed as such, can we dismiss these artistic renderings as "just doodles," the random and inconsequential firing of a child's pencil? No. And this shouldn't suggest easy answers along the lines of sugar and spice VS. snips and snails. But it is evocative, and needs due consideration. These drawings were produced by individuals socialized within certain conditions, and those conditions are shot through with power. Doodles also help people learn. A natural instinct as a teacher is to keep the students on task. Text messaging, chatting with friends, scratching pentagrams into one's skin with the business end of a compass, these are all things which we should encourage students to avoid in an atmosphere of being educated. But I exempt doodling from this list of classroom no-no's, and I do so for two reasons. One reason is that absent drawing acts as decompression time for the burdened mind. Over three hours of class time, or even fifty minutes, it is unlikely that you will be able to pay strict attention the entire time, or even a significant majority of that time. Doodling allows the brain to wander and float and deal with the stress of being crammed in a desk for unbearably long periods listening to what, in a more lively context, might be very stimulating discussion. I have spent my class time well, supplementing notes with these little excursions in line-figure yoga. Below are some examples. So, in the glorious tradition of capitalism circa Marx, I have relaxed myself just enough so that I might reengage with the system of production at full steam. I have taken my vacation, and now I'm ready for work (serious learning). This is one way to think about it. Another way would be more abstract and philosophical, and it would have something to do with a restless subconscious, a metaphorical society exemplified in a room of pressing walls (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind), and a sort of fundamental humanity, whatever the hell that is anyway. Doodles also keep one on task, as much as they promote mind wandering. Observe the following from my class notes. This is Hoggart's idea of selective tradition. Put more succiently to me in line-drawing than could be done in words. It is also more memorable. Here we have an admittedly simplified academic view of "truth." This relates specifically to Michel Foucault, but in retrospect I can apply it just as well to the whole Birmingham School, and the love of my life, Stuart Hall as well. This meant something to me at one time, but it's too abstract to recall. Ok, so doodles fail sometimes too! So, doodles are socio-culturally relevant and produce upstanding academics. This is my point, and it is simple enough. Why though has the doodle risen to such a place of prominence in popular culture? In my last post, I wax hostile about hipster movie posters. There is little doubt that, however you conceive it, the doodle-esque line-drawing enjoys a ton of cache' amongst the young folks of today. I pulled the following image off the Internet. It was the first picture that came up in Google Image Search with the word "doodles." A lot of these characters should be familiar. The ninja, the communist hammer and sickle, grenades, guns, hearts, video game stuff, stars etc. Any of these things may appear in an eight-year-old boy's school notebook, but it's equally plausible that the above images came from the hand of twenty-somethinger. The doodle is extremely profitable after all, and images that replicate the doodles unassuming earnestness sell the goods. This is fine, I love doodles. But it seems to support a wider trend of elementary schoolizaiton going on in our culture. The TV show Flight of the Conchords, for instance, features the lead characters Brett and Germaine wearing an inexplicable variety of childish clothing. Granted, they look quite adult in sport coats and button-ups. But the moments where we catch one of them in a T-shirt are sublime! It took me awhile to put my finger on it. Initially, I thought of renaming the show simply Parade of Zany T-Shirts, but they are more than zany T-shirts, they are the T-shirts that fat kid with poor parents used to come to school in back in the second grade. They are second-hand, they are ugly, in 1988 they would have marked the poor fool wearing them as hopelessly uncool. Ok, so I didn't actually go and collect screen captures of all the zany T-shirts Brett and Germaine have worn over the years. I have simply provided a couple suggestive images, and your imagination and experience can fill in the detail.

So my argument here is that the elementary schoolesque T-shirts and the trend towards more doodleesque art in hipster subculture generally (see below and previous post), both indicate a wider youth trend of a retreat to childishness. Anecdoteally, I spent more time in a few graduate courses talking about how great Ecto-Cooler was than I did on Jameson, Barthes and Baudrillard combined. A crappy fruit flavored beverage from the early 90s is more important to us than critical theory? The answer is of course yes and no. It's not slimer himself (itself?), but the nostalgia for slimer, the nostalgia for that sickening fruit flavored box beverage with the shitty plastic straw that used to always stab you in the gums. Youth culture today, and by youth I suppose I mean twenty and thirty somethingsers (because we are overgrown children after all) is obsessed with nostalgia. It doesn't matter if it was good, great, boring or downright awful. The fact was that it happened in the past, and the past is Good. Do you remember Big League Chew? Sure do! How about Garbage Pal Kids? You bet'cha! Thundercats? Kickball? Stupid clunky glasses your mom made you wear? Yes yes and yes! This would be fine if it were totally relegated to the sphere of aestheics. Do I enjoy the site of a gaudy tiger upon black velvet? I didn't used to, but now I could see the appeal (damn!). This doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when grown-ups say "I heart Nelson Mandela" and mean it. The difference between this statement and something like "I love Nelson Mandela," "I respect, admire, and adore" Nelson Mandela," or anything between is both profound and profoundly microcosmic. In the difference, Nelson Mandela has been transformed from a human figure worthy figure of praise to a mere bobble in the semiotic claw machine of word choice. In this new formulation, where Nelson Mandela is "hearted," he becomes the emotive equivalant of the prize in a claw game you'd be willing to spend your final quarters trying to win. Much better than that Donatello electric toothbrush, but not quite as valuable as, say, the 1000 ticket SpongeBob pool float behind the arcade counter. It is still a compliment to be sure, but a rather vague and ineffectual one. Sapir and Whorf demonstrated decades ago that language affects reality in a fundamental way. Language is reality. Researchers have suspected as much for hundreds of years prior, and evidence today suggests the same thing. Words are our world. Literally. Now, just because you say that you "heart" something doesn't necessarily diminish your affection for that thing. I'm not saying that it's prima facie insubstantial, vacuous, or insincere. But what I am suggesting is that these attitudes, this popular adulation of childhood markers in our thoughts, conversations, and visual repetoire, are changing the way we think about our world in some fundamental ways. Fer serious? Yes. Fer serious. And this may sound like so much gloom and doom, the kids today are dumber than the kids yesterday, and so much other reactionary crap, but I swear it is not. If nothing else, I think it's necessary preperation for the world we live in. A world where human relationships are mitigated more and more by mobile communications devices and where we're just as likely to think of our companions as "social networks" as "friends." Where I know what my friend Sean is doing in New York not because I talk to him on the phone, but because I read his Facebook status updates. Perhaps this elementary schoolization is just getting us used to the idea of dealing with meme sound-bites rather than meme conversations? The truth is, I don't know, but it scares me a little. With that said, I enjoy playing kickball. I enjoy it perhaps more than is healthy for a man my age. I also enjoy pictures of dinosaurs. But sometimes, when I think of my dad sitting down as a 28 year old man and thoroughly enjoying the werewolf VS. vampire bowling drawing his lover did for him, I feel a creeping unease. Are we a generation of kids in adult bodies? Is our fascination with nostalgia and childhood authenticity damaging our ability to be "responsible" adults? What does "responsible" even mean? It frightens me a bit that even as I say the word I feel a primal revulsion. That "responsibility" is implicated in a system of dominance and control that I hate. That being an eternal child is somehow a noble way to opt-out of this system. But at the same time, while I think it's funny to put your kid in a little wheelchair and roll her around on Youtube, or jam a camera in their face as they recover from oral surgery, I think that it's not only childish and fun, it's just plain old fucking wrong. Maybe I am a reactionary after all.