Nostalgia's Appeal for Alternative Lifestyles: Formulas Work

Nostalgia’s Appeal Has a Formula

A Look at What Makes Retro Cool Today for Alternative Lifestyles

                                                     John J. “Jack” Crowley                         

HUMAN-240 F2WW

Professor Harlan Schottenstein

Oct. 29, 2014

   The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Nostalgia comes and goes, yet stays interestingly relevant in a new time. It’s all about looking back, perhaps through rose-colored glasses. Critics scoff at the conveniently forgetful aspects of selectively looking at the past. But it works. In gay culture, nostalgia in music recounts the pre-AIDs era and the later repression of open sexual culture.

     “Remember when” changes with musical, theatrical or fashion whim, historical revisionist rewrites of unpopular facts. Arguably, dusting off glory-day ideas sells new products.  Or paying tribute to a sexual freedom once less endangered.

     That’s the crux of formula analysis detailed in, “Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia.” In this article, though, transgender music and gay culture join the look-back fun.  It also uses “trans” amid sexual-surgical changes to retroactively revisit transgender politics in a more-enlightened and less-conservative time. 

     Elitist rejection of nostalgia in the transgender community overlooks a simple fact. Whether a person is gay, straight, bisexual or transgender still means nostalgia still is a time of change or transition, argues author Nishant Shishani (1226)

    Shishani concludes that nostalgia formulas make just as much marketing and business as good-guy triumphs or love-seeking girl finds the right man.  She cites in her analyses a sweeping negative generalization of indiscriminate thirst for all things “retro.” It’s populist and consmumerism mixed together to generate product interest, especially in fashion. While that may appeal more to women, or so some may presume, nostalgia can even repeatedly reconstitute things such as World War II. (Fury, the current Brad Pitt tank-crewman movie,  is formula male nostalgia.)

    Nostalgia also plays a role in the music culture of drag queens and queer bands, even as they display purposeful filth, portray genital mutilations and appear on mainstream shows like (David) Letterman. One even had a song on the cult movie, V for Vendetta.

     Shishani revisits the often-criticized use of nostalgia as a convenient way of dividing high versus low classes. Middle-class people might like retro comic books, while the upper crust consumer prefers original paintings that reference retroactively “good” times. The latter takes big money. The comic book fan can subsist from one collectible to another.  Both like things gone by; one pays more.

   Nostalgia is not the fashion of history, but rather its scraps. The post Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell world has dulled the transgender or gay world’s political teeth amid neo-liberal concerns about “privacy” among consenting adults. (Shishani, 1228)

 Conclusion

     Nostalgia offers a chance for society – and people of alternative sexual preferences – to return to the days of the past. When they can – at least in their political and cultural lives – return “the intimacies of exile in the past.” When it was OK to revel in their “otherness.” Shishani eschews the class-divisional shunning of nostalgia, both as a formula and as a fact. The author asserts that remembering the privacy of the past is important. It is a continuum. Politically and sexually, it permits transgender, gay and other couples to honor a more-private past, recognize the continuities of the politically correct presence, and work toward “a more-radically democratic future.” (Shishani, 1228).

   I always thought nostalgia was about remembering old times, glory days and neat pieces of history. About comic books, romance and good versus evil. This analysis, however, takes a different view of nostalgia. It’s one I’d never appreciated because I don’t live in the world that is explored. Yet nostalgia is a formula for alternative-life partners too.  Looking back is a continuity of their own unique circle of life.

    Shishani’s writing added a dimension of nostalgia in a political sense in the context of those often shunned in traditional political, sexual and cultural circles. To those with alternative lifestyles, there is a nostalgia for the days when there was less disease, fewer well-meaning but misguided societal inquiries and more interpersonal and cultural privacy.

References:

“Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia, (Shahani, N.)

       The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 46, issue 6 (December 2013), p. 1217-1230

      ISSN: 0022-3840, DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12085, Wiley

Heroes/Celebs: Moral Guidance or Crosstalk?

Dispassionate Analysis of Heroes and Celebrities (Crowley)

Heroes and Celebrities: Moral Guidance versus Entertainment

HUMN240, E1WW – Fall 2014

Professor Harlan Schottenstein

John J. “Jack” Crowley

Oct. 26, 2014

   When I was younger, my father used to let me read comic books. As long as I was reading, he’d say, that’s all that was important. Obviously, he didn’t want me reading smut, but heroes in Batman, Superman or X-Men comics taught me about heroes. The old man was sly, because the older-style comics from DC or Marvel also reinforced hard work, cleverness, physical strength and right-headedness. Culturally, we crave them all.

     Celebrities do disservice to the genre of Batman, for instance. Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney and Christian Bale don’t really get it all “right.” Gotham, even the new, dark TV series by the same name, is never as fully served as Batman’s true potential. And celebrities are not as durable: Keaton’s 62 in his new send-up of playing a superhero, Birdman. Kilmer’s gotten fat, Clooney’s gotten married, and Christian Bale is too brooding. America’s love of “crime comics” reaches back to their heyday in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It also was a time when the still-90-percent-male readers were confused after World War II and the start of the nuclear-age Cold War – and still today.

     Jeffrey A. Brown’s article in our Popular Culture textbook captures the mindset, and publishers’ tricks. Brown decries the “have” and “have-not” social classes within comic bookdom. (Brown pp 306-323). To him, it’s not so much about heroes, celebrities and plots as it is about marketing, “hot” editions and “complex intensification of more general aspects of popular culture.” (Brown, 322) It’s fans augmenting their morals and status.

    Hero-based plots in animated texts are redeeming tools in a wrongly-perceived social status of deprivation. Celebrity comic movies and books supplement religious/moral values. Fans read comic books, which are “intellectually debased” by upper-crust intelligentsia. (Brown, 323) They are revered as heroes  in their “subliterate” culture based on the discerning collection of V for Vendetta or Death of Superman “hot” comics.  

    

   

References:

“Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital” (Brown, J.A.)

        Profiles of Popular Culture, A Reader, (Browne, R.B.), Popular Literature Chapter,

        pp 307-323

“Cult of Celebrity,” May 25,2011 (Champion, S. blog; Yoffie, E.H., r abbi;

         and The Atlantic magazine), The Huffington Post

    Retrieved from:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/cult-of-celebrity/

and

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-eric-h-yoffie/lady-gaga-charlie-sheen-a_b_808042.html

“The Way We Are” (Pollack, S.)

Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture

   (Petracca, M., Sorapure, M.) 2012 University of California at Santa Barbara

         Seventh Edition, Pearson, pp 453-463

Heroes and Celebrities: Their significance to culture and to us

    Heroes can be cultural, classical, popular or personal. Celebrities are distractions of public conscience. American media personnel merely pose questions and entertain viewers – and it reflects our overall and relative moral fabric. Values are fluid.

    Morality is the “sanctity of the individual,” said Sydney Pollack speaking about the reflection in popular movies of American moral ideas. Film disiplays an ever-evolving American culture. There are “older values” still remembered from the advent of modern films from the 1930s – 1960s. Moviemaker Pollack says six men then controlled American film and cultural influence. Gone are tales of Ulysses, Gary Cooper’s Sgt. York and Superman. (Pollack, 454)  Love, violence and evolving social custom rule now.

     The writer and producer asserts that good movies entertain, make money and show a heroic character – often an underdog – triumphing with motives driven by day-to-day life. Whether the protagonist is male or female, they often fight against injustice. The man may be more violent or physical about it, but the female heroes can be if provoked. They often, however, are equally if not more cunning. Either way, the movies deliver.

     All of these things also involve a so-called cult of celebrity, Such heroes in American life, the Huffington Post asserts, can vary from Moses to Lady Gaga. Rabbi E.H. Yoffie calls celebrities and heroes essential to American life, just as our readings assert. He says, in relevant part, that young Americans – even religious ones – look at celebrities as an entertaining distraction, not heroes. But Yoffie says if parents want to imbue some sense of personal heroism and admiration, they should give their kids something to look up to. The Bible, the rabbi asserts, gives traditional heroes traditional-value acclaim. And if parents want to extol virtues and their own lead-by-example potential, they could point to the first responders of 9/11: People who stepped up when the nation needed them. They were not celebrities, but they were and are still heroes. See Yoffie’s assertion that we fret too much about cultural distractions, celebrity and the media, and not enough about the heroes in our midst: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-eric-h-yoffie/lady-gaga-charlie-sheen-a_b_808042.html

     The need for distracting entertainment also is shown in movies because it’s what people buy. Human life is more disposable, Pollack asserts, because the people want to be entertained, and therefore sanctity gives way to Hollyood sensationalism. His assertion is that it does not make us lesser persons. Similarly, love, marriage and how they are portrayed “belong to the consumer,” Pollack asserts. And as such, the trepidations of movie pioneers gave way to the need for subsidiaries of large corporations to make a profit. “Making films,” the famed creator asserts, is “a merger of two antithetical things: Some form of art and sheer commerce.”  (Pollack 455).

    Pollack seeks truth, but it is relative, living in a character from moment to moment. The public gets what the viewers want, and not what the producer thinks they should have. The latter idea is “just plain wishful thinking about how to improve society,” Pollack went further when he told his conference audience concerned about movie mores:

     “I share your nostalgia for some of those lost traditional values, but attempting to reinstall them by arbitrarily putting them into movies when they don’t exist in everyday life will not get people to go to the movies or put those values back into life. I wish it were that simple.” (Pollack 458)

   Pollack’s film have a “spine” and an underlaying framework or “armature.” They revolve around “some argument that fascinates me” that invariably is played out by heroes. They often are conveniently marketable celebrities of the day. (Pollack 458-46) He does a film strictly about “arguments,” not trashing values he believes are fair. He avers that “most of our films pro the underdog. … There’s usually a system – or a bureaucracy – to triumph over.” Yet Pollack argues durability: “American culture is general. … America has the most easily digestible culture” compared to (more-culturally restrictive) Indian or Japanese societies. (Pollack 461)

    He points out that movies made despite fears that they would not appeal to culture “paid off handsomely, because there are no rules.” He lets viewers decide a film’s value.

     The goal of movies, heroes, celebrities is not to agree with viewers, but to argue with them. So Pollock’s movies are both “reasonably intelligent” and seek to entertain. The role of heroes, celebrities, writers, producers and filmkakers is “rather to make the whole world cry than (just) 17 intellectuals in a classroom.”

    Pollack’s goal to explore arguments through movies compels the audience to evaluate the questions presented. They hold it up against the backdrop of their own personal heroes, cultural protagonists and popular celebrities playing a role or commenting on news of the day. It’s subjective because it overlays the viewer’s framework and perspective. The result can be anger, dispassionate analysis, or uplifting thought-provoking messages. Just don’t “bore the pants off” the audience. (Pollack 457)

    The moviemaker has found heroic “motives that are hidden in day-to-day life.” (Pollack 457) Rabbi Yoffie similarly extols 9/11’s responders, urging the public to look beyond celebrities to find true American heroes. Celebrities just come along for the ride. Popular media exist to distract/entertain. True values come from upbringing and life lessons’ moral teaching. We skin our knuckles in life. We need a break via mock heroes, real role-model personal heroes and celebrities/popular culture. Our values should survive filmed moral arguments played by stars in thought-provoking movies. That’s true even when our general culture and values evolve as dynamically as our daily existence. 

References:

“Cult of Celebrity,” May 25, 2011. The Huffington Post

    Retrieved from:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/cult-of-celebrity/

“Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen and Moses: Celebrities and Heroes in American Life”

(Yoffie, E.H.) May 25, 2011. The Huffington Post

     Retrieved from:

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-eric-h-yoffie/lady-gaga-charlie-sheen-a_b_808042.html

“The Way We Are” (Pollack, S.)

Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture

   (Petracca, M., Sorapure, M.) 2012 University of California at Santa Barbara

         Seventh Edition, Pearson, pp 453-463

Popular Culture: Written Analysis II

Popular Culture: Written Analysis II: Prison Break is a show that was about a man who was sent to prison and put on death row even though he was completely innocent. During this ...



Hey, Andrea.... Why wouldn't you expect Prison Break to have stereotypes. Folks on the outside have to take it on faith. People on the inside are likely to follow the rituals to survive. As such, the fish have to prove they are going to withstand the hassling as the older vics stand by and jeer.



I haven't seen this show: They have women guards overseeing male prisoners?

Smartphone Rituals, Stereotypes & Are iPhone Users Smarter?

Written Analysis, Week 2: iPhone Rituals and Stereotypes

John James Crowley

Popular Culture, HUMN 240

Professor Harlan Schottenstein

Oct. 19, 2014

iPhone Rituals and Stereotypes

     iPhones not only require rituals – and invoke stereotypes – there’s even an “app” for that.  Before you download the alleged-productivity program, you have to: Log into iTunes; pay credit-card points to buy it; verify the purchase; download it; and then open it.

    “Ritual” from Stoeffler.cc costs $2.99 for version 2.42. Upgrading is another ritual about Ritual and iPhones in general. If you don’t remember your iPhone/iTunes password(s), you have to guess three times. Then you answer security questions. If you can’t remember those answers, you have to start over. Or you can ask that it be sent via email. Finally, you have to change a randomly-created password to something you can remember. Next week, when you want to buy something else, you likely have forgotten your password – or lost that scrap of paper you put in your wallet. Still, Yahoo’s news says iPhone users are smarter than Android owners. Stereotype?

    Yahoo quotes an admittedly unscientific Hunch.com study. Android users are less-educated men who embrace technology late. Women use iPhones at an older age and make more money. Users of each phone type also have different tastes in movies, style and varying personalities, Yahoo claims. Hunch.com interviewed 700,000 people to predict demographics, traits and tastes. Then 15,800 boiled-down answers were somehow parsed against millions of other questions answered by the same group of Android versus iPhone users. Such studies are themselves suspect. The reader doesn’t know how the study was done, and Androids also are cheaper to buy.

   Smartphone stereotypes overall though are true: Being tethered to an outlet to recharge. Sitting entranced in traffic, in line or multi-task engrossed in a public restroom. iPhones promise an easier existence. You just endure rituals, stereotypes and complicated annoyances in order to simplify. The same is true of Androids, but Yahoo says those people are somehow dumber.

References

“Android, iPhone User Stereotypes Revealed,” Yahoo Live Science. Aug. 17, 2011

        Retrieved from:

http://news.yahoo.com/android-iphone-user-stereotypes-revealed-181805502.html

Ritual, an iPhone productivity application (Stoeffler.cc) July 20, 2014

     Apple iTunes pay-to-download site

      Retrieved from:

     https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ritual-get-motivated-build/id731897835?mt=8

     

3 Pop Culture Icons    (Crowley)

Storytelling Meets Myths: Television Shapes Viewers’ Attitudes

Popular Culture: HUMN240, E1WW – Fall 2014

Professor Harlan Schottenstein

Due: Oct. 9, 2014

Submitted: Oct. 12, 2014

John J. “Jack” Crowley

   Facebook, the iPhone and Jeep Wranglers are popular-culture icons that are relevant to me. I use Facebook to keep track of my friends all over the world. I use the iPhone as my tool to do that, plus use the web and send text messages. And I like Jeep Wranglers because I drive one, and it’s been around since the advent of World War II.

    Facebook may or may not be a good idea from a privacy standpoint. I don’t care. It’s convenient to befriend people, track their life events, and tell them what I am up to. It’s free, it’s powerful and it’s everywhere.

    The iPhone is the smartphone of choice for me. It’s easy to use, it’s literally blast-resistant if you get a special case, and there are very many helpful navigation and other applications I use every day. That includes text messaging, email, a camera and even a flashlight.

   My 1999 Jeep Wrangler is an icon that dates to 1941 in its design. Willy’s, the original manufacturer, made a military General Purpose vehicle. It became known as GP or a Jeep. Their four-wheel drive, simply design and ease of maintenance made them a hit in both theaters of operations during WW II. I like mine because it has a 4.0-liter in-line 6-cylinder that doesn’t leak even though I offroad with my Wrangler due to high ground clearance. 

References:

“The Cultural Influences of Television: Society’s Storyteller: How TV Creates the Myths by Which We Live (Gerbner, G.) 1993

Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture

   (Petracca, M., Sorapure, M.) 2012 University of California at Santa Barbara

         Seventh Edition, Pearson

Television Perpetuates our Pop-Culture Myths: But Perhaps Social Media Sets us Free

   This posting differs from the Common Culture article/myth topic i gleaned from the 1993 article by Gerbner stating that TV is Society's storyteller. Because of Facebook, social media and exploding web use that came after '93, my assertion is that that is only partially true.

   The public’s inherent need to tell and hear stories has propelled television into the heart of its viewers’ perceptions of world and local events. Though George Gerbner’s article was written in 1993 – pre-internet prevalence – it gives a narrative about the myths and still pervasive on cable and network television. Television also ties into my other paper’s pop-culture theme, the good/evil myth of personal-injury lawyer advertising. TV ritualizes, institutionalizes, entertains and socializes. Besides those myths, it helps consumers make choices, about what to believe, what lawyer to hire, and how much trust to put into the world around them. Social media does the same, but widens choice.

     TV creates the myths, to some extent, by which we live. We are storytellers, we believe in ancient good/evil struggles perpetuated by our legends, and we need to form opinions about the world around us. The internet has changed some of Gerber’s assumptions, but there likely still are 5 acts of violence an hour on TV. That attracts male viewers, whether or not they are still 3:1 to women in the audience. Children also watch mostly adult-programmed television. Only 7 percent is “children’s programming.” So TV is the overall mythology “we grow up in and grow with.” (Gerbner, 119)

   The author sorts time into pre-print, print and telecommunications. I would add to that mix the post-1993 internet, most notably Facebook and other social media.  “The Cultural Influences of Television: Society’s Storyteller: How TV Creates the Myths by Which We Live” is a Gerbner’s concise yet partial look at U.S. popular culture.

    Social media brings TV’s ritual fan base to hand-held smartphones. It divests TV’s moguls of their control over what is watched. The internet overall is more “total” in encompassing virtually anything you can google. And the web/Facebook amplify TV’s socializing process with richer media, greater variety and different viewpoints.

References:

“The Cultural Influences of Television: Society’s Storyteller: How TV Creates the Myths by Which We Live (Gerbner, G.) 1993

Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture

   (Petracca, M., Sorapure, M.) 2012 University of California at Santa Barbara

         Seventh Edition, Pearson

Smartphones have made us less human

     Go into any restaurant, or stand in any line. No one is talking. Everyone is looking at their smart phone. They use it to communicate on Facebook. They use it to text. They use it to for Facetime and for calling.

    The internet also is accessible via smartphones. Anything except real contact. You don't meet people in the real world any more. I will use the iPhone as my primary example, because it is what i have.

    Smartphones are part of popular culture. Popular culture is what is shared by the common media we all use. It's advertising, marketing, branding and incorporates our traditions and ways of behaving. Some people have ethnic cultures, which have become blended into American pop culture. Pizza was Italian, Pierogis are food from Eastern Europe, and fireworks started in China.

    Smartphones bring together things such as who we are, and what we learn. The culture of the warrior is different than the culture of the economist, or the politician. A Japanese artist is different from one in the Middle East.

    Smartphones are homogenizing our culture. Girls take selfies to get their faces and personalities known. Barbie dolls dictate to little girls what normal is, and PintInterest or other platforms are accessible via Smartphones to make us all see them.

   Smartphones are physical manifestations of culture that can be nonmaterial, as in the virtual world. It also smoothes out the stratifications between nationalities, race, gender and class. If you have a Smartphone, no one knows if you are poor.

   We don't sit and exchange ideas in person. We have blogs. We don't meet at parties. We have Facebook. We don't date. We use match.com. All those internet applications can fit in our pocket on our smartphone. One thing that survives is taste.

   What kind of music we like, our political beliefs, our intellectual biases and even the kind of socialization we do -- all filters through a Smartphone.

    An iPhone is a classic example. Apple sold millions of the new iPhone6, even though it is so flexible that it bends when you put it in your pocket. Though the software also is buggy, people stood in line to upgrade. The pop culture that facilitates the world at your fingertips also requires you to have an iPhone or a Smartphone to access it.

    At least in a virtual socializing world, we at least interact. I just wish it was more in person.  I wouldn't mind being segregated from the 10 percent of our culture that is elite, if that means that i prefer rock music to a classical symphony. I would rather see a group of buddies than visit a museum to see what the more-monied class of people think is tasteful.

    I normally eat at McDonalds, or a Bob Evans rather than a place that serves pheasant under glass. The fact that anyone could afford pheasants means they can splurge money on exotic game birds from China that serve no other purpose than to prove wealth and status.

   Education, to me, also is relative. I did not go to Harvard or Yale. I am attending Franklin, and I have an Associate's Degree from a technical school. But it doesn't mean that I don't know acute-trauma medicine, the stench of war, or the tools needed to be a survivor in war or daily life.

    What also suffers is pop culture - oral traditions from remote geographical areas such as Appalachia, or family history passed from Spanish or other Hispanic people from Mexico to the U.S.
   It can even be as simple as the legacy of kids' stories, fairy tales or physical keepsakes handed from one person to another.

    I fear the segregation that iPhones, Smartphones and the internet generally are bringing to younger people today. It's our job to try to stay in touch personally - and not just through technology. We are losing the emotional impact of interpersonal contact. And it saddens me.

Welcome, friends and fellow vets

  Hi, I'm Jack Crowley.

   Hello to my fellow college students, and any other veterans of OEF or OIF. This is jaxvetblog.

  I'm a contractor available to hire for teaching Basic or Combat Life Support skills in this country overseas.

   Currently, Mt. Carmel Medical Systems in Columbus, Ohio, uses me to teach classes for them in First Aid, CPR, Basic Life Support and emergency medicine for use in any situation.

   I do the same thing under contract with Chicago-based Citywide CPR.

   And I have been overseas, soon to South-Central Africa (Rwanda). There I will teach three weeks' combat-trauma medicine to local military medics and soldiers.

 I've also spent 18 months in Cuba, including mass-casualty victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

   Most notably, i spent 7.6 months on dismounted patrol with Marine 1/7 "Suicide Charley" in and near Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. I've been humbled by earning a Bronze Star for saving 4 men during a night attack, while myself wounded.

   Sangin has been added by the Marine Times as one of the Marines' bloodiest battles in its recent editions. The area joins Iwo Jima, Hue (Vietnam) and Fallujah (Iraq) in the annals of USMC history.

   So I'm a former "dirt Sailor," a Navy Hospitalman retrained as a Field Medical Technical expert, earning me the designation of "Doc," or a Fleet Marine Force Corpsman.

See also:

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/08/06/Purple-Heart-veterans-week.html

And Franklin Univerity's writeup of my humble Purple Heart scholarship selection is:

8/29/spotlight-on-purple-heart-scholarship-recipient-student-jack-Crowley/

--

John J. "Jack" Crowley, recipient: Bronze Star (valor) & Purple Heart

Registered Medical Assistant, former combat Corpsman, Marine 1/7 

Apt.near Grandview, but mail is:

  c/o 4149 Maystar Way

  Hilliard, Ohio 43026-3012

Direct: 614-753-0206

Fax: 614-474-8187

email: jackcrowley1987@gmail.com

RMA # 418213

American Heart Association-certified

as Basic Life Support Instructor # 07140263683;

Mt. Carmel Health Systems: OH03247

Originally trained by Navy/USMC, Military Training Network