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MY SUMMER VACATION
by Daren Foster

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MY SUMMER VACATION - You're listening an interview from WILDsound radio with Daren on Monday August 25 2008

MY SUMMER VACATION
By Daren Foster

Some regular readers of this column have taken time from their busy schedules to point out a certain… ‘tone of disengagement’… shall we say (hats off to you, Mr. Paulo Viccano of Broken Shelf, West Virginia, for being the first of many to point it out) with current events over the course of the last few weeks. Dated reference points, rehashed litany of topic choices, flat and dull prose styling (another level of complaint entirely, in my opinion) -- oh yeah, and an overuse of parentheticals, double dashes, ellipses and vernacular.

Such is the intense degree of complaint that only the most oblivious would fail to sit up and take some notice. Which I have done, coming to the conclusion that there may well be a dollop of truth behind all the muttering and moaning. Perhaps my mind has been ever so slightly preoccupied with matters unrelated to pertinent cultural happenings. Maybe, just maybe, this writer has allowed too much real life to creep into the proceedings and indulged in some casual postings. Quite possibly the summer of 08 has by-passed me entirely, pop culturally speaking.

Yes, OK. I have taken a hiatus from all things entertainment related and am back to bear witness that life does go on. Bearably, even. Dark Knight? What dark night? I may be the only person in North America not to have seen it and I got to say, if ignorance isn’t bliss, it ain’t overly onerous either. For about a week recently, the TV in the house wasn’t turned on once. No bouts of depression or skin-crawling withdrawal symptoms to report. This being an Olympic year has only been an additional bonus as I was able to ignore the proceedings almost entirely. How’d we do anyway? Another disappointing medal tally?

That’s right, boys and girls, I’m here to tell you that it is possible to live contentedly without the constant wall of sound and blather that emanates from movie and television studios, record companies, newspapers and cheap advertising flyers. More startlingly still, you can even go off-line for a bit and come through on the other side practically unscathed. Not only is all this possible, it may even be beneficial. Step back, take a breather and revel in the notion that all these enterprises, from iTunes and summer blockbusters to Fox News and Bell Sympatico, need you far more than you need them. You can survive without them. Not them without you.

This knowledge should give us a great sense of power. To paraphrase the fictional but no less relevant for that Tyler Durdon, we are not our iPhones or our Hi-Def or our MTV, regardless of how much and insidiously advertisers try telling us otherwise. Cattle are branded. We should rankle at being so.

And yet, we seem to be increasingly happy, eager even, to lunge toward the white-hot iron so that we can proudly display our prized corporate tattoo. Without this stamp of approval, life is empty and devoid of meaning. No logo. Nobody.

As a former 14 year-old, I do understand this mindset. Identity not yet in place, you cast about for a group to join, a tribe to be part of, so you’re susceptible to the lure of a sales pitch promising to make you important, sexy, a player. A somebody.

For me and my cohort, it was Levis with the orange tab. Rumour had it that if you collected enough of them (10? 25? 50?), you could get yourself a free pair of jeans. This set off a period of thievery with everyone attempting to rip the little orange tabs off everyone else’s backside. I never knew anyone who actually got themselves free attire out of the deal but it most certainly garnered you some attention for a little while if you wore orange tab Levis.

Then there were coveralls, white painter pants, Kodiak Grebs, Adidas 3-stripers and tracksuits, and Roots shoes. Ours was certainly a branded generation but wasn’t that something we were supposed to grow out of? Leave behind childish things and set out to make your own mark on the world.

But we seem to have held on tightly to certain, disagreeable traits of our youth. That desperate need to fit in, to be marked by what we own not who we are or what we do. All of it egged on by the relentless march of technology, possessions we covet that all have an increasingly shorter built-in obsolescence factor. Faster, more memory, sleeker, talk anytime, anywhere, Blu-ray, blah, blah, blah.

I lay most of the blame for this arrested development on Mac computer users. More than anyone else, they define themselves by the tool they use. To hear them tell it, they are more creative, more independent-minded, more right-brained than lowly PC users. Never mind that Macs are more expensive (therefore more exclusive), thereby exempting a less-than-affluent portion of the population or that Macs are more insular than PCs, making computer-to-computer communication less open if one doesn’t happen to be operating a Mac.

You see, in this worldview it’s OK to be a Mac person but heaven forbid if you’re a McPerson. You’re either with us or you’re ag’in us.

What these self-proclaimed geniuses fail to realize is that you can have all the best gizmos and gadgets money can buy but without a plan of action or a set of goals to accomplish -- a vision, even -- it amounts to squat. Look at the mighty American military now bogged down in Iraq. While a bad carpenter blames mistakes on his tools, stupid gits define themselves by the inanimate objects they own. I think therefore I am has been replaced by I own therefore I am.

In his book, A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright suggests that one of the causes for the disappearance of the native population from the Easter Islands was the destruction of their forests. The Rapanui felled the trees that helped in the construction of the massive stone monuments they hoped would please their gods who would, in turn, reverse the ill fortune that had befallen them manifested largely by the continued environmental degradation laying waste to the island. The gods remained unmoved. The Rapanui vanished, leaving behind giant rock heads staring out blankly over the ocean.

It’s no stretch (Wright’s point in the book) extrapolating the dismal fate of the Rapanui to the rocky road we currently travel. Praying to different gods, those of consumerism and capitalism, we offer up our money for objects in the hopes of making our lives more complete and our souls fuller. The president’s response to the catastrophic events of 9/11 was a plea for Americans to go out and keep shopping. This, before he himself went on a spending spree buying billions of dollars of armaments to lay waste to two already near-Stone Age countries. An endless cycle of destruction and reconstruction, keeping the wheels of commerce well greased.

All well and good for commerce but maybe for us, not so much. Every so often we need to remind ourselves of that, to step back from everything we think is important and reassess its true value to our existence. Can I survive without seeing the latest Hollywood release on its first weekend in order to text all my friends to tell them it sucks even before the credits start to roll? Check. Can I survive not being the first to pre-order Oasis’ new album? Check. Can I survive missing a week here and there of this column I am reading? As much as it pains me to admit, yeah, you probably can. Take a break from it all and you may be pleasantly surprised just how little we need to get by.

READ MORE COLUMNS BY DAREN FOSTER

August 25 2008 - PHONING IT IN

August 18 2008 - GUNGA GULUNGA

August 11 2008 - EMMY DAZE - Where is The Wire

August 4 2008 - ME TALK GOOD

July 28 2008 - TAKE THE CANNOLI

July 21 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 2

July 14 2008 - TECHNO BEAT 1

July 7 2008 - THE INDIGESTIBLE HULK

June 30 2008 - KING GEORGE

June 23 2008 - PLAYING ONE ON TV

June 16 2008 - NEW MONDAY MORNING COLUMN - LIFE IS TOO SHORT - Finally, I saw the last episode of The Wire.

June 4 2008 - FLIP THIS CHANNEL - Buying first house leads to having many things on the mind.

May 29 2008 - BE AFRAID VERY AFRAID - The Canadian military is no longer some namby-pamby, truce-brokering, do-gooding, adventure-seeking, peacekeeping bunch of pacifiers

May 22 2008 - STONE COLD BORING ANGEL - All about The Stone Angel

May 15 2008 - HARD TO SWALLOW CANDY - Madonna is back!

May 8 2008 - THE DUMBEST GUYS IN THE ROOM

May 1 2008 - AN ARRESTING DEVELOPMENT

April 24 2008 - Just TWEEN you and me

April 17 2008 - A Day at the Movies

April 10 2008 - Stop the (March) Madness!

April 3 2008 - Heaven's Gate Revisited

March 27 2008 - ACTING OUT - A great actor working with sub-par material

March 20 2008 - TECHNO ROBBER BARONS - When daylight savings time ruins my taping of The Wire

March 13 2008 - DAMN AGES - Growing up is hard to do

March 6 2008 - CULT OF SADNESS PART 2 - How tearjerkers still baffle me!