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Doomed to Repeat Ourselves: Taylor Swift, Millennials and the New Romanticism

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

hipsters

OK so Edgar Allen Poe, Taylor Swift, and a bunch of Occupy Wall Street protesters walk into a bar. They don’t have much to talk about, right? I mean, what could a macabre poet, America’s sweetheart, and a handful of disgruntled neo-libs really have in common?

Well, kind of a lot, really, but it takes backing up for a minute to think about in detail.

So go back a ways to your high school lit classes, or wherever it was that you first really started to think about literature and artistic movement. For me, that was not literature class. Most of what I remember from English Lit was Mr. Demos reiterating that “all love is tragic (but lust is fun!),” something about a loss of innocence, and that if you leave your wife for a younger blonde girl your jilted ex will definitely chop up your children with an ax.

While that’s all helpful advice, most of my more rigorous thought on literature has come much later in life. In fact there’s probably something to the idea that we aren’t even really meant to get anything out of our high school lit classes beyond the lesson that there are some really great books out there that aren’t about vampires. At 17 I don’t think I finished The Great Gatsby. At 27 it made me want to be a writer.

Most of my literary education has taken place since high school. Even since college, really, and it’s been after dark, with booze, and usually with a lot of yelling. A few years ago I was in a bar in Guatemala, arguing with a Scottish guy about who Shakespeare really was and the finer points of Jack London’s demons, and at some point in the rum-addled conversation he claimed that the whole Romantic movement was really just a bunch of whiny rich kids who hated their parents.

Now, I don’t think we got to the bottom of the Shakespeare issue, and I maintain that Martin Eden is London’s most underrated work, but that last part is really what stuck with me.

“A bunch of rich kids who hate their parents?” I thought. “You mean like the Millennials?*”

And so think about it. Dig way back into those little crevices of your memory where you store things like the Quadratic Formula and what the hell a covalent bond is, and think about the characteristics of the Romantic literary movement.

It flourished on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, as a rejection of the environmental decay and inflicted order of industrialized Enlightenment thinking. Romantic thought is characterized by an embrace of the natural world as well as the macabre, by a cultural celebration of the medieval over the industrial, and by the pursuit of an aesthetic sublime over brute force rationality. By self-reliance, independence, and a rejection of religiously based moral convention.

Sound familiar?

The burgeoning economic growth fueled by the proliferation of the internet has been widely hailed as a second industrial revolution. And if you overheard me mention a person who “considered folk art and ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity, as in the musical impromptu” would you picture Ralph Waldo Emerson? Or a waxed mustache and a mandolin?

How is the Best Made Company anything but an aesthetic celebration of the medieval?

Is an effort “to escape population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism” what’s driving the minimalist movement and all those 180 square fot mini-houses in Portland? Or is that why Thoreau moved to Walden Pond? Poe’s writing brought to life horrifying stories of strange death and torture in the 19th century, but that would never be popular now, right? That must be why True Blood, The Walking Dead, and Dexter all flopped.

The first Romantics came of age during the French Revolution, in a time when Europe’s cultural center was embroiled in tumult and popular thought began to strike back against plutocratic traditions. Does this remind anyone else of growing up during the longest lasting U.S. military conflict in history, or of staging sit-in protests during the financial crisis? Sure, we didn’t cut off the Lehman Brothers’ heads, but I bet a few of you wanted to.

Millennials buy homes, marry, and start families later than any generation in history. This may be a manifestation of an uncertain economic outlook, but is certainly a shift in thinking from our parents’ generation on how best to use the resources we have. And who better to challenge the moral order of our parents than the mouthpiece of a generation: Taylor Swift?

Tay Tay’s newest album is a wholesale rejection of the swooning young girl, waiting for prince charming, that won her fame and acceptance by a nascent generation. Instead 1989 assiduously celebrates the individuality and confidence that formed the foundation of the Romantic movement. In her song, New Romantics (really), she extols the virtues of allowing haters to hate while evoking Hester Prynne, the Romantic era protagonist. If you can’t take it from me, surely you can take it from Taylor?

It’s easy to dismiss the Millennial generation and our infuriating hipster movement as the most entitled generation, or as a bunch of cry babies. Maybe it’s even accurate. But what we’re seeing is a shift in creative era that rekindles the tenets of Romantic thought. The conditions that gave birth to the Romantic artistic movement are as present today as they were 200 years ago, and the people that we so easily disregard as stupid hipsters and lazy teenagers are not simply a generational phenomenon, but rather the standard bearers of a 21st century Romantic renaissance.

And so when Poe, Swift, and those people off the street finally agree on a place to get a drink, my guess is that their bartender will prefer the term mixologist.

Bonus Quiz

To further solidify the point, I’d like to add a quick “Who Said It?” quiz. So who said it? Taylor Swift? or Ralph Waldo Emerson?

1) Always do what you are afraid to do.

2) Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.

3) I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

4) Whatever you do, you need courage.

5) “Fearless” is not the absence of fear. It is not being completely unafraid.

6) No matter what happens in life, be good to people.

7) When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars.

*It’s probably important here to clarify that I love my parents, and that you likely do too. By this I don’t mean actually hating your mother and father, but resisting the trends and values cherished by the previous generation.

Solace of the Huts

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

December brought us such high hopes for a winter that never seemed to come. The storms that pounded western Montana in the early season were cold and deep and set the tone for a ski season to match last year’s banner conditions, but January’s doldrums have stuck around through March and what moisture we’ve gotten has come as rain in the high alpine.

When the skiing is bad, though, the living can be great, and sometimes getting rained on in an alpine yurt isn’t the worst thing that can happen.

Poor conditions send the folks inside for group-cooked meals and a reminder that skiing isn’t just about the snow. Retreating to the dry warmth of an adoptive mountain home forges camaraderie or allows for a few moments of respite before descending back to the ringing phones and shirked duties that never seem to take a breath.

A few lessons from one dumb idea

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment

PLOD Plot Here

Well, I made it. It wasn’t always fun, and it wasn’t always pretty, but I worked out at least three hours a day for ten days. I’ve got the PLOD Plot updated above, and will talk some more a little later on about what I did over the last two days below, but in case you’re short on time I think I can sum up the whole experience pretty well in one sentence:

That was a dumb idea.

And that’s great. Most of my adult life can be described fairly accurately by connecting the dots from dumb idea to dumb idea, and at each point the execution gets a little bit smoother.

There’s been no shortage of dumb ideas. There was that time that I spent a week in the Tetons with two inexperienced climbing partners and we flogged our way to the top of a couple of mellow summits, escaping with our lives, if not our dignity:

 OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Or that other time I stayed up drinking until 4am the night before I was supposed to ride my bike alone the 70 miles to Polson along one of the most dangerous highways in America. In December. I was still drunk until at least St. Ignatious and got lost on the way, which, while adding about an hour to the ride was actually a blessing because I found a truck stop where I could buy extra wool socks.

pig
I don’t have a photo of the Polson Ride, but here’s another one. This is opening the recently unearthed Luau style pig before 100 hungry dinner guests. It was not cooked.

Or then there was that other time that I was caught offguard by a manic episode and accidentally offered to cook a twelve course dinner for fifteen people in a different down while in the middle of a house remodel that was already behind schedule. That one actually came out pretty tasty.

The ideas never really seem to get any better. I’m still waiting to have a good one. But I’ve noticed that my execution of bad ideas is steadily improving, which I think is a great sign. Like my cousin sometimes says, “Ideas are bullshit. Everone’s got ideas. Look, I want a jetpack. That’s a great idea. Everyone wants a jetpack. But it turns out they’re really hard to make. Ideas are bullshit, execution is what counts. If you figure out how to execute, eventually a good idea will come to you.”

And so while I try to take a lot of the things that that cousin says with a heavy grain of salt, I also try to sift through the derelict for a bit of lagan. Every terrible idea that I’ve slogged through has brought me to the other side with a lesson or two that I can put toward my next terrible idea. We almost died in the Tetons, sure, but then I was merely very cold and uncomfortable on the ride to Polson. Every once in a while I even pull something off.

Without getting all pedantic, I’ll try to lay out a few of gems that I picked up through this silly ten day challenge.

1) 3 hours is much to much to run in one day

If you have to ask yourself, “can I physically run for three hours?” then the answer is moot. Regardless of whether or not you can, you shouldn’t. There are a lot of people out there who stand to gain from going on a three hour run, and they know who they are. If there’s any doubt in your mind, maybe just go for a shorter run.

My ankles hurt. My knees hurt. My IT is blowing up. And that was from a single three hour jog. Ride a bike or something.

2) Don’t procrastinate

This is one that you might think I would have learned in 4th or 5th grade, or whenever you start getting legitimate homework assignments. But I didn’t. Almost every of the last seven days of this stupid challenge I found myself leaving work at about 5pm and staring at the business end of a three hour workout. Usually it was getting toward being too dark to ride a bike, and skiing has a Futz Constant* just high enough to make it not ideal for weeknights, which conspired to conceive some long runs, and we’ve established that those are ill advised. The days in which I split the workouts into a morning hour, a lunch hour, and an evening hour were much more pleasant.

Some nights, such as Night 9, I found myself hiking vigorously for three hours in the dark and just getting hungry.

3) Accountability can get you where regular willpower won’t

I said I’d avoid pedantics and so in an effort to keep it informal I’ll use an example here. On Day 10, the last one, I had an elegant plan to leave work, head to Snowbowl, and hike a lap on Point 6 with a quick detour down Whipped Cream. That’d get me about three hours and almost 4,000 vert, and seemed like a beautiful way to top the whole experiment off.

That was the plan.

Instead I had to ride my bike across town after work and pick up the car and drive home to change before heading up the hill. This put me almost an hour behind schedule already.

On the way up Snowbowl Road I began to smell something sweet and boozy, and wondered if some ancient and long forgotten half-bottle of schnapps and broken open or something. A few minutes later the check engine light came on, followed by my engine’s insistence that I not exceed 1,900 rpm, and, finally, as I was parking, steam billowing from under the hood. A quick glance at the engine compartment revealed a blown radiator hose and a sheen of that sickly sweet green fluid covering everything.

So I went skiing for a while, but curtailed the grand scheme of that morning. A while later Girlfriend met me in the parking lot and followed me back to town after we put everything back together and topped off the radiator.

This put me at home at 9:30pm and only having exercised, all said, about 90 minutes for the day. I wanted to go to bed. I was tired, and it was cold outside. If it wasn’t the last day of this stupid challenge thing I definitely would have. But instead I ventured outside and briskly went to collect my bike (still far on the other side of town) and cruise back, still making it into bed before midnight. Without knowing that as many as six people would be waiting to read about the end of the challenge on this blog right here, I certainly would not have finished it.

There’s a TED Talk by Derek Sivers that refers to an old study to assert that by making our goals public we begin to identify with them just enough that it becomes much less likely that we achieve them.

I can’t say that I agree.

 

*Futz Constant – The amount of time associated with an activity that is necessary for the completion of that activity, but that is not that activity. e.g. driving to a trailhead, putting on skins, running a shuttle, etc. A hierarchical ranking of sports based on the Futz Constant is probably deserving of its own post.