By Daniel Rigney
Welcome to the cultural twilight zone.* This new series recounts the spectacles I encounter each time I take the Metrorail downtown ($1.25 one way) and walk through the magic doors of a big-city convention hall into subcultural worlds that are somewhat unfamiliar or even alien to me, and perhaps to you as well.
Like Harry Potter passing into Hogwarts through a mysterious door in the train station, like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, I'll be entering subcultural worlds that are strange to me in one degree or another. I'll be reporting sights and sounds from a Texas gun and knife show. From a bridal extravaganza. From a nerd convention. I'll be exploring these and other subcultural worlds as they present themselves publicly under the bright but eery halogen light of a large metropolitan convention center. "Submitted for your consideration," Rod Serling might have said, are the multiple worlds on exhibit in the mirrored convention halls of the twilight zone.
I submit for your consideration that one way an outsider can begin to understand an unfamiliar cultural world is to participate actively and observantly in its public events. Here I’ll be reporting on various events in early 21st century Houston, New Texas – its conventions and traveling tradeshows, its lifestyle celebrations, its political liturgies, its sporting events, its carnivals and sideshows. I'll be reporting what I see and hear in my newly-invented role as a cultural visitor and whimsical storyteller. My blogging notepad ever at the ready, I'll hawkeye these esoteric worlds in search of the comic, the disturbing, and the surprising detail, and then dispatch these to you. I'm not zoning out here. I'm zoning in, as your alert but mild-mannered cultural reporter on this daily planet.
As I parachute into one cultural twilight zone after another, I have no illusion that I am somehow penetrating to the heart and soul of my host subculture in the few hours I spend with it (supplementing my field notes with print and web background-reading and informal conversations with insiders). On the contrary, I realize that most of us spend our entire lifetimes in our own cultural and subcultural worlds without penetrating to their cores, or even much beneath their surfaces. Be warned: This tour is not for the incurious georges among us. What we are doing here is a kind of amateur urban anthropology or ethnography, driven largely by natural curiosity and the odd and (some would say) existentially-dangerous desire to learn more about the unfamiliar cultural worlds of other people.
Most of the people we will encounter on our journey would seem unexceptional if we, as dull normals, passed them in the streets and corridors of our everyday lives, as we in fact do. Every day. But in the enclosed and security-guarded mileau of their subculturally conventional worlds, these seeming normals suddenly disclose all manner of arcane knowledge and practice about quilting, or sports collectibles, or sustainable tech, or Republican politics.
Soon, as I mentioned, I'll be transmitting messages from the subcultural world on display at a large Texas high-caliber gun and knife show. “Why in the world would a peace-loving progressive want to visit a gun show?,” many of my friends may wonder, recoiling in horror at the very thought that I might see or be seen at such an event. They may be concerned for my physical safety, and even for my political sanity.
To allay their concerns, I can say simply and honestly that I’m a writer (now blogger) of sorts, and that my natural curiosity leads me to want to learn about cultural worlds that are at least somewhat unfamiliar to me, and to share what I learn with curious others.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, as everything in the world is. But that’s an honest start toward saying why I intend to visit our downtown convention center episodically to pursue, if you’ll forgive the pun, some unconventional (and rigorously unscientific) journalistic writing about the parade of subcultural spectacles that floats through our town each year.
Most of the subcultural exhibitions I'll visit are varieties of Americana, representing distinct aspects of life and culture in the United States, and hence they are loosely or tightly culture-bound, if not proudly and aggressively ethnocentric. A few, however, are more international, transcultural and cosmopolitan in their composition -- the ethnic festivals and the international science conferences, for instance. But all are fascinating to me in one way or another as diverse representations of our glorious and hideous, variously-expressed and yet ultimately-shared humanity.
I want to resist calling what I’m doing “cultural tourism,” a metaphor fraught with issues. A better term might be “cultural traveling.” I’ll be entering unfamiliar or semi-familiar cultural worlds as an interested and well-mannered guest, somewhat as one might visit the ceremonies of those who practice religions or political ideologies other than one’s own, for the purpose of learning more about them.
My own principal home-world in recent decades has been an academic one – familiar and conventional to me as a former college teacher, but not to everyone else. To many others, academia may seem an alien world. It seems odd even to me at times, and I’ve been living in this strange and absorbing subculture at least since high school. Now I'm venturing into more unfamiliar worlds, including the myriad cultures of the blogosphere, where I am composing this draft of a word-jazz piece on the keyboard.
If I seem to exoticize or "orientalize" the places I visit, it is usually for comic effect. I am not here to sensationalize or tabloidize. (I can report now, for instance, that I have not yet discovered any firm or incontestable evidence of cannibalism in my journeys so far. I'll let you know if I do.) I'm finding that real subcultures are strange enough on their own factual merits, and don't require much hyperbole to make them interesting.
If facts talked, I would let them speak for themselves. But since they don't, I'll occasionaly put a comic frame around them and call it a picture of reality.
Following my visit to the gun and knife show, I plan field excursions to a politically-driven prayer rally, an art car parade, ** a professional football game or perhaps a wrestling match, and whatever other traveling circuses I can get to for $1.25 (one way) on the Houston Metro.
This is inexpensive entertainment at its best. Except maybe for the football game. Like Thoreau at Walden, I'm on a strict budget, having been passed over twice already for the $2 million corporate satire grant I applied for. Three strikes and you're out, Chamber of Commerce.
Most of the field sites reported here are geographically and historically specific to one set of GPS coordinates in the United States (near 29º north latitude, 95º west longitude) in the early 21st century (2011 C.E.). I make no claim to possessing a universal, objective (there's a slippery word), transcultural or transcendent perspective. Nor do I claim that these travel notes are any more than my own ephemeral impressions of ephemeral events as they pass briefly through our town.
But to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, "in the long run we're all ephemeral." In the meanwhile we can enjoy the intriguing moment, and hope for more such moments in the twilit future, as we enact the human comedy together both in and out of our centers of social convention.
*with tributes and apologies once again to the legacy of Rod Serling, "The Twilight Zone"
**It is not widely known, nor sufficiently appreciated, that Houston, New Texas is the art car capital of the world. More later on art cars, and on
New Texas, whose motto is "The Imaginary State."
-- Danagram, posting from the Salon Zone
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
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