Scott is a gay man living in Minneapolis. We went to school together way back when. We first met on craigslist.org...and then later we realized we had an Anthropology course together. I interviewed him this morning, and this is what happened:
Hi.
My boyfriend broke up with me yesterday.
Oh no! How long were you guys together?
Since January. It hasn't been that long but it seems like it's been so much longer, which I guess is how everything feels when you're 21. Time is different at this age. Everything takes forever and it goes by so fast.
Were you in love with him?
Yeah.
I'm sorry, Scott.
I'm eating for the first time in three days. McDonalds. I have to feed my need for trans fats and all that great stuff.
What did you order?
The #2 cheeseburgers. I didn't eat red meat for a long time and the only thing I had cravings for was McDonalds Cheeseburgers. I really wanted a flattened amorphous beef product.
What have you been doing since the break up?
I've been watching Star Trek. It's the best mix of every genre, because they can use science fiction which usually makes comments about human society by transposing them on alien civilizations. Like yesterday I was watching something about a species that doesn't have gender. But it also has mystery and action and romance and it's just a mixture of all these genres but at the end everything comes back to stasis, the normal way of living. People pretty much stay the same. It's really comforting to come back to the same characters season after season. I think that's why people watch television.
Are you still going to France?
No. Right now I'm in the middle of an identity crises. When you have diabetes it's really hard to think about things like going abroad. I decided I was going to go to England so I applied for a scholarship through the University of Minnesota. I was going to try and do cultural studies in the UK, which is where cultural studies was born, and I was going to do my thesis on youth dance music cultures, because there's a lot of work that's been done on that. So I applied for a Fullbright and I didn't get it. Then I applied for a Marshall scholarship and I was asked back for an interview which was basically the worst experience of my academic life.
What happened during the interview?
I was put in this room, and it was really uncomfortably hot which is weird for Minnesotta, and I had to wear nice clothes so it was even hotter. There were seven faculty members in the room and they basically grilled me on academic things and I had to have an opinion on everything which I don't think is usually part of the undergraduate experience, and they wanted to see what I thought about the history of Anthroplogy as a discipline, so they started grilling me on my work studying white middle class youth leisure and they said it was continuing the legacy of white anglo american domination or something. Basically they said "why would you study white middle class youth lesure when you should be studying black kids who need a voice." For someone to say someone needs my voice, I thought was problematic but I didn't feel comfortable disagreeing with them.
How did you react?
Well, my blood sugar was really high so it was hard for me to think straight. But everything I said was like 'what about the working class' and they were like 'well what IS the working class?' So I sort of just shut down in a way that I wish I hadn't. It was the apex of me realizing I didn't want to join academia because its so beaurocratic.
Tell me more about what you wanted to study.
I'm interested in subcultural theory and how a youth culture might resist a parent culture, and what it means to make that resistance in the sphere of aesthetics. I'm studying hipsteres which sounds so absurd but I really think its a fascinating culture that has its own set of discursive features. Like irony. I'm studying irony.
How do you study irony?
That's been a really big question and I'm not sure how to engage with people sincerely about something they're being ironic about. I'm still in the process of figuring out how I'm even going to talk to people about irony. I don't know if I've made any progress in that area. But my thinking thus far is that irony and kitsch are ways of thinking about culture outside of mass-produced ideologies and what does it mean to hip hop that white kids consume it with this ironic distance? Does it implicitly marginalize hip-hop cultural production? Does it reinforce the distance between the white suburban middle class youth and urban black youth? Does it politicize it by saying 'I appreciate this as a kitsch value' and does this reinfoce a certain power relationship? My theory is that it does.
What's the difference between kitsch and camp?
Kitschy objects are objects that were made in poor taste for cheap, and camp is sort of an attitude toward performance that's over-the-top, fully aware of itself as over-the-top. Did you just hear my kitty purr?
No I couldn't hear it.
Oh. Listen.
Shit.
Yeah.
That's loud.
Yeah he's a really loud purrer. My mom has two. She's a cat lady now.
Last time we talked you were going to a BUTT magazine party.
A BUTT magazine party! That was like a year ago! I went to see the creator of BUTT give a speech at the Walker Contemporary Art Museum. There was a slideshow of BUTT magazine photos behind him. I was going to start a gay zine called "Sir!" and it was going to be all about gay men with pictures and raunchy articles on power relations. I didn't end up doing it because I broke up with the guy I was going to collaborate with.
Why don't you do it alone?
Oh I don't have the energy. I've been doing less and less. I want to do things. People tell me I need to do things. But it's frustrating because I don't know what I want to do.
1 comment:
You've misquoted me in several places. This is really funny to see though. Bravo!
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