Category: Features

By Siobhan Lyons, PhD Candidate
Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies
Faculty of Arts
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia

“For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century–Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot–had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience–from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.”

-Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine, March 1969

An Intro to Trash

The above is an excerpt from famed media scholar Marshall McLuhan, in an interview with Playboy magazine. His notion that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experiences, from trash to treasure, shows the theorists’ own perception of where art comes from. Moreover, McLuhan himself can be described as transgressing the ordinary boundaries of art—appearing in Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall, being alluded to several times in hit HBO program The Sopranos, and of course, being interviewed in Playboy magazine, as authors Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov have also, already disrupting the conventions set up around high and low brow forms of culture.

Trash Culture is an elusive concept, and does not conform to one particular cultural group or categorisation, which is why, then, it proves to be an intriguing concept. More than popular culture, trash culture carries with it certain cultural and societal definitions and assumptions, all of which are subjective, though undeniably unfavourable. But it changes and adapts. J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous epic series The Lord of the Rings was considered ‘juvenile trash’ when first published (Sandbrook, 2015), but has gone on to be included on various ‘greatest works of literature’ lists, and is now considered essential reading for most youngsters.

Trash touches each and every aspect of culture; from music to fashion and literature to philosophy. Anybody who has read or is familiar with Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), for instance, will appreciate the merging of theory and trash in such essays as ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘Toys’, in which Barthes shows how useful these so-called ‘trashy’ elements are in society. Theorist Susan Sontag, too, was known for her embrace of pop culture, keen to shatter the ‘false divide between pop culture and “high” culture’ (Popova). Stravens, moreover, argues that Sontag embraced ‘certain forms of pop culture as simply another turn of the avant-garde’, and ‘embraced mass culture at the same moment that she was embracing the French nouveau roman’ (283). Objects seen as belonging to separate ‘fields’ are therefore considered, by some, to exist on the same plane of cultural existence, with trashy mass market paperbacks coexisting on the same bookshelf with Tolstoy or Nietzsche. The assumption that trash cannot function alongside high art is perhaps this century’s greatest myth.

What is Trash Culture?

But what exactly constitutes trash culture? As a theme or issue, it is relatively under-explored in both academic and everyday criticism. Richard Keller Simon’s book Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition (1999) is one of the primary texts concerning the dynamics of trash culture. ‘The relationship between great books and popular entertainment’, he notes, ‘is important and worth examining carefully. What really is the difference between trash culture and the great tradition? Why is The National Enquirer so bad and a tragedy by Euripides so good?’ (2).

For Keller, the difference between trash culture and high culture is in storytelling methods, with Dumb and Dumber standing in for Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Clueless a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, and Rambo a revision of the Greek classic The Iliad. And then there is Star Wars, perhaps the most notable creation to be considered trashy, whose narrative is taken from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and in many respects is considered a retelling of The Bible. Trash, then, appears to be linked to a deviation from an original. Considered an inferior product, it gleefully repeats, becoming what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls ‘difference within repetition’.

Indeed, the issue goes beyond mere class and elitism, and extends towards anything from medium to aesthetics. The revamped version of classic stories supposedly affronts the integrity of the original, making the familiar strange in the process.

Moritz BaBler argues that: ‘the aesthetics of Trash can either appreciate the Die Hard movies starring Bruce Willis or the disco world of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever directly or mediated’ (32). For Vexen Crabtree, trash culture features ‘Cheap thrills, shock, brainless action, explosions’, with ‘no concentration or depth required’. This is what separates trash from the popular: its apparent absence of any redeeming intellectual quality. Yet this is also where a supposed contradiction emerges, as many highly intellectual figures profess their love of trash. As Sontag herself once noted, she should not have to choose between The Doors and Dostoevsky: ‘I am for a pluralistic, polymorphous culture’.

The simple pleasure of zoning out, long considered a negative trait of humans, is seen to be beneficial for the brain. According to Lucia Peters, science backs up the benefits of mindlessness, saying: ‘Simply put? It’s an excellent way for you mind to solve problems in less conventional ways’ (2015). Evolutionary speaking, temporarily removing the need for in-depth concentration allows the brain to formulate ideas that would not otherwise form. It also gives the brain a much-needed chance to relax, making Trash enormously beneficial in the process.

There is, of course, the simple notion that anything trashy is that which appeals to the masses. But why is this considered such a bad thing? If some medium or story is appreciated on a wide scale, why does this translate as problematic? For theorist Raymond Williams, writing in 1961, the issue is simply that mass appeal translates as the declining quality of the medium itself.

Discussing the notion of a mass public in relation to literature, he writes: ‘On the one hand there is the fear that as the circle of readers extends, standards will decline, and literature be threatened by “blotterature”. Related to this, but involving other prejudices, has been an essentially political fear that, if the common man reads, both quality and order (sometimes the one standing for the other) will be threatened’ (179).

We associate trash culture with more recent decades, but even in the Victorian era, trash was affiliated with the widespread dissemination of books, previously reserved for a minor elite. Famous figures such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain may have been celebrated for their focus on the working class, but ultimately they were derided by arbiters of taste who were keen to keep literature out of the hands of the lower classes. As Lisa Rodensky argues: ‘Reviewers note – both to praise and to blame – that Dickens’s novels reproduce the language of the lower classes’ (584). She explains:

Set against this cluster of meanings are those circulating in the reviews that relegate the popular to the lowest common denominator, a category of mass-produced novel and novelist that better classes of readers should resist for many reasons, among them the suspicion that a work which attracts so many readers will degrade them, make them part of a manipulated and undifferentiated mass reading public (584).

The issue then becomes about individuality, or what we may understand as the myth of individuality, and the desire to be differentiated from others, in which products and entertainment that is widely consumed makes us all the same. The more unique and obscure the product, seemingly the more unique we become. Because trash is unapologetically repetitive, it is seen to contribute to this dreaded system. Yet when it comes to choice of entertainment and consumerism, there is little difference between choosing between a pop singer such as Britney Spears and the more obscure Tom Waits. Why? Because according to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the products and entertainment we choose to define ourselves by actually say nothing meaningful about us at all. Indeed, they note that ‘something is provided for all so that none escape’. Rather than resisting the system, then, it becomes important to understand the benefits of trash and the place it has in society. Or, as Sontag argued, we may not have to choose between trash and ‘serious’ products at all: ‘There are contradictory impulses in everything’, she stated. Hence Star Wars novels such as The Courtship of Princess Leia may in fact go hand in hand with even the most complex Dostoevsky, without any threat to perceived ‘established’ categories of cultural acceptance.

Learning to Embrace Trash 

At this point it seems only necessary to point out that there is, of course, a distinction set up between Popular Culture and Trash Culture. Yet this distinction is replete with confusion and inconsistencies. While television programs such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer are, arguably, a part of high popular culture, reality television talk shows reside firmly within the area of trash culture.

One the website Human Truth, blogger Vexen Crabtree distinguishes between popular and trash culture:

There is a distinct difference between popular and trash culture. In many countries, the things that are massively popular are not intrinsically trashy. It is not essential that the most liked music has to be the most shallow music, nor that the most bought newspapers have to be the most absurd. The UK in particular has a popular culture that is very dumbed-down, but it has not always been like that (2001).

            In many instances, trash exists as a form of social anarchy, as seen in the British television program The Young Ones, and undoubtedly many others. Therefore, there is no one understanding of trash, though it has a pivotal role to play in shaping the cultural values of society.

The difference between popular and trash culture, then, is about its very approach; popular culture from Seinfeld to Twin Peaks contributes something intelligent and artistic, even if it appeals to elements as seemingly ‘crude’ as humour and sex. Trash culture is purposefully vulgar and sees the value in momentary mindlessness. A simple ‘Google images’ search gives a good indication of the aesthetics of trash: crude, colourful, and kitschy. Images of vibrant colours and outlandish appearances. It also involves images of sex and the body, the body transformed, alien, strange.

Returning to the beginning of this essay, Marshall McLuhan, whose perhaps most famous for his declaration that ‘the medium is the message’, becomes a useful figure in examining trash culture. His focus on how the medium itself, rather than the actual content, is useful insofar as we can see how moments in time and culture have been shaped by changing mediums.

The twentieth century, as Charlie Anders notes, was seen as the first wave of trash culture: ‘An era where there were a lot of 25 cent paperbacks with gun-toting lesbians on their covers, plus drive-in movies, stag films, cheap comics and weird burlesque shows’. Australian rock musician Dave Graney similarly celebrated the now respected genre of pulp fiction on Jennifer Byrne Presents: ‘The pulp world is very good because it was like 10 cent books for people. It was trash. It wasn’t coming through some critical avenue towards people. People just picked it up.

It was written for money. There was [sic] a lot of great characters in it’ (2011).

But Anders declares that we are currently living in the golden age of trash, and that the changing mechanisms of media in the 2010s exemplifies this celebration of trash:

Why is 2012 the best time ever to love pulp trash? Because we’re witnessing two things: the death spasms of old media, and the unruly birth of new media, at the same time. And both of these phenomena are unloading huge bounties of trash. You’re lucky to be alive at a time like this.

            Trash therefore becomes about experimentalism as a response to change. In the twentieth century, trash culture responded to the changes to literature, witnessing the birth of the magazine, the comic book, a new era which produced outlandish images. Now those very same mediums are changing and adapting, and the elusive space left over is where the experimentalism of trash finds its footing. The leftovers, the detritus, the excessive waste: these are the things that trash celebrates.

References

Anders, Charlie Jane. ‘Are we living in the Golden Age of Trash Culture right now?’ io9. December 6, 2012 http://io9.gizmodo.com/5917853/are-we-living-in-the-golden-age-of-trash-culture-right-now

Moritz BaBler. ‘New Standards of Beauty and Style and Taste: Expanding the Concept of Camp’. Quote, Double Quote: Aesthetics between High and Popular Culture. Paul Ferstl and Keyvan Sarkhosh (eds.). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005, pp. 23-43

Crabtree, Vexen. ‘Western Culture: Trash and Popular Culture, Elitism and Multiculturalism’. Human Truth. September 9, 2001. http://www.humantruth.info/culture.html

Lucia Peters. ‘Zoning Out Is Good For You, Says Science, So Go Ahead And Let Your Mind Wander Today’. Bustle, August 8, 2015, http://www.bustle.com/articles/102828-zoning-out-is-good-for-you-says-science-so-go-ahead-and-let-your-mind-wander

Popova, Maria. ‘Susan Sontag on How the False Divide Between Pop Culture and “High” Culture Limits Us’. Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/11/11/susan-sontag-the-complete-rolling-stone-interview-1/

Rodensky, Lisa. ‘Popular Dickens’, Victorian Literature and Culture (2009), Vol. 37, 2009, pp. 583–607

Sandbrook, Daniel. ‘Did Tolkien Write Juvenile Trash?’ December 17, 2015. BBC Culture. http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151215-did-tolkien-write-juvenile-trash

Simon, Richard Keller. Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. 1999.

Stravens, Ilan. Singer’s Typewriter and Mine: Reflections on Jewish Culture. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 2012.

Williams. Raymond. The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1975.

Television

‘Jennifer Byrne Presents: Cult Books’, March 15, 2011, ABC http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s2815885.htm

By Matt Spry

Towards the end of high school, I helped produce a live call-in talk show that appeared on my local public-access television station. Given our influences and the overall lack of adult supervision — we once featured a cast member’s dramatization of a classroom finger-stapling incident — I’m not sure we would have created the same content had there been a public event that re-aired that material 20 or 25 years later. Fortunately, due to the efforts of several dedicated media professionals based in Somerville, MA, the Community Vault project does just that.

Local media makers and Somerville Community Access Television (SCATV) members, Amanda Wild, Emily Falcigno, Bryan McKeon, and Erica Jones (SCATV’s Director of Membership and Outreach) are members of the project’s program committee and were instrumental in shaping the theme of the inaugural event. The seed for this idea — the public exhibition of community media content from Massachusetts — was planted during months of casual conversation, and the group sought to create a retrospective program with an emphasis on the dynamic between past and present.

In parallel with SCATV’s own deep dive into its archives for suitable content, the station sent out a call for submissions to sister stations throughout Massachusetts (submissions were required in digital format). After reviewing anywhere from 100 to 200 hours of footage over several months, the committee chose submissions from media centers based in Cambridge, Somerville, Ashland, Northampton, Stoughton, and Easton. In any selection process driven by careful curation, plenty of worthy submissions must be excluded and that was no different here. According to Wild, the committee “didn’t start with specific criteria” for their selections, but a more intangible “fit” — in tone, context, and length — became an important aspect of the review. Falcigno described the challenge of making the program flow as “puzzle pieces all over the table, and parts of puzzle pieces fitting together and having a continuously morphing puzzle.” The result was a program that spanned over three decades of local media production, and ranged from the historically compelling to the surreal and comedic.

On a warm afternoon this past June, dozens of theatergoers packed into Somerville’s Davis Square Theater for a screening of the final product. The program began with the offscreen voice of sitting U.S. President Barack Obama as he spoke at Cambridge Public Library in 1995. In another sequence, a skeleton chatted away while wearing colonial garb. An amateur scientist earnestly guided the audience through the relationship between containers and the “invisible” force of physics. A young Tracy Chapman delivered a subdued but stirring musical performance. Through roughly two hours of programming, the audience was subjected to shifts in tone and subject matter, some subtle and others jarring, but they felt seamless and familiar — despite having no personal recollection of this content, I felt oddly nostalgic for the times and places in which they were produced. For others, however, the screening hit very close to home. Some attendees had even appeared on or helped produce the content that was shown. In a strange twist, a woman tending bar just outside the theater recalled appearing on an early 1990s show called “Somerville Dance Party,” the city’s awkward, adolescent take on the “Soul Train” format.

Falcigno noted that the theater experience “was totally different for me because watching it non-stop, editing, helping Amanda edit, and then seeing it on a large screen in a dark space without distractions — and also hearing how the audience was reacting — made me see it in a different light.” The audience howled with laughter where the curators had hoped (the aforementioned Somerville Dance Party) and grew quiet and pensive when more profound content, such as footage of couples gathered at Cambridge City Hall on the day same-sex marriage was legalized in 2004, was used to demonstrate how far our communities have come and how much further we have to go.

The short documentary, “The Staircase” — which chronicled the community push for a staircase to provide safe passage down a hazardous hill following a teen’s death — provided such a bridge to the past. In an email exchange last month, screening attendee and Executive Director of The Welcome Project, Warren Goldstein-Gelb, shared that, “[i]t was powerful to see Mystic residents from 30 years ago working hard and paying a big price (a child’s death) in organizing for the stairs to be constructed. I felt inspired by the efforts of Mystic youth and adults so many years ago, and believe that the documentary can inspire a new generation of residents, who, despite much improvement, still struggle for better connections between home and school all these years later.” That a 25-year-old segment of the screening can still resonate so strongly with the audience speaks to the effectiveness of the Community Vault team’s curation process, and the lasting connection between communities and the media they create.
While the program committee has no publicly stated plans for the future of the project, Jones hopes that such a showcase helps viewers “to see community media as not just the Wayne’s World kind of stuff” and that it illustrates to other media stations “a way to collaborate with different groups and members, and other stations, to put together something similar.”

by Matt Spry

There’s a scene in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction where Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, explains the history behind a gold watch he’s delivering to the adolescent son of a fallen Vietnam War comrade. On its face, this scene is evidence that Walken is a great actor and Quentin Tarantino writes dialogue well. More important, though, it demonstrates that even seemingly mundane objects have interesting and sincere stories attached to them.

Since founding the Mobile Museum of American Artifacts (MMoAA) about two years ago, director Laurelin Kruse has explored the relationship between objects, the people who owned them, and the stories that bind them together. During a June 2015 event in Somerville, MA (co-sponsored by NEMMC), Kruse stood in front of the 1968 Cardinal travel trailer that houses the museum’s collection, and discussed its origins, objectives, and ongoing collection development.

The fuels that keep this traveling museum running are, according to Kruse, “the sincerity of people who participate” and “feeling the ‘ghosts’ behind objects.” When she drives MMoAA to a new destination, it’s an opportunity to welcome new visitors to the exhibit and convey the museum’s message of embracing the connectedness and richness of everyday life. Then, there’s an implicit opportunity to convert these visitors to donors; many museum patrons (this author included) donate personal objects from their own lives. Some people may learn of the MMoAA’s impending visit to their community and bring a donation during their first walk-through. Others only learn about the museum upon their first visit and are compelled to run home for something meaningful to donate. Every donation is accompanied by a donor form for additional context. Kruse makes an audio recording of each donor’s story about the object — a requirement for every donation — and his or her connection to it. Since Kruse performs no additional research about an object’s origins, the donor’s memories alone comprise the wall text that future visitors will read when the object is exhibited.

As part of this process, Kruse is exploring an “archaeology of the present” and whether “it’s possible to create [a] kind of intimate, emotional connection between strangers” through the relatable stories that donors tell about their personal items. The objects that line the shelves of the museum’s walls couldn’t be more different — a pair of oven-melted glasses sits alongside a group of “flip” cell phones and an antique doorknob, among other exhibit configurations — but all of them, now divorced from their primary use, attain artifactual value in this museum setting. However, in the space between an object and the donor who once used it, an odd phenomenon emerges, according to Kruse. “[W]e can try so hard to summon a person or a moment through an object, something that was once very much alive, but objects are inherently inanimate, and so this absence and silence is all the more apparent, devastating, creepy, heartbreaking, present. Objects contain the presence of an absence and an absence of a presence.”

MMoAA’s approach to collection development — where the donor might be anyone, the object could be anything, and personal narrative trumps aesthetic value — breaks sharply with conventional museum practice, and Kruse found resistance within the field of libraries, museums, and archives (LAM) even before the project was operational. In relaying a discussion she had with a museum curator, she noted that “he shook his head often, and wondered what I was doing there (with my half-baked idea). I left totally devastated and thinking I’d made a huge mistake, that at best I’d end up with a pile of meaningless junk, or more likely, nothing at all.” Since the project has been on the road, however, Kruse has been surprised and encouraged by the reactions of visitors, donors, and colleagues. “Now that MMoAA has had a little time to become itself, people in the LAM field, seeing the MMoAA parked in front of their institution of employment, or at their local farmer’s market, have for the most part been surprised and delighted by the MMoAA. One of my favorite parts of this whole project is that it inspires spontaneous conversations with people in the field who constantly think about these issues and are at the forefront of how the field is changing.”

While Kruse’s subversion of the traditional museum model is not without its detractors, it does speak to a continuing trend of community-focused hybridization within the LAM field. Libraries continue to embrace their roles as makerspaces. The success of StoryCorps is evidence of a sustained public interest in oral histories. Pop-up museums are all the rage. As much as MMoAA bears many of the traditional marks of a museum, it can also be considered a sort of object-oriented oral history project. “Not everyone is on board, but my hope is that it will make people think a little differently about museums, our own pasts, objects, the stories we tell, how we assign meaning and value, where nostalgia comes from, why we’re trying to preserve the past or make it known, and whose history we’re telling and who is telling it,” Kruse said.

While her aspirations for MMoAA include collecting donations from all 50 states and a potential documentary project, Kruse remains focused on developing the collection through contributions gathered during artist residencies and stops throughout the country. She added, “as the collection grows and features objects and stories from a wider range of geographic locations and communities, I’d like to play with that more, showcasing artifacts that may contrast with my current location, or complement it.”
The MMoAA will be featured at the Rocky Neck Artist Colony in Gloucester, MA through September 28, 2015, before traveling to The Children’s Museum of Denver in Colorado on October 10, 2015. Kruse and the museum will end the autumn season in Green River, UT for the Frontier Fellows Artist Residency at Epicenter from October 22 through November 22, 2015. For more information on the continuing travels of Kruse and MMoAA, visit: themmoaa.org.