i love Los Angeles. But the Northwest is a special place.
I moved to Portland around seven years ago. Portland felt like a small town, with a slow, connected pace of life. When I lived off Burnside, the center of town, it seemed I knew someone on every corner.
On a recent visit to Portland, I noticed how many more people had moved to the city. Traffic was dense. Faces were new. I’ve moved many times, but am always amazed at the short amount of time it takes to recognize a significant amount of change in a city.
My favorite part of returning is seeing the types of interaction retained. People running their indie shops selling homemade wares asked how I was– genuinely! Organic, sustainable EVERYTHING was readily available. Everywhere I looked, greenery dominated the moss-covered streets and giant, towering trees.
Back in my day, we didn’t have YouTube to help us find other weirdos. We had the magazine section of Tower Records and chance opportunities for a single-air televison viewing. I must not have been watching Letterman on my teeny black-and-white rabbit-ear TV these nights.
I loved Harmony Korine’s Kids, his book Crack-Up at the Race Riots(now being re-released), and I used that book as a personal branding tool, just like my Dead Kennedys stickers and brightly dyed hair. The intimidating cover, a cross burning in front of bunny costumes was cultish and provocative and frightening. I laid it on my desk each day as a measuring stick– did you get it? Were you cool?
While I scoured record stores for secondhand Richard Kern videotapes and desperately hoped to find interviews in fly-by-night indie zines, my sister pulled Kembra’s entire videography from YouTube, has a file folder of photographs, and maintains a tribute blog.
The differences in our cultural absorption are huge. Where my teenage self had to get in the car, grab my friends, then pool our resources as we sought the strange, today’s generation can access, absorb, and catalog their preferences in an atmosphere that not only supports this behavior but rewards it. One is not better than the other; but they are different.
As I grow older, I don’t want to lose my teenage sense of justice and wonder. Teenagers are so pure in their self-obsessed anxieties and indestructible immortality. I recently went to a Crystal Castles show. One teenage ecstasy-seller actually wanted to see my ID after I told him “I’m too old for drugs, my friend.” He could NOT BELIEVE I was born in the 80’s.
My need to stay connected to youth isn’t based in any sexual appeal of minors (god, no, they’re BABIES), or in order to represent myself as younger. It’s based in the need to stay culturally afloat, mentally alert, and CREATIVELY RELEVANT. I found this quote from Harmony Korine to be extremely insightful:
“The soul has morphed. It’s become something else. It’s a new idea. It’s a new vision. It’s about kids that are raised on video games and YouTube clips. Television babies. The step from watching to doing is sometimes very small.”
What a fluid observation on pop culture. Using my access to online weirdos and thinkers, I keep uncovering thoughful support for the theory of an emergingenergy shift. The future is being created, and we older Milennials on the cusp must cross the digital bridge with determination. Our youth of restless real-world wandering no longer exists. It’s time to digitize ourselves.
I had a friend who had a brother who skated with Harmony Korine when Harmony briefly lived in Vegas. This is only a story I’ve heard. I have no proof. But it feels like a real connection, and it lent authenticity to my copy of Crack-Up at the Race Riots as I laid it on my desk as a challenge and expression of my personal “brand.”
But if I follow Harmony on Twitter and he tweets back at me…. is that more or less real?
