A pop culture education

Most parents will tell you that part of anticipating a child coming into the family is looking forward to sharing one's culture. And pop culture is a lot of that. Noel was shaped by the records in his father's collection; I devoured the classic books on my parents' shelves. We were excited about introducing our children to the things we loved.

That ended up being on a slower timeframe than I think we had imagined. Yes, we shared some classic children's literature when they were young, but it took a while for CG to develop an interest in the television, music, and film that consumes her parents' lives. AA, meanwhile, has always gone his own way and developed his own obsessions; we worried, early on, that he would have nothing to talk about with his peers, but it turns out that Pokemon is a universal language (thankfully).

Another factor, though, is that it turns out the easiest way into popular culture's archival depths (aka the stuff that was meaningful to us when we were younger) is by way of current culture. And those entry points need to have some family appeal. They need to be things that we can watch or listen to with our child. CBS's Supergirl, for example; we made plans early on to include CG in our viewing of it, based on the creative people involved, its empowering messages, and the geek appeal factor. But once we're all hooked, when the show makes references to other parts of the DC universe (or even does a version of a classic story, like its retelling of Alan Moore's "For the Man Who Has Everything"), it's a simple matter to give those ancillary materials to CG and let her expand the connections.

We all treasure the moments when we bond with our children over shared culture. But those moments aren't really the heart and soul of a cultural education. As suggested by those records of Noel's dad and those books of my parents, the most important thing is to leave a lot of culture lying around, and wait for your kids to burrow their way in, by any route they choose. CG uses our Amazon Echo to stream music from our collection while she reads, and sometimes we can suggest other artists she might like. She developed her love of comic strips from the many collections with which we seeded her shelf. But as rich as our libraries might be, they'd be a prison if that's all she ever explored. She made her own way to manga and anime, and together she and Archer have ventured into gaming and design, areas their parents would never have been able to lead them.

And now they teach us, and amaze us. That's the part that we didn't know enough, years ago, to anticipate, and it's the part that now seems most miraculous.

To explore strange new worlds

J.J. Abram's reboot of the Star Trek franchise opens tomorrow. Noel and I aren't planning to go see it until Sunday -- too much graduation-related hoopla for the rest of the weekend -- and the search for a babysitter (difficult when the entire college population is leaving town) left me briefly anxious that I wouldn't get to see it right away.

That's a worry based on my long but spotty history with all things Trek. In high school I was a total Trek nerd. I watched the original series in syndication on a local UHF channel (and dragooned my younger brother into watching it with me whenever I was left in charge of the house). I read the novels. I read the novelizations. I read the photo-novels. I wrote fan fiction. I saw all the movies. I went to the local SF con and bought stickers reading "It had the virtue of never having been tried."

But by the time Next Generation started, I had moved on, to a certain extent. I watched it sporadically, getting engrossed in the Borg storyline. I defended poor Deanna Troi, everyone's least favorite character, because I have a soft spot for the underdog (and because I secretly wanted to be like her). But I didn't get into any of the ancillary fandom, and I didn't even make a serious effort to be completist about the series. And my disconnection from the later elements of the franchise -- Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise -- has been pure and complete.

So it's with some mixed feelings that I look forward to the new movie. Frankly, my excitement about it stems almost equally from its Trekkiness and from its Abramsicity. I am deeply connected to ST:TOS, in a way that I'll never be able to shake. I imagine that the movie is going to reawaken all those old loves and obsessions. Yet it's a part of my past, not my present. I don't have the long-term bona fides, born of serious dedication through the wilderness years, to claim the cultural moment as my due. I'll be a bystander. Enjoying myself, sure, but with neither pride of ownership nor standing to complain.

Great despite the evidence

The A.V. Club staff has had an interesting e-mail conversation today, sparked by a reader question that we'll be answering this Friday: What pop culture figure gets a lifetime pass? Who will you always respect, no matter how far they fall?

I won't reveal any of our answers. But John Travolta came up as an example of someone for whom an argument might be made, although it would be a shaky one.

Back and forth we went, trying to decide if Travolta had enough greatness in his career to earn a pass. The negatives immediately came to mind: Look Who's Talking (the trilogy!), Battlefield Earth. And many more. But it's amazing how easy it was to use those disasters to dismiss some of the really solid -- even transcendent -- work found in his filmography. Pulp Fiction was generally held to be unassailable. But what about Saturday Night Fever (a movie I just showed to my film class)? Get Shorty, a wonderful comic performance? Blow Out, one of the cleverest of the De Palma pastiches? Heck, even if you hate Grease and Michael, try to separate Travolta's performance from the movie around it.

It's always interesting to get the staff together, because there is a surprising diversity of opinions on what we all know to be true. Anyone who suggests that movie X or album Y is obvious schlock -- and, more importantly, assumes that everyone in the conversation is going to agree -- soon finds themselves embroiled in an argument they didn't expect to be having.

The question made me realize, though, just how soft a touch I am. Or maybe it's loyalty. If a filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, or artist does work I love, it's very difficult for them to lose me completely. I'll wait forever for a return to form -- for the genius that I once saw, and can't quite believe is gone forever, to reappear.

Filling in the gaps

We all learn about pop culture in such a haphazard, piecemeal way. What we encounter in our formative years -- necessarily the sources of the standards we use to judge everything else we encounter later -- depends on where we happen to live, the people we happen to associate with, the tastes of our parents and peers, the random twirling of the television and radio dials.

One of the joys of having a vocation or avocation involved with popular culture is the opportunity to fill in those gaps, for yourself and for others. There's a palpable sense of depth and knowledge that comes from knowing where the pieces of your pop culture past fit on a larger map.

Today at lunch we were talking about the canon in the context of the battles over cultural literacy that took place in the eighties. I'm a great defender of the canon as an evolving collection of artistic standards, a cloud constantly growing and changing shape, an environment where we can place any work we can think of in relation to others over time. But because its purpose is expressed in the last phrase -- to serve as a multifaceted set of standards against which we can measure other work and ultimately our own work -- the kinds of canon lists that proliferated during those debates defeat the purpose. They present the canon as complete and closed, or at the very last as the work of aliens of ineluctable genius.

The canon should be an invitation for us to contribute, to find out where our talents fit in the universe of human accomplishment. It's valuable precisely because it protects from relativism, guarding against the reduction of creative excellence to mere taste or opinion. But it's dangerous to the extent that it's used to emphasize the vast gulf between the masters and us mere mortals. When we fill in those gaps and get that deep sense of where our scattered experiences fit into the vast starscape of popular culture, we should understand that the world we're exploring starts right at our front door -- and that all we have to do to be a part of it is take a single step.