Betwixt and between
Among indie-banded, indie-filmed, and Nintendo-reared people, there seems to be a debilitating nostalgia for childhood. I’m part of it, that’s for sure. I’m, say, into the Arcade Fire, half of whose songs’ lyrics are either about longing for childhood or written from the point of view of a child.
And if the snow buries my,
my neighborhood.
And if my parents are crying
then I’ll dig a tunnel
from my window to yours,
yeah a tunnel from my window to yours.
You climb out the chimney
and meet me in the middle,
the middle of town.
And since there’s no one else around,
we let our hair grow long
and forget all we used to know,
then our skin gets thicker
from living out in the snow. . .But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
and our parent’s bedrooms,
and the bedrooms of our friends.
Then we think of our parents,
well what ever happened to them?
I saw my friend Jeph, author of Questionable Content, give a talk to 50+ mostly indie college students and twixters at Boston University last night, and as much as I was struck by a high school friend of mine’s having so many devotees, I was really astounded by how many people at a fine university were obsessed with a comic about indie-twixters. Jeph seemed to be surprised too; though he loves his readers, there was clearly a divide between him as the active, entreprenuerial artist and them as the passive, well, wannabes. Jeph had a maturity about him, one I remembered in high school being hidden behind teenage awkwardness, but at 25 easily appreciated. Much of the audience lacked the same maturity and self-confidence (I think now of a 30-something Comic-Book-Guy ringer who sat to my right). A tense issue came up about halfway through the 2-hour Q&A: what’s Jeph going to do when he gets tired of Questionable Content? That question unresolved, his answers implied he’ll get tired of QC when he no longer relates to his characters, which by extension is when he no longer relates to his audience.
Will QC’s audience mature with Jeph? I can’t say. But he’s got head-start.
Indie-twixter (that is, largely white; educated; often paralyzingly sarcastic; secretly dreamery; self-centered; anti-confessional in terms of religion; pro-confessional in terms of lyricism; parentally, capitalistically, and employmentally ambivalent) culture isn’t
manifest merely in music and within the Nintendo-Internet complex. It’s shredded in books like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It’s elevated to college-credit-worthiness in the academifcation of pop culture—the Zen of Homer Simpson and the like. It seems, hm, to be present in everything having to do with refighting middle school social battles.
Therein lies what’s really compelling and sad and fruitful about the whole thing. Indie-twixter culture is powerfully elitist, exclusionary, and retrospective. Here’s a crazy-ass analogy then, true in regard to human nature if not historical significance: Indie-twixters are like the ancient Hebrews at the time the Jews assembled their canon. Attacked on all sides, the Hebrews needed to assemble and write down—to record—an account of their past and their rules for life. With nothing to look forward to, they looked back, with considerable longing. So far back, they spoke of a time that was positively Edenic. Of a time that they won battles. Of failures overcome by adherence to the Law. And in assembling the canon, they made one rule for inclusion: rather than the actual stories needing to be proven accurate, educational, or pragmatic, the literal pages must
have been agreed to have been “handled” correctly. Kept physically sacred.
In that sense, the Hebrew history was written by, or in the spirit of, fanatical arbitrariness. Not at all different from many histories. Not at all different from the fierce retrospectivity—the fierce nostalgia—of indie-twixters. That’s their (our) arbitrary standard, wrung dry in places like, say, Pitchfork. If a song, a movie, a lover, a life doesn’t match up to the innocent complexity, the harmless pain of childhood—to the bands we loved when we shamelessly loved bands, to the movies we watched a thousand times before we knew we were supposed to ridicule the plot arc, to the girls we anguished over and never said a word to, to the idyllic afternoon of having two friends over to beat Mario 3 in turn before heading outside to laugh hard in the woods because just then you laughed softly and snot came out—then it’s not worth our recording it.
So to a question, is there a precedent for the Twixter Generation? Was there ever a time when nostalgia, immasculity (listen to the voices of our singers), and high-education were so comingled, accepted, and nourished? I can’t think of when. The Internet has surely aided. Otherwise reticent young people whose niche-y edges used to be ground off by oppressively massive media and disinterested, pre-rebellion-as-neat-fetish employers now have communities. While still shat upon in high school, they excelled in college, earned some social capital, and got laid by expected and unexpected types of people. But while being rewarded in college for what they were reviled for in high school, future indie-twixters never received what other people do: a blueprint—or expectations—for how they should live their adult lives. In fact, what may be the defining characteristic of indie-twixters is radical independence and a total lack of stakes, to use the writing workshop term. Few people make demands on them. Parents are typically supportive of all ventures and still there when the ventures fail. Critical-thinking skills are at their peak; thus, there’s nothing worth standing for because nothing stands on its own merits. Nothing survives scrutiny. All that gives pleasure is the clever comment and, of course, childhood and its trappings.
Ultimately, indie-twixters find themselves tied to mild rebellion and seething comfort, trapped not between a rock and a hard place but between, like, a rock song and a broken-in Craigslist couch.
The imperatives, the correctives, the shoulds-from-now-ons will have to wait for another time.
