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Pop culture rules the day There's a new world, and our high arts have failed to grasp the change The autumn season is upon us, and I cannot wait to see what the merchants of pop culture have on offer. Television thrills me and I get 500 channels, so I can be thrilled a lot. I'm even considering a pirate dish so I can get the 30 or so channels the CRTC, in its unwisdom, doesn't want me to watch. I ration, I discipline myself, I develop interests, serious ones, with reading lists even, all to keep me away from it and end up lost in a fashion magazine. My mind ponders: Ricky Martin, is he gay? Who decided not to tell? What happened to Anne Heche the day after she broke up with Ellen? Is Jane Fonda really born again? How did that happen? What happened to Margot Kidder's teeth? Gloria Steinem got married? This from a woman who was dragged to the symphony throughout her childhood, read classics for pleasure starting at eight, and spent her early 20s managing and even acting in alternative theatre, to the point, memorably, of playing one of Medea's three younger sisters. Did you know she had sisters? We made it up. We wore sackcloth, we drummed, we poured stage blood over our heads, and were encouraged by the director to take off our clothes, as in, "if you felt like it, it would be absolutely fine if you took off your clothes in this scene. Or, in any other scene, actually." You would have to march me at gunpoint into any alternative theatre production, hell, any theatre production whatsoever -- naked 17-year-olds of any sex notwithstanding. I will never, never, as long as I live to see another Sam Shepard or Arthur Miller play. They're too sleepy, too dopey, too way far behind what is actually happening out there and way too full of liberal guilt, which means pain is necessarily part of the experience. Even the best of literary fiction -- full as it is of petty regional complaint, muttering and pawing over the injustices of recent immigrants and people of colour -- is way behind the curve. And spare me one more courageous, yet quiveringly sensitive heroine taking on a sexist, brutal, corrupt world. Can you imagine what Shakespeare or Euripides could have done with the saga of Puff Daddy and Jennifer Lopez? What pale imitation of life that makes up our so-called high culture can rival the pathos, passion and idiocy of that story? Or what about Luther and Johnny Htoo, the cigar-smoking twin 12-year-olds leading the Army of God in Myanmar? The excruciating fascination of gladiators Gore and Bush? There's a whole new world born fresh in the last few years, and our so-called high arts have failed us utterly in grasping the depth and breadth of the change. Real creativity fled to pop culture long ago and what we're left with is the equivalent of dutiful local museum visiting. If painting and sculpture seem to be enduring some kind of crisis, advertising, housewares, graphics and industrial design are flourishing. If classical music is stagnant, look just beyond the Billboard charts. Theatre might be stone-cold dead, but look at the pure chaotic brilliance that is independent film. And if fun is absent, look to Japan. Japanese video games, anime movies such as Princess Mononoke by legendary artist Hayao Miyazaki, alternative music by performers such as Cornelius, manga (comics), and Tokyo street fashion continue to influence underground youth culture around the world. In Los Angeles, "fansubs" -- translations of obscure Japanese anime films and television series into English -- are avidly traded amongst collectors. And a constant cultural exchange by young people on the Internet linking Tokyo to other international pop culture centres such as London and New York has made Japan's most powerful export, its unique sense of creativity, a surprise and news only to the mainstream press. In "Shibuya Valley," the trendsetting neighbourhood of Tokyo, the spheres of music, art, fashion and the digital realm intersect. Nowhere in the world is there a culture that focuses more on new trends, information, product development, technology and style. Last year, for example, there were more than 1,000 new drinks launched by distributors and marketers on this tiny island. There are more magazine titles per capita in Japan than anywhere else in the world. In just eight short months, the Japanese telecommunications firm NTT DoCoMo signed up more than two million young subscribers to Internet services on their cell-phones, and this year, the number of Japanese online will grow to 20 million. I think what we are witnessing is the birth of a classless, race- blind world. No one force is creating it either. No one wants reparations for the sins of the past. No one honest, that is. "The wretched of the Earth want to go to McDonald's," says Thomas L. Friedman, in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his breathtaking nail- down of globalization. In New York last spring, I met a young Argentinean whose grandmother was trying mightily to talk him into a Harvard MBA. He couldn't have cared less. Detailing his many enthusiasms about his country, the many businesses he could hardly wait to throw himself into at home, the new vibrancy of his culture and his friends, he said, "You know, we don't care about the past. It's over, it's done with, it only slows us down. We are the future. We are creating a new world." Luckily, I can watch it on my television.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.