Home » Posts tagged 'rebellion'

Tag Archives: rebellion

Smoke, and a mirror

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I started smoking, I guess, somewhere between 12 and 14 years old. The uncertainty lies in the definition of starting. Neither of my parents smoked, and their disapproval of the habit was complete, at least for us kids. As a result, I would sneak a fag away from home every so often but didn’t reach anything like a habit until I was 16 or 17.

Everyone who has ever let cigarette smoke past their lips and into their lungs knows one thing: it is an awful experience at first. This is quite unlike every other addictive chemical, whose initial effects are, at worst, boring. So how does anyone get beyond that to addiction to tobacco?

For one thing, it’s helpful to understand the status of smoking in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up. It was everywhere. On the street, in bars and restaurants, in elevators and doctors’ waiting rooms. There were even adds claiming that such-and-such a brand was the most “doctor recommended.” People would arrive at your house for a dinner date, pull out a cigarette, light up, and only then look around for an ashtray; and there it was, invariably, in every house.

I still remember vividly the smell of stale smoke and alcohol even in our house after any of the dinner parties my parents would throw. I thought it was wonderful. During holidays, a favorite uncle would be a house guest and spend his days sitting on the living room couch drinking rum-and-cokes and smoking cigarette after cigarette. I never heard any objection from my father, who was his older brother.

So, the answer is pretty simple: kids started smoking to look grown-up. Did it give you coughing fits and make you light-headed and slightly nauseous? Well, that was apparently the price of sophistication. There was no shortage of older kids to laugh at your discomfort, but they would be quick to remind you that as your body became accustomed to the poison you were giving it, the unpleasantness would pass and you would begin to enjoy it. In my case, it had the added attraction of being rebellious. It was a curious and irresistible combination of fitting in with adults and rebelling against them at one and the same time.

It was a thoroughly ingrained and respected part of society. When I was in Basic Training in 1966, we would occasionally get a smoke break. “Burn ‘em!” the drill sergeant would shout without warning, and within seconds cigarettes were pulled out of God knows where and the whole squad was enveloped in smoke. It was such a welcome respite that some guys who had never smoked started up just to get in on a treat that otherwise left them standing around with nothing to do.

Now, of course, everything is different. You can’t smoke anywhere indoors. If you want to grab a quick smoke at work or at a restaurant, you have to skulk around among the dumpsters in the back. Even at home people are so sensitive to the stink of it (something we never even noticed in the old days) that they sit outside their own homes to indulge.

But kids still start smoking, and adults still continue. Why?

For the same reasons. The glaring difference is that, as fitting in with the adult world has diminished as a motive to almost nothing, rebellion has burgeoned to displace it, and peer pressure has maintained its role. Add to that a plethora of new ways to indulge the tobacco habit, many without disturbing the air of others, and kids can feel in on some technology adults are woefully ignorant of.

Still, the numbers are encouragingly down as tobacco in any form has lost its sheen of sophistication. I quit 24 years ago as this transition was gaining steam. It was not an easy process, for society or for individuals like myself. I was lucky to be able to quit, luckier still that I had not already damaged my body irreparably.

So what’s the point of this rather long-winded disquisition? There are lessons here about human nature.

All ideological blather aside, we are a social species. Irrevocably, gloriously, abjectly, and mercilessly social. Everything we do is informed by it, but not always obviously; sometimes it’s in invisible, even insidious ways. Conformity and rebellion, far from being diametric opposites, are hopelessly entangled in complex ways, because our social memberships are complex and overlapping. We can always make micro adjustments to that jumble of loyalties to justify almost any behavior, even behavior that is clearly pathological.

Older adults love to make fun of rebellious teens all dressing the same despite their cult of non-conformity, but we could say the same for ourselves.

What it takes to be an artist

Posted on by | 3 Comments

Think of the stereotypes. Artists are loners, wild and unruly, enthralled with themselves, beholden to no norms, egoists above all. Whether you approve or not, artists are held to different standards. Think of Picasso, Warhol, Morrison, Joyce. The #MeToo movement has put some cracks in this image, but, I think, without doing any serious damage to the stereotype. Is there a kernel of truth to it?

Maybe. Or better, in part. I think the image of the self-possessed and self-obsessed seer of things the rest of us can’t may be a caricature of a small subset of artists as a whole: those who are successful enough to rise above the mass of humanity and become visible to us. In a word, the famous.

I know a lot of artists — painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, novelists, musicians – who will never be able to quit their day jobs but ply their crafts with as much dedication as anyone. Is it because they’re not as good at it? Some part of it is no doubt that, but who is as good as or better than whom is an elusive quality to pinpoint. I suggest that more of it has to do with precisely those personality traits that make up the stereotype.

Doing art involves rejection and ridicule. A lot of it. A little Googling will turn up dozens of famous writers who collected numerous rejections. As for painters, the term impressionist was first used as a term of ridicule. It’s not hard to find any number of inspirational essays citing these facts and exhorting the artist to stick to it, that perseverance will eventually pay off.

This isn’t one of them. It may payoff, but most likely not much, and that’s not the point. The point is that all the artists you know about had, in addition to the basic skills (and occasional genius) required of their craft, an ability to face up to rejection and ridicule, to keep close an image of themselves as important people with something unique and valuable to contribute to society.

It’s an attribute of character that’s more about success in general than peculiar to art. Think of Steve Jobs, whose self-confidence about knowing more about cancer than cancer researchers actually killed him.

Still, being a little bit wacky doesn’t hurt.

Okay, it hurts, but it’s a gas.

Piano

Posted on by | 11 Comments

When I was a kid in the third grade at St. Phillip’s school, my father decided I should take piano lessons.  The basis for this was my recent obsession with this new singer on the pop horizon by the name of Elvis Presley.  He sounded like nobody I had ever heard before, or, rather, like everybody I had ever heard before at once.  He played guitar, although as little as possible, so I wanted a guitar, too.  My father, sensible beyond all reason, thought I would be a better musician if I learned to play the piano first, and then branched out from there.  He either didn’t notice or didn’t care that what I really wanted was to be a rock and roll star, wriggling and hooting my way to popularity and fame; in my child’s mind the two were indistinguishable.  If musicianship was a requirement of that, I was happy to go along, but to a point.  Elvis, as I said, played his guitar as little as possible, leaving musicianship to the musicians in his band.  Never mind, Dad wanted me to take piano lessons.  He had played violin before the war, and loved music, but had abandoned it, along with much else of beauty, after the war spat him back out.  He didn’t understand Presley and rock music, except to acknowledge their financial potential.  “The more they wiggle, the more money they make,” he used to say.

It was his own fault, in a way.  He worked at RCA record division, at the plant that pressed the vinyl into music.  As a perk, the company let him take home six albums every couple of months, his preference.  He had no preference.  As a result, the take-homes were random, everything from Stravinski to Homer and Jethro, and whatever lay between.  In those  days, RCA pressed the records for a lot of smaller companies too, so the range was wide as the world.

At the same time, the radio music scene in my city was the epitome of eclecticism.  In a single hour on the same show, you could hear Mario Lanza, Hank Snow, the Platters, and Elvis.  I had no idea until much later on that you were supposed to pick a genre and ditch the others.  I made no artistic distinction between  Ezio Pinza and Elvis.  But I knew the other kids at school and around the neighborhood were crazy for the latter, and not the former.

It didn’t hurt that Elvis had this rebel persona.  Suffocating in my staunchly religious family, I immediately identified.  When my father told me I was going to take piano lessons, like it or not, my dreams came crashing down.

First, he had effectively coopted my ambition, spun it around until it was unrecognizable, and made it his own.  I couldn’t imagine anything less rebellious than piano lessons at St. Phillip’s.  I thought I knew the terms of that, and I didn’t like them.

My friend Wayne was the only guy I knew who was doing that.  Every day at 3:00, the rest of us would line up to leave the school and enter the free world; I would see Wayne trudging across the playground to the convent to take his lessons, always after school, and, it was darkly rumored, sometimes on the weekend as well.

The convent!  The actual lair of the creatures whose lives were dedicated to stripping the joy from ours!  Who knew what torments Wayne endured there?  Many years later, he told me it wasn’t at all bad.  I’m still not sure I believe him.

I knew what had to be done.  I resisted with all my might, and discovered that my father had given me the very thing I thought he was stripping away: an opportunity to Be a Rebel.  I marshalled every argument I could think of, mostly involving how much time would be lost from my other studies (in the third grade!), or how I would have to be late for dinner a lot, a cardinal sin in our house.  I stomped and put on magnificent silences, I exiled myself to my room.  In the end, against all expectation, I prevailed.  He gave up.

I was on cloud nine.  I got my guitar eventually, and hacked away at it.  By that time I was into folk music, and regarded music lessons of any sort as too gentrifying for my tastes.  My tempo was ragged, and I was king of the 13 bar blues.  I discovered jazz about that time as well, and predictably played guitar less and less as I realized how abysmally incompetent I was compared to the musicians I admired.  I made a hash of it, like most things.

The only abiding result of all of that was a growing regret that I had talked my father out of those piano lessons.

Well, this year, I finally gave in, bought a piano, a beautiful Yamaha P-115 electronic keyboard capable of pretending to be a dozen other instruments as well.  I started online lessons, the excellent Playground series created by Quincy Jones.  So I sit at the keyboard, practicing, getting a little better, a little more musical every day.  And as I sit there, I notice a little voice in the back of my head:

“Michael, sit up straight!”

If you won’t go to the convent, it seems the convent will come to you.