Dick Clark and the Death of an Unknown Celebrity

 Posted by  Kultur Clash  1 Response »
Apr 252012
 
Dick Clark and the Death of an Unknown Celebrity

Dick Clark passed away last week and the news left me unmoved. But as the narrative of Clark’s cultural impact unfolded over the next few days, once again I found myself scrambling on the acculturation treadmill. The NPR news segment identified Dick Clark as the TV host of "American Bandstand" and the New Year’s Eve countdown at Times Square; later I learned he had been the first American "television personality." Having seen the music show, which ran from 1957 to 1987, precisely zero times and the "New Year’s Rockin’ Eve" only for a [...] Continue reading >

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American Euphemisms and Evasive Thinking, Part 2

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Mar 192012
 
American Euphemisms and Evasive Thinking, Part 2

In his 1965 essay "On Evasive Thinking", Václav Havel bemoans a degradation of language from being "a means of signifying reality, and of enabling us to come to an understanding of it" to being "an end in itself". Havel saw the "verbal mysticism" or "ritualization of language" cause the word as such to cease to be a sign for a category and instead gain "a kind of occult power to transform one reality into another". Havel discussed this shift in the context of 1960′s Czechoslovakia, but the similarity with American [...] Continue reading >

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St. Patrick’s Day and Immigrant Holidays

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Mar 172012
 
St. Patrick's Day and Immigrant Holidays

Official, or federally recognized, American holidays derive from historical events (Independence Day/Fourth of July), religious traditions (Christmas), and national heroes (Martin Luther King Day). Among the unofficial but widely recognized and celebrated holidays, which include Mardi Gras, Easter, and Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day holds a special place: it celebrates the culture of an immigrant group.  Every March 17th, St. Patrick’s Day commemorates Ireland’s patron saint and the arrival of Christianity to Ireland in 12th century. About 12% of U.S. population, or more than 36 million people, reported Irish ancestry in 2008; the Irish diaspora [...] Continue reading >

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America the Hyperreal

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Feb 172012
 
America the Hyperreal

Visiting and then writing about the U.S. has a solid tradition among the French, but it’s safe to say the late Jean Beaudrillard‘s 1986 work"America" hasn’t made the list of books covering their country that Americans would showcase. Even the most cynical among my new compatriots would hesitate to call their country "a giant hologram", a "blank solitude," or a "narcissistic refraction." Abstract hyperbole defines Beaudrillard’s "America". On the ground, it is the desert that defines Beaudrillard’s America. He can’t get enough of it because "you are delivered from all depth [...] Continue reading >

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American Euphemisms and Evasive Thinking, Part 1

 Posted by  Kultur Clash  1 Response »
Feb 152012
 
American Euphemisms and Evasive Thinking, Part 1

Last year’s final issue of The Economist featured an article exploring euphemisms—expressions that substitute neutral, ambiguous wording for a potentially uncomfortable one. The article “Making murder respectable” alludes to the experience every immigrant knows all too well as a cultural and language outsider. American euphemisms are in a class of their own, principally because they seem to involve words that few would find offensive to start with, replaced by phrases that are meaninglessly ambiguous: bathroom tissue for [toilet] paper, dental appliances for false teeth, previously owned rather than used, wellness [...] Continue reading >

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Now You’re an Immigrant

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Feb 042012
 

The Devil appears to a man on his deathbed. “I’m going to give you a choice between Heaven and Hell,” he says. “And just to make it fair, I’m going to let you see them first.” Heaven is, well, Heaven: halos, harps—pleasant but dull. Hell, however, looks terrific: drinking, music, dancing girls. “I’ll take Hell,” the man says. Once he dies, though, Hell turns out to be exactly what you would have imagined in the first place: flames, screams, demons, pitchforks. “Wait a minute,” the man complains. “This isn’t [...] Continue reading >

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Catching Up on the Acculturation Treadmill

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Jan 232012
 
Catching Up on the Acculturation Treadmill

Aside from being a wonderful English phrase, "learn something new every day" captures an immigrant’s experience to a tee. It feels good to understand your new home better, day by day. Until you hit the acculturation treadmill. The bigger the cultural difference between your own and the host American culture, the steeper and longer the learning curve. Even immigrants and transplants from Central Europe, who have, culturally, always taken inspiration from and looked up to the United States, have plenty to process and learn. After a while, the instances [...] Continue reading >

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The Puzzle of America’s Infant Safe Haven Laws: You Can Legally Abandon Your Child

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Jan 182012
 
The Puzzle of America's Infant Safe Haven Laws: You Can Legally Abandon Your Child

San Francisco can leave you with many memories, but the one that’s stuck with me most strongly is the sign I saw on a fire station (see right) indicating people can leave their unwanted babies there. Even two years later I have a hard time fully wrapping my mind around the American infant safe haven laws. Many State legislatures have enacted legislation to address infant abandonment and infanticide in response to a reported increase in the abandonment of infants. Beginning in Texas in 1999, infant safe haven laws have [...] Continue reading >

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“Russian Old New Year 2012. Party!” on Friday the 13th Promises a Party

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Jan 122012
 
"Russian Old New Year 2012. Party!" on Friday the 13th Promises a Party

And judging from Chervona’s Xmas video shoot a month ago, a good one too! In fact, most, if not all, of the good people who populated and helped shoot the video (below, includes American Robotnik in a snow-white ushanka) will be in attendance at Dante’s on Friday the 13th. Tickets may even still be available. According to Stephanie Salvey’s intro to the reprint [pdf] of my article about the video shoot on Oregon Music News, “Each year around this time the cheapest round trip to Russia is a ticket to Chervona’s Old Russian New [...] Continue reading >

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The Lure and Magic of Junk Stores

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Jan 092012
 
The Lure and Magic of Junk Stores

On a recent road trip to Northern California, I made a point of revisiting the Guerneville junk store. Tucked in the western edge of the Safeway parking lot in downtown Guerneville, the junk store, like many other junk stores, casts a strange magic on me whenever I visit it, which is on every trip down there. A junk store is like a lure: it pulls you inside but it hurts as well. As always, I forgot to check the name on the storefront. Thinking back, there may not even be [...] Continue reading >

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The Little Big Differences

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Nov 282011
 
The Little Big Differences

Whether you consider yourself an expat(riate), a transplant, an émigré, an exile, or an immigrant, you notice how and in what way your new country—the U.S. in the case of American Robotnik—differs from the country of your birth. “Cultural distance from host society”, that is, how much your new country differs from your old one, plays a role not only in your acculturation, but also in what you notice and how it affects you. When it comes to the differences between developed Europe and the U.S., Vincent Vega said [...] Continue reading >

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Black Friday vs. Buy Nothing Day Smackdown

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Nov 252011
 
Black Friday vs. Buy Nothing Day Smackdown

If you’ve lived in the U.S. for at least a single Thanksgiving, you know about Black Friday. Retailers open super early to launch the holiday shopping season with ridiculous deals, and shoppers respond by raiding the stores. It’s called “black” because it’s hell out there and because it marks the retailers starting to run a profit on the year (or be “in the black”). A lot of people have strong feelings about Black Friday.  In the Black Corner… Representing the Pro Black Friday side this year is the man who [...] Continue reading >

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Hallowhat?

 Posted by  Kultur Clash  3 Responses »
Oct 312011
 

Halloween (or Hallowe’en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, which commonly includes activities such as trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films. —Wikipedia Today is Halloween and other than bonfires, which I have yet to see anyone do, there just is nothing to Halloween that connects with me. I know my history enough to appreciate Martin Luther King, Presidents, Memorial, Independence, Labor, Columbus, and Veterans Days. I’ve learned the basics of American football rules [...] Continue reading >

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Heritage Festivals Distort National Cultures

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Oct 132011
 
Heritage Festivals Distort National Cultures

Reading about and attending ethnic/national heritage festivals here in Portland, Oregon, has enabled me to draw some tentative conclusions about their purpose, effects, and shortcomings. While heritage festivals fulfill an important role in preserving ethnic/national cultures, they also distort them by presenting their antiquated versions. What Heritage Festivals Have in Common The only difference between the recent Serbian, Polish, and Greek festivals was the heritage they celebrated and the resulting substance; each festival wrapped the same prescription in a different flag and flavor. The festivals had a lot in common:* [...] Continue reading >

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I Survived a Peanut Butter Pickle Sandwich

 Posted by  Facestuffing, Kultur Clash  No Responses »
Oct 112011
 
I Survived a Peanut Butter Pickle Sandwich

Living in a new country means constant learning. Food is no exception. When you get used to, and even begin enjoying, a new dish or an ingredient, the learning curve flattens and further learning occurs on the edges of your experience. This has been the case for me with peanut butter, the principal ingredient in a peanut butter jelly sandwich, or PBJ. After several PBJ fits and starts during my stateside travels last century, I adopted PBJ into my breakfast diet about 8 years ago, after I settled in [...] Continue reading >

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