Trash of the Titans: an Introduction to Trash Culture

Trash Culture Journal: Vol.1 No.1 Trash of the Titans: An Introduction to Trash Culture By Siobhan Lyons, Macquarie University “Outsider artists, in effect, gather up what is usually considered the abject in the Kristevian sense, that which the symbolic order discards, sees as ‘trash’. Joyce’s litter of the letter, the trash and discards, the waste that society throws away, is picked up and reassembled to make a new Imaginary order.” –Jan Jagodzinski, in Psychoanalyzing Cinema: A Productive Encounter with Lacan, Deleuze, and Žižek (2012) “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride , I adopted an extremely moralistic approach to all environmental technology. I loathed machinery, I abominated cities, I equated the Industrial Revolution with original sin and mass media with the Fall. In short, I rejected almost every element of modern life in favor of a Rousseauvian utopianism. But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century–Yeats, Pound. Joyce, Eliot–had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation. I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience–from trash to treasures. I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” –Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine , March 1969 The latter excerpt from above is quoted from famed media scholar Marshall McLuhan, in an interview with Playboy magazine. His notion that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experiences, from trash to treasure, shows the theorists’ own perception of where art originates. Moreover, McLuhan himself can be described as transgressing the ordinary boundaries of art—appearing in Woody Allen’s classic Annie Hall , being alluded to several times in hit HBO program The Sopranos , and of course, being interviewed in Playboy magazine, as authors Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov have also, already disrupting the conventions set up around high and low brow forms of culture. Trash Culture is a varied cultural artefact. It does not conform to one particular cultural group or categorisation, which is why, then, it proves to be an intriguing concept. More than popular culture, trash culture carries with it certain cultural and societal definitions and assumptions, all of which are subjective, though undeniably unfavourable. This journal, i Trash Culture Journal: Vol.1 No.1 therefore, has been created out of necessity in the overwhelmingly elitist journals that are somewhat exclusive to academics. But trash culture involves every facet of society all over the world, and as such this journal’s scope reaches further than many others. Trash touches each and every aspect of culture; from music to fashion and from literature to philosophy. Anybody who has read or is familiar with Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), for instance, will appreciate the merging of theory and trash in such essays as ‘The World of Wrestling’ and ‘Toys’, in which Barthes shows how useful these so-called ‘trashy’ elements are for society. In early 2013, Sydney held two events that can be described as fitting the over-arching frame of Trash Culture. The first, which is the subject of a review in this first issue, was Symphony of the Goddess: The Legend of Zelda , an orchestral performance at the Opera House in Sydney. Combining two seemingly contradictory cultural tastes—Nintendo and orchestra—such an event is characteristic of the changing natures of culture and taste. The second event was a concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre featuring the bands Deep Purple and Journey . Described by some as ‘rock music for those who don’t like rock’ Journey is one such band that has both appealed to the masses and been the subject of much criticism for their popularity. A cultural nexus can be identified between the two, that is, that their appeal to the masses has invariably created criticism in others. In an interview with American Psycho author, Bret Easton Ellis, the author writes how, when writing for his college paper, his readers were less inclined to read about Elvis Costello, and instead wanted articles about the latest Journey album. Ellis mentions this in somewhat of a scathing manner, a musical elitist whose views on the subject are intimately and obscurely explored throughout American Psycho . Moreover, Journey’s song Don’t Stop Believn’ , arguably their most famous and beloved song, has been excerpted in various pop-culture (and trash culture) programs, including Glee (notably in their first episode), Scrubs , Family Guy , The Sopranos (famously in the very last scene of the entire series), The Wedding Singer (in an orchestral rendition), the film Monster (2003), and many others. Being injected into so many programs, each of which is varied in its entertainment and philosophical value, it is no surprise then that the song has come to receive such a mixed reception. At this point it seems only necessary to point out that there is, of course, a distinction set up between Popular Culture and Trash Culture. Yet this distinction, for the purposes of this journal, is replete with confusion and inconsistencies. While television programs such as The Sopranos , Breaking Bad , Big Love and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are, arguably, a part of high popular culture, reality television and talk shows reside firmly within the area of trash culture. ii Trash Culture Journal: Vol.1 No.1 Yet programs such as Family Guy and The Simpsons appear somewhere in the middle, on the margins of popular and trash culture. I say this only since, while I would place them within the area of popular culture, many consider it otherwise, whether higher up on the spectrum art or at the very bottom. What these essays inform is that while popular culture is often overlooked, trash culture is altogether dismissed or discarded, and it is this process of discarding that interests this journal. It is important to know that the term Trash is not a wholly reprehensible concept, nor is it a term of endearment. When Elvis , The Beatles and The Rolling Stones first launched their music, many consumers regarded it as mere ‘trash’, though there also exists authentic kinds of trash that are less likely to become accepted cultural phenomena, including Justin Bieber, The Hills, and most reality television programs. In many instances, trash exists as a form of social anarchy, as seen in the British television program The Young Ones , and undoubtedly many others. Therefore, it has a pivotal role to play in shaping the cultural values of society. The old adage ‘one person’s trash is another’s treasure’ is not the theme of this journal. It does not rely on the subjective opinion of trash alone, but attempts to understand what place trash, in all forms, has in contemporary society, and also how the politics of trash has transformed over time, generations and cultures. As Dave Graney argued about the now respected genre of pulp fiction, “The pulp world is very good because it was like 10 cent books for people. It was trash. It wasn’t coming through some critical avenue towards people. People just picked it up. It was written for money. There was [sic] a lot of great characters in it.” And in his work All Man (2009), a great book of Ernest Hemingway’s masculine appearance in various American magazines, David Earle describes pulp magazines as having become ‘so denigrated that not only have academics neglected them but so have the companies that published them…such popular magazines are the great ignored literary product of the twentieth century (2009: xi). We’re always forced to defend our choice of consuming lower forms of art. The essential problem is that the dialectics and politics of trash assume an absolute characterisation of trash, that is, many assume that consumers of trash consume only trash, and nothing else. The perception that trash and high culture cannot coexist in a person’s cultural palate is a predominant issue in trash culture politics. For instance, it is assumed that women who watch Oprah do not also read any works by Jack Kerouac. It is assumed that people who play Nintendo don’t also read the newspaper or attend opera (a notion to be debunked in this issue). And it is assumed that people who read Bret Easton Ellis don’t also appreciate the literary works of Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard and Kafka. What is more, it is assumed that iii Trash Culture Journal: Vol.1 No.1 those who consume higher forms of culture do not also dabble in those lower forms of art. Countless theorists and texts exist in an aim to encourage the erroneous notion that avant- garde and trash culture cannot be simultaneously consumed. From those theorists trying to reconcile Thomas Pynchon’s elitist work with his popularity (having appeared on The Simpsons three times), to Bob Dylan’s transformation from indie to the popular, there is a constant attempt to separate cultures traditionally viewed as incompatible. When Jonathan Franzen criticised Oprah’s Winfrey’s choice of placing his work, The Corrections , on her Oprah Book Club list, fellow author Andre Dubus III proclaimed, in defence, that Franzen erroneously assumed that ‘high art is not for the masses, that they won’t understand it or don’t deserve it.’ However, while this journal does, indeed, put a focus on the more important aspects of trash, it does not therefore take the view that the avant-garde, indie, unknown, underground or obscure forms of art, literature and music are in any way irrelevant. It is not the aim of this journal to show trash culture’s triumph over higher art forms that are, for all intents and purposes, incredibly relevant, valuable and indispensable.

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