....In the perfect suburban scenario a devoted husband and father leaves his adoring family for a day’s work at a meaningful job in a nearby city only to return after eight hours to the warm embrace of his anxiously awaiting loved ones. For some people this scenario or something close to it became a reality, but for many more Norman Rockwell's genteel turkey eaters crossed paths with John Cheever’s upwardly mobile martini soaked depressives and gave birth to David Lynch’s oxygen sucking psychotics. Beaver Cleaver and gun-toting post-Columbine teenagers are all products of the same environment. From “Andy Hardy” to “The Ice Storm,” from “The Brady Bunch” to “Married with Children,” from Fairfield Porter to Cindy Sherman, the assumption has always been that these representations of suburban life were mutually exclusive. In fact they have always existed side by side. ''
(From a link Dennis Claxton posted, an article, Home Again, by Peter Drake)
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This idea of building a light rail line from the city center out to `nature' beyond was evidently going on in some of the European cities in the early 20thC. Thomas Mann for example bought a big house in the outskirts of Munich and used the trolley line a few blocks away to commute to the city where all his contacts with literature and politics lived, i.e. his public life. In his journals he follows the civil war between the communists and the social democrats, in the late morning by whether or not the trolley lines are running.
What this separation did was many folded. His most famous short story of the period is called, `A Man and His Dog' (1918). Bashan, looks like a shepherd collie of some kind who needed to be taken out into the woods and fields nearby to run and chase about. The undercurrent narrative is about the joy in animal life we all share and its needs in relation to a urban world that has little to do with nature. It is an idyllic rendition. The story's popularity must have reflected a widespread ideal.
Meanwhile, at about the same time, Mann's oldest kids were becoming extremely introverted and closed off from the larger world. They began to revolt one by one in their own ways and joined into the world, plunging into the creative, political, and then for some in self-destructive ways. You can see this in some of Mann's other stories of the period and by following his journals. Also Golo Mann wrote a good autobiographical sketch of his relation to his father and the family and life at during 20-30s period.
I think this psychic pattern has been repeated over and over and over on a mass scale. First the isolation from a public life, theoretically and then not theoretically as a safety measure, then from the isolation into the introversion of adolescents, and then the revolt and plunge into the creative, political, and self-destructive all at once.
I knew some of the elements of this pattern and had felt their destructive load. So then I spent a fair amount of time figuring out ways to defeat this pattern while raising my kid (half time). Since I rarely returned `home' to the LA suburbs, I rarely thought about them as a source of art, except in their alienation from the life of the mind. the life of art, and a generalized public life.
I only took one picture of the dad weekend visit suburban backyard on a later visit. It was a relatively large patch of well cared for grass from house to back cement brick fence. I had mowed it every Saturday from age twelve to eighteen. On the left against another cement brick fence was a bricked off narrow patch of mostly bare earth with an occasional rose bush. The bare ground represented the missing tomato plants my father had taken to planting.
It was during Thanksgiving so even the light was gray and the air was damp with a mild chill. I squatted at approximately my own sight line as a twelve year old. I shot this picture as an icon to the emptiness or no there there, I had felt one afternoon, when all the pretend had suddenly gone missing, and I saw the place, as if for the first time. My parents and sister had gone shopping.
I had forgotten this particular feeling for years. Rather I had intellectualized it, and forgotten its impact. Then in the narrative of interior, I was a grown man with a family, home for a holiday visit to re-discover part of his world as boy was an utter void. Safe, but empty of all meaning. My parents were still loving and well meaning, but they had no idea who their son was. We kept to happy empty conversation about the new baby, our lives up in Berkeley, which were `going well'. And all, all along the way, there was a great need for sentiments that were not really there. I am certain I was the only one who felt the chasm between us. Was it just charity because they were old and all the battles we had fought were gone in their memory, but not mine? I could see my father was not long for this world. It haunted me. And yet, he seemed completely uninterested in his new grandson. So the old wars were still with us. They were from big families and must have long ago made up their minds that children were a grudging necessity, a sort of household chore.
I think of this icon of no there there, as my roots. This is a very difficult position from which to tell a story, because there is no story. What is the story of `a more affordable assembly line pastoral'? The only answer I can come with is something out Antonioni's L'eclisse.
CG