Honor Thy Parents?
I’m reading A.J. Jacobs’ book, “The Year of Living Biblically” (which I recommend), and I have to interject something.
I’m at the part where A.J.’s aunt Kate witnesses his son, Jasper calling him “A.J.”. She disapprovingly remarks, “Children aren’t supposed to use their parents’ first names. It’s disrespectful.”
A.J. writes:
“She’s probably right; in biblical times, there was no such thing as an informal, I’m-friends-with-my-kid father. Without me knowing it, Jasper was violating the ‘honor your parents’ commandment.”
Bla. I disagree. I mean, maybe he is one of those “I want to be my kid’s friend even if it works to his potential detriment because really I’m just afraid to use discipline” pansy-type fathers, I don’t know. But just being on a first-name basis with your kid doesn’t automatically mean that’s the case. Nor does a kid calling his parents by their first names show disrespect.
If anything, you honor your parents more by calling them by their first names — by acknowledging them as individuals with complex identities, histories, hopes and dreams of their own, not just the ones centered around you. Calling them ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ exclusively is reducing them to only the role they play in relation to you, just as if they were to call you ‘Son’ or ‘Daughter’ exclusively.
Words are hypnotic. You are lulling each other into the familiar comfort of habitual roles and behavior patterns. You are one-dimensionalizing each other, type-casting each other. You are reinforcing limits around your relationships (some of which, I realize, are there for good reason, but not all) and the identities of each individual involved.
Maybe it has something to do with my weird beliefs which I won’t go into, but which include reincarnation (sort of). I don’t think my biological parents ‘created’ me any more than I created them. We came together to help each other out and maybe because we are friends at another level. Or enemies. Maybe they were my kids last time. That would explain a lot. Who knows, but we’re all sovereign beings.
You don’t have to believe in reincarnation (even sort of) to realize that people are not born blank slates and then merely molded by their earthly creators. Parents are the first and strongest influences on the child’s ego, but we’re more than our egos, and nobody owns anybody, and there’s more to the picture. I can’t prove that but I know it.
And as a parent, placed in such a position of influence, I would want to help instill a strong sense of sovereignty and independence in the developing ego I’ve been entrusted with, not dependency (or codependency — parents can get awfully attached to the parent-child dynamic, too, and that’s not good for anybody).
That said, I address my parents by the standard, socially acceptable labels. It’s how they grew up, it’s how I grew up, it’s habit, it’s what they want to be called. Of course now my husband’s Mom wants me to call her ‘mom’ too, which I do when I remember to, though reluctantly (it feels really weird to me), out of respect for her wishes if not for her individuality, or mine.
Reinforcing role-relationships… and inequalities within them. Most people don’t even think about this, so I don’t hold it against anybody. I’m just sayin’. Being on a first-name basis signifies equality and mutual respect. It reminds both involved that even if you’re playing different roles in relation to each other, they are just roles and you are not those roles, you’re both just people.
My kid(s) will call me Brooke. And yeah, maybe sometimes I’ll have them call me ‘Our Lord’, like on Tuesdays or something. But I’ll let them pick special titles they want to be called sometimes, too. I want them to develop warped senses of humor, after all.
Coming up next!
(or whenever I feel like it!)
(probably never.)
Psychological Experimentation On Your Child: How to Get the Most Personal Amusement While Doing the Least Possible Damage to Your Child’s Fragile Psyche.
Music Strategy Guru of the Day :: Bruce Warila
I’ve been devouring the “unsprung wisdom” of newly discovered (by me) Bruce Warila this morning. I was impressed by his comments on the following post by Andrew Dubber, and happy was I to find that he has his own blog. He seems to know his shit and provides some good counter-insights to those of Andrew, who also seems to know his shit in these areas, so the plot has just thickened. The fact that they both make excellent arguments while disagreeing on several points is a great thing. I’m really thinking now. I’m reminded anew to stay on my toes and keep questioning when in comes to all these theories going around about the direction of music and the music industry.
It’s important that we as artists pay close attention to this stuff (that’s why I’m excited about this Bruce guy and passing it on to you), but also that, above all else, we trust our own instincts and rely on our own creativity. Nomatter how informed or expert someone may be in these areas, they don’t know it all, and there are other pieces to the puzzle.
But, that said, I’ve been “tumblr-quoting” the hell out of Bruce’s stuff, my non-bullshit detector (the oppposite of my bullshit detector) going off like crazy, and that’s a good sign that he’s onto some important things. He’s certainly sparking a lot of creative thought for me, even getting me re-excited about business strategies (a wave I need to ride when it’s high, so I’m going to wrap this up with some quotes now). Most significant to me is what he’s getting at in this post:
“A MySpace page dotted with fancy graphics, YouTube videos, slide shows and images, and a shitty music player was great in 2005, but this is 2007! A page of stuff is no longer compelling. We need something that really blows the socks off people.”
“Advice: Time to pick up the pace people. You need to learn how to be entertaining on the Internet. You may want to go out and buy the TV (yourband.tv) domain for your band. You need to start looking at your band like a television network. Have a filmmaker and a writer join your band, choose a theme, write a story, lash in your music, create episodes, write notes about your story on your blog, engage fans, develop characters, have a storyline, create a soundtrack, etc. Stop using your Internet presence to be INFORMATIVE, use it to be ENTERTAINING!”
“Nobody is going to make money selling $.99 cent downloads. Sell your music to some and give it away to everyone else that refuses to pay for music. Use your music as the bait that brings people into your shows and onto your new ENTERTAINING website/blog. If you make great music and you are entertaining, you will make money. By the time you learn how to incorporate story, basic film making, blogging, and how to be episodic - into your repertoire, the industry will have the tools you need to profit from all of your efforts - and your registered fans.”
Gyrus On Glamour
In response to my recent post about Glamour!, fellow godstar and friend of the show Gyrus had this little brilliant snippet to add to the conversation (in an email, but quoted here with permission) :
“I guess we who critique Western civilization have a tendency to react to the whole surface artifice thing, and being more “natural” ends up being associated with being plain and a bit grubby! But how many indigenous people spend ages adorning and beautifying themselves? And hey, if you want natural, check out all those birds with stupendous plumage! We really do need to rediscover that natural parading and glorifying, without getting sucked too far into the mass-media gloss that parasitizes that sort of stuff … It seems like a strange issue to get involved with as we teeter on the brink of ecological catastrophe… but oddly it seems important. Maybe it’s important to us people who’ve invested so much energy in suppressing that natural strutting about… Now’s the time when people with ideas like ours need to get noticed more!”
New Music Strategies (Amazon Is Still Falling Short)
DRM-free is great and all, as is any healthy competition for iTunes. But you know how else you can get DRM-free music, plus not give iTunes or Amazon or any big record company any money at all, and just support artists on your own terms, as one human being to another according to how much you actually value their work? I do. Most people do, whether they choose to engage in it or not.
It’s actually two things in combination. The first is file-sharing, the second is donating. And plenty of people are choosing to engage in both — if more often the first of the two. But that’s the messy, realistic reality of things, like it or not, Elton. Why the hell fight it? I ask that not just in the sense of “why bother fighting the inevitable”, but in the sense that it’s not something that should be fought. It’s a positive r/evolutionary trend, both a cause and effect of old metaphors being outgrown and new, better, more expansive metaphors taking their place.
Radiohead is with it enough to see this and to actually live in the present (which in some sense requires also living in the future). Radiohead are clearly forward-thinking people who understand media and marketing (see TIME’s article “Radiohead Says: Pay What You Want” if you haven’t already). And they aren’t the only progressive thinkers willing — in fact, happy — to face and embrace the evolving reality of the music business (and all business, and life itself), to see the good in what’s going on and to find constructive ways to begin facilitating it, actively, now. Radiohead are just the most famous.
If you are a musician, artist, entrepreneur, whatever — person — you can’t afford to wait idly by for the ‘new music industry’ (or whatever industry) train to slow down and stop before you hop on board. It’s not gonna slow down or stop, so you better start moving, if you’re not already. Andrew Dubber is a smart person and here’s a smart thing he has to say about this (From his New Music Strategies Manifesto):
“…changes are still underway, and it is a process of navigation, not a process of conversion from an old model to a new one. By the time you have adapted you will be obsolete again. Develop a strategy for keeping up.”
Every second and every dollar you invest in the old business model is essentially a step backwards. Not a good move in a situation where you need to be not only keeping up, but preferably staying ahead of the curve, and better yet, actively participating in the direction of the ‘curve’ itself. As such, I have compiled for you a starter-kit of essential study materials to help you in this endeavor:
The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (by Andrew Dubber)
New Music Strategies Manifesto (also by Andrew Dubber)
The Wu Tang Manual
And the following awesome conversations going on over at Tim’s place:
Pay What You Want
Rock Stars Need Not Apply
(no doubt these awesome conversations will be continuing in future posts and threads here, at Tim’s and at Andrew’s, so I would subscribe to / bookmark us all if I were me, and I am, and I have. You should too, mkay).
Why Must The Damned Dolphins Keep Harassing Our Poor Rich People?
When your biggest problem in life is getting peeped on by jealous dolphins while you have sex in your super-secret luxury submarine, you don’t have problems, and you need to shut up.
And what, you can’t afford super-secret luxury submarine curtains? Seriously, shut up. Go away.