Panaphonic, Magnetbox, and Sorny

Mexican Grandma Who Was Really French used to give the best worst gifts. A globe. An LED key chain. A coin purse. An eye glass repair kit. A bike lock. Underoos well past the age Underoos were desirable but before the age I would have wanted them ironically. A handheld "drum machine" that clipped to my belt called the "Rap Mate." Drugstore colognes in train and car shaped novelty bottles. A baby blue satin driving jacket.

Those things were awful, but they were possibly wonderful in their oddity. These things were so unique, unexpected, and outside the boundaries of our gifting standards, they were probably the closest things to a gift we could actually know.* In their strangeness they were lovely and exciting.

But just as one takes the miserable lows along with the exhilarating highs of bi-polar disorder, (That's right, I'm comparing wacky gift giving to the emotional chaos and frequent physical danger of mental illness. I'm also going to compare it to the crap Christians create and embrace. How about that?) her gifts could be a disheartening demonstration of loneliness and alienation- a hint at the vacuous reality of relationships and the chasm between generations. They betrayed our distance from each other and threatened all other relations as illusory and tenuous. Many of her gifts to me, and likely mine to her, were intended as gestures of love that instead revealed how little we knew each other.

Or sometimes they just showed how incredibly unhip Mexican Grandma is.

I don't know.

But in addition to the wacky, was the lame. When I was Kid Skybalon, she seemed aware of my life, or at least popular kid's culture, enough to know that I played with changing robot toy cars, but not enough to know that they were Transformers. Oh sure, Transformers represented the corporate takeover and hyper-branding of kids, wherein childhood became one long commercial. But gimme a break- I was a kid. I wanted Transformers. If I was lucky I got GoBots. If I was me, I got "Robotcar With Fast Styling!"

If Transformers were bad, the knock offs were worse. They were parasitic; the cheaply and quickly produced Radio Shack and swap meet copies made you think the artless consumer culture they emulated was worth something.


Oh enough of the set up- this is about Christianity... or one aspect of American Christian culture. We are the Creed of our musical gruel. Walker Texas Ranger. Left Behind. Christian as an adjective is so frequently synonymous with lame.

Why are we so often the 99 cent store of our strip mall culture? A strip mall culture is something to want? We seem to have a vague sense of what is popular- whether it should be or not- and go nuts making lame knock offs and awkward references.

We broadly embrace- not just live in- but value and support a materialistic consumer culture of marketed identity and lifestyle.

Good grief. It's bad enough that there's so much garbage- that so much human effort goes toward creating waste intentionally rather than incidentally, but to create even more- and of a worse quality?! Why do we pour so much of our talent, energy, and resources into some insatiable belly. There is what is worthless, and there are our Christian copies. Maybe both show we don't know what really has value. Why is that?

Any Garbage Here?
Another Demo Tape- Quasimoto
Flauta y Timbal- Tito Puente
Mike Mills- Air
My Beloved Monster- Eels
Working In The Coal Mine- Devo
Caroline No- The Beach Boys
wooden Ships- CSNY
Bridge Over Troubled Water- Simon and Garfunkel
Because- The Beatles
Go to The Mirror Boy- The Who
Clampdown- The Clash

*You can learn more about the aporia of a gift at your local library. Ask your librarian for Given Time by Jacques Derrida.