American Pie, 'Worldwide pop culture phenomenon'

When I was a teenager I loved going to the movies with my friends, it was one of the "cool" places to be seen on a Friday night when football wasn't in season. My high school boyfriend actually worked at the local movie theater and we would constantly sneak into movies for free sans regret.

It has been 12 years since the teen comedy American Pie was released. I was about 15 years old and can still remember the first time I snuck in and watched this movie in the theater. I thought it was the most hilarious/crude thing I had ever seen, and would have felt embarrassment if forced to watch it with my parents. Living through the same developmental stages as the characters, I connected with their stories and the phases they were going through. An underlying theme which is unavoidable in teenage coming of age movies is the need and experience of sexual awakening. Scenes like masturbating with a warm apple pie, or experiencing oral sex for the first time was an educational lesson for my friends and I; American pie was the perfect way to learn these scary truths. "The New York Times felt American Pie was "one of the shallowest and the most prurient teen films," (Wikipedia), which it may have been, however, the New York Times didn't get a pubescent teen to write their critique.

I look at the current teen comedy, and I see that not much has changed aside from clothing and music trends. I recently watched Easy A, a contemporary teen comedy that came out just last year and it didn't even compare to the stories told in the American Pie franchise. I feel like the explicitness of the American Pie series created a timeless homage that even contemporary teens can view and still feel like they are experiencing the same issues as teens 12 years ago.  American Pie took teen comedies to another level, one in which other directors in this genre don't feel worthy of competing against. It has spawned at least six more films in this series that I can think of, the most recent in 2009. The older I've become the less I've cared about viewing these more recent films. I have grown past that stage, but I can still see the need of production for these films, and I know that our current generation of teenagers are fully enjoying them as much as I once did.

Laser Floyd

My fiance was raised in Huntington, a bay town on the north shore of Long Island. I love visiting this historical town for an occasional break from city life. Huntington has great culture stemming from its use of the shore's harbor as an import and export of goods dating back as early as the mid 15th century. There are many great mansions in the area and one specifically being The Vanderbilt, which is now also a museum, educational center, and planetarium. Our friends told us about great laser shows that the planetarium put on all weekend long. The one in particular we attended was Laser Floyd, Pink Floyd's album The Wall at 10pm.

I was surprised by how many high school aged teens were in attendance. A concern to many interested in the development and growth of teenagers is a serious deterioration in the messages of some contemporary music. Since the 1930's the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an independent US government agency became "charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable." (www.fcc.gov) These regulations only make teens in contemporary society want to rock harder and rebel more.
Perhaps this is also something that past generations were experiencing with the rise of rock bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, or The Rolling Stones. A current trend that is on the rise again is the resurgence of vinyl records. Its great that teens today can get their hands on LPs that are full so of replete instrumental sound. I enjoy the fact that the bands that created what music is today can still be heard and reflected upon through show's like Laser Floyd, and still remain interesting even to these younger viewers.

http://www.vanderbiltmuseum.org/home.php?section=planetarium&sub=schedule

On the F

Usually my daily commutes via Subway consist of earphones blasting my favorite tunes and a nice game of Angry Birds. Since I began observing for my visual cultures class, I've pressed pause on my play-list and decided to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings. Just Saturday I was riding the F train uptown to Penn Station when I caught an interesting conversation by a group of high school students also traveling the underground.  They seemed to be excited to be traveling together, like they were on some sort of an adventure, another event or experience that would draw their group closer.
Finkelstein shares in Art of self-invention, image and identity in popular culture (2007), about the "universal self." No matter what background you come from, people conform themselves to society creating a "cultural mask," that allows them to fit in with the norm. The universal self can have many different appearances, like this group of teenagers for instance, but everyone is conscious of their social presence and conform themselves within the customs and structures of their particular culture. I noticed that everyone in this group wore only dark colors, grays and whites. One young lady with a ton of smokey black eyeliner and bright blue bangs (the only noticeable color on any of them) ran most of the conversation amongst a group of three or four guy friends. She seemed to have strong opinions on much of what the talked about.

BRAINNSS, BBRRAAIINNNS!

Amidst a hand-clapping game and chit chat about friends, much of the teenagers conversation was about a recent Anime (Japanese animation style) show called High school of the Dead, and an online video game where the player is in control of themselves as a zombie. I myself enjoy watching zombie flicks every now and then, but never really thought about why they were so engaging. Zombies have been a large part of American pop culture since the success of George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Since then it has become its own sub-culture, whether it be a Halloween costume, viewing the video to Michael Jackson's hit Thriller, or even tattooed on the arms of zombie-lovers nationwide.

I stumbled across a blog that helped in analyzing why Americans as a culture like zombies so much. http://137design.com/blog/7-why-do-we-like-zombies. Specifically reason number five jumped to my immediate attention."On the train, we listen to our ipods, blocking out external stimuli. When the train stops and we get off, we move with the crowd...like a flock. It's no stretch of imagination to suggest that we spend a good portion of our day relying on routine, rather than our higher levels of cognition to guide us. We see these zombies, partially, as a reflection of ourselves...as something we're slowly, methodically, lurching towards...and we don't want it." Was it just me who was saying that I tune out the world around me on my commute to work?

Unknown

My fiance and I spent our Saturday night cozied up to a movie now at the Windsor Terrace Movie theater to see a 7:00 show of Unknown. A PG 13 flick with great suspense. We were outside the movie theater and I couldnt help but overhear a group of teenagers deciding which movie they would spend $12.50 on. It's a tough choice to find whats worthy(way too expensive these days if you ask me.) And then I heard a comment that too me back to my youth.
"My brother would be severely disappointed in me...he'd say why are you wasting your money on that!"
I am assuming that this teenage boy was speaking about his older brother. Growing up with two older brothers constantly influencing my decisions, I know that I've thought the same things this boy has many times. If it wasn't about movies or what was "cool" to watch, it was about music. When you are raised with older siblings it places you in a role, you want to be liked by them or at least have their approval. You find yourself conforming to the same social likes as them. If I were to tell my brother in high school that I likes Justin Beiber for example...I would have been made fun of for it. Therefore if I wanted to listen to Justin Beiber I would hide it. However I found that the more I absorbed the type of music and entertainment they liked, the more that it became an integral part of who I was.

Bowl America!

This weekend I took a 4 hour bus ride to the town where I grew up. Rockville, Maryland is about 15 miles northwest of Washington DC. It’s a historical suburb with a lot of great visual culture. Last night my parents and I decided it would be a fun night to go bowling at local bowling alley one town over. Bowl America is situated off of Interstate 270, one of the main highways in the area. I had spent many fun times at this particular alley growing up, for birthday parties, fun weekends, and as I became a teenager it was one of the places my friends and I would go to hang out socially. Talk about blast from the past.

This time I was going back to Bowl America with a different mind frame. Yes, I wanted to have a good time, but I was also interested in taking a closer look at what it was like to be a teenager in this particular environment.

It was a league night so there were not as many teenagers as I was expecting. Bowling is something that I would consider to be one of the United States favorite competitive sports. As soon as you walked in you could see large American flags hanging above the bowling lanes. Half the lanes were available for recreational use, and a short wait was required.

I noticed that what few teenagers that were there were in the arcade area. Taking a closer look I realized the only games that were being played were the games that had guns. One Alien game in particular caught my eye. It had large futuristic looking guns that would draw any spectator in, by far one of the brightest most inviting games in the room. Why are these games the ones that the young men are drawn to? Why not the race car games or the skeeball?

 Violence in video games is common in our society. The male dynamic is driven towards the fantasy of what it’s like to be a strong and unbeatable force, perhaps the military’s ideological influences. Teenagers are desensitized to this type of violence and spend their money competing against each other on who can shoot the most aliens. “You suck!” Was a common phrase spoken by the two teenage boys I was observing. My Saturday night was bombarded again by this all to familiar subject!