Ahead of what assuredly will be another flash in the pan by the Burton/Carter/Depp machine which has continued for the past decade to squirt out steaming piles of films whose sole purpose is to leave stains upon cheap t-shirts and sell them at Hot Topic, the British Film Institute has released this restoration…

Okay, well, maybe I do.

I’ve been what you might call a plain clothes freak my whole life, and continue to be now. I’m comfortable with a lot of alt cultures, and with the people in them (and the music that goes hand in hand), but I’m not exactly a part of them, nor am I really what you’d call maintstream, even though I grew up in White Bread Republicanville, USA (where long hair is enough to make you an outsider, even if you dress perfectly normally). So my view is perhaps not entirely reliable.

But!

I have to agree with Mer that Burton has never really been anything other than mainstream, even if his ideas were often acting critiquing or in subversion of the mainstream culture. And more power to him. We should all be so lucky as to make bucketloads of money while prodding the culture we come from.

Is he resting on his laurels? Perhaps. One can also be trapped by their own success, if not careful. I honestly find the descriptions of some of his recent movies (which I’ve not seen) as strange and out of character. Alice without a commentary on the sexual subtext? I mean, yes, it IS Disney, but it still. There is a great deal to work with in the material. The Walrus and the Carpenter has always struck me as a filthy thing, and could certainly be made subtly so on film. EAT ME. DRINK ME. Even the original Disney film doesn’t try to shake a good deal of it.

And on the subject of DIY, well, I grew up in Crackerville, as I mentioned earlier, and hung out a bit with the few goth kids and so forth, and there was far less DIY than I see now. And this might just be a local phenomenon, and certainly my anecdotal experience does not fact make, but somehow being able to -buy- more seems to have spurred some to -make- more, and buy less.

I do think Ross came off as dismissive and a touch elitist, but what the fuck, it’s the internet. Everyone comes off as dismissive and elitist sometimes. The main point is that he put up this interesting bit of history, which otherwise I wouldn’t have seen. The dunking of the dormouse had me laughing.

And that’s far more important than his views on Hot Topic and Tim Burton, honestly.

Karen. That skit. Is Fucking. GENIUS. I peed my (stripey, spooky) pantaloons.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1929453

I had no idea Hot Topic was such a divisive subject. The “Hot Topic flavored” line is not meant to imply that once something appears in a chain store it is uncool. If that were the case I would have to throw out a lot of my music and all my Jhonen Vasquez comics. The issue I take is that it seems to me that Burton is making films specifically in that vein, aimed at a specific demographic and this has come to define his work. It has nothing to do with whether or not he’s cool but how he has turned himself into a brand and seems to pick his movies based on the ability to license t-shirts.

So what I’m saying is that Tim Burton has, like, totally sold out.

Nadya- Don’t you make fun of my Darkwing Duck t-shirt. It’s amazing and you know it.

I read Josh Ellis’s piece in the latest issue and thought it was brilliant. It came at a fortuitous time, as I read it when I was deep into thinking about the vast difference between my teenage experience and the experience of my current crop of students (who are generally in the 18-21 age range).

To extend the Hot Topic metaphor, back when I was a fledgling weirdo we didn’t have easy access to the Internet’s treasure trove of “alt. fashion,” or alt. anything for that matter, so we all became DIYers out of necessity. I’m sure my friends made a lot of cool stuff by hand that they wouldn’t have if they had the option of going to the mall and buying instead of creating.

But when I look at the wonderfully strange group of students who populate the first row of my classroom, I realize that access was never a problem for them. A couple clicks and the alt. world is their oyster. While the DIY ethos may suffered a bit in the seismic wake of the Internet(1), the fact that these kids are literally spoiled for choice and have so much fantastically odd stuff at their disposable does feel like a cultural victory of sorts.

I’m left being of two minds about the proliferation/appropriation/invasion of alt. culture into the “mainstream” or normative culture. On one hand, it feels like something has been lost (in that slippery Baudrillard or Debord sense), but on the other it’s awesome that a kid in Podunk, Nowhere can get his or her mitts on books, music, and else that my teenage self could only dream of.

PS – I’m glad you characterized this exchange as congenial, as I have nothing but respect for everyone on the Coilhouse team and really appreciate your willingness to listen to critique. (And to give it in turn!)

(1) I only half-buy my own point here; the Internet also makes available so much information on *how* to do things yourself that perhaps it internally balances its own tendencies toward commercial consumption and alt.-as-brand?

This comment reminded me of something. If you haven’t already, please do check out Josh Ellis’s “Children By the Millions Wait For Alex Chilton” essay. It was recently recently published in Coilhouse #4, and in a very strange twist of fate, is now available for free download as a PDF on the Pixies website. If you find the time to read it, please let me know what you think of it. Very curious to hear your opinions.