Click On Title To Link To "Rebel Without A Cause" Website.
Commentary
One never knows what subject matter will come bubbling up to the surface in this space from comments on yesterday’s amorphous memories through to today’s harsh social reality. Sometimes they merge so that I can make my usual cogent and witty comment on them. Case in point. Recently I found myself on one of my infrequent visits to a suburban shopping mall. A moderately upscale one if I can judge by the well-known national brand stores that are located there, in any case, one that seemed not different from any other of the ones that seem to dot the landscape of every outer urban area in America. That social characterization of the mall may be neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things but, perhaps, what went on there may be more common than I assume. You are entirely free to add your own observations on this one if you have had any mall experiences.
While taking care of my business there (if shopping for an appropriate gift for a special occasion is business rather than something akin to a visit to the dentist) I noticed several teenage boys about fifteen or sixteen (and possibly a couple of younger teenage girls on the periphery, it was not clear to me at that moment what their relationship to the scene was) being harassed and told unceremoniously to move on from their “hang out” benches by a couple of rent-a-cops. There was the usual back and forth "macho" talk before the boys left the area. From all appearances (which I later confirmed independently) these kids were from some kind of middle class families, were something like professional “mall rats” and had all the cultural attributes of today’s “youth nation”. You know-the right sneakers, the right technological gizmos (including the ubiquitous Sidekick) and the right tribal “language”. In short, these kids were being harassed and threatened for hanging out while being teenagers.
Needless to say there is nothing new under the sun here. It is apparently a rite of passage in post-modern bourgeois society to steamroll the young at every opportunity. Of course this little episode that I witnessed allows me to segue into a tale of my own youthful “hanging out” for a couple of years in the early 1960’s. Obviously my tale is not centered on shopping malls which were just coming, for better or worst, into vogue. No, this is a tale of hanging around street corners. Or rather, a street corner as the etiquette of the day (enforceable by fists, if the occasion warranted) set the parameters of who “hung” where. Well, for my bravos and me this spot happened to be a very popular pizza parlor at the corner of two main streets of the section of town that I grew up in. Religiously, on Friday and Saturday nights seemingly at any time of the year , for that couple of years, we could be seen in or just out in front of that establishment “holding up the wall” by the automobile traffic going by. And just as religiously, the store owner or someone else would, on occasion, call the police to have us removed. Sometimes, just to keep in shape, the police would just do it on their own authority. And our offense- hanging out while being teenagers. Sound familiar?
The upshot of all this is that my boyos and I got something of an undeserved reputation for being “hard guys”. Oh sure, a couple of the guys wore the then common footwear for tough guys - big black engineer boots complete with silver buckets- that the ‘real’ motorcycle gang types wore. And we certainly affected a James Dean/Marlon Brando existential air about ourselves, without knowing what the hell it was all about. And, sorry to say, a couple of the guys later turned in some very wrong directions. However, in the main, we were just asserting, as of right, all the approved outward bravado of 1950’s alienated white working class youth.
A funny sidebar to our ‘reputation’ was that a Boston area graduate sociology student who was doing research on “street corner” youth society heard about us and interviewed us. And we were more than willing to comply with our ‘stories’, maybe too willingly. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with the times or with a film like "Rebel Without A Cause” starring the above-mentioned James Dean as the consummate alienated middle class youth, not only was mainstream society concerned about the “red menace” but also about this disturbing drift of that era’s “youth culture” toward nihilism.
At the working class level (and below) that translated into a concern about juvenile delinquency, especially the fascination with small-time crime, fast cars, booze, and ‘babes’. Actually, that too sounds familiar, right? So we probably piled it on for our very proper middle class professor. She later sent us a copy of her paper. I am a lot more jaded by such things now and nonplussed by the methodologies used to argue academic theories but I remember reading her thesis ( Ya, I liked to read that kind of stuff even then.) and scratching my head in disbelief about her narrative. Something, as I would later discover from reading, out of Nelson Algren. A vivid imagination is not confined to the literary types. Nothing new there either, right?
But let’s get to the real point of my entire ‘thesis’. What were we, young unattached teenage boys, doing "hanging out” at that corner with all that traffic flowing by? Well, for one thing when we went inside the joint the pizza was great-and cheap. For another it had a great jukebox where one could hear all the hits of those days, as long as the nickels held out. But who is fooling who here. We were standing there looking at (and for) girls going by. Are you shocked? And to bring this little tale to an end I’ll come forward to today again. I mentioned, rather obliquely, in describing the recent scene that I witnessed the presence of a couple of teenage girls on the periphery. Well, what do you think those teenage boys were doing “hanging out” at the mall? Hello.
Commentary
One never knows what subject matter will come bubbling up to the surface in this space from comments on yesterday’s amorphous memories through to today’s harsh social reality. Sometimes they merge so that I can make my usual cogent and witty comment on them. Case in point. Recently I found myself on one of my infrequent visits to a suburban shopping mall. A moderately upscale one if I can judge by the well-known national brand stores that are located there, in any case, one that seemed not different from any other of the ones that seem to dot the landscape of every outer urban area in America. That social characterization of the mall may be neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things but, perhaps, what went on there may be more common than I assume. You are entirely free to add your own observations on this one if you have had any mall experiences.
While taking care of my business there (if shopping for an appropriate gift for a special occasion is business rather than something akin to a visit to the dentist) I noticed several teenage boys about fifteen or sixteen (and possibly a couple of younger teenage girls on the periphery, it was not clear to me at that moment what their relationship to the scene was) being harassed and told unceremoniously to move on from their “hang out” benches by a couple of rent-a-cops. There was the usual back and forth "macho" talk before the boys left the area. From all appearances (which I later confirmed independently) these kids were from some kind of middle class families, were something like professional “mall rats” and had all the cultural attributes of today’s “youth nation”. You know-the right sneakers, the right technological gizmos (including the ubiquitous Sidekick) and the right tribal “language”. In short, these kids were being harassed and threatened for hanging out while being teenagers.
Needless to say there is nothing new under the sun here. It is apparently a rite of passage in post-modern bourgeois society to steamroll the young at every opportunity. Of course this little episode that I witnessed allows me to segue into a tale of my own youthful “hanging out” for a couple of years in the early 1960’s. Obviously my tale is not centered on shopping malls which were just coming, for better or worst, into vogue. No, this is a tale of hanging around street corners. Or rather, a street corner as the etiquette of the day (enforceable by fists, if the occasion warranted) set the parameters of who “hung” where. Well, for my bravos and me this spot happened to be a very popular pizza parlor at the corner of two main streets of the section of town that I grew up in. Religiously, on Friday and Saturday nights seemingly at any time of the year , for that couple of years, we could be seen in or just out in front of that establishment “holding up the wall” by the automobile traffic going by. And just as religiously, the store owner or someone else would, on occasion, call the police to have us removed. Sometimes, just to keep in shape, the police would just do it on their own authority. And our offense- hanging out while being teenagers. Sound familiar?
The upshot of all this is that my boyos and I got something of an undeserved reputation for being “hard guys”. Oh sure, a couple of the guys wore the then common footwear for tough guys - big black engineer boots complete with silver buckets- that the ‘real’ motorcycle gang types wore. And we certainly affected a James Dean/Marlon Brando existential air about ourselves, without knowing what the hell it was all about. And, sorry to say, a couple of the guys later turned in some very wrong directions. However, in the main, we were just asserting, as of right, all the approved outward bravado of 1950’s alienated white working class youth.
A funny sidebar to our ‘reputation’ was that a Boston area graduate sociology student who was doing research on “street corner” youth society heard about us and interviewed us. And we were more than willing to comply with our ‘stories’, maybe too willingly. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with the times or with a film like "Rebel Without A Cause” starring the above-mentioned James Dean as the consummate alienated middle class youth, not only was mainstream society concerned about the “red menace” but also about this disturbing drift of that era’s “youth culture” toward nihilism.
At the working class level (and below) that translated into a concern about juvenile delinquency, especially the fascination with small-time crime, fast cars, booze, and ‘babes’. Actually, that too sounds familiar, right? So we probably piled it on for our very proper middle class professor. She later sent us a copy of her paper. I am a lot more jaded by such things now and nonplussed by the methodologies used to argue academic theories but I remember reading her thesis ( Ya, I liked to read that kind of stuff even then.) and scratching my head in disbelief about her narrative. Something, as I would later discover from reading, out of Nelson Algren. A vivid imagination is not confined to the literary types. Nothing new there either, right?
But let’s get to the real point of my entire ‘thesis’. What were we, young unattached teenage boys, doing "hanging out” at that corner with all that traffic flowing by? Well, for one thing when we went inside the joint the pizza was great-and cheap. For another it had a great jukebox where one could hear all the hits of those days, as long as the nickels held out. But who is fooling who here. We were standing there looking at (and for) girls going by. Are you shocked? And to bring this little tale to an end I’ll come forward to today again. I mentioned, rather obliquely, in describing the recent scene that I witnessed the presence of a couple of teenage girls on the periphery. Well, what do you think those teenage boys were doing “hanging out” at the mall? Hello.
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