The Narrative Lives of Ex-Suburban Teens
If my interests were mapped as sounds, urban planning and urban design would be a hum, constantly underlying all the booms, pops, and trills of my daily focus. Think of them as the sound of a kettle full of boiling water, heard from the next room. Every now and then, the steam builds just enough and the hum turns to a whistling scream. Time to pay attention.
Visualization of Aural Fixation
Today’s whistle came from the pot of social critic James Howard Kunstler(, who apparently has a podcast). I broke the spine of his book Geography of Nowhere this morning and was struck by a passage only a few pages into his book: a description of the suburban life of teenagers. We’ve all heard this one before, but Kunstler’s passage is poignant for two reasons:
One: It is intimate. Most descriptions of the ‘burbs are clinical lamets by talking heads, citing the most recent story on teen depression before cutting to a commercial break. Kunstler’s prose is personal and therefore the opposite.
Two: Although we have all heard the tales of youthful woe before, there is something fascinating about the fact that even when we tell these stories from a personal point of view, we use the same language.
Maybe that’s just what happens when people tell stories: language is limited, storytelling is learned, so of course when we translate our lives into narratives there will be some overlap…Or maybe it’s that suburbia really has replicated itself as an “experience,” reproducing similar life lines, isolation, community, whatever irregardless of actual Place.
Dunno. Now I’m just inspired to make a word cloud or chart out of personal narratives of Ex-Suburban Teens to see what patterns form. Comparing only a recent narrative I wrote with Kunstler’s, we can expect to see a lot of references to cars, drivers licenses, rock and roll, basement hideaways, and waiting.
As a teenager I visited my old suburban chums back on Long Island from time to time and I did not envy their lot in life. By puberty, they had entered into a kind of coma. There was so little for them to do in Northwood, and hardly any worthwhile destination reachable by bike or foot, for now all the surrounding territory was composed of similar one-dimensional housing developments punctuated at intervals by equally boring shopping plazas. Since they had no public gathering places, teens congregated in furtive little holes — bedrooms and basements — to smoke pot and imitate the rock and roll bands who played on the radio. Otherwise, teen life there was reduced to waiting for that transforming moment of becoming a licensed driver.
Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, page 14
Categories: Muse
