August 18th, 2010

August 18th, 2010

Dear Jeremy,
Well, it seems you will be getting two letters this month; two letters in such close proximity to each other that I can actually lay off the politics and venture into the realm of “pop culture and bullshit” as outlined by the title of the blog in which these letters are made public. I am going to, for once, really talk about me.
It is important to me that in these letters you get a sense of who your father is as a person along with events that are transpiring in confluence with your developmental milestones. I have not yet really stated the purpose of these letters as such—at least not in the body of them—and I feel that it is important that you understand that when I talk to you here about politics, pop culture, and bullshit it is not to inculcate you with my personal view points (hopefully you will be sufficiently brainwashed by our day to day encounters [insert emoticon]) but rather to give you a sense of who your father is; how he grows as you grow and what is transpiring in the world as that happens.
On a morbid note, if something should ever happen to me that you are not able to know me these letters should stand as some sort of testament or dialogue that we can have and I hope that my attempt to communicate with you through them, in that event, are not poor in the sense that you should at least have some sort of idea about your old man. Since I can’t provide sunstone crystals and holograms this is what you get. Enough of this for now and on to the main event.
I am going to start out talking about something which you probably will have no idea about—or even worse will seem to you to be a wheel that gets pushed with a stick in all the “old tyme” representations of my great-grandfather’s youth—8-bit video gaming. When I was a little boy, and I remember this quite clearly, it was my fifth birthday, I received a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It was one of the most monumental gifts I had ever received. In retrospect this gift probably had as much impact upon the rest of my life as did the two comic books I would receive from my mother a year later (more about that another time).
Upon the receipt of my NES life was never quite the same. While my childish mind had been opened to a world of imagination and imposed imagination through action figures, television, movies, coloring books, and formative schooling video games had opened up a sort of voyeuristic or vicarious adventure via nigh pixel high heroes such as Super Mario, Link, Ryu Hayabusa, and Jimmy Lee; the likes of whom would have a profound effect not only on the culture of my generation but upon the sensibility of it as well.
In all of the 8-bit glory of two or three leveled synthesized sound and limited graphics the NES was a gateway to a multiverse of action and adventure (or in the case of Trivial Pursuit the Video Game, confusion) that could never be garnered from any other medium. Sure movies had action and adventure but where was the snazzy music? Literature had the allure of the full imaginative process but not the fulfillment of growing in adept skill or thought process that was required for, say, the level 8-4 castle maze in the originals Super Mario Bros. I remember the unbridled excitement I experienced when I one day found a copy of Super Mario 3 under my pillow or the confusion upon what would happen if I used my power pad past midnight (which was a child’s misreading of “do not use for more than 12 hours”…but even so, what happens after 12 hours? Does the earth open up and swallow me and my Nintendo?).
The NES was simultaneously a norm and a status symbol among other children, and the games that you had were what separated a king from the paupers. This was before there was a great many choices of video gaming console to choose from. As a matter of fact that phrase “video gaming console” is almost too institutional for that point in time—the phrase may have been coined at the point but what you had was a Nintendo, or at the most sophisticated a “system”. There were other systems around—there was the Sega Master System and the Atari, and...I dunno fucking Pong or something; the NES was the standard though. They sold NES games in the drugstore, at the gas station, they were covered by your health insurance, and had cereal named after them (only one of those examples is hyperbole, by the way).
(sidebar: for some reason novelty cereals were a staple of the late 1980’s and early 90’s. If there was a movie or fad to be exploited you better be sure there was a cereal to accompany it. While writing this letter I just reminisced with you mother about: Addams Family Cereal, Barbie Cereal, Batman: The Movie Cereal, and Ghostbusters Cereal. There must have been more. The Nintendo Cereal was called the Nintendo Breakfast System and it had two cereals in one box: Super Mario and Legend of Zelda. It was quite a deal, because both sucked catastrophically…as did all of the gimmick cereals.)
Nintendo popped up everywhere: on bed sheets, commercials, television shows (see Super Mario Brothers Super Show). It was bigger than Jesus, or religion at that time; but there were no bon-fires burning the dog from Duck Hunt in effigy. But even it, in its mighty glory could not live forever. Eventually it died out and 8-bit begat 16-bit which evolved to 32 and 64 bit within a single console (in the case of the NES’s successor the Super NES).
The countless hours that my generation spent flicking buttons across multi-generational platforms lead to a significant issue in the way that my generation approaches work and work ethic—we don’t. I’ve heard many rumblings about my generation being overly accustomed to, what is called, instant gratification. Instant gratification is a simple concept—you play a video game, it makes a noise, you like the noise, you repeat the desired result. The time that is put into getting skilled in a particular game is immediately rewarded with an ending, or gamer points (that came later), or whatever it is the game is giving for meeting goals. When it came to, and indeed still does come to life, well things get hairy if you are expecting the same kind of instant gratification. My whole generation expects it, however, on one level or another.
Now I don’t mean to bash your parent’s generation as being complete morons, unable to separate video games from reality, but the formative idea of short term goal equals quick victory totally trumps our sense of long term goal equals nice house. The advent of the internet didn’t help this too much. That’s right, we didn’t always have internet…and we didn’t always have cell phones either…or fetch-a-sketch drawing tablet shopping machines (as a matter of fact I think I just invented that…if that exists when you read this we had better be filthy fucking rich). The internet took a lot of the work out of academia and all of the steam out the music industry in my lifetime.
Gone were the days of hounding a record store for a rare record or tape or CD; gone were the days of holing up in the library and writing a term paper behind a stack of books. By the time I was in college the library was a place for pranks and naps and record stores were renamed “FOR RENT” or worse yet “Starbucks”; yes even coffee became instant gratification with awful yuppie results.
What that instant gratification generation mind-set means is that a lot of us really decided not to achieve. That doesn’t necessarily imply that we didn’t go to college—for example I did and it only took me seven years to finish: that is NOT instant gratification—furthermore not everyone needs to go to college, it isn’t for everybody (slow it down there, Cowboy, it is for you and YOU DO NEED TO GO TO COLLEGE). Many of us didn’t leave home for a long, long time (if we ever did). It’s a part of being “Generation Y” or “The Boomerang Generation” or whatever we end up being called but the fact of the matter is simple: we have, at the time of this letter writing achieved very little.
Maybe that’s unfair. At the time that this letter is being written, I am five days short of being 26 years old. That’s pretty young, right? Plenty of time to achieve, right? Let me tell you at 26 your Grandpa Glenn owned a business, a house, was married for five years, had your mother, and was an accomplished martial artist. Your Great-Grandfather Joe was a mechanic and a farmer, he spoke Polish, Yiddish, German, Russian, was a retired soldier (for what his military tenure was read his book), and was learning English and photography in a new country at 26. At 26, I am not yet qualified to do what I want to do, married, have you, and have…a…large…collection…of comic books…and video games. I hope you see the important differences. I am probably closer to the “go-getter” category than many of my contemporaries by the way.
Which brings us back to the NES. Nintendo and video game technology changed the face of the world. Without it there wouldn’t be as much of a drive for the advancements in computers technology that there has been in the past 21 years since I was given one. I can’t say that as an undeniable truth but there is no doubt a strong truth in what I say. The world has changed around and because of the advancement of the technology of video games, specifically the 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System. As the industry has grown from there and the quality of art work and music has grown in sophistication and maturity during that time is both a boon and a loss for the art of the genre. These is something irresistible about 8-bit gaming in its appearance, its sound, and its feel—and it isn’t nostalgia. There’s an ingenuity to it. The sprites had to be simple and convey as real objects, the sounds had to remind you of other sounds. They were representations not presentations and something about that was really good for the soul—but also really bad.
Hopefully by the time you read this letter, when I am 50 and you are 25 my generation will have done something to make them great, or at least something will have happened to make us memorable. Because as it stands now all we have is the Konami Code (if you don’t know what that is, then I have failed you son. Father Fail). Now either get to playing some video games or get into college, right now. Or do one than the other. I’m still cool…

Love,
Your Father
P.S.- The day I wrote this we spent the day with your Grandpa Kenny. We went out to lunch with him and ran a few errands. I was still off from school and you were a big hit everywhere we went. You happen to be a really good baby, and thanks to the urging of your mother, you are really quite good in public places because you go out so much. Grandpa Kenny played with you all afternoon and held you then took a nap on the couch. Then you took a nap. Then I played video games while you both slept. Good times. Also I haven’t had a cigarette in 18 days. So I got that going for me too. Let’s see if that lasts.