november the 1st and its raining...culture!

My plan was to avoid making snide cultural observations that delight in the misappropriation of Anglo-American artifacts. After all, gleeful reportage along the lines of ‘look at this hilarious grammar!,’ or ‘every handshake finishes with a somewhat ungainly gang-inspired clasping and rocking that expires so aimlessly it feels entropic’ is both fairly uninspired and well-worn territory as well as the further perpetration of a cultural urbanity that most Americans would be well off to outgrow.

Lofty sentiment, but things changed this afternoon. I came home to the losmen where I am presently living (a losmen is basically an inn, but with minimal facilities), a place that serves in some ways as the de facto art command post for the quarter. The owner of the place is a painter (the entire place is decorated with his pleasing, albeit very heavy on psychedelia and Eden-esque themes, paintings) and the place is the most westernized losmen in the neighborhood. Sometimes there are batik painting courses held here for whiteys who happen to be passing through.

Batik painting is a very Javanese technique that involves painting on cloth with different colors of heated color wax. The wax congeals and between each color application the piece is washed, leaving a colorfast cloth with an interesting and aged quality. It is a huge industry in Yogya and the people here are very proud of it (admittedly, it can be very beautiful); it is nearly impossible to walk down a street without being showered with invitations to batik galleries (and special one day, once in a lifetime sales). One of my favorite ruses is to offer tourists a ridiculously cheap flat fee to hire a becak for an hour long tour of the city and then take them to all the batik galleries that offer commission, where the owners are predictably good at laying down the hard sell.

Anyhow, the soundtrack of choice for the Javanese batik guru was ‘November Rain’ by Guns’n’Roses. Not that there is a problem with Axl and the boys, but I must say I was expecting something a bit more in the vein of traditional gamelan music (or at least IndoPop).

Besides the surreal qualities of the whole scene, it got me thinking what determines this crapshoot of cultural diffusion. What determines the sundry cultural bric-a-brac that makes it to the developed world? Is the fact that everyone responds to my saying I lived in Boston by inquiring if I know the New Kids on the Block or that people casually ask me how many ‘Twisters’ I have lived through (in reference to the highly realistic film of the name and a question often punctuated by ‘bccccssh’ and ‘boooms’ that celebrate its destructive faculties) completely haphazard?

Since I cannot believe that Indonesians love the saccharine melodies of NKOTB, but feel like Too Live Crew just really is not their style, there must be something more. ‘Twister’ was great, but I thought ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was a tired rehash of that same old apocalyptic blockbuster. Seriously, who is in charge here? If we are going to act as cultural imperialists should not we at least set up some sort of vetting committee to disseminate an accurate portrait of American life? You know, one where we all settle our scores with automatic weapons and pursue our maidens through lush jungle foliage.