Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho

by Jen Sookfong Lee Narrated by Andrew Joseph Perez

Overview

Gus Van Sant's film and the '90s cult of the alternative Gus Van Sant's 1991 indie darling My Own Private Idaho perplexed and provoked, inspiring a new ethos for a new decade: being different was better than being good. Gentlemen of the Shade examines how the film was a coming-of-age for a generation of young people who would embrace the alternative and bring their outsider perspectives to sustainability, technology, gender constructs, and social responsibility. My Own Private Idaho - fragmented and saturated with colour and dirt and a painfully beautiful masculinity - also crept into popular media, and its influence can still be traced. R.E.M. Portlandia. Hipsterism. James Franco. Referencing the often-funny and sometimes-tragic cultural touchstones of the past 26 years, Gentlemen of the Shade sets the film as social bellwether for the many outsiders who were looking to join the right, or any, revolution.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Gentlemen of the Shade brought my horny ’90s back to me; I felt 20 years younger reading this book. Jen Sookfong Lee presses on the pulse of Van Sant’s film, catching its rhythm, and then, in a terrific alchemy, she draws her own images of his dark jaded youths and their hard-won insights across our backs. This is a gorgeous and dirty book, like a line of shooters along the bar to remind you what it was like to be badass.” — Michael V. Smith, author of My Body Is Yours

“Lee perfectly captures the feeling of the pre-internet early 1990s and how My Own Private Idaho helped shape and define alternative culture, as well as influence the ideas and attitudes of a generation.” — This Magazine

“Jen Sookfong Lee’s Gentlemen of the Shade, her critical appreciation of Gus Van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, is the seventh Pop Classics title and among the best I’ve read among these series in making a case to a general reader for the pop artifact at hand … More than Gen X nostalgia, Lee is interested in how aesthetics influenced the choices of a generation. That should be of interest to us all.” — Globe and Mail

“Gentlemen Of The Shade: My Own Private Idaho by Jen Sookfong Lee revisits the film’s impact on the youth of 90s and how that impact informed the decisions of the adults they would become … [Jen Sookfong Lee] is one of the very best.” — LaineyGossip.com

“Analyzing My Own Private Idaho’s philosophies and depictions of same-sex love and masculinity, Gentleman of the Shade also takes a look at how the film ended up indirectly influencing popular culture and media in an indelible way, pinpointing it everywhere from R.E.M. to James Franco.” — Book Riot

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160273594
Publisher:	Spotify Audiobooks
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Series:	Pop Classics , #7
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Gentlemen of the Shade

My own private Idaho

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By Jen Sookfong Lee

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Jen Sookfong Lee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-313-9

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CHAPTER 1

It Was 1991

I'VE BEEN TASTING ROADS MY WHOLE LIFE.

I had always thought of the 1990s as a very particular time, as an era when our views of the world and our individual positions in it were constantly shifting, and what we learned in the 1980s about capitalism, HIV/AIDS, sexuality, and diversity was being challenged and rebuilt. But I'm also aware that I'm looking backward through a thick layer of nostalgia. I graduated high school in 1994 and finished university in 1998. I fell in love in 1995 and again in 1997. I wrote a sonnet for the skinny and awkward Beck and, in a fit of obsessive optimism, sent it. (If you're wondering, he still hasn't replied.) It was the decade of my adolescence and young adulthood, and my friends and I changed in many huge ways and many small ways. It was possible that I was confusing these individual changes with global, social ones. After all, no one is more narcissistic than a gloomy 19-year-old writing love poems for famous musicians. And it's not just me: the internet has ballooned with people in midlife writing about their young adulthoods, about that time they saw Jane's Addiction in a 150-seat venue accessible by a stairwell set deep into a Boston alley. The creative output inspired by the 1990s — in film, television, and books — is just beginning. Think of Fresh Off the Boat, Straight Outta Compton, the explosion of grunge-inspired fashion at Urban Outfitters. The 1990s might have had far less influence than I, or anyone else my age, could objectively measure in 2017.

But as I thought deeper, I came to understand that 1991, when My Own Private Idaho was released, was a year full of opposition, drama, banality, and tragedy. Paul Bernardo murdered Leslie Mahaffy. Generation X by Douglas Coupland was published. The Gulf War. Full House. The conflicts and contradictions were everywhere. You just had to know where to look.

The 1990s were years that produced huge cultural changes, shifts in popular thinking that would shape the trajectory of politics, relationships, and social constructs for the next two decades. Without the 1990s and how it shone a light on outsiders and the culture they were producing as well as consuming, so much of what we've created since then as writers or filmmakers or musicians would not exist. And our intimate lives — whom we sleep with and how openly we do it — would have looked very different. After all, without RuPaul or Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, we wouldn't have the same tools we have today to discuss or even acknowledge the spectrum of gender and sexuality. My Own Private Idaho, released in September of 1991, was one of the harbingers of this sea change. From its visuals to its lead actors to the lo-fi titles that flash between scenes, Gus Van Sant's film is a cinematic fortune cookie: it gave us, an audience who was already dissatisfied with mainstream culture, a beautifully (yet still messily) wrapped narrative that helped shape our forming sensibilities, whether we knew it yet or not.

SHINY, HAPPY PEOPLE

It was tough to deny: if you were living in the Western world, you could easily be lulled into cultural and political complacency. And a large part of this privileged blindness had to do with the power of majority culture. In a review of My Own Private Idaho published in The Washington Post, Desson Howe likens the film to the ringing of wind chimes, an unimportant sound to some. He writes, "Those with ears to hear will love this music." It was those of us with ears attuned to other, less obvious frequencies who were more than ready for Gus Van Sant's music.

In order to understand the firm grasp majority culture had on the world, we have to remember that our engagement with culture was entirely different in 1991. This was before the internet gave voice to oddity. Writers of fan fiction had a hard time finding each other. Cosplay partners were few and far between. You couldn't pull out your phone and find a BDSM hook-up in five swipes. By necessity, a large portion of the world was watching or listening to or wearing the same things. We talked about Seinfeld on Friday mornings because we all had the same cable television subscription. We read Rolling Stone to find out which musicians we needed to pay attention to because that was the only popular music magazine available at every corner store. We all wore the same floral dress with the denim jacket from The Gap, the coolest mall store that wasn't cool at all. The idea that the United States was exporting a kind of cultural colonialism with its domination of entertainment was starting to take shape. Bill Clinton, the U.S. president who was famous for his flawless speech delivery and saxophone playing, became a high-profile symbol of American cultural polish when he was elected in 1993. Everything seemed shiny and easy and happy, but, tellingly, only two years into his presidency, he would begin his affair with Monica Lewinsky, the relationship that finally cracked his smooth public façade.

Before Bill Clinton, other realities were emerging to mark 1991. Conflicts were simmering in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Rodney King was beaten by police officers in Los Angeles. In South Africa, it was the end of apartheid. Freddie Mercury openly died from complications of AIDS. If you were the sort to pay attention to the undersides of things, to the ringing of wind chimes, as it were, you noticed. In Vancouver, where I grew up, women from the impoverished and ghettoized Downtown Eastside were disappearing. When I accompanied my mother to Chinatown, which is part of the same neighborhood, I was morbidly fascinated by the women who stood on street corners while I was carrying plastic bags of oranges and barbecued pork. When I passed them on the sidewalks and looked at their faces, they weren't so different from me. Some of them were the same age or listened to the same music or wore the same shade of lipstick. It was one of the few times that the gloss of the early 1990s cracked in my everyday life. In 2007, Robert Pickton would be convicted of murdering six of these women and charged with the murders of 20 more.

There was an abundance of hypocrisy in the world around us. Before My Own Private Idaho, I was only dimly aware that this was true and was still, at least partially, a believer in the prettiness of the culture I had grown up in. After My Own Private Idaho? That was a whole different story.

WHEN GRUNGE HAPPENED

No discussion about culture in 1991 would be complete without Nirvana and Kurt Cobain. Nevermind, the album that catapulted the band to mainstream success, was released on September 24, just three days before My Own Private Idaho had its theatrical release in North America. In retrospect, it seems serendipitous.

Recently, I watched the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, written and directed by Brett Morgen and co–executive produced by Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt's daughter with Courtney Love. Through journals and drawings, I very distinctly saw and felt Kurt Cobain's pain at living his adolescence in an inhospitable world. With divorced parents, he lived in a series of homes, never really settling with either parent or his extended family. He had difficulty with his peers until he found a community of punk musicians, which eventually led to the formation of Nirvana.

My first exposure to Nevermind's first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," was watching the video on MuchMusic, a channel I watched every day for several hours as my main lifeline to popular culture. The song's title, taken from a commercial for a brand of deodorant marketed to youth, seemed innocuous. After all, so much of what we were watching or reading was so suffused with advertising that slogans became as much a part of culture as the television shows or magazine articles themselves. In the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video, though, there were many signifiers of subversion: the dimly lit high school gym, the kids forming a mosh pit on the hardwood floor, the janitor dancing with his mop, the first few low, moody guitar chords. But for me, it was the cheerleaders in their black uniforms with the red anarchy symbol on their chests — purposely reminiscent of the letter A that Hester Prynne is forced to wear as an adulteress in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne — that were the most striking. They were both sexy and forbidding, and they wore, proudly, a symbol of anarchy, the most defiant and subversive act of rebellion I had ever seen in popular music. It was sex positive. It was unruly. It was a song and video that changed mainstream music.

Nirvana was the band that didn't just scratch at the surface of the 1990s, it seemed to explode from underneath, like a volcano spitting disenchantment and dirty hair. I could liken it to the emergence of punk in England in the 1970s, or the birth of rock 'n' roll in America in the 1950s, and those examples would both be relevant. But what the 1970s and 1950s didn't have was the high sheen of corporate perfection that characterized so much of the culture we were consuming in 1991. The boys on Home Improvement were teeth-achingly cute. Boyz II Men sang crystal clear harmonies. Even Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie that had a human-led rebellion at its core, generated the most discussion around the new, seemingly psychopathic killing machine played by Robert Patrick, whose liquid metal body was shiny and smooth and, of course, perfect. Nirvana, and especially Kurt Cobain, was decidedly imperfect. Kurt's vocals cracked when he sang high notes. They had formed a three-piece band that sometimes played harder than it played well. When they accepted Best New Artist at the MTV Video Music Awards (presented, incidentally, by Boyz II Men and the also perfect-sounding Wilson Phillips, which made for an awkward moment of 1990s pop culture opposition), Kurt, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl, all with uncombed hair and ill-fitting clothes, seemed pleased, but they also didn't seem to know how to express joy in this mainstream marker of success. Kurt, after thanking Nirvana's "true fans," said quietly, "You know, it's really hard to believe what you read." And then, like the charismatic lead singer of a hugely famous rock band, which he was, he smiled cheekily at the audience and walked off, trophy held closely to his body.

It didn't really matter what you thought of their music. There was no denying their impact on a Western world that had become forebodingly homogenous.

The same world that was ready for Nirvana was ready for My Own Private Idaho and, by extension, for culture from the margins that didn't care about perfection, or even quality. The culture that would eventually dominate the 1990s circled around authenticity, perspective, and, above all else, singularity, even if that singularity included missteps and artlessness. How many times did I have a conversation with my friends ridiculing the "posers" who only discovered Pearl Jam after they played Saturday Night Live in 1992? How meanly did I laugh at New Kids on the Block when the band tried to grow up and changed its name to NKOTB in 1993?

It wouldn't take long for the high shine of the early 1990s to wear off. Pretty soon, even Bill Clinton couldn't hide the mistakes — the Rwandan Genocide, the Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA — his administration would make. Pretty soon, the disenchantment I was just beginning to feel on that October afternoon in a dark movie theater would be articulated in every kind of media, from every kind of artist. Banksy began his street art in 1990. David Foster Wallace began writing his sprawling, messy novel Infinite Jest in 1991. It's not a coincidence that the popular documentary series VH1's Behind the Music premiered in 1997. By then, we were well aware that the version of culture that movie and music producers had been selling to us throughout the decade was designed for easy watching and easy listening. Consumers of culture were developing a taste for mashed-up, undiluted creativity, especially if it included the addictions, the pressures to succeed, and how public scrutiny destroyed fragile egos. They wanted to know that their own lives weren't the only ones that were filled with mistakes and unreliable emotions and fear. The perfection of Mariah Carey was alienating and impossible. And so we pushed back and made antiheroes into real heroes, whether any of them liked it or not.

IF NOT X, THEN WHAT?

In the 1990s, two Canadian books attempted to define generational shifts in opposing genres: Generation X, the novel by Douglas Coupland, and Boom, Bust & Echo, the business book about economic demography by David K. Foot. When I worked at a bookstore in the mid-1990s, I saw both books selling in huge numbers to all sorts of people — older baby boomers, younger Generation Xers, people in suits trying to understand buying habits and social characteristics. As much as Generation X seemed to be a handbook for the grunge-obsessed listeners of Nirvana, and as much as Boom, Bust & Echo made sense of the economy my friends and I were about to graduate into, definition seemed pointless.

Generation X is commonly defined as the people born after the post–World War Two baby boom, from the 1960s to 1980. My friends and I were born at the tail end, in the late 1970s, and yet the characteristics of what Gen Xers were purported to be never seemed to fit us exactly. Yes, we were overeducated and underemployed, but the basic tenets of overeducation or underemployment seemed quaint. To be angry at these conditions meant that we had once believed education was supposed to be an entry into a practical job, when we had known for years that this was no longer true. My panicky consumer education teacher in high school taught us the magic of compound interest, but also warned that we might not be hired for the jobs we wanted. It meant that we had no expectations for employment because we had already been told, over and over again, that the 40-year career was dead. We were graduating into a recession and an economy that seemed to be ever-shifting and working for companies that expanded and contracted. None of this was a surprise. And so we looked elsewhere for meaning and self-definition.

Douglas Coupland, born in 1961, is 15 years older than me. David Foot, a Harvard graduate and university professor, was well established in academic circles by 1991. Back then, I was a 15-year-old Chinese Canadian girl who wrote poems in the margins of my geometry homework and hung pictures of Jason Patric and Keanu Reeves (clearly, I had a type: dark-haired and moody) in my locker. Even by the end of the 1990s, when I was 23 and trying to write my first novel while working at three part-time jobs, a discussion on my choices or the future of my professional life seemed irrelevant. I was living an adolescence and young adulthood built around flexibility and a willingness to learn new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality and diversity. It was how I learned to pay the rent and form friendships. Definition — the act of writing down the essence of a generation on paper and publishing it in a book — was the exact opposite of the adaptability that had characterized my relationship to the shifting, conflicted world to date. Whatever Douglas Coupland and David Foot were trying to tell me about how most of my generation was going to end up didn't matter. The mainstream was already using them to try and make sense of Generation X — their books were being discussed on daytime television talk shows — and this seemed hopelessly inauthentic. The perfect world we had already chosen to disengage from was clinging to relevancy by adopting our vocabulary in ways that were inaccurate and, well, laughable.

Definition was, even then, something to ridicule. In 1992, the New York Times published the much-maligned "Lexicon of Grunge," a glossary of grunge terms given to them, as a prank, by an employee at Sub Pop Records during an interview. Not only were the terms fake, but the very act of trying to define grunge, or alternative culture, was hopelessly structured. Trying to place a generation or a movement into a box in real time was out of step, particularly with this movement, which was marked by its plurality, adaptability, and authenticity. The "Lexicon of Grunge," published in the American newspaper of record for millions of readers to shake their heads over, was the antithesis of all of that.

In 1991, the world was waiting for something real, or at least something that was more real than McRib sandwiches and the sweetly bland songs performed by DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. We were teetering on an edge. Behind us was the flawless culture we had grown up in. We were waiting for our authentic, visceral lives to begin, ready, like Mike and Scott, to experience anything and everything we could get our hands on. Literally and figuratively, we sat in a silent theater, waiting for the right movie to start.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Gentlemen of the Shade by Jen Sookfong Lee. Copyright © 2017 Jen Sookfong Lee. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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