PopMatters Event Review

Atlanta. Hotlanta. The ATL. A regular pop culture kingdom. Home of dirty South, the ’96 Olympics and the annual Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) conference. This is the time when academics come together to discuss the finer points of pop culture, because, you know, pop really does matter. Popular culture is a teeming playground for university types to exercise their mental muscles. Is there anything redemptive about commercial hip-hop? How does present-day porn compare with back-in-the-day porn? Is Charlize Theron in Monster a feminist lesbian idol? How do first-person shooter games empower players in real life? Why do people love The Big Lebowski so damn much? The PCA/ACA conference invites hundreds of academics to gather in Atlanta, navigate the labyrinths of hotel conference rooms, and discuss what’s happening in emerging fields like Motorcycle Culture Studies and the unceremoniously named Fat Studies. I was invited to present a paper from my little corner of expertise, Indonesian cinema. This is a marginal area of interest, so marginal that I was tacked onto a panel with three people discussing Japanese popular culture. I thought this might have been an alphabetical choice, until I found out that a friend presenting on Indian personal ads was presenting with three people discussing Korean pop culture. My friend and I arrived at the Marriot Marquis, a hotel where Sedona, Arizona meets Las Vegas. The walls are pinkish, rising in tiers towards a skylight 50 floors above, giving visitors the sensation of being at the bottom of a canyon that just happens to have a Starbucks, conference rooms, and a gift shop. The conference rooms were named after great European cities. Everywhere people were asking the direction to Stockholm or to Paris. There were books galore for sale. Amongst the academic tomes on film and media studies, you could find everything from Continuum’s excellent “33 1/3” series on music albums to the Feminist Press’ repackaging of ’30s pulp novels written by women and a compilation of Riverbend’s blog entries on Iraq. We got our conference packets — green books the size of a summer beach read — to tell us about the more than four hundred panels taking place over four days, each with three or four panelists discussing specific cultural phenomena. A German guy discussed machinima and showed a roomful of professors and grad students how World of Warcraft characters can dance like the Backstreet Boys. A woman on my panel talked about black actors in Japan, who are getting airplay as long as they maintain a Mr. T-style tough/cuddly persona. We missed the Motorcycle Culture get-together at a local burger joint that is apparently the biker hang-out, but I can only imagine the fun. Instead, we opted to spend time with a friend who also graciously put us up in her loft, eating fancy pizza in Little Five Points — a section of Atlanta full of parks, Afro-chic hair parlors, and “well-curated” thrift shops. I presented on a Friday morning. I rushed into my presentation session about 10 minutes late — not considered very fashionable in the patched-elbow circles. My professor, who looked like Santa Claus, loves cartoons and Asia, introduced my paper about Indonesian cinema. Afterwards the questions started flying, and I got some odd ones. How am I supposed to know if The Year of Living Dangerously, with the young and not-yet-scary-religious Mel Gibson, was received well in Indonesia? Or whether Indonesian VCDs make it onto the Singaporean bootleg market? At least I didn’t get personal questions; my friend who presented on Indian marriage advertisements (“medium pretty, fair MBA, PhD, MD Brahman seeking same”) was asked if she had an arranged marriage. Studying popular culture can do one of two things: it can make something boring into something interesting, or it can make something interesting into something boring. A boring subject like football fight songs can become a window into our culture of patriotism and religious fervor, or a very interesting topic like porn can be dissected into a taxonomy of useless bits with long, unpronounceable names. What’s more interesting — discussing the sociological wherefores of “The Lebowski Effect”, or watching the damn movie? After researching hundreds of panels on this and other topics, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s unmistakably the latter. After all, unlike most academics, the dude abides.