Introducing our blog-on-the-side. Featuring heavy contributions by Whitney and Catherine C.

Hey yo to everyone on the best coast!
1) I miss you 2) Maggie Foster’s wonderful Beneath a Passive Surface art-video show, featuring our JME in Myspace: Tropical Feelings, is screening this Friday! Here’s the info:

Ice on the High

December 3-5
Thursday Dec. 3- 7:30pm Staged Reading of Ginsberg’s HOWL
Friday Dec. 4- 11-5 day viewing; Performances and video 6:30-10pm
Saturday Dec. 5- 11-5 day viewing; evening performance 6:30-10pm

West Berkeley’s Pacific Basin Building presents,
“Ice on the High” a feral art/music event for three nights and two days in the first week of December. Ice on the High is part of a growing wave of temporal upstart art exhibitions, concerts, and events taking the San Francisco Bay Area by storm. All the artists presented are experimenting with this new context for the first time. The economic downslide has led us to create new spaces for art/music. We consider this an antidote in the face of disaster. Pacific Basin is a mixed-use artists/architects’ building with empty storefronts and this art/music program will fill the space. It is our hope that the arts will bring new possibility to our West Berkeley project.

Ricardo Rivera Luciano Chessa and Terry Berlier Eric Ullman Josh Churchill A.K. Burns Catherine Czacki Kim Anno Joshua Kit Clayton Deville Cohen Maggie Foster David Horvitz and Lukas Geronimas Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn Kamau Patton Marcia Scott Ashley Bellouin Ben Bracken Beulah Baker is Lana Voronina Danishta Rivero Darwinsbitch Seth Horvitz and Chuck Johnson Aida Gamez Joshua Clayton Tina Takemoto Eg Crichton Elliot Anderson Liz Walsh David Coll Heather Gordon’s Amy Balkin Jackie Francis Stephanie Johnson Leonie Guyer Joyce Burstein Lauren Marsden Catherine Sherwood Jill Poesner Kim Nelson Bruno Fazzolari Alicia Escott

Pacific Basin Building, 1643-45 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA at the corner of Virginia Street

NOTE: We made this post on the request of another blog but it didn’t end up fitting their requirements. I think the text offers some good examples of the realism-via-TV-methods hinted at in our The L interview, and the pictures are great especially at full size. Enjoy!

Five things we know about Degrassi:TNG

1. It Goes There. For years, “It Goes There” was the slogan of Degrassi: The Next Generation. It got to the point where, by Season 6 (2006), the station’s (then The N now Teen Nick) riffage had gotten truly baroque:

You might’ve heard that it’s the go-there-iest season ever. I’ve seen the new episodes, and I’m here to tell you that claim is entirely true. Not only does the new season on the whole go extremely there, but the season premiere goes as far there as any episode to date.

and so on.

Yes, Degrassi has sexting, teacher-student affairs, school shootings, crystal meth, cocaine, those colored bracelets you get for blow jobs. [see video, text & images.]
But it’s not the scandalous content that makes you pause the show and run around the room like “No WAY.” Plenty of teen shows go there. It’s the stuff so embarrassing you can’t bear to watch it.

Like when Claire’s vibrator goes off in class and the teacher finds it; or when Peter tries to impress Mia by performing his song “California Whoa” at the society party; or Riley and Anya’s date where they flirt by talking about what carb they are. Moments where the awfulness of being young really comes out. This is really where Degrassi goes that other shows do not. And those three examples are just from Seasons 8 and 9 (Riley is panini, btw).

Wait. Worse. When Claire has to tell her mom she doesn’t know what a vibrator’s for.

2. As we progress in our 20s, it’s good to remember that teenagers are deeply lame and Degrassi helps with this. Its teens are in awful bands with worse names (Downtown Sasquatch, the Stüdz, Paige Michalchuk and the Sexkittens), their jokes fall flat, they can’t lie, can’t hold their liquor and they make-out clumsily. The special thing about Degrassi as opposed to other teen shows is that lameness is spread around to each character, and that it’s unacknowledged by the show itself. If you consider, in contrast, how Beverly Hills: 90210 treated Donna, you might see something very democratic in this approach.

Degrassi doesn’t telegraph to its viewers what it thinks is cool vis-à-vis what its characters think is cool.It inhabits their lameness. You might argue this is because Degrassi doesn’t know what’s cool but we see it as a move of Altman-like restraint (especially considering how attuned the target market supposedly is to issues of cool). We figure the producers are like “Hey, sometimes we like corny jokes and weird hairdos. And shit, Jimmy became Drake. So let’s just leave ourselves out of this.” A refreshing and Obama-esque stance for a teen show.

3. We made you this. It’s mostly newer cast members.

4. We made this for Jay.

5. Like its Star Trek counterpart, Degrassi: The Next Generation belongs to a larger continuity, now 22 years long. What this means is that unlike practically any other teen show, Degrassi was never stuck on one set of 5-8 kids. Characters graduate, sometimes hang around a bit, eventually drift away, and then reappear when their own kid’s going to the same school. That’s just awesome and unique. It also pays off in realism. First, despite all the dramatic shit going on, there’s never one character absolutely burdened by incident (see The O.C.’s Marissa). More importantly, it does something to the way stories can work.

It seems like every year on Degrassi, a young girl’s sexy photos get emailed all over school. Or a boy starts abusing substances and gets way belligerent. But because every year it’s a different girl or boy, and the older ones have moved onto different problems, the iterations of these stories don’t seem repetetive. They come to describe the rites of passage for these teens. And when Craig and his buddies joyride his step-dad Joey Jeremiah’s car then trash it just like Joey did 20 years before, the episode isn’t reusing an idea. It’s about families and cycles in a way impossible on any other show.