Various
Coming Of Age In Babylon: Finding Your Own Reality (New Spring)
by Marc Hirsh
Various
Coming Of Age In Babylon: Finding Your Own Reality (New Spring)
by Marc Hirsh
never published
From the very basis of the word, there's no reason why a book/CD combination couldn't justifiably be considered "multimedia," although of course there's an ironically specific and narrow definition these days. In any event, multimedia is what Coming Of Age In Babylon shoots for. It is a weird little package intended to be a guide to life and the wonders and confusion therein.
The book is a simple read, and I blazed through it in less than 24 hours (including meal breaks, sleeping, watching TV, etc.). It is not a good book; it is self-contradictory, confused and disorganized ("Capitalism" runs head-on into "Love & Sex," which smashes unwavering into "Religion," and so forth). The book exhorts its readers to "find their own path," offering advice (which it denies doing) about things like love, drugs, politics, religion, sex and personal imperfection. The author, Doug De Bias, purports to supply "straight answers" but never actually bothers specifying what the questions might be.
One question not mentioned or answered is this: who the hell is this guy and what qualifies him to tell us how to live our lives (or how to find out how to live our lives, as the case may be)? Basically, what I can tell from the book is that he's a Vietnam veteran, an ex-hippie, heterosexual, married with children and a pretty decent guy, none of which justifies why anybody should listen. He's also condescending ("Most of you have never heard of Timothy Leary") and very fond of pseudopsychobabble (he talks about "de river of de Nial" at one point). Worse, but connected, he's constantly creating his own terminology, such as "the bubble," "should-ers" and "clone," all of which I will gladly neglect to define. He never actually says it in so many words, but he sounds like the type of person who considers himself a Ph.D. from the University of Life. Without any sort of justification as to why I should take his word over, say, The Tao Of Pooh (which provides a much more practical worldview, in my opinion), the effect is that of a total stranger giving you unsolicited advice about anything and everything.
Oh yeah, there's a CD attached to this project as well. I'm not entirely sure how the music is supposed to fit in with the book. In fact, I'm not entirely sure it is. The "instructions" make a big deal about diving into the package "in no particular order," so obviously the individual songs don't have a specific correlation to any of the book's topics. That wouldn't be a liability if they had some sort of thematic consistency, which they don't. And that wouldn't be a liability if just about every song weren't deadly dull. But what takes the soundtrack beyond just anonymous innocuousness is the earnestness of it all. Dayroom's "Better Days" seems to be a key song here: stenciled-in roots-jangle of the Hootie & The Blowfish or Seven Mary Three variety with a singer who might as well be Michael Bolton singing every single syllable in a forced moan that some unfortunate listeners mistake for emotional authenticity. It is, in a word, awful.
In more than one word, it's typical of the rest of the album. Although the styles of the music vary oh-so-slightly (from go-nowhere jangle-pop to half-assed quasi-funk to by-the-book distorted alternarock), the bands and songs all blend into one seamless mush. The thing that angers me about this is that it gives the impression that non-cynical and optimistic songs are boring as hell, which then feeds into the next generation of musicians for whom irony is so deeply ingrained that it becomes a sort of sincerity. I swear, it doesn't have to be this way, although the fact that one of the only listenable songs here, Mary Prankster's "Piss Off," is sardonic and resigned and, maybe not coincidentally, loaded with the charm missing in almost everything else certainly doesn't help my case. Really, the best tune here is "The Right Idea," Kenny Howes's '90s pastiche of '60s beat pop. It is the only song that is really good, the only song that is fully formed and (important to the topic of the book) the only song with a sure sense of what it wants to do. The rest are done in by their own self-importance when they bother to make any impact at all.
De Bias is big on letting others say things clearly that he himself cannot, so I'll take a cue directly from him and boil down every single chapter of this book to a phrase from a Mr. Shakespeare: "This above all, to thine own self be true." So save yourself the money and apply that directly to your life. If you want more specific day-to-day answers, well, there's an excellent and very odd Danish guidebook to life and societal hypocrisy whose title I've forgotten that I read at my mom's cousin Sue's place last Thanksgiving. For you to work with even that sparse information is still more worthwhile than wasting your time and money on Coming Of Age.