In the new lifestyle of the tv generations, we are challenging the culture of celebrity by bringing pop into our everyday lives - but at what cost?

It's three days before the concluding episode of the moron cartoon Beavis and Butthead. I'm sitting in a radio studio waving around my Beavis and Butthead pseudo-remote control with sound effects (a present from my brother) and listening to a professor of media studies from Ottawa's Carleton University explain why the show is ugly, stupid, violent and, worst of all, morally bereft. That's when it hits me: Culture is dead.

At least, culture as this particular academic knows it is dead, buried, reincarnated only to walk the earth as a movie remake based on the original sit-com. So when it gets to be my turn, I can't help myself. First thing I do is hit the Shuddup! Assmunch button. I follow this with the key that vomits up Butthead's he-he-he laugh. There's a brief moment of stunned silence. Then I tell Avril Benoit, at the time co-host of Canada's morning radio show (who looks on with an expression somewhere between bemusement and horror), that our dear Professor's concern with the values of Beavis and Butthead reveals a larger, more endemic problem that is at the crux of cultural consumption in the late twentieth century. The problem isn't dummy art or the proliferation of immoral pop culture, or even a house of mirrors assembly line media. The problem resides in the inability of the majority of those who comment on the arts - journalists, academics, professional artists, producers, editors, information age cultural critics - to come to terms with emerging new ways of living with and through mass culture.

Today, choosing between this brand and this channel and this pair of jeans and this superstar has become far more than the casual lifestyle choices we fit into our weekends. Instead, these commonplace practices have become our way of making sense of ourselves and the world around us. It's the one thing we all share, and it's the thing we do - watching tv, listening to music, surfing the web, arguing about the new Star Wars movie over mocahino lattes - more than anything else.

Once, politicians, priests and parents frightened of the immoral impetuosity of pop culture railed against it, rejected it out of hand. But rejecting pop culture, returning to "the old ways", is no longer an option. The tv generations are replacing the traditional values of country, work, religion and family with a slavish dedication to mass culture. I call this phenomenon "lifestyle culture". Lifestyle culture isn't just watching a lot of tv, it's a new way of understanding tv, and all the other manifestations of an impersonal mass world. What we do in lifestyle culture is simple: We make the stuff that isn't supposed to matter - movies, bands, fashion, toys, tv shows, and an endless world of possible products - matter. We give that stuff prominence in our lives. We elevate the meaningless because we have grown up believing - being taught - that through mass culture we can find meaning. In lifestyle culture, things that do not of themselves have direct relevance to our lives - the vagaries of thousands of formulaic tv plots, for instance - become somehow crucial and important. Lifestyle culture is the triumph of our leisure lives over the things we are supposed to be paying attention to.

How did we come to lifestyle culture? Much of this evolution comes out of the promise underlying almost every formulaic plot and pop song: Be yourself! go for broke! seize the day! just do it! scream our sitcoms, our movies, our billboards. But, in fact, the individual promise is delivered to us via the mechanisms of a mass culture that depends on our silent acquiescence and conformity. We sit in our Nike sneakers and Gap jeans and silently watch the latest blockbuster in which a poor mom (played by a rich gorgeous superstar) defies the odds, challenges the giant corporation, and makes the world a better place. The pop promise, then, is a false one -- not meant to actually confer upon us the capacity to announce ourselves as autonomous, rebellious, creative individuals. And yet, however gradually, this bogus promise -- the ironic contradiction at the heart of mass culture -- has become a central precept by which we organize and evaluate our lives.

Frustrated by the contradictions of pop, we search for a way of living, a lifestyle, that will allow us to become part of the fake-real entertainment environment we live in but cannot control. We begin to demand the opportunity to shape our own movies, malls, theme parks, zoos, offices. In doing so, we situate the blockbuster movie, the pop song, the marketing campaign even closer to our everyday lives. Rather than rejecting the lies of pop culture, we admit that we can no longer live without them. "There's plenty of bad art and entertainment in the world," a reporter once noted while commenting on the short lived Magic Johnson talk show, "but these don't pervade our lives the way television does, don't create a kind of constant alternative consciousness in which we are all forced to dwell."

So we come to lifestyle culture as a way to validate the promise we want to believe in and accept as true. In at least partially elevating pop culture's (fraudulent) promise of freedom and individuality over every other aspect of our lives, we are using our lifestyle culture as an unheard battle cry that announces our engagement in an invisible war: we want to be part of the entertainment confluence; it is real to us; it is important and fundamental to our lives; we refuse to be shut out of it, to be deemed passive consumers and willing dupes whose chronic leisure pursuits are indicative of the complete collapse of morality in society. At the same time, we also want to recognize that we are separate from the trappings of pop culture - we have been effected by tv characters and celebrity personas, but that doesn't mean we have become them.

Evidence for the increasing prevalence of people who bring pop culture into their lives as something other than just entertainment is all around us. "Oh my God. She's dead. I can't believe she's dead!" a man was reported to have screamed while browsing through the weekly edition of Soap Opera News in a Toronto bookstore. Last year, this newspaper spoke with Stanley Won, computer programmer for the Bank of Montreal who spends five to eight thousand dollars a year on Star Wars memorabilia and has twenty cartons of merchandise stored in the house he lives in with his mother. Montreal poet David McGimpsey includes titles like "I, Urkel" in his pantheon. The lines "Charlie's Angels try to Get Smart in The Wonder Years/Inner city life Welcome Back Kotter and Good Times/John Travolta is an adult now/Jaclyn Smith clothing on sale at K-mart" jump out from Jeffery Mackie's aptly titled zine Junkfood Architecture. "Beauty is boring," proclaims the Toronto artist/activist Sally McKay whose solo exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario consisted of a mock collection of Fisher Price kiddie phones and heaps of Ernie and Bert dolls. "Art on its own isn't that interesting." The zine Heinous devotes itself entirely to the legacy and exploits of the Seventies icon Evel Knievel. Writes Steve Mandich in the introduction to issue five: "I've amassed a wealth of information not only on Evel, but also on nearly eighty other motorcycle jumpers from the last fifty years. My goal is get it published some day, and better still, become required reading for Oprah's Book Club." Someday soon Steve will not just fulfill his goal, but become an international star, a hero, an art god, surpassing Warhol, he might win the first Nobel prize in pop. Or maybe Steve will lose out to rural Pennsylvania's Phil Petra who, safely approaching middle-age in his parents basement, has amassed over 40,000 items dedicated to Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Says Phil: "But I'm not some weird fan, like a Trekkie."

Like Steve, Phil dreams of opening a museum, publishing a book, being recognized as an authority. Of course Phil already is an authority, he has the museum collection, all he needs to do now is put up a website and send out a press release and he's in business. Or he's a laughing stock. Either way, it's no accident that increasing numbers of individuals are announcing themselves - however tentatively - as experts on all manners of incredibly bizarre esoterica. We can say the examples cited above are aberrations outside normal society, or we can admit the experiences of our Tarzan enthusiast and our anonymous soap opera fanatic are common to all of us in various gradations. The more our lives revolve around pop culture, the more we have the desire and need to manipulate pop culture into something coherent to our everyday, something that we don't just buy and sell but become and believe. We devote ourselves to slavish rituals that defy analytical understanding, that speak to our base desire to have some presence, some identity, beyond faceless consumers. We are, in essence, attempting to make the big lie of pop culture come true, taking it upon ourselves, invisible citizens of the unrecognized republic of mass culture, to explain the way we have become confused, disengaged, fascinated, and obsessed.

Meanwhile, our media pundits seem to collude to perpetuate the myth of the homogenized culture of non-participants, casting us as dazed fans who spend hours in line ups for tickets to the show without a thought in our heads. This is understandable. Many, including our expert commentators, are finding the rise of lifestyle culture to be a disconcerting development. In a world of Tarzan fanatics and Bert and Ernie art, who is in charge? Who sets the standards? Who proclaims what cultural endeavor worthy? And, in associating ourselves so closely with what isn't supposed to matter, aren't we in danger of devaluing our "real" lives, attuning ourselves to our culture's ethos of fragmentation and self destruction as embodied in our mass culture celebration of drug addiction, deviance, insanity, and violence? One thing we can all agree on: When it comes to cultural creation, confusion is pandemic. The same old thing -- groupies and fanatic fans, bobby pin punks and the tie-dye druggie guy who drops out to follow the Grateful Dead -- has given way to the level headed completely insane fanzine Toronto's Glendon McKinney publishes in devotion to flamboyant New Brunswick fiddler Ashley MacIsaac. Looking at this lavish, on-going document I can't help but think - well, no, this is something bold and beautiful, something right for our times, something creepy and pathetic and altogether new.

I'm not trying to say that lifestyle culture is a good thing or a bad thing. Lifestyle culture is a response to a world increasingly dominated by an all pervasive entertainment industry -- it's a way to deal with a world where everything is subsumed by entertainment, even our own lives. So lifestyle culture by its very nature is an ambivalent idea. It's a reflection of our general ambivalence toward an entertainment industry that promises us freedom and power through mediums that actually convey passivity and impotence. Most of us don't announce that from now on we will be actively engaged in creating and commenting on mass culture in order to hold the medium of mass culture to its as yet unfulfilled promise. We don't become practitioners of lifestyle culture any more than we become regular tv watchers. It just happens. Some of us take the urge to be involved in pop culture to the next level - we start bands, produce zines, stage plays in the back room of bars. These are our lifestyle culture pioneers, taking the risks we all wish we could take, but don't.

And yet we are ambivalent about what these lifestyle culture pioneers - often our friends and family members - represent. There's just something about paying six bucks to sit on a sticky milk crate and watch our brother's girlfriend's take-off skit of Happy Days performed on the stage of the local tavern. In a way, we'd rather be at home, watching the "real" Fonz, instead of some pomaded thespian fresh out of acting school. Though we recognize the urge to intervene in the way we are force fed our pop culture, we are also embarrassed by what that urge says about us, about the culture we believe in.

This too, is lifestyle culture -- we are embarrassed to admit that we get through the day by thinking about sports, or Tarzan, or movies, or our collection of antique tea cozies. We don't want to admit to anyone, even ourselves, just how much time we spend in the amoral, subjective, self- reflexive Beavis and Butthead world. But unless we begin to accept the truth of pop as it resides in our collective consciousness, we'll be forever wielding our Beavis and Butthead remote control, trying to find our own voice amidst the babble of talking heads, and hearing nothing but an empty echo: This Sucks! Change It!