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Published
in Gulf News, December 5, 2006
Living in pop-culture
central
When
a New Yorker sees the subway train to Harlem, it's unlikely that
the jazz standard 'Take the A Train' comes to mind every time. Similarly,
a Californian on the Santa Monica Boulevard is probably not humming
'All I Wanna Do' by Sheryl Crow, the way I do whenever I see the
sign. The Americans I know find it amusing how exciting I find having
these references come to life. Living in pop-culture central takes
some getting used to.
At
a screening of the controversial Borat the other week, I
was stunned to see that the last scenes with Pamela Anderson were
shot in the same mall in which I was watching the movie. There she
was, running across the same car park I'd cross to get home. To
my surprise, my fellow theatre-goers bore this revelation with equanimity,
not bursting into applause the way I thought they might.
I'm
slowly taking for granted being in the thick of things where movies
are concerned. It's hard not to when the newspaper carries sections
with pages and pages of movie reviews, and when free test screenings
are on offer all the time. I now watch the films before the debates
begin (as in the case of Borat) and not the other way around.
It's easy to forget that, living elsewhere, I used to ask deep questions
of every movie I read about: "Will it come here? If so, when?
And once here, will it be recognisable?"
Then
there are the stars. I haven't had a sighting yet, but it fills
me with wonder that Britney and K-Fed are squabbling only a short
drive from me; that Snoop Dogg is from the town I visited for a
party the other month; that some of the most famous people in the
world potentially share roads with me. Even concert listings are
so far removed from what I've known (the occasional hit band a couple
of times a year, and the rest left to unknown local groups). Here,
every listing has familiar names - from Gnarls Barkley to Steve
Miller Band, mentioned so casually that I keep doing double takes
as I read.
I actually
miss the excitement that surrounded big-name concerts in India and
Dubai - when all the newspapers carried lead-up stories, there were
posters everywhere and everybody was talking about one thing. Remember
the Robbie Williams craze? I wasn't even in Dubai and I remember
it.
On
a more personal level is my experience with that supposed remover
of boundaries, the world wide web. 'Supposed' because the web can
be extremely US-centric, so it's still a novelty for me to no longer
be an outsider to free-shipping offers, "enter your zip code
for the weather" boxes, competitions and dealer locators.
In
the last week I have gone online to buy air tickets, apply for a
visa, buy replacement camera parts, bid on LPs, pay utility bills
and book an appointment at the local department of motor vehicles.
Nothing out of the ordinary as internet transactions go, but a huge
change of attitude for somebody who was too suspicious to do more
than order a few CD's from Amazon every year. It isn't just me being
revolutionary though - distances and costs in this country just
make it easier to do it the internet way.
The
sum of all this, though, is ironic. Feeling like a child let loose
in a toy shop only makes me more aware of the damning power of the
knowledge that there's an entire world outside the United States
of America. Living here, you can see why so many Americans tend
to forget.
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