Picture this: A ten-year-old Jim Boswell sits in the family room of his home in Upper Arlington, Ohio. He is a recent arrival to the Midwest in general and to Ohio in particular. One of the more interesting things about living in Ohio is the "QUBE" box attached to his television. Check this out: Instead of the four TV channels he had back in Maryland, this box gives his TV thirty channels! And yesterday, in the mail, a new channel listing came that included something called "MTV". It's supposed to start today. He turns on the TV...
Those of you who aren't old enough to vote wouldn't recognize the MTV we watched back then. There were, I think, six "vee-jays" who introduced every other song, and there were three songs between commercial breaks, and that's the way it worked, twenty-four hours a day. No shows, no special "themes" like Headbanger's Ball or "Yo! MTV Raps". And certainly no shows like "Becoming".
"Becoming", for those of you who haven't seen it, is an absoultely fascinating MTV program. I found it quite by accident while channel-surfing during a commercial break (Speedvision WRC coverage, if you must know. I can't seem to bring myself to watch more than about three hours of TV a week) and I was utterly transfixed by it. The show works like this: They take MTV viewers who slightly resemble pop stars and then re-film MTV videos with said viewers in place of said pop stars. In the episode I saw, four young women played the roles of, uh, the four girls in the "Lady Marmalade" video. They show everything involved in the filming of the video, and then they play the video itself. It's like watching the world's most expensive karaoke show.
Karaoke, of course, is not particularly fascinating in and of itself. So why did I find "Becoming" so interesting? It took me a little time, and a repeat viewing, this time of a young woman who took the place of Janet Jackson in the "Somebody To Call My Baby" video, to figure out why. At the end of the second show, the woman who was "becoming" Janet said, "I will always have this. Even if I never accomplish anything else in my life, I will always have done this, and they can't take that away from me." Hmmm.... Can't take what away from her? Lip-syncing to some crummy pop song in a fake video? Does that count as "accomplishing something" in the year 2002?
Apparently, yes, because the next two (don't laugh) episodes I watched featured people expressing exactly the same sentiments. Another young woman who was very pretty in her own way was styled, made-up, and brow-beaten into looking like a forty-year-old Madonna, and a bunch of kids who looked like they should be hidden behind the fry machine at "Burger King" became either Limp Biskit or Staind, I'm not sure - and they all said something along the lines of, "My life was worthless before today, and tomorrow it's back to the Dirt Devil production line (a job Mrs. Boswell briefly enjoyed while in school, by the way), but at least I can stand in front of the world and say I did something with my life." Did they really believe that? Is imitating someone famous and being on MTV really the best thing they could ever hope to do?
It made me think about a trip I took to my local skatepark, shortly before sustaining my annoying injuries in December. I arrived early in the day, while the park was relatively empty, and had the chance to watch a rather competent young rider. He was not 'pro-level' by any stretch of the imagination, but he rode the park well and could pull a lot of different stuff. When he and I found ourselves waiting together on the deck of a quarterpipe, I spoke to him briefly and found that he was reserved, almost shy, and very quiet. He seemed genuinely uncomfortable when I complimented him on a particularly well-turned 360. "Oh, it's nothing," he said, and looked at the ground. Seemed like a nice kid.
About an hour later, a bunch of riders arrived to shoot some kind of video. As is usual in these affairs, you had one guy who ran around with the camera, one rider at a time trying to pull something, and the rest of the people just sitting around clogging the ramps. They recognized the rider I had been speaking with earlier and asked him to hit some of the ramps. He agreed. He went for some kind of alley-oop transfer, something I had seen him bail on earlier in the day, and he missed it in pretty much the same fashion he had missed it earlier.
What happened next really surprised me. He ran to his bike, picked it up, and pitched it again the nearest ramp, all the time cursing up a storm and hopping around like there were ants in his pants. I thought perhaps he had injured himself and was really mad for that reason - but after watching him throw his bike five more times in the next half hour, I realized that this was just something he did as long as there was a camera watching him ride. After the camera was turned on someone else, he went back to his quiet, unassuming self. Why? The answer was provided by another rider, who told me, "He thinks he's Kris Bennett." Mr. Bennett is a rider who is, apparently, famous for throwing his bike when he doesn't finish a trick.
With that insight, it all made sense. This young rider thought he would be more famous, more marketable, or just plain happier if he "became" like Kris Bennett in the video. Never mind that he wasn't like that in "real life", as Bennett apparently is - I don't know Kris, so I am simply relating what I have read and/or heard - he felt that he was better off imitating someone else than he would be just being himself. Why wouldn't he be satisfied with just being the person he was? I took a moment of comfort in realizing that I have always pretty much steered my own boat in BMX. It may not be much of a boat, and certainly nothing others would want to imitate - after all, what kid says to himself, "Someday I'm going to take dead last three Pro motos in a row" - but at least I wasn't trying to imitate anyone, right?
A few weeks later, Mrs. Boswell had the painter come in to add a couple more odd colors to the house, so I decided to get out of the house and drive around a little bit. My meandering path took me into a subdivision about three miles behind mine. This subdivision is well-known for having eight million-plus-dollar homes on the same street, (Hey, it's Ohio, not Los Angeles. Million-dollar homes don't grow on trees out here) but there are about fifty homes total, As I was driving slowly past all these eight-thousand-square-foot neo-revival-colonial-whatevers, I have to admit I got a little depressed - and my depression didn't ease up when I saw a guy who looked to be my age, or possibly less, playing with his kids on the front lawn of one of the larger homes. Ack. How depressing. What did I do wrong in life? Why is this guy sitting in front of a monster home while I crouch in the meager confines of Casa Boswell? Well, to be honest Casa Boswell isn't that tiny, but it's probably not as big as Dave Mirra's guest bathroom... even if, according to Dave's website, we have the same refrigerator. (As the rappers would say, "mad props" to Angert's Appliances in Cincinnati, Ohio.) At that moment, I really wanted to be whoever that guy was, standing out of the lawn of his eight-thousand-square-foot monster, secure in my immense wealth and amazing achievements - and I realized just what that bike-throwing kid was trying to do. We all want to be more than what or who we are.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, not everybody can be Janet Jackson, Kris Bennett, or the owner of a seven-figure home. It doesn't hurt to dream a bit, but I think that the best thing each of us can do is to set, and achieve, realistic goals. The people who "star" in "Becoming" would be better off trying to start their own bands and do their own thing. My friend at the skatepark will be happier if he does what his own inclinations tell him to do, and to hell with trying to look cool in a video. If he works hard, and has a little bit of luck, perhaps one day kids will try to imitate him. And perhaps I should spend a little less time worrying about what other people have, and spend a little more time being grateful for my home, my family, and all the things that make my life worth living. In the end, the best person to "become" is yourself.