Don't fuck with that guy, he cheats on tests dude.

Well I could not find the reading assigned for this weekend, the Meat is Murder piece, so all I have to go on for my comments are the movie and my own experiences. All the characters in the movie were first and foremost kids that live int he suburbs. The asian characters represent a common asian american identity construction of the suburbs, which is ultra academic, competitive, and ambitious. The main characters were all kids that "played the game," even though they played it the hardest, so their entire identities were based on following rules. There transgressions were all within the framework of suburban teenagers...they couldn't obtain their badassness and pull of their scams without the being in school, having the favor of the authorities, and being the most capable, multi tasking, ambitious students possible. Cheat sheets, scamming computer hardware from office depot, even selling drugs are all activities for these characters that depended on pre-set institutions and codes of behavior that they and everyone else have to at least pretend to follow. The characters could transgress as much as they liked, as long as they didnt get found out by their parents, the teachers, or the cops. I suppose what I am saying is that all suburban bad-boyness is carried on in a sort of double life-sort of way, where a person's main concern is to maintain their external normative image. For if a character were to go too crazy, they would be kicked out of school, sent to boarding scool, or else juvie. The asian american bad-ass subarbanite is an interesting archetype because it contains two extremes - the super complaint conformist and the super transgressive crime kingpin.
I knew a group of kid in high school who made fake-IDs. Others stole shit from target and returned it, things like x-boxes and computers. These are all the type of activities that a suburban bad-boy would do. In short, there is NO OR MINIMAL INTERACTION WITH OTHER CLASSES, namely lower classes. All the suburban crime is done within the bubble, helping to maintian the borders as much as possible. Otherwise it is done by an outsider, a vagrant most likely, and outsiders are usually succesfully kept out. This makes the job of the cops and authorities a lot easier.
As far as the girls of the suburbs go...well in this movie they were still pretty maintained within current gender norms. Stephanie was sheltered from the illegal going ons of the men her life because she is too fragile and innocent to be exposed to things like those. She turned out to not actually be in the porno. She was an emotional character whom the male characters felt first and foremost needed protection. I would have liked to see her as a bad-girl, norm breaking character as well, it would have made for a more interesting character. Wouldn't it be cool if the boys discovered she was actually a bigger azn suburban kingpin than they were?
I view the most common transgression bad-boy/girl method in the suburbs is drug use...it fits perfectly into "maintaining a good front" thing i talked about earlier. I think a good identity construction to talk about for contemporary (kind of) suburbs, one that is closely tied to the asian suburbanite, is the raver. Drugs, remote locations, all night parties, promiscuity, high tech fun -- then going to class the next day. These raver kids used to be in my math class in HS, and would tell the craziest stories.

Chronic analysis

OK. So the moms of the community, embodied by Mrs. B's friend, the blonde bitchy mom, represent the sterilized, contained, conformist construction of family and suburban life that the Spiegel article says was recreated and enforced through 1950s television programming. She obsessively tries to keep the people around her to conform to white hetero-normative, nuclear family based standards. From our point of view, we can speculate that the early television experience helped to ingrain into suburban white conscienceness such standards, to the point where we actively try to replicate them. She uses gossip, coercion, spying, and plays on other people's insecurities to achieve these goals. The "not under your roof" metaphor that she uses with Mrs. B (a can't remember the main character's first name) reflects the ways in which suburban architecture was meant to enforce white conservative family values, and the vague lines in such a community that separate private from public spheres. The black family represents a transgression of these white conservative values, as they are a family who engages in an illegal activity. While they're position outside of the conforminty of the white suburb that Mrs. B comes from paints them as "immoral and criminal" in the eyes of the white suburbanites, they also reside outside the pressures and stresses that living in such a suburb and maintainging a "good" image can present, which is why Mrs. B goes to them for emotional support at the end of the episode. Their "blackness" is a haven for the main character, as she is noticably relieved to not have to act the way she does with all the PTA moms. The transgression in this episode, weed dealing, reveals a great deal of interesting social commentary on the split selves of pulbicness and privateness, and ways in which different racial and class groups have to present themselves to their families and peers.
Sorry, I had to get that all out of the way first. This show is fascinating and wonderfully written, and I just bought the first season, so I'm excited to continue it. Also, sorry I missed class on friday, I'm sure you all missed me :)
So the television in this show perfectly illustrates the type of "ellectronically sterile" versions of reality that TV presents to the suburban home. The boys watch a show about hunting bears, which cathartically presents a sort of rugged, ruthless masculinity to the boys who watch it, lets them experience a different type of cultural experience while still residing under the domesticated roof of the suburbs. The show's catharsis mirror's the actual show of "weeds" catharsis, as us as viewers get to watch particularily illicit themes without actually meeting drug dealers and users. I think the "premium" channel that hosts the show allows it to adress themes which would not be approvable by regular cable's standards because regular television is still rooted in the tradition that Spiegel describes, meant to enforce and maintain certain identity constructions.

I must include this little antecdote, which is probably somewhat incrimination. I live on 24th street, in a house with 9 other SC students. We are the onle students living on our block, the rest of it is mostly latino families. There is a group of teenage boys that live on this block, and they use our backyard, namely our little garage, as a place to smoke pot, probably because it is the only place they wouldn't get caught. We never told them to not do it, and don't really mind, and they offer to smoke us out if we ever are around. So today I joined them in a little, um, conversation, on my way out to buy the Weeds first season. They were talking about a pool that they go to, and I asked which pool it was.
"Is it a public pool?" I asked, to whicht hey laughed and said no. "Oh, then it's one of your friends' pools?"
When I said this they laughed even harder, and I was a little confused.
"No man, it's probably one of your friends pools," onbe of them said to me, and they all burst into more laughter. Oh, I get it. Fair enough.
Anyway, the racial and class differences that this show explores really reminded me of that little exchange.