The 2011 Coachella lineup has just been announced. Headliners, though somewhat predictable, will doubtless please many: Kings of Leon (Friday), Arcade Fire (Saturday), and the Strokes and Kanye “Foot in Mouth” West (Sunday).
Delving further down the bill is where the true gems can be found. Cee Lo Green leading a Coachella-sized crowd through choruses of “Fuck You” will likely be a highlight of Friday’s schedule. Conversely, waiting for Ms. Lauryn Hill to hit the stage will probably have folks cursing for a whole other reason.
The first copy of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger I ever saw was an aged, ominous looking mass-market paperback sitting gravely at the top of my mother’s bookshelf. Its cover was a very solemn looking burgundy with gold font announcing its title and author. No picture on the front, no plot summary on the back – this book just simply existed. My mother, having passed on her uncanny hunger for books of all types and sorts, once shared the story of how my grandmother lost her shit when she found out her daughter was learning about this filth in school. I knew then I had to read this book right away.
For six decades, The Catcher in the Rye has been both the most ardently taught and fervently banned book in American literature. Along with James Dean and rock & roll, Salinger’s stream of conscious tale of angst and alienation invented the American teenager and, by extension, changed the way we create and market everything from clothes to music and movies. Its hero is a sixteen year-old, anti-social fuck up named Holden Caulfield, who has been kicked out of at least three private schools, has no qualms about going to New York for the weekend to have a few drinks and pick up some girls, and sees through all the insincere, “phony” bullshit that constitutes ninety-nine percent of our sad, pathetic adult lives.
Caulfield’s attitudes and viewpoints remain evocative of their time and place, when the ever-increasing gulf between childhood and adulthood had nearly imploded and the infuriating restraints of proper society threatened to strangle an entire generation. Yet, his anger and his fear resonate more than half a century later, those immortal words echoing through the dividing, massively constructed social schematas in which we live and breathe with little alternative. Is The Catcher in the Rye still meaningful in 2011? If anything, the book’s message is more imperative now than ever before.
“If you fuck with me then that’s it.”
– Sharon Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne has been a lot of things over the years. She’s been a tough-as-nails manager, a famed rock wife, a concert promoter, a cancer survivor, a mother of three complex children (and leader of a pack of sometimes unruly dogs), a television personality with multiple shows, and now she’s added the title of headmistress to her bag of tricks.
