I entered us into a mutual review thing - I had to review someone else's weblog, someone else reviews ours. Part of the deal is that I have to post it here - prepare for hatemail.
Dead Yet Living. Great name. There are two possibilities about this weblog – the first is that it is a brilliantly conceived and fantastically detailed satire on Christian Teen Culture (apologies for the oxymoron). The other possibility is too horrible to contemplate.
The site purports to be a group weblog, with contributions from a wide range of mainly young, mainly pretty American kids who in the thumbnailed author shots pull off that smug-Christian rictus grin to perfection - my personal favourites are the tragic Wendy (“Maybe someday I'll be well-balanced. But until then, I'm working on growing closer to God.”) and the genuinely scary Tyler (“Personality: Spiritual hunger; Month and Year Saved: September 2000; Future Plans: Graduate from BCF if God wills, and help build the Kingdom of God; Other Stuff: Girls trouble me and I'm not your social butterfly”) – “Girls…trouble me” – superb stuff.
The content of the posts is balanced to perfection, and so there are the more straightforward satirical posts – Jed the Fed’s lengthy piece about the duty of missionaries to lie in order to gain access to other cultures and destroy them from within, for example, - and pithier posts such as this from Rich (Saved: April 1999):
“Five Days in the Life of A Hardcore Kid:
Day One Ow! Some dude's head flew into my lip and now I'm bleeding everywhere in the midst of this concert! Hardcore!
Day Two AHHHH!!! What is that in the mirror?! Oh, it's my lip. Hardcore!
Day Three I wish people wouldn't look at me like I was a freak.
Day Four This lip is really becoming annoying. It's hard to eat.
Day Five OW! It hurts so bad I can hardly talk or eat! Thank God for Anbesol, mouth numbing extraordinaire!
Moral of the story: it's hard being hardcore”
Between these to extremes, the tension between being young and wanting to do all the things young people do so well, (the sex, the drugs, the guitars and dancing and living) and the imposition of the lies and guilt and the arrogant pig-headed moral certitude of American Christianity is poignantly clear.
Dead yet Living – funny, sad, damning - recommended.
