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I’M PRETTY SURE you’re all damn sick-N-tired of the millennial hype by now.
So we’ll take a few days off from the whole new-era talk, and instead talk about an era that’s ending today.
When other boys in the mid-’60s were into the likes of Spider-Man, I was collecting Peanuts books.
The Fawcett Crest volumes, to be precise–mass-market paperbacks that arranged four-panel daily strips into full-page layouts, often with additional, anonymous artwork that usually ruined the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s designs. (Yes, I could realize that as a kid.)
My family didn’t subscribe to a paper that carried the daily strip; so the books, which showed up in supermarket newsracks a year or two after the strips’ original newspaper publication, provided my only access to them.
Eventually, I tracked down the better Peanuts books–the Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston trade paperbacks that stacked two strips per page in proper sequence.
When the papers announced “the first in a series of animated adaptations” of the strip, I was elated. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out the “series” wasn’t going to be a weekly visit with the gang but just occasional specials. The week after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in all its depressing glory, I glommed up to the black-and-white Magnavox only to find a regular episode of that mediocre sitcom The Munsters.
A very Charlie Brown-y moment.
Like a lot of smart, unathletic, unpopular boys throughout North America, I identified a lot with Charlie Brown.
He was no dumbed down kid-lit tyke like the Family Circus brood, nor an artificially cheery “lovable loser” like Ziggy or The Born Loser. He was a realistic kid with realistic kid frustrations. He lived in a cookie-cutter suburb like the one growing around our house.
He was lousy at sports, at making friends, at one-upsmanship games–at everything except verbally articulating his troubles; a skill that often just led him into deeper troubles, thanks to “friend” Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth.
His only true friend was a dog whose hyperactive playfulness settled into an elaborate fantasy existence, part of which Charlie Brown was once invited into (the sequence in which Snoopy’s tiny dog house was revealed (verbally but not visually) to be a Doctor Who-like dimensional portal into a vast, art-filled mansion).
Such occasional flights of fancy (a boy known only as “5;” Pig-Pen’s magical ability to become instantly unclean) somehow only enhanced the “realism” of the Peanuts universe.
The strips were often funny and more often poignant, and always maintained sympathy with the characters. They taught an infinite number of lessons in comic pacing, dialogue, and the construction of complex narratives within the discipline of daily four-panel installments.
Bill Melendez’s TV specials and movies (all scripted by Schulz) expanded the visual scope of the strip’s universe without breaking its fundamental laws (except for a few of the later shows, which showed adult human characters on-screen). Vince Gauraldi’s jazz-piano music was gorgeously understated. The casting of real child actors to voice the characters’ elaborate dialogue further cemented Schulz’s central tenet that children really do think and talk this intelligently.
But the tight perfection of Schulz’s draftsmanship (at its peak from about 1965 to 1985) was one aspect of the strip that Melendez’s animators never quite mastered. This was a clue that the strip, unlike most strips from before the days of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, would not continue without Schulz.
In 1987, Schulz suddenly abandoned the format of four identically-sized panels per strip. Peanuts went to three taller panels most days; except on days when Schulz chose to divide his space differently. At the time, I wrote that, while it brought a new energy to the strip, it ruined one of its main unspoken themes. The rigid repetition of the same number of frames, all the same size, perfectly matched the ultimately hellish concept of these characters forced to repeat the same life mistakes, to remain the same presexual age for eternity.
Now, they finally get to leave their newsprint prison. Not to enter adult freedoms, but merely to disappear.
AARRGH!
IN OTHER NEWS: Thousands took my heed (or, more likely, got the idea on their own) and gathered all around the closed-off Seattle Center to enjoy a healthy, terrorist-free New Year’s despite mayor Paul Schell’s best efforts to ban them. Schell himself showed up to be interviewed on KOMO, and was very properly met outside the TV station by safe-and-sane jeers and catcalls. Good job, citizens. Next step: A recall election that would be a referendum on the city’s now more official than ever damn-the-non-upscale attitude.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The one company you’d expect to have changed its name by this week still hasn’t, at least as of Sunday night.
TOMORROW: A portent of the digi-future most culture mavens don’t want to talk about–the potential obsolescence of culture mavens.
ELSEWHERE:
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:
One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.
Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.
Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.
TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.
SINCE IT’S THE LAST ‘TRIPLE-DOUBLE’ DAY of the century (11/22/99–get it?), I’ve got just as good an excuse as any of the current barrage of century-in-review pundits to go off and pontificate.
But instead of reviewing all the supposedly most important movies, CDs, public speeches, world leaders, or stadium-organ songs of the past 100 years, let’s skip the present century altogether and instead look at the 21st century as somebody imagined it in the 19th.
Edward Bellamy (1850-96) wrote Looking Backward in 1888. Many critics consider it the first major utopian novel written in the U.S.
Like most of the perfect-future tales that have followed, Bellamy’s is less of a story than a tract. The plot, such as it is, is pretty much over by page 50–a wealthy, “refined” young man of 1887 Boston, who’s come to loathe most of railroad-age industrial society, awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000.
From then on, just about all that happens is that our 19th-century sleepyhead looks around the future Beantown, while the kindly doctor who’d awakened him (and the doc’s smashingly-beautiful daughter) simply tell him everything about how wonderful everything has become. (The doctor has a wife, but we see or hear almost nothing of her.)
There are no conflict points in the story, but that’s part of the point.
Bellamy’s ideal future is one of those in which most anything that could result in trauma, let alone drama, has been systematically removed from the social condition.
Indeed, in one chapter the awakened narrator reads from a late-20th-century novel (you millennium-sticklers out there will be relieved to hear Bellamy refers to 2000 as part of the 20th century). Without detailing this other story’s plot or characters, the narrator tells us how weird it was for him to read…
“…a romance from which shall be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer… a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfettered by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart.”
As you might’ve guessed, Bellamy’s is one of those utopias where nobody goes hungry but nobody’s obscenely wealthy. That’s ’cause everybody works for one employer (a strict-yet-benevolent government “Industrial Army”) for the same wage. (Physical labor and other unpopular jobs are made to be as attractive as cushy office posts, by offering shorter hours or unspecified prestige perks)
It was a popular fantasy at the time it was written. Many of Bellamy’s readers had become baffled by the rapidly-changing industrial scene and its massive social consequences–which by 1888 had already included urbanization, telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, monopolies and cartels running key industries, the mass immigration of low-paid laborers from such places as Germany and China, the lonely-guy culture of single-male immigrant workers (hookers, saloons, gambling), tenement housing, coal-smoke pollution, nationally advertised brand-name products, and the first large-scale labor strikes.
To those dismayed by the 1880s present, an end-O-history future, a stable and prosaic future with no conflicts or worries, would seem mighty desirable.
TOMORROW: More on why Bellamy’s scheme wouldn’t work, why he and his readers thought it might, and lessons for muddling through the real century-switch.
ONE OF MY FAVORITE Net-centric literary forms is the funny list. Not necessarily the faux-Letterman type, but the more informal, longer, add-on-your-own type.
Among my favorites: The “Ways to Annoy Your Roommate” list.
A few days ago, I suddenly had an idea for a perfect annoy-your-roommate concept that I hadn’t seen on any such lists: Rent porn videos, and fast-forward past everything EXCEPT the dialogue scenes.
That simple idea led to a more elaborate one: Rent porn videos, and then use a second VCR to copy only the dialogue scenes.
Then I got to thinking: These throwaway plot parts constitute one of today’s most ephemeral commercial-art genres. A genre that should be studied and preserved.
That one notion, natch, led to more.
There are plenty of such genres and forms, still underdocumented by a popcult-scholar racket still obsessed with Madonna deconstructions. Here are some:
Somebody already put out a picture book showing old Apple Computer employee T-shirts. Somebody else could create a similar, but fictional, book using logos and slogans to depict the rise and fall of an Internet startup from its first big idea, to its venture-capital phase, to its unsuccessful IPO attempt, to its “restructuring for the future” downsizing phase, to its Chapter 11 reorganization, to its last appearance on a shirt “celebrating” another company’s acquisition of its remaining assets.
TOMORROW: A newspaper for the digital age.
AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED, my cable company finally restored the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to my local cable lineup recently.
CBC’s got a lot of great Canadian-made programming (though its audiences and budgets have fallen during the Cable Age, as have those of the old-line U.S. networks).
But my favorite CBC attraction is a British import, the prime-time soap Coronation Street.
“The Street,” as it’s called in the UK tabloid press, will begin its 40th year this December. Most of those years it’s been the country’s most popular show, and the backbone of the commercial ITV network.
But you’ve probably never seen it. Apart from northern U.S. regions that get CBC, the show’s only Stateside exposure came when the USA Network ran it for a few months in the early ’80s, as part of a package deal to get reruns of the miniseries Brideshead Revisited (both shows are from the Granada production company). But American audiences apparently couldn’t decipher some of the characters’ heavy Yorkshire accents; USA dropped the show as soon as it contractually could.
So in 1985, when the BBC devised its own Street knockoff show, EastEnders, they made sure the characters would all be comprehensible when the show was shipped Stateside. Thus, EastEnders plays to loyal audiences on scattered PBS afiliates and the BBC America cable channel.
But there’s nothing like the original.
The Street has a feel all its own. It comes from the “music” of the accents and the dialogue (like EastEnders, Coronation Street uses no background music), the rhythm and pacing of the scenes (few lasting longer than a minute), the lovable non-“beauty” of the cast (even the teenage characters are as awkward-looking as real-life teens often believe themselves to be), the character-driven storylines, and the respect the show gives both to its audience and to its working-class characters.
The Street was launched when “kitchen sink” realism was all the rage in British literary and film drama. The show reflects that era in its tightly-sewn format, chronicling some two dozen people who live and/or work on a single block in a fictional industrial town outside Manchester.
There’s no glamour (the show’s wealthiest character merely owns a small garment factory), and no overwrought melodrama beyond the limited scope and ambitions of the characters.
What there is, is a community–an extended, close-knit, multi-generational family of people who may argue and fight and cheat but who ultimately love one another. Just the sort of community that late-modern suburban North America sorely lacks, and which those “New Urbanist” advocates always talk about trying to bring back.
A couple years back, CBC began its own Street imitation, Riverdale (no relation to the town in Archie Comics). While Riverdale’s creators seem to have made every effort to replicate every possible element of the Street formula, it doesn’t quite translate. Riverdale’s relatively emotionally-repressed Ontarians, living in relatively large, set-back private homes rather than the Street’s row houses, have far less of the interaction and adhesion seen on the Street.
USA’s said to be developing its own working-class evening soap along the Coronation Street/EastEnders/Riverdale style. It’ll be interesting to see if the formula can even work in the setting of today’s disconnected American cityscape.
IN OTHER NEWS: Another Northwest Bookfest came and went. This year, it was moved from the funky ol’ rotting Pier 63 to the clean, spacious (and about to be made even more spacious) Washington State Convention Center. While the move was made for practical, logistical reasons, it could also be interpreted as signifying a move “up” from the homey, rustic realm of the Northwest-writing stereotype (beach poetry, low-key “quirky” mysteries, and snow falling on you-know-what). Even litter-a-chur, the festival’s new setting implies, has gotta get with the program and become just as aggressively upscale and as fashionably commercial as everything else in Seatown’s becoming.
TOMORROW: Strange junk e-mails and other fun stuff.
LET’S TRY TO GET THIS STRAIGHT. A couple weeks ago, a teenage boy from the Seattle suburbs was hospitalized for severe injuries, following a backyard boxing match that got a little out of hand. News media immediately branded the incident as an obvious copycat of the movie Fight Club.
Then, a few days later, the mom of the injured boy revealed that he and most of the other kids involved in the bout hadn’t seen Fight Club, but had simply been attempting to emulate their real-life boxing heroes.
On the immediate level, it doesn’t matter whether the kid wanted to be Brad Pitt or Ali. It still got him a night in intensive care. On another level, it shows how today’s ever-more-tabloidy media are oh-so willing to exploit personal tragedies, and to believe and spread silly hype angles concerning these incidents.
But the differences go deeper.
Fight Club, based on a novel by Portland writer Chuck Palahniuk (a book described to me by one reader as “a novel clearly written to be made into a movie”), posits a present-day dystopia in which emasculated, office-cubicle-imprisoned, studly white guys have few options to reclaim themselves. Our antihero first sits in on other people’s self-help and 12-step groups, then falls in with a gang of white-collar nihilists who get their kicks in bare-knuckle extreme fighting. Then, the charismatic gang leader reveals himself to have loftier, even more violent ambitions. The “Club” adopts a Manson-esque agenda of generating random violence in order to cause a general state of chaos.
Thankfully, the real world isn’t in such a sorry state.
What the suburban teens were doing was undoubtedly just good old fashioned male bonding via competition. Something young males have done at least since the days of ancient Sparta. One of the boys landed a heavier punch than he’d intended to. But that sort of thing, alas, happens–just as boys can get hurt in more organized sport competitions.
For a good view of the positive values of bloodsport, check out the Canadian movie Les Boys. It’s not on video Stateside (I saw it on Cinemax), but the amiable hockey comedy was one of Canada’s top box-office draws in ’97 and has spawned two sequels.
It stars Marc Messier (no relation to real hockey star Mark Messier) as a middle-aged, small-town Quebec bar owner who leads an amateur hockey team. The minimal plot involves his gambling debt to a small-time hood, which leads to a game between Les Boys and a team of the hood’s hand-picked thugs with ownership of the bar at stake. The real attractions are the characters of Les Boys. They joke and banter, they check and fight, they shoot, they score.
More importantly, they live in a real community. One that recognizes the need for Boys’ Night Out. One that realizes testosteronic rages, when safely expressed in the proper context, might lead to permanent knee damage but also to enduring friendships, stronger families, and a personal pride (even in defeat) that can help one overcome the daily grind.
MONDAY: Can you tell me how to get–how to get to Coronation Street?
A pompous profile of the in-between generation that fails to mention punk rock, hiphop, zines, or any cultural artifacts more “indie” than Indiana Jones….
I’VE OFTEN LIKED to define “Northwest environmentalists” as the people who moved here in the ’80s, complaining about all the people who moved here in the ’90s.
Back before Puget Sound became cyber-boomtown, ex-Cali and Eastern rovers with dough would move up here hoping to Get Away From It All. Only they managed to bring “It All” with them, in the form of traffic congestion, inflated housing prices, dumb phony “regional cuisine” restaurants, and particularly increased wear-‘n’-tear on the hiking trails and X-C ski routes which, to them, symbolized temporary escape from the crush of humanity.
(I also like to say I do my part to keep our wilderness areas unspoiled by not going there.)
Anyhoo, all this is nothing new. Humans have always struggled to create what they hope will be ideal living environments, only to then dream of another realm where everything would be different somehow–more “natural,” more mystical, more magical, more heroic, less stressful, less humdrum.
Which brings me to today’s book–Escapism, by Univ. of Wisconsin geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.
In this slim but intellectually-rigorous volume, Tuan proclaims that “a human being is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is.”
Therefore, to ridicule somebody’s ideas or visions as “fantasy,” “myth,” or “escapist” is more than insulting. It’s a denial of basic human nature, the nature that enabled our species to spend these past millennia steadily constructing more permanent and effective escapes from nature and its cruelties.
For one example, he offers the genre of landscape painting. Tuan asserts it only developed as European and Chinese civilizations got “advanced” enough that The Land was no longer seen as the all-powerful, dangerous, fickle element upon which humans totally depended; but instead as the relatively tamed, pastoral setting of a relatively stable existence.
For another example, here’s his quite rational argument against the E-droppers’ hyperbole about druggies somehow being the Next Stage of Human Evolution:
“Drugs that produce sensations of orgasmic power and visions of mystical intensity do not turn their consumers into better, more enlightened people. One reason why they do not–apart from the chemical damage they inflict on the human system–is [a] fixation on unique particulars at the expense of their weave and patter. From this we understand why artworks are superior to drugs in cleansing perception. Though they cannot produce amphetamine’s euphoria, they make up for it at an intellectual level by putting objects and events in context. They hint at, if not explicitly state, the relatedness–the larger pattern….”
As you might surmise, Tuan’s a generalist whose essaying goes pretty far afield, taking vague definitions of “escape” and “escapism” as a springboard for broad discussions of human nature. Such as this passage, with which many of the harassed-as-kids computer-nerd types out there might identify:
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored…. “Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
“The Navajo father commends thinking for its poewr to produce temporary stays against disorder. Many societies, however, recognize that thinking without some immediate, practical end in mind can cause unhappiness that, indeed, it is itself evidence of unhappiness. Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living. To Inuits, thinking signifies either craziness or the strength to have independent views. Both qualities are antisocial and to be deplored….
“Even in modern America, thinking is suspect. It is something done by the idly curious or by discontented people; it is subversive of established values; it undermines communal coherence and promotes individualism. There is an element of truth in all these accusations. In an Updike novel, a working-class father thinks about his son reading. It makes him feel cut off from his son. ‘He doesn’t know why it makes him nervous to see the kid read. Like he’s plotting something. They say you should encourage it, reading, but they never say why.'”
Thankfully, history’s had its share of ladies ‘n’ gents who’ve dared to break this taboo. Including Yi-Fu Tuan.
TOMORROW: Remember kids, Fight Club’s only a movie.
YESTERDAY, I looked at a book collecting “Postmodern American Fiction” and wondered when Western society was ever going to get over postmodernism and start being and/or doing something new.
If you think of “the modern era” as everything since the Renaissance and Francis Bacon, as many PoMo theorists do, then you might be a little less impatient than me.
The modern era, by this definition, has gone on so long that its failings and fissures are all-too-evident to the PoMo skeptic–but has also become so entrenched that the good postmodernist can’t think of a thing to do except ironically kvetch about it.
But if you think of “the modern era” as essentially the 20th century, as I do (maybe we could appease all factions by calling the electricity-and-motorized-transport age “late modern”), then there might be a little hope.
As seen in the handy comparison charts on some college-course websites, the mostly-reactive tenets of the various substrains of PoMo thought do contain, here and there, a few hints of prescriptions for a more positive-minded future. Not many, but at least a few.
And it’s fairly clear to most anyone that, due to several interrelated factors (computers and other advanced communications electronics, Global Business, ever-bifurcating subcultures, socialism’s crash-‘n’-burn, enviro-awareness, feminism, religious revivalism, STDs, indie-pop, etc. etc.), that the late-late-modern dream of a post-WWII utopia where everybody would rationally coexist in one homogenous society, under the benevolent guidance of the Best ‘n’ the Brightest, is pretty much shot.
So, the big End-O-Millennium question is, What Next?
In occasional pieces over the next few weeks, I’ll try to forge a guess.
To start, it’s fairly clear the old late-modernism, in both aesthetics and philosophy, was predicated upon early-to-mid-century advances in metallurgy, streamlining, communications technology, etc. Advances that led to air travel (and the bombing of Hiroshima), broadcasting (and the media monopoly), small-press publishing (and Holocaust-revisionist tracts), personal transportation (and gridlock), declining death rates (and soaring populations), etc.
Postmodernism, I’ve posited above, was and is a state of mind predicated upon people having gotten tired of those onetime “advances” and their eventually-evident limitations.
But can there be an era after the postmodern or late-modern? I say yes, and it’s already showing up.
Some gals ‘n’ guys are being paid small fortunes to tell people with money what they want to hear–that the new era will be especially beneficial to persons such as these pundits’ audiences. It’s a revolution, but merely a “revolution in business,” that has no chance to ever become a revolution against business.
As I’ll explain in tomorrow’s installment, I’m less sure about that.
TOMORROW: Why George Gilder’s future won’t quite happen, if we’re lucky.
I recently spent a few days pretty much shut-in by the painful recovery from extreme oral surgery.
The extended couch-time gave me a chance to finally finish Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology.
It’s 632 pages of tiny type. Except for the theoretical-essay collection at the end, none of it’s horrible. Many of the pieces are, indeed, good. A few would even qualify for my own highest honorific, Great Kickass Writing.
(Among them: The piece of Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, Sherman Alexie’s Captivity, Tim O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story, and pieces of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.)
But, of course, the whole project of a postmodern anthology brings one to ask what the hell “postmodern” is anymore (besides an already-obsolete term MTV once used to use to announce videos by The The or New Order).
Some of the pieces do seem to take a more-or-less literal interpretation of the adjective–i.e., they express a culture in which “modernity” has grown old and stale but in which nothing’s come up to replace it.
That’s the world of endless air-quotes, where everything’s an ironic insincerity. The world of Douglas Coupland, for instance. A literary world very similar to the nihilism of the Sex Pistols (who, in turn, were heavily influenced by group svengali Malcolm McLaren’s time with the PoMo ideologues of the French Situationist movement).
A second category of stories in the collection attempt to imagine a world beyond the world beyond the modern. Where modernism sought a bright, clean, shiny future (as seen in a mid-century literature of clean writing about rational decision-makers) and postmodernism saw the limitations of that future, some of these folks (such as William Gibson) try to celebrate the coming of a decentered, decentralized, chaos-theory society. (Something similar to the society I’ve been celebrating on this site.)
But in a chaos culture, there will always be those who would simply exchange the old hierarchical order for a new one. That’s what you get with the likes of local writer Joanna Russ, who (in an excerpt from her novel The Female Man) imagines a sci-fi alternate dimension in which everything’s darned-near perfect because the whole population is not only composed exclusively of women, but of women who share a certain sensibility.
Like most utopians, Russ’s ideal society consists pretty much solely of people exactly like herself. In this regard, she’s quite modern, or at least pre-postmodern. Her fantasy is of little use toward helping real-world folk figure out how to live among hundreds of ethnicities, dozens of gender-role variants, and thousands of conflicting worldviews.
As the book’s website notes, this collection was at least partly meant as a college reader. Certainly some of the closing essays belong strictly within campus grounds–they’ve got that peculiar combination of borderline-incomprehensible communications-theory lingo and academic-left sanctimony that implies another dreamed utopian future, the very old-modern wish for a dictatorship of the academics.
But then again, the name “Postmodern” implies that we have only yesterday’s modernism (with its utopian dreams of well-ordered civility and certainty under one centralized authority system or another) to either long for or to scoff at, without any new worldview to replace it.
I like to think we can learn to become “post-” that by now.
TOMORROW: After PoMo, then what?
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s been a fast news week in my town, climaxing with the potential beginning-O-the-end of the century’s last major empire….
IN STILL OTHER NEWS: …But it’s a great week for us adopted fans of college football’s formerly most luckless team; now eligible for its first bowl game since ’65 (before college teams started using separate offensive and defensive squads). Remember: Once a Beaver, Always a Beaver!
TODAY’S AN “OFF-OFF-YEAR” ELECTION, the kind where neither Presidents, Congresspeople, nor state legislators stand up for the picking.
My town holds its big municipal elections during odd-numbered years, so as to give its own politicians the spotlight.
And, as it happens, the Talk-Radio Right has one of its “across-the-board tax cut” schemes on the ballot, in the form of a state initiative.
And, as it also happens, the state initiative and the Seattle City Council elections both turn out to involve appeals to “We The People” against the common enemy of both rightish “populists” and leftish “progressives”–the corporate middle-of-the-road.
The eternally-lovable Jim Hightower likes to say there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But so far, the center has managed to hold, at least in segments of the American system–albeit as a center that’s drifted steadily rightward.
The Religious Right has had fewer successes in its attempts at “morals” legislation in recent years; the prog-left has been equally unsuccessful at reforming health care or getting working folks a fairer share of the economic boom.
Instead, big business and its wholly-owned politicians have pretty much had a free run in the U.S. Executive Branch, in the Federal Reserve System, and in many state and local jurisdictions. All the talk in the post-Reagan era about new paradigms or the end-of-politics-as-we-know it has, thus far, still found the entrenched old-line powers-that-be still being.
That doesn’t mean they’re not running scared, at least around these parts.
Seattle news media are chock full of heavy-handed wrangling over the potential devastating effects of Initiative 695, which would replace graduated-rate motor vehicle taxes with a flat $30 fee–and would impose tuff referenda requirements any time the Washington legislature wanted to add any new revenue source.
As phony-populist “across the board” tax cuts go, this is a particularly clever fraud. It cuts just enough from average folks’ car taxes to seem like a sensible bargain to average voters. But it cuts hundreds or even thousands from what the big boys pay for their Lamborghini SUVs.
And the funds it cuts from include funds targeted for transportation (including the new regional light-rail scheme as well as road-fixing) and those used by the state to prop up county governments.
I-695’s so extreme, the business lobby loathes it. It would potentially cripple some of the basic infrastructure business needs to get its goods trucked around, and the referendum part would make it damn difficult for the state to create new business-subsidy plans, like those used for the new baseball and football stadia.
But the Washington State Republican leadership felt it needed the talk-radio gang’s rabblerousing capabilities more than business’s patronage, and endorsed 695. No matter what happens in today’s vote, a possibly permanent rift has been created between the Rabid Right and the corporate powers who used to be its chief beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, five of the nine Seattle City Council seats are for grabs (all are citywide races).
In four of these contests, self-styled “progressive” candidates (Curt Firestone, Judy Nicastro, Charlie Chong, and incumbent Peter Steinbrueck) not only won their primaries but won by big enough margins that they’re threatening, with fellow prog-candidate Dawn Mason and incumbent prog Nick Licata (whose re-election bid comes in the next half-cycle), to form a majority coalition that could push for renters’ rights, slow the pace of gentrification, and block new subsidies for corporate-backed development plans.
And oh yeah–they also just might, if given half the chance, officially call BS on city attorney Mark Sidran’s “civility” laws, a systematic war on poor people, black people, young people, and anybody else who doesn’t fit the downtown business establishment’s upscale-boomer target market.
So some members of Sidran’s upscale fan base, led by a Microsoft executive (as if those guys knew a damn thing about “civility”), are spending “soft money” on behalf of the progs’ opponents.
In a municipal system traditionally run by corporate-Democrat machine politics, we’ve got a real, essentially partisan, race here. Should be fun.
TOMORROW: A self-styled “alternative” magazine whines about not getting the opportunity to sell out to big advertisers.
JUST OVER A WEEK AGO, I attended a reception for a specially-commissioned set of works by ten top contemporary artists.
All the artists had to start with the same object and paint or otherwise decorate it to their tastes.
The objects of beauty: Five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs.
It was a promo piece for Millstone Coffee, the Everett, WA-founded, value-priced, supermarket gourmet-coffee operation that was bought a couple years back by none other than Procter & Gamble, the conglomerate ruthlessly fictionalized in Richard Powers’s novel Gain.
P&G’s been running national TV spots touting Millstone as the real coffee lover’s alternative to “that leading specialty-coffee chain,” alleging that other company’s more interested in selling T-shirts (i.e., promoting its brand name) than in serving up the finest quality java.
That’s a mighty allegation to be made by P&G, which practically invented brand-name marketing early in this century.
But anyhoo, they’re trying to emphasize that real-coffee-lovers image by test marketing a line of even gourmet-er beans, “Millstone Exotics.” That’s where the artists came in.
They include several whose work I’ve followed for some time–Parris Broderick, Meghan Trainor, and Shawn Wolfe.
Their colorfully-decorated big mugs, to be trucked around to public outdoor viewing spaces in the cities where Millstone Exotics will initially be marketed (Seattle, Portland, and Spokane), were meant by the company to convey a new image for the new higher-end product line; as something even fancy-schmancier than the stuff found in the coffee-store chains.
(Even though Millstone is now made at P&G’s existing coffee plants as well as its original Everett facility, and is shipped to supermarkets by the same distribution infrastructure that brings you Tide, Tampax, Iams pet foods, and diet snacks made with Olestra.)
Anyhoo (again), the artists at the reception expressed no public qualms about the project (many have done commercially-commissioned work before); not even for a company traditionally known for less than avant-garde cultural visions. And, goodness knows, in today’s art climate they could certainly use the income.
I have just one beef about the project. Because the giant cups were devised for outdoor display during the winter, they were molded with sealed tops. They can’t be reused (without a lot of hacksawing) as something an exotic dancer could jump out from.
Not even for the old “Won’t you join me in a cup of coffee?” gag.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some background reading about the fashion industry’s “friends” in Saipan.
TOMORROW: Another possible way to restore contemporary art’s place in urban society.
A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
MY FIRST BEEF about James Gleick’s new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything has to do with a passage near the end, about the mind’s ability to discern patterns in strings of numbers (part of a discussion on short-term memory and people’s ability to receive information at accelerated rates).
Gleick mentiones several such sequences of numerals (prime numbers, numbers divisible by seven, etc.), then gets to a sequence “any New Yorker, for instance, will recognize.”
He never bothers to tell non-New Yorkers what “14, 18, 23, 28, 34, 42, 50, 59, 66, 72” is supposed to represent. He just assumes everybody in North America’s so into NYC local lore that they’ll recognize these as the street numbers of Manhattan subway stations.
Of course, the fact that I (as one who’s only been to NYC twice) was able to guess this answer (which Gleick confirmed to me in an email exchange) may be part of Gleick’s intended lesson–that human minds can figure out puzzles like this with only minimal clues.
The rest of Gleik’s story is pretty much what you (if you’ve got the nimble mind he thinks you’ve got) could predict it to be. For those of you whose lives are too hectic to even read the book (a briskly-paced tome, with short paragraphs and lotsa chapter breaks), a summary:
But there are exceptions and caveats in Gleick’s oh-so-linear timeline.
Movies and novels these days can be frighteningly long. The new Star Wars runs a whole half-hour longer than the original. Passions, that new “youth oriented” soap opera, is decidedly leisurely-paced (one day in the story can take up to two weeks of episodes). Net-browsing and video-gaming might seem exciting, but can be among the greatest time killers ever invented. Rush-hour freeway speeds in many metro areas are slowing down to bicycle rates. Today’s most heavily-hyped fantasy vehicle isn’t the sports car (promising mastery of the clock) but the SUV (promising a make-believe world outside the clock’s reach).
Gleick might say these are fantasy-realm counterparts to an ever-faster reality. I’d say they’re parts of a more complex set of figures than Gleick’s ready to deal with.
Stuff involving (directly or indirectly) electronics and computers is indeed always getting faster, smaller, cheaper, etc. Everything else in life still runs by basic scientific laws. Faster-than-sound flight is possible, but usually impracticable. Puberty, gestation, digestion, alcohol absorption, clinical drug trials, falling in and out of love, pretty much take as long as they always have.
As that favorite old computer-geek bumper sticker used to say, “186,000 Miles Per Second. It’s Not Just A Good Idea, It’s the Law.”
TOMORROW: Susan Faludi and other writers dare to insist that men are people too–why’s this treated as something shocking?
MOST EVERYBODY LOVES ODD STUFF. Strange events. The unknown. The wacky, the wild, the bizarre.
Even stiff-upper-lip Brits.
Especially those Brits who read and write for the quarter-century-old journal The Fortean Times (named for pioneer odd-stuff researcher Charles Fort, and now published by the same folks behind the bad-bloke magazine Bizarre and the bad-boy satirical comic Viz).
One of the mag’s chief researchers,Mike Dash, has now come out with Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown. It’s been out in the U.K. for a few months now; the U.S. edition might be available this week or within a few weeks.
The book’s a long, leisurely intro to all sorts of odd and quasi-supernatural stuff around the world, past and present. Think of it as a quaint stroll through just about everything that seems to happen or to have happened, and which can’t be firmly, rationally explained.
What you get: UFO sightings and alien abductions. The Loch Ness Monster. Yetis. Ghosts and poltergeists. Crop circles. Miraculous relics, stigmata, and Mary sightings. Stonehenge and mystery spots. Ley lines and energy centers. Dear-death and out-of-body experiences. Seances and spirit guides. Mediums and ESP. The face of Jesus in tacos and Arabic script in vegetables. Fairies, gnomes, goblins, and wildmen. British authors who claimed to really be Tibetan wise men. Carlos Castaneda and Uri Geller. Time travelers and clairvoyants.
And of particular interest to our local readers: Bigfoot! The famous 1947 “Flying Saucer” sighting near Mt. Rainier! The Olympia “Satanic cult” scare, eventually blamed on false-memory syndrome. Ogopogo, British Columbia’s own mythical lake monster. Reports of a similar beast in our own Lake Washington in 1987, found to really be an 11-foot sturgeon. The mirage-like “Silent City” visions in Alaska.
But plenty of books, movies (documentary, fictional, and in between), zines, comix, and TV specials and series have explored some or all of these topics. What sets Borderlands apart is Dash’s personable-yet-levelheaded tone (he’s a Cambridge Ph.D.) and his attitude of informed, open-minded skepticism. He’s ready to call a fraud a fraud (Castaneda). He’s all for scientific and material evidence behind strange occurrances, when and where such evidence might be found. And he’s open to both rational and supernatural explanations for this stuff.
But, ultimately, the phenomena he chooses to include in this book are phenomena which remain unsolved, unproven, unconfirmed. Something that has become known and proven, such as hypnosis, is something that’s now within the rational realm. The “borders” of knowledge referred to in the title keep moving back, but the borders’ length, and the size of the area beyond them, may remain as large as ever.
TOMORROW: Celebrating one year exclusively online.
