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memory of our friends gone und e r to the brainwash of co r porate jobs. the intense and enthus i astic gone salesmen or congr es sional staff e rs; thos e we slammed with now in th e milit a r y, hopeless on the dole, s tr ugg lin g on for the l ong lost ca use in small college towns, and otherwise
Winter/Spring 1993 Thomas Frank, Keith White editors Andy Beecham - Layout Greg Lane - Stuff Getter "Diamonds" Dave Mulcahey - House Slacker Our thanks to Mr. Studs Terkel; Mr. Michael Warr and the Guild Complex; Mr. Rohan Preston; WFMT, WBEZ, and of course WHPK; Mr. Lawrence Rocke; the University of Chicago and the UCSG; Gill's Cut Rate Liquors; Mssrs. Chris Holmes and Jeff Thurlow; and Mr. Mark C. Meachem for their understanding and kind support.
We produced this Baffler over a gruelling three-week period in November, 1992, hidden away in an obscure corner of an enormous house on the South Side of Chicago, listening constantly to the Sex Pistols, the Wipers, the Micronotz. As usual, we laid the whole thing out ourselves on a puny Macintosh computer and ran it off on a laser printer when no one was looking. Such are the conditions of independent literary production.
All materials Š copyright 1992 The Baffler. All rights are reserved. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. The Baffler is distributed by Ubiquity and Book People. If your bookstore or library doesn't carry it, ask them to. Write to us. Send us your poetry, your money. Copies of Baffler #3 are available for $5. Subscriptions (2 issues) are $8 for individuals, $10 for institutions.
The Baffler P.O. Box 378293 Chicago, IL 60637 2 • Baffler
Number Four YOUR lK FESTY1E SUCKS Monoculturalism, T. c. Frank, p. 5 The Libidinal Tourist, David Mulcahey, p.71 Gedney Goes Bohemian, Keith White, p. 73
TWENTY-NOTHKNG The Making of a Twenty-Something Literary Superstar, Maura Mahoney and Richard F. Kolbusz, Jr., p. 116 Twenty-Nothing, T. C. Frank and Keith White, p. 121 Twenty No-Think, Eric Iversen, p. 123 The Fabricating of Youth Culture: An Exclusive BafJler Blunting!, p. 129
FICTION
Uncoupling, Mat Lebowitz, p. 23 Playing Down, John Redford, p. 45 Colonial Text, Dave Berman, p. 53 Syzygy, Bill Holmes, p. 67 Consumption, Dave Jacowitz, p. 85 Zamboni, Mike Newirth, p. 98
POETRY
FEATURES
Rick Perlstein, Picasso at 25, p. 33 Semiotics Mailbag, p.15 Editor's Note, p.16 BaHler Fashions, p.60
Gaston de Bearn, 56, Barton Longacre, 42, Steve Healey, 54, Sean Francis, 58, Angela Sorby, 92, Alec Dinwoodie, 96, Wendy Kagan, 102, A.P., 103.
ART Barrett Heaton, 40 & 94, Eric Forst, 49, Dave Berman, 52, Chris Holmes, 66, Carla Bruce, 113. OUr fiction stories are flctJonaf. any resemblanoe to anybody, HYing or dead, Is, as they say, purely coincidental.
Baffler • 3
Us Tom Frank, the Kansas City Ranter, is cynical and obvious at 27. He has sent out over 200 resumes in his lifetime, has never had a job, and will soon be one of the guys Bush and Reagan referred to when they used to talk about "the judgement of history." Keith White sings Irish folk songs, resents everyone, and seeks a better life than his 27 years have heretofore offered. When he's not baffling the citizens of New York, he's usually injecting his insidious ideas into a literature-product that you probably read every day. Look out! David Berman (26) and company have a 7" record out on Drag City. Band: Silver Jews. Sound: difficult but rewarding. Steve Healey and Eric Forst, Dave's physical and intellectual neighbors, are twothirds of Frances Gumrn, whose new 7" was just released by Trixie Records (P.O.Box 379373, Chicago, 60637). Don't worry, they're both in their twenties too. Graduate student Dave Jacowitz, 24, hopes someday to introduce the term "cheez" (fromage) into critical literary discourse. Barton Longacre, 25, is heading to Montana to infiltrate and undermine the poetryllifestyle scene there. He also edits Wann Orchid. Mat Lebowitz, 27 and poised for stardom, is working on two screenplays and a novel, which collectively will secure his place in history. In the meantime, he hides out in New York City, teaching impressionable youngsters underhanded techniques for tricking the SA.T. Maura Mahoney, at 26 The Bafflers literary torpedo, has partied with F. Scott Fitzgerald, attained an advanced literature degree, and is currently penning an apologia for suburbia. The Very Rev. David "Diamonds" Mulcahey, S.S.G., 27, is Undersecretary of the Sacred Congregation for the Suppression of Otherness at the Vatican. Rick Perlstein, 23, recently completed his Ph.D at the Ecole de France under Eric-Jacques Paraplui, the founder of postpoststructuralism, His Scatologies: Allegories of Defication in the Texts ofNorman Rockwell will be published in 1993 by Routlege. John Redford, 29, labors as a data slave amidst the green hills of Massachusetts. He aV,?ids television, drives too much, and fears for the republic. Hypatia Sanders, wise beyond her 25 years, monitors traffic and shipping with a powerful telescope from high atop her apartment building on the shores of Lake Michigan. She now claims to know the secret. Angela Sorby, 27, is one of the all-too-young editors of Chicago Review. Her poems have appeared in several of the many small magazines that rival Baffler for space on the "literaty" shelves.
4 • Baffler
The following was read at a real-life staged by The Baffler on October 21, 1992 at the Hot House, a Chicago "performance space" and favorite art-lifestyle hangout. Capture the ambience of the moment by shouting this piece angrily as loud as you can and tearing the pages out of the book as you read them.
I (.(/a.f (.(/atck.lirj tk.e, tf{ariPl(l(a t()ar #(()(Ne, ()I( Ttl tk.e, I(fk.t. a .fce,l(e, .fk.e, k.a.f.fleli? .f()#(e, dull? tal(arfta.1(!()tee" (.(/M riPl( C(.(/fJ.I(t !I"abblirj cl'(/tci rlarlirj tk.e, r/a.l(ce, I'(/at/I(e, I()I" ()I(e, ()I k.e/" .f()9f. TJ,e,?:"e, .fe,NbMf} lirte,l(t M Bat tf{ariPl(l(a, ,fk.e, ()(.(/I( (.(/()/f(fJ.I(, ,fk.e, (.(/()I( C'tV-e, lir t() tk.ue, dull? ()lrI/l"a.I(u, lad t:& ,fk.e, (.(/()I( C !Iire, lir t() t7U.fe, I/e,!",.f fJ.I(rIalltk.e, ck.arck.la.rftu acl'(/.f.f tk.l:r l"o/l"U.fel CP((.I(tl"? tk.l:r ()I(e, /al(ta.ft;c .fce,l(e, .fk.e, al(rI twe, t(.(/() t()talf} .fe,If-CMft{/e,l(t(.(/()#(e,1( ()Ic()101''jP (.(/al"irj ()I(t() tk.e, .ftfJ.j'lt fJ.I(rI!a.r.r I"fk.t lir II'(/I(t ()I tiue cO;'" (.(/ea.I"lirj tk.ue t()talf} ()atl"a.p()M C().fta.#fU fJ.I(rI,flirj;,,/ .f(),,/ "1Iot'rltJ.? ,f() It ,f()a.I(rI.i t:& 'VIe tk.all ()I" ,f()#(eti'irj fJ.I(rllt t:& tk.e? :"ejMt tk.a.#filirj tiu;"I(().fu at tiu"/atiet,e/atl"l'at--cu. TJ,e co;.r Q/"e i();tirj ()(I-e/" (.(/Iti I"fk.tePa.f iat .ft;1Itk.e? k.av-e t() iact riP(.(/'f, tk.e? Cal( Ctale M .f()#(ePl(e .f() t()tal!} a,f tf{ariPl(l(a. IIl(rllt l"e#(lirriei#(e ()I k.()(.(/ (.(/e lir tk.e art are, al(.(/P.F ,ftl"fI./!tirt 101" tk.e I"fk.t t() ()ar,felv-u, fJ.I(rIk.()(.(/ tk.e #(fJ.I( l:r tl"flirt t() ,fk.at M rIo(.(/l(. It l"e#(lirriei #(e ()I !eP!1e t:& R()iel"t #o,o/leti()l"!e fJ.I(rI tf"uti /lQ/"Iir;! (.(/k.() akP.F iarlt() Ifit tie #(()I"at:rtle al(rllt #(arle #(e tk.lirt 4 k.()(.(/ tk.l:r ia ttle, iet(.(/ul( a,f riPlirt ()ar ()(.(/I( tk.lirj al(rI tk.eI;" ,ftul'" rft'rla.ctle iait'ttl"? l:r tk.e ()I tk.e artl:rtle to i()(.(/ rio Fa allfeelai()at tiat? /I
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Baffler • 5
A R T
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Well, tuck you! That's got to be one of the most fatu· ous shibboleths in the entire bourgeois lexicon! Now I'll tell you about another platitude. It's a TV commercial for the Gap, part of their current campaign in which dozens of art and music and dance celebrities endorse their products as some kind of hip lifestyle signifier. It depicts a Luke·Perry·ish guy with sideburns - and a ponytail, probably - reading a ludicrously pre· tentious poem about ••• his trousers in a place a lot like this one; dark, smoky, slightly risky. I suppose that by reo inforcing all those fond suburban fantasies about the ex· Citing, fulfilling lives of artists it's convinced a lot of people to buy their jeans from the Gap. Gap products, you know, are supposed to make you stand out from the crowd, mark you as a daring nonconformist, a rebel, an impudent shocker of the bourgeoisie, an artist. Thus does advertising, the great American art form, encapsulate for us the true legacy of modernism: the corporate poet, singing his ode to the commodity muse. It's an image that's almost impossible to avoid. Beck's beer runs a similar commercial in which they portray their product as the choice of TriBeCa, a part of New York City recently gentrified by artists. It pictures the remarkably accessible product in lofts decorated with huge inscrutable canvases, with people painting, with people dressed up to resemble artists. Heath candy posi. tions itself as the angst.relieving bonbon of those ultra· creative sculptors and ever·so·radical action painter types. A brand of trousers is promoted with photography that screams 'daring' and 'impressionistic', disjointed bits of suggestive phrases like "foreign films" and "modern art." Levi's are pictured in an extensive array of Matisse and Picasso imitations, reminding us not only of those artists' cool celebrity hip, but of their revolution. ary defiance of middle·class mores. Of course you think these are just more cheap rip·offs, another co·opting of your precious scene. But in fact ads like these present a much more accurate and honest vi. sion of the state of art in America than does anything produced by anybody in Soho or Provincetown or even Wicker Park. They make no pretenses about the function of artists today, the role you play in a consumer society
6 • Baffler
like ours. Ads like these correctly make one crucial but simple observation: that "art" is fundamentally a lifestyle. It's a pose you adopt, a look and attitude that you affect. It has almost nothing to do with what you produce; in fact it's almost completely content¡free. And it's also, with its image-consciousness, its taste for unrestraint, and its reverence for the new, a lifestyle singularly well-attuned to the cultural necessities of consumer capitalism. Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, it seems, is a publication dedicated to proving this proposition. Month after month it drives home its vision of artist as consumer hero, with glossy photo spreads depicting the amenities of the creative, sensitive lifestyle. Artists are daring nonconformists who, for fear of seeming too conventional, never appear in the same clothing twice. Artists are a liberated people who flout their ineffable individuality by patronizing the most transparently worthless consumer goods just as soon as they are marketed, and abandoning them shortly after. Each issue of Interview escorts us to a consumer fantasy-land inhabited by the brazen Madonna, the sullen Keanu, the challenging Thierry Mugler, the thoughtful Moschino, the army of insurgent models and soon-to-be rock stars, accompanied by all the stuff they own and wear. All are rebels, boldly flouting convention with unusual purchases; all celebrate their liberation from conformity with wild displays of fiscal frivolity; all stoutly defend the integrity of their prize personalities by buying stuff that nobody else has yet. Of course you will have that stuff as soon as your copy of Interview arrives, but our ever-inventive lifestyle leaders will by then be off on something different. The artist, as the word is correctly understood in the context of the spectaclist regime, circa 1992, is a lifestyle you take up as a kind of consumer decision, much as you decide on any other look or commodity ensemble. It's a look and attitude that symbolizes a certain variety of hyper-consumer, the person who leads us perpetually to new styles and products, the pioneer of fashion and neighborhoods, the gentrifier of working-class h.l:oJits and houses, the people who made The Gap, Benetton's, and Pearl Jam possible. And although you
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Baffler • 7
may not dress or behave like your sturdy suburban parents, your role in powering the great wheels of consumer capital. ism is no less important. You may not wear a gray flannel suit, live in a split.level ranch house, or commute every day to the mindless grind, but your duties are just as important to the health of the state. For you, the artists, are a special variety of iiber·bour· geoisie, as the obscene prices commanded by your works and the spiraling rents in places designated as "artist colonies" amply testify. Your role is not to churn out the paperwork, but to churn out the images capital needs to keep us glued to the tube, enthralled with the malls, banal, stupid, and utterly superficial forever. You set a consuming example for the rest of us, you embody the new and demonstrate through your works, deeds, and dress the importance of an ever-novel appearance. In a society driven by an eternally shift· ing public facade you provide a living jus. ... tification of the motto, "Image is Every· thing." Your lifestyle antics serve to eternally remind us of the obsolescence of the old, the invalidity of last year's craze. And holding the whole thing together is that old middle·class favorite, the avant·garde. Now, some fifty years after the historical duties of the avant·garde were universally recognized to have been accomplished, you have made of its doctrines a bizarre commodity cult. You take as your highest - and only! - mission its tired old causes, the shocking of the bourgeOisie, the overturning of tradition. You have abandoned its passion, its conviction, its meaning and have taken instead its mistrust of tradition and made it your only message, your sole article of faith. You flail against the phantom enemies of puritanism, self·restraint, and nonexistent censorships. You fancy yourselves rebels in the mold of Rimbaud, the Dadaists, James Dean; free spirits who refuse to conform to the mandates of a onedimensional society. It's never occurred to you that the one·dimensional soci· ety now runs on images of rebellion, that the bourgeoisie
8 • Baffler
now thrives on being shocked. Your avant-garde posturing now serves to reinforce the planned obsolescence so central to the system you are supposed to be subverting; your eternal trumpeting of the new works to corroborate the great lessons of TV advertising. Your calls for release from the moralistic constraints of the past helps to erode the vestiges of the work-and-save ethos so that it may be replaced by the credit-driven unrestraint deemed necessary by the financial powers-that-be. You are the custodians of commodified dissent, liberators of the consumer id, the paramount symbol of the consumer culture that has made our nation so slack and stupid. You have erected an official style of institutionalized rebellion, a well-oiled image-generating motor which runs at fever pitch to keep the great wheel of eternal novelty turning and turning. With your NEA grants and your daddys money spent on performance spaces and galleries and loft studios you have built an orthodoxy of transgression. It is no surprise that your greatest moments, your "Next Wave Festivals," your big-money gallery openings are sponsored by people like Philip Morris and AT&T. All down the line you professional vanguardists are in league with the cultural project of Madison Avenue. You are the cultural stormtroops of the New, savaging "master narratives" so that the manipulation of the consumer can continue without interference from troublesome things like ethics and tradition. And while once upon a time the leaders of the avant-garde may have posed a serious intellectual threat to the machinations of the official culture, the highest, most forthright embodiment of your lifestyle is the celebrity product spokesman: Andy Warhol for Braniff, Kim Gordon for the Gap, Bohemians for a kind of beer. A number of years ago Daniel Boorstin referred to advertising as "the omnipresent, most characteristic, and most remunerative form of American literature," a body of works "destined to have an intimate popular appeal and a gross national influence without parallel in the history of sacred or profane letters." Michael Schudson calls it "capitalist realism." Either way, advertising is the paramount art form of our age, the cultural expression of the times that dwarfs all others. Here is a form which has absorbed every radical
Baffler • 9
representational technique of the last century. It has been a pioneer in language, film, and video, with a hundred times the money and brain power spent on each prime time TV commercial than on the programs which surround them. It is also an art form with a specific designated goal in mind. Advertising aims to sell not only products but also a way of life in which the buying of products is the primary path to human happiness. No room for precious ambiguity or empty erudition here: advertising means to change your mind, and it uses the often opaque methods of postmodernism in the service of a very unambiguous project. The struggle of the twentieth century has been a cultural one, ever since business recognized that the public's con· suming pattQrns would have to change in order for their profit.taking to continue as usual. But this the art lifestyle fails to comprehend. The conflict is not over some literary canon, as you would like to believe, or over some threat of censorship by the moralistic, or even over the privileging of Western ways. All of these are miniscule sideshows to the central issue: the unquestioned hegemony of consumerism over every facet, every mode of our nation's cultural produc· tion. We are besieged daily from all sides by the braying of the great megaphone of business culture, with TV, film, lit· erature, and artists all screaming the same ever·shifting message. Not multiculturalism, but MONOCULTURALISM is the operative word of the day, as the tide of shit rises unimpeded higher and higher, and the public mind is molded accordingly. The battle is a cultural one, and yet never have the forces of cultural opposition been so blind to the tasks at hand, to the nature of the conflict. The Baffler calls for a earnest embrace of the adversarial purpose to which modernism once dedicated itself, for a frank recognition of the way the monoculture has determined our thoughts and lives. We must have an art that is at least as well done as advertising, that provokes thinking - if not so blatantly, at least as persuasively. We cannot afford to regard the postmodern ... dition" of detached surfaces and unanchored images as an innocuous, inevitable, and irresistible development. The business imagery that has created the postmodern world, remember, is an imagery that works, that does things, that refers to signifieds that make people do things, that causes
10 • Baffler
them to spend their lives in dreary pursuit of a shallow and impossible consumer bliss. If we are truly concerned with humanity and not merely our works' reflection of this or that art theory, we cannot regard this development ironically or fatalistically. As Big Art draws bigger and bigger sums, the fundamental assumptions of the avant-garde are reduced to meaninglessness. The artist has lost his critical social position and become a more or less conscious propagandist for planned obsolescence; a corporate illustrator, decorator, or copywriter: a good little cog in the monocultural machine. And as literature becomes mired in precious sloughs of irony and textuality, these debasements lose their shame. You veer unfailingly away from the central aesthetic questions of our time, opting instead to invent plays for hipness that can be easily transmuted into clever new advertising. And the whole consumerist project itself, the central motive force and organizing theme of our age, becomes unjudgeable amidst the fogs of "undecidability" you have called down upon yourselves. Impotent, powerless, fearful of forthright speech lest you privilege one discourse over another, you have left the world open to exploitation, manipulation, and control by those who know what they want: Madison Avenue and THE BAFFLER. As the great American monoculture achieves an evertightening hegemony, we call for a new aesthetic of resistance, a final secession from the Culture Industry. We call for an art that is radical in its content, not merely in its playful surface innovations. The Baffler proclaims itself the enemy of the stars, the deflator of celebrity, the subverter of your corporate cadre of subversives. And as the nation slides deeper into depression we call for an aesthetic of genuine dissent, for an honest recognition of the forces that conspire to keep us dumb and complacent before the deafening din of the consumer monoculture. In a time when the 'cutting edge' has become a powerful tool for mediocratization, we dedicate ourSelves to its blunting. In an age when the Hollywood glamor of the 'avant garde' has long since overtaken its aesthetic usefulness, we happily devise new tactics to send it scurrying in disarray.
Baffler • 11
12 • Baffler
A Dress its warm bodice and intricate lace tells nothing of its past which I know from a black and white sign hung on an outlet rack. "smoke damaged garments, price reduced." a bubbly clerk, "from a building fire in the L.A. riots; they smell fine." "much sweeter than perfume." a value. ravishing. all gussied up in near-looted cloth, worn resistance. like donning a slab of the Berlin Wall with frills attached. and that is why I have written this across the breast of your treasure. and see within its weave a monochrome of politics, you, and a burning riot on your back.
- Gaston de Bearn
Baffler • 13
Learning English Ginta: Excuse me, that is your cat? Sanita: Hm .... G: I ask: That is your cat? S: Yes, yes. G: Whose? You unknown? S: Who? Where? G: That was only moment. S: Who? G: That self. S: You over event the yesterday.
G: no S: What about you? G: Only about today S: Who is happen? G:Who indeed is you people? S: Please, untouched me? G: You is egoist! S: Why is you of me to trouble? S: It at all about we to speaking G: about a cat S: what is cat? G: About you S: But now is cat G: Then already nothing!
- Bill Holmes 14 • Baffler
semiotics mailbag Responses by Theophile , translated by Hypatia Sanders Dear Theophile: My partner's sexual praxis might conventionally be characterized as "kinky." A favorite discursive intervention during foreplay is, "Let's be someone else tonight." Is (s)he problematizing core bourgeois paradigms of subjectivity and sexuality, or does have a crush on someone else? Theophile Replies: I am disturbed by your use of the active voice. Until your woefully Modernist conception of yourself and your Schnauzer as a system of active agents with essential cores of identity that adopt "masks" at will dries up and blows away, your insistence on the presence of some "other" self outside of your "unified self' will continue to radically undermine the relationship. In the free-floating field of free play that is the funky postmodern lifestyle, your Little Beastie is ALWAYS AND ALREADY fucking ME. Dear Theophile: My roommate and I recently had a dinner party. During the course of the dinner party, our white table cloth was stained with red wine. My penis-possessing roommate suggests that we pour salt on the wine to absorb and remove the stains. Is this act of erasure a patriarchal trick?
Theophile Replies: Your white tablecloth was stained with red wine. Your whiu tabkcloth was stained. ..This is too much. I can't go on. I'll go on. Let the inscriptional evidence show that (my own (grammatically shifted) copy of) the predicate of your problematic has been parsed according to the power-packed discourse of normative grammar. I'm still not "sure" what you're "talking about." Aside from the color terms, containing the implicature of a Freudian signifier-contraption so hackneyed as to constitute an assault on my every orifice, (a RED STAIN yet?) the thing that interests (and being dressed for success in a white penis, I do mean interests, ones accruing from my investment, as in SOUTH AFRICA, interests that both overdetermine the direction of the proceeding response and give me the cultural capital necessary to (apparently) overwhelm any other response that this inquiry might have elicited) me here, the word-crack which I designate as the site of my analytical penetration, is the hyphen, that ligature between "penis" and "possessing." I bet you think that such a grammatical entity isn't HISTORICALLY DETERMINED. HA! I laugh in your face! Before post-structuralism, nobody knew that phrases and images and
Baffler • 15