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The
AFFLER NUlDber Seven
l<uPER
TWEN TIE TH CENTURY LITE The City in the Age of Information
66The .Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge99
Rsmer Number Seven The City in the Age of Information
lOOOk Anterica Paul Lukas Forty- Two Pickup 9 Keith White Sweet Portable Lifestyle 15 Kim Phillips Lotteryville, USA 21 Robert Fiore Fire Sale 29 Stephen Duncombe Quality ofLife 47 Daniel Harris Dirty Talk 91
Civic Amnesia Diamonds Mulcahey Screw Capital of the World 81 Steve Healey Ghosts 99 Dan Bischoff Carter's March 101 Maura Mahoney Our Man in Savannah 105 Thomas Frank A Machine for Forgetting 113
The City and the 6vrhird Wave" Edward Castleton The Fifth International 35 Naomi Klein Just Deserts 36 Tom Vanderbilt Revolt ofthe Nice 61
Fiction Irvine Welsh Disnae Matter 13 Janice Eidus Why I Watch Love Connection 55 Tibor Fischer, Then They Say You're Drunk 69 David Berman Epic Freight 89
PoeDlS
Art
David Trinidad 45 Damon Krukowski 58 Jennifer Moxley 68 Peter Gizzi 87 Rosmarie Waldrop 110
Peter Kuper cover Don MacKeen 5, 17 Greg Fiering 52, 53 Joe Sacco 62, 65 Brian Ralph 104 David Berman 111 Archer Prewitt 122
Thomas
Matt
editor-in-chief
senior editor Greg Lane, foreman
Keith White, editor-sans-frontieres Diamonds Muleahey.. editor-at-sea Maura Mahoney, Tom Vanderbilt. contributing editors Damon Krukowski, poetry Thom Powers.. art To say that an American city in its design and styles represented our spiritual capacity would be almost to say that we were a nation of madmen. -Randolph Bourne, 1915 Enormous cottages of the architecture of the eighties, like warehouses, like institutions-one with dingy Ionic pillars and with a huge black gable carved with grapes and vine leaves ... ; deserted houses of gigantic bulk in which it seems incredible that anyone could ever have lived and which seem to lie so massively on the ground that they must have flattened out the hills with their weight; gulches and gullies, dingy cliffs lined with ignoble dwellings, like blackened barnacles left by a tide which has subsided and turned stagnant; a great many stained-glass windows, like the green and blue of oil in a muddy street or like the scum of stagnant water; the churches monuments of desolation; the Venice jazz cafe; the Carnegie Steel Works sending up nocturnal vapors of solid gold; the nerve-racking Westinghouse Electrical Company covering acres and bristling with machinery and lights; the Heinz factories in Allegheny; CRUICKSHANK APPLE BUTTER aloft on the bald hillside; the "inclines"; motor accidents; students fucking in the hallways of the Carnegie Tech; the unrivaled blackness of those buildings and of those of the Pitt School; the small hills razed and removed, leaving bare unsightly stumps; ... the turbid gray haze-a society smothered in smoke; an epic grimness and harshness-violence oflife-people always breaking out when they did anything at all-throwing themselves over cliffs, going on disastrous joy rides .... -Edmund Wilson, 1923
Thanks to William B. Mallard for his theoretical expertise, Andrea laiacona for her expert theorizing, WHPK-FM, Ion Roikow, Steve Wolters, Fireproof Press, laura at 57th Street Books, Susan at SI. Marks Books, the Empty Bottle and the lounge Ax in Chicago, the Knitting Factory in New York, John Huss, Magic Hour, the Handsome Family, and the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments. The Baffler is published in Chicago by its editors. This one was laid out in June, 1995. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. It is distributed around the world by fine independents. Unless otherwise marked, all contents are copyright Š 1995 The Baffler. Subscribe to The BoHler, $16 lor the next lour issues. Be warned: it tokes us a while to read through all the manuscripts we gel. Please don't write asking us what we're so angry about. No, we don't have on e-mail address. Or a telephone, either. But please send all orders, address changes, correspondence, and manuscripts to us at
P. O. Box 378293, Chieago, IL 60637
Twentieth Century Lite
Q
h, that cyber-revolution! It's turning out to be the long-awaited deliverer ofAmerican business from all the dreadful forces, riotous impulses, and malign social movements that have prevented its happy hegemony all these years. The "Third Wave," philosopher-king Newt Gingrich and his stable of third-rate thinkers proclaim, has fmally liberated the wise entrepreneur not only from the grasp of Washington bureaucrats, with all their meddling demands about workplace safety and minimum wages, but from every other social institution that once threatened him. Labor unions, for example, the nightmarish Second-Wave organizations par excellence, are openly gloated to be a thing of the past, happily ruined by the near-total freedom of capital to move around the globe at will, wherever poverty severe enough to induce people to scab can be found. Best of all, the advent of the Information Society seems to have accomplished the very rosiest of middle-class dreams: it has freed us at last from the ftlthy grasp of the city and its teeming, huddling, criming, union-joining, welfare-cheating, liberal-electing masses. With the final perfection of the global computer net, place will be irrelevant: it will be as easy to transmit "information"-meaning all those human activities we used to call thought and culture-across three thousand miles as it is to meet a client for lunch. As the cloying youngster intoned in last year's MCI commercials, "there will be no more there." No sooner was this profundity grasped by the Gingrichites (it probably helped to have it explained by a cute little tot with what sounds like an English accent) than they were declaring the millennium to be at hand: the metropolis had been abolished. Actual physical social interaction was a relic of the benighted past. No longer would we need to put up with the filth and dangers of the city to get our business done. This is the age of the "suburban entrepreneur hooked up to the Internet," David Brooks wrote recently in New York's City Journal a quarterly propaganda sheet for the latest Republican fantasies. "In the Gingrichian world, cyberspace replaces urban space. Conversations are conducted over the modem instead of over dinner at a metropolitan restaurant or club." Whatever doubts had lingered about the wisdom of suburbanization (a product of New Deal social planning, but we'll overlook that for the moment) have now evaporated: distance doesn't matter. The city is now officially obsolete. It has no further economic function. We "knowledge workers" can do our labor anywhere we want. Let the proles commute. By an almost unanimous verdict, American corporate thought heartily agrees: forget the city! What business theorist George Gilder calls the "telecosm" will have no place for urban agglomerations. "I think we are headed for the death of cities," he asserts in a recent issue of For6es magazine. In the near future, the magazine continues, "people will choose to live anywhere they like while working with anyone they please on the Net; they will leave behind crime, crowds and corrupted schools; they will flee cities." As expressions of pure upper-middle-class fantasy, there's nothing new about the anti-urban bombast of Gingrich, Gilder, and Forbes. Their chimerical cyber-visions are merely another outbreak of a chronic allergy to the metropolis, the latest installment in that favorite affluent daydream of serene Olympian detachment from production and all its complexities. For forty years Organization Man defined himself by his precipitate flight from the cesspools of social interaction, relocating himself in the fantasy BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘
3
land of suburbia where he could remake himself in any image he chose. That initial postwar geographic and demographic shift-which, not incidentally, read poor and working-class America out of the the country's official collective identity and wrecked our landscape as thoroughly as the war did in Europe-has long been the inescapable foundation of national culture, the basic premise from which all events are to be understood. Our televisual world already operates on an assumption of total detachment, of a pristine bourgeois universe into which nasty events like poverty and disaster intrude only as occasional oddities. And the latest cyber-development serves merely to make the fantasy seem that much more natura4 to make the longstanding dream of uppermiddle-class secession, of gated communities and zero contact between us and them appear an utterly practicable maneuver, to make the initial flight from the cities seem miraculously far-sighted. The now economically-outmoded metropolis-what Gilder calls "these big parasite cities sucking the lifeblood out of America" -must learn to forsake the "dole" and accustom itself to a new role: the city is to be the ultimate form of entertainment for the suburban upper middle class, better than CD-ROM even, and brought conveniendy through the wonder of electronics into our ranch homes for our pleasure and consumption. Gilder et al. have no problems with the famous image of the city as a meeting place for people of different ethnicities and walks oflife; in fact, in accordance with the latest multicultural business theorizing, they actively celebrate the kind of cultural crossfertilization that is believed to make American capitalism so vital. It's just that they don't think they should have to physically enter the city in order to partake. After fantasizing about the possibilities of big-city opera being made accessible to all through computers, Gilder asserts that "The telecosm can destroy cities because then you can get all the diversity, all the serendipity, all the exuberant variety that you can find in a city in your own living room." In such a climate who will speak for the city? Why, Utne Reader, of course, which produced a special issue celebrating American cities just last year. But if you came to the magazine expecting some sort of reaffirmation of twentieth century American civilization, you'd be disappointed: the value of cities is that they are Utne Reader writ large, a non-stop alternative lifestyle carnival, where one can gawk at real-live ThirdWorld peoples performing their colorful culture-stunts, consume all sorts of authentic treats, question dominant paradigms at a pricy disco, and then retreat-by public transportation!-to your hip urban abode, well-stocked no doubt with all of the gritty new products designed just for your hip urban demographic. The great achievements of the American metropolis? Such consumer delicacies as coffee houses (which are, erroneously but somehow appropriately, identified with the 1930s snob term "cafe society"), street musicians, and, of course, rollerblading. The most perfect metropolis in the world, that, after considerable thought, the magazine decrees we should emulate? You know without even opening the book-it's Prague. The issue's most telling point is its summary of the joys of Boston, Massachusetts, which reads more like an ironic scoresheet of the fundamental emptiness of urban-hip than a celebration of the city. The author declares his aff"mity for, of all places, Harvard Square, where he consumes "spinach pie" and (of course) coffee and watches the "human potpourri." It's bad enough to describe humanity in terms of a popular yuppie house fra-
4 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN
grance, but it's infinitely worse to actually believe, as the author declares he does, that the street musicians who accumulate in Harvard Square-perhaps the definitive urban fakers: the very most privileged youths of the suburban heartland here to play-act at rock 'n roll rebellion for four years before taking a position in daddy's firm-are actually good Thus do Americans debate the future of the metropolis, the basic issues of how we are to live. There is no more fundamental question, and yet our most prominent dissenters can do little more than mimic the obscene verdict of the right-wing cyberfuturists: cities are places of pleasure, theme parks for the lifestyle experimentation of affluent consumers with the rest of us around to provide colorful entertainment or to clean up after them if we carlt sing and dance. The only real debate occurs over the relatively minor question of whether we should enjoy lifestyle in person or whether, as Gilder puts it, the "tdeputer" will allow us to join in the fun-filtering out all the crime and filth-from our safe, suburban, "own living room." There is, of course, a vast critical literature on cities apart from the lifestyle-carruval tweedle-dum of Gilder and tweedle-dee of Utne. A host of enlightened commentary on our contemporary predicament sometimes finds its way into the public press: Mike Davis's writing on the curious civic culture of Los Angeles and the staggeringly gigantic blunderings of California's policy-makers; Salim Muwakkil's essays on race and urban America; David Harvey's brilliant analysis of space, capital, and consciousness; Camilo Jose Vergara's graphic documentation of urban decay; the committed essayists published recendy in Witness magazine; and Robert Fitch's devastating account of the lucrative engineering of New York's decline. But by some weird inversion of intellectual value, this sott of responsible discussion remains marginalized while the scatterbrained ravings ofwriters like Gilder, Alvin Tomer, Tom Peters, and Jad Garreau receive the attention and plaudits ofthe people who will actually be determining our collective future. Since it refuses to make the fun-
damental acknowledgementofbusiness
benevolence that is step number one in what Doug Hemwodcalls the punditlicensing process, honest criticism can have no sayin the matter. It's either pay
your homage or get out of the game.
BAFFLER SEVEN路
5
We cannot address our civic predicament, it seems, by simply discussing problems with honesty and compassion-any such approach will be resolutely ignored. We must also identifY the disease that prevents difficult or critical ideas from crossing the screens of our national consciousness. As ever, the problem is a cultural one, the devices by which our peculiar urban culture of decay, unconcern, lifestyle, and total segregation by class are made to seem nonnal Our problems arise from a complex: of never-to-be-questioned municipal faiths, bizarre assumptions about the public-mindedness of private industry, and a thoughtsquelching climate of competition between states and between cities. We can't understand what's happening because we suffer from a deadly form of civic amnesia, a tendency to fancy ourselves cut loose from the past; a willingness to forget about whatever it was that caused our cities to be built in the first place in a frenzied, headlong rush to attract conventions and make ourselves attractive for corporate 'relocation.' We can no longer comprehend the hard, basic urban reality of social class, we have no idea how these conglomerations of power and people which we inhabit ever came to be, and we cannot imagine our own pasts, except those happy times spent amid the jollycaperings of celebrities---cowboys and Indians, rubicundAl Capone, the homes of the Stars. To even suggest an alternative to business control of every aspect of life has become heresy unthinkable. Even worse, the instant mobility of the "Information Age" has vasdy intensified competition between cities. Here, as it has done to almost every other species of discussion that it has touched, the cyber-revolution has transformed what was left of committed commentary into craven, desperate, panic-stricken self-promotion. Boosterism has always been an underlying urban stupidity, but in recent years it has been become the pre-eminent form of civic discourse, the omnipresent theme of every newspaper article, every business round-table, every sportsbar conversation. Cities are scurrying to transform themselves into consumer products, to substitute brand image for history, a carnivalesque "diversity" for ethnic identity, and to prosper not by, say, building things but by winning as large a market-share as they can. The waves may be lapping at the gunwales, but our officials seem to have convinced themselves that the answer is to crow loudly about how much drier it is over at their end. Here in Chicago, the South Side steel mills continue to be razed along with the lives, generations, and neighborhoods that surrounded them (never worth much more than a two-minute human interest segment on the 1V news in the best of times). Buy a plasticized city map at any downtown store and look for the South Side on it: it isn't there. Drive around and try to find the neighborhood where the Memorial Day Massacre took place in 1937 (or better yet, find the "labor martyrs" web site); you can't. Here a tree grows through a roof, there a factory is dynamited for the cameras of a visiting Hollywood movie crew. Down here civilization is over; The City is an obscene joke. Oblivious to it all the new order is prospering out on Navy Pier, just east of the glittering North Michigan Avenue shopping district. The city has finally completed there a monumental embodiment of its new civic vision: a gigantic ferris wheel from which the town's towers can be viewed to advantage. The city cannot guarantee that fog will obscure the smoke and fires of the South Side on every day of the week, but the wheel suffers no shortage of customers nonetheless. -Thomas Frank 6 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN
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"alternat ive· lifestyles 10 Ihe social function of Ihe Illinois lo((<:ry,he Ihffier l$ Ihe only magazine in America thai offe rs such a consislendy (!':I nk and :lbruivc quality. As it begins (0 appc;lf more rl:gularly, il will publish much (hal you cannol well afford 10 miss. • In addition. olherwrilers across (he co ntinent are beginning 10 nOlice our parl icular nylc of cultul'1Ii criticism. The Slar, for example, now openly admilS ,hat we all: "(hI' sm:l. r(C$[ :md mOSI udling magalin.: in America." • vital" is how Farlsh"/ Fivt pUIS jt. "Almost like:l. roadmap of can-
temporary culture. '
• «Only slightly larger than R(Odrrs' Digest but with Ihe weight of:l. hand-gr.:. nade, murmurs the awestruck N= y"rkn: •Writing in The Nllti"R, E1iubeth I'o<:hod;I averred that · You'd have to look at the fighn New York intelleclUals in the fiftiC$ to find the $Or! of veroal firepower unle:l.$hed here." • A{Urnlltiw Prm &lIi= auerrs that we're of the most brilliantly critical of the journals eovering pop cu hure ...along with all the 5earingCSS<lYS is a good sdection of fiction, poetry, and art. · • one of the smartest publications in the cou ntry: eonfides Might magazine. "Consistently ahead of the pack crifi(;2lly, The Barne r is genuinely dangerous and would be illegal if morc people knew about if.· • -A mid the mush of m;In;Igerial newspeak and cd ... brity journalism that p:uses for public discoursc,The Ibmer is an important and encouraging sign," $;Iys historian Jack$Oll !..ears. "Filled. with vigorous, witty, and incisive critidsm. it OfTNS a bracing alternative to postmodern celebrations and neoconservative condemnations of popul;It cuhu!'e--to conventional wisdom of all variedC$. The Bamer is a vital, unpredictable, and independent voice. At laSt. "
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BAFFLER SEVEN
•.
,'11
Forty-Two Pickup
T
Paul Lukas
he headline on the full-page newspaper ad reads, "Times Square: The greatest retail opportunity in New York at the Crossroads of the World." The ad's text gushes over the "80,000 square feet of prime retail space now available on New York's most exciting four corners--42nd Street where Seventh Avenue meets Broadway-a new world ofshopping, dining and entertainment!" The fine print politely but firmly informs us that" Crossroads ofthe WOrldis a registered service mark ofTImes Square Center Associates." So it has come to this: In what was once the greatest city in the world, realtors, acting with the full complicity of city government, spin ludicrous schemes to unload mountains of overpriced square footage that nobody wants in a neighborhood most sane retailers abandoned years ago. A neighborhood where nobody has "dined" in nearly three decades and where most of the "shopping" and "entertainment" revolve around peep booths. A neighborhood where every development plan over the past 20 years has come crashing down like rubble from a structurally deficient tenement. In the umpteenth attempt to transform Times Square into a silk purse, the city is now resorting to the governmental equivalent of a three-card monte game designed to dupe unwary tourists. Tourists, as it turns out, are the key element here, for today's New York, unable to sustain itself on indigenous revenues alone, now relies increasingly on an influx of cash from wide-eyed outsiders who come to town to see the sights and, naturally, spend some dough. The sad irony, of course, is that the dismantling of the city's manufacturing base over the past few decades, which has necessitated this tourism-dependent approach, has also made New York a much less interesting place to visit. Once a city teeming with light industry (the NYC garment trade, now almost wholly absent except for a few sweatshops, once featured over half a dozen shops that did nothing but sew buttonholes), New York is now a perfect example of the country's shift away from production and toward a service economy. And the best place to see these forces at work is in Times Square. The Square, of course, was once a tourist magnet in the classical sense: people came here to gawk because it was the center of a living, working metropolis. Like the rest of the city, it never had to aggressively market itself-local retailers and manufacturers provided a viable economic base, and if out-of-town travelers felt compelled to drop some cash during their visits, well, so much the better. At this point, however, the Square's fabled billboards and movie marquees have long since become the stuff of memories and overblown legend. The huge billboards that populate the Square today are little more than selfparodies, super-sized monstrosities that serve to institutionalize a marketing myth that few of today's young ad-agency go-getters are even old enough to remember. As for the thePaul Lukas works in Times Square and lives in Brooklyn, where he publishes Beer Frame: The Journal ofInconspicuous Consumption. He firmly believes that a service economy is a servile economy. BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘
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aters, 42nd Street (or "the Deuce," as it is called here) appears destined to be known more for the pornographers who have taken over the movie halls in the past 25 years than for the big-budget Hollywood epics that once held sway there. Not that the city isn't trying to do something about that, however. After years of being treated as a tolerable nuisance, maybe even a necessary evil, the skin merchants are now finding that a tourist-centric New York is a much more image-conscious New York, which means even the Square is no longer a safe haven for them. The city's recent anti-smut campaigns may play well in November, but these latest sweeps have less to do with puritanical moralism than with hardball economic concerns: as one industry after another has deserted the city, lured elsewhere by the promise of lower real estate costs, cheaper overhead, lower prevailing wages, and so on, Gotham's tax base has crumbled, leaving New York more dependent than at any other time in its history on a steady influx of awestruck tourists, a cavalcade of gullible out-of-towners who can be counted upon to stop staring up at the skyscrapers just long enough to eat a few meals, see a show or two, and buy a bunch of souvenirs. As the reality of this increasingly desperate environment began to unfold, the porn trade's adjacency to the still-lucrative Broadway theater district could no longer be tolerated-the sex-peddlers would have to go. The crucial step in accomplishing this was the early-'90s establishment of the Times Square Business Improvement District and the Times Square Redevelopment Project, the latter of which allowed the state, acting under its broad powers of eminent domain, to begin condemning a series of Times Square properties and evict the tenants-primarily pornographers-therefrom. Not all of the pubic panderers have been given the heaveho--indeed, a noontime stroll down the Deuce or the immediately contiguous strip of Eighth Avenue still offers some very interesting variations on the Businessman's Lunchbut a fair number of the establishments have been shut down, a fact that the city, the Redevelopment Project, and the Business Improvement District trumpet to the press at every available moment. But in a public-relations mess that nobody appeared to anticipate, many of the T &A merchants simply relocated elsewhere in the city, often in largely residential neighborhoods, prompting many NYC denizens who hadn't given Times Square a second thought for years to suddenly pine for "the good old RELOCATION days" when the xxx: crowd could be counted upon to remain safely on the Deuce. The curMoving? rent mayoral administration has responded A move illnOftl than just a change of address. Many individuals now dts. covmng that with proper planning and with a rezoning plan designed to move the .....uch. the IUatyIe ""'"II"' ..quUed with a need not be painful. sex trade to the very outskirts of the city, alProfnsional relocation set\I'ice com".home and arranging the transportation of ....... They will pnMd•• rues offer auistance (usually at no dwge) _ that can ease the transition to a new area. comprehensive infonnation that though this scheme appears so unlikely to pass A relocation counselor worb with you includes dala about taxes. schools, child through your entire move. Your couaseior care, transportation and more. 1h! relocaFirst Amendment scrutiny that it can only be Wlll discuss your concerns regarding the tion counselor will maldt you with • sales relocation process, housing associate who assumed to be a cheap show of face-saving ... ""'....... typeofoo...u.g"", deoU.. The relocation counselor will stay in I I, shopping, cultural attractions - whattouch W1th you until you are successfully ! effort for the voters. I ever your needs may be. 1bey will also settled to ensure need.s are , I discuss local real estate practices and can and that you are receIVing quality servtee 1 Meanwhile, as one property after anI ilS5ist in effectively marketing your old hom all your service providers. I other has been condemned and shut down, 11M
10 •
BAFFLER SEVEN
the city has been frantically attempting to lure new tenants into the Square, which explains the desperate advertisements like the one cited at the beginning of this essay. In an attempt to make the area more palatable for tourists during this interim period when the Bad Guys (i.e., the libido brigade) are on their way out but the Good Guys (i.e., anyone who can be tricked into investing in the Square) haven't yet arrived, the Business Improvement District and the Redevelopment Project have embarked on a series of programs designed to put a rosy tint on all things Square-related. In a 1993 move that bordered on the surreal, a team of conceptual artists was turned loose on 42nd Street, transforming condemned storefronts into postmodern art galleries (the worst aspect of all this: marquee after once-proud marquee displaying vacuous statements by the very annoying Jenny Holzer). How this played with the tourists from Peoria is anybody's guess, but the Redevelopment Project and Business Improvement District aren't taking any chances. In the tradition of so many unimaginative tourism boards before them, the groups have convinced themselves that what out-of-town visitors really want is a touch of artificial nostalgia-hence the plans to run a thoroughly useless trolley across town from the Square to the United Nations building. One can easily envision the Californians-hell, the Japanese.Lburning up the phone lines to their travel agents: "Listen, book me and the family on a flight to New York, pronto-I've got to ride that trolley!" In the midst of all this nonsense it should be noted that the city's shell game has succeeded in attracting a few well-heeled saps into the fold. The New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street is being renovated by the Walt Disney Corporation, a dream investor that surely fits the city's profile of an ideal partner: deep pockets, plenty of experience in the service sector, and from out oftown. The Disney honchos apparently found the Square so well-suited to their plans that they more recently announced a scheme to build a hotel/ entertainment center on the northeast corner of 42nd and Eighth. The city had hoped that the presence of the Mouse That Bored would attract other entertainment moguls to the Square. But it took over a year and the humiliating prospect of Disney threatening to withdraw their investment to force the city fathers to put together a sufficiently cushy deal to entice others into the fold. In mid-July, with Disney on the verge of pulling out from the New Amsterdam, a relieved group of redevelopers announced that the Livent theater production company would be renovating the Academy and Lyric theaters. A day later, longsimmering negotiations were completed to bring the British Madame Tussaud's and the Kansas City-based American Multi-Cinema firms into the Square. All this to reassure the Disney brass, who had already been given enough city-financed low-interest loans to cover 75% of their Deuce-related costs. In any event, not even the Disney coup can overshadow some of the uglier realities of the current Times Square campaign. The Redevelopment Project, in its zeal to sanitize the area via ritual evictions, has succeeded in putting scores of small businessmen, and their respective staffs, out of work. Not all of these were pornographers, either-a cigar/candy shop on the northwest corner of 42nd and Seventh, for instance, had to go in early 1993 in order to make room for a pamphlet-dispensing Visitors Center, an object lesson in how the BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘
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new urban priorities cater to out-of-town money at the expense of home-grown entrepreneurism. In a move that essentially amounted to rubbing salt in the wound, the Visitors Center stayed in the space for only about 18 months, after which it was relocated down the block to the Harris Theatre. As of this writing, the storefront that housed the cigar shop is closed, shuttered, and locked. Other non-pornographers unlucky enough to have been in the way of the Redevelopment Project's master plan include a group of about two dozen artists facing eviction from their loft and living spaces on 42nd and 43rd Streets. Armed with hand-held signs depicting a death skull wearing Mousketeer ears, the group staged a small protest at the corner of 44th and Broadway on March 30th of this year. While their claims of being owed special status simply by virtue of their creative endeavors was typical art-community claptrap, their basic point-that it makes little sense to evict them when it's far from certain that any corporate tenant will ever be brought in to replace them-struck at the heart of the current Times Square situation. In fact, the desolate string of abandoned storefronts now dotting the Square's streets can hardly be described as a visual improvement over the way the area looked before the sex biz was given its walking papers-at least the neighborhood still looked alive then. The many establishments that now stand vacant, offering mute testimony to the Redevelopment Project's purge of pornographer and non-pornographer alike, include a popular deli on 43rd Street, an arcade and a series of novelty shops on Seventh Avenue, and a pair of taverns on 43rd, among them the venerable Gough's, which for decades served as the prototypical newspaperman's bar, second home to generations of New York Times reporters, photographers, and pressmen. Gough's, as it turns out, may have suffered the most humiliating chapter in this entire enterprise-in a classic case of adding insult to injury, the bar was shut down in early 1994 in order to clear the way for a back door to a theater being renovated on 42nd. Years from now, when the trolley is just another dimly remembered fiasco, when Disney has abandoned their experiment on the Deuce and taken their tax write-off, when the majority of the city's populace is employed selling Statue of Liberty pencil sharpeners and Empire State Building snow domes to foreigners and strangers, someone should remember the perfect irony of a tradesman's bar, a worker's bar, being displaced by a tourist trap. Welcome to the modern metropolis.
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BAFFLER SEVEN
Disuae Matter
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Irvine Welsh
h wis it that Disneyland in Florida, ken. Took hur n the bairn. Wi me gittin peyed oaf fi Ferranti's, ah thoat it's either dae somethin wi the dough or pish it doon the bog it the Willie Muir. Ah saw whit happened tae a loat ay other cunts; living like kings fir a while: taxis ivraywhair, chinkies ivray night, cairry-oots, ye ken the score. N whit dae they huv tae show fir it? Scottish Fuckin Fitba Association, that's what, ya cunt. Now ah wisnae that keen oan Disneyland, bit ah thoat: fir the bairn's sake, ken? Wish ah hudnae bothered. It wis shite. Big fuckin queues tae git oan aw the rides. That's awright if ye like that sortay thing, but it's no rna fuckin scene. The beer ower thair's pish n aw. They go oan aboot aw thir beer, thir Budweiser n aw that; its like drinkin fuckin cauld water. One thing ah did like aboot the States though is the scran. Loadsay it, beyond yir wildest dreams, n the service n aw. Ah mind in one place ah sais tae hur: Fill yir fuckin boots while ye kin, hen, cause whin wi git back hame will be livin oafay McCain's oven chips till fuck knows when. Anywey, it this fuckin Disneyland shite, this daft cunt in a bear suit jumps oot in front ay us, ken? Wavin ehs airms aboot n that. The bairn starts fuckin screamin, gied ur a real fright, ken? So ah fuckin panels the cunt, punches the fuckin wide-o in the mooth, or whair ah thought ehs mooth wis, under that suit, ken? Too fuckin right! Disneyland or nae fuckin Disneyland, disnae gie the cunt the excuse tae jump oot in front ay the bairn, ken. Thing is, these polis cunts, fuckin guns n aw ya cunt, nae fuckin joke, ah'm tell in ye, they sais tae ays: Whit's the fucking score here, mate, bit likesay American, ken? So ah goes, noddin ower tae this bear cunt: Cunt jumped oot in front ay the bairn. Well ootay fuckin order. The polis cunt jist says somethin aboot the boy bein a bit too keen it ehs joab, ken. The other yin sais somethin like: Mibbe the wee lassie's frightened ay hears, ken? So then this radge in a yellay jaykit comes along. Ah tipples right away thit eh's that bear cunt's gaffer, likesay. Eh apologises tae ays, then turns tae the hear cunt n sais: Wir gaunny huv tae lit ye go mate. They wir jist gaunny, likes, gie the boy ehs fucking cairds like that. This is nae good tae us, eh tells the hoy. This perr cunt in the bear suit, eh's goat the head oaf now, likes; the cunt's nearly greetin, gaun oan aboot need in the joab tae pey ehs wey through college. So ah gits a hud ay this radge in the yellay jaykit n sais: Hi mate, yir ootay order here. Thir's nae need tae gie the hoy ehs cairds. It's aw sorted oot. Mean tae say, ah banged the cunt awright, bit ah didnae want the boy tae lose ehs joab, ken. Ah ken whit it's fuckin like. It's aw a great laugh whin they chuck that redundancy poppy it ye, bit that disnae last firivir, ken. Aw they doss cunts thit blow the dough Irvine Welsh is the author of the short story collection Acid House and the fonhcoming novel Marabou Stork Nightmare, both published by Norton. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. "Disnae Marter" is excerpted from The Acid House by Irvine Welsh. Copyright Š 1994 by Irvine Welsh. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘
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oan nowt. Thuv goat mates they nivir kent they hud-till the fuckin hireys run oot. Anywey, this supervisor radge goes: S'up tae you mate. You're happy, cunt keeps ehs joab. Then eh turns tae the boy n sais: Yir fuckin lucky, ah'm tellin yeo If it wisnae fir the boy here, ken, ye'd be pickin up yir cairds, but this is aw American, likesay, ye ken how aw they doss cunts talk, oan the telly n that. The cunt ah gubbed, this bear cunt goes: Really sorry, mate, rna fault, ken. So ah jist sais: Sound by me. The polis n the supervisor boy fucked off n the bear cunt turns n sais: Thanks a lot, buddy. Have a nice day. Ah thoat fir a minute, ah'lI fucking gie ye nice day, ya cunt, jumpin oot in front ay the fuckin bairn. Bit ah jist left it, ken, nae hassle tae the cunt. Boy's entitled tae keep ehs joab; that wis rna good deed fir the day. Ah jist goes: Aye, you n aw, mate.
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Sweet Portable Lifestyle Keith White In Our City You Can Rollerblade Near water like my dinners ethnic, my coffee latte, my gossip salacious, and my conversation wired. Not a lot to ask, you might think, but difficult to know where to find in an unfamiliar city -if one doesn't know where to look. Fortunately, despite a peripatetic life that has meant six different urban settings in three years, I've suffered no appreciable change in my leisure-time pursuits. That's because a bevy of slick publications- Washingtonian, New York, San Francisco Focus, and Chicago act as my guides, willingly exposing each city's secrets, directing me to the microbreweries and tattoo parlors that define my life. As a nomadic member of the meritocratic class, I maintain a mobile lifestyle, flowing as easily as capital or information between the moneyed pockets of the nation's various urban centers. A loyal knowledge worker, I'm ready to pack up my rollerblades and mountain bike at a mere beeper message from my boss, to be hermetically transported to yet another hip, urban playground filled with like-minded members of my psychographic. For my truly important consumer decisions-which sneakers, bottled water, or computer operating software to own-I take my cues from the national media. But many aspects of my urban lifestyle-which third-world restaurants, home design stores, and sports teams to patronize-simply don't lend themselves to presentation on a national scale. This, then, is the objective of the city magazine and the form of press-release journalism that it has perfected: to glamorize the handful of culture-products that go unaffected by national image advertising, to provide elaborate breakdowns of the various items that are supposed to be unique to my town. The resulting trade-off is simple: I get to feel like a savvy, life-long resident of a place, intimately acquainted with all its gritty minutiae; and local merchants, their wares enhanced by inclusion in long "best of" lists and full-color, slick-paper articles, get my business. Thanks to these magazines I can consume a city like any other packaged product.
I
A Riot 0/Same "Where do you want to go today?" asks Microsoft's new ad campaign, associating its products with the glamorous globetrotting lifestyle of a cast of cyber-corporate protagonists. This is the official version of the new bourgeois dream: everywhere they-and I-go is supposed to be wildly diverse and exciting. But the fact is that everywhere we go the diversity and excitement are always the same. The main difference I notice when I go from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury to Chicago's Wicker Park to Washington's Adams-Morgan, is whether the local Starbuck's is independently owned or a franchise. Things trumpeted as making each town unique turn out to be remarkably predictable: Guess what-
they revitalized the waterfront! And there's gonna be riverboat gambling! With less and less to distinguish one place from the next, city magazines teach me to invest tremendous meaning into the minute differences that are discernible, like those BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘
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