No2

B

The

AFFLEIt Summer 1990

SUBURBIA

The Joumal that Blunts the CuttlnQ EdQe

Ce poison va rester dans toutes nos veines meme quant, la fanfare toumant, nous serons rendu a l'ancienne inharmonie.

Rimbaud

B

The

~FFLER

Nothing speaks more plainly of the entertainment plutocracy's "institutional avant~garde" than their own public relations puffery.

The Philip Morris company, inc., recently ran a full~color two~page advertisement on the inside cover of Harper's magazine for the "Next Wave Festival." It read, in part: The Wailing of Qawwali, RoUer Skaters, Mega~Decibel Machine Music, Uve Chickens ... And Let Us Not Forget the Goat.

THIS IS ART? You betcha! This is the Next Wave Festival. The next frontier of the visual and perfomting arts.

This is a window to Torrurrrow. Dazzling. Exhilarating. Controversial. Perhaps even incendiary. (Has there ever been a significant new movement in the arts that hasn't driven traditionalists stark, staring mad? ) ....

If the Next Wave Festival should start minds ricocheting at new angles ... then there wiU be quiet rejoicing at aU the Philip Morris companies, whose people light creative fires in many fields. In Enterprise as weU as the Arts.

A T & T, the sponsors of the recent Robert Longo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, took out big ads in the Chicago Tribune to slaver over their chosen avatar of the avant~garde in remarkably similar terms: Art from the dark side? Or the cutting edge of creation? ....

The spectacular art of Robert Longo is causing debate and making viewers stand back and take notice. Of the power with which he brings together drawing, painting, sculpture, music, and video. Of the impact With which he challenges complacency. And of the audacity with which he assaults our senses.

For 50 years, we at AT&T have made it our business to put artists and audiences together. Often the result is applause. Sometimes gasps. Always spirited communication.

And communication, after aU, has been our business for more than a century.

These notices, with their slick post~modern graphics and their ad~ 2

man's prose, provide us with a startlingly apt opportunity to renew THE BAFFLER's battle with the false avant,garde of contemporary art. On the surface, the ostentatious public homage paid by certain corporations to "Next,Wave", the "cutting edge," and "audacity" in art seems very peculiar. Art and business are ancient enemies, or pretend to be, anyways. For years avant,gardists have made careers out of simple schemes for shocking the bourgeoisie, the benighted Babbitts of the provincial cities.

But in 1990, as these conspicuous announcements demonstrate, corporate America has few qualms about endorsing most major,league art, since it so thoroughly mirrors their own cultural program. For all their talk about "windows to tomorrow" there is certainly nothing more audacious about these vanguardists than, say, commercials for MTV or perfume or shoes. This art is not adversarial; it's not even 'alternative.' It is, though, openly and utterly given over to PR ex, perimentation, to the imperative of novelty and the other perennial themes of consumerist culture. The works promoted here are con' sumer products; from their countless facile attempts to startle, to the trendiness which supports their market value, to the easy alliances they have found with advertising campaigns. These days both artists and admen mouth standard paeans to the New and obligatory slights of those who fail to keep up with the industry's latest models, and both cooperate in a transparent attempt to humanize certain loath, some corporations.

Convinced as firmly as ever that the taste of our time has been determined by the imperatives of the Culture Industry, THE BAF, FLER calls upon artists and writers to recognize the extent to which their craft has been appropriated by plutocracy for its own uses. The cult of the new that resounds so sneeringly from these ads is merely a smokescreen for the hegemony of planned obsolescence; the effort to shock simply a tool for the generation of markets; and the schemes of intentional obfuscation a shameful surrender to the powers which would render art toothless. The art of the "Next Wave" is a businessmen's art; its techniques that of the PR,man. By deploying the once,radical concepts of 'the avant'garde' and 'the shocking,' business culture has eliminated the once,vital artistic opposition to its consumerist project.

In 1990 "avant,garde" means something closer to being the first 3

on the block to wear a Batman t,shirt than it does to inventing a truly meaningful, penetrating representational (or abstract) technique.

And shocking the bourgeoisie was never much of an artistic program in the first place. It's just as shallow as ever, only today - with the sanctifying cultural models of the ''Next Wave Exhibit" to guide them - it's the bourgeoisie who go through an endless pantomime of shocking one another. Nobody is truly shocked anymore; the entire apparatus of shockery persists only because the shocking has been so profitably appropriated and fetishized: the perpetual scramble for the latest model has been blessed by a coalition of artists and admen, and the purchasing public is only too willing to buy and buy and buy as much art and cigarettes and clothing and cars and hi,fis as they can, provided their new stuff will vex their less up,to,date neighbor.

In the last century this marriage of business and art has produced a vast pan,media celebration of the folkways of Capitalism; an Official Style that subverts opposition by simulating rebellion; a dignified kitsch that gives apathy a sophisticated facade. Its works are displayed on the slick pages of almost every national magazine as well as in the nation's trendiest galleries. The alliance of commerce and culture has convinced the booboisie of the urbanity of conformity more effec, tively than even the slickest of 1950s commercials. And, if their complacent vanguard ism goes unchallenged, capital will have created a new and improved acquisitive machine that eliminates or co,opts its intellectual opponents like never before.

As Big Art draws bigger and bigger sums, the fundamental assump, tions of the avant,garde are reduced to meaninglessness. The artist is loses his crucial social position and becomes a more or less conscious propagandist for planned obsolescence; a corporate illustrator, decora, tor, or copy,writer.

And as literature becomes mired in precious sloughs of irony and textuality, these debasements lose their shame. Our writers veer unfailingly away from the central aesthetic questions of our time, opting instead to invent facile plays for hipness that can be easily sold to Madison Avenue. And the whole consumerist project itself, the central motive force and organizing theme of our age, becomes un, judgeable amidst the fogs of "undecidability" they have called down upon themselves. Impotent, powerless, fearful of forthright speech lest 4

they privilege one discourse over another, they have left the world open to exploitation, manipulation, and control by those who know what they want: Wall Street and

THE BAFFLER In a time when the 'cutting edge' has become a powerful tool for mediocratization, we proudly rededicate 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.

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Thomas Frank Editor in Chief Managing Editor Jeff Smith New York Editor Keith White Virginia Editor Gaston de Bearn

The Arbiters of Elegance Sean Anderson Silvia Fernandez Greg Mikkelson David Nichols

Myra Chachkin Andy Golub Dave Mulcahy Chris Ostergaard Marianne Potje

Special thanks to Fernando Jones & MY BAND! and the New Century Singers for

appearing at the Baffler benefit, to Blackey Douglas for typesetting, and to the Student Government of the University of Chicago.

The Baffler has moved illl headquarters to the University of Chicago, where it is a "recognized student organization."

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Baffler Summer 1990 Sean Anderson Frederic Wakeman JohnHus Leah Zonis Gaston de Beam T.C. Frank Gaston de Beam David Levinsky David Berman Robert S. Nelsen Sean Anderson Lisa Grunberger A. Plantageonette

2 Poems A Shudder in the Loins Dual Yul Century And Yet ...

Pinweelz Cul,de,sac Country Twilight of Idylls Marty, Joey & Jesse The Sad Edge Angel&Me Landfall Pillsbury Dough Man A Strauss ian Analysis ...

8 9

14 16 17 18 30 31 33 35 43 44 45

Cover drawing by Dina San Giovanni

Š Copyright 1990, The Baffler. All rights revert to authors.

Please send submissions and praise to our new address: 1212 E. 59th Street Room 210, Box 26 Chicago, Illinois 60615 Copies of Baffler # 1, the original "Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge," are available for $2 plus 70¢ postage. Baffler# 1 includes the celebrated exegesis on Mark Trail as well as the Baffler manifesto and fiction by Julia Clinger.

Editor Erik Bennett, where are you?

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Bedroom Scene By the bureau you swam into black cloth, belted red. Perfect mourning marked with fire; sorrow for blood shed long ago in some other bed. You dressed without looking at me, not daring the glance that might have held you for a stammering moment. Three steps in stockings to the door, and swinging from your hooked fingers, two red shoes.

Simile Just as your toes are warming up beneath the covers, the wife whispers "Darling, America wants to come in out of the cold," so you grumble through the frigid kitchen to the door, and there sits this orange cat looking all matted and filthy from who-knows-what rubbish it's been poking in, and when you reach for a towel it blinks twice and darts off again into the darkness.

Sean Anderson

Emil~' Dickin~()n

col1oge; Raina Grigg

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A Shudder in the Loins Frederic Wakeman While retrieving my New York Times I noticed that it was September 12, 1962.

My twenty-ninth birthday, god the time.

On my stroll from the Harvard Club, where I lived, to my office on Third Avenue, I became pleasantly aware that Manhattan island was waking up from its summer snooze. Gtand Central Station was discharging male human hordes whose white jackets, dark shirts, white neckties, and deep suntans turned them into negative prints of their winter selves. Even the weather had returned from its beach holiday; a friendly breeze licked my face.

My first phone call was from Ben Fairweather's Miss Finnegan: "Unless you're busy, Mr. Lovelady, he'd ... " "Come in anyway," I said. "And why not? He's the boss."

On my desk was a registered letter with a Hallmark birthday card attached to Mom's certified check for $200,000.00.

Thanks to good old Mom, I could now emulate Ben and force my underlings to listen to my monologues! Seriously, I could open my own publishing shop, quit promoting schlock, and for a change start printing reading matter deserving the name of litetature.

But ambition soon spawned a sort of post-coital skepticism. Even to today's dreamers, alas, the film and soundtrack are mightier than the typewriter.

However, the book business was still very good. Our country boasted a literate president who had written at least part of a good piece of non-fiction.

Although fiction itself was in a cyclical depression, literary criticism never had it so well. Universities overflowed with the new breed of critics, some of them apparently arriving in flying saucers.

Structuralists told us that the Oedipus of Sophocles owed its glory to a lame foot. And the hermeneutics crowd became adept at turning oak trees such as Hamlet into acorns.

But one of these over-nights, I fondly presumed, literature would suddenly mushroom into something as creative as Big Bang science. So let the coroner-critics perform their autopsies on our masterpieces. I was waiting for the authorial renaissance and what better reason for going into the publishing business?

Sometimes, it was hard to see the roses for the thorns, though. "Because of rising production costs," Ben Fairweather was now gravely rejecting all manuscripts that promised great reviews but small sales. Not quality but number had become the name of the publishing game. And paths of numbers led but to the compu ...

"If you're busy, Pod ... " It was Ben with his usual cat-to-mouse humility. For

Frederick Wakeman is the author of numerous novels, among them The Hucksters (1946) & Shore Leave ( 1944) .

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answer, I poured him a coffee which he ritually saccharined, although forty pounds overweight from too many canapes.

"This is my morning to think," I explained.

"About what?" ''Who,'' I corrected. ''Who in coming generations will be capable of comprehending the new literary masterpieces, if there are any? T oday's students seem to be having a hard time merely understanding one sentence written by such as Henry James, Joyce, Faulkner, Austen, or George Eliot. I mean, Ben, are you and I following or whipping a dead hearse?"

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY SON," shouted Ben, picking up Mom's birthday card, with check attached. "I did not spend my time in the OSS for nothing, Pod. Your Mom is your backer, your angel. Poor thing! I'll miss you and these morning dialogues."

"Monologues," I corrected. We fell silent together, looking at workers entropizing in the other glass houses across Third Avenue.

Finally, Ben said, "No stones are thrown. Just bullshit."

Monologue time. Obligingly I prompted, "Why poor Mom?" "Because our tank thinkers have picked the wrong Nemesis. What's going to get us finally is not the atom bomb but TV." "Illiteracy is not fatal," I scoffed. "Turtles can't read."

"Our species is too sexy to self-destruct. By us I mean us book people. Your poor Mom's money will be whipping a dying horse. TV is the paradigmatic pedophile, the ultimate child-rapist. Babes trained from birth to think via images.

Language, writing, speech are based on logic. Alice in Wonderland has to be written credibly. But there are no syllogisms in a sequence of images. Image A does not have to be true in order to believe Image B. The winning image is the most socko one. Soon, the only writing will be in scenarios."

Miss Finnegan tiptoed in whispering, ''There are two gentlemen in turbans asking for you, Mr. Fair .....

* * * * * . I spent the remaining working hours of my twenty-ninth birthday in the New York Public and J.P. Morgan Libraries doing research on a projected coffee-table art book tentatively titled: Juana the Mad Master.

I emerged from the Morgan Library just before five to find myself under a black cloud much bigger than the island of Manhattan. Riding up to my twenty-ninth floor office, I was startled to relate my business address to my age. In the foyer, Ben had his fiction editor pinned against the wall with one more gleaning from his vast anectodagery: ''Together in a hansom cab! Can you imagine how Joyce's vile Gauloise cigarettes must have exacerbated Proust's asthma?"

Dis-Iapeling the fiction editor, he neatly blocked my quarterback sneak with, "Wait, Pod, I want to pin a p.s. on this a.m.'s dialogue."

"Monologue. Shoot."

"Circa 1990 you publishers will discover that reading manuscripts is not cost10

effective. So you'll return all of them unopened."

"If you present publishers paid us readers half the wages this city pays its subway changemakers, Ben, manuscript-reading would not be cost-effective now."

"Come, come, Pod. All you speed-readers come down to us from the Ivy League not for salaries, but to sneakily learn our trade so your Moms or Pops can set you up in business. Have you leased your offices yet? And do I get any thanks for training you?"

"Ummm. So who reads after we stop reading?"

'The literary agents, who else? They'll decide on what you publish," Ben cassandrized and I said, "At least you left us one job, thinking up titles."

I joined Ben, standing at the window. In the towering transparency on the other side of the avenue, there was one patch of fluorescence where business did not, this moment at least, prevail. A female figurine entered an open door. A male figurine locked the door and they embraced, kissing voraciously.

Ben said, "A clearcut case of harassment."

I quoted "Leda and the Swan," "A shudder in the loins engenders there the broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead."

Ben counseled, ''Tomorrow's editors will delete Agamemnon, Pod. To their readers, he'd sound like a new medicine for constipation. And forget titles. Like politicians, they will be chosen at supermarket exit polls."

"In your model Limbo will there be any room for authors?"

'There needn't be. By the year 2000 any assembly line word-processor can be programmed to write any book on any topic. But publishers will still use authors for jacket photos and TV talk shows. You'll seed them like tennis players, based on their sales figures."

"But if reading per se is not cost effective, how can the literary agents rule the presses the way the talent agents now decide what movies we'll see?"

"Easy. Agents will charge authors fat reading fees. That will be the biggest money in the book business, my boy."

Across the avenue, the kissing stopped. Then the lights over there went out. I had intended to ask Ben how the real writers, the likes of Scott Fitzgerald or George Meredith, would manage to get themselves discovered, but I already felt the answer.

There would be no real writers in this new world that was siamesing its young, not to a printed page, but to a picture tube. For without readers, who would be possessed by the lust to write?

My mind completely clear and completely made up, I said, "Ben, if you still want to hire me, I will invest Mom's birthday present in IBM stock, not any sort of publishing venture."

"Good. Welcome back, Pod. About salary, maybe 1..." ''No raise. I want the first year off, though. I'll be back on my thirtieth birthday. Deal?"

"Deal."

* * * * * Ass-deep, that's what my desk area was when I returned to it, on my thirtieth

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birthday, per sacred promise to Ben Fairweather. Junk mail, real mail, but mostly memoranda. Whatever else my new status might be, I had neither been missed nor needed.

Twelve months of globe jogging had altered office more than jogger. New decor. On the walls, two credos in needlepoint: one that Nietzsche himself might have embroidered: COMMIT THYSELF! and the other a Calvinist bit of non-sense gussied up by Grandma Moses: WORK IS AN ETHIC! Obviously, no one had been aware of my absence, for the memos date-spanned the entire year. I pushed a strange new button on my intercom. Miss Finnegan's clone appeared. She muttered "Multi-nat now, sir." I asked her to remove the embroidered pep-talks and she left with them mumbling ''have a nice ...

I bent to the immense task of extracting from the myriad memos a storyline that might tell me who, what, where, and why I am.

In a deal fraught with murk, mystery, and suspicion, Benjamin Fairweather had sold his publishing company to a TV network that had previously been acquired in the merger of a Hollywood studio giant and a monster talent agency, which after a bitter stock battle had been taken over by an Arab oil consortium that also possessed the Mary Jones Smith & John Smith Jones Foundation that controlled a British intellectual magazine called Enlightenment, ''The distinguished world-opinion moulder for moulders of world opinion" whose assets included English-language rights to a long list of foreign authors. One memo six weeks old told me the list "sorely needs pruning, advancewise."

But I had yet to discover exactly who owned me. Twelve weeks back, my salary had been tripled by my new boss, ''Thereby of course rendering your continued reading of literary manuscripts cost defective."

Then, nine days ago, on purest rice paper waxed with ring seals of Arabian splendor, had come a hand-delivered denouement! All memos led from, and all strings were pulled in, Damascus. I was a toy, a plaything, of Shahs and Sheiks and Emirs, who were transferring me immediately to the Enlightenment office in London "to cull the foreign author list. The prior policy of advancing advances to literary contractees having poor track records is obsoleted."

I opened my new desk drawer to discover a stack of Fairweather Publications stationery, which informed me that Ben was still Chairman of the Board, a selffulfilling prophet of his own monologues.

Sadder but wiser, I now fully understood the folly of carving a life out of anything as low in the pecking order as reading or writing. Mom's birthday gift had gone in the right direction.

But what about now, my future, this London offer? Ideals? Self-respect? I got rid of those pests by changing one word. My road to Damascus would not be a career but a game. Enlightenment would be a fun way to go. If the game got too unsporting or boring, I'd cry foul and send myself to the showers.

I picked up my awesome back-salary checks, noting my new boss was an Invisibility named "Malsi." After squash, drinks, and dinner at the Harvard Club with a couple of classmates, I caught the Concorde to Heathrow.

* * * * *

Although there is not all that much to choose between the two, Persian Gulf

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money prefers Claridge's to the Dorchester. Verdi's choice of music's greatest composer also applies to these two hotels: "Naturally Beethoven and of course Mozart."

As to cutting foreign authors off at the pockets, when playing Sardonics (the name of my new game), the choice is even simpler: Keep the ones with the Gucci

loafers.

Before my spectacular rise to sipping split-pea soup in a Claridge's suite, most of my previous London hours had been spent under that great, quasi-religious dome where Edward Gibbon, Karl Marx, Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca West had once scribbled their hearts out. The jewel in the crown. The navel of Western civilization. The repository of all eons, epochs, eras. The British Museum Library.

Alas, my new salary had rendered it cost defective. Waiting patiently at one's desk for the flunky bearing the volumes of one's choice was an affordable pleasure for the clerks and dons and fellows and scribbler chappies, but no longer for me.

I had more pressing business, such as rushing frenetically to 37, 38, 39 Savile Row for my Henry Poole fittings. Or power luncheons in Les Ambassadeurs negotiating such serious fimmcial investments as the Aston-Martin DB7.

Like traffic jams, altered states, and pandemic pollution, the New Illiteracy finds all of us guilty. Especially me.

So, hail and farewell, British Museum Library. I'll always treasure the memory of those good old days when I was poor enough to afford you, when I was Leda and you were the Swan.

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Dual Yul Century

by John Hus (as sung by the New Century Singers) Ewell Gibbons always symbolized to me That man can live and eat naturally So how's there any hope for a guy like you or me When Ewell Gibbons died from the wrong part of a tree Guess we'll find out in the new century Yul Brynner always made me wonder why The movies would pick one foreign guy To play another foreign guy In the King and I Yeah, the King and me Guess we'll find out in the new century One day I was drinking rum And God said to me John Build a cabin get some grape nuts

and the King and I

And they will come.

I said God who will come He said the Yuls will come In century twenty-one Running out of real estate Let's get goin while the goins great Pack up your goods Let's hit the woods Bring your VCR You only need an extension cord We ;on't be going far

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Blackstrap stovepipe hammock pipestem Sticksnap napstop staghom gunsight Pe1that rucksack bootstraps rumflask Bucktrack creekjump switchback sidestitch Hoochswig napbreak treetrunk winds top Matchstick pipelight breathback flaskcap Sumac outbreak skinscratch backtrack Cloudc1ap runback woodstove winecask Grape nuts The King and I The Yuls and me In the new century.

,

~\~)

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and yet I will send the nude photos Leah Zonis Suffer victim! bury your face between my eroding shores! crave my seaweed suckled rocks! thrill the creamy white mud!

Suck the heat from my lips Catch my miserable breasts! frame by frame Think of my cavernous shores! frame by frame don't forget to touch the glossy don't forget to smear the curves Spread yourself on a page! feel the indestructable, forever capturing in two dimension I I I I

am am am am

caught in the camera bathroom preserved in the frame caught in the camera bathroom saved by the frame

don't forget to touch the girl don't forget to smear the face

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Pinweelz Gaston E de Beam A sclerotic passage through indigenous tunnels, when in forever's milk,white atonality, a hemorrhaging thought still meanders, fructifying, a lap top terminal rests as plastic synergy, arias wailing beneath mango thunderheads, swelling til explosions spill over sticky black tarmac midnight streets.

B stylized rumors catching over video, wide walls, searching among tunics and turbans for a colored telepathy, homespun fabrics wrapped around chest cavities and skulls, calumnies and forgeries, disturbing gaps between trust and chance, likewise blue fists clenched steady on the rudder, rolling ships on surging, heavy,slated seas. winds are serrated knives, lost in skin that thrives on continuous suction, throbbing moist against an Oxford background, her lips licking between curvaceous aluminum files, teetering and unctuous (linoleum bound) and straddling a beast monotonously pumping.

C's eager, and quick to rummage through filth, ties on the wagons, ploughing through hills; eager in fortitude to rest there as dust, your sex is confusion, uncertainty's thrust.

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Twentieth Century Lite the sugar-coated world of late suburbia

T. C. Frank The county of Johnson is situated in the northeastern corner of Kansas, just to the south of the confluence of the Kaw and the Missouri rivers. For many years it was the home of the Osage and Shawnee Indians, who traded pelts with the Europeans that began to appear in this region in the 1820s. These latter inhabitants established a trading post and settlement that would eventually grow into the metropolis of Kansas City. Ad Astra Per Aspera reads the Kansas state motto, and the development of the region did not come without significant struggle or suffering.

A party of pioneers, travelling on the Santa Fe trail, were killed here by marauding Indians, and the Indians themselves were subsequently slaughtered, chased away, or converted by the Europeans. In the decade just before the Civil War the county of Johnson saw savage combat between pro-slavery settlers and abolitionists, both determined to conduct Kansas' future along their own chosen course. Within thirty years the frantic boom that followed the war gave way to grinding debt and depression. The state's population began to decline as the gold standard and the railroad monopolies made agriculture increaSingly unprofitable, and the county's residents turned to radical politics for a solution. Women agitated for the vote, Populists for economic reorganization. And Carrie Nation led fervent prohibitionists on hatchet-swinging campaigns through local saloons. In the twentieth century the City of Kansas, famous for the violent passions of its people, saw the rise of one of the nation's most powerful political machines as well as some of its most stirring jazz performances.

But today this land of immoderation presents a different face to the world.

Kansas City, the symbolic capital of the plain-spoken, drought-hardened people of the Midwest, is now the site of some of the nation's most intensive suburbanization.

Once the home of such earthy types as Sockless Jerry Simpson, Tom Pendergast, Count Basie, and Harry Truman, it now sprawls itself over hundreds of miles of Johnson County prairie, fleeing frantically to the south and west from its passionate, vigorous, strongly-worded past. And perhaps the most representative specimen of

~-===-=-=-=-=-=~~~a=-=-=-= Stream of Spite

__-=-=-=-

Tiny Tomahawk Creek flows through northeastern Johnson County, where it once irrigated corn and cabbage. Today it traces a jagged line across some of the fastest-growing suburbs in the nation. There are twenty small earth dams on it now, creating twenty polite ponds, replete with plastic lillies and all the rustic accoutrements (waterwheels and falls in particular) appropriate to an eighteenth century Quaker village in the Rocky Mountains.

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this once-vital town's flight from the nastiness of life is "Aristocrat Forest," an expansive subdevelopment a few miles to the south of the old pioneer graveyard and a full hour by car from the ci ty' s decaying downtown. In the subdevelopments of the nineties, the suburbanite's quest for the Bland seems to have been accomplished; his longing for detachment from past and place most completely realized. And a new, insular culture of sweetness and /aiblesse obUge is articulated.

"Aristocrat Forest" epitomizes the settlements of the new, improved, climate-controlled America that you recognize from TV.路 Life has truly been lightened for modem suburban dwellers. Here all unpleasant realities give way to the obligatory false friendlines, the omnipresent cheery music, and the deeply-held conviction that all problems can be solved by a new purchase. This is consumerist America in its putrescent stage, where an airtight cultural hegemony has long since been achieved and life has become an interminable role-playing game with all the accessories; where candy people dressed like businessmen coexist nicely with candy people dressed like rock stars, or artists, or athletes. This is the therapeutic America, where cycling machines (and the appropriate bicycle costume) substitute for labor, "sin" is a dietary transgression, and living facilities come increasingly *"Aristocrat Forest" is a pseudonym. We were too afraid of offending someone to use its real name. _ _ _ _E&_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ~

-*~~

________________-

There is scarcely any water left when Tomahawk Creek flows into the Missouri.

There is a fairly good-sized pond at Manchester Meadows, where they captured some real swans and clipped their wings, so they couldn't leave.

But the fertilizer from nearby lawns washed down into the village pond, turning the plastic lillies orange and making the swans lose all their feathers in the very first summer. Next year they're sw~ching to mallards.

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to resemble lifelong hospitals. This is the America dubbed "Cupcake Land" by Richard Rhodes, where "the Holy Grai1...is pleasantness, well-scrubbed and bland," and holidays are but an occasion for the exchange of greeting cards. Here in "Aristocrat Forest" Americans have paved over their agrarian past and obliterated their ancestors' years in the factory so thoroughly that such disturbing echoes need never frighten them again. Except, of course, for those pleasant collective memories of their imaginary aristocratic forebears, who once hunted faxes and lived in gardenparty splendour on the plains of Kansas or the landfills of New Jersey.

Yet suburbia is not a bad thing in itself. The impulse to live amidst grass and trees and clean air is entirely understandable. It is the way of life chosen by most Americans. But suburban life in the United States, circa 1990, is very different from its 1950s prototype. In the forty-four years since returning veterans crowded into Levittown, New York and made it an immediate symbol of the age, suburbia has generated its own distinct culture, best symbolized by the "Aristocrat Forest" on Kansas' sun-flattened plains. The culture oflate suburbia is defined, predictably enough, by the imperatives of consumerism and the remarkable insularity of suburban life. It is the cutrescent culture of a decaying order increasingly obsessed with "cuteness," a saccharine inoffensiveness redolent of rotting honey. Suburbanites of the nineties are an infantilized people, reduced by the cultural engines of American capitalism to a perpetual childhood ignorant of responsibility or subtlety.

Modern suburbanites are streamlined consumerists who have incorporated the facile liberation of the sixties into their world of malls and subdevelopments. They are a nation of postmodern consumers, detached from the world in ersatz hamlets and affecting an irony that goes hand-in-hand with faiblesse oblige. The cutrid and TVworldly people of "Aristocrat Forest" scorn all but harmlessness and self-indulgence, which they assume to be the natural predilections of mankind.

They are "organization men" to be sure, but with a brightly-colored facade of the kind of individualism PESTICIDE APPLICATIO that you can buy at any boutique in the shopping center. Hence the affected playground cynicism that substitutes for taste among the subKEEP OFF urbanites of the nineties; a cynicism best exemplified by pop stars like Madonna and funny-page

CAU o

~

__________

~

____

~~~

________a&______

~

Jaymestowne has a large pond, too, built on a hillside and dyed a deep blue. Stucco buildings right up to the edge. Scenic, but vulnerable. Some youthful pranksters realized this and managed to destroy the dike with a lawnrnower, tinting the entire project a beautiful robin's egg color but flooding the basements and first floors of "Jaymestowne Manor" Units 5, 15, and 32.

Jaymestowne Homes, Inc., wasn't adequately insured and in the end everyone was evicted and the buildings razed.

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icons such as "Garfield" and "Marvin," the eternally scheming baby: And, since suburbanites dominate the U.S. numerically and financially the culture of suburbia continues to determine the mass culture of our country.

The culture of cutrescence is in tum determined partially by the physical facts of suburban life, and its detachment from the community, the past, and productive labor. Out there in the garden communities people are removed, culturally and politically as well as geographically, from the life of the cities which they surround. "Flight" is an appropriate metaphor for the phenomenon of suburban growth, for it is a fleeing from the complexity and responsibility of community existence. To be sure, suburban promoters talk a lot about the bogus "communities" they are planning complete with quaint English names but no organic unity at all.

Needless to say, there are no proles in the new suburbia. And, as friendly Kansas City corporations make their long-anticipated removals from downtown to the suburbs, the need for commuting disappears and the final links with the city - with workers, with the non-white, with the poor; the open-air market, the streetcar, the tenement, the skyscraper - all this vanishes. The people of "Aristocrat Forest" staff the nearby malls and the brand new offices of "Leawood Corporate Manor," a scant five minutes to the north. Their children attend nationally recognized schools, where they will never be tainted by contact with the offspring of black or workingclass families. And these schools are public, since the geographical divide between the Kansas suburbs and Kansas City (which is in Missouri) makes infiltration impossible. This sort of alienation is actually a subject of boasting for suburban promoters, who invariably push their pre-planned homesites' isolation from traffic and convenience to highways. The symbol of this estrangement is the cul-de-sac, the street that goes nowhere, utilized extenSively so that serene "Cupcake" families might not be disturbed by unpredictable outside influences other than television.

Leawood, Kansas, the jewel in KC's suburban diadem, has taken this strategy of detachment to a brilliant but inevitable conclusion: although it stretches for 72 blocks along the Missouri border, only 24 streets penetrate the suburb from this • Mark Trail, on the other hand, is the hero of an older, more idealistic suburbia.

~==============~~~=========e=e==~

Innocuous Tomahawk Creek was also the site of the decade's worst industro-suburban misunderstanding. Unicorn Arms, a charming treeless development constructed in two months in 1985, allowed for a "Corporate Park" within its city limits to provide tax revenue. Unicorn city parents expected, of course, only a few tasteful office complexes and maybe a warehouse with nice lawns, but the corporations that moved in thought differently. On August 14, 1987, Moxoplast, Inc. gave Unicorn Arms a taste 21

direction, and most of these end quickly in cul-de-sacs. Leawood's blatant ploy to discourage visitors from the poorer neighborhoods to the east has earned it the moniker "Baffieburb" from some literate Kansas City residents: Detached from the life of the community, the new suburbia is quite naturally detached as well from real productive activity, typifying the shifting of American culture in general from a producing to a consuming orientation. Residents of the new suburbia buy on credit and discard on whim. They work not at farm or factory but at desks in minute corporate departments. They are the "Organization Men" of William H. Whyte's landmark study, only much fanher removed from the productive livelihoods of their forebears and much less important in the jobs they do.

They are the corporate vassals of Richard Rhodes' "Cupcake Land," performing ever more insignificant tasks under ever more pompous corporate titles. And the wisdom of their most important economic duty, Buying Lots of Things, can never seriously be questioned.

The new suburbanites are, finally, alienated from both history and geography.

The make-believe world of "Aristocrat Forest" obliterates the past by completely ignoring the nation's ethnic, working class, or agrarian roots. There are no references to Indians at all in the place and street names of the newer Kansas City suburbs {as there were, constantly, in the old}: the developers have systematically omitted local history altogether. The names developers have chosen in their place are utterly bland and homogeneous, equally applicable to a collection of cheap grandiose houses in Long Island as well as Kansas or Utah. The choice of the new suburbia is for a spurious English genealogy, expressed for them by subdeve10pment promoters with German or Irish or Scandinavian names, denying America's ethnic or tumultuous past. The placid ways of the English middle-class, they imply, have persisted tenaciously out in the ground now transformed into "Aristocrat Forest," and have been bestowed magically upon a handful of loyal junior executives. These modern suburbanites, ethnically and financially heterogeneous, have nonetheless accepted as pan of their creed of faiblesse oblige - along with their gray poly/flanne1 suits - the age-old Anglophilia of the nation's "best" families. Hence it is to places like "Bristol Place," "Cambridge Pointe," {whose emblem depicts the famous old Cambridge lighthouse} and "Buckingham Estates" that the City's predominantly German population flee. A "Plutostadt," while conveying the right messages of fabulous wealth, would almost certainly fail to arouse interest. {But the French may soon have their day in the hearts of the upwardly-mobile: a brand new Johnson • There is an undeniable resemblance between the labyrinthine wanderings of Leawood's streets and the jargon-riddled acrobatics of the institutional avant-garde.

-4=-==============~~~================&­

of industrial savagery at its plutocratic best. Discovering that the petite Kansas village had almost no laws restricting the dumping of noxious chemicals, Moxoplast poured a foul-smelling phosphorescent pink fluid into the gurgling waters of the Tomahawk. The developments downstream from Unicorn suffered the most as Tomahawk Creek developed a thick cremey pink foam topping that killed lawns and pets for miles. The stench made the out-of-doors uninhabitable and put quite a strain on nearby air-conditioners.

22

County subdevelopment is called "Charlemagne Manor."} This tripartite detachment has produced a culture of cutrescence that is distinguished most strikingly from earlier modes by the desperate, screaming insistence upon the fantastic wealth possessed by the residents that confronts one at every gently winding tum. The oversized houses, the comically Anglophilic names, the grandiose iron porticos at the subdevelopment's gate, each demonstrate the vast inflation of suburban pretensions that has accompanied the triumph of detachment since those humbler {and often home-made} suburbs were erected by GIs returning from World War II. In other years Kansas Citians were content to live in simple "Prairie Vi1lage": conspicuous consumption, nineties style, though, means that a modem "homebuyer" needs an "estate," a "farm," a "manor," or even a "grand chateau elegant" to assuage his class insecurity. Announcements for new subdevelopments invariably trumpet the "elegance" and the "luxury," of the "exclusive" or "prestigious homesites" up for sale.

But no matter how the new suburbanites may slaver over Anglo usages, prestige and exclusion are qualities derived strictly from bank accounts, not anything ethereal like heritage or breeding or taste. So baldly mercenary is the pitch to sell "prestige" to the highest bidder that many subdivisions openly classify themselves "upper bracket," presumably open only to those who make the IRS's super-classy list of the most prosperous plutocrats. This insistent boasting often takes embarrassingly ludicrous forms, as with "Aristocrat Forest" or "Charlemagne Manor." Suburbanites of the nineties, though, are notoriously insecure about their purchased "prestige," and they demand that the outward emblems of priciness (and, hence, elegance) be displayed on all their property. These are the people who leave labels on the outside of garments or, better yet, buy clothes that carry unmistakable signs of "classiness."

Their shirts often sport a tiny man on a horse; their sturdy plastic luggage is spattered with "MCM" or "Y St Lj" their shoes have loud corporate logos stamped into the leather; their plaid scarves proudly announce their descent from the ancient clan of Burberryj their sunglasses, briefcases, ties, sweatshirts, and trousers are covered with words - words signifying only "I paid too much for these goods; they are indeed the ones depicted in the sophisticated advertisement you saw; I am a prestigious person by association." The subdevelopments in which these people make their house are, quite naturally, announced in much the same manner, their preposterous puffery well-displayed on elaborate brick or stone or wrought-iron edifices near their points of entry. This sort of crass trumpeting is entirely appropriate though. For the hundreds of thousands of dollars a wide-eyed "executive" pays for a "home" in "Aristocrat Forest," he should surely expect an unmistakable public declaration of his newly-purchased status. Most Kansas Citians would not think

~==============~~~==========aEaE&足

Moxoplast's abuse of Unicorn Arms' nostrils (and innocence) only ceased when the "Olde Towne Council" began work on a new "gaol."

Rivulets the size of Tomahawk Creek do not flood ordinarily, and in the age of suburbanization springtime sees the creek at its dryest as nearby homeowners pump thousands of gallons of water onto their lawns. Fall, on the other hand, ends the season of the swimming pool and the creek is suddenly swollen with the chlorinated waters of backyard pleasure ponds. In

23

him an "Aristocrat" otherwise, as the ''home'' he now occupies declares only his foolishness and bad taste.

Stucco, Tudor, Queen Anne, Spanish, Colonial, and French Provincial are liberally intermixed in the homes of the "Aristocrats," often with three styles represented per home. So senselessly eclectic is the "Forest" that one suspects the entire project of being an ironic architect's PoMo prank. The only consistent element is the absurd parody of grandeur that characterizes every single "home": pointless but enormous columns, plywood turrets, concrete statuary, decorative cupolas. The builders greedily aspire to occupy whole lots. But for all these banal outward emblems of old wealth, each "home" in "Aristocrat Forest" conforms to one of four designs from which the buyer must choose. In each one the ample garage is the most prominent feature; a trait which Paul Fussell ascribes to prole roots but which more likely indicates a lifetime of sedulous attention to TV dramas, where cars and garages are important status implements. And the buildings themselves are rarely anything sturdier than simple board-and-bat construction. Like the shoddy clothing covered with declarations of "prestige" that the new suburbanites wear so faithfully, their "estates" and "chateaux" are slapped together hastily, according to a pre-set plan, of sheetrock and plywood. We fear for the flimsy manor ''homes'' of "Aristocrat Forest" when they confront their first Kansas tornado.

Nonetheless, it is to these architectural incarnations of all that is mindlessly,

-4.aaEe===e=aa__~~~====&E==~~====足 "The Villas of Nottingham-by-the-Brooke," where Tomahawk Creek is called "Pleasant Brooke," these seasonal floods are intensified by a lining of concrete that was applied to the brooke's banks in 1979 to hasten its flow.

Last labor day tragedy came to ''The Villas of Notlingham-by-the-Brooke" when two children, idly frolicking in the concrete canyon behind their homes, were swept away by a flash flood resulting from the simultaneous draining of five nearby swimming pools.

24

tastelessly acquisitive that Americans flock to live out the third cultural principle of suburbia: the myth of total, seamless tranquility which has increasingly come to characterize the culture of the American middle class since the unpleasant days of World War II. Late suburbanites regard the world as spectators, receiving images of it through electronic mediation, and taking an interest only when they discover new "lifestyles" which they can adopt from the people down below. "Lifestyle" is perhaps the most telling cutrescent buzz-word, an indicator of late suburbia's distance from the world where "lifestyle" could mean things like race, class, religion, or occupation. For the people under the sway of today's cutrescent lifestyle, however, a "lifestyle" is a consumer decision one makes, parallel to choosing a brand of soda pop or a make of car. For the late suburbanites the struggles of the rest of us are a more-

or-less interesting TV show to be watched from the placid, hermetic universe of the air-conditioned manor home on the distant cul-de-sac.

And what deity presides within this universe? The spirit of cuteness, before whom all discontent melts away and reality is reduced to the shining polite office complex and neighboring mall, the carefully tended lawn, the luv between fellow upper-bracketers. This siissgeist is represented physically by the omnipresent teddy bear, the household god of suburbia,' the very incarnation of cutrescence; who, with feeble arms outstretched, winsome face contorted with fun, and pudgy body as often as not fitted into some "serious" human garment, stands ready to coo the anxious "Aristocrat" back to tranquility. The teddy is a child's toy no longer: suburbanites own them for life, and have even been known to dress up their infants like the bear. The teddy bear is us, suburbanites believe, and their peculiar teddydressing rituals -like their use of the word "lifestyle" - illustrate their cutrescent • In some areas "Hello Kitty" divides authority with the bear in the suburban pantheon.

~==============~~~==============~­ Fragments

"We're a brash new generation buying all new products." - New Coventry Mall Motto.

An afternoon of furtive joy in unwrapping packages. What heights of anticipation in rending the crisp cellophane! What rapture in struggling with the

25

vision of productive life.

The spirit of cuteness will tolerate no suggestion of dissatisfaction, let alone tyranny, oppression, death, or disorder. These things are to be sugar-coated, forgotten, or ignored by the culture of cutrescence. When late suburbanites are vexed by lifestyle unfulfillment they tum to the "support group," the teddy bear writ large, since they couldn't imagine expressing dissatisfaction unless dozens of others were present to sympathize. When suburbanites voice a rare political opinion it is informed by the politics of politesse ("that just isn't nice") or sympathy for cute creatures like seals, bunnies, and starving children. "Hands Across America" brought considerable celebration to "Aristocrat Forest," along with plenty of selfcongratulations for active suburban consciences. Holidays are torn from whatever their mythical, Dionysian roots happen to be and become an occasion for exchanging reassuring messages of cuteness' omniscience. And the language of late suburbia is, like greeting cards, larded with whimsical, cutrescent usages. Subdivision monikers are sometimes intentionally misspelled, giving them a playful quality that distances them from the sometimes unpleasant aspects of land ownership. It is difficult to imagine an earthquake destroying a neighborhood - however flimsily constructed - called "Peppermill" or "Sugarland Estates." Suburban children are given names like Krystyn and Pyper and pass a ready-sweetened childhood consuming such products as Quisp, Froot Loops, and Trix before moving on to the mockthreatening stage ofRatt and Motley Crlie. When older they inhabit such agreeable places as ''Wyncroft'' or "Stoneybrooke." Sometimes these words of whimsy are even interchangeable, especially when they conform to the Anglophilic principle. In one possible scenario, Britnie Woods, of Brittany Woods, IlIinois, becomes a follower of heavy metal band Britny Fox. But for all their shortcomings, the ersatz communities that surround the nation's cities do possess a feature that other modern paUses lack: they are organized around thriving, well-designed centers. And within the walls of the local shopping center (or centre, if Anglo worship runs high), the ethereal teddy bear reigns supreme. The mall is a totalizing consumerist institution, a hermetic marketing cosmos where the outside world enters only in the guise of the cute or the ironic.

Here all the pseudo-needs of suburban life can be met without leaving the weightless world of well-tended lawns. Suburbanites flock to their malls not only to buy, but to exercise, to vote, to drink, to be entertained, and of course to socialize under the aegis of the benevolent shopping authorities; in short to perform all those acts that once would have forced them into the larger world. Certain clever physicians have even begun to move their practices into the malls. The culture of cutrescence is articulated most comprehensively in the shopping center, as this is the physical area

~OVing

vacuum-sealed paksI What bliss in pins and cardboard from the garment fragrant with new! And afterwards, the proud mound of refuse to be separated from the pile of products and placed properly in its receptacle.

"Teddy bears for adults. The billion dollar stuffed-animal industry is targeting adults, many of whom are in need of a cuddly friend." - Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1990, p. 1.

26

LillIe Debbie

Photo: "Moving Day" - Jake NMI Baxter most directly under the control of the leading organs of consumerism. Here cutrescence can be observed in its purest, most sophisticated form.

Cutrescence, nineties style, is a stripped-down, post modern ethos that has dutifully encompassed and fetishized rebellion, as it has been told to do by advertiser and DJ alike. "Old-time values" are an eternal straw-man allowing them to congratulate themselves for their progressiveness and rebelliousness and ensuring a bottomless market for new goods. The simulated rebellion found among the suburbanites of the nineties is mainly a matter of clothing and attitudes towards consuming, and it does not prevent them from flocking to places like "Brittany Yesteryear" or voting Republican. Above all else this perpetual revolution of style must be perfectly unthreatening, working itself out entirely within the dialectic of mall boutiques and MTV. In cultural terms it means the cutrification of the bohemian pastimes of the sixties. Rock 'n' Roll means "wholesome fun" in suburbia, and "Aristocrat Forest" parents as well as children can groove to the thoroughly pasteurized images of Madonna or the New Kids On the Block. They sense, somehow, that the fuel or rock 'n' roll is essential for the advertising machinery that powers the nation, and they dutifully spend several hours per day watching favorite stars. Parent and child, they pass hours in the local mall to procure the latest in distinctive clothing, just like all their neighbors do.

The cutrification of rebellion combined with suburbia's detachment from the

"Imagine driving home at night and passing by your own private lake illuminated by a lighthouse. Imagine coming home to your very own custom home built by one of the Northland's finest builders. Imagine dropping by your private pool or racquetball court and a chit-chat with your neighbors." advertisement for Charleston Harbor subdevelopment, New Neighborhoods of Greater Kansas City, December 1989.

27

world spells Postmodernity, and postmodernism very naturally characterizes the

weltanschauung of this nation of blanded spectators. In suburbia all things besides the Bland are ironic and cute - they are The Other - and few phenomena are close enough to be taken seriously. PoMo is naturally put to its most creative and appropriate use out in the new suburbia, by mall designers and decorators. Suburban kids live in a fantasy land of retro styles, borrowing from other people's "lifestyles" as their fancy dictates. The suburban intellectual looks back and down on the preceding decades of struggle, which he perceives as leading directly to the wellplanned heights that he now occupies. From this background come the nation's elite: the artists and admen and theorists and publishers who are constitutionally unable to take seriously any experience that does not fit the logic of consumerist cutrescence.

* * * * * Forty years ago Richard Hofstadter wrote that "the United States was born in the country and has moved to the city." And in its dotage it has passed on to suburbia. In places like "Aristocrat Forest" America has moved back to its imaginary ancestral home to die, blithely leaving the control of the nation to professional caretakers. Here in the new suburbia our botched civilization lives out its sunny downhill days amid all the twisted trappings of Anglo-American culture as perceived by a people formed in front of the TV set. In the late suburbias of the nineties like those surrounding Kansas City, the gigantic farce of American social and material longings is played to its bland, banal conclusion, and the nation's future is defined accordingly. As banks fail, debts mount, and crime and poverty skyrocket, America's privileged class seals off the approaches to its climate-con-

~================~~=================­ "A jogging trail encircles the neighborhood and is accessible from each lifestyle area, with Hawthorne Lake providing a serene perspective for the home owners .... Tomahawk Creek Parkway is the only through street in Hawthorne and the homes are built on cul-de-sacs to curtail traffic. The four lifestyle areas are separated by wrought iron and masonry walls to further insure privacy." - advertisement for Hawthorne subdevelopment, New Neighborhoods, September 1988 ""A Lifestyle So Fine, The Builder Lives Here Himself" - slogan for Windsor Manor subdevelopment

"I would go out with you Suzi..." Jaisyn said earnestly, gesticulating smoothly enough but struggling with himself for words. "It's just that your tits aren't big enough."

Shifting her eyes to the floor, the girl walked Silently away, leaving Jaisyn staring at a poster advertiSing Levi's 501 jeans. After a moment he produced a pair of sunglasses and placed them on his face. Maybe in the 1920s or

28

trolled play land where such nasty things are never permitted to filter through. In response to these problems the world's wealthiest society is inventing a culture of practicedfaiblesse, unabashed showiness, and simulated rebellion. Its would-be leaders are doing all they can to continue undisturbed in the rococo pseudoopulence to which they are accustomed, unanimously choosing ignorance over involvement. And if they have their way, the teddy bear will soon be a more apt national symbol than Liberty ever was.

- 4_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

.~~----------------~

1970s a girl in Suzi's position would have had a chance. But this was 1990, and Jaisyn knew what girls were supposed to look like. He himself matched the male figure in the Levi's ad in every discernible particular: jeans, shoes, shirt, glasses, haircut.

"See that Olde Pizza Shoppe?" the older boy demanded. ''That used to be a shoe store. Before that they sold organs and stuff there. When you've been around this mall a few years, you learn that nothing ever stays the same."

Jaisyn didn't need to be told about mall memories. He had a few indelible ones himself. This wing in particular had always made him uncomfortable. As a small child, he had been brought to a doctor's off!ce here: the pediatrician, a little harried at the prospect of dealing with dozens of temperamental children, had afflicted the lad's young arm with painful injections. The office had long since been converted into a fashionable clothing store, but Jaisyn retained a certain instinctual dread for this corner of the complex.

29

Twilight of Idylls Gaston F. de Beam Persephone's brow like brimstone and mica lingers longer to await a bovine tug, robes fall around her, naked flies dance circles from her hair with strength to rule swarming trojans, felled likewise, bush, hogged - forests are cleared for the mall, collapsed and mauled, a tinderbox her touch, dancing with straw arms spread in agony, a wardance and song, shouting, one hundred feet tall, a suburb falling hollow like Eliot's man, make,up smeared, car ports smothered, a Dick Van Dyke apocalypse hovers, waking the crooning sneer of wild,eyed Calypso, hungry for those raked beneath lotus and sleepy soapy dreams, ivory and crest, a zestful dove dials alone for land, waxing Ulysses' gourd, homestyle and spun; plumed cap of Cadmus watches gleeful from a bulldozer's lens, stirring a stew pitchforked lentils, and picking tender bones to feed on afterwards in the House of Somnus, an Aegean sleep Ophelia's desperate dream gone bankrupt, and Dylan Thomas' raised eyebrow on a stainless steel swivelchair.

30

Marty, Joey and Jesse David Levinsky The boy kings cruise in Marty's Camaro, body tattooed with primer scars. The real story lies under the hood: nothing but polished chrome bought part by part as weekly money was pocketed. Jesse's riding shotgun, a bright city navigator on nightclub patrol, searchin 18th for Miss Scarlett Monkey Wrench doing the grind.

Spread across cramped backseat, Ambro Joey sports a backwards cap, Marty's being cold, saying, ''What you doin in that Yankees hat, you act more like a Tigers fan, no?" speeding to beat a light turnin orange kaleidoscopic wail turquoise whore singe

But it ain't a cholo, or the cops, just some brothers snaking low, running a Dodge Dart with store-bought siren hand held on rooftop, scaring folks outside of the brotherhood.

A pull alongside rolls down the window, some crazy-ass mofos representing, asking Joey, "You an Ambro, aintcha?"

"I ain't no Ambro. I ain't shit no more."

But the brother thinks different, draws his luger, fires three times. Only way Marty knows Jesse got hit is the splash: finding out blood bums the eyes, finding out blood blinds. solitary ghost moonlight drive by wheels California street drag traumatize

31

The worst part wasn't the hospital: brown brick storage house of South-side casualties, where twin orderlies pinned Marty to flat stretcher bed - a case of mistaken wounds.

The worst part wasn't seeing Jesse, steel plate grey placed in his skull, can't remember Marty and Joey's names, escaped his head with the viscera on vinyl carseat.

The worst part was telling Jesse's ma, no anglo cop could explain parts of Jesse dried in Marty's hair, her hatred so real it carried a smell: ozone, molten lead.

Marty says his stories gotta be told with Jesse's head placed between him and life.

-~-

David Berman 32

The sad edge david berman He was kitchen drunk again.

Times like these he liked to so

far.

review his

life

I've done well.

Hell, I'm a millionaire in dollars.

He had a low coefficient of drag, he quoted Lincoln, looked you square in the eye, had settled down with a female of his species and spawned.

I'm judge, he thought.

Drunk, so.

If a tree gets drunk in the forest when no one's there, oh that's going no place.

He cast his eyes on the television.

The quarterback exchanged souls with the wide receiver on 4th down and five.

Let's see what I remember from s.chool.

Disraeli/Gladstone.

Math 920 Ring theory.

I was always sick then.

A beer can fell off the table like an indian shot through the heart tumbling off a cliff face.

Like I told myself all along: DON'T FEEL. LET PRIDE FEED. UNITE IN SEXUAL CONGRES S .

Man, I can live by that stuff.

I should be President.

He looked over at his wife lying naked on her stomach.

She lay flat and still like the symbol for a plateau on a desert map's legend.

She sure looked good in the kitchen light.

Minarets over Istanbul, and look at the hot wigwam, but best of all, her butt.

I t looked like a clever pet pig.

Oh how it dances!

She got up and sat on his lap.

She started squawking.

Her laugh sounded like an amusement park in full swing, where every ride must be oiled soon.

(Gentle reader, take his wife please.)

All of a sudden he felt very sick, like back at school.

Furniture, paintings, and dust were all orbiting him, 1920

33

while the kitchen itself spun slowly on another axis about five feet to his left.

His stomach pulsing like an almost accident, twirling around in his gut.

All of a sudden.

Yeah, all of a sudden he could see everything.

He was gonna get it for everything he had ever done wrong.

All the people he had screwed and squashed.

One was robbing his bank right at that moment, and his own son was driving the getaway car.

Others were down at City Hall calling him a liar, a cheat, Indian giver, dirt, zero, and no-count also.

Worm! you will see the rim of the sun before you go to sleep.

You will go howling into the morning corridor like a dog shot in the ass.

Need I point out to you very knowing folk that worms are not insects, or members of any known genus or species?

That their origin eludes the greatest of scientists?

That a worm can dig deep, cannot burn, cannot love, and would kill you and your children if only the Lord had given him hands?

The pluses of being rich -

Better lighting

-

Privileged

-

Expensive

Information vitamins

The funeral was attended by three. the world could not be bothered. the

' 70s

and groovier things

There was Love TV, hot green war to down.

were

Fat government,

jack our

The rest of You see it was diverging. and a

fabulous

jizz from sunup to sun-

American humans never felt

so good as when

7 was the third digit in the year they were in.

34

Angel and Me Robert S. Nelsen My radio was playing, and Angel was on my mind. Sammy Schultz and me were stacking hay down on the Harper place. We were about to be seniors in high school, and it was my first job. Sammy had hired me on at two and a half cents a bale. He owned the tractor, an old John Deere B. He was forking up bales to me on top of the haystack with the tractor, and I was busy trying to keep count. my shirt was off. Alfalfa leaves were stuck all over my chest. The words to ask Angel to the homecoming dance that fall after school started kept getting jumbled up with the numbers in my head. It would have been our first date. The fact is I'd never really talked to Angel before, just looked.

Sammy stopped at bale number seven hundred sixty-three and waved at me. He got off the tractor and disappeared down the creek bank into the trees. I sat on a bale of hay, turned off my little transistor radio, and tried to times out my wages. I still couldn't get the numbers to work out. When I looked up, I saw Sammy coming back out of the trees. He was carrying a sixpack of beer. The way I remember it, he was holding one of the cans in his hand and the other cans were hanging down below, dripping creek water, but I'm not sure I'm not sure if they made them plastic six-pack holders yet. Sammy ripped a can off and tossed it up to me. My uncle was the town preacher, and I was the church deacon. I'd never drank beer before. But I'd never made as much money as I was making then either.

I popped the can and stuck the silver tab on my ring finger. I took a swig of beer and it fizzed up my nose. ''This beer tastes like horse piss," I said, trying to sound like I drank beer all the time even though 1 knew Sammy knew I didn't. ''Oly was the only kind I could get," he said. he opened a can for himself.

"Come down here. I've got something to show you."

By the time I had climbed down the haystack, Sammy had guzzled his beer and was drinking another. I grabbed my shirt from off the ground and wiped the alfalfa dust off my face and chest. My chest was turning red where it was supposed to be white. Sammy handed me a second beer. I'd left my first one on top of the stack on purpose. I popped the top and put that tab on my finger with the other one. I brought the beer can up to my head and rolled it backward and forward.

"1 took Angel out last night," Sammy said.

"You can't do that. She's your cousin," I said.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "Mom sent me over there with some eggs, and I Robert S. Nelsen recently received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He has accepted a position at the University of Texas, Dallas, as a creative writing professor.

35

asked Angel if she wanted to go for a ride."

'That's not taking her out," I said. I pushed the beer can hard against my head. The can dented in, and the beer sloshed out down my face and arms.

I knew something was up, the way you just know. It's like an old rusty railroad spike up there in your head poking around and saying something bad is up. ''We drove down here," Sammy said. "Jimmy down at the Silver Spoke sold me a whole case."

"So?" I said. I squeezed the beer can harder against my head.

"Angel wanted one," Sammy said, "and you know how Angel is once she's got beer in her." ''No, I don't know. And you don't know either," I said. ''Trash. That's all the talk is. Trash." ''Trash?'' Sammy said. He was laughing. "Well, it might've been trash before, but it ain't no more."

Sammy sat his beer can on top of the tractor's back tire and unbuttoned his pants. His fingers fumbled over each other as he forced the buttons loose. Sammy pulled down his pants, and pointed at a big spot, blood, on his underwear.

"See? Proof," he said. "I popped Angel's cherry, and I got the proof."

I lunged at that blood spot, spiking my head into Sammy's crotch. Sammy was the star running back on our football team. There's no way i should have been able to hit him, but hit him I did. He toppled over backwards against the tractor tire, and I jumped on top. He jerked his knee up, and his knee clobbered my jaw, knocking me onto my back. His pants still down around his legs, Sammy crawled over on top of me, and clobbered me in the face. Blood came spewing out of my nose. I always did get bloody noses easy.

I shook my head hard, and blood splattered over the two of us, in Sammy's face, on my bare chest, on Sammy's shorts. Sammy was yelling something I couldn't understand. I rolled out from under his legs and tan toward my car.

Sammy tackled me from behind. I thought he was going to hit me again, but for some reason that I didn't understand then and still don't today, he hugged me, just held me and hugged me.

Sammy opened another beer and poured some of it onto my hands, and then the rest of it into his hands and washed the blood off my face. He climbed back on the tractor and I climbed back on top of the haystack.

Sammy didn't say anything more about Angel, and I didn't either. He didn't know about me and Angel. Nobody did. Not even Angel. He probably thought that I was in love with the red-headed girl in our class, Alice, what with the poem I'd written her last year, the one she'd showed around to the girls in the girl's bathroom. You don't know how many times I've wished that I'd just pointed at that blood spot and said ''That doesn't prove anything. You probably caught your dick in your zipper." But I was just too crazy about Angel, and that spike in my head hurt too much to talk.

* * * * * 36

I didn't go to the homecoming dance with Angel, but Sammy and me saw her there. I'd asked Alice instead, and Sammy, he'd went with this blond freshman girl come in from California. The dance was a sock hop, not because those were the days of sock hops, but because the gym floor had just been varnished. Angel was up by the band, up next to the foul circle, I dancing all the new dances. One of those sparkling balls was hanging from the ceiling above her and was turning around and around. No matter what, I couldn't keep Angel and her long, black hair out of my sight. I tried keeping Alice between me and Angel, but the floor was too slippery and Alice too good a dancer. If I moved one way, she moved the other. Finally I gave up and laid my head down on Alice's shoulder and slow-danced all the dances, never taking my eyes off Angel through Alice's red hair.

Angel had come to the dance with this eighth grade guy. She was only a freshman herself. I can't remember much about the guy, except that he had a scrawny moustache. I think he must have penciled it in. He just kind of stood there, hands stuffed in his pockets, shuffling his feet from side to side, watching Angel, like I was doing.

I slumped a bit, and Alice pulled me tight. She brought her hands up my back, one bone at a time. Her hair felt thick like straw against my cheek.

That's when Angel started walking over through the crowd our way. The sparkling ball up above her made it look like she was shimmying as she pushed her way toward us. Her hips moved one way, her hair another, but her face was stationary, frozen in my direction, at least that's what I thought, though more likely she was looking at Sammy and his blond freshman girl. I spun Alice around and buried my head in her hair, down deep trying not to see.

Sammy stopped dancing and came over to Alice and me. He had his arm curled around the blond California girl's waist, and his hand was slipped inside her sweater. I could see his middle finger stuck inside her bare belly button. With his free hand, Sammy pointed at the door, letting me know it was time to go. Specks of light from the turning ball caught his class ring and sparkled in my face. Over his shoulder I could see Angel still shimmying toward us through the crowd. I'd been avoiding her, though I'm sure she didn't know it, since Sammy showed me the blood spot, turning around, pretending to be going some place else, whenever I saw her coming down the hall. I grabbed Alice's hand and hurried toward the door.

Sammy drove down to the campground next to the river, me and Alice in the back seat. A full moon was shining. Maybe that had something to do with it. The moon reflected off the river and bounced back up into the car.

Sammy pulled the blond freshman girl in next to him, and Alice slid over next to me and pulled me in tight too.

Alice pressed her legs against the door, and she leaned over on top of me and kissed me, sliding her tongue in my mouth. The muscles on her back made a valley between them. I slipped my hand under Alice's blouse. Alice wouldn't have allowed anything else, she planned on going to law school,

37

and I wouldn't have tried anything else either. God was still strong back then. Her red hair hung down over me, cutting the moon apart. Angel's face was disappearing, and Alice's hair went from straw to silk.

Sammy started laughing. His laugh didn't sound like he was laughing at me, but I looked up to make sure. Sammy reached down inside the blond California girl's sweater and pulled out a wad of pink toilet paper. He held it up in the moonlight, and it kind of shimmered. That's the word - shimmered. A piece of it still trailed out of the girl's sweater. Sammy switched on the dome light.

"Surprise," Sammy said, tossing the toilet paper back at me. "Look what I found."

The blond California girl pushed away from Sammy, opened the door, and ran down toward the river. Sammy looked at Alice and me there in the back. I could feel Alice's back tighten even tighter. Sammy slid across the front seat and went after the California girl. I watched Sammy put his arms around the girl there on the river bank, hug her, and I pulled away from Alice. I grabbed the toilet paper off the floor and stuffed it into my pocket.

About then is when it happened. I found out about it the next day in the boys' bathroom.

* * * * * Sammy waved to me in the school hall and pointed to the door of the boy's bathroom. 1 stuck my hands in my pockets, squeezed my fingers around the pink wad of toilet paper, and got ready to tell about the blond California freshman girl. Sammy went in first and 1 followed after him.

The bathroom was crowded and noisy. Sammy pushed through the guys, and we stopped in front of one of the two stalls. Everybody was talking at once, jabbering about Angel, telling it their way. Seems like after Mr. Carlson, the school principal, shut down the homecoming dance at midnight, all the seniors hopped in their cars like usual and headed up the hill to the county fairgrounds. Angel got up there somehow. Nobody was saying how.

Sammy and me had decided not to go on account of the two college football scouts that had been out to see him play that afternoon. Sammy didn't want anything messing up his getting out of the valley. One of the guys poured a can of gasoline onto the wood that they'd carted up there after the game and one of the cheerleaders torched it. the fire lit up the whole hillside. the football players tapped the keg that they'd brought up there with the firewood, and the beer started pouring. I don't know what happened to Angel's eighth grader. Nobody was talking about him.

Angel opened all four doors on one of the cars and turned the radio on to KOMA, her favorite station. On nights like that night, when it was clear and the moon was out, KOMA came in clear as crystal all the way from Oklahoma. She grabbed a couple of footb~ll players by their hands and pulled them over next to the fire and started dancing. Everybody soon joined

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in, dancing and drinking. I'm sure the guys must have been pouring Angel beer after beer, what with her reputation, fighting for a chance to dance with her.

The moon was real bright when it happened. Everybody agreed about that.

Angel took one of the guys - I don't want to say which one - and led him away from the bonfire, over to the pick-up they'd brought the beer up in.

She opened the door to the pick-up and pulled the guy inside on top of her. It didn't take long. Everybody was saying it went real fast. the guy came back carrying Angel's bra. He stuck it on top of the antenna of the car with the radio playing. Then they all jumped in their cars and drove off.

I tried to stop listening. The spike was turning around, spinning around in my head. I squeezed tighter the California girl's toilet paper in my pocket and ducked into one of the stalls. Somebody was saying how the guy had forgot to zip up his pants and how one of the cheerleaders had told him as they took off down the hill to check his bam door before the swallow got out. Under the stall, I could hear people laughing about Angel, about her being left up there by herself in that pick-up to sleep it off. I sat down on the toilet. I took the toilet paper out, and I tossed it in the toilet and pulled the plunger. I yelled at Sammy through the stall door to tell Mr. Carlson that I didn't feel good enough to go to class.

* * * * * Angel didn't come to school that day. In fact, she didn't go back to school at all, not till three years later when they put her in the senior class.

Angel, she was pregnant. I know it's not supposed to happen that way, but that's what happened.

Sammy told me about it right after he found out about it. He passed me a note in the middle of American history class. It was on yellow paper, I remember that. Alice was seated across the aisle from me, and I could feel her reading it over my shoulder. I passed the note back to Sammy.

Sammy whispered, ''Will you go with me?"

I nodded my head. Sammy raised his hand and asked the teacher if he and me could be excused to deliver a load of old clothes to the orphanage.

We'd collected a load for my uncle's Christmas poor folk's fund three weeks before. I was surprised when the teacher said yes.

We drove in my car over to the trailer where Angel and her mother and her sister lived. I got out of the car first, faster than Sammy, and I walked over and I knocked on that trailer door. the trailer sounded hollow inside.

Angel came to the door and she smiled at me - she smiled a big smile. she was wearing a pair of dirty jeans, and you could tell she'd been working on the flower beds around the trailer. The snow had been scraped off and they were all dug up. Flower packages were stuck on the ends of sticks like flags, telling what in the spring was going to be what. Angel's little sister, Amy, was tugging at her knee and smiling up at me too.

I stared at Angel, my eyes going down from her black hair and fixing on

39

her stomach. Then I just blurted it out, straight out, right there in the doorway of that trailer house.

"Angel, will you marry me?" I said. Where it came form is beyond me, but it was out, finally.

Angel didn't know. There's no way she could have known. Sammy, he didn't know either. He just stood there, not saying a thing. Amy staned giggling, her long black braids swinging backward and forward.

"Shush," Angel said to her sister. She brushed her hands off on her pants and held one hand out to me and the other out to Sammy. "Come on inside where it's warm. It's nice of you two to come and visit. Mama, look who's here."

"Hi, Aunt Ruth," Sammy said.

Angel's mother didn't look up from the television show she was watching.

She was stretched out on her recliner, a magazine on top of her huge stomach, and a half-smoked, unlit cigarette in her mouth. The trailer had a thick moldy smell.

I looked up at Sammy and he looked at me like I was crazy.

"My uncle would do it," I said. "He could marry us."

"Don't be silly," Angel said. "Sit down and I'll make you boys some hot cinnamon tea."

Angel's mother pulled herself out of her chair and headed toward the bedroom. ''No eggs ?" she said over her shoulder. ''No eggs," Sammy said, ''but I'll be sure to bring you some tomorrow."

Amy sat down in Sammy's lap, and I sat down on the couch next to the two of them.

"Do you know how to play eat's cradle?" Amy asked. ''Nope,'' Sammy said.

"I'm going to learn when I grow up," Amy said. "Angel's going to teach me."

I picked up a ball of red yam out of a basket filled with needles and knitring stuff next to the couch and broke of a long piece of the yam. I tied the ends together, doubled it over, and strung it around my hands and through my fingers.

"Come here. I'll teach you," I said.

Amy climbed off Sammy's lap and over onto my lap. Angel came back into the living room and sat down on the couch between Sammy and me.

She filled two cups with steaming cinnamon tea and sat them on the coffee table. I turned to say something to her, to propose again. The words just wouldn't come. She took the yam between her fingers and twisted it of my hands and onto her own.

"Amy's been after me forever to teach her this," she said.

I picked up my cup and took a sip of the tea. The cup left a round sweat ring on the coffee table. I sat the cup down perfectly on top of the sweat ring, then pinched the yam and spread it out across my fingers. Amy tore the yam out of my hands.

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"I know lots of knock knock jokes," Amy said, stretching the yarn and looping it over my neck.

* * * * * made Sammy go with me to that trailer house every day till school got out after that. We used the eggs as an excuse. Whenever Sammy's mother's hens hadn't laid enough eggs, we bought them in town at the grocery store.

Sammy always lets me carry them in. And here's what I'd do.

I'd knock at the door and Angel'd open it, and then I'd blurt it out again, "Will you marry me?" trying to smile and make it sound more like a joke each time. Angel'd just take the eggs and with her free hand pat me on the shoulder or smooth back my hair. She never said yes, she never said no. Her fingers always felt soft and cool against my skin.

Before long, Amy was pushing herself past Angel's pregnant stomach, taking my hand, pulling me inside. "I will. I will," she'd say. Then Angel would laugh and I could laugh too and we'd all sit down on the couch and talk, Amy squeezing in between us, telling her jokes, stringing the yarn between Angel's and my hands.

* * * * * Sammy and me, we went our separate ways after school, him to Butte as some sort of accountant for one of the mines-he didn't get the football scholarship-and me to Utah, selling plywood in a Salt Lake hardware store.

We wrote sometimes, and he called me once to tell me that Angel had up and married a guy who worked in the saw mill on the day of Angel's little girl's second birthday. Mostly I kept track of Angel and of everything that was happening in the valley by subscribing to The Valley Times. I read in there about her divorcing the guy at the saw mill and marrying the foreman at the Broken Sun ranch then divorcing him and marrying Jimmy at the Silver Spoke and ending up divorcing him too. It was there that I read about Amy making head cheerleader, and it was there that I read about what happen~d the day of the homecoming game.

Traditions are traditions, and on that night the party was going to be at the county fairgrounds after the homecoming dance just like all the times before. But the keg didn't make it up to the top of the hill and the wood didn't get laid out for the bonfire. Amy and the rest of the cheerleaders were in the back of the pick-up on their way to the fairgrounds, steadying the keg of beer, when the pick-up rounded a bend in the road, and plowed into a herd of sheep. Amy was thrown out headfirst. A semi-trailer loaded with logs, coming down the hill in the opposite direction, hit her. The driver said there was nothing he could do. His brakes just wouldn't hold, not with the sheep jammed between his rig's dual tires. My hope is that she was dead when she first hit the road.

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I packed my bags, got in the car, and headed back home, back to Angel.

One idea rolled around, poked around in my head all the way back, a thought I hated but couldn't get rid of. Amy was the lucky one-she broke the string. See, Amy was illegitimate, so was Angel, so was Angel's mother, and Angel's mother's mother before her. Not a one of them had had a father.

I parked the car in front of the Silver Spoke. I figured Jimmy could tell me where to find Angel. It took me a long time to get the guts up to go in. I just sat in the car, shaking. There in Salt Lake, I'd gone back to being religious, attending church again, tithing, doing it all, righteous. They'd even made me deacon. I hadn't been in a bar in years.

I opened the door and the first thing I saw was Angel. I guess that was the way it was supposed to be. Her black hair was just the same, just as long, not gray like I expected, still swinging behind her. Her body wasn't the same egg-timer shape as before-it was more rounded, softer, but I think that that was the way it was supposed to be too. She was carrying a tray of half-empty glasses and wearing a checkered apron. I walked up behind her, smelling her, feeling her close like back on that couch between Sammy and me. I put my arms around her and buried my head in her hair ''Will you marry me?" I asked, my body sweating, my stomach knotted.

"Lenny, is that you?" Angel asked.

I don't know why I didn't say yes. I don't know why I said what I did. I always blame it on the spike whenever I think about it. ''With Amy gone, I thought I'd come back and try for seconds or fourths or fifths or whatever it is now," I said.

Angel dropped the tray. The glasses crashed all around us. Warm beer soaked over my pants and into my shoes. I expected her to hit me. Maybe I wanted her to hit me. Instead, she turned and looked at me with those black eyes that look right through you. She took my hand, and she led me into the bathroom, with me crying, with her holding me, looking right through me, for the first and only time Angel said no.

The world's small. I know that now. I took a job at the Harpers', at the place where Sammy and me had stacked hay, at the place where Sammy showed me the blood spot. The Harpers are old, and they let me run the place. It's only half a mile from Angel's and Angel's little girl's trailer. Every night I go there, go visit them in that trailer-alone now, what with Sammy still in Butte. The good part, the good part of it all, is that Angel's little girl always opens the door and says yes.

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Landfall Sean Anderson

You were tall-masted in the breeze, sloop-rigged on the day of your first landing. Iblessed your coming cautiously, as was my way, and offered you pearls from the deepest shelf.

Your hair was shorter than mine, and I was comfortable in the modem coat you lent me.

My warrior's virtue humbled, I accepted terms my life an Open Door to this new spice trade of your comings and goings.

Down to today, when I say to you again that I am not built for a harbor. Then, again, I fall forward on the blade, your tall whiteness, and ecstatically bleed.

we: Dc

Ih lu e

collage: Raina Grigg 43

The Pillsbury Dough Man Usa Grunberger The Pillsbury Dough Man has a workshop up in the skyAfter hours only.

When lights are turned off below, In factories and shops And the blazing sun, fatigued and hot, retires The whistle blows and the oven is ignited.

The Pillsbury Dough Man emerges fresh and coolUp in the sky preparing his hot, Cresent rolls The butter drips down below, Touching green leavesGlazing the grass with a moist dewYou stand agape, head slightly tilted up And welcome the smooth drops.

They glide down your throat, And creep between your bare toes In the deep grassThe Pillsbury Dough Man whistles while he works.

Below, the milkman commands the Mrs. To change the channel and get him a beer.

The children frolick In the honey-coated grass.

Mrs. Casper calls the cop And Mr. Jones spots a crescent-shaped, butter-dipped UFO. The Pillsbury Dough Man patiently awaits the final batchAnd spreads a hot plump one with maple marmalade.

The sun peeks through heaven's window, Shining on the empty beer can at the milkman's humble abode.

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A Straussian on the Suburban Evil Aloysius Plantageonette Doubtless these findings must needs be published in all great journals, for they report the lair of the dragon, of the Dionysian influence which is so corruptive of our souls. It lies not in the mellifluous melodies of the harlot Madonna, nor verily in the narcotic haze through which our young strain to see only the scion screens that alternatively breed and parade epileptic scenes of sex and violence; rather, I have discovered, with unsparing exegeses of diverse texts representing without exception the nodes of social existence, as well as with the exercise of a keen eye trained to notice especially the subtlest of American phenomena, the root of the evil that draws us funher and funher from the great truths, continually quantumly distancing us, as an entire culture, most noticeably spiritually, from Athens. Too, like the evils it visits upon our souls, it draws us out, toward the edges of the polis, to our separate lives bereft of any meaning at all: I speak, you may have guessed, of that most fundamental of vice-spawning larvae-the suburban auto dealership.

The empirical methods too exact, the scholarship too voluminous to permit a full reconstruction, I here only sketch the barest outline of my twenty-four year meditation. Last month it all became clear to me: upon my return from Paris-ahh, gentle, tasteful Paris--I called for a taxi at the airport. With an alacrity characteristic only of that service industry, a white and rather oblongly structured vehicle appeared and arrested all traffic in its perpendicular assault on white and yellow lines, suddenly fishtailing to the curb upon which I stood. I pulled the latch on the back door and seated myself in the startingly plush interior: leather bucket seats with their own arm rests, carpeted floor, individual vanity mirrors, behind each padded head rest adjustable stereo speakers for each passenger.

"Oh, this is quite nice!" I remarked. "Who would have thought-a flashy Packard as a taxi!"

"Heard WHO had a flashback?" the balding head queried. "Look, mister, I don' 'low no druggy, kinky, or crazy stuff going on in that backseat there. It's agin' the law, and this rig's new, 'sides. Now just sit back and where can I take you to?"

I chuckled: how wonderfully human! "To the University, please. Tell me, what make is this car? Is it standard for your company?" I watched as he greedily eased the gear shaft up a notch, then joyfully depressed the accelerator to the floorboard.

His reply reached my ear as my head rebounded from the rest: "'S one 0' them Saabs. New. Yep, Man's 'vamped the whole g'rage, 'gotta keep up wi' the competition, the times, image's changin', '90's and so on,' he says. Hell, I don' mind. This baby's NICE!" His point was suddenly amplified by a cacophonous burst from the speaker next to my head, and then a brutish cackling from the front and "Sorry, buddy! Hey, hey ...you know, s'times I jus' lose control in this thing."

Naturally my next questions were: ''Tell me, do you believe in objective value?

Or is everything relative to you? Don't you agree that the souls of our youth are

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emaciated, caught in a maelstrom of mediocrity, hapless simulacra of what our young used to be like? Haven't you yourself been hypnotized by the undulating, pelvic rhythms of this music? Have you solved the sexual problem? Ever heard of Nietzsche?"

His head was nodding vigorously in the front, though he said nothing. I leaned forward to develop my inquiry, but saw that he could not hear: this Saab-like all others, I have since labored to discover-was equipped with personal headphones for private listening. I sat back and began to muse on this state of affairs. Perhaps, I reasoned, I have been looking for the source of our moral corruption in the wrong places all along. It might not find root in sundry cultural phenomena-the music, the television, the drugs, and so forth-but in those devices which carry us to and from our separate homes, the concerts, the drug deals, in luxury, in seclusion, and which in some sense noumenally make possible those very phenomena. (Oh very good, but I must be discriminating in my analysis, I cautioned myself. One step at a time.) And if it is our carriers which are ultimately entwined with our moral condition, then it necessarily follows that there be a summum bonum and a summum malum of the auto industry. Reflecting, I looked out the window as we passed under a highway placard for our exit, marked "Suburbs." Three other Saabs were in sight, all taking our exit, and the nearest occupied by four youths passing around what to Joyce's heavy-souled eyes would only be "an ashplant" (if he only knew!) and bobbing back and forth to some Pandemian beat. At that moment I knew. Yes, I concluded, it must be so.

Here, then, is the nature of the beast. Our cities, our would-be polises (and therefore derivatively our very hearts), lie striated, beltway arroyos separating the vital city center, the informing pulse of social life, from what we--in our modem and veiled sensibilities--<:onsider "the promised land:" those municipally (and severally) peripheral regions where we make our homes, school our children, and take our leisure. If we are "lucky", we find employment there and never have to leave these suburbs; otherwise, and usually, we rise in the morning to arm ourselves in chrome, fiberglass, and luxury for the long drive in to the city and our places of work. We work our days in our separate offices, caring only about Efficiency and Productivity and Profit, never pausing to reflect that our lives may be fundamentally empty, thinking only of the moment when we can return to our Saabs and Benzes and our wives' silent Wedgewood and then the equally quiescent metronomic VCRs. (My spite fairly drips onto the page.) We return to the suburbs and our discrete lives, never musing on nor discussing with our children the public life, the good life, and in so doing march in time to the obliteration of our already fragmented and sedentary moral sense.

And the suburban auto dealership, that scourge of the soul, is uniquely responsible for our spiritually dilapidated condition. The chain of reasoning, I now know, is as obvious as it is powerful. America is, fundamentally, a mobile culture.

We need automobiles as we need shelter and clothing. And just as where we live and what we wear are symbols of social distinction, what we drive is vitally important to us as well. We therefore respond as calves to the teat to the most alluring auto advertising campaigns, and those successful Kaisers soon construct

46

their apparat-dealerships in those areas in which we have (alas! inexplicably) decided to live: the suburbs. (They know very well American society is one constructed around convenience.) They peddle their wares on our souls, and we respond willingly-we buy their Jettas, their GTI's, their BMW's, their BeOles, and their Saabs. And each car a veritable microcosm of the T eutanic disease which plagues the American spirit: steeped in luxury and amenity, with power windows and individual headphones facilitating retreat into the self, and tinted glass which monochromizes the outside world and draws us away from the bright light of the sun and the Real, these German machines simultaneously establish in our national psyche that it is only in comparison with others that we are worth anything at all, that it is only relative to others and their possessions that we have any sense of ourselves. And there it is again, the term which recurs over and over in our stilted moral conversations and has, even only through a linguistic tum, become the (oh, how cruelly ironic!) leitmotif of American culture: "relative".

Ahh, but more than merel y microcosms, these German automobiles actually, phenomenally, noumenally, and (notably) essentially catalyze our moral dissolution. Here is how it happens: though our soul detumesces with each day we embrace the separateness and relativism of suburban life. each day also offers (but only for most of us) an opportunity for convalescence and redemption. Every day many of us commute to work in the city center-the potential polis from which, were we its citizens, we could derive a sense of community and spiritual and physical athleticism and therefore meaning in life-complete\y oblivious to the moral and aesthetic majesty which informs its rectangular buildings .. .its compressed humanity ...its Pythagorean shadows ... its open public places. Great souls of politicians and poets and philosophers could blossom there, if only we would reconsider the demographic dispositions we have indulged. And wherefore that obliviousness, and consequently our oblivion? Quite simply: those German displacers in which we commute to (or, as they would have it, through) the heart of the polis, never wondering about the good life-I mean of course a life of sustained inquiry with other citizens into the Great Questions-because we do not hear the pulse of the city through our personalized headphones nor recognize the buildings' geometrical truths mediated as they are by tinted windshields. Comfortable in our luxurious Saabs and BMW's, we never feel the heat of the sun on our faces, never talk ta anyone directly, never comprehend the sublimity of (even private) physical exertion because we only push buttons and flip switches, and soon we are on our ways home, back to the suburban Cave and more privacy, more buttons and switches, and no meaningful social contact at all. During the

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few moments in which we might find cultural fragments of Athens in modern day America, our sensibilities are cauterized, deadened by the suburban, and necessarily German, automobile. I need only refer to my cab driver for the assurance that I am right in my conviction: indeed, this is the capstone of Nietzsche's colonization of America.

But I do not mean to leave you, oh chosen reader, oh discriminating mind, without recourse in this suburban viscera. There is a way out, and it lies, you might have guessed, much nearer the heart of the polis. It is the Chevrolet dealership. That uniformly buying Chevrolet automobiles will trigger a spiritual rebirth in and radical reorganization of American society becomes transparent after the appreciation of only a few considerations. First of all, my meticulous research and meditation have revealed that all but one of the Chevrolet dealerships in my city are found in urban areas, much closer to the city center and therefore the good life. (To understand the significance of this, let us call this discovery X, and proceed with me as follows: X is true of one city; one city is necessarily in the subset of all cities; therefore, being in that subset, X is true of all cities.) Consider secondly, the name of a popular Chevrolet make: the Nova.

The very name connotes starbursts, calling our minds upward to the sky and the constellations, and all the Greek gods, and... but I am overcome. You of course see the magnitude of this observation. Moreover, manufacturers of such makes as the Nova must have subtly intended that society be reorganized around Athenian principles, for they precisely rejected all the individualizing and relativizing features of, for example, the Saab. The Nova is not made in more than three colors (and those, wonderfully, only the primary colors), it does not come with power windows or with tinted glass, nor individual bucket seats, the singular stereos soon break down, as do the manual window rollers--all of which force drivers and passengers to talk, to be close, to exert themselves, to notice the outside world, and especially during commutes to notice the polis and the potential and sole realm in which we can realize the good. Further proof of this hidden intention is to be found in Chevrolet's European advertising brochure, which entices consumers with the vision of driving Chevrolet models "across the United Kingdom, France, [...], Spain, Holland, Scandinavia, and Italy." The text makes no mention of Germany; by this important silence, the writer-what a discerning soul!-suggests that no one should visit Germany, that bastion of moral relativism.

But space grows short, and I must refer you to my fuller exposition of these views, hopefully forthcoming: Let me say in conclusion only this: we find ourselves at the historical moment for which we will always be held accountable, and it is very much in doubt how our progeny will judge our roadsmanship. Buy Chevrolet. Today.

*Another morally compelling reason to buy Chevrolet is that for a limited time each sale will

be rewarded with an unbound (and soon to be published) copy of my more developed thoughts on these matters. Supplies are limited, so don't delay.

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