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SulJversive Stars oud the

ConsutJIers Who Love Them!

"The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge"

Once again we are pleased to denounce the sordid art establishment of anti-establishment poseurs that burdens the American life of the mind; the talentless collection of would-be rock stars; the tired, ossified institutional avant-garde for whom image is in fact everything. Their blue jeans are far too expensive; their affected homeless-person fashions are a nausea-inducing parody of art's traditional role, a whimsical nod at our society's ethical collapse. their sycophantic big-money openings, their (bad) poeby rea~, their ever-more conspicuous attempts to outshock one another but still retain the patronage of their capitalist friends. TIlE BAFFlER calls for secession from this sordid, bloated culture of institutionalized rebellion All down the line our professional vanguardists are in league with the cultural project of Madison Avenue, providing image and credibility to the machinety that would reduce the people of the world to brainless organization men. They are rebels in capital's cause; pretentious pwveyors of packaged dissent; the cutting edge of a corpulent business culture, helping to establish the consumerism of pseudo-rebellion and to enforce the iron law of planned obsolescence. They are the cultural storm-troops of The New, savagtng "master narratives" so that the manipulation of the consumer can continue without interference from troublesome t:hf.ngs like ethics and tradition. For artists -- espedally the brand name kind who appear in advertising for liquor and cars and clothes -- are the model dtizens of the new consumer ideology.

And meanwhUe the whole consumerist project itself, the central motive force and organizing cultural theme of our age, has become unjudgeable amidst the fogs of "undecidability" our baffled inteligentsia have called down upon themselves. Impotent, powerless, fearful of forthright speech lest 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 1HE BAFFlER In a time when the "cutting edge" has become a powerful tool for mediocratlzation, 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.

aWl

Are you SHOCKED?

Winter/Spring 1992

Thomas Frank, Keith White editors Thanks to Diamonds Dave Mulcahey. Mark C. Meachem. lloyd

Frank, the University of Chicago. and the Illinois Arts Council for its

generous support.

We laid out this Issue of 1HE BAFFlER in a marathon session of four days in the garret of a sprawling ranch/tudor house in suburban Kansas City. We like the Midwest. The whole thing was printed on a Macintosh laser printer.

Apologies to everyone whose stuff was not included.

All materials e copyright 1992 The Baffier. All rights reselVed. ISSN # 1059-9789

Write to us. Send us your poetry. your money. SubSCriptions (2 issues) are $8/year for individuals; $l0/year for institutions.

1HEBAFFLER P.O. Box 378293

Chicago. Ilinois 60637

Number Three T. C. Frank Keith White A Plantageonette Rick Perlstein Greg Delanty Dagfinn von Bretzel John White Eric Iversen Jake Baxter David Berman Gaston de Beam Sean Francis Julia Clinger Alec Dinwoodie Seth Sanders Rick Wojcik Bill Holmes Eric Forst Keith A White A Plantageonette Thady Quill

Up Against the Wall, Deadheadl Gedney Gets the Girl sick Scooby Dooby Doo Alone in Vermont Do I Wake?

Remembering the 80s Ben Franklin, Uar Cutrescence Revisited New Centuxy Century poems Profession Centrifuge Places I Hid Rock Music Reviews Architecture Reviews Goddess poems 路 Continental DMde City Book Reviews

Z Z Quest Que s t 路

5 7 12 15 20 21 22 27 34 35 42 44 45 50 52 53 79 83 99 100 101

65 65

ENEMY OF THE STARS All neologisms are printed in boldface.

Contributors Tom Frank is a starving graduate student of American History at the University of Chicago. where he also manages the insufferably avantgarde radio station WHPK. His writings appear everywhere.

Keith White makes a living as an honest-to-god editor at a major national magazine. On weekends he looks for buried treasure and Valley. traps squirrels throughout the Hudson valley.

Gaston de B~arn is a real live French count. No lie.

Dave Berman is presently boring from within at one of the great institutions of the Institutional Avant-Garde. We won't say which one. one, but it's in Manhattan. He's been published in Caliban as well as BajJler 1& 2.

Clinger and Dagfinn Dagflnn von Bretzel attended the Iowa Both Julia Cllnger Writers' workshop. which was savagely denounced in Bqffler BajJler#1. # 1. Julia. describes herself who contributed to that watershed publication. now deSCribes as a "creepy experimentalist" and hides from civilization in Vermont.

The poetry of Greg Delanty. Irishman. has appeared in a great number of journals. including the Times Literary Supplement, Supplement. the L. A. Times. and Southern Review. He has been poet-in-residence at NYU and taught at St. Michael's College. His book Southward (LSU Press) will appear later this year.

Dinwoodle. he of the Sideburns. is a Marshall scholar and ediAlec Dinwoodie. tor of the Chicago Literary Review.

Gurmn. whose Eric Forst edits Row Boat and plays bass for Frances Gumm. first 7-inch record was recently released by Sweet Portable You. Intellectual-at-Iarge Eric Iversen's latest home is Chapel Hill. N.C. Baffier # 1 and will soon be published in His stuff has appeared in Bqffler the comparatively obscure Lectura Dante.

Rick Perl(stein) is a text that always and already inscribes itself in figures of overdetermination. discursively re-producing the condition ofits (un)writing. of its own (un)writmg.

Colonel Aloyisius Plantageonette. whose Straussian piece on subBaffier #2 caused such a stir. returned from the Gulf conflict urbia in Ba.ffler just in time to turn his latest literary gems Baffier. over to The Ba.ffler.

Seth Sanders. rock 'n' roll Jacobin. is a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and editor of Nest of Ninnies.

The bold Thady Qulll Quill is a stock broker. radical agitator. and masscult mOnitor monitor in Chicago. city of slumped shoulders.

John White is known to friends as the "SWinburne "Swinburne of Rye (N.Y.)" for his free-spirited. sOirees. alcohol-fueled soirees.

4

The American Nonconformist In the Age of the

Commercialization of Dissent T. C. Frank \\e saw 1hJs trend approaching a millim. cmsum.er-mJles away. It was inev1table: the Protest Generatlcn ames of age as the Genemt1cn ofSuper-Consume:rs.

Faith Popcorn. 1991

Thirty-five years ago, Norman Mailer first gave voice to the idea that the "hipster," the young art-appreciating free-spirit alienated from an increasingly repressive society' was the existential hero of the day. In an America terrified by the bomb, grown stagnant from over-organization, cowed into homogeneity and conformity by red scares and the depersonalization of the computer age, the "hipster" was supposed to represent liberty and the affrrmation of life. "The only life-giving answer" to the deathly drag of American civilization, Mailer wrote, was to tear oneself from the security of physical and spiritual certainty, to embrace rebellion, particularly rebellion associated with the black American subculture of jazz and drugs. The distinction between those who resisted mass society and those who collaborated was a clear and obvi0us one, Mailer insisted: "one is Hip or one is Square ... , one is a rebel or one conforms, ... trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed."

Today the opposite is true. In advertising, television, and all the other organs of offiCial culture, the hipster is now a figure to be revered. He has become a central symbol of the technocratic system he is supposed to be subverting: a model consumer, a good citizen in a society which demands moral indifference and a perpetual patronage of the new in order to keep its gigantic wheels 5

turning. Rather than resisting the enormous cultural machinery of mediocrity, impoverishment, and stupidity, in 1992 the hipster is its star player.

•••••

Spike Lee has made his reputation as a film innovator by posturing as a free-floating radical, as a spokesman without portfolio for the nation's outsiders and oppressed, as a fulminator against convention and bourgeois morality. He is also a spokesman for the Nike corporation, and you can regularly see this daring and revolutionary young filmmaker on prime-time 1V, selling an extraordinarily expensive athletic shoe.

On another channel the Burger King corporation confides that "Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules." A brand of perfume named '1ribe" calls upon consumers to "Join the Uprising." A new variety of chewing gum is cast as the embodiment of hip teen resistance to the puritanical, antifun ways of police and old people. Rock radio stations routinely promote themselves as rule-breakers of the most defiant sort while Mazda introduces us to their new models by ridiculing "Mom" and "apple pie" images and telling us that if "You're not John Doe, why drive his car?"

Bizarre and cynical anomalies? On the contrary, these incidents are perfectly representative of our contemporary consumer culture, which for some time now has utilized images of rebellion to encourage a mindset of endless dissatisfaction with the old and a never-ending compulsion to buy, buy, buy. In 1992 the transformation of rebellion into money is the fundamental operation of our pop-cultural machinery. The commercialization of deviance is fast becoming the universal theme of American culture, the preeminent motif of the age.

And not simply because of its value in reaching the kids. The simulation of dissent we see all around us has 6

become the preeminent image of mass culture because it reinforces an ideology focused on the eternal new and the identification of individuality with product chOice. The beautiful hipsters we see in ads, movies, and malls are always celebrating their liberation, their differance, their emancipation precisely because these aspects of rebellion, American-style, make them model consumers. They have embraced a worldview of bourgeois antinomianism, an automatic scorn for anything even vaguely established, permanent, or conventional (except, of course, their own incomes), because this is the attitude they must adopt to do their part in keeping the great machine racing at fever pitch. Our young pseudo-radicals buy, eat, and discard freely and unrestrainedly, unencumbered by the repressive moral baggage of their square, tightwad elders, who didn't buy a lot of things they didn't need, who saved money and didn't purchase on credit, whose dull, unliberated lives centered on producing goods rather than consuming them.

So commercial rock 'n' roll music, the veritable incarnation of commerCialized deviance, becomes the inescapable soundtrack of daily life, and millions of products are peddled in its wake. So American youth and its young-thinking parents fall over one another rushing to patronize the latest consumer expression of rebellion, whether it's acid-washed jeans, leather

Gedney Market felt like a new man. Even his walk was lighter, bouncier, more selfconfident. As he strode down Lexington Avenue with his chartreuse fanny pack riding jauntily on his hips, everything seemed to interest him. The little musical Peruvians, desperately seeking riches in the United States, the old men and women huddled together in darlc coats, even the drunks he stepped over as he boarded the subway. The whole world was shining with a glossy new patina, and there was simply too much to do, too much to spend. And he knew he could top everything that had come before, that he would soon be living in a great big way.

Once every year, as the earth tilted solemnly in its orbit, rolling down the temperature as well as the sleeves of most New Yorkers, Gedney prepared himself for the grand expedition. In early August he obtained from a friend the early proofs 7

oflnterview,G. Q..

Esquire and the Village Voice. in which he

carefully studied the "looks" the fashion cognosceti had decreed were available to him.

Gedney would then whittle down his choices, usuallyarriving at two or three that allowed him to convey his own, personal sense of himself as the new Urban American Hipster, both coolly confident and calculatingly hip. And this year was particularly excit-

ing. because he had decided to go for something utterly new and different: the updated James Dean look. All summer he had allowed his forelock to grow, carefully hidden by his "X" cap. Now his hair hung casually from his brow, ready to be slicked back or to remain true to the 8

motorcycle Jackets, or multiple-pierced ears. We let our hair grow. cut it short. tie it in a ponytail. dye it, cut lines and words into it. We wear all black (no one on the Baffler staff has done this since 1985 - ed.) or don ..X" caps and wait anxiously for the next hip dispensation from the East. We make sure our bandit garb has labels conspicuously displayed because we want there to be no question whether we have bought the real hot article or a cheap knock-off. We purchase every product, visit every nightclub we think will set us apart from the crowd and exemplify our daring disdain for tradition. And then a few weeks later we do it again. and again. and again.

Commercialized dissent is a condition of perpetual youth, because our identities are more flexible when young, and we can experiment with the (external markings) of many. many different "lifestyles." It is a condition that has thrown off the restraints of tradition and values, because without these we are truly free to buy any product, appropriate any motif, obsolete it quickly thereafter, and go on to the next.

And the art world, with its traditional reverence -for a hyper-alienated avant-garde, has served as a prominent model for the development of commercialized devi-ance.'. Arty hipsters appear regularly in ads and sitcoms as icons of consumer perfection.

And this is hardly a media distortion:

on the contrary, every movement in the institutional avant-garde scene during the last 25 years has served to reinforce the new ideology of consumption being fOisted on the world by Madison Avenue. Nor is this complicity a new problem. Malcolm Cowley wrote of his G"eenwich Village experiences in the Q-eenwich 1920s that To keep the factory wheels turning. tUrning. a new domestic market had to be created. Industry and thrift were no longer adequate. There must be a new ethic that encouraged people to CCRlSumptiDn ethic. buy. a CCRlSumptian It happened that many of the Greenwich Village ideas proved useful in the altered situation. Thus.

Keanu-esque revitalization of the familiar teen rebel. With the addition of sideburns Gedney's Fonz-ification fantasy was about to come to fruition.

Emerging from the subway, Gedney barely avoided a splash of blood as he bounded past two young men stabbing a tourist tourist.

Gedney noticed the green bandanas the young toughs wore, and made a mental note to himself to pick up something similar, if not slightly more

9

expensive and menacing. Soon he was pressing through the shiny, gilded doors of a wellknown department store, leaving behind the sounds and smells of the street. Gedney proceeded deliberately towards the the bank of elevators, gently repulsing the advances of the flirtatious and aggressive perfume girls. On the fifth floor he was greeted by Moschino, his personal guru, who was obsequiously pleased to see him.

Mter a few words, both men were grinning broadly and stepping smartly towards the racks and racks of carefully pressed Razzy jeans. The pants had been broken in by a genuine Marlboro Man on a Brazilian ranch, and stood as a swank affIrmation of Gedney's astute evaluation of this year's vogue. Gedney then pored over a cornucopia of black leather jackets, finally selecting an Italian clothier's model replete with skid marks designed to mimic those from real motorcycle accidents on the great highways of California. Already 10

self-expression and paganism encouraged a demand for all sorts of products -- modern furniture, beach pajamas. cosmetics. colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match.

Living Jor the moment meant buying an automobile. radio or house. using it now and paying for it tomorrow.

Today the story is the same, but the inversion of values we are faced with is a trifle more complex. Artists are given to strutting their pseudo-dissent like no other group except rock stars. Take for example Interview magazine, the preposterous Andy Warhol's greatest contribution to American life, a showplace of commercialized deviance which is actually taken seriously south of Houston street. Warhol himself was, of course, the model consumer of his day, playing with maximum effectiveness the role of artist/nonconformist as hyper-consumer and celebrity-worshiper. His magazine carries on this legacy, whether it's railing against the imaginary bogeyman of moral repressiveness, slavering over the institution of celebrity, or tantalizing us with visions of our purchase-lust unfettered. A lucrative testimony to all in the art/fashion/ad world that is unfailingly superficial and aggresively stupid, Interview puts forward a consistent ideal of the alienated, vaguely artistic (and always handsome) outsider as ideal consumer.

The non -advertising text of Interview has one reliable qUality: the

artist/ celebrities which it incessantly praises are "unconventional" people.

We are told again and again and again in words and pictures that they resist conformity, that they do their own thing. The ads hammer away at the same point: the rebels who appear in DKNY or Cavartcci clothing are always distinguishing themselves from the crowd, being their ineluctable selves.

"Resound," reads the caption for a recent Interview ad featuring saxophonist Maceo Parker. "It's the thunder you create, the way that everything you choose [to buy] adds to the roar.

For individuals it starts with the Gap." What is it about the celebrity rebel hipster that makes him/her such an Imagine Rimbaud effective corporate as a dancing pitch- symbol?

These ads man for Coca- Cola, are the key to grasping with his famous the whole sneer and a little thing, to undergel in his hair_ standing why this juxtaposition of alienation with advertising, the central pillar of the consumerist establishment, seems so appropriate and yet rings so false.

It's the same point THE BAFFLER has squawked about for three years. Not only is big art big money in this image-obsessed age, but its most characteristic poses -- the alienation, the

ensconced in a regal pair of Reebok pumps (the choice of JDs everywhere), Gedney headed towards the cash register, tripping briefly from the overabundance of fabric in his trousers but quickly recovering and snapping his Platinum card deftly on the counter. Moschino nodded approvingly as Gedney signed the imprint without even bothering to notice the four figure amount that was to be debited against his account.

Later that day Gedney stopped by his apartment to collect his mail and his landlady invited him in for some herbal tea. Pringle Pypkin, the owner of the East Village walkup our hero inhabited as well as a mid-size advertising company, served as a sometimes mentor for young Gedney.

Today she responded immediately to his new look. "Oh, chills.

Gedney, chills!" she exclaimed, managing somehow to pronounce the "s" as both a "th" and a hard "s" at the same time. She fawned (see page 70)

(continued on page 70)

11

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is a matter of leer: this is my Tool, my pretty So she proteges and exeges but just all the while pendages his verifile texuali ty.

--A.P.

12

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"Ten "Ten Best Best Magazines Magazines of 1990" Library Journal.

Journal.

1\"y - Library -ct~ Reviewer 'Ot~ Reviewer Bill Bill Katz Katz praises V THE V -',-'"."'(;" THE BAFFLER BAFFLER as "a pleasant ~.~: ~<):/' )~ reminder reminder that that the old-fashioned G~ <:.\l.~\-Y

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AAnumber numberof ofcopies copies of ofthis this now-important now-important magazine magazine are still

available availablefor for$3 $3 ++$1 $1 for for postage. postage. BAFFLER BAFFLER #2 features the famous famous Baffler Bafflermanifesto manifesto on on postmodemism, postmodemism, fiction by Frederic FredericWakeman Wakeman (The (The Hucksters), Hucksters), poetry poetry by John Huss, and andthe theesssays esssayson on suburbia suburbiain in which which the the concept concept of "cutrescence" was first first introduced introduced into into American American discourse. "cutrescence"was Copies Copies of ofBAFFLER BAFFLER #1, #1, which was even better, are which was even better, are ~~ ~;:, ;:,...' {,.~/C I I:::'/) so so rare rare that thatitit isis now now ~ ... ~ eR ...... unavailable. unavailable. ItIt featured featured fiction fiction by byJulia JuliaClinger, Clinger, the the ~ ground ground breaking breaking essay essay on on Mark MarkTrail, Trail, Iversen's Iversen's "Letter "Letter :~. to to Wordsworth," Wordsworth," and and lots lots of of . '>., charming channingpoetry poetry and and art art and anffd ... ,.....,,,.â&#x20AC;˘......."....'", . ...... stuff. stu .

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Don't Don't miss miss any any more more installments of The The Journal Journ.al that that Blunts Blunts the Cutting Edge!

SulJserlptlons 'or lor tteO t..,o bsues Issues are Suflserlptlons $a/year 'or lor individuals individuals and ancl S10 $10 'or lor SSI"ear institutions. institutions.

Send Send a// 011 YOUI your money and ond praise proise to THE THE BAFFLER P.O. P.O. Box Box 378293 Chicago, Chicago. Illinois Illinois 60637 13

realize, you must admit to your"The first thing you must realize. self, is that you are a victim -- a victim of THE BAFFLER." self.

14

t18nn8b8rbildung~roman

by Rick Perlstein I

When public television aired Ken Burns's ninetypart series on the Civil War, eggheads tripped over each other to proclaim this soft-spoken young writer as the American Homer, the architect of a Yankee national epic.

The series was more than just good television; it was the narrative repository of all of our most cherished cultural values born Phoenix-like out of the fiery chaos of war. It extemporized for millions of viewers across the fruited plain the glorious sweep of heroic struggle and self- and national-transcendence that distinguished such classic texts as the book of Exodus, France's Song of Roland, Iceland's Edda, India's Baghavad Ghita. All at once, it seemed to these intellectuals, the Colonies' eternally crippling cultural anxiety, that collective penis envy of the American intelligentsia, had been lifted: culturally speaking, we'd finally Made It. We had found our Bildungsroman.

Hardly. What was far more impressive about the show was that it got the American public to actually watch a show on PBS and that it got intellectuals to admit to having watched 'IV at all. And yet while millions of snobs came out of the closet and admitted that, yes, they actually owned television sets, our cognoscenti were still too ashamed to own up to the obvious: that the truest aesthetic embodiment of the American sublime was not to be found in the cathartic saga of brother fighting brother, but in the weekly chronicle of the spiritual journey of a vessel called the "Mystery Machine" sqUiring Shaggy, Scooby, Velma, Daphne, and Fred to an eternal youth spent Fighting of the Good Fight. As national myth, the Iliad doesn't have anything over "Scooby Dooby Doo, Where Are You?" 15

II

In the classic epic of transcendence, a tormented hero hears the lonely call of adventure, setting off to combat foes mortal and immortal, struggling with the alien forces of self and society, to emerge triumphant and whole. By taking leave physically of the nation he takes with him its spirit, rendering its glorious character lucid and visible in stark contrast to the slovenly barbarians he triumphs over. His antagonists are invariably bigger and seemingly more powerful, but by using their power and size against them the hero shows that it is spiritual pUrity that truly carries the day. Thus his struggle inspires the powerless multitudes by its example. They too can embody the nation (or the city-state, or the true faith) like good little sheep. And so the bard repeats his saga over and over and over, in a ritually hypnotic way, continually reproducing for his auditors the first prinCiples principles of the nation so they can carry them forth in their everyday lives. They all know the story, and yet it is still told over, and over, and over and over (after these messages we'll be right back) and over and over and over and over In Glowing Radioactive Primary Colors and over and over and over in Pulsating Half-Hour Units and over and over The Technicolor Bard tells and retells and tells and retells Uplifting Saga Of Adulthood Averted as the nation learns and " relearns the Shimmering Ideal to which each and every citizen in our great democracy must aspire: to be A Teenage Rebel, Rebet the symbol of consumer perfection that the gods of Madison Avenue and Hollywood implore us from on high to personify through what we wear, through what we drive, through what we /6 16

drink, through what we eat, through what we watch, through what we Buy Buy Buy Buy like there's no tomorrow to keep those wheels of commerce roll-roll-rollin' along ...

In this saga the first prinCiples of consumer capitalism are ever embedded: by its positing of an unattainable ideal of libertine youthfulness we are taught to be habitually unsated in our desires. We are taught that commodities are the way in to a mystic Outsiderness which really and emphatically is the vital center of a culture rapidly losing its vitality. Next time you see a flying phallus blaze by you on the interstate at illicit speed, take a glance at the driver. Chances are he's not under fifty.

And he's not, despite what the ads promise, getting younger. Balding James Deans. A nation of Rebels With Menopauses playing a game of chicken with the old folk's home. A nation where earnest rebellion is impossible because the socialized means of dissent always lead tautologically back to the marketplace. We are lured into a commercially lucrative psychiC terror of maturity, of spiritual wholeness.

This knife cuts both ways. The pre-pubescent is taught not to idolize Mom or Pop, but older Brother or Sister, with their cool clothes from the Gap, their cigarettes snuck on the sly, their music that annoys Dad so much, their tantalizing mating rituals. If junior can muster the energy to extricate himself from the Nintendo machine, it is to mobilize all his or her powers of cutrescence to separate the 'rents from their hard-earned cash so he or she can aspire to the very expensive hobby of Teenagerdom. Teenagerdom achieved is costly to maintain, and often it transforms the lumpenproletariat of pre-adolescence into a proletariat of 16-year-old hamburger flippers, keeping the suburban economic infrastructure humming along.

We are thus socialized from birth into a terrifying cycle of truck, barter, and trade as we each are forced to shell out for our own personal City on a Hill, an unattain17

able utopia that ever seeks to erase the inevitability of death. The Fountain of Youth is supplied through an underground spring of Mountain Dew, the commercials suggest. Or are we just getting pissed on?

We are catechized in the true and only American church on Saturday mornings when we are very very young and very vulnerable at the alter of Our Lady of Perpetual Hucksterism, Reverend Shaggy presiding, Hallelujah: and pass the Doritos.

III

Every episode has the same plot. The Mystery Machine sets out from nowhere to rendezvous with one of the crew's relatives, who invariably live in some eerie run down old mansion. Here already we .can read a socialization of a vital American commercial mythos of rootlessness: Scooby and his comrades don't seem to come from anywhere, and don't really seem to be heading for anywhere in particular, either. Like the classic American mythologizers of the open road John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac. and Ken Kesey, the auteurs Hanna and Barbera present the viewer with the ever-receding ideal of infinite possibility. In Tocqueville's words, they reproduce the classic American conceit of "forever seeking. forever falling to rise again, often disappointed, but not discouraged, [tending] unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track [Route 18

66?] which humanity has yet to tread." Utopia equals the day after tomorrow. This is the existential American condition we are forever doomed to retread as we fantasize our own eternal youth. In this epic, rather than the destination becoming spiritual wholeness and self-knowledge, the goal, sCripted by some demonic Zen master, becomes the futile journey itself. Yikes!

Onward we press. The crew arrives, only to be greeted by a crew of "creepy" (the show's favorite word in referring to adults) midqle-aged wackos. A grave crime against property has been committed, our heroes are informed: a ghost has been scaring everyone off the premises: it would be best for them to just stay out of the way and let the grown-ups take care of things. But this will not do: their Argo after all is called the Mystery Machine and with those words' transcendent implications of post-psychedelic youth culture in all its righteous splendor, the revolutionary and benevolent truisms of the rootless hippy of American legend are recalled and exploited. Rather than trusting anyone over thirty, the kids follow Jerry Rubin's and the Monkee's (who are too busy singing to put anybody down) call for an America redeemed by its children. And here is where their (and our) arch-nemesis steps in: the Pigs. The local sheriff, a seedy looking character if there ever was one, gruffly warns the "kids" that they'd better back off. But they would sooner let Richard Nixon himself toss a bucket of napalm over a Cambodian babe-in-arms than resist the challenge of Doing The Right Thing Cut to a commercial And another And another And another And (continued on page 80)

19

Alone & Late at Night in Vermont The crickets croon their natural chorus & though they must be in the agony of relentless desire like so many now, their soliciting wing song is strangely calming.

The trees are like embracing figures in a negative who can't be made out.

A bird singing from one of their shoulders, is probably also desperate for a mate.

A Chevy of lovers passes with purpose & hangs a right down to the lake.

As if they're home, they hit the lights.

I am at home now too as I take in the sexual night.

- Greg Delanty 20

Do I Wake or Sleep?

Dagfinn von Bretzel I lie in bed with my personal Venus. She is of flesh and bone like me. I am sleepless and feel belabored reaching for paper and pencil at two forty-four in the morning. I am not a Romantic! I employ only the twentysix elements and nothing else. I do not nearly know the infinity of combinations. Narrative to reader sympathy, Revolution! I scribble in the black book: "Nicholas walked into the room looking for his pals." No. Must grab the reader's attention like a pitbull. Must contract lock-jaw:

***** Nikita paced his way through the Untimely looking for acquaintances. The Untimely was not exactly the Chicago version of the Boston book-bar. The emphasis was less on the books, or for that matter the coffee.

Rather it was on the clientele -- a distinguished motley of local 'Ahht' types sporting a wide variety of clothing. Also a few poseurs from city institutions who actually paid for what they ordered and played chess like samurai. With all that, the Untimely still retained a casual feel, and that was the most extraordinary feature of the little cafe.

Nikita had walked all the way to the rear yet the only person he recognized was Clever Hans. Hans was a gaunt curly-haired scarecrow of a man with very large fingers. He had the swarthy appearance of a Turk, though he was a Jew. He had a Swedish name, but was Polish. Nikita knew Hans from conversations in which things were discussed rather abstractly and with little regard for the participants. In fact most of these had been inane discussions on the nature and denature of modern 21

poetry. They had concluded that it was in a decimated state. That was some time ago.

"What a morbid coincidence!", thought Nikita.

Gloomily, and with these testy thoughts and counterthoughts (a fencing of neurons ... J. Nikita approached Mr. Hans.

It seemed that Hans was busy with a long, doorshaped piece of wood. Upon coming closer, Nikita noticed it did indeed have a striking resemblance to a door. As suddenly as Nikita had noticed the door he was stricken by a profound and subtle sense of hysteria, like a hair tickling the back of his throat. The piece of wood was unquestionably a door. The hysteria vanished completely, and Nikita sighed evenly.

"Hans," his voice sounded thin: he took a deep breath, "How are you, sir." Thicker.

"Fine -- hey, Nikital How are you my Droug?" A long look from Hans was enough to rally any demoralized

The Catcher on East Seventy-First Street

by John White I suppose the first thing you're going to want to know, if you really want to hear about it, is how I got kicked out of school and went running like a madman all over Manhaffan and all, having cocktails in hotel restaurants, taking cabs instead of buses, and calling up old friends 22

voice.

"I'm alright Hans. What's that you're doing?"

Nikita's sounded to himself as he should sound, sound. it had been some time.

Hans flashed his eyebrows and grinned with abandon. "This here is the door, door. yes indeed -- you know what I mean. I've got the hinges in. in, and now I'm working on the jambs!"

Hans cast a screwy eyeball at his friend for the briefest instant and then returned to his door. Nikita was startled by the Similarity of Hans' eyes to those of a chameleon. But why was he doing what seemed to be such dreary work? It was unlike him. Clever Hans was an unusual fellow, fellow. composed of equal proportions bawd, bawd. wit. and wile. He was amusing but a claSSical failure with women. This and his untransliteratable soft-as-sour cream Polish accent endeared him to Nikita. This same clever Hans painted huge. vile canvases in his dingy garden-level/ dungeon flat and displayed them at mysterious den-level/dungeon semi-industrial loft spaces which had been instantaneously converted into art-galleries an hour before the show and miraculously stocked with viperine black mambas who took on the appearances and breaths of young women when out of the shade. Hans' groupies were very hip.

"But what of this wood?" Nikita thought. Dear, clever Hans was an artist. not a some sort of noble craftsman. and being terrifically cynical about them and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap. Well, first, that stuff bores me, and second, that guy is the biggest phony a guy could ever read about. I don't know who old J.D. thought he was fooling, but Huck Finn, Holden is not. You probably expect me to go on and on about how my parents never loved me, how they drank, and beat me, how I was locked up in a kitchen cabinet for the first six years of my life and all, but my mom would probably have to refill her prescription about a dozen times before she finished reading the 23

As these familiar thoughts passed through Nikita's

head, Hans put his screwdriver down and presented him with the steady glance of his full attention.

"How are you these days, old Nik?" Nikita hissed under his breath and bent his beard against its grain. "Not the greatest."

Then there was one of those odd pauses, a silent coma of an instant that are present even in the conversations of friends.

'" ...'" ...'" ...'" ...'"

...

Nikita had tried, desperately for much of his life, to become an 'artiste.' Yes -- that's what he wanted most in his sleep. But alas! He was unskilled in painting -- it took him two years to find out, as it was his first passion and very dear. He was not inclined towards sculpting, for his hands did not obey him.

Abandoning the spatial arts Nikita lunged at film, as an adder to a rat. He took a course called "Editing for the Screen -1." He composed several theories on the subject and devoted all his time and money to viewing cinerna d'art. It was not for him: he could not come up with anything well-defined and had a particularly uninteresting taste for black and white shots of sidewalk cracks.

So he tried music. Bass. He quit after a year's stint with the "Articulate Pythons" because of a painfully distinct lack of rhythm. Those experiences were back in his first chapter, and besides, there isn't anything like that to tell. I haven't really been abused -- I've got a goddam personal charge at Paul Stuart.

What I will tell you about, if you really want to know (and I'm beginning to wonder why anybody would), is all this madness that went on last fa Colorado Saturday, before I got pretty run down, and had to go out to and do Outward Bound.

My brother's going to fly out here to visit me, which is relatively 24

time at college, the young manhood of 18 through 22, on the campus of De Paul University. Nikita was now thirtyone and was quite sure that those days were behind him.

During his senior year as an English major Nikita had decided to try his hand at the art of fiction. The "Pythons" had just broken up after a post-show squabble about beer, amplifiers and somebody's girl. Nikita seemed to remember she had long brown hair. Long legs maybe -a girl with a serpentine posture.

That night Nikita had returned to his studio flat on Halsted and Wellington and tapped out his first poem. He read it to his dog, and then to his friend. They both liked it. A few months later Nikita decided with uncalled-for passion that poetry had been killed by media and undertook his first short story. He wrote it in a night and all his friends had liked it. But seven years later, after teaching, shooting pool, waiting tables, and fixing sinks, he forgot about his stories. He didn't have the time or the desire to wrack his brains re-living his rust.

So Nikita had never discovered his creative gift, and was finally unable to realize his highest aspiration, his dream. He gave up the quest, sold his leather clothing and settled for the armchair. comforts and minor challenges of appreciation and barroom critiques. He was even approaching connoisseurship at one point but decided he risked becoming altogether too snide.

At present Nikita's mind was a bit jumpy. He briefly (continued on page 85)

earth-shattering if you know C. 8., because he's sold his soul to Wall Street, and if he takes a minute off he loses about six billion dollars. He'll probably spend the whole time at Aspen skiing, anyway. It just kills me.

C. B. is really this unbelievable painter. He was a goddam genius with finger paints. He would do these finger paintings that you would just look at and they'd make you want to laugh and cry and have gall bladder surgery -- all at the some time. He had this one finger painting that he had really only done on one half of the paper, but he folded it over so 25

it was on both sides. It just killed me. But now he's prostituting himselF down at Solomon, old CB., and he hasn't touched his finger paints in years; he's even considering moving to Connecticut. I can't stand investment bankers, don't even talk to me about them.

At any rate, I guess where I should start is back at good old Fairfield County Private Country Day Prep School, which has the distinction of being the thirteenth school I've attended in the First Five weeks of 26

Firing the Cannon Eric Iversen You know, Ben Franklin was the one who really started it. His relentlessly folksy "Almanacks" and his calculating "Autobiography" made him the ready midwife in the birthing of the venerable American practice of cynically manipulating the terms of public discussion to suit one's own self-aggrandizing purposes. Franklin exploited the persuasive power of the resonant image at the expense of whatever real-world implications of the campaign might be. All of Franklin's pithy homilies slight the development of internal moral character and address themselves instead to the value of the appearance of industry and virtue for the purpose of securing other's trust and money. As he says of his own capacity for humility, "I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal regard to the appearance of it. " The Franklin lesson on the utility of appearance has taken deep root in the American consciousness. It is of course most obvious in pop culture, from Andy Warhol's manipulation of commercial icons to Andre Agassi's firm conviction that image is in fact everything, and the artisticocommercial complez complex continues to exploit our cultural fetish for a manufactured reality of an academic rating, but it is built on this term. It doesn't have much of land that was originally the first golf course in Connecticut. I've even lanel heard hearel that the Trustees are fighting a hostile takeover bid from some big wig alumnus of Choate who wants 10 buy good old FCPCDPS and tum turn it back into a golf course. I guess we'd all be pocked oU to schools in packed oH 10 Mass. or New Hampshire, and then we could come back and cack/y caclcJy in exira dough. the summer 10 pick up some extra 27

more exciting. sexy. violent. emotional. and beautiful than any lived experience to the tune of a billion dollars every year. All right. so movies. TV. pop music. etc .. have always been in the business of selling illusions. This practice degrades our own imaginative faculties but it yields invaluable glimpses into the collective networks of desire that fuel the American psyche and may even occasionally serve to prod people to a deeper acquaintance with the society they live in . Rap music. for example. has probably educated more white teenagers about the realities of urban life than the most brilliantly conceived school programs could ever have done.

The primacy of the appearance in politics is more pernicious because of the obvious influence lawmakers exercise over our lives. But it yields no comparative advantage to any political group because the techniques of image manipulation are equally available to all sides. and they tend to cancel each other out. Moreover. the images that seem so powerful during a campaign. for example. seem to have a way of haunting their proponents when the realities of public responsibility prove more complicated that the process of getting elected.

George Bush's notorious fondness for the pledge of allegiance in classrooms becomes a poignantly ironic contrast to his meager steps to remedy the actual problems that afflict American classrooms. What seems like gold in a campaign quickly becomes lead in the alchemy of

I really wonted to call my sister Plebe, just then, because I'm completely obsessed with her (almost as much as I am with my dead brother's baseball miff, which I will tell you about in unbelievable detail very shortly) Plebe kills me, though. She's only nine yeors old and she's already hitch-hiked to Tibet and hod cocktails with the Dalai Lama and all. It just kills me, the way she just sits on this enormous bed in my brother's room, with her 28

implementing policy.

Unfortunately, we can also perceive the Franklin doctrine at work in the raging debate in academic circles over the composition of the "canon of great literature." It is the appearance of thought rather than genuine understanding of literary history which prevails among all sides on this ersatz issue. Mter ten years of battle, it is time we called all parties to task for the ideologically-motivated, self-aggrandizing postures they strike in the name of "bettering" the moral character of readers. Seeking to impose their visions of literary order, they have fought it out over reading lists and required courses and anthologies in the absurd belief that any of these have anything to do with the course of literary history. Instead this sham battle is merely a smokescreen for the recruitment of minds and souls that each side believes will help it to save the world. Yet if anyone involved in this ridiculous debate were to take a moment's respite from their headlong production of rhetoric to study the actual material over which they are struggling, they might see that the monolithic canon they are fighting about does not exist now and never really has.

As Jorge LuiS Borges says of Franz Kafka: "each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." After reading Kafka, earlier writers suddenly begin to seem Kafkaesque to us because of the peculiar alchemy Kafka

legs tucked up in a liffle lotus position, wearing some incredibly cute dress from the children's shop at Bergdorf's, chanting her mantras. I mean it's the kind of chanting that makes you want to run right out to Park, grab a goddam cob and say "Tibet, and step on it."

29

works on our way of reading, making his truths seem so pervasive. Literary reputations undergo continual reappraisals as the values we bring to literarure are revised by the changing character of contemporary culture. Mter all, who was William Faulkner until Malcolm Cowley got a crick in his neck from Yoknapawtawpha County that he just couldn't get rid of? Yet to hear either side of the debate say it, the "canon" is only a bit less immutable than the Ten Commandments.

The right believes the "canon" is a transhistorical vessel of the moral and aesthetic truths that have put western society on the good side of God's own history and insured our victory over the red devil of communism.

Strangely, these same truths insist that we are a society of no convictions more sacred that the freedom of individuals to be whatever they chose. Of course this freedom is in fact nothing but the freedom to conform to the right's strange ideology and mouth mindlessly the platitudes of "freedom" that actually bind us into ever more constricting homogeneity. but the Right has world domination on its mind, and can't bother ,to heed soft-minded suggestions that our freedoms might be less liberating than we think. We'll be free as long as we all think alike, they say.

On the other side of the argument, the left levels charges of systematic racial, sexual, and economic oppression against the fictitious canon, wielded in the name of solidifying the power base of white, middle-class,

Blood I'm staring at my finger, and quite frankly I'm amazed at the amount of blood that is coming cut of it. "Jesus Christ, Dan ... hey, Dan cut his goddam hand!" That's Jonah, I think he's also impressed.

"Jesus, Dan -- what the hell were you going to do, iust slam it against the table until it broke?" says Holly. "Slam what?" I say, forgetting momentarily about the shattered bottle. "My god, he really is bleeding!" she adds. I really am, too. The blood is really coming. The odd 30

European males. With the help of the "canon," the true nature of the oppressed objects of the demon white European male thought have been squelched, and their individuality can be resuscitated only by demolishing the power structures that have enforced their silence. For example, Homer is charged with racism, because the only non-white characters in The niad are slaves, and of sexism, because the Trojan War is implicitly started by a woman, Helen, who asked to be abducted by Paris and brought back to Troy. For these reasons, we are to banish it from the "canon."

Presumably the new "canon" will have non-whites and non-males represented only by paradigmatically positive characters who will resemble human beings about as much as the idealized worker figure featured in ideologically sound socialist realism. Such brazen reductivism not only ignOJ;es the historical context which provided the subject matter for the work, but also imposes a stifling dogma on the process of reading which obliterates precisely those individual aspects of literature that make it last. Forcing works through a valorizing gridwork of race class, and gender sifts out the actual blood and flesh of literature that allows it to breathe and to challenge us as readers.

Both Right and Left seek to destroy the individuality of literature while pretending to fight for the SUrvival of the individual in society. Of course the "individual"

thing is, I can't actually feel it. I am experiencing no sensation of pain.

"Look, Jonah, get something, a towel, anything," Holly says, toking charge of the situation.

"Drew, look," I say, holding up my finger to Andrew who is crouching by the wood stove trying to smoke hash oU the end of a forie.

"Check out my blood. "

31

both seek to preserve is a highly abstract figure that simply embodies the political agenda which underlies both sides of the supposedly literary nature of the debate. In presenting the appearance of debating the "canon", the unctuously puritanical neo-conservatives on the right and the strident, single-issue, new tribalists on the left are dueling it out for nothing more than the appearance of control over literature. Ben Franklin would be faSCinated. But in the mean time literature itself goes its merry way, obeying the imaginative dictates of those who produce it and the always evolving cruelties and wonders of the world, leaving the ideologues jabbering away in the dark over who controls the uncontrollable "canon" of literature.

32

~toa~WhichOnceHe1d aGin& TonicButCotItaiffi Now only a Hard, StXkylime, AUahed (proOObly) Rnnanentiyto the Bottom The Empty glass doth mock me from its shelf -I can't believe I drank it all myself.

But that was nigh a month ago today, And yet upon the shelf the glass dids't stay.

The lime, once tart and fresh and so alive with flavo" now is dried like an old chive.

That such Gin, which to me was mother's milk Which mixed with Tonic was of no such ilk As sweeter drinks which made me cringe and cry, And with that lime, to drink it was to die And go to heaven, that such drink in time Could be yet so gross, a hard stuck dusty lime.

So now it sits

and mocks me till I'm sickly, Oh why did I not clean the glass more quickly?

- Algernon Charles Blanc-Norton

33

~utrescence

Revisited

â&#x20AC;˘ A Little Debbie truck containing

$2,000 worth of Little Debbie snack cakes was taken between 7:30 p.m.

Monday and 5: 45 a.m. yesterday from the 600 block of Kasold Drive, Lawrence police reported.

â&#x20AC;˘ The Little Debbie truck taken from the 600 block ofKasold Drive Tuesday was found that night in the Malls Olde English Village parking lot, 2411 Louisiana St., with the keys in theignition and the doors locked. None of the Little Debbie cupcakes valued at $2,000 had been removed, Lawrence police reported.

In Dave Berman's Tree W-etve Yow Ever 1!een to WheeUng'

(Have You Ever Had That Feeling?)

Houses lean into the gold and brown hills. On the FM station someone sings "there on her face, a row of teeth he'll replace".

Ten thousand souvenirs and not a single one worth having.

A group of depressed elderly men meet on Tuesday nights for coffee. They call themselves the Chamber of Commerce . . A young girl, in a factory's employee lounge. reads the recipe on the back of a soupcan' for "How to Run Away With Your Boyfriend."

Whett Doesnt Move 1!wt Is AUve I walked into the house, opened a beer and sat down in front of the 1V. She was on the phone, arguing with her boyfriend again.

Channel 10. Acrobats Channel 11. Local news Channel 12. Footage of a cropduster I could hear the tiny buzz of her boyfriend's voice on the other end. The problem was, I realized, that she had come of age during the Carter presidency and he during Nixon's.

"I'm not turning your identity down," she wailed.

'Then why have I become gay," he cried.

The Inner Christ .... ets It's after midnight and the baby is sleeping like a machine. The living room is lit amber and channel 9 is showing a burning fireplace all night long. Periodically the cameraman comes around and throws another log on the fire.

Everyone in the world is asleep, except the 35

Orientals, and it leaves me as moved and thoughtful as when a president dies.

I open my wallet and pull out the Christmas list I'd found on the bus that morning. In small crabbed handwriting it Said: 'Vodka, Cane, Ornament."

The Mechetnics of etn Aw'(iences Arowsetl A young lady patiently waits to cross the street.

She is a philosophy student, and while waiting for the traffic light she considers its evenly changing mind.

The light goes green and she steps off the curb.

The driver whose mind is wandering does not see the light, strikes the girl, flipping her onto the roof of the car, he brakes and she rolls off onto the street.

She is cut, unconscious, and not breathing. A man in a brown sweater with a book under his arm kneels beSide her and begins performing CPR. He has never touched a woman this beautiful before. Her Ups are full and soft. He sends his breath deep down inside of her. Everyone at the rescue scene becomes vaguely uncomfortable.

The Etern41 Confwsion I was upset to fmd myself in Hell but I understood the nature of my sins and why I'd been sent there. I was looking around at all the condemned when one guy turns to me and asks what I'm in for.

"Hating all of you," I say.

lJebretsk4 Kaleidoscopes sell briskly in Nebraska. They are needed because the landscape Is so simple and repetitive.

It was natural for the insurance industry to settle here, these are the most cautious people in the world.

The companies build long bulldings, low to the ground.

Skyscrapers, it would seem, are flashy and unsafe.

36

The land was conquered and settled through the Invisible Wars of 1825. They were fought in an unusual fashion and casualties were high. Indians and settlers would check into hotel rooms alone and commit suicide.

Eventually the settlers prevailed.

'Fro .... the ~ook of 'Fol,ce,c Ar .... s Astronauts appeared to the Virgin Mary. They floated down from the rafters on white cables and told her about the angels on Mercury. who are welded together into clumps. One gave her a box of icicles while the chorus sang "the sky is hung on a curtain rod, that runs straight to God." Meanwhile. the Pope was confounding all human discourse by "going to the bathroom" 1n the woods.

Septe.... ber 1999 Black charcoal spirals are drawn on fences around town. They're giving free tetanus shots at the entrance to the old amusement park. An old man on the radio talks about "the crime that will end all crime."

Tonight the moon is swollen and the fountains are 37

snuffed. The world gone still.

He finds her in the kitchen, staring out the window at the wheels turning slowly in the sky. He needs to know one thing before it all ends, If there can be stairs in the river, can my name be in you?

AaJwsting the Censws Perkins stood on the ridge firing shots into the lake. He looked on calmly when he saw the black and yellow gear rise to the surface. He'd shot the scuba diver.

Of course he had to shoot the diver's partner and the photographer who stood at the edge of the lake. And there was another witness that had to go.

This would be the hardest one to kill. For this one he'd have to push the trigger not pull it. With his toe.

Clowa, C4stle, L4ke Johnny EI, what a piano player. He rendered the keys waves. Look at this album cover, 1962. Leaning on the window sill of the clubhouse. A smeared audience out of focus behind him. Vice-presidents galore. The clicking drinks, the clinking dricks. A hundred dollar sunset over the golf course. A real estate picture moon over the log ride. Thousands of evenings on thousands of terraces, Wack, shimmer went the jazz drummer.

38

The Swrgeon Generetls 'Report on Wetiting The situation in my country is this. Our poor love our rich, and our wives adore our wife-beaters.

It's sad, yes, but let's not talk about it. Even the subject of sadness will make us sad.

Here's something else we do. In my country, when we're waiting for someone who is very late, we stand at the meeting spot and smoke cigarette after cigarette.

Then, when we die, we blame everybody who kept us waiting.

Mw,(letrks Men in our universities study primitive cultures, though historically, the natives have also studied us, crouched in the bushes, just beyond the arc of the camp路 fIre's light.

There is a tribe in the Amazon whose wealthiest members have their arms and legs amputated as a symbol of their status, to show that they will never have to work.

In an exchange program, wisemen from that tribe will visit here, to take in the psychological thunder of Times Square.

Owoting 'Rich Wottten "in my purse" "evening walk" "private drive" "little drink"

S)llvetniet We were too poor to afford ancestors. Our nineteenth century forebears didn't have indulgent nightmares about columns of marching grandfather clocks, which they didn't write down in a diary, and isn't in our attic in a trunk.

39

We defend the tuba, drive downhill for hours, sing "look away, look away," and agree everybody's a shoeshine boy for the murky powers.

The modern search for a mechanic you can trust takes us to the four corners of the town. We drag the lakes, and look under the cushions, always returning to our half-formed self saying "I am never who I want to be" and "I have one life in one world" so much depending on the only number you could never understand. that it's no wonder you live for the book where all indians are trapped in all canyons.

'Forgiveness It was a documentary on door-to-door salesmen. It had everything that makes a good fIlm. There were beautiful shots of black sedans pulling up alongside curbs and feet wiping on doormats. There were speeches and conversions, scenes where the merchandise became a third character. There was the paradOxical scene when the salesmen were trying to sell to each other. There was the heartbreaking final scene when the weeping Nazi answered the doorbell.

40

Dave Berman's cartoon.

AI ,H E

END of THE Wo~LD

ill t .....~" ... I1 ... ill

ftrl< VfO.

pol;.",' .. .j bo,s,,)..r;., or. f'.;,,1~f/y r~ rtrvc.t" .... J

rivecs ~o foliJ .....:"' .. 11 \-,"~ 1.â&#x20AC;˘..,.t ...-t""k, pIlU '" ~I...rI\f

'r,.or: . .

- Dave Be rm an 41

Poseidon's Lover En Route Beneath ice, She undulates, Such carefully timed rifts, Oxygen fills her soul, Dreams and deepening skies, Beasts roam daily, Cold midnight sleeps.

Suns and cheers urge on every surging wake, momentum and roiling seas, toes merge as leaves, a flood, daffodil stems, crystallizing contours, shouts she cannot hear, a spine folding back, foam coursing hair, children as moments, fusing gray, grafting to a wave, windmills, organic machinery, stolen from stillness, her eyes obtrusive infusions, collapsing and twisting, writhing to surface, soaring in arcs, from agonizing dins.

- Gaston de Bearn 42

Widow A widow combs her wirey flaxen hair and her dark eyes flow coldly beneath a wilted brow, her tome breathes heavily as she sits on a raft, curled in a warm magenta cup, a rose's basin, teaching scents, burning lessons, scratching her life on a flower's soft wall, rubbing a stamen to sharpen her pencil, chalky film collects as she winks, blinded, an incessant snow invades her dark rose, long-picked, wilting powerfully over ice-capped wakes.

- Gaston de Bearn

43

Profession I

The discipline that requires one to sit through sift through the flickering fakery the monotonous monotony of Birth of a Nation more than half a time must be chafed beneath and ultimately unsubmitted to. Art history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.

II

I hate the word poetry and poesy is a nosegay of peonies. cheery. spry and almost aromatic. like tin.

III

Joe Montana never wondered.

He arrived without leaving. assumed a gold helmet. let four dimples dazzle from lightly-downed cheeks.

He had the gusto delivered.

- Sean FranciS

44

Centrifuge Julia Clinger When Ellie looks in the mirror, she sees only skin.

Hers is dry, but also oily. It is pale and burns easily.

She is told skin changes every seven years. It is the body's largest organ, the organ that wears no shield. She thinks of her skin breathing as she breathes, feeding on the muckings of the air. With a special brush, Ellie cleans her skin six times a day. She exfoliates, she rehydrates, she extracts and applies moisture. The skin itself is alternately pleased and confused. It glows, chafes, and reddens, in accordance with the formulas she uses.

Ellie lives with her boyfriend Jack. They share a white house with green shutters in a valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. They eat three meals a day in restaurants, always sitting on the same side of the table. Jack cuts Ellie's food into bites and pays for the meals with a checkbook. He keeps old checks in a drawer of his bureau, and Ellie removes them to read their memos when he leaves. She is curious about the things Jack buys without her. She is wary of his life outside the house.

Jack's parents are British and have numerous traditions. They believe in the possession of degrees. For one of these degrees, Jack must travel to a British university. He explains this in a soft voice over dinner in the spring. He says, 'Will you still be my princess in a year?"

In London, he tells her, he will learn about the past and its action in the present. Ellie feels her own past is swaddled in the cloth of Jack's shirttail. She imagines his heart beats in her chest.

Jack sends Ellie to a doctor before he goes. This doctor has a head that is all beard. He tugs at the beard 45

while she talks, as if he wants to remove it. As if the beard is a creature that is nesting on his face, and that's fine, but he'd like it to get off now. Ellie sees his skin stretching under the mustache and muttonchops, under the lush grey beard. She sees his face, beneath its hair, as a weird, distended putty. Mer her visits to the doctor, Ellie carries herself like a pocket full of eggs.

While Jack is away, Ellie stays in their house. She looks through his drawers for clues to what will happen.

She has long been aware that what she doesn't know will hurt her. In rummaging through Jack's possessions, she is only trying to meet the pain halfway. She has a small thrill of panic each time she discovers a photograph.

When she fmds one of Jack's old girlfriend, Cecile, she holds it with numb fingers. The skin is perfect, a landscape woven of petals. Ellie's hands beSide it are windburnt and scaled from her failure to protect them. Her face, in her mind, has the texture of a lizard's.

Finding pictures of Jack, she remembers how he saved her, saying yes, I know exactly how it feels, but no, your eyes will not bleed, your heart will slow down, and I will be here. Painful thoughts and visions were spinning through her mind like objects thrown by a poltergeist.

When she fell to the floor Jack threw himself upon her as if she were a person on fire. Their life together since then had been a long, sad holiday.

At night she sleeps in the shape of an unborn child. She has moved the mattress to the floor, knowing better than to stray from the ground. On the ground there is a stillness which speaks to her: she feels connected to the movement of the earth. When Ellie awakes she cries. She hasn't lost anything but she will. She loves Jack skin, bones, heart, glands, and brain. She loves his slender hands and frail, naked feet. On the flesh beneath his lowest rib, there is a scar he got showing off for another girl. Thinking of it, she cries harder, her voice echoed by the silence of the house. Jack has seen her at her worst, yet he still loves her. When she 46

ponders this fact she is like a miser counting change: How to save it. how to feed it. how to protect it from the others?

We are not safe: even in our own house. even in our own skin. It is useful to know this. she thinks. but hard to remember.

Ellie decides to seek help about her skin. For twenty-one years. she has allowed it to be burnt by sun and frozen by cold. Her skin is sad. it is hostile. it would turn on her in a second. She finds a listing for an expert named Ludmila in the Yellow Pages. BeSide the number.

Ludmila glowers from a stamp-sized photograph. She is the arch-enemy of bad skin. Ellie calls for an appointment and marks the date on her calendar. Thinking of Ludmila. she feels a calm like being immersed in warm water. It is as though she has read ahead in her own biography and discovered a happy ending.

Ellie will use the money she spends on the doctor to visit Ludmila twice a month. She knows her brain is a mess. but who can see it. who will touch it? It is locked in its case. swimming in a charged fluid. It can wait. in a way that skin can not.

Women in London are known for the beauty of their skin. Moisture in the air settles kindly upon them while they go about their business. The air is helpful and nourishing: the women don 't need to lift a finger. Ellie swallows rapidly. imagining these women in their trench coats and stunning complexions. She is certain that if

47

her skin gets worse, no one will want her.

At their first meeting Ludmila assures her this is true. 'You are lucky to haff come when you deed," she says, wielding the special masque of correction. 'You are gud with beeg problem." Ludmila cleanses, buffs, peels, rubs, and opens Ellie's skin. Then she soothes it, massages it, and mends it with the masque. She coats it with a layer of cream. She tricks it into looking better than it is.

Ellie returns home and goes directly into the bathroom. In the mirror, her skin is so lovely it frightens her.

It smells like peaches, but there is no one to smell it. The effects will last, at most, a week. She drinks water from the faucet until her stomach strains against her shirt.

She takes a picture of her skin with Jack's camera.

Ellie doesn't hear from Jack for a month. She sleeps all day with his socks on her hands. The phone rings evenings at six o'clock. She can tell it is the doctor by the way he calls on the hour and says nothing into the phone. She must do the talking if she is to heal herself.

Finally, on a Monday, Jack calls. Is he five hours ahead or four hours behind? She straightens on the bed as if he can see her. Her skin shines from emollients she applied last night. Her stomach is bloated with old water.

Jack sounds happy to be away. He has been drinking with people she will never meet.

He says, "I'll tell you, these musty old professors ... " He says, "A couple of ales are like a loaf of bread."

Ellie wrings her hands in their socks. "A man came to the window last night," she says. "He's been following me everywhere. I can see him when I'm in the doctor's office, he's waiting under the awning of the White Spot."

After a silence, he says, 'WhaaaAT?" She says, "I hit my head. I keep falling down. I can't stand up."

"Ellie, I am three thousand miles away. There is an 48

ocean between here and there. You can't tell me these things right now."

"Who can I tell?" she is crying. She thinks of the way he would lace up her boots in the morning and feed her an orange slice by slice. He had kissed her chapped lips and held her brittle wrists to his heart. 'We used to sleep like spoons," she says. "Don't you remember?"

Ellie removes herself from Jack's house, her heart heavy as a soaked blanket. She does not deserve him.

She will go away and improve. Collecting her things, she finds a stack of pornographic magazines under the bed.

The centerfold girls slouch spreadlegged and panting, their skins slick with desires Ellie shudders to imagine.

In columns amid the photographs, people expose themselves in print. A woman is sticking a candle up herself when her husband enters the room. Far from being disgusted, the man is aroused. In weeks to follow, the candles get larger and larger. Ellie feels like a hypochondriac discovering an unplanned symptom. She will never see a candle in the same way again.

She rents an apartment near the railroad tracks, using cabs to move her luggage, since she doesn't know how to drive. On the last trip, the driver refuses to accept her tip. He says, "Get yourself a sandwich, little girl, you're too thin."

That night she walks through snow-textured darkness to a phone booth in the lobby of Howard Johnson's.

The booth's interior is orange and perforated by constellations of tiny holes. The cold, blue plastic receiver is attached to the phone by a metal wire thick as a finger.

She handles this wire as she presses the sequence of buttons that will connect her to Jack.

The phone rings in couplets, somewhere in London.

Ellie tries to imagine Jack's apartment. She sees him lying on a thin bed, flat on his back in a star shape, the way he looks when he's asleep by mistake. He wears the thermal suit his mother gave him because it's wet there, (continued on page 94) 49

Places I Hid In the dryer. I could see a wide circle of my mother's apron. She pretended loudly not to know I was there, and finally reached in to tickle me. I tried to slam the door on her arm in my joyous panic.

In the niche between myoId bed and my bookshelf, with six Playmobil knights and my meanest plastic dinosaurs and my feet perched like happily frightened rabbits on the air vent. The black knight usually befriended the Tyrannosaurus and won.

Under the stairs with my brother playing "Nuclear Holocaust" or -rornado." The mutants or the black funnel would circle our fort until dinnertime, most days, but sometimes I let them come in. I thought that would keep him in his proper role-whimpering behind me for pathos while I manned the laser or worked feverishly on a weather machine. Then as now, however, he uncooperatively believed himself invincible at hand-to-hand combat, even with wind. I was the only one who really enjoyed hiding.

In the girl's bathroom, where no one would chase me.

When I came out, I was at once a gir-el, a gir-el, a girl! and a hero: everyone had been told I had climbed into the ceiling and seen Rachel Toback in a stall. I was told this myself and although I did not believe it, I did believe I could have climbed into the ceiling. I believed I should have.

In someone else's bathroom at my first high school party, where I only had to half-fake being sick to go home and avoid dancing. I think I may have been homesick, too. There was actually no beer at this party. I might remember it better today if there had been.

50

Under the Rte. 29 footbridge while they ran on above.

Trolls must be incredibly confident people to yell out things like that. It's dark and full of echoes under bridges. In my most secret moments now I can imagine being a troll. The key, I think, is not to consider trollhood at all.

In the security stairwells at the famous Mall in Columbia with a bowl made out of a toilet paper tube and aluminum foil spangled with pinholes. We always burned our bowls when we'd fmished. That kind of cardboard doesn't leave any ash. There were three exits from every stairwell, and the guards were never smart enough to cover all of them, even when they knew we were there.

In Steve's plastic dorm room across campus when my new life-long intimates and fellow scholars knew something true about me. I had thought I could hide in Chicago, a place big enough to let me forget I was hiding, but nonetheless I wound up more and more often with Steve, who still listened to Dio. I still like to sing operatically once in a while. Try singing this poem operatically to maximize its effect and your own generous empathy.

-Alec Dinwoodie

51

Everything That I Don't Need A Music Review by Seth Sanders Reprinted from the Summer 1991 Nest of Ninnies.

I used to dislike the Wedding Present; they were the sort of band that inspired not just admiration but FANDOM in others.

Fandom's like pot-smoking: a group of people sit in a room, intensely absorbed in a holy, marvelous object that displays nothing but repetition and a vaguely pleasant surface to the outsider. This is the bong; this was the George Best CD belonging to the people down the hall from me. Eventually, by a route not worth describing, I decided that I liked them: after all, I was a lonely middle-class white person too. I began to feel that lines like "Slowly your beauty [tiny but dramatic pause] is eaten away/ by the scent of someone else/ in the blanket where we l-~ lay" were intensely poignant. The ~ lines sounded good if you took the '( time to fake yourself the appropriate J memories. After all, the lines sound ) like something someone ought to sing; after all, they rhyme.

Everybody's impressions of things have to do with surface sheen. One Saturday night I got the actual thing in my face, and in a really unique way, and also ina highly general way, it sucked. The unique thing was the look of contempt on the faces of the tall, well-dressed women at the front of the crowd; they resented me shoving my way to the front, and I in turn chewed over the thought that the children of the rich, even those with the ugliest faces, are almost inevitably more attractive than the children of the poor. The reasons for this difference are so pathetically obvious in the age of explicitly targeted marketing for different demographic groups (bottled water and good skin cream for the upper middle class, fat sneakers and lard-saturated food for the inner city) that all of

fTl1irg fiml

Dismemberment of Things Past Rick Wojcik It happened about a year ago at this time, so I

guess I'm kind of thinking of it out of some sense of anniversary, but I really don't remember much of it, or at least it itself, because I wasn't there when it happened, and I really didn't know her well, so I guess I don't have many details to remember.

The whole thing started when I decided that I was interested in buying some property -- more specifically, a condo (although I hate using that word and will henceforth refer to the property in question as an apartment). I had heard about a place along the lake up north that sounded like a great deal. The owner, Valerie Blaine, had to sen it because of back taxes and was in a hurry because the condo association was threatening to evict her or something like that. She hadn't yet put the apartment on the market because she was hoping to save money by selling it herself, so I contacted her, thinking I too might be able to save a bit on the deal. We talked on the phone and I made an appointment to see the place.

When I arrived Valerie wasn't home. Wondering what to do, I hung out on the front steps for a few minutes, until a woman carrying an armful of dry cleaning came up to me and said, "Hi, you must be Rick. I'm Valerie. I'm sorry I'm so late, but I got held up at the dry ------------~==_()E==~-----------that good taste and care show up like pimples on the faces of the beautiful. Of course I had been rude in pressing up to the front of the stage; of course they hated me for not being one of them. These, then, were my fellow fans. What did we share?

Something the world in its stupidass way had made for all of us there: to be lonely, middle class white persons.

You may think that I'm off track. Why, then, do people look the way they do? Why do you feel the way you do? I want to know. And I don't want the answers that come in a pop song.

53

cleaners. They thought that they lost my favorite jacket and I've never seen another one like it and I got it in Las Vegas years ago and I really couldn't replace it, so I started crying because I thought it was lost, but then they found it and now I'm happy because here it is." Saying this, she held up a sort of suede and denim jacket hung with tassels and sprinkled with rhinestones. Looking at the thing bothered me, so I told her I thought it was "really great" and could appreciate her sense of loss, in the hopes that my compliments would make her put it away.

She did, thanking me, and took me upstairs to see her place.

When she opened the door, I had trouble seeing into the room. It was a bright, sunny afternoon outside, but no natural light seemed to be making it into the apartment. She pushed ahead of me and turned on a number of lamps that were scattered about the place.

The lamps were clearly giving off light, but they were the kind that really didn't illuminate a place; they just sort of luminesced, and that was it. Maybe she was using low wattage bulbs, I'm really not that sure, all I remember is that I had a very difficult time actually seeing the place through the feeble indirect light that was provided.

In retrospect, it's probably a good thing that the light was poor, as the apartment was furnished in a style that would make even the Nelson Brothers cringe. The furniture, laid out in an erratic maze, was all of the sort ----------------------------~=_()&E~------------足

Especially pop songs about being jilted.

Even live, the band sounded produced; the cutting, clearly separated noise totally pointless, a trophy of good equipment and production that utterly destroyed the illusion of warmth that their better songs gave. Their fans who dress like bankers may, during musical adventures, have heard this sound on Big Black LPs, and its immediate attraction (it's clean, hard; it registers emotional intensity in the same way as a guy claiming he's gonna kill somebody: surprising, and then nothing happens) 54

that screams modernity through use of bright colors and aerodynamic design, but adds the occasional panel of "natural" veneer to tie the piece to the history of interior design -- kind of like the stuff you see being offered on E-Z Terms in discount outlets in marginal neighborhoods (which was the kind of neighborhood the apartment was in). In contrast to the furniture, the walls and carpet were amazingly dingy. They were both colored in a shade that seemed to belong to the yellow end of the spectrum, but absorbed far too much light to ever be called a bright color. This dullness was enforced by the blinds on the windows, which were dark blue and drawn tightly, sitting like two black holes on a wall of grimy yellow.

Reeling from this spectacle of inferior decoration, I made my way into the other room in the apartment, the bedroom. I stepped inside, but found it was equally murky. The light switch turned on a row of colored track lights that pOinted at the bed. Piles of clothes that were close siblings to the jacket displayed earlier were spilling out of the closet and dresser, and lay on top of every other surface in the room, which was already overcrowded with surfaces. Dazzled by color, I opened the blinds (colored metallic gold) to let in some natural light, but was immediately blinded as the afternoon sun reflected off of the three full length mirrors placed about the room.

I let the blindcord go, and stepped back to the living room where I asked Valerie if the apartment had a kitchen, as I ------------~===().==~-----------grabs them; since they listen at the surface of the song, they can skim by for twenty minutes on good treble. And what, exactly, did it get their songs? Well, it's a diversion from lyrics like "a long walk home, the pouring rain .... " But gee, it's hard to listen to a song as a whole when outbursts of REALLY LOUD GUITAR (yeah, if I had an advance from RCA I'd buy one too) jump into your face halfway through the song.

Gedge changed guitars after every song, whether to keep the tuning or to change sounds I neither know nor care -55

did not remember seeing one on my way in.

She showed me to a closet behind the front door that was packed with undersized, food encrusted appliances. The cabinets were rusted, coming off their hinges, and covered with stickers from packages of various presweetened breakfast cereals. There was carpeting on the floor, strange for a kitchen, with a design that was supposed to create the illusion of ceramic tile. The illusion was not vety convincing, as the carpet had been horribly stained by years of careless (perhaps overenthusiastic) food preparation.

Finding myself close to the door, I said goodbye to my hostess and promised to call her back if I was interested in the place.

Strangely enough, I found that I was, although in retrospect I can recall no real reason for this decision other than a frugal fIxation on the price of the "unit."

When I came back the second time, I had my father in tow, thinking, as sons often do, that dad would be able to bring some useful paternal judgement to the matter.

We initially had some trouble getting up to see the apartment. I called Valerie on the lobby intercom, but a voice on the line said that the phone had been disconnected. Using dad as a respectable entree (also as a shield in case we were caught), I snuck in the building behind an old lady who happened to be shuffling her way in. We went up to the apartment, where Valerie met us --------------~=-()~==~------------足 doesn't he realize that their songs all sounding the same is one of their biggest selling points?

Music so loud, equipment so good, banter about flying back from recording a new record in Minnesota (why Minnesota? Who cares?), brilliant banter ("nothing but the best for Americans," great, how unique: an English band with a good recording contract and contempt for its fans, just what we need), superb banter -- they wouldn't play requests because the set list had been "carefully worked out to include highs and 56

and apologized for her phone, saying that she had sent in her check and they must not have gotten it, or be taking their time with it, because she had paid and this wasn't supposed to happen, but it always seems to when things get this way.

I showed my father around the apartment, but he proved to be of little help. His tastes run along the lines of country club conservative, so I should have realized that he would be even more stymied by the interior design of the place than I was, and even less equipped to deliver a judgement on its soundness. In fact, he soon became a distraction, as Valerie had obviously taken a liking to him and began telling me about it. "Your father's a very attractive man," she said, "I would have never expected you to have such a handsome father. He really is qUite good looking." Wondering what she implied about my appearance in relation to his, I thanked her for complimenting my father, who was standing next to me, hemming and hawing and motioning for us to leave. We did so, but not before I told Valerie that I thought I was interested in buying the place and asked if there was a way I could contact her given the unreliability of the phone lines.

Mter some brief negotiations by carrier pigeon, I bought the apartment and arranged to take occupancy after a planned vacation which would give Valerie two weeks in which to move out. When I returned from my --------------~=_()E==~------------lows" -- oh, really, could you include some fake-emotive janglepop in there? Thanks! Oh, and if you're going to be personal and sensitive, so we really buy into your intimacy, then, uh, hey: make DAMN sure to playa WHOLE LOT LOUDER than "opening band" Cop Shoot Cop. (the most positive description I heard of the "Weddoes" was that they were "really good;" compare this to Cop Shoot Cop, probably the only really political rock band around now that the Mekons' music sucks so hard; Cop's actual instrumentation is an attack on the standard rock 57

trip. I picked up the new keys from the building management and set about to inspect my investment. Since I was no longer hindered by the presence of Valerie. I cast open the blinds and let sUnlight pour over the landscape I now commanded. The light revealed some startling details about the apartment which might have made me think twice if I hadn't been so blinded by the low price.

The carpet was indeed yellow. but only in the spots where furniture had been sitting for the past few years.

Everywhere else. it was Stained. worn. and filthy. as were the walls. which in parts offered a most unusual mural of abstract expressionism done in what appeared to be spaghetti sauce over a network of cracks in the plaster.

The walls and ceiling in the bedroom were painted as a bold statement against late 20th century color theory. shaded. respectively. white. grey. grey. dark blue with flowers (wallpaper. one wall only). with the ceiling a grey matching the two adjacent walls. A six inch strip of the blue wallpaper rimmed the ceiling. except on one of the grey walls. where it appeared to have run out. Set against this rhapsody in blue was the metallic gold of the window blinds. sparkling strangely in the glow from the colored track lights.

The kitchen was even fIlthier than I remembered. and appeared to be the center of a booming fertilizer industry dealing in the dung of small. but highly productive creatures. The --'"

I I

\

l-' If I iconography and the conventional RnR songstructure that doles out thrills at the chorus: they still manage to rock in a wildly, painfully intense way) I mean, what good is all that equipment if you can't "stress test" it by "breaking out" with a fuzz-pedal drenched "guitar solo" during the "climax" of the song? And the headlining band is always supposed to be a WHOLE LOT LOUDER than the 58

carpet in particular was evidently a crucial link in the food chain of the fertilizer economy. While inspecting the kitchen I realized that Valerie had left behind quite a bit of her personal stuff, including a number of antediluvian leftovers which were snowbound in the freezer waiting for the glacier to thaw. I went on to find other treasures in the other rooms and took an inventory of the items left in the apartment. Here is a partial list: Three cable 1V boxes, complete with remote controls. I don't know what she was doing with these. The apartment only had one cable jack and two rooms; unless she liked to watch three lVs at once, it didn't seem possible that she actually needed all of them.

Besides, I was under the impression that they were the property of the cable company and couldn't be kept without service. Very strange.

Stickers and Prayers. I found these on walls all over the apartment, especially in the kitchen and the bathroom. A fair amount of the stickers were from the sugary breakfast cereal packages I had noticed earlier, mostly of Tony the Tiger. These covered at least half of the kitchen cabinets. Apparently Valerie intended to plaster the entire kitchen with stickers, but it seems she was interrupted in the middle of some sort of epic task that involved the consumption of thousands of boxes of Frosted Flakes. The rest of the stickers, which I had not noticed before, had smiling faces and words of praise, like --------------~=a()E5~-------------

opening acts. Because of dynamics: you see, if you start off soft, and then go to loud then your expectations build up and then payoff -- it's a really INTENSE experience. Fucking pantomime. A HEADLINING BAND. I would have gotten up on stage and tried to make "Gedgey" eat his fucking fuzzbox, but the press of fans would have killed me before I was even halfway there, torn me apart like Pentheus' mom did to him when he tried to stop Dionysus from leading the Maenads in their mad hilltop dances. Except 59

the kind that an elementary school teacher puts on the papers of good pupils. I also found these near handwritten index cards bearing little prayers and messages of inspiration which Valerie had posted in the high traffic areas of the apartment. Some of the messages read: "I must keep trying harder". "If I be myself. nobody can hurt me". and "Smile." This one was in a lot of places.

A pair of roller skates. They were of the kind that were popular in the late seventies. looking like a pair of running shoes with big. bright wheels attached. and which had gone out of fashion quickly because they offered poor ankle support.

At least a hundred and fifty books. Most of these were outdated self-help books like Cellulite and Your Erogenous Zones. There were also a number of career oriented books with titles like Your Future in Hotel Management. In addition. she left three dictionaries. five bibles. and a few dozen religious guidebooks.

A few letters. One of these was really bleak; it consisted only of the last page and read: "... if I had know this place was like this. I wouldn't have come here. Most of the people here are on welfare or retired. or they are working for the government. I have to do something soon. because Angel has only two more years for school. then she goes off to college. then I'm all alone. Let me hear from you Athenia (Who was that?). I called you twice since I been back. but I guess you were out." The --------------~=-()EE~------------this was at a rock club called "Lounge Ax" and everyone was smoking cigarettes. The WEDDING PRESENT. Headlining at LOUNGE AX. And this was one successful band that wanted no backtalk. After he turned down various incoherent requests from audience members, the singer went into throes of ironic gesturing (I know I can't honestly do these pleading movements, but I have to Sing the song, don't I?) Successful and sensitive: all their songs are about being 60

other letters were similarly melancholic testaments.

Five full length mirrors. The apartment only had two rooms. Why five mirrors?

A photo album. This was the most unusual item in the apartment. Most other albums I've seen are filled with pictures of friends and family, or they try to capture some sort of event; this one did not. It only contained pictures of Valerie arranged without any specific chronological or thematic order. There would be pictures of Valerie as a teenager next to Valerie at thirty next to Valerie in a beauty contest. Nearly all of the pictures involved Valerie in some sort of suggestive (if not sexual) pose, and seemed to be taken by a dominant male figure.

I don't know much about photographic language, but these pictures were clearly about submission to or seduction of the camera.

TIlere was a lot of other junk in the apartment, all of which I hauled down to the dumpster. The only thing I kept was the photo album, partly because I thought that Valerie might come back for it, but mostly because it fascinated me. Going through Valerie's stuff was like picking through her hopes and dreams, her successes and failures. Holding onto the photo album was like having some permanent testament of the will that had so marked this place I was going to call home. I felt a bit guilty about keeping it, but I told myself that I was just holding it for Valerie, that she would be back for it.

------------~EE.()~==~-----------jilted, a topic unexplored since Phil Collins. It may be that English "dry" (snide) humor only translates well if you hang on every word that someone in your favorite rock band says. It may be that I don't have a good reason to hate them now. But at this point, I'd certainly take any opportunity to lure "Gedgey's" girlfriend away from him. It might cause him to iterate. And only in the artist's anguish can he fulfill his need to create.

61

The next day, when I was bringing some of her stuff down to the dumpster, the bUilding manager pulled me aside and asked me if I had come across any items of value in the apartment. I thought that she might be referring to the photo album, but I kept quiet and asked why. She replied that Valerie's family was looking for something, but they wouldn't say what it was, so she figured that it must be something valuable. The mention of the family was intriguing: I asked the manager to explain what was going on. 'Well," she said, "I didn't want to tell you this (obviously she did), but Valerie was murdered four days ago."

When I pressed her for details, she told me that Valerie had been involved in a bizarre triple murder along with her best friend and another man. The three of them had spent the night together in the man's apartment a block away, where they were joined by another man, apparently a friend. At approximately six a.m., the friend woke the three of them up, told them to stand against the wall, and shot them in the back. The neighbors heard this and saw him race away in a car that had its license plates covered up.

The police claimed the incident had clearly been premeditated, and had wanted to get into Valerie's old apartment for clues. I was still out of town, and the building manager wouldn't let anyone into the apartment without my consent. Within a few hours, Valerie's family also tried to get into the apartment, but were also stymied. Evidently they were looking for something specific, but wouldn't say what it was. Valerie had moved her personal belongings into storage, but nobody knew where, so with Valerie dead, the location of her stuff would remain a mystery. I tried to think of all of the things that I had seen in the apartment, but apart from the cable 1V boxes, I can't remember a single item of value. There was the photo album, but I thought that they would have asked for that specifically if it was what they wanted. I intended to give it to the family if they 62

contacted me, but they never did.

I began to see my apartment in a new light. I had thought earlier about gutting the place completely, and I decided then that this was the best thing to do. It was in such disrepair that a total rehab job was in order.

Besides, it would galvanize the apartment of Valerie's presence and perhaps assuage some of the guilt I felt about what I had been doing. It was true that she had chosen to leave some of her stuff behind, and she obviously couldn't help decorating the place in the way she had, but I still felt strange about the intimacies I seemed to share with her through my inspection of her property.

I had been erasing all traces of her life, throwing it in the dumpster, and yet at the same time absorbing it all and making judgements about her as I saw fit. Now that I knew she was dead, these conclusions were part of me permanently, never to be altered through interaction with Valerie herself. The photo album was the last concrete representation of her stay on this planet, one that was carefully and consciously constructed as some testament of her identity. I took care to preserve it, and started to wonder whether I actually would give it to her famUy if I happened to meet them.

In the months that followed I went about rehabbing the apartment. I did all the work myself, so I ended up spending a conSiderable amount of time there before moving in. Early on, I had a phone installed to establish a feeling of residency while I worked, and the phone company issued me a new number, as they supposedly do My number must not whenever a phone is connected. have been a new one though, because I immediately began receiving calls for Valerie. When a caller asked for her. I would pretend I didn't know who she was and that this phone had always been mine. I thought that this was a better approach than trying to explain to these people that she had been murdered. espeCially as I had no idea who they might be.

The callers' voices ranged in age and type, and they 63

seemed to call at any hour of the day. Sometimes they would ask for other people ("Sugar Daddy" is one name I remember), but most of the calls were direct inquiries for Valerie. I don't know why I responded so sharply to the callers; it was almost as if I was called upon to deny Valerie's existence every time the phone rang. My Catholic background supplied the obvious biblical reference and compounded the guilt I already felt towards the deceased. I was thinking of having the number changed, but the frequency of the calls dropped off after a few weeks.

As the apartment began to take shape, my feelings towards Valerie began to lessen in intensity. Having the photo album to contain both her essence and my gUilt, I had no trouble erasing all traces of her stay from the rest of the apartment. I eventually got the place fIxed up to my liking and moved myself in. I'm still living there now, receiving the occasional call for Valerie and serving as curator for her photo album. I've gotten over most of my strange feelings of intimacy, an intimacy that I never really shared with her, just towards her. I hardly ever think of her now, except sometimes, when I'm on the street, I see her in a crowd coming towards me. This illusion disappears qUickly, but in the time that it lingers, I panic, and wonder if she sees me, and I ask myself what sort of judgement she has passed over me.

64

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and purred enthusiastically as she examined him. Gedney always felt a little silly about this part, but it did reassure him, as his Aunt Heddy's sloppy kisses had done when he was a boy in Poughkeepsie.

Pringle belonged to an older generation, and Gedney sometimes felt indebted to her, as he had often appropriated her beatnik and hippie past in his never ending quest for fashion's grail. But his new look was a resurrection that could have occurred only in the early nineties, an expensive rehash of a poor minority's misinterpretation of outdated styles. And today Pringle was only serving as an embarrassing reminder of all those earlier incarnations Gedney had sloughed off with his latest purchases. Had he really borrowed her Janis Joplin albums and Linda Goodman books just last year? And what about her copies of Grand Funk Railroad and Erica Jong?

Pringle made Gedney feel confused; he 70

hipness, the shockery we have been hung up on for a century now -- are eminently marketable.

And not just "eminently marketable. " The commodification of dissent is the great ideological innovation of our time, the central theme and image of almost all our mass culture.

Millionaire Michael Jackson pushes product by opening his latest Video with classic images of youth rebellion against adult authority. An advertiser moves units by admonishing us to "Dare to be Different." An irritating tennis guy who routinely dresses up like a rock star endorses a camera called "The Rebel" with the'line "Image is Everything" [see Iversen]. This kind of faux insurgency is almost pandemic in advertising for beer, fast food, cigarettes, radio stations, and cars. It is the hegemonic and inescapable consumerist idea of the day.

Levi's blue jeans, which have been a standard image of faux deviance since the golden years of the 1960s, have lately revamped their appeal to the hip market by introducing their new jeans for women in a series of ads based loosely on the modernist paintings of Matisse and Picasso, those darling nonconformists loved by businessman and Villager alike. Some of the installments in this ad cycle contain enough detail that the viewer can identify the figure as a minority of some sort, Signifying immediately the born

nonconformist, the automatic outsider, secure in her womanhood and in her longed to clear his head Levi's blue jeans, the veritable emblem with the latest pronouncements of of individuality and rebellion. theVoice. He knew he A number of other companies have was tired of all this made effective use of the minority as campy stuff, but he artist/rebel/model consumer. Uke the couldn't find anything hipster (who in Mailer's essay was sup- more real with which to posed to be a sort of "White Negro"), replace it. Maybe the answer was in the sixthe African-American is a standard ele- pack of Schiltz loogment of the adman's visual vocabulary, necks, symbol of the which he uses not merely to appeal to wotking classes, coolthe black community but to symbolize ing in his freezer. the outsider as consumer, to lend their Anyway, it wasn't here. up his pile of products credibility, and to enforce Gathering the latest mail-order their ideal of fragmentation and the catalogs, Gedney imperative of difference. Thus "The pushed through her United Colors of Benetton" campaign bead curtains and headreinforces that company's desire for us ed upstairs.

In his studio he to resist convention and buy a very dumped a quarter in his great number of distinctive outfits, to newly installedjuke reject the Square, to embrace the box, which had recently Other, and to do it again and again and replaced his Victrola, and readied himself for again as long as our credit holds out. the latest from Kitchens In academic circles they call it "the of Distinction, Pops discovery of difference," but in simple CoolLove,NNVA,and business terms fragmentation and oth- Transvision Vamp. erness mean that Americans must buy Watching the videos twenty products to avoid traditionally- spring to life on his sanctioned norms where just one or 1972 Zenith, a canny purchase from a bus two would have sufficed in the con- driver who lived on formist age of the Gray Flannel Suit. If West 162nd Street, his our personalities, our "lifestyles" are no mind emptied comfortlonger stable or unitary things (as we ably. Jesus Jones was right: "Right here, are told over and over by admen and Right now" was the academics that they are not), but best time to live. "being ourselves" is of the utmost Unfortunately Gedney importance (ditto), we must immerse 71

had only half an hour to coif his hair before heading out to Parvenoos, the new club built on a garbage barge floating in the East River. It had been built by the pan-generational hipster, Thierry Mugler, who felt he had captured the spirit of recycling, nineties style. Another plus was its location, which was inaccessible to the average New Yorker and the bridge and tunnel crowd. But not to Gedney, who carried in his pockets the keys to his uncle's new speed boat.

The machine responded well as he knifed through the viscous and lumpy waters of the East River.

Gedney enjoyed the smell of salt and exhaust he was creating in the oily spray of his wake. He savored even more the sense of control that so often eluded him in his attempts to define his image.

Racing through the night Gedney was for a moment lord of his present. He could see how Mick Jagger found these boats so appeal72

ourselves in a lifelong frenzy of shopping, eternally seeking the perfect embodiment of our always-already shifting individuality. And this is exactly what Americans do, prodded on by our 1V rebel-heroes and the beautiful hipsters of GreenWich Village, Interview, and Vanity Fair.

Yet somehow, thanks to the hidebound mind set exemplified by Interview, the traditional leaders of dissent have failed to recognize how obsolete their simple "alienated" stance has become -- how the hipster has become the favorite image of several generations of 1V Americans as well as our much vaunted poets and painters. The dissent of the art world has become so toothless, so mired in textuality. that in almost every way it has become a harmless pose, an attitude they and millions of mall-mired others strike to signify "artist" -- "hipster" -- "consumer."

We have failed to understand it because the hip arty ones are now wellloved by admen and 1V watchers alike.

They have been elevated with great acclaim to the vanguard of the American way of life. In the public culture of our time the corporate artists of the "cutting edge" have come to exemplify the ideal consumerist existence, flailing endlessly at a phantom Puritan "conformity" and an imagined "repressiveness" which have long ceased to exert any significant influence on American life. Consumerism itself long

ago made the strait-laced Victorian order of character and thrift obsolete: it is retained only as a sort of cultural punching bag in 'IV sitcoms and imaginary threats from Jesse Helms so that the consuming celebrity vanguard can rail endlessly about the daring virtues of unrestraint, about the individualism of product choices which is the prerogative only of the liberated, about immediate gratification through credit buying. The avant-garde we are taught to admire spin round and round in their blind but righteous fury, attacking over and over again the same cold corpses of conformity and complacency and morality, always new, always improved, always different, but all the while missing the real target and creating nothing that is not defined and even ordained by the economic necessities of a consumption-driven economy. ***** Pop singer Madonna is the peerless darling of hip consumerism. Rock stars in general are the veritable personification of commercialized deviance, and Madonna has dominated the commercial pop scene for so long just because she has internalized and acted out the drama of consumeristdeviant so perfectly. With her wellplanned iconoclasm, her insistent railing against a long-dead sexual puritanism, and her biannual total image make-over, she is the embodiment of postmodern consumerism. Her subver-

ing.

Docking and flipping his keys to the valet, Gedney avoided the envious stares of the lesser folks crowding the docks just outside the white-hot center of hip. He did offer a shy nod to "The Love Boat," a whimsical craft owned by a retro-seventies group who drank nothing but Kaluha and frozen Daiquiries.

Gedney's new garb assured him immediate access to the inner reaches of Parvenoo's, but he couldn't help feel a quick pang of guilt as he circumvented those left outside. "That could have been me," he thought, "if I hadn't kept up my subscription toPopcom's BrainReserve." Nothing quite enforced his dedication to hip as pathetic tableaus like this: the slightly less-cognizant left humiliated outside the gates of paradise while undreamed-of fun went on inside.

Then he saw her.

She was wearing a black leather jacket with "Too much Irony" printed on the back, in direct contradiction with her retro plaid

73

skirt and huge safety pin from the early eighties. She was definitely hip, ironic to the core, and utterly marketable.

Gedney stared. He coveted. No matter how he turned it around in his head he couldn't suss out her signifiers, but the ambiguity made her even more attractive.

Fortunately Gedney's technique in such situations was almost foolproof. With a series of exagerrated gestures he produced his leather bound lap top and tapped out a few lines.

Then he conspicuously flipped his platinum on the bar and asked for a thesaurus and an AbsoluL She could not miss these obvious marks of literary prowess. The girl approached him immediately.

"You...write?" she asked, opening her jacket to reveal a blouse made of old copies of THE BAFFLER magazine, "stories and stuff'l" " And poetry...poet-

ry," Gedney responded, trying to suppress the knowledge that it had in fact been months since he had put together more than a few intelli74

sion of accepted norms frees us to adopt new identities (as she so expertly does) and new products at whim, it sends us on frenzied searches for the right set of things to express our very own personal and subjective individuality, and it frees us from any incidental constraints we might feel from a vestigial "producer ethos." Naturally she is the darling of Inverview magazine. The heroines and heroes of commercialized dissent appear to counter the authority of every established figure except one: the system which makes them millionaires.

Even so, the Mailer vision of the "Hipster" is the one which still holds sway over the educated imagination, and Madonna's exemplary cultural service to capital is often touted by respected writers like Camille Paglia as an exemplar of triumphant feminism.

The January 1992 Interview celebrated Madonna in their "Pageant to Progress" with a quote from dissent-packager David Geffen proclaiming her "a trailblazer who has ... smitten the obstacles of convention, and distorted boundaries into challenges with the power of her will and inspiration." Yeah, right.

And also a moving force behind the great postmodern narcotic hucksterism of the glorious Republican '80s.

Madonna also has the peculiar distinction of having appeared on the cover of all the leading magazines of commercial deviance. One of these, Rolling Stone, like its higher-brow

cousin Interview a legacy of the 1960s, is worthy of discussion because it so gible thoughts.

"Have you got a exemplifies the public face of the new light?" she asked. ideology. In Rolling Stone, as in Gedney quickly Interview, the advertising assault conresponded, offering her tinues at fever pitch, only the con- a light from his elecsumer-idols are rock stars rather than tronic Zippo, modeled artists. Commercial rock 'n' rollers hilariously after a real have marketed rebellion for forty years butane lighter. She was now, all the while (with a few excep- impressed, and even more so when he asked tions) keeping the kids out of danger- her if she knew the ous stuff like sensible politics or Aborigine, based on the awareness of the way our culture quaint mating rituals of works. They function now as the chief that culture. She did, and they danced togethhucksters for the American way of life, er and laughed about all the paradigmatic emblems of a souped- the things they had both up consumerism, absorbing our dis- owned as kids and all satisfactions and desires and refocus- the things they both ing them on the purchase of commodi- wanted now.

Later they went ties. It is no coincidence that commerfor a drive in the boat, cial rock has become the omnipresent and Gedney pointed out background noise of everyday life, in the Newport sign in malls and beer ads and Monday Night Queens. They agreed Football, nor is it a coincidence that that mentholated cigarettes had overtakthe rock bands with the most challeng- en the outdated red ing music and unsettling social views packs. Out on the river are kept marginalized in the indie-rock they felt like the only scene (but let's leave that to people like couple in New York, Seth Sanders, p. 52). RoUing Stone is and for a moment, they the great chronicle of this success really were, having found their unique lanstory, the head cheerleader for the guage. His favorite heroes of the new order, the tireless shows had been Mannix hagiographer of the sixties, golden era and the Avengers, while she had liked Gilligan's of commercialized dissent.

•••••

In the 1950s consumerism was a pathetic and clumsy thing, appealing

Island and the Partridge Family . (to be continued)

-K.A. White 75

openly to people's status fears and terror of standing out.

Its public face was a tired. demoralized advertising indusby whose products were so transparent and contrived that they were the butt of jokes then and are quite universally mocked now. Books like The Hidden Persuaders and The Hucksters (by BAFFLER contributor Frederic Wakeman) easily shamed a bUSiness already dispirited by a stagnant "gray flannel suit" mentality.

Sometime between now and then the whole direction of consumerism changed. and it is not difficult to see MaUer's essay on the "Hipster" as one of the first calls for a new consuming ideology. The last vestiges of the obsolete producer culture had to go some time. and that time was the sixties. While it challenged bigotry. autocracy. and hierarchy on all fronts. the youth movement of that era can also be understood as a consumer revolution.

The greatest contribution of the counterculture has turned out to be the consolidation of a bourgeois antinomianism. a species of vague rebelliousness firmaly grounded in the imperatives of mass market consumerism. And anyone who has noticed the number of expensive cars bearing Grateful Dead stickers in college towns -- Saab. Cadillac, BMW. Mercedes, Volvo, all of them truckin' up to Buffalo-- can understand the appeal of the countercultural message to the 1V-raised children of the middle class. can understand how the hedonist. anti-establishmentarian obseSSion with visual differentness of the hippies could be easily transformed into the hedOnist, anti-establishmentarian commodity fetishism of today.

As Jane and Michael Stern have written, the Sixties was above all a time of lifestyle experimentation. As established cultural modes of understanding the world were discarded. the young rebels were freed to adopt any identity they chose to: their dismissal of (all varieties of) authority meant anything was possible. And their embrace of generic rebellion, their antinomianism, ensured that they would shift lifestyles as rapidly as they 76

could. In books like the Sterns' Sixties People the counterculture comes off sounding much more like the fmal apotheosis of spectacular consumerist shallowness than its implacable foe. "Our attic tells a story of many incarnations," the Sterns write.

Its trunks contain love beads and a Nehru jacket, hootenanny song books, an empty beer keg with a fraternity emblem, a BeatIe wig, a disposable paper dress, go-go boots, an "American Bandstand" souvenir book, a first edition of Sex and the Single girl, a wig done up in a flip like Mary Tyler Moore's, a poster that says KILL THE PIGS, and a 45-rpm record of Sergeant Barry Sadler singing "The Ballad of the Green Beret."

Sometimes we look at this patchwork quilt of discarded identities and wonder: Who were we? In fact, we probably weren't much different than many sixties people who fell in love with the cavalcade of new identities that swept through that prodigious decade. The sixties were a time when, like so many in our generation, we craved to ally ourselves with something bigger and more momentous than our single selves: the newest cause, the latest fad, the hippest beat ....

With identities no more stable than the Top-40 charts, the sixties was the age of postmodern fantasy and retailers' dream, for each identity, each new phase of rebellion, necessitated a comprehensive shopping expedition. Yes, the baby boomers railed against the establishment and its 'traditional' values, but mainly because they didn't want to be bound to any single identity or image: they would be rebels, poets, perky-girls, English, hippies, and playboys in quick succession. As the Sterns put it,"the sixties was a moonstruck time when people were smitten with new identities, then insouciantly discarded them in search of the next one, always looking for the true light and the real meaning of life .... " And, needless to say, never really fmding it.

• ••••

And in suburban malls across the republic the 1V youngsters and their 1V parents are living out that rebel dream, breaking away from the rat race, from the lonely 77

crowd, freeing their libidos, welcoming otherness and other styles, spending unrestrainedly and staying always one step ahead of the demon conformity. They believe earnestly in Madonna and in the sixties, in the never obtainable stuff that they will someday wear and eat to define their ineluctable, intensely subjective 1V personalities. They believe in the great orgasm of purchasing, they cast off their Puritan restraints, and sometimes wonder why it's never like it is on lV. But that's no matter.

Tomorrow they will drive a little bit farther, spend a little more, break down those hard edges with some more sensitivity training....

78

Goddess There, that is where she resides She floats there amid a sea of shit and refuse, coursing subcutaneous in the veins of the city.

On her back perhaps, arms outstretched in mockery of our familiar savior, her cool nails dredging slicks she weaves her garland crown.

Glowing hollowly pale in manh~ld moonlight, phosphorescent in greenblack mIre, call her mystery she is the soul of the city.

Devoid of her magic we are ravenous, pick clean this festering carcass, claws of overriding reason.

You will come to her again in the palpable silence of latenight city, amid the empty howls of nowhere dogs bristling at the uneasy sit of night, drawn by her gentle haunt murmuring through the grates, back into box and a match to the silent rhythm of your soul descend faceless you will know it's time. among the crowds.

Embraced by the rotting scent Her buttocks staining forever your reasoned whiteness, squeak softly, you will know it's time. rhythmically Crouch and lift the grate aside, with the manual motion you will see her, of hand as she light flash on blackened watermasturbates to cadaverous crone pass time. in moonshrouded glory her pale crooked finger tracing a line beckoning you - Bill Holmes to descend the depths and be 79

(continued from page 19)

They split up to investigate -- they can cover more ground that way -- "Scooby" always ends up with "Shaggy." He is thus indicated as the epic's bearer of meaning, and a word on the semiotics of "Shaggy" is in order. He personifies the show's project of pounding into dust the possibility of any genuine cultural dissent precisely because he mobilizes in his character so many of characteristic figures through which post-war youth dissent has been represented. With his scraggly goatee echoing that original television deviant, "Maynard G. Krebs" from The Dobie Gillis Slww, he recalls the casual subversion with which America's original deviant youth subculture, the Beats, were co-opted.

The world Beat originally had a triple-significance.

First it referred to the beat of black music, that supposed mystical funky release from white America's all-pervasive sexual and cultural (and consumer) repression. Second it referred to their own proud marginal status; they were "beat" with the hypocritical dominant culture. Finally, it referred to their supposed self-beatification, their unrepressed and thus saintly repudiation of the world of middIe-class sinners. And "Shaggy " is down for all these things, the spiritual guru of the Mystery Machine ethos.

But as a salesman for whatever products are being peddled this morning. he finally becomes down for none of the underlying things these outward manifestations represented. He is a radical transfigured by his debased status as a cartoon character into an avatar of "radical" conformity to the logic of the market. He is funky sexually (if we are to take his relationship with "Scooby" as more than a mere friendship), totally "out there" in behavior. and proud of it; but finally. he is a hedonist who prides himself on his limitless powers of consumption. Thus the beatnik anti -American becomes. through the miracle of television. a sort of Uberamerikaner. the ultimate consumer. Eating a ten-foot long sandwich in each episode doesn't come cheap. you know. A hero to be emulated.

80

but beyond emulation, "Shaggy" pOints the way to his status as the repository of the most enduring value in American life: the never-ending imperative of a market society to continually make and remake consumer desire through the exploitation of the need to release repressed tensions by styling yourself a rebel.

But that's not all, folks. With "Fred" representing the hip fratster, "Daphne" the strawberry-coifed sexobject, and 'Velma" the earnest would-be campus bomb thrower, the viewer is offered up a tantalizing semiotic soup of significations of commodified deviance.

So much for that ludicrous digression (I recall the Monkees: "Who writes this stuff?"). Back to our story.

The young ones split up and investigate. In the dramatic climax they fmd and unmask the wrongdoer, who turns out to be ... Surprise!.. .the PigU Uke the classic hero of antiquity, the youths use the villain's power and size against him to demonstrate their spiritual superiority.

Spiritual superiority, it is implied, is the young viewer's spiritual superiority over the menacing, doddering forces of Old Age. As the good (but pathetically emasculated in their power to affect reform, like the well meaning liberal bureaucrats of the Kennedy administration) adults breathlessly thank the kids for saving the world, "Fred", 'Velma", and "Daphne" describe how simple it really was - and, how the praise really belongs to the clueless "Shaggy" and "Scooby", the true heroes, who teach that ignorance is bliss, style is substance, and that consuming like a hog has spiritually redemptive capabilities.

And as the Bad Guy mournfully intones "I would have done it too if not for those meddling kids and their dog," youth is tragically reminded that its transformative power in society resides in its purchasing power.

Aside from all this, the thrilling saga of youth rebellion also serves as a simple ruse to get kids to watch the commercials.

Next season, the story remains the same, with some surface changes. "Scrappy Doo" is added to the 81

cast, celebrity guest stars are also added. Children are thus taught the logic of planned obsolescence, that what they purchase today becomes worthless tomorrow. In sum the show presents a masterful rhetoric of psychological stagnation, a fully integrated ideology of infinite infantilizatlon; useless crap put in the service of selling useless crap. Here, in Scooby Doo, is demonstrated a distopic vision of how the American is made, not born.

Burn Ken Burns. Long live the Hannabarbildungsroman!

~ /

82

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Primal Facades A bus passes on my way into town and I shout at its passengers, "we aren't well assembled!"

My head quivers.

I stride carefully past merchants drinking coffee and selling magazines on the sidewalk's stark eternal lines.

I can't talk to them.

I'm overwhelmed by the disfigurement of flesh in the world of geometry.

So I become an obelisk standing in a bed of leaves in a park.

I would strangle the town's small facades, but I have no arms.

The high moon slinks over me.

Undisputed Master of the Yard A poet pretends to speak. for the season: A boudoir blooming everywhere, the lovely patina cracked.

And the landscape does not transcend a boy with muddy socks yanking small leaves, ripping an insect. He tucks it in his pocket and whispers in the face of all life, the question-mark seedlings.

- Eric (So Rudely) Forst 83

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(continued from page 25)

noticed a young woman with a shirt made of mohair. or maybe it was yak. who knows? She was beautiful in that animal hair. He imagined himself a young man. but was neither young nor old. He was more of a moderate man.

There was an illusory comfort in this realization. and Nikita had recently been reminding himself of his moderate status and moderate means. But most of him was not about to accept the mediocrity of this classification.

Nikita's imagination. annoyed with such moderation. ran rampant and naked in full glory like some tareaten Gaul charging the outerworks and the Roman legions manning them. The tables turned at Alesia. the Gauls spread and Vercingetorix rises to towering heights after burning Rome.

Every night, this pesky barbarian caused more angst for Nikita than one man could withstand in a lifetime. He did his best to remind Nikita that the day world had only a shade of the night world's misgivings. Nikita was unaware however, and was spared from being a nervous wreck simply because he didn't remember his dreams. He would wake up having forgotten.

He also had certain dreams which, piled on top of the imaginative ones, were more easily recalled but more contrived. He had a particular recurring dream. mostly during the day but never asleep, which told of his potential. In this dream he would be addressing a large crowd. usually at a rally but sometimes at a stately and opulent dinner. He was often clothed as the pope. He would Simply raise his arms -- that's all -- and the crowd would be moved to applause. even to outright cheers. Then, or shortly thereafter (occasionally he raised his arms for a second round of kudos) Nikita would come round. Thus he dreamt the dreams of success and power, and there were so many variations on this theme that Nikita was constantly revising his strategy "for de life" rather than simply opening with pawn, so to speak. In a word he was a dreamer, and just what was to be done?

85

****• Hans had made an extraordinary rise to underground popularity and notoriety with the performance of his major project "Stlll Born and the Aqueduct." just four years ago. The show was a smashing event, though several orchestra members narrowly escaped bodily harm when part of the aqueduct separated and fell from its moorings. Had it not been for the irreparable damage to the aqueduct, Hans was convinced that upon second or no later than the third performance, he would have made it big. His mother had called him last night. She wanted him to visit her in Sun City-West, out in Arizona. He had never been there.

Hans, the Untimely legend, hOisted the end of the door up with a mighty grunt and pOinted out the slots in the wood for the jambs. Nikita rubbed his finger over it -it was as smooth as plastic. Hans said something about the skin of women and this wood. Nikita thought he wanted to design some sort of wooden dress for women.

"It wouldn't be comfortable, Hans."

"Huh?" It was exactly that, which was bothering Nikita.

Wood and doors. Nikita mused. Wood, Doors ... snakes and wooden doors.

*•*•* He had met Simone at a health-food cafe which featured fresh-squeezed glasses of homegrown grass-juice.

There were many grasses available for many tastes. A few of them were even tasty. The cafe also had a children's playpen. It was not exactly Nikita's kind of place, but it had elements that appealed to him intensely. His favorite color was green.

He had come in the middle of the afternoon after a brief and careless walk down Halsted. He noticed an 86

attractive woman in one of the boutiques. She was dark in complexion and her hair was quite black. She was about five-foot-nine. She was looking at fake fox fur while Nikita peered judiciously at her from behind a rack of second-hand shoes. She left soon after he noticed her, so he bought a pair of vintage wingtips for a ridiculous twenty dollars.

A few minutes later he saw her again, this time outside a hair salon. She was looking in the window.

Nikita was not about to stop for any reason, but he did notice her flowery Betsey Johnson jumper -- yellow daffodils lain gently upon 'blackest night'. He inhaled as he passed her -- sweat and ... roses?

Nikita was interested out of boredom and feeble aesthetics. (He could not forget aesthetics -- misery! -- for the sake of democracy.) Yet he continued on past, wondering if he should order a red hot. He had never known a woman intimately. He deCided instead to go into a used bookstore. This would be the more interesting choice, if I was a woman, Nikita thought. As he crossed Halsted, he looked back towards the garden woman but she was already gone. Nikita was disappointed, and he proceeded immediately into the Encyclopedia section.

But then he saw her again, in the Greenest Earth Juice Bar and Health Emporium. He walked in, and there she was, sitting at the counter. Nikita took the only bar seat remaining, precisely and quite perfectly positioned next to hers. He pretended not to notice her and ordered bulghar-wheat nectar.

She turned to him with big brown pupils, blinked once, and smiled a wide grin. Nikita nearly gasped in fear of her garishness. She spoke carefully.

'You found some shoes?"

'Yes, uh yes indeed, thank you."

"I found some white fake fox fur and I was thinking if I deCide not to wear it I would line the dash of my Toyota."

"Really."

87

''Yeah ... '' It was the laughter which followed that brought them to the beginning of what could be described as love. Nikita fell immediately under the spell of her name, 'Simone,' "See-mon-ah" he breathed. She was a few years younger than him, had been married once, and worked as a librarian. They began talking of their respective dreams. he to run an international crime ring specializing in theft of antiquities, and she, to become a saint. Nikita thought of Simone as he would consider a powerful judge -:- he was ignorant of much hagiography. They retreated from reminiscence, tried vainly to resist sentimentalism, and were thrilling to one another. consistently.

They soon began seeing each other so much that living apart became intolerable, as well as impractical.

They got their fIrst place together two months after they met. Once they began living together. normal everyday trips down the street became something like curious circus sideshows. They existed someplace on the fringes of an involuted three-ring. Nikita cut his hair. He rediscovered his taste for bawdy music and rediscovered an embarrassed joy listening to Zappa.

Simone was buoyant and very energetic. She was always going here or there. dragging Nikita along in her often eccentric escapades. They adopted a cat they named 'Keg.' Eventually Simone deCided to go back to school and get her Master's degree in Art Therapy. She was going to quit at the library because of classes. Nikita was happy for her. but was unsure that his feeble salary working as a guard in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities would be suffIcient. He also wondered. ''What is Art Therapy?"

The problems began when. six months after they had moved in, Simone started coming home late after classes. She was working as a waitress a few nights a week. and sometimes she would not come home until late 88

at night even when she did not work. Nikita fretted and picked his appendages in his extra time. He became more and more nervous. He began thinking maybe everything was not right between them.

He suspected Simone of seeing another man after work, or at the restaurant. Nikita could not accept Simone's devotions to her studies. Of course he was too scared to tell her of his suspicions, so for a while he just came into the restaurant where she worked and sat at a table drinking coffee waiting for her few seconds of attention. Nikita was so worried that he began smoking more and more Cigarettes, beyond a pack a day. He imagined what Simone might be doing at school and it made him both jealous and sick.

Simone didn't understand Nikita's strange attitude, and was offended when he finally explained what he was nervous about. She began to avoid him because he asked so many questions, which only made him more jealous.

Finally he left, taking his few possessions and leaving a crude sort of note.

It was now three weeks Since Nikita left, and he had not yet broken down and called Simone. He was not comfortable on the telephone, and did not get one installed in his new apartment .

••• •• Like an old man savoring an as yet unrealized dream, Nikita frowned and clenched his teeth. He realized he had been staring blankly at Hans and the door for at least five minutes, while he had rerun his most fervent romance reel again and again upon the dimly lit screen of his memory. He was as usual a passive and occasionally terrified viewer.

"Nikita, hey -- how are you, eh? Look... Door! You like eh?"

Nikita looked at the the door. It was a nice door, 89

straight and solid. He saw Hans involved in the object. caressing the wood like a pet snake. He saw groups of people he did not recognize clumped around tables drinking coffee. He felt old and out of place.

He had never felt this way with Simone.

Nikita remembered a T.V. show he had seen about some guy with Alzheimer's. He was an old guy who ran a hardware store. This old man was a sympathetic character in a way. and became more so when his senses atrophied. The viewer felt pity and pathos as they watched him wither. Somehow. even though he was forgetting simple things like sink and door. this old guy's imagination was exploding all over the place. The guy relished his sleep and had incredible dreams with many themes. In some dreams he flew. in others he was a fish. When he woke up he would spend most of his day remembering the last night's dream. He began to exist more and more beneath his body than within it. It got so bad that he couldn't remember who he was or what he was. He had dreams of passions and greatness too, though the show was not entirely specific. With each strand of hair left on the pillow, there was more of this guy's lost life locked away in his sleep. But then one day the old man with Alzheimer's can't remember any of his dreams.

Nikita's dream of pleasure and happiness had been growing more and more vivid all the time -- his imagination took care of that -- and yet it was actually becoming less and less likely with the passing of each moment in that friendly cafe. Nikita was afraid of growing old. He was already thirty-one. He knew that his body was already starting to sag. The rubber bands that held his face together were losing their grip. He still had most of his hair. but noticed some recession.

"What's the matter, Nik? Check out this door, huh?"

Nikita looked at the door, glad that it really was a door.

90

"Nice door... I'm getting old, Hans. Old, decrepit, haggard, crotchety, wizened."

Hans gave his friend a noticeable run-down with his head. "Rubbish."

"No, its true."

"If I called you a fool, that would be too sparing a term; an idiot -- still too nice. You're still thinking for her, eh?"

"No ... "

"What do you know about love, my dear friend?"

Nikita wondered if Hans cared at all. If he even could. He scowled at Hans, who was smiling with a certain plasticity to his lips that was less human and more like gummi candy. It was a sticky, even sickly grin. Nikita felt offended, decided to act on his feelings rather than let it pass, and stormed out of the Untimely despite the insistent protestations of Clever Hans.

***** I lie awake on my small bed in my small room.

Venus is gone. I get up. I light a cigarette, make coffee.

Eat Grape Nuts, toast. I shall have potatoes again for dinner. I think about writing something about the gay MG mechanic who tried to get me to come over to his house a few nights ago at three in the morning to play 'Uno'. Was that a dream? No. I type at my blue screen: 'Nikita was afraid of growing old.'

Name still a problem. Nikita used by bad Russian villains etc.

***** So it was that Nikita entered his period of sulking.

There was no question of ownership -- it was his alone.

The more he thought about the fragility of his new friend91

ships, the less amiable he became. He started avoiding people in what became rather severe ways. He hardly ever went to the Untimely. He would walk down alleys rather than main streets. He stayed in his tiny studio brooding and not doing much of anything. He smoked most of the time and thought he was courting the Muse, whom at the time he believed was the Indian goddess Kali. Eventually Hans came over to apologize. He said that he was too critical and that he was 'truly sorry.'

Nikita forgave him and that night they went to a party.

The party was held in an entire three-flat, each floor with its own theme, booze and food. Nikita saw some old friends. He talked with a friend of Simone's who told him that Simone wanted to reach him. He started having a good time. He danced and shook his body and stared down.

After the party, Nikita decided he must get a phone. He had to call Simone; he had left some things over there anyhow. The next day Nikita called in sick to the museum so as to be home when the phone man came. After installing the line, Nikita offered the phone man a beer, using a line he had practiced: "Hey... Have a beer?" The phone man laughed and declined.

After he left, Nikita picked up the phone and dialed Simone's number. Nikita heard the distorted voice of the answering machine after a few rings. It sounded like a rediscovered bit from some evil-smelling album that Hans listened to.

He called again and again but still nothing. He did not understand a word of it. He wondered if it was in another language, or if Simone had moved.

He tried again, busy. Message still playing, he thought. His buzzer buzzed, someone at the door. Who could that be? He called again, two rings ... no machine.

Someone picked up the other line.

"Hello?"

"Is this Simone?"

'Yes." Her voice sounded different, Nikita's heart stood on balance 92

beams for a split second before plunging into his bowels.

"TIllS is Nik." Simone gasped and laughingly asked him how he was doing. It was a happy, rushing laugh.

"I am doing... rather... badly," Nikita said, and wished he was in another place, another time, where he would not have to explain and the gallery of his loneliness could be emptied before her to rise towards the sky, like helium balloons.

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(continued from page 49)

he is afraid to catch cold; Ellie gave him gloves and a hat with flaps when he left and he wore them on the plane, he waved from the little window, he smiled. His perfect teeth, thin lips, black curls, warm eyes. "Are you my princess?" he would ask. A woman answers the phone.

It is seven a.m. in London.

Football Saturday. Ellie walks fast through the parking lot of a shopping mall. Deserted, the city feels like the blueprint of a hangover: still, cold, and electric.

Around her snow hardens in drifts. She wears red mittens and a gray sweatshirt with its hood up. She holds her own hand as she walks.

Amplified cheers from the stadium crackle in the air like static and Ellie stops to listen, folding the shirt's fleeced hood from her ears. The noise is distant and unreal, like the hissing of the ocean through a shell. It seems likely to exist inside her head. She stands for a long moment within the white lines of a parking space.

Empty cups rattle in the gutters. A passing truck of strangers blares its horn.

Moving again, Ellie watches the ground pass beneath her. She looks at the white rubber toes of her shoes. My shoes, she thinks, slowing. My feet: me. She comes upon the blue glass gravel of a shattered windshield. There has been an accident, and she stops, as if to mourn it. She sees people, their skin sliced to ribbons by flying glass. Jack's father, a doctor, has once spoken of a serum which, when applied, would render the skin so supple that surgeons could operate without making incisions. ''They'll just reach right through the ribcage, no scars, it's fantastic!" he exclaimed. Ellie starts to run, looking straight into the empty air in front of her.

She arrives at a white door with a silver handle. It is a handle she has held many times. Inside, music breathes from unseen speakers. The chair is shaped like the glove of a giant. One's head lies on its wrist, while its fingers support one's legs. When Ellie arrives, Ludmila 94

drapes her in a blanket. She pulls the hair back from Ellie's face with a cloth band. She doesn't bother, any longer, to make conversation.

The cleaner is abrasive and requires soft sponges.

Feeling these sponges, like the tongues of big cats, the blood yearns upward to the face, the skin opens like a flower touched by light. A nozzled machine beside the chair emits a veil of warm moisture. Ludmila faces Ellie through a magnifying glass as big as a porthole.

Ludmila's hands are firm as she batters impurities from Ellie's face. She has no patience for the sordid urges of the skin. Sloughing dead cells and removing pockets of clogging, she prepares for the dermal massage.

From a round jar, she gathers a palm full of olivecolored cream. It is cool and smells of oatmeal as she touches it to Ellie's skin. Ellie knows it is a good, clean, simple thing. Ludmila frames Ellie's face with both hands as though it is a fragile treasure. She begins to move her fingers in concentric, soothing patterns over Ellie's cheeks, forehead, and chin. The movement is gentle, feather -soft. It starts to draw Ellie from herself, making her only her skin. She remembers how Jack would run his fingers over her scalp in the morning. Propped up reading in his big bed with her beSide him, he would absently sketch figures on the skin below her hair. When Jack left, Ellie tried to scratch her own head, but it hadn't been the same at all.

Lying prone in the special chair under a wool blanket, Ellie is paying a stranger fifty dollars to handle her face. It is a concept so pathetic she cannot think of it.

She thinks instead of Jack, lips drawn back from his teeth in a canine grimace as he kneels, naked and sweatsoaked, before a girl grasping a candle thick as a hydrant.

The heart is a muscle, Ellie thinks. It can be flexed, controlled, restrained, slowed down. The brain cannot tremble in its case. It cannot cause the eyes to bleed.

Ludmila continues to massage her skin, though now the 95

rhythmic gestures seem obscene. Ludmila has a cold, narrow, Slavic face. The skin shines smoothly on her flat cheeks like plastic. She would not flinch if Ellie died at this moment. She would take money for the appointment out of Ellie's purse before calling an ambulance. Ellie is an ugly girl with oatmeal on her face, nobody's princess.

Ludmila wets a towel with warm water. She swabs exfoliant from Ellie's face with quick, circular motions.

She chooses the herbal masque best for combination skin and applies it with a wood-handled brush. She sets a timer, turns up the music, dims the lights and leaves the room, to return in aproximately fIfteen minutes.

Ellie is alone. She will die, she thinks, this feeling will kill her. Her brain twitches like a fish on land. She remembers how her father, a jowly, heckling, walrus of a man, used to punish her hungover brothers by taking them for rides in the Oldsmobile. Midway through the trip, he would roll up the windows, light a cigar, and offer them dry roasted peanuts. He would remind them of the good things in life. 'Waffles, boys, you could use some cold waffles: with syrup! And pork chops!" He kept one eye on the boys in the rearview mirror as he wove slowly over the county road.

Her brothers had taught Ellie how to waterski on a week-choked lake outside Falconer. They'd sped out in the orange boat one choppy, too-bright afternoon, cans of beer on ice in the stern, the tow-rope coiled like a serpent on the floor. Ellie was small and white, her brothers were twins and drunk, the sun hurt her eyes, the waves were too high, she wore rags wrapped around her feet because the skis were too large.

"Please," she says aloud, tears welling in her eyes and spilling onto the blue clay of the masque. She looks down the narrow length of her covered body. Her hands find each other under the scratchy yellow blanket.

She is shivering. Across the empty room thick with steam, she hears the ticking of the timer. It will be over in a matter of minutes. Ludmila will return to find ... what?

96

Ellie will be speaking. nonsense flowing from her mouth like bilge. She will be carried out on a stretcher. She begins to sob. her head rolling on the folded towel beneath it. She thinks of falling to the floor. knocking herself unconscious. It would stop then. but it would be there when she woke. the first thing she'd feel.

In the center of the lake her brothers would abruptly cut the engine. so that all one could hear was the licking of waves at the boat. They would zip Ellie into a red life-jacket and fit her swaddled feet into the rubber lips of the skis. Holding her ankles with callused hands. they adjusted the bindings tighter and more tight. Then the pried off the skis and turned on the engine low. They threw Ellie into the lake afield of the propeller with one. two. three sickening swings. tossing next the skis which coasted with alarming speed. nosing toward her in the water like predatory fish. The tow-rope unfurled in the air. its grip landing with a splash just beyond her reach and she swam sideways to it. dragging her legs with their planks behind her.

The boat crept forward. straightening the rope as Ellie floated. knees drawn to her chest like a fetus. stiff arms holding to the grip between her skis. She saw her brothers' faces. small as pennies and as blind. They drank and laughed on the idling boat without watching.

Long weeds flirted with her legs and arms. The rope tautened and began to drag her in the water as the motor churned a wake which swallowed her smaller one.

"Help!" she shouted. "I don't know what to do!" The twins lifted their silver cans in greeting and one took his seat behind the wheel.

"Are you ready?" he yelled. and in the shrill moment between her nod and the roar of the engines. as speed travelled down the rope to her hands upon the handle. Ellie flexed her fingers in a white-knuckled grip. praying the rope would pull her up before she let it go.

The timer rings. Ellie has wept the clay from her face. Beyond the closed door. Ludmila greets her next 97

customer. "Come in. how are you." she says. "I see you haff problem." Outside. a needling ice-storm has begun.

Ellie shuts her eyes and moves her hands to the worn leather armrests of the chair. The steamer ceases steaming with a sigh.

More by Julia Clinger from

Decoy At night I dream of the Precious Thing. Giant. exquisite. amorphous. and utterly fragile. it speaks but can't be heard. it is waiting: it has chosen me. The Thing is a mammoth with bones weak as the spokes of a web.

Eyes big as planets it weeps on me. and for me: for us.

At night when I lie awake praying. thinking I want. I deserve. I must have. it is the Precious Thing who hears me. I understand that the Thing is not precious because it is valuable. I understand that it is hungrier than I am. that it is hunger itself. and thirst. and a yearning impossible to measure. How easy it would be to kick it. to abandon it. for it can only get larger. But I gather it up. I sustain it, for though it is huge it is light. and it loves me.

My God is as helpless as I am. and I lie beSide it. saying Here I am: armless. legless. VOiceless. but with wings: your angel.

98

Continental Divide She lags below, as I press on, climb, up the mountain towards Emerald Lake.

A coyote sounds on the stone. My limbs freeze. "Is this where the water flows back?"

"Not yet," I say, frustrated. "Soon."

She itches for the smog-choked valley Where dissipated men meet, spoon Sugar in cappucinos, speak Farsi, Dress expensively. Now is a season for granola, frugality. We're nearing, but is she with me? I look back. Slashing through brush, I escape, the green basin Explodes before me. But I see the glassy Skin alone, for I have lost Eurydice.

- K. Andrew White

99

cmCAGO (shi-ka'go) n. American city, Oat. 41 0 50' N., long. 87 0 38' W.l SYN: three syllables. sounds craving sense; meanings yearned for. drooled. exclaimed. hotly forged. shot and cursed--bellyup in the acres. the buoy has logged itself with sweat and South-seared tears. The Lake will not save it. Stlll they stay. those Nine Million who clutch to it tightly. afraid of the land. crammed on stoops and stages. but for crossing its streets just to drag on that last gasp of light. purposed that their blue night will not suffocate under the furrow dreams of the Midwest. to be plowed deeper and deeper by the Everlast dawn. Here migrance ends.

America's insomniac circulation. pumping trains and now bussing tables. whiting out its Delta blood. The several histories Dropping red. the gravity of passed abuse. But the cradle jostles on. and we may yet daub it: the cries recollecting All who ever bred a dream. to y'all a chile to better. to shephard a foyer of mirrors. to riff alone or gather tlle stricken. All who ever strode dancing. Kicking. gunning a car or worse. who brokered the poor. who sought wherefore. who Crlpped to green and did a ho, who struck, who got your back, who tomorrow will again croweye freedom beyond our sills. This their babies' joints race and print and profit. Church and mate and institution gnaw but cannot unmarrow. So the city. Distinctions' easy victual. might in a good telling be remembered a closer place-sturdy hips and fat hands. and jumpropes and baskets and strays in the street. choirs for Homes. wiping fevered dribble. supper's indifferent ladle. boycotted yokes and cancer's resinous wake--conch upon a time quenched gulping warm milk and Scotch. and many fighting dreams. for "community" and "morality" the Sisyphean and all the less sufficient task of connotation. More for the lapping. time and time and time. sidewalk crests to nuller depths ... and it's good that this is too much of a stretch. meaning buoyancy. because "Chicago" has Yet littly delimited itself. Now: our need for words full of life and grammars protective of it. conscioned wordplays. fewer and more compassionate metaphors. abstracting rules. but every so often vanity and even homonymy steal up on the clearest intentions and--

- Aloysius Plantageonette 100

CilLL HE POPCORN The Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn. Doubleday. 226 pages.

Reviewed by Thad Quill.

America is a consumer culture. and when we change what we buy -- and how we buy it -- we'll change who we are.

Someday (soon) children will be able to communicate through their Nintendos to other children allover the planet. Kids wUl convince their peers to Join the crusade ... to save the planet.

- Faith Popcorn. 1991

For professional "trend -watcher" and now published author Faith Popcorn, American life is a lot like a super-detailed Nintendo game. As in Nintendo, where through the manipulation of a control device strangely known as a '1 oystick" , the catatonic viewer/player acts out serial violence and/or frenetic flight from phantasmagoric creatures, so it is in the America of cognitive abnegation deSCribed in The Popcorn Report. Economic SUrvival is physically taxing, the world is dangerous, life is dull. We require ever more sophisticated means of escape, and Popcorn presents her book as a guide for those who wish to profit from this groundswell of discontent.

The literature of self improvement, a peculiar product of hard-bitten Protestantism and the pioneer spirit, has long held Americans in thrall. But now that instrumental rationality and the consumerist ethic have utterly colOnized the American personality, the genre has shifted its emphasis from the virtues of hard work and industry to strategies of self-presentation. This development pOints to a profound rift in the soul of Corporate Man, and it accounts for the prevalence of the two cardinal obsessions of self-help literature in late imperial America-101

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interpersonal competitiveness and psychological wellbeing. Struggling businessmen of the late twentieth-century quite commonly subject themselves on the one hand to the ranting exhortations of seminar circuit can-do charlatans. and to seek absolution. on the other. in the pseudopsychology of glib positive thinkers. All of which is absurd. because they have little hope of achieving either the self-possession or the moral self-righteousness of their entrepreneurial forbears. If this crisis of subjectivity makes moral choices difficult. it makes consumer choices difficult as well. Or so Faith Popcorn would have us believe. describing in The Popcorn Report an elaborate scenario of consumer discontent and cautioning purveyors of commodities to t8.ke heed. Her contribution to business literature takes the great American genre one step further than its predecessors: we are not to overcome our society's problems -- we are to profit from them Unfortunately. Popcorn is no more useful as counsel to manufacturers than she is as a sociologist.

Marketers will find nothing profound in the book. as her postulates are impressionistic and Singularly unburdened by hard demographic evidence. But these shortcomings are unimportant in the end. because the book's real audience is the middlebrow book buyer. the consumer of such stuff as Newsweek and "Entertainment 102

Tonight", the slack gazer into the mirror of self-referential infotainment. The book's prose style is by turns sentimentally ingratiating and condescending. Popcorn invites us to stare into the crystal ball of her expertise, and what will see? We will see Faith the consumer's mentor. Faith our older Sister. She will tell us what is cool. She will wink at our peccadillos. She will assuage our anxieties.

She will help us get the stuff we want from the grownups.

Getting stuff is really what it's all about, and Popcorn is not ashamed to say so. Having been the darlings of the Reagan-era consumer orgy, Popcorn and her consulting firm, which goes under the cutely elided moniker BrainReserve, now pride themselves on the claim to have diagnosed an improbable new consumer dysfunction. Apparently people are just too frightened these days to venture from their cocoons, too tired to watch lV, too health-anxious to consume their favorite foods. America, the land of regeneration, is discouraged.

We need new thinking, new attitudes, new ads, and above all new products. As our self-appointed Newness Czar, Popcorn is boldly pointing the way to a new dispensation of Optimism, and she has coined the neologisms to prove it. She has been monitoring the ConsumerSpeak of DOBYs and MOBYs, PUPPYs and WOOFs, Glob alKids, SurvivorKids, and TrophyKids. There's a sociDquake coming (you know, that "coming, total transformation of mainstream America"), and Faith has news for corporate WhiteMen who think it's going to be business as usual.

The demographic masses are gaining cohort consciousness, and they've got ConsumerStruggle on their minds.

So you had better be down with Faith's generation, or else you can forget about moving your merchandise. Ever the defiant contrarian, Faith has dared to dub the 'nineties the "Decency Decade," the time when the rapacious, status obsessed consumers of the 'eighties will surrender the vanguard to the "vigilante consumers"-savvy, sensitive, globally aware activists. To survive, 103

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multinational corporations will have to discover the value of "soul". "Culture is back in the hands of the people."

Horkheimer, Adorno, Popcorn.

Faith Popcorn, trend oracle, was once Faith Plotkin, ad woman. One can imagine the epiphanic moment of TrendVision, the ecstatic BrainJam, that inspired the transformation. For those who cannot, Popcorn fills in the details. When she started in the advertising business, times were simpler. She was drawn to the profession in large part by the romanticized representations of it in movies. She loved the fabulously creative people with whom she worked. In time, though, the inherent cynicism of the business conflicted with Faith's "pure and noble" aspirations, and her flight to BrainReserve is the result.

Don't be fooled; nothing important has changed in 104

the business of public manipulation. Popcorn is still on the make, armed with a new angle for exploiting consumer insecurities and fears. She understands that as a result of sophisticated public relations campaigns carried out by environmental and consumer interest groups, many large companies have serious image problems. The Popcorn Report is her attempt to capture a niche, to present herself asthe credible intermediary between these industries and socially conscious consumers. Popcorn proposes an improbable new orientation for the advertising industry: instead of hyping products for companies, agencies should work in "partnership" with consumers. Flying in the face of past experience, advertisers in the future will be paid -- by corporate clients -- to give disinterested, objective accounts of a product's quality to buyers. She gives no details about how such a relationship could ever evolve or work, but she helpfully suggests that such a future agency might have "someone like Ralph Nader as CEO." She calls it 'Truth in Advertising", she says it's gonna happen.

Popcorn's faculties of self promotion are enviable.

She is famous for sending executives TrendPacks, collections of popcultural detritus supposed to be packed with revelatory significance, in return for which she is paid handsomely. If the trends she sketches in the Report are any indication of her work, her clients would do just as well to peek into their neighbors' garbage cans. (On the other hand, one can understand how a bemused corporate captain might, for a few thousand bucks out of the company kitty, willingly indulge himself in the frisson of random detached signifiers). Faith does have one blue chip gimmick which is apparently responsible for her credibility: she applies cute names to time-honored behavioral patterns and calls them trends. Popcorn came to national prominence by coining the expression "cocooning," which refers to that heretofore unremarked "need to protect oneself from the harsh realities of the outside world." Now that TrendFans are adjusting to the 105

idea that a lot of people hole up at home to watch lV. Faith has delineated a host of subspecies of the trend: "armored" cocooning Oots of people are buying guns and alarm systems). "wandering" cocooning (Winnebago sales are brisk). "socialized" cocooning (or. what is catchier. "saloning and salooning". the concept that people like to go to their friends' houses sometimes or sometimes go to bars with their friends). A canny businesswoman. Faith hedges her TrendBets and is always on the lookout for CounterTrending. For example. this may be the Decency Decade. with people Folking. Clanning. and DownAging. but keep your eyes peeled for the New Decadence. a possible ''Trend-In-Progress''.

Underlying the Popcorn project is a profound cultural neurosis. Almost all the trends Faith discusses are consumption shifts in the entertainment or cash-andcany businesses. and for good reason. Though she may not realize it. most of the important trends she describes are motivated by irrational fear. boredom. and infantile narcissism. "Happiness used to be part of our birthright." she writes of her angst-wracked generation. This is the generation "that pushed beyond want to deserve." In Popcorn's narrative. the desires and preoccupations of adults and children are strangely inverted. Grown-ups that are not worrying about job security are bored and alienated. needful of tonic self-indulgece and escape.

Kids. on the other hand. when not immersed in consumption themselves. seem to have assumed the concern and responsibility assumed by adults in other generations. The 'nineties. Faith assures us. "will introduce the Children's Crusade: little ones reshaping our foreign policy. changing our views on education. and saving our environment." Faith exhorts us to accept kids as international peace arbitrators and on the boards of directors of major corporations. All of this is suggested. apparently unironically. in a chapter entitled. "Cashing in on the Children's Crusade". But that is Faith all over-- she's 106

Maybe It Was So Reginald Gibbons

From impassioned lovers to apocalyptic landscapes, Gibbons's poems articulate a vision of the individual life in the midst of larger forces.

"Gibbons's work has the highly disciplined artistry that scrupulous honesty requires. A supple syntax, a measured demotic, an intimate speech tone, an ear finely tuned to nuanced emotion, and a protective tenderness distinguish his poems." - Eleanor Wilner, Oxford Companion

to Twentieth-Century Poetry Paper $7.95 72 pages Library cloth edition $20.00

Covenant

Alan Shapiro

''The poems in Covenant sta rt from that secret point in the psyche where instinct and memory both swirl and flash together. The sweaty seams of adolescence; the rock pool of family life; the keyhole through which we watch the comings and goings of others; the ghostly underworld of our own feelings - over all this material the poet arches a rainbow bridge of husky eloquence, tender intelligence, and brooking sympathy. Any new book by Alan Shapiro is cause for gratitude, and this one is his best." -J. D. McClatchy Paper $10.95 '04 pages

Library cloth edition $22.00

The University of Chicago Press 5801 South Ellis Chicago, IL 60637 107

talking out of her ass, but somehow it sounds so right.

Faith is right about one very basic thing: something's gone terribly wrong with the American way of life.

We just aren't happy defining ourselves by the constant purchase of new goods. Consumerism is sapping our will to produce, threatening our environment, and destrOying our culture. But don't look to Faith Popcorn for any permanent solutions. She is Capital's woman, and for her this malaise is paydirt. another demographic wave to ride, an exciting public whim around which to construct new ad campaigns, new products. Dissatisfaction with the present is, after all, the generalized emotion advertisers love to capitalize on, and as long as Faith and her pals can keep one step ahead of the endlessly gUllible public, can keep us from effectively articulating our inchoate awareness of emptiness, they can transform our discontent with consumerism into a new lease on consumerism's life. And that's what the commerCialization of dissent is all about.

Writing for a public mesmerized by the stars, Popcorn hopes to become a star herself. Banal, trite, and self-absorbed, she possesses all the ingredients for PR success in America today. And like other celebrities. her primary function is to help business keep us glued to the tube, enthralled with the malls. and banal. stupid, and utterly superficial forever. Meanwhile she couches the entire project in the therapeutic language so commonplace in AdTalk: 'We're a small, caring clinic for future thinking," coos Popcorn. Pass the Crisco.