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memory of our friends gone und e r to the brainwash of co r porate jobs. the intense and enthus i astic gone salesmen or congr es sional staff e rs; thos e we slammed with now in th e milit a r y, hopeless on the dole, s tr ugg lin g on for the l ong lost ca use in small college towns, and otherwise

Winter/Spring 1993 Thomas Frank, Keith White editors Andy Beecham - Layout Greg Lane - Stuff Getter "Diamonds" Dave Mulcahey - House Slacker Our thanks to Mr. Studs Terkel; Mr. Michael Warr and the Guild Complex; Mr. Rohan Preston; WFMT, WBEZ, and of course WHPK; Mr. Lawrence Rocke; the University of Chicago and the UCSG; Gill's Cut Rate Liquors; Mssrs. Chris Holmes and Jeff Thurlow; and Mr. Mark C. Meachem for their understanding and kind support.

We produced this Baffler over a gruelling three-week period in November, 1992, hidden away in an obscure corner of an enormous house on the South Side of Chicago, listening constantly to the Sex Pistols, the Wipers, the Micronotz. As usual, we laid the whole thing out ourselves on a puny Macintosh computer and ran it off on a laser printer when no one was looking. Such are the conditions of independent literary production.

All materials Š copyright 1992 The Baffler. All rights are reserved. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. The Baffler is distributed by Ubiquity and Book People. If your bookstore or library doesn't carry it, ask them to.

Write to us. Send us your poetry, your money. Copies of Baffler #3 are available for $5. Subscriptions (2 issues) are $8 for individuals, $10 for institutions.

The Baffler P.O. Box 378293 Chicago, IL 60637 2 • Baffler

Number Four YOUR lK FESTY1E SUCKS Monoculturalism, T. c. Frank, p. 5 The Libidinal Tourist, David Mulcahey, p.71 Gedney Goes Bohemian, Keith White, p. 73

TWENTY-NOTHKNG The Making of a Twenty-Something Literary Superstar, Maura Mahoney and Richard F. Kolbusz, Jr., p. 116 Twenty-Nothing, T. C. Frank and Keith White, p. 121 Twenty No-Think, Eric Iversen, p. 123 The Fabricating of Youth Culture: An Exclusive BafJler Blunting!, p. 129

FICTION

Uncoupling, Mat Lebowitz, p. 23 Playing Down, John Redford, p. 45 Colonial Text, Dave Berman, p. 53 Syzygy, Bill Holmes, p. 67 Consumption, Dave Jacowitz, p. 85 Zamboni, Mike Newirth, p. 98

POETRY

FEATURES

Rick Perlstein, Picasso at 25, p. 33 Semiotics Mailbag, p.15 Editor's Note, p.16 BaHler Fashions, p.60

Gaston de Bearn, 56, Barton Longacre, 42, Steve Healey, 54, Sean Francis, 58, Angela Sorby, 92, Alec Dinwoodie, 96, Wendy Kagan, 102, A.P., 103.

ART Barrett Heaton, 40 & 94, Eric Forst, 49, Dave Berman, 52, Chris Holmes, 66, Carla Bruce, 113.

OUr fiction stories are flctJonaf. any resemblanoe to anybody, HYing or dead, Is, as they say, purely coincidental.

Baffler • 3

Us Tom Frank, the Kansas City Ranter, is cynical and obvious at 27. He has sent out over 200 resumes in his lifetime, has never had a job, and will soon be one of the guys Bush and Reagan referred to when they used to talk about "the judgement of history."

Keith White sings Irish folk songs, resents everyone, and seeks a better life than his 27 years have heretofore offered. When he's not baffling the citizens of New York, he's usually injecting his insidious ideas into a literature-product that you probably read every day. Look out!

David Berman (26) and company have a 7" record out on Drag City. Band: Silver Jews. Sound: difficult but rewarding.

Steve Healey and Eric Forst, Dave's physical and intellectual neighbors, are twothirds of Frances Gumrn, whose new 7" was just released by Trixie Records (P.O.Box 379373, Chicago, 60637). Don't worry, they're both in their twenties too.

Graduate student Dave Jacowitz, 24, hopes someday to introduce the term "cheez" (fromage) into critical literary discourse.

Barton Longacre, 25, is heading to Montana to infiltrate and undermine the poetryllifestyle scene there. He also edits Wann Orchid.

Mat Lebowitz, 27 and poised for stardom, is working on two screenplays and a novel, which collectively will secure his place in history. In the meantime, he hides out in New York City, teaching impressionable youngsters underhanded techniques for tricking the SA.T. Maura Mahoney, at 26 The Bafflers literary torpedo, has partied with F. Scott Fitzgerald, attained an advanced literature degree, and is currently penning an apologia for suburbia.

The Very Rev. David "Diamonds" Mulcahey, S.S.G., 27, is Undersecretary of the Sacred Congregation for the Suppression of Otherness at the Vatican.

Rick Perlstein, 23, recently completed his Ph.D at the Ecole de France under Eric-Jacques Paraplui, the founder of postpoststructuralism, His Scatologies: Allegories of Defication in the Texts ofNorman Rockwell will be published in 1993 by Routlege.

John Redford, 29, labors as a data slave amidst the green hills of Massachusetts.

He aV,?ids television, drives too much, and fears for the republic.

Hypatia Sanders, wise beyond her 25 years, monitors traffic and shipping with a powerful telescope from high atop her apartment building on the shores of Lake Michigan. She now claims to know the secret.

Angela Sorby, 27, is one of the all-too-young editors of Chicago Review. Her poems have appeared in several of the many small magazines that rival Baffler for space on the "literaty" shelves.

4 • Baffler

The following was read at a real-life provoca~ion staged by The Baffler on October 21, 1992 at the Hot House, a Chicago "performance space" and favorite art-lifestyle hangout. Capture the ambience of the moment by shouting this piece angrily as loud as you can and tearing the pages out of the book as you read them.

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IIl(rllt l"e#(lirriei#(e ()I k.()(.(/ (.(/e lir tk.e art C()#(#(a.I(l~ are, al(.(/P.F ,ftl"fI./!tirt 101" tk.e I"fk.t t() e~!l"u.f ()ar,felv-u, fJ.I(rIk.()(.(/ tk.e #(fJ.I( l:r al(.(/~ tl"flirt t() ,fk.at M rIo(.(/l(. It l"e#(lirriei #(e ()I !eP!1e t:& R()iel"t #o,o/leti()l"!e fJ.I(rI tf"uti /lQ/"Iir;! (.(/k.() akP.F iarlt() Ifit tie #(()I"at:rtle ~!u, al(rllt #(arle #(e tk.lirt 4 k.()(.(/ tk.l:r ia ttle, iet(.(/ul( a,f riPlirt ()ar ()(.(/I( tk.lirj al(rI tk.eI;" ,ftul'" rft'rla.ctle iait'ttl"? l:r tk.e cel(tl"ale,~/~/e,l(ce ()I tk.e artl:rtle tlu~le. to i()(.(/ rio Fa allfeelai()at tiat? /I

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Baffler • 5

A R T

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Well, tuck you! That's got to be one of the most fatu· ous shibboleths in the entire bourgeois lexicon!

Now I'll tell you about another platitude. It's a TV commercial for the Gap, part of their current campaign in which dozens of art and music and dance celebrities endorse their products as some kind of hip lifestyle signifier. It depicts a Luke·Perry·ish guy with sideburns - and a ponytail, probably - reading a ludicrously pre· tentious poem about ••• his trousers in a place a lot like this one; dark, smoky, slightly risky. I suppose that by reo inforcing all those fond suburban fantasies about the ex· Citing, fulfilling lives of artists it's convinced a lot of people to buy their jeans from the Gap. Gap products, you know, are supposed to make you stand out from the crowd, mark you as a daring nonconformist, a rebel, an impudent shocker of the bourgeoisie, an artist.

Thus does advertising, the great American art form, encapsulate for us the true legacy of modernism: the corporate poet, singing his ode to the commodity muse.

It's an image that's almost impossible to avoid. Beck's beer runs a similar commercial in which they portray their product as the choice of TriBeCa, a part of New York City recently gentrified by artists. It pictures the remarkably accessible product in lofts decorated with huge inscrutable canvases, with people painting, with people dressed up to resemble artists. Heath candy posi. tions itself as the angst.relieving bonbon of those ultra· creative sculptors and ever·so·radical action painter types. A brand of trousers is promoted with photography that screams 'daring' and 'impressionistic', disjointed bits of suggestive phrases like "foreign films" and "modern art." Levi's are pictured in an extensive array of Matisse and Picasso imitations, reminding us not only of those artists' cool celebrity hip, but of their revolution. ary defiance of middle·class mores.

Of course you think these are just more cheap rip·offs, another co·opting of your precious scene. But in fact ads like these present a much more accurate and honest vi. sion of the state of art in America than does anything produced by anybody in Soho or Provincetown or even Wicker Park. They make no pretenses about the function of artists today, the role you play in a consumer society

6 • Baffler

like ours. Ads like these correctly make one crucial but simple observation: that "art" is fundamentally a lifestyle. It's a pose you adopt, a look and attitude that you affect. It has almost nothing to do with what you produce; in fact it's almost completely content¡free. And it's also, with its image-consciousness, its taste for unrestraint, and its reverence for the new, a lifestyle singularly well-attuned to the cultural necessities of consumer capitalism.

Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, it seems, is a publication dedicated to proving this proposition. Month after month it drives home its vision of artist as consumer hero, with glossy photo spreads depicting the amenities of the creative, sensitive lifestyle. Artists are daring nonconformists who, for fear of seeming too conventional, never appear in the same clothing twice. Artists are a liberated people who flout their ineffable individuality by patronizing the most transparently worthless consumer goods just as soon as they are marketed, and abandoning them shortly after. Each issue of Interview escorts us to a consumer fantasy-land inhabited by the brazen Madonna, the sullen Keanu, the challenging Thierry Mugler, the thoughtful Moschino, the army of insurgent models and soon-to-be rock stars, accompanied by all the stuff they own and wear. All are rebels, boldly flouting convention with unusual purchases; all celebrate their liberation from conformity with wild displays of fiscal frivolity; all stoutly defend the integrity of their prize personalities by buying stuff that nobody else has yet. Of course you will have that stuff as soon as your copy of Interview arrives, but our ever-inventive lifestyle leaders will by then be off on something different.

The artist, as the word is correctly understood in the context of the spectaclist regime, circa 1992, is a lifestyle you take up as a kind of consumer decision, much as you decide on any other look or commodity ensemble. It's a look and attitude that symbolizes a certain variety of hyper-consumer, the person who leads us perpetually to new styles and products, the pioneer of fashion and neighborhoods, the gentrifier of working-class h.l:oJits and houses, the people who made The Gap, Benetton's, and Pearl Jam possible. And although you

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Baffler • 7

may not dress or behave like your sturdy suburban parents, your role in powering the great wheels of consumer capital. ism is no less important. You may not wear a gray flannel suit, live in a split.level ranch house, or commute every day to the mindless grind, but your duties are just as important to the health of the state.

For you, the artists, are a special variety of iiber·bour· geoisie, as the obscene prices commanded by your works and the spiraling rents in places designated as "artist colonies" amply testify. Your role is not to churn out the paperwork, but to churn out the images capital needs to keep us glued to the tube, enthralled with the malls, banal, stupid, and utterly superficial forever. You set a consuming example for the rest of us, you embody the new and demonstrate through your works, deeds, and dress the importance of an ever-novel appearance.

In a society driven by an eternally shift· ing public facade you provide a living jus. ~. . . tification of the motto, "Image is Every· thing." Your lifestyle antics serve to eternally remind us of the obsolescence of the old, the invalidity of last year's craze.

And holding the whole thing together is that old middle·class favorite, the avant·garde. Now, some fifty years after the historical duties of the avant·garde were universally recognized to have been accomplished, you have made of its doctrines a bizarre commodity cult.

You take as your highest - and only! - mission its tired old causes, the shocking of the bourgeOisie, the overturning of tradition. You have abandoned its passion, its conviction, its meaning and have taken instead its mistrust of tradition and made it your only message, your sole article of faith.

You flail against the phantom enemies of puritanism, self·restraint, and nonexistent censorships. You fancy yourselves rebels in the mold of Rimbaud, the Dadaists, James Dean; free spirits who refuse to conform to the mandates of a onedimensional society.

It's never occurred to you that the one·dimensional soci· ety now runs on images of rebellion, that the bourgeoisie

8 • Baffler

now thrives on being shocked. Your avant-garde posturing now serves to reinforce the planned obsolescence so central to the system you are supposed to be subverting; your eternal trumpeting of the new works to corroborate the great lessons of TV advertising. Your calls for release from the moralistic constraints of the past helps to erode the vestiges of the work-and-save ethos so that it may be replaced by the credit-driven unrestraint deemed necessary by the financial powers-that-be. You are the custodians of commodified dissent, liberators of the consumer id, the paramount symbol of the consumer culture that has made our nation so slack and stupid.

You have erected an official style of institutionalized rebellion, a well-oiled image-generating motor which runs at fever pitch to keep the great wheel of eternal novelty turning and turning. With your NEA grants and your daddys money spent on performance spaces and galleries and loft studios you have built an orthodoxy of transgression. It is no surprise that your greatest moments, your "Next Wave Festivals," your big-money gallery openings are sponsored by people like Philip Morris and AT&T. All down the line you professional vanguardists are in league with the cultural project of Madison Avenue. You are the cultural stormtroops of the New, savaging "master narratives" so that the manipulation of the consumer can continue without interference from troublesome things like ethics and tradition.

And while once upon a time the leaders of the avant-garde may have posed a serious intellectual threat to the machinations of the official culture, the highest, most forthright embodiment of your lifestyle is the celebrity product spokesman: Andy Warhol for Braniff, Kim Gordon for the Gap, Bohemians for a kind of beer.

A number of years ago Daniel Boorstin referred to advertising as "the omnipresent, most characteristic, and most remunerative form of American literature," a body of works "destined to have an intimate popular appeal and a gross national influence without parallel in the history of sacred or profane letters." Michael Schudson calls it "capitalist realism." Either way, advertising is the paramount art form of our age, the cultural expression of the times that dwarfs all others. Here is a form which has absorbed every radical

Baffler • 9

representational technique of the last century. It has been a pioneer in language, film, and video, with a hundred times the money and brain power spent on each prime time TV commercial than on the programs which surround them. It is also an art form with a specific designated goal in mind.

Advertising aims to sell not only products but also a way of life in which the buying of products is the primary path to human happiness. No room for precious ambiguity or empty erudition here: advertising means to change your mind, and it uses the often opaque methods of postmodernism in the service of a very unambiguous project.

The struggle of the twentieth century has been a cultural one, ever since business recognized that the public's con· suming pattQrns would have to change in order for their profit.taking to continue as usual. But this the art lifestyle fails to comprehend. The conflict is not over some literary canon, as you would like to believe, or over some threat of censorship by the moralistic, or even over the privileging of Western ways. All of these are miniscule sideshows to the central issue: the unquestioned hegemony of consumerism over every facet, every mode of our nation's cultural produc· tion. We are besieged daily from all sides by the braying of the great megaphone of business culture, with TV, film, lit· erature, and artists all screaming the same ever·shifting message. Not multiculturalism, but MONOCULTURALISM is the operative word of the day, as the tide of shit rises unimpeded higher and higher, and the public mind is molded accordingly.

The battle is a cultural one, and yet never have the forces of cultural opposition been so blind to the tasks at hand, to the nature of the conflict. The Baffler calls for a earnest embrace of the adversarial purpose to which modernism once dedicated itself, for a frank recognition of the way the monoculture has determined our thoughts and lives. We must have an art that is at least as well done as advertising, that provokes thinking - if not so blatantly, at least as persuasively. We cannot afford to regard the postmodern "~o ... dition" of detached surfaces and unanchored images as an innocuous, inevitable, and irresistible development. The business imagery that has created the postmodern world, remember, is an imagery that works, that does things, that refers to signifieds that make people do things, that causes

10 • Baffler

them to spend their lives in dreary pursuit of a shallow and impossible consumer bliss. If we are truly concerned with humanity and not merely our works' reflection of this or that art theory, we cannot regard this development ironically or fatalistically.

As Big Art draws bigger and bigger sums, the fundamental assumptions of the avant-garde are reduced to meaninglessness. The artist has lost his critical social position and become a more or less conscious propagandist for planned obsolescence; a corporate illustrator, decorator, or copywriter: a good little cog in the monocultural machine.

And as literature becomes mired in precious sloughs of irony and textuality, these debasements lose their shame.

You veer unfailingly away from the central aesthetic questions of our time, opting instead to invent fa~ile plays for hipness that can be easily transmuted into clever new advertising. And the whole consumerist project itself, the central motive force and organizing theme of our age, becomes unjudgeable amidst the fogs of "undecidability" you have called down upon yourselves. Impotent, powerless, fearful of forthright speech lest you privilege one discourse over another, you have left the world open to exploitation, manipulation, and control by those who know what they want: Madison Avenue and THE BAFFLER. As the great American monoculture achieves an evertightening hegemony, we call for a new aesthetic of resistance, a final secession from the Culture Industry. We call for an art that is radical in its content, not merely in its playful surface innovations. The Baffler proclaims itself the enemy of the stars, the deflator of celebrity, the subverter of your corporate cadre of subversives. And as the nation slides deeper into depression we call for an aesthetic of genuine dissent, for an honest recognition of the forces that conspire to keep us dumb and complacent before the deafening din of the consumer monoculture. In a time when the 'cutting edge' has become a powerful tool for mediocratization, we dedicate ourSelves to its blunting. In an age when the Hollywood glamor of the 'avant garde' has long since overtaken its aesthetic usefulness, we happily devise new tactics to send it scurrying in disarray.

Baffler • 11

12 • Baffler

A Dress its warm bodice and intricate lace tells nothing of its past which I know from a black and white sign hung on an outlet rack. "smoke damaged garments, price reduced." a bubbly clerk, "from a building fire in the L.A. riots; they smell fine." "much sweeter than perfume." a value. ravishing. all gussied up in near-looted cloth, worn resistance. like donning a slab of the Berlin Wall with frills attached. and that is why I have written this across the breast of your treasure. and see within its weave a monochrome of politics, you, and a burning riot on your back.

- Gaston de Bearn

Baffler • 13

Learning English Ginta: Excuse me, that is your cat?

Sanita: Hm ....

G: I ask: That is your cat?

S: Yes, yes.

G: Whose? You unknown?

S: Who? Where?

G: That was only moment.

S: Who? G: That self.

S: You over event the yesterday.

G: no S: What about you?

G: Only about today S: Who is happen?

G:Who indeed is you people?

S: Please, untouched me?

G: You is egoist!

S: Why is you of me to trouble?

S: It at all about we to speaking G: about a cat S: what is cat?

G: About you S: But now is cat G: Then already nothing!

- Bill Holmes 14 • Baffler

semiotics mailbag Responses by Theophile , translated by Hypatia Sanders Dear Theophile: My partner's sexual praxis might conventionally be characterized as "kinky." A favorite discursive intervention during foreplay is, "Let's be someone else tonight." Is (s)he problematizing core bourgeois paradigms of subjectivity and sexuality, or does (~)he have a crush on someone else?

Theophile Replies: I am disturbed by your use of the active voice. Until your woefully Modernist conception of yourself and your Schnauzer as a system of active agents with essential cores of identity that adopt "masks" at will dries up and blows away, your insistence on the presence of some "other" self outside of your "unified self' will continue to radically undermine the relationship. In the free-floating field of free play that is the funky postmodern lifestyle, your Little Beastie is ALWAYS AND ALREADY fucking ME. Dear Theophile: My roommate and I recently had a dinner party. During the course of the dinner party, our white table cloth was stained with red wine.

My penis-possessing roommate suggests that we pour salt on the wine to absorb and remove the stains. Is this act of erasure a patriarchal trick?

Theophile Replies: Your white tablecloth was stained with red wine.

Your whiu tabkcloth was stained. ..This is too much. I can't go on. I'll go on. Let the inscriptional evidence show that (my own (grammatically shifted) copy of) the predicate of your problematic has been parsed according to the power-packed discourse of normative grammar. I'm still not "sure" what you're "talking about." Aside from the color terms, containing the implicature of a Freudian signifier-contraption so hackneyed as to constitute an assault on my every orifice, (a RED STAIN yet?) the thing that interests (and being dressed for success in a white penis, I do mean interests, ones accruing from my investment, as in SOUTH AFRICA, interests that both overdetermine the direction of the proceeding response and give me the cultural capital necessary to (apparently) overwhelm any other response that this inquiry might have elicited) me here, the word-crack which I designate as the site of my analytical penetration, is the hyphen, that ligature between "penis" and "possessing." I bet you think that such a grammatical entity isn't HISTORICALLY DETERMINED. HA! I laugh in your face! Before post-structuralism, nobody knew that phrases and images and

Baffler • 15

Bafflers Behind Bars As most of our ing imprisoned was course, we have readers who live in unpleasant, what tried for some time Chicago know by now, with the bologna to get this magazine three of the Baf- r - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - , reviewed, menThe adventures of our editorial fler editors tioned, or dis(Greg Lane, "Diastaff since the last issue. cussed by the monds" Da ve L-_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _---' mainstream Mulcahey, and me) sandwiches sans may- press, wi th very were arrested the onnaise and the little success. Tranight before Colum- urine-stained con- ditional methods of bus Day and held in crete, but the most spreading the word one of the city's compelling aspect of (i.e., sending out grottiest jails for the incident was the copies to reviewers) 12 to 18 hours. Our way it immediately failed utterly: evioffense? We were acdrew the attention dently we are just cused of putting up of a heretofore untoo academic-soundflyers to promote an interested press. ing, or too serious, evening of readings Believing as we or too unserious, or at the Hot House, the do that The Baffler too unslick, to be well-known Wicker has important ideas bothered with.

Park performance to introduce into And then everyspace. Obviously bethe national disthing changed, wm~~WJlmm~~·w.~(o~·>'>~~,·Xw."'«~·$~~(o·w.i'!··~{"'w.·::,~:.mm:m@l?'{~·:_~·~¥='{1~"!W<·~~W*,i;i;;&@~~mm

modes of discourse HAD HISTORIES! They probably didn't know FRENCH, either, so they couldn't make such multivalent puns as HISSTORY! I don't know if you got that one, because the idea is so BRILLIANTLY SUBVERSIVE OF ALL YOU HOLD DEARl! Okay, honey. I will now DECONSTRUCT you. And there's nothing you can do about it, because the essential contradiction that permeates the base, shaft, and dizz of the phallogocentric signifier is always and already engaged, in flagrante delecto, in the act of DECONSTRUCTING ITSELF!!! There IS NO first time, so

16 • Baffler

come on: it'll be easy and feel good, and it already happened.

First of all, since no discursive formation is natural, there is no essential reason thatinheres in the nature of the linguistic desire motivating your inscriptive articulation for your identification of your roommate as "penispossessing" to appear as such. Why not "bedicked?" "Enchoaded?" Perhaps you think that his gender is too deqJiy enschwanzedin his essential being for such designations. Well!

You've got another thing coming, mister, and it ain't inscribed between your legs.

Now that I have exposed the

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thanks to the Chicago police. Suddenly we slid perfectly into a favorite stereotype of the artistic lifestyle: the persecuted artists; the clear-eyed youths imprisoned for their beliefs; the daring avant-garde magazine whose ideas so shock the bourgeoisie that its editors have to be silenced by force. This time the response of the media was quick and sympathetic. We appeared soon after the arrest on a popu1ar radio show covering the art scene, and an art-lifestyle paper ran an article

(with photo) detailing our delicious detention. We had a new and marketable image: we were outlaws, rebels, the incarnation of the pose.

But unfortunately for our own myth, we were arrested by mistake. The authorities were hardly interested in persecuting The Baffler: they simply thought we were agitators posting antiColumbus Day flyers along the next day's parade route. Men as hardened as the Chicago Police know that literature is harmless, that clean-cut white boys

(inessentially) arbitrary nature of your pimply white ass, I will FORCE (since this is a power relation we've got going here, you and I, you gotta have FORCE) a re-reading. To wit: the PO LITI CAL act of del sig(n)ation committed 3 paragraphs ago (reading time as space, as we have been forced to do since the 19th century), worked to problematize, act excessively and unnecessarily upon, in short, to inflame the fabric of the text around the hyphm which (apparendy) bonded your roomate's "penis" to the participle ("possessing," as if you didn't know) by which • he claimed it. To (falsely) follow the

like us are almost never a threat to property or the stability of the state.

Nonetheless our flyers, which read "SUB VER SIVE" and "IRRI TAT ING" in 200point type, were enough to convince them that we were out to disrupt the next day's civic festivities. As several of the officers told us (and subsequently denied) while we were being booked, they had special orders that evening to prevent a radical group from "tagging" the loop area. That we were in fact postering for so innocuous an event as a

Great White Hunter Freud into the veldt of hair (a treacherous act of deFreuding), the female vagina may be equated with the nostril: moving from body to language, and taking the body with us, "That which is not pleasant of [your] vulva" (K 7924 obverse ii line 6), the heavy, stinky weight of the fleshy folds themselves is imposed on the supposedly abstract issue of the tongue; a (deliberately) crude phonetic analysis of the sound of "hyphen" renders the "ph" as an IfI , a labial a sound articulated at the lips or labia, and allows us to equate it with the nasal sound Im/; we pronounce it: "hy-

men."

I. ::·:··'IIIIIIIW,\I[I[I[IIf. . .a~.llIIl_

I I

I m._1 Baffler • 17

poetry reading was cause for great amusement among our captors, once they had figured out who we actually were.

They became quite pleasant and several of them even took copies of our "YOUR LIFESTYLE SUCKS" flyer to post in their offices. For all our calculated abrasiveness, the cops weren't offended or uptight or abusive or stodgy.

They just matter-offactly locked us in a very small barred room and forgot about us for twelve hours.

It's difficult for us to wax ironic

or clever or outraged about all this, since the whole scenario was obvious to us as soon as the plainclothes lawmen pulled up and, spouting outraged pieties about private property, began going uninvited through our pockets. As one friend later commented, "tangible suppression" of this kind is something "most people just dream about." With the handcuffs carne visions of TV appearances and favorable reviews. The oppressiveness of our tiny cell (#6 on the 11th floor of the

By such an anal/ytic thrust, we have pierced the sexual/textual surface; stressing it so hard with the overreading performed above, we have brutally brokm said hymen. Taking the maidenhead of the word, we find it now split, "penis" separated from "possessing," aching with (semantic) loss but (so the story goes) ready for more analysis. But no more is necessary. For the defloration was a castration; the verbal adjective by which your roomate held the rod of phallic might has been severed from the "thing" itself. In fact, the predication of this discussion, the red stain, can now be seen as expressing not some

18 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Municipal lockup at 11th and State, in case you ever wind up there) was relieved by the certainty of our impending fame.

We emerged chastened and ready to assume our new role as photogenic Victims of State Persecution.

Who Reads The Baffler?

Of course we can't be sure, but when, shortly after we purchased an ad in that esteemed publication, Spy magazine ran an article called "Everyone's a Rebel" accompanied by a cover illustration that mirrored ours, we knew that

manual error involving spilled wine, but the lost virtue of your roommate's lesbian phallus. Provoking the livid issue of my analysis, your text has shown itself a "scheming, hustling two-time virgin" indeed. Minx. Rather than now asking "is heterosexuality even possibld" you should recall traditional Northern Greek practice: hang your stained cloth, like the bloody sheet of the first wedding night, out the window. Looking out, we will all see that now, doubly inscribed by the mother tongue, the regendered penis has detonated inside out, consummating itself.

Tasty!

our "American Nonconformist" article (Baffler #3) had had some effects on the upper echelons of the postmodern high command. Whether Spy just outright stole the idea or independently came up with an article based on the very same themes we described in our ad will remain forever a mystery. One thing is certain, however: this idea is gaining everwider circulation, will soon be commonplace, and The Baffler will never receive any credit for having first proposed it.

We were convinced

even more of the article's influence by the ever-increasing deluge of ads utilizing the Frank principles. Here's a typical one, which promotes "Fila" brand athletic shoes in certain collegeaudience pUblications: in the upper left corner is a black and white snapshot (complete with old-fashioned white borders and other signifiers of age) of three basketball players, two of whom are glaringly white, from some benighted period in the distant, pre-MTV past. They are all three wear-

Dear Theophile: My boyfriend recently lost his job. He spends most of his time watching MTV, which is o.k., I suppose, inasmuch as MTV resists idealogical closure. However, when he watches "Coors Silver Bullet" commercials, he has a tendency to act out what is known as "air-guitar." Air guitar bothers me, as it does my womyn friends. But, I've noticed that his left hand usually mimes chord progressions which subvert melodic authority by challenging oppressive toncl hierarchies, leading me to believe that it is an ironic eblematization of the Lacanian triad of having. being and seeming. Nevertheless, I fear he is par~:~. ¡. . . ~u~ If :W:

ing crew-cuts, clunky black-framed glasses and standard basketball-team outfits, sitting passively on a bench with their arms folded, the ball resting flatly on the floor before them.

Consumers! the ad screams, Here is the Enemy, bereft of brand names or hip signifiers of any kind, the all-tooeasy target of our unending disdain.

And, sure enough, right next to them on the page is the single word sentence of damnation to which we condemn all things so vaguely

ticipating in ritualized phallic violence. Please advise.

Whil~ Thlophik has nro~r shrunk .from ~ounding on subj~cts with which h~ is notfamiliar, it is at all romts uukss to ask a Frmchman about rock and roiL Aft~r al4 pr~tmus hav~ th~ir limits.-

~ds.

I

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 19

but convincingly 'old': "CONFORMIST." Ugh! But immediately below lies our salvation. A large color picture of a young man of color, "RADICAL" (as his caption reads) in every way: he wears dreadlocks, an earring, and a most unconventional basketball suit; he spreads his legs wide and screams with consumer abandon as he stuffs the ball into the hoop; and of course all his clothing is marked prominently with brand names. He is different!

He is new! And as the copy tells us, he is a rebel ,"improving"

20 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

his "attack" and "resisting" the pressure to "be one of the crowd." Yow! Whoever does Fila's advertising certainly learned the lessons of Baffler #3. If you haven't already, if you're still fancying yourself a radical nonconformist because of your Al ice in Chains records, your books

by Lyotard, or some stuff you bought at Benetton or the Gap, make a REAL rebel purchase by sending us $5 and getting yourself a truly hip signifier. It comes in bright pink with blue letters, can be displayed easily from coat pockets,

and packs a hundredpage pseudo-intellectual wallop that is sure to impress your friends.

To our regular readers we say: find this ad. Tear it out.

Frame it or preserve it in a scrapbook.

The Baffler guarantees it will be cause for much amusement not too many years hence, 1 ike Partridge Fami ly lunchboxes are now and like the mid-80s Busch Beer fratboy wi th Ray-Bans, "duster," bandanna, and "Busch"-ernbossed electric guitar will be by next fall. And wha tever you do, don't shoes.

buy

these

- Torn Frank

one of the

"Ten Best Magazines of 1990" was how Library Journaljudged The Baffler back in 1991. Studs Terkd called the subsequent issue an organ of "healthy irreverence," and Spy referred to it as "veryclever-perhaps too clever." Of course the Chicago Police don't like it, and neither do the angst-affecting, Gap-wearing patrons of the Art Lifestyle. But for trenchant cultural criticism and darn good contemporary literature, you can't do much better than The Baffler.

Copies of BajJler #3, which carried the "American Nonconformist" article later reprinted (in shortened form) by Utne Reaaer, the first installment of the Gedney Market saga, Rick Perlstein's engaging cri""""Jo:::r: __ " tique of Scooby Dooby Doo, a whole raft of material from Dave Berman, and the intertextual cartoon in to.!:::: ,.:; â&#x20AC;˘ ----which Jonny Quest met ZZ Top, can be had for a s.-....... SIa" mere $5 (it's 108 pages). This was the number from which the words "commercialization of dissent" be- .... -... _ _ ... -=-... gan their ascent to the status of household slogan.

A number of copies of Bafller #2, featuring the fiction of Frederic Wakeman (The Hucksters), poetry by John Huss, and the original Bafller attack on suburbia, are also gettable for $4. Copies of#l, which we printed in 1988, are now unavailable.

Llt'SaDl'I~~~t

Don't miss any more Installments of liThe Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge!"

Subscriptions for two issues are $8 for individuals and $10 for institutions.

Send all your money and praise to The Baffler P. O. Box 378293 Chicago, 1160637 And if you honestly enjoy our magazine, do us and everyone who reads a big favor by asking your local library to subscribe.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 21

22 • Baffler

Uncoupling Mat Lebowitz "Evan is having an affair."

This is the first of two surprises I've brought to my girlfriend's college from New York. The second is small and circular with a gem the size of my pinkie-nail. I was planning to wait with both until their respectively appropriate m')ments. But Sarah has been distant and frosty since I arrived an hour ago, so I produce this, the first, as an ice-pick.

Her reaction lacks the animation I had anticipated. Sarah doesn't know Evan like I do, and perhaps she predicted it, but he's still her sister's husband. I expected concern over his disloyalty. She seems more curious about the candles reflected between herself and the night than in my news. She barely blinks acknowledgment. The window is propped and cool fall air sifts through, fluttering the little flames. Outside, the rumble and crash of the trains has begun. Last weekend, it framed our lovemaking until dawn. This weekend, she has yet to let me kiss her.

I slide beside her, and wrap my arms around her shoulders and attempt to pull her against me but she's all angles and tension. She ducks and I'm left holding air. It's no use asking. This is one lesson I've learned in the three-weeks since we met. When the time is right, she'll reveal her distress. Not before.

"It doesn't surprise me," she says.

It surprised me. It surprised me that he was even home. I had my key in the door of his apartment before the laughter froze my motion. Unmistakably female. Not mistakable as Megan. Then his own laughter in response. The solid 'Hu Hu Hu' reminiscent of a Paul Bunyon sized Santa Claus. I held my breath removing the key from the tumblers. I virtually tiptoed my retreat.

It wasn't until I hit Fifth Avenue that I began to question my impulsiveness. The laugh was undeniably female. But Evan has female friends. Even if he's slept with most of them, it's no reason to suspect adultery now. But there was something beyond the door that flashed red-alert. Something in the laugh. A suggestion of ultimate betrayal.

I let my feet walk south to thirty-seventh street, and then west toward Herald Square. Perhaps I mindlessly retraced my steps for I found myself passing the jewelry store I had visited not two hours before. This reminder of pending commitment restored confidence to my movement. I can always count on Herald Square to do this one way or another. I find solace in the commercial heartbeat of neon lights and ur-

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 23

gency. I feel my own ambiguous yearning lost in the mass craving. It is here, where desire embraces reality, that I find my identity.

As my comfort factor rose, so too did the dubious nature of my recent discovery.

False accusations can ruin a marriage. I passed the Tower Records Midtown store and snapped my neck in double-take. The television in the window display was flashing MTV images of the very campaign which Evan had been shooting in Boston and Chicago over the past three weeks. The screen was ftIled with Megan's smile, straight and white, the beauty mole on her upper lip, some jerky camera motion revealing a hint of shining eye, grainy and frozen ... staccato snap-shots of Megan's smile... and then a longer shot of her in a phone booth with one hand over her eyes ... arched against the door of the booth, her other hand touching the receiver like she just hung up or else has yet to call ... and the last shot, again, close and grainy: her fingers brush her hair from her eyes, her eyes shine, wet with tears because she's not smiling at all... she's crying. The screen displayed the name of the cologne, and, beneath, in smaller letters: BECAUSE SHE'LL ONLY WANT YOU MORE. The copy is mine. My small yet vital contribution to the campaign.

I took a breath and blinked and became aware again of the rest of the display: the long-hair posters, CDs and tapes, concert promos, the mass of people pushing past, searching for a perfect product.

Usually Evan's work leaves me feeling frail and small and mostly worthless, but at that moment I felt only elation. During the sequence, confusion had cleared. I knew how to resolve my uncertainty. I found a phone. I dialed Evan's apartment. It rang three times before he answered. I tried to decide whether this was an unwarranted amount.

"Hello?" said Evan.

"You're back." I said.

There was a pause while he processed my assertion. I tried to discern the nature of his silence.

"Who is this?" he said.

"Welcome home."

"Waldo?"

"I just saw your Tout Les Soir piece," I said. "Fabulous. Powerful. Made me think of you. Made me think of watering your plants which might, incidentally, be thirsty."

"Just watered them, Waldo. Appreciate your concern."

"Should I come over?"

"Well... " "I'm in the neighborhood. Not five minutes away."

"Not so good, Waldo. Just back for the night. Early plane and all. Must get the power sleep, you know."

Then his laugh. Low and throaty. I gritted my teeth and scanned the shops across Seventh for a rejuvenating campaign. A bright Banana Republic shop mooned its perfect manicure like a beacon of success.

24 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

"If you're heading out again tomorrow, Evan, all the more reason for me to visit for a half-hour or so. Just to see the uh ... battle scars. Just to gain strength from your great red beard."

"Can't do it, Waldo. Sorry."

"Is someone there? Are you busy?"

"No. Just tired. An arduous week. Tired, Waldo. Talk to you soon."

Then he hung up. And I hung up. I braced one arm against the glass and took deep breaths of the neon mist that dulled the higher bars oflight. Traffic was clogged and backed to the park. I watched the million-legged consuming machine begin to close its shutters for the night.

"It's like someone's lifting them into the air and then dropping them onto the tracks," says Sarah. She's referring to the crash of the trains behind her apartment.

"All night, every night. I'm going to complain."

"You could move back on campus."

She doesn't bother to answer that, just rolls her eyes and heaves an exaggerated sigh. She's leaning against the headboard of her bed. Even in the wavering candlelight, her beauty makes me shiver. Straight from a billboard, her features could sell cars or clothing or cosmetics. Pure American. California without the sun damaged skin. Oklahoma. Whoever could have predicted? Her bangs shift when she moves.

The tilt of her face suggests an inner logic. Her cheekbones narrow to the cut of her chin, to the slight sweep of her throat. Back up past parted lips, a slice of nose, to her eyes: large and dark and shiny, now, reflecting the candles. In daylight they vary from hazel to aqua. Her eyes are chameleons, shifting hue to complement their environment. My hand lifts toward her face like metal to a magnet. She turns her chin away.

"Are you worried about your sister?" I say.

"Did you find out more, Wally? Anything for sure?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"Not to accuse my sister's husband."

"He lied, Sarah. Someone was there. " "It doesn't mean he's having an affair."

The bed rocks as Sarah swings her legs to the floor. She stands and stretches, and then bends and kisses me on the lips. She holds my face between her hands. "Don't concern yourself, Wally. It's not worth it one way or the other."

"What... " I say. My throat is thick with confusion. I say, "He's like a father to me.

He's your brother-in-law." And then I almost say, 'Your future uncle-in-law' but I stop myself. There's plenty of time for that surprise.

She kisses me again and then pulls away and shakes her head. "No," she says. "It's a dangerous thing to say. " Evan is my dead father's brother: my uncle. Our relationship, however, transcends biology. After my father died, Evan took it upon himself to aid my mother in

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 25

any way he could. He helped finance my college education. When I graduated, four months ago, he arranged the interview with Angus Pierce of Pierce and Shully Inc. which secured my position. Part of this extended concern may have been fueled or even motivated by guilt since Evan was in the boat when my father drowned, but this speculation is superfluous. Evan introduced me to the two most valued elements of my life: the world of advertising, and the world of Sarah King. For this I am forever indebted.

Three months ago, Evan called an informal meeting and announced his engagement to a woman named Megan King. She was a model and actress, he said, and of course no one had heard of her because she went by the name Megan Precious, and of course no one had heard of her because her career had just begun. She had moved to Manhattan from Oklahoma.

Barry Lubin, Director of European Layout, spluttered surprise, "An Okie? For real? How old is she, Evan? I mean, is she legal?"

"Of course she's legal," answered Evan. "Or... ," and he winked this addition, " ...she will be by church time."

And something about his tone, the slight nod of his head, the thin smirk which suggested an inside joke, kept us from enjoying what should, by all rights, have been a period of extreme hilarity. For the concept seemed preposterous given his history of proud philandering. Mter Evan left the room, Barry forced a chuckle and said, "Look at you all. It's like you believe him." And when no one responded, he laughed louder and said, "Come on. Snap out of it. Evan is not getting married."

But I wasn't sure. I had witnessed the change in Evan. I knew him in a separate way from the others in the agency. At lunch the day before, he had sat mute and staring. He seemed thinner and pale. Our conversation wandered and lurched, and at one point he slapped himself on the cheek, and said, "Ridiculous! Ridiculous," and shook his thick red hair and laughed, and when I asked him why, he smiled through me and said, "Your uncle is losing his mind."

So I was partially prepared. But my jaw still dropped its distance three days later when, at the Halloween masquerade, Evan arrived with a woman of such divine beauty that not even Barry could draw the breath to query or jest or sneer, or do much of anything except stare ... and maybe drool. Wrapped in black with bare shoulders and blond hair spun around and lifted like a golden rose. Even before we noticed the seven carat star on her finger, it was obvious she belonged to Evan. Or vice-versa. For he wavered in her presence. And it wasn't just because she rivaled his height - victorious given the heels and the hair. She was the type of woman that required complete attention. And not only attention, but commitment of thought. And beyond thought, requiring even the world of tangible substance to validate her existence. An anomaly of nature, she only had to breathe and everything else fell into smooth orbit around her.

Evan orbited smoothly for the rest of the night, with a small, guilty smile pinned to his chin. His smile said something about risks and rewards. Like a child caught

26 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

with the cookie already safe behind his lips. They were married two weeks later.

It was the perfect New York match ... the perfect complement... the perfect couple.

Megan: smooth and blond and delicate, fluid beside Evan's solidity. Both of them tall and striking and powerful. Their occupations could not have been better suited. Evan cast Megan in a series of cosmetic spots that earned her immediate recognition in both the commercial and the cinematographic world. In that same month, she was commissioned to do multi-page layouts for Snlmtun and Cosmopolitan. She appeared on Donahue with a panel of emerging New York models and actors, and surprised evetyone with a rare balance of confidence and deference. There was talk of a series ... then a fUm. Evan began negotiating with agents, and they in turn began negotiating with Hollywood. People whispered "star." It seemed the logical extension of the traditional Manhattan fairy-tale. Evan spent less time in the office, and although he maintained a dogged silence about his other affairs, the consensus was that he and Megan were on the edge of something vast. When pushed, he would smile at his inside joke and refer enigmatically to this or that meeting with this or that producer.

So it came as an incongruous jolt when, a month later, walking back to the offices from Evan's favorite deli/bar, he spoke of the relationship in ordinary human terms.

And not such positive human terms either. "It's tiring," he said, and this was all. But it made me glance at him because I could tell he hadn't meant to say it. His tone was flat, unfocused: an unintentional expression of emotion. I camouflaged my initial surprise with a cough. Evan believes that curiosity indicates weakness, or worse, perversion. When I looked again, he was watching me, so I leaned further away from him, craning to read the headlines as we passed a newsstand. But he had seen, and he knew I had heard, and he watched me as though he had caught me spying.

"Tiring?" I kept my voice distant, my eyes on the vender.

His pause was tense, prolonged, a reference to danger, a silent warning. Then he laughed, and I breathed a nervous laugh myself because I knew he had decided to cover it. His laugh was boisterous and loudly confidential. "Damn tiring" he said.

"God-damned tiring woman! Wears me down ... " and this with a nudge and a wink, "...Just about wears me down to the nub."

I laughed with him. I nodded my head and nudged accordance. I said, "She's remarkable, Evan."

He said, "Aren't many like her. That's the fact of the fact."

"None," I said. It seemed self-evident. I had yet to speak to Megan Precious, but I had certainly watched her, and the more I saw, the more I heard, increased my conviction that she was unique.

So when Evan said, "Aren't many like her," my response lacked pause or pretense, and this was, perhaps, predictable, because his response to my response seemed unsettlingly prepared.

"Her sister is coming to town."

I couldn't help but glance at him again. I hadn't known she had a sister, or any

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 27

relatives at all. No one had come to her wedding. Evan never mentioned in-laws.

He said, "Her sister is visiting from college, Waldo. I want you to entertain her."

"Is she as pretty as Megan?"

Evan nodded slowly, watching me, and then leaned forward in sudden disclosure of relevant secrets. "It's her twin," he said. "They look exactly alike."

And so they did. The four of us went to dinner, the first night Sarah arrived, and I spent much of the time glancing from her to Megan. Sarah had shorter hair and no mole, but an otherwise indistinguishable facial structure. Indistinguishable bodies.

Seeing them side by side was disorienting... a fantastic hallucination.

"Have you decided who is who, Waldorf?" These were the first words Sarah sent in my direction.

I nodded my head. I said, "I'm Waldo." Then I said, "You're Sarah."

This made t\:tem all laugh, because although I meant only to correct my name, it sounded like I was differentiating her from myself. Evan pulled his beard, and laughed until his eyes watered, and I felt my face heating because 1 couldn't shift from Sarah's eyes, laughing and shining through the candles of the table.

The second thing Sarah said to me, just to me, was, "They're perfect for each other."

This was later, still that first night, after dinner, when we were walking toward Springfield's for cappuccino. Evan had pulled Megan back to expound upon a weakness in a window display and Sarah had kept walking so I kept walking beside her. It was a clear night and I was trying to decide if I should offer her my blazer in an attempt at old-world chivalry, or maintain a cool New York detachment. I unbuttoned it, then rebuttoned it. The fact was, I might get cold. I peeked at this apparition beside me, and felt the wave of disbelief at my own good fortune. Evan and Megan were leaving the next morning for Los Angeles. It was my job to entertain Sarah for the weekend.

I said, "Yes they are. It's such a magical union."

"I didn't mean like that." She smiled when she said this, her eyes crinkling and her teeth shining in the streetlights.

"How did you mean?" I glanced behind us. Evan trailed by a hundred yards, his heavy frame dark and blocky beside Megan. fu I watched, she squealed and hit his shoulder and he ducked and sidestepped.

"I mean that he'll cheat on her. He's that type."

"Right," I said. "He's very faithful. Very sincere."

"No. He will cheat on her, Wally. It's just a matter of time."

My focus snapped to her face and she watched me solemnly before starting to laugh. Then I laughed also. I couldn't help it. It was during that initial moment of confusion, before I laughed, that I committed myself to her smile and wherever it would take me. And then I wasn't confused anymore because I was laughing, and I didn't think much of anything except how wonderful it felt, and I knew then that the

28 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

water around me was warm, even if it was unpredictably deep.

The next day Sarah continued to talk about Evan and Megan. "She deserves it," Sarah said. "She cheats on everyone herself. All her boyfriends. Even me once."

"She cheated on you?"

"Well not on me, exactly. He cheated on me. With her. A boyfriend I had. Can you believe it?"

This was in Central Park, the next day, Saturday, in the cool grass of an annex of Sheep's Meadow. Sarah lay on the Burberry blanket, her forearm resting over her eyes, her other arm stretched out with her fingers brushing the wrapper of the Ghiridelli's chocolate squares. Her champagne glass wavered, balanced on her stomach. Her stomach showed, bare, where the champagne glass touched between the hem of her blouse and the waist of her pants.

I sipped from my own glass of champagne. Chandon, White Star. Forty-five dollars for the bottle. In the store I had bypassed the Dom in a fit of frugality. It was a decision which haunted me during the rest of our shopping. I kept the bottle wrapped, wondering if she had noticed.

Before parting, the night before, Evan had drawn me aside. He had wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me dose. "Can you handle her?" he asked.

I looked up into that red beard of competence and power and I said, "Of course, Evan."

He said, "Listen, Waldo. Buy her things. She's young and beautiful. She wants to be pampered." And then he nodded and I nodded with him, repeating this wisdom in my mind.

So I berated myself for my inexcusable lapse with the wine, and tried to compensate with the rest of the picnic. I bought smoked salmon, curried chicken salad, twicedeviled eggs, rolls, and French bread from Zabars. The strawberries and grapes we purchased from the street vendor on Eighty Sixth street. I bought an extra six-pack of San Pellegrino for washing. I had rented a Central Park carriage to transport it all, and instructed him to wait while we ate. Most of the food remained uneaten. We nibbled the chocolate and drank the Champagne. We were far too intent on each other's eyes to take notice of silly things like hunger.

I won't condemn our romance to a love-montage. Suffice to say that we ate dinner at Windows on the World. We watched Miss Saigon from seventh row center.

Mterwards, I took her to Nightingales for FraAngelica and jazz. Suffice to say that we slept together, that night, in Evan's apartment. It was my first time sleeping with a woman. We didn't have intercourse. My body won't let me until I am married. This used to bother me: my body's reluctance to explore, but with Sarah it wasn't an issue.

We both knew the time would come. I had been waiting for the perfect woman. Now Evan had given her to me.

Suffice it to say that after brunch the next morning, at Grand Central Station, waiting for the board to display her gate, I told her that I loved her. I said that it was love at first thought, that I had known it before I had ever seen her.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 29

She looked at me and her eyes were wide and sad. I said, "Shhh. Don't say anything. I know. I know."

And I did know. Her eyes told all about the difficulty of believing. About years of empty promises and broken dreams and outright lies. I pulled her to me, there in the frenzy of Grand Central with the frantic scurry of necessity spinning around us, and I stood on my tiptoes to press my cheek to hers. I held her tight, and whispered, "Shhh. I know. I know."

The following weekend, I visited her school. Suffice to say that the reunion was as spectacular as our introduction, with only the background shifted from New York to Boston. It was as though, when I saw her again, no time had passed. Everything in between became dreamlike and insignificant. It was during that weekend .. .last weekend ... that I realized, consciously, where our lives were heading.

I bought the ring on Wednesday. I heard somewhere that an engagement ring should cost a full month's salary. Consequently, I spent three. I found as close to a duplicate of Megan's ring that I could. It rests now, safe in the pocket of my blazer.

Tomorrow night I will propose.

"Why won't you drop it?" says Sarah in the morning. She's standing in front of her dresser mirror, preparing herself to face the day, and even though the question doesn't relate to anything immediate, the reference is obvious. It's as though we have been debating the subject throughout the night, in our dreams, utilizing some secret, nonverbal mode of discourse. This happens often with Sarah and me. This is one of the reasons I know we are meant to share our lives.

"I have to know for sure," I say. "He has to tell me."

"Why do you have to know?"

I don't bother to answer. She's still upset and contentious. Neither of us slept well, which didn't surprise me. Even if Sarah had predicted infidelity, a discovery like mine can disrupt a lot of cemented beliefs about the nature of close kin.

Sarah's housemate pokes her head into Sarah's room and asks if she can ride with us to the dining hall. The housemate has a moon face, freckles, and black stringy hair that has obviously never seen a salon.

"I imagine she has a good personality," I say when the house mate closes the door.

Sarah shrugs. She's applying finishing touches to the masterpiece of her visage. I slide behind her and rise on my toes to nuzzle her ear. Her face glows next to my own.

And mine glows next to hers. I'm not especially handsome. But with Sarah I become part of a larger whole. A complete product of absolute purity and precise perfection.

Without her, I am, again, Waldo Kimbal: struggling assistant account executive.

With her, I am more. Waldo Kimbal and Sarah King. I have considered adopting her last name after our union. Waldo King. A king with his queen.

Sarah's house mate cracks the door again and pokes her lumpy proboscis through my reverie. "Almost ready?" she asks.

"Almost." Sarah doesn't flinch, leaning toward the mirror with her mouth wide

30 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

and the red Alexandra De Markou pressed against her lip. The housemate watches, expressionless. Her eyes flicker to mine and her nose wrinkles.

I say, "She said we're almost ready."

The housemate purses her own pale lips, blinks, removes herself from the doorway. Sarah caps the lipstick, stands examining the result in the mirror. I lean very close, on my tip-toes to press my mouth to her ear. I say, "Do we have to go with your housemate? Do we have to eat on campus? Why don't we go to a nice restaurant here in town?"

She doesn't answer but her eyes switch to mine in the mirror. Her attention quickens my breath. With Sarah, I don't feel physical arousal, although I'm sure that will change with marriage. My excitement is deeper and cerebral. I press my body against her back: the slightest suggestion of alternative venues. "We could just stay here."

She remains motionless. The humming in my head rises a notch, accompanied by euphoric dizziness. I tighten my arms, drawing her against me. Then she smiles.

"Wally," she says. "Come on. I want you to see our dining hall."

The dining hall is no Les Mussier. A factory sized, second-floor space with ranks of fold-out tables and an institutional odor weaving through the industrial-strength racket of 250 freshman scraping chairs and stacking trays. The furthest wall boasts windows which afford a panoramic view of uniform grayness. It is beside this outlook that we find seats. Sarah and I sit on one side, the housemate squeezes her bulk into the corresponding slot across the table.

Outside, gray trees wave the last shriveled leaves of fall toward a field of frozen grass. Further, beyond the field, more buildings rise, stamped from the same indistinct material as the one in which we eat. A group of football players jog in line toward the field. I can see the field, if I lean close to the glass. I hear, dimly, the chanting of the team, in unison: the coughed counting of regimented steps. College. Evan would see it as a bright reservoir of blossoming consumers. Five thousand from this school alone, heading into the jobs that provide the funds to buy the items which produce true happiness. Five thousand processing machines. The possibilities would make Evan smile. I try to smile.

Sarah makes me smile. Nodding an admirable attempt at attentiveness, she keeps her chin up, her shoulders back, as the housemate prattles her monotonous litany.

Sarah lifts her fork, slides the leaves oflettuce between her lips. She chews. My chest aches, watching her chew. Effortlessly, thoughtlessly, she chews with grace and poise.

She swallows. My eyes begin to water with love. Such perfection.

"Another thing," I say.

The housemate pauses, her cheeks bulging, a forkful poised to fill gaps as they form. Sarah looks at me.

"Another thing I realized while watching Evan's new piece with Megan."

continued on page 104

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 31

PRAISE FOR THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

BY NORMAN MACLEAN

YOUNG

MEN

"He does what great artists have always done.... remains true to the power of his own language and his own heart."

-James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review, front page

AND

A treasure-part detective story, part Western, part tragedy, part elegy, and a wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ronks ... in a search for truth and the rest it brings. It-Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune, front page

Oath 519.95

"You've got to read this book.... [Young Men ancl fire] is a big book, not so much in length os in subject matter and approach, and I find it heartening that there are still American writers capable of essaying bigness and bringing it off. It-Dennis DrabeDe, Washington Post Book WorM

---- -----------

FIRE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

32 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

U

Picasso 25: Chicago 'and the Civilization of Deviance Rick Perlstein 1963: Before Picasso In 1963, Chicago architect William Hartman was assigned the task of procuring an appropriate sculpture for the plaza in front of the newly-built civic center his firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, had designed. The center was Mayor Richard J. Daley's showpiece: a monolithic thirty story black steel tower built in the au courant International Style for a city anxious to display to the world its au courant international style.

So Hartman journeyed into the European heart of darkness to approach the only artist grand enough to put the capstone on this monument to civic hip-- none other than the formidable Pablo Picasso. Hartmann didn't fear, for he came bearing gifts, several sacred objects from his native land: a Sioux Indian war bonnet, a White Sox hat and blazer, a Bears' helmet, a Chicago Fire Department helmet-and, the object the natives of Chicago revered most of all, a check for $100,000.

Picasso graciously accepted everything but the check which was, after all, chump change for the master. He would design the sculpture, free from the sullying taint of the filthy American lucre, which might have bound him to create something his middlebrow benefactors might find intelligible; say, a statue of a civil war general on a horse. His work was to be proffered to the city of Chicago as a gift from the Europe of haute-couture to civilize the Hog Butcher to the World.

Picasso set to work, and two years later, he had produced a scale model of the work, over which the following benediction was inscribed: The monumental sculpture portrayed by the maquette pictured above has been expressly created by me, Pablo Picasso, for installation on the Plaza of the Civic Center in the city of Chicago, state of Illinois, United States of America.

This sculpture was undertaken by me for the public building commission of Chicago at the request of William E. Hartmann, acting on behalf of the Chicago public building commission, and I give the maquette to the Art Institute of Chicago, desiring that these gifts shall, through them, belong to the people of Chicago.

The wording here is significant; his was to be a monumental sculpture, whose construction would symbolically bind the people of Chicago under the authority of the civic fathers of Chicago, through the talismanic power of the great artiste, "me, Pablo Picasso." Its import was not merely artistic, but political-a monument to

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 33

imposed civic order itself, disciplined under the sign of Culture.

1967: Unveiling the Picasso Picasso never in his life set foot in Chicago. His design was realized, all fifty-feet and 162-tons of it, at the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel of Gary, Indiana. It could withstand, the engineers there promised, winds of up to 185-miles-per-hourand even the torrential hot-air gusts of the politicians who would hold forth under it at civic functions in the ensuing years. The statue was transported in pieces and assembled at the site in the summer of 1967, its construction bankrolled by $300,000 in donations from latter-day descendents of the tycoons who built Upton Sinclair's jungle and then assuaged their guilt by building William Rainey Harper's University of Chicago.

The unveiling, on August 15, was an historic event. It represented Picasso's first and only foray into public art, and the debut of the very first piece of abstract public sculpture in America. With this cultural two-bagger, the City with the Perennial Inferiority Complex announced to the world of the limp-wristed cappuccino drinkers that they couldn't push Chicago around anymore!

The significance of this was not lost on Chicago's boosterist press. One commentator proudly proclaimed that the unveiling ceremony would divide Chicago history into two periods, "BP and AP"-Before Picasso and After Picasso. The Chicago Daily News breathlessly described the unveiling: It was, probably, the greatest day in the cultural history of Chicago. The thousands who jammed Civic Center Plaza to witness it, left with impressions that, years later, they will doubtless will recall for their grandchildren. There was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Oed by Seiji Ozawa), playing at an outdoor public ceremony for the first time in its history. There was Gwendolyn Brooks, Chicago's Pulitzer Prize poet voicing a poem she wrote specially for the occasion. And, most imponant of all was the piece de resistance-the fivestory abstract sculpture of a woman's head by the famed Spanish anist Pablo Picasso that seems destined to become the symbol by which Chicago will be known the world around.

Once again, the language here is significant. Chicago's greatest cultural achievement, "the symbol by which Chicago will be known the world around" is revealed as borrowed goods, prostituted from a "famed Spanish artist," and sanctified by a Japanese conductor. Its power actually issues from its very distance from any quality that could properly be called Chicagoan.

And, significantly, its power issues from its baffiing unfathomability to the honest plain folks who inhabit the city. Lift magazine reported that in the midst of the fifty thousand celebrants, "pickets demonstrated the whole project on the grounds of incomprehensibility." Here high art serves a novel political function: rather than merely providing material for the self congratulation of the idle-rich for their patronage of

34 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

the "radical" and "subversive," it holds an entire city in the thrall of radical chic. "It is a head-but whose head no one knows, " Lift-continued. "Some see a horse's head, others the head of Picasso's Mghan hound. In the minds of the project's sponsors it is the head of a woman." Brooks' unveiling poem registers the significance of this very confusion, however, for the cultural work of the statue: Does man love an? Man visits An, but squirms.

An hurts. An urges voyagesand it is easier to stay at home, the nice beer ready.

In the commonrooms we belch, or sniff, or scratch.

AIe raw.

But we must cook ourselves and style ourselves for An, who is a requiring counesan.

We squirm.

We do not hug the Mona Lisa.

We may touch or tolerate an astounding fountain, or a horse-and-rider.

At most, another Lion.

Observe the tall cold of a Flower which is as innocent and as guilty, as meaningful and as meaningless as any other flower in the western field.

In other words, the statue's very condition of possibility as a civic monument seems precisely its irrelevance to real lives of people living within the arbitrary geographic boundaries signifying "Chicago." If you don't like it, there's something downright unpatriotic about you; don't you want Chicago to be a "world-class" city?

Civic Center Plaza (later renamed Daley Plaza) soon became the epicenter for a neverending pageant of rituals held "under the Picasso"-public performances, government ceremonies, civic celebrations-where people living in Chicago are "cooked and styled" as Chicagoans, far removed from the" common rooms" where they would ordinarily belch, sniff and scratch. As a locus of civic pride, the "deviance" of the sculpture fashions Chicago into a marketable commodity, rendering invisible the struggle and toil of diverse peoples that constitute the actual materiality of any city and replacing it with a purchased, sanitized civic semiotic. An inscrutable product of decades of antibourgeois sentiment, the Picasso sculpture does not here merely epate Ie bourgeois, but rather it creates him; it is a monument in the service of the com-

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 35

plexes of civic pride which under gird the construction of civil subjects as such. You can't fight city hall; it's too damned hip.

1992: Veiling the Picasso Since the Enlightenment, European culture-in its poetics and its politics, in its utopic dreams and its distopic nightmares, has rested on the premise of the ultimate availability of an objective perspective, an archimedean point of view, a universal subject of history. Irreducible aesthetic laws, the ultimate meaning or meaninglessness of existence, the revolutionary end of history or the evolutionary perfection of human freedom, all were thought to open themselves up to the possibility of human knowledge, refinement, and ultimate resolution. Man thought he could see clearly.

Picasso's life project of rigorously interrogating the "essence" of the subjects he represented was part and parcel of this complex of notions.

This is the thought that sprung to mind one day when, walking around downtown, I saw the Picasso sporting a ten-foot tall birthday cap. I walked on, determined to locate the reason for this rude and unseemly rupture of the modernist project, in the year 25 AP. Had some clever concept artist decided to replace the stately seamlessness of this masterpiece of the high modern with an ironic bit of postmodern pastiche?

No. It was "Picasso 25," the city's 25th birthday celebration for the Picasso sculpture. A colorful banner hung from the civic center facade, proclaiming "Public invited to dance at 25th birthday party," and below that, "Richard M. Daley, Mayor."

Hey! I was ready to boogie ("Can I cut in, Mr. Mayor?" "Why certainly, young man."). But, alas, the dancing was to come later. There first was to be a ceremony featuring the mayor himself, the Spanish Consul, and the now-Illinois Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks. I strolled the grounds, anxious for the festivities to begin.

There are dozens of birthday cakes arrayed along a line of tables. I learn that they have been donated for the occasion by Chicago's most prestigious restaurants and hotels, whose pastry chefs have had a field day recreating the sculpture in cake batter and frosting. On my way to a table where bright blue souvenir T-shirts, balloons, and mugs are being sold, I run into a man who, in an era of modernist certititude, would have been confined to a mental institutions. He wears a clown outfit (which is, coincidentally, the same colors as Picasso's birthday cap) covered by a ratty gray tweed jacket, a tattered bowler hat, and mutters to himself, dancing in a circle. I browse the wares for sale; "Each unique, full-color, hand-painted Picasso 25 silk scarf was created by designer Tolanda Lorente. Dimensions: 40" X 40"" I fill out an entry blank to win a free flight to anwhere in the continental United States.

The crowd hushes as the ceremony begins. The Spanish Consul speaks first. He gives a high-minded speech, droning on about Picasso's philosophical influences and his impact on modern aesthetics, and his "message of freedom and peace against terror and fascism." He speaks with the flair and style of a Ricardo Montalban selling Cadillacs. Then Daley Ie petit speaks. He begins by quoting Dad's remarks from the

36 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

1967 unveiling: "What is strange to us today, will become familiar tomorrow." This is perhaps Richie's way of commenting on the family business, for, as Marx just as for the Daleys, history has repeated itself in Chicago, first as tragedy, and then as farce (exactly one year after the Picasso was unveiled, policeman were clubbing innocents at the '68 Democratic Convention while the whole world watched; this year, the Chicago police are under investigation by Amnesty International for torture). He blathers on: "People continue to debate what the sculpture is and what it represents ...Towering giant of art in this century... He was at the forefront of every major art movement of this century [and we got him-not New YorklJ, and though he never visited this city, he obviously had a place in his heart for this city...same steel that drove the economic engine of this city... union of public and private that made this city great ... " And so on. He speaks with the style and flair of one of those small business owners who does his own commercials, but has trouble reading the cue cards.

Then Gwendolyn Brooks, who delivers another Apologia for Art to compliment her 1967 effort: Set, seasoned, sardonic still, I continue royal among you.

I astonish you still.

You never knew what I am.

That did not matter and does not.

Mostly you almost supposed I almost Belong; that I have a Chicago Beauty, that I have a booming Beauty.

I tell you that although royal I am a mongrel opera strange in the street, I am radical, rhymelessBut warranted!

Surely I shall remain.

Then, as if to assure that things will keep on a campy keel, we are presented with a concert of "Spanish dance," by a couple on parole from the Fred Astaire Dance Studios. Finally, the head of the Mayor's Office for Special Events, our MC, bubbles, "We're all going to sing Happy Birthday and enjoy our cakes." The crowd, mostly a mix of curious yuppies on lunch break and senior citizens who look like they had marked the event on their calendars a month in advance, oblige her. The crowd is then invited, at last, to dance, "to," the MC states, "the greatest music in the world."

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 37

The "Stanley Paul Dance Orchestra", which appears to have an afternoon free between weddings, strikes up an appropriately listless performance of "Chicago, Chicago, that toddlin' town." The man in the clown suit starts dancing first, wearing now a straw hat, an American flag in his hand. and then some of the senior citizens take to the floor. A photographer in a safari jacket and a big-game zoom lens squats histrionically, framing an elderly waltzing couple and the guest of honor in the same shot-"I hope you don't mind it 1 take some pictures ...just don't look at me ... " A fat ward-boss type with hair the same greasy-gray tone as his three-piece suit chomps a thick stogie. Someone hails him heartily, "Hey, Louie!"

And a young man with a goatee scribbles furiously in a notebook, remarking that it is the only the statue's veiled quality-symbolized by the obscuring of the aesthetics of the piece with a ten-foot red, yellow and blue birthday cap-that is this moment's very condition of possibility. Were any of the sculpture's intended symbolic resonances actually obtaining at all, the earth would open up beneath the trailer-hitch housing the Stanley Paul Dance Orchestra, sucking the tuxedo'd musicians and everyone else present into the fiery bowels of the earth itself, and "me, Pablo Picasso" himself would thunder down angrily from the heavens. Or not.

Our faithful scribe composes his own poem, honoring this implosion of avant garde and kitsch, European high-modernism and American low-postmodernism, Pablo Picasso and Richard Daley(s), Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Stanley Paul Dance Orchestra at the "Picasso 25" celebration: It looks mosdy like a vagina, From Behind.

From the front, A phallus, flaccid.

Chicago's taunting androgene, Unaroused, and Unarousing, The steeled might of civic booster ism, Tempered by the blank stares of a baffled public, Avant-Garrulous.

38 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

hyde park

CO-Op 55th Street at Lake Park • 667 - 1444 • Free parking Store hours: ~onday-SaturdaYI 8 am- 10 pm Sunday 8 am-9 pm

Baffler • 39

40 • Baffler

- Barrett Heaton

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 41

Remember, We're in the Duck Lot Sunday after Church the parking lot fills and people drive circles to save those 50 steps to the mall entrance.

When peasants gathered Sundays around Notre Dame it might've been like this - what they found is what we get: Madonnas and images of a heaven where everything's well-lit - and we believe because fIuo.rescent tubes erase our shadows and our doubt.

Nothing's old here, except retirees, and they've got their walking shoes on, tiny weights in their hands. They battle decay in this temple of the shiny.

Some sit around fountains asking each other, "Can you believe this?"

Once in Bozeman's mall I saw a sculpture made of Coke and Diet Coke cans. You would've recognized the Air Force logo, but a nearby sign explained, teenaged kids'd built it in their church's basement because they'd given up drugs and had nothing else to do.

If! squinted, I could just about make out the Christ ready to blast a smuggler's Cessna to bits over the Gulf of Mexico.

I chug the preferred orange froth.

Everything here seems to be a miniskin.

- Barton Longacre

42 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Anatomy Course Consider the margarita glass: among the hundreds of cups it stands like the four-eyed geek you were ten years ago in the headlights of a high school kegger.

It has none of the weight of a beer glass nor its fundamental thick-sided dishonesty.

It has not the whiskey glass' dan-like precision and heft.

With its rim dipped in salt it is the transparent mouth of a bottom-feeding fish in a chemical drainage pond. Yet filled, it takes on the air of a quick, remorseless romance.

There are those who insist this glass belongs south.

Probably not. It's comfortable in my hand right here in Chi-Chi's, surrounded by professional wresding, St. Patrick's Day mobiles that don't move, this inexcusable bar on Monday afternoon, my car dead, the check bad, love four hundred miles east of here.

- Barton Longacre

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 43

44 • Baffler

PLAYING ¡DOWN John Redford 1978 The last burst of photon torpedos almost got him. If the Imperial destroyer had set the spread a little wider, the torpedo in the innermost orbit would have hit for sure. As it was, Jim's left shields had been weakened. Now both of them were in wide orbits around Cygnus Prime, and neither were in a good position to fire. Time to try something dramatic.

With a burst of the forward manuevering jets Jim flipped end-for-end. Now his main drive was pointing forward along his trajectory. With a carefully-timed blast he killed most of his forward velociry. He watched nervously as the little blip on the screen that represented his ship began to fall towards Cygnus. He had changed his orbit from being roughly circular to highly elliptical, with a close approach to Cygnus. Very, very close. It looked like he was falling straight in. Could he have killed too much of his speed? His fuel reserves were low; there wasn't much left for manuevering. He was sweating a little beneath his Federation issue T-shirt. Another slight rotation, another touch on the drive. Cygnus was getting closer and closer.

Meanwhile the enemy was making his own manuevers. He dropped into a lower orbit as well, but it wasn't quite as daring as Jim's. He was circling now, reloading his torpedo tubes and waiting for Jim's outbound pass.

Both knew that such a close approach could cause a radical change in one's velocity vector. Tiny shifts at perihelion could cause wide changes in the out-bound angle.

The ship could be flung out anywhere.

Jim still had plenty of torpedos left. He disdained fanning a group of them out together, preferring the single, clean shot. Just as he was coming up on perihelion, he fired one back at the enemy, who.simultaneously fired three straight at Cygnus, hoping to catch Jim in the tight quarters of his pass around the star. Jim dove inward, making the slightest shifts in position, operating on the instinct and reflex honed by hundreds of such battles. The enemy's torpedos drove in closer and closer. Jim set his shields on maximum, praying that the left one would hold. The first torpedo passed too close to Cygnus and went off prematurely, briefly filling the screen with white.

The second detonated behind him, jolting his ship but not penetrating the rear shield. The blip marking the third torpedo disappeared a moment before his own exploded. The screen again went white, but the shot was wide and the enemy unharmed.

Quickly Jim whipped around Cygnus and came bearing down on the enemy with

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 45

tremendous speed. Within seconds he had loosed a fearsome barrage of torpedoes.

The enemy barely had time to turn around before he was hit again and again. The screen flashed white, then white, then red to indicate a direct hit.

A faint communication came from the drifting hulk of the enemy ship. "Hey, wicked flying! The close pass was really cool."

"Yeah, well, the Force was with me. Hell, it's late. See you later, Imperial scum."

He left behind his X-wing fighter and bicycled home. Mom had dinner waiting, but his calc homework was waiting too. Jim sighed. Maybe if he finished it early, Dad would let him work on his Dungeon layout.

1982 The first three waves of aliens had been beaten back. General Sean breathed a sigh of relief. They had gotten close that time. Before he could settle back from the firing controls, though, the fourth wave started its inexorable assault upon the Earth.

He leapt to the offensive, shuttling his missile batteries back and forth beneath them.

They had to be destroyed at a distance. In dose up fighting they were deadly. Their blood contained a powerful acid which was almost as dangerous as their protruding jaws. The blood from a wounded alien would eat through the base floor and damage the weapon systems. They laid their eggs inside captured humans too. He remembered how the alien larva had ripped its way out of his navigator's chest, and shuddered. His date had screamed out loud.

The momentary slip in concentration cost him. An alien ship plunged through the atmosphere and destroyed one of his batteries. Sean could hardly bear to think of the camage inside. He set back to work with grim purpose. Shift left, fire, left again, fire, now right and fire. He had a smooth rhythm on the controls. Never mind the grim scenes of destruction around him. What was important was a clear, burning concentration, a direct connection between eye and hand.

The fourth wave was destroyed and the fifth started down. They got faster every time. There was no end to them. Dad had been drinking again. Sean dreaded going home that night. There would be light, tense talk around the dinner table. Dad had first left years ago, but he always came back. These days he and Mom would never look straight at each other. Maybe the lasers in their eyes would crisp each other if they locked on. He wished they would just let it go.

Another battery was lost. He was down to his last one. The aliens came down in row after row. No time to think of anything else now. There was room now only for reaction. He fired and fired, and they just kept coming. He cleared out the fifth wave, and the sixth was even faster. They were blurring now. His wrist was starting to ache.

His whole world focussed down to the shifting icons of the aliens and the battery.

The eighth wave got him. Shit. Didn't even make the top ten. Maybe Mom and Dad would let him go out early. There had to be some movie playing down at the mall.

46 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

1986 Mom was working late tonight at the store, so there was no reason to go home early. Lord Carl of the Axe strode down the palace hallways, alert to any danger. She usually came home late these days, and always seemed tired. The sorcerer's henchmen were everywhere. The store wasn't doing well. A guard leaped out at him from behind a curtain, and Carl dispatched him with a single blow. Someone had broken the store's window with a rock and she still hadn't gotten the money to fix it. Two more came at him. He killed the first one with an axe swing, then leapt over the second and chopped him from behind.

Somewhere along here was the entrance to the dungeon. The princess was chained up in its deepest levels. Chained up and helpless. He knocked off a couple of more guards before finding the door. He chopped it open and descended to the next level. Here his opponents were a little tougher. Instead of guys in pansy capes and plumed helmets, they had leather armor and broadswords. It took more than one swing to kill them. Still, it wasn't long before he found the entrance to the dungeon proper.

He wished he knew who had thrown the rock. He'd use a rock on them. The place looked terrible with a cracked window. Few enough people came as it was.

At this level they started getting really tough. Here they were big beefy guys wearing black hoods and carrying axes like his. The place was filled with prison cells. A lot of the cells were occupied. Starved faces looked out through the bars, but there was no point in trying to free any of them. None of those doors led anywhere.

Maybe someone at school had thrown it. The Crips would do something sneaky like this. Shit, he hoped not. Cross a gang and you were toast.

The axemen could come at you from either side. You had to strike, then swing around to get the guy coming at you from the other side. They were better at parrying too. Carl hit and hit, but they blocked every blow. He chopped down one of them, but more were coming onto the screen. He was stuck in place. It was all he could do to keep fending off their attacks, while the clock ticked down and down. He battled his way towards the next door, but didn't get very far. An axe came down on him just as his time ran out. No bonus lives either.

He glared at the screen. "I'll be back." he said in his best Schwarzenegger. Nothing stopped Arnie. Fuck, no more quarters. Maybe he could borrow some from Mitch.

1990 He glided through the jungle, knife in hand. His bare chest rippled with muscle beneath his open flak jacket. You had to be constantly on edge, alert to any movement. They could come at you from in front or behind, from up in the trees or erupting out of the ground. There! A khaki-clad soldier charged him with a bayonet. Joey

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 47

leapt forward and stabbed down. The soldier met his first blow, but the second got him. His guts spilled out on the forest floor and then he disappeared.

Now they started really coming at him. He was still a long way from the POW camp where his buddies were being held. He slashed and stabbed his way through the press of bodies. There weren't just commies here. They'd brought out the meres and ninjas. The meres wore mirror shades and carried Uzis, but the ninjas were worse.

They would appear up in the trees and then leap down and slash at you. You had to jump for it or else you were dogmeat.

"Joey, what is this fucking kiddie shit?" came a voice from behind him.

"Chill man, I'm almost up to the lake of sharks."

"We've got business tonight, remember? These guys don't like to be kept waiting.

We could get serious trouble and you're off playing fucking Rambo."

"Just let me play this one more ~ shit, look what you made me do." The boa con~ strictor had looped around him. While the snake pinned him, he'd been hacked into a dozen pieces. "Stupid fucking game. OK, let's go."

Once they were out of the sub shop, Ramon asked him "So whad'ja got for green?" Joey showed him the wad of bills. He'd had to hock Mama's rings to get it, but he'd make it all back after this score. "Not bad." said Ramon. "Are you carrying?"

"Fuck, what d'you think?" He opened his jacket and showed him the gun tucked into the back of his pants. He didn't show him the switchblade. You never could tell.

They could come at you from every direction, especially from your back. You had to be alert to everything. This wasn't some fucking game, man.

48 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Baffler • 49

__. . . . __ _.

~_.rm_.

50 • Baffler

~

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~_,

....,.1M&

._~'M'P.d _

These drawings are selected from "Borderland,Âť Eric Forst's deck of tarot cards for the 90s. The entire set is available for $5 from 38 Elizabeth St., Northampton, MA 01060.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 51

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52 • Baffler

C Do r 0 I; f\ ~5

Colonial Manuscript found in a Safety Deposit Box

by Dave Berman Orbit One-Far above my life, one trillion storeys up, above the silver judgement wheels, is a dear civilization, along the sidereal coast, a perpetual glide, where the rapid hearts sleep, where armrest factories puff, "we invite the nervous", for warm firm handshakes immemorial.

Orbit Two-On the table is a glass of red soda, a traffic ticket, and a sketch of a telephone. Out the screen door I can hear two men arguing about a shed.

The screen makes the whole tableau into a grid. I'm surprised when a cardinal lands on the window sill. I've only seen them on placemats.

Orbit Three-It was a revelation on a sled that brought him in from the cold white hills. To ask his wife, if in a city in the afterlife, she would recognize him on the street.

Imagination, memoty in drag, called up a picture of an endless plane covered in sidewalks.

Orbit Four-In the painting, sky and ground run parallel. There is a palm tree and a jet. A forest stands in the corner, a set of antlers lies in the grass.

Off to left there is a river, but you can't see it, it's outside the frame. The river is full of old wheels and chain, but they don't make it go.

Offin the distance, it's very faint, there's a hill. A man sold everything he owned to buy that hill. The agent said he would be able to see the future from up there, and that it would be the same future every time.

Orbit Five-Several thousand years ago there was a man who wanted to kill a very powerful man. In his own room he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall to find out whether his hand could carry through. By some chance the powerful man was standing on the other side of the wall and was thus slain.

And that is how I live out every one of my days.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 53

How Are You? Steve Healey Identity is pan of the problem, although we have ways of verifying cenain persons, putting our finger on them.

About this time a year ago there was a war going on halfway around the world, and here in town there was a young man - the step-son of a famous newspaper columnist - who went to the hardware store and bought a ~ouple cans of kerosene.

Later he was sitting in a grassy, tranquil spot on the town common, pouring the kerosene all over himself. I think it was a Sunday afternoon. There were some war protesters scattered around the edges of the common, getting in the way of traffic, et cetera.

People say they saw him trying to light a match, and when it didn't work, he tried another, until he got it right. He went up in flames on a Sunday afternoon.

Beside his charred body they found a cardboard sign that said: stop the violence. And in the lower left-hand corner was taped his driver's license, a photo identification card identifying him as who he was.

54 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

The Answering Machine Steve Healey It was good while it lasted.

As if all color had drained out of things. As if music were the bridge to take you elsewhere, and els~where turned out to be right where you were, where there was no such thing as music.

He was alone in the kitchen, listening to the hum of the refrigerator as it played against the swishing of leaves outside.

Then the telephone rang. But there were cenain persons he was afraid to talk with, especially on a telephone. So he let the answering machine take the call, while he stood by, listening for a voice, his ear leaning toward the possibility of a voice.

As if the kitchen were growing smaller.

It was someone calling long distance, from across the country.

Someone to whom he was, and still is, as they say, attracted. Someone with whom he has had some ambiguous sexual relations.

Just as he reached to pick up the phone the voice said: if you're there, don't pick up the phone ....

And so, following the voice's instructions, he retreated a few steps, to play the pan of the sad listener, as the sad message squeezed itself out from the tiny speaker of the answering machine.

Nothing but stillness now - a photographic negative. And the dull voice, too familiar, lapsing into formalities.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 55

Freddy's Lament I took a swim in the sea. my life staned over. my boner lasted longer. my appetite swelled. my hunting skills were sharper. although I never hunt.

I wanted the hurricane-watch software package advenised on tv.

I called the toll free number: sold out. my boner sagged. hunger annoyed. broke, I relished a dip, but could not budge.

- Gaston de Bearn

56 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Halftime Gaston de Bearn Tuck finished his soup and salad one Sunday afternoon.

His wife left to play tennis at a posh club downtown. She was late getting back.

He went to the mailbox at halftime. There were sexy girls in bikinis on TV. He like to look at the girls. But he really wanted to check the mail.

He opened the mailbox and saw a small package. "They don't deliver mail on Sundays," he mused. There was no return address. Just "Fragile" in scrawled handwriting. He tore the brown wrap. A small blue box. A bead of sweat bubbled on his brow. He took the package inside.

With shaking fingers, he lifted the lid. And peeked.

When he saw the eye he told himself, "That's Madge's eye." He closed the lid.

Then he thought, "This is really sick." Then he thought, "Well, where's the other one?" and "I hope it's okay." Then he thought, "Is this some kind of joke?" He opened the lid and checked the eye closely.

Yes. Good. It still had the contact. Paid good money for those.

Then he thought, "First thing tomorrow, I'm gonna look into this."

Tuck went upstairs. He popped a beer and turned up the TV. To drown the sirens. He set the box down next to the remote.

More commercials with beer and girls. He liked those. Especially at halftime with a buzz coming on.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 57

At the Tomb ofthe Unknown Poet Not without talent but lacking the reqUisite petting, he perished; unpublished.

Sean Francis

58 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Opulence Lost Once upon Kalispell, Montana redwood bars scarce scored by spurs shone in saloons, chandeliers cast brilliants with open handsbut the wax and the wane and again has left but gleaming steeds.

- Sean Francis

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 59

The Baffler Look

Zowie! Commander Greg of the Red Army reporting for his new postrevolution duties! Hat by Proktarianz! of Evanston, $290. Pony tail of real human hair by PhonyTails, $55/week.

60 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

for Spring 193

Tonight editor Tom's the 'celebrity writer,' with tiny glasses for that oh-sointellectual look, a thick book and crumpled papers to demonstrate his literacy.

Dinner jacket and tie by UHB, $835. Glasses from X-Ray-Spex, $400. Old book from Marshall Field's Interior Decorating Department, $150.

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 61

Our man smashes stuffiness with in-line skates from "Radical, Dude!" $210.

Victim: shirt, jacket, and tie from Brooks Brothers.

62 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Diamr:nd Dave's mitre, cope, and alb by Georges Marciano, Pour L'Ev;que, $3195.

BajJler â&#x20AC;˘ 63

Rick's silk blouse by Crackers N Croppers of North Michigan Avenue, $85. Glasses

by Matsurnoro of Trieste, $300.

64 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Chris is so excited••• today he just signed with a major label. He is going to be rich!

III I NONBUSINESS

REPLY MAIL

POSTAGE NECESSARY IF MAILED IN THE UNITED STATES

I

THE BAFFLER MINT P.O. Box 378293 CHICAGO, IL 60637-0105 Baffler • 65

An adorable little punkrocker comes enchantingly to life in a fine porcelain collector doll.

Utde Chris Is 10 exctted..•be's practically bursting with pride! He bas just signed his first major label deal! Now award winnJng doll artist, Bodsworth Rubblesby m, bas captured the joy of Chris' big day In a new porcelain collector doll, available exclusively from the Baftler mint!

Remarkably lifelike!

With his record contract In one band and a leather anarchy coat in the other, Chris is as proud as a litde boy can be.

Only a sculptor with the extraordinary talent of Dodsworth Rubblesby could have recreated luch irrepressible happiness in Chris' adorable features.

Chris is dressed In a delighlful band tailored outfit His leather punk rock jacket, and dull colored flannel shirt keep him toasty warm In the late night concert lines.

Attractively Priced.

Chris Is alfordably priced at $3990, payable In twenty easy payments of $199.50.

Send for YOW" reservation tDtkJJ. We are lOllY to aDDOI1III:e !hat due to pop!Iar danuld the Kurd! and COllrtney dolD have ao\d out

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.J.brUle aM ~ CIfI1~ will brint the ,XlliJerantfrY of a jrtrnI4 little ~ to allY !WIn in yov.r 1unne!

-BESERVATION APPIlCATION -

The Bamer Mint P.O. Box 378293 Chicago, n 60637

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Please return

prompt}·

~ accept my reeeswdaIl far CIfI1it

by BodIWmh RIIWeaby m. a coIIec:tmdol WIth head, IDDI uxllep dJa.d. pUlled t.qae pon:>eIUa. My dell coma ccmpIete rib ........ AIludzy.Jacbt, eIedIic 1lJiIIr. and mIDIatIIre Doc )fartaI Boola at DO eslra dwp.

I aeed.1eDd 110 mooey DOW. I w:III pay " my dalln twenIy IDOIltbly tDIIIlImlllll d $199.50". Ibe lint blIJed ptar to ~t If DOt I&III8ed, I may

_retummyHbIElIbe IIImIaave DI widell cktv. our

o-aww Economy.

"DeIIn:ry not pnIIIeed

66 • Baffler

Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ Addreu ________________

~~--------~~~-----

~----- ~'t'P'------

Syzygy Bill Holmes Reuben stared up at the posters. "That's a strawberry popsicle, right? and what's that your friend's got there? The children silently smiled down. " ... a Nutty Buddy? OK, then, that'll be 95 cents."

"Out of a dollar ... there you are, five cents change. Thanks kids and remember to come again!"

The children were the first things he had tacked up; they had been his company during the long weeks he'd spent preparing the store. The gleaming poster faces, an artistic array of ethnicity, each delightedly clutching their booty from the cornucopia of frozen treats. They were an omen, Reuben knew. A sign of the success to come.

Reuben's eyes flicked impatiently over the body of his store, each flashing glance aspiring to savor every detail simultaneously while at the same time reclining completely in the vast greatness of his dream. He felt a nervous excitement like just before the consummation of a long sought-after love affair. The long weeks spent in isolation stacking shelves, fixing stubborn lights, affixing advertisements, polishing the tired floors. All performed with this day in mind-the opening of Reuben's castle to the public. Triumphantly he raised the front window blinds.

Outside the morning street was still sleeping. "SALE 2% MILK, 1 Gal. 98¢" the sign above his head claimed. Catching his reflection in the glass Reuben said with a smile "Thank you, sir, that'll be a dollar five with tax."

Standing back behind the counter his eyes traced the rows of candy bars holding the tight line of the aisle. His gaze shifted ... Rolaids, Q-Tips, Band-Aids ... chilled Lone Star and Milwaukee's Best swimming in their bargain tub ... ChefBoyardee and Campbell's cans, all stood proudly in their ranks. He lifted his eyes to the shiny conical mirror he had planted just yesterday high in the corner. In it he confidently made out the bastions of beer bottles and boxes that stood solemnly in the cooler.

Everywhere his eyes settled he was pleased with what was there to greet him. This store has everything, he thought, truly a convenience store. The word lingered in his mind. In an inspired moment he decided to call his store "Reuben's Convenience Store." Currently the sign above the window simply read "Reuben's Store." Sighing contentedly he shuffied his feet behind the counter.

His mind wandered; he thought anxiously ahead to that first customer. As so often happened in his imaginings, the mental stream of customers soon melted into one another, each man becoming a legion, each legion an army. In the days preceding today he often saw himself hiring his first assistant-a beautiful union that soon led to marriage and thoughts of expansion. Reuben knew if he moved the rusting steel dumpster outside away from the ice cooler wall he could gain another 20 yards of store space.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 67

The sudden jingling of bells pulled Reuben from his reverie. He turned to the door in time to see a uniformed back moving resolutely down the nearest aisle.

Reuben berated his inattentiveness and quickly smoothed down the front of his shirt.

Instinctively he ran his hand smoothly back over his scalp, flattening the few stray hairs that connected the tufts nestled above either ear. He focused his attention on the customer who had just turned up the next aisle. Reuben could now recognize that the man was wearing a policeman's uniform. He beamed at the customer, but his enthusiasm passed unnoticed as the man stooped down to select an item off the shelf.

Reuben craned forward.

As the man stood up, Reuben noted with great satisfaction that a package of Twinkies had been selected. He began his practiced speech: "Good morning, sir, and may I welcome you to Reuben's ConvmimceStore. It is my great honor to serve you today, sir, and if you may wish any assistance in any way please don't .... " The man slowly turned his head toward Reuben. The lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses and his shiny black hair, neatly slicked, reflected an annoying glare from the sputtering overhead fluorescent light. The man gave a compulsory smile, but said nothing; then, turning his back to Reuben, headed to the rear of the store. As he turned the aisle and fell out of sight Reuben shifted his eyes to the parabolic mirror securely nestled between the corner and the ceiling. He heard the pucker of vacuum seal as the cooler door opened.

In the mirror Reuben could see the distended face of his customer staring intently at the bottles on the rack, and he thought he recognized a distinct but hideously distorted unhappiness beginning to develop. A growing unease permeated Reuben's being. Quickly he glanced up for reassurance at the smiling ice-cream children; they idiotically grinned their never-changing grins back down at him. Reuben inhaled the consolation, then, fearful of missing a second, shot his gaze back to the mirror. The man reached up forward into the cooler and began aggressively sliding several bottles to one side. Reuben's unease increased and he began a mental inventory of the cooler's contents. The customer, apparently unable to locate what he wanted, turned slowly, and, levelling his attention on the owner, began to walk steadily towards him.

With the light dancing merrily across the badge he wore the man advanced to the counter. A bead of sweat stinging his eye, Reuben noticed that one of the sides of the package ofTwinkies the man carried had ruptured from the force of his grip, spilling its creamy contents. Reuben felt as if the man was clutching his heart.

"Hey buddy! Where's your Cutty Sark at, huh?" the man suddenly demanded, startling Reuben to such a degree that he had to ask the man to repeat himself.

"Where do you keep your Cutty Sark, comprende!"

Reuben comprehended. He was familiar with the product and somehow suspected the request was improper for a convenience store, yet all the same he reproached himself for failing to provide the requested item. He began a hurried apology: "It is most unfortunate sir ... I am very sorry... ," all the while silently denouncing himself for his pitiful lack of goods. Oblivious to the excuses, the man stood silently

68 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

and stared at Reuben as he continued to stammer. " .. .And, I might add sir that 1.. .. " Abruptly Reuben stopped, suddenly aware of the nakedness of his own voice.

In the weighty silence Reuben's synapses were firing pell-mell, furiously trying to navigate around an impasse of trepidation. Reuben winced uncomfortably from the glare projecting off the man's oiled head.

"Hello sir, welcome to Reuben's Store," he unconsciously spat out.

"Cutty Sarkl" the man shouted vehemently, then returned forcefully to the back of the store.

Reuben picked desperately under his thumb nail and managed a weak gasp as he tried to clear his throat. Any further attempts to mollify the customer might constitute harassment and, Reuben was certain, would jeopardize any possible purchase.

Cutty Sarkl, he chided himself, how he had so foolishly praised his foresight, his preparedness! Uncon troUably smoothing back his twin furrows with both hands in precise, unified repetition, Reuben stared fixedly at the rack of Texas Pride beef jerky directly in front of him.

Perhaps as a result of his catatonia, Reuben didn't notice that the customer had ceased ransacking the shelves, had fallen to one knee, and was now, twisted on the floor and rumbling, trying with unfound agility to wrestle offhis policeman's uniform as quickly as possible. Thus it was a great surprise to Reuben when the man, a mighty "S" emblazoned on his chest in a script of old, the tight blueness of his leotard revealing a sizable paunch, bolted out the door. In his hand a Twinkie was thrust aloft, freed from its cellophane, scintillant and golden under the sputtering fluorescence like a well-wrought lance. Reuben stood in silent disbelief amid the chaotically jingling bells, watching the flapping cape and heels streak down the empty street. As, one by one, the poster tacks pulled free from their moorings, he was possessed by the inevitability of his failure.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 69

Mr. G Finer Foods When you're tired of tile alienating experience of warehousestyle shopping...

"Resist dominant shopping paradigms }Iff G~" at lY.lr. s Open six days from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, and Sunday from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm.

1226 East 53rd

70 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

363-2175

The Libidinal Tourist D. M. Mulcahey "The postmodern world is a suitcase packed with lifestyles. Its history, a postcard from Vegas."

-James Hatt, Th~ John-Erik H~xxum M~morial L~ctum

The East Bloc. The Iron Cunain. The Gulag. Long lines and empty shelves. The benighted totalitarian domain where nobly longsuffering peoples live out their meagre lives in "internal exile", longing for liberation from their Godless masters. The land where an enterprising American tourist can sell his old Levis for princely sums.

This is how my generation came to think of our nation's ideological enemy: a vast, expansionist empire, driven by resentment and envy, a drab, stunted society cursed with poveny and pathetic taste. In the mature years of the upward-sloping curve of postwar prosperity, what assured us young Americans of the privileged status of our republic was not so much our confidence in the panicular vinues of American political culture, although many had vague convictions in that direction.

It was, rather, the bedrock belief that given a choice, anyone would gladly choose the bliss of American-style consumer culture over any other possible form of social organization.

Times have indeed changed. What warmth we all felt during that extended television binge which started in the Fall of 1989, as we watched in disbelief as regime after regime fell to the picturesque masses before the cameras ofCNN. What hope we thought the future must hold for those unburdended people. This was a remarkable historical watershed indeed; but what was perhaps more remarkable was that these events presaged the loss of a teleological cenitude in American culture that we should be the beacon of freedom to the world. We are now told of a son of generational anomie which has sapped the willand spending-power of young American adults, the result, in the first instance of course, of a dysfunctional economy. But there now appear inklings also of a dysfunctional culture, a dissatisfaction with the

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 71

tawdriness of the influence of "the market" in every facet of cultural production and social existence. Indeed, it now seems more appealing to project onto those same recently-Communist countries we once pitied the very innocence and virtue we so much long for. This has made for a new genre in American travel writing. As one might expect, while the reality of the recently opened East is something like newly conquered Indian territory, ripe for settlement by any paleface with capital and a covered wagon, popular accounts of the bonanza mostly evoke images of some son of theme park where America's eternal kids can relive in fantasy the historical stages of capital accumulation. "The Wild, Wild East," as plugged-in journalist Henry Copeland calls Prague in a recent issue of Details. The realEurodisney, with mercenary tourists.

With their own land gripped by recession, a handful of enterprising Americans have glimpsed the green light of opponunity and are laboring to remake the East Bloc in our own postmodern image. They have brought the starved Gulag not only their lively selves, but they have taken with them the greatest cultural gift of American capitalism: our understanding of "lifestyle." Coached in the consumer hothouses of suburban malls and urban bohemias, these glowing youngsters are transplanting in the original Bohemia our foremost contribution to civilization, the ability to think of "life" itself as a consumer decision.

As the lives of the bourgeoisie in the West became, over the last hundred years, more and more bureaucratized and drained of immediate meaning, our mass media stepped into the void, offering us relevance and excitement by elaborating a whole array of interesting "lifestyles" we could fit into the gap. We have now so refined the notion of "the way one lives" that it is an optional, commodity-focused choice that a well-heeled professional makes, a package oflooks and dress and appearance that he buys. For the American middle class "lifestyle" does not refer to difficult factors that a person may inherit: class, religion, race, ethnicity. With the enlightened luxury of non-fixed identities "lifestyle" has become for us over the last few decades a perpetual Halloween party, somethingfon, something adopted because it suits our fancy at a given time and place: the take-charge businessman, the anist, 72 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Gedney Goes Bohemian

the rebel rocker. It has come to dominate our understanding of the world because the surfeit of "lifestyle" choices not only gives the bourgeoisie something to do, a historical/social/ athletic fantasy in which Keith White to drown their boredom, but it also works For the first time in weeks, as a spur to unending consumption as Gedney felt in complete control of endless ensembles and accessories are his image. He let out another purchased to round our a given look or twenty yards, and then tied off. His affectation. Exponing this understanding eyes followed the deep grade of to the East, that vacuum of a world, our the twine as it arced into the azure lads are busily constructing a lifestyle Carpathian sky, disappearing some two hundred feet below the playground withour monitors or bound- orange smudge that laid against anes. the clouds. The kite's outline was barely visible at this distance. He checked the electronic readout Naive for so long about how "the from the anemometer on his North market works", former Communist sociFace Extreme jacket sleeve. and eties are now shedding their innocence, calculated that soon conditions to borrow an image from Fitzgerald, like might be right to make his move. If calories of heat. The cool, media-savvy he was successful, this would be West is warming itself on the radiance. the highest single-string flight on We read with envy about canny young the European continent since the fall of communism. Gedney Yanks getting a piece of it while the grinned as he thought of all the free going's great, exploiting the laughable pUblicity. He had certainly come a undervaluation of every possible good long way from that day in Central and service to be had, buying the assets of Park, six months ago.

nations at rock-bottom prices. Here Copeland's piece in Details is instructive.

He writes from Prague- where, he confides, "everyone agrees Something is Happening"- about a group of recent graduates of American colleges who are publishing an English-language newspaper. Making his reportorial rounds, Copeland includes us in a succession of

Towards the end Gedney's lifestyle in New York had lost its special sheen. He had only just acquired his New Urban Hipster look when there appeared a myriad of Gedneys, each outfitted almost identically in the rebel image that he had so carefully mapped out (see "Gedney Gets the Girl", Baffler #3). Gedney had meant to es-

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 73

tablish his individuality and nonconformity with a strategic series of purchases. But as things developed, all the planning and the considerable expense had been for nought. Just a few weeks after Gedney first appeared in his ripped Razzys and scarred leather jacket, the streets of Greenwich Village fairly teemed with like-fitted radicals.

But then Gedney had read an article in Men's Journalon the kite craze in Europe, and he knew he wanted to be a part of it. He had grown tired of his rollerblades and his mountain bike; he hungered for a new lifestyle, a new set of accessories. After reading the article, though, Gedney had made a terrible mistake: he dusted off the old single piece bat-wing kite he had flown on the beach as a youth and headed for Sheep's Meadow.

There he was astonished to see a vast number of kite practitioners, most of them proudly and skillfully flying double-tails, box kites, even a few difficult Chinese dragons.

"How did I get so far behind so quickly?' Gedney thought as he somewhat shamefully unfurled his childish kite. Gedney's embarrassment multiplied as his modest contraption veered haplessly into a stand of trees lining the south end of the field no more than two minutes into its voyage. But as he climbed blushing into the tree, he saw that he had been joined by an agile dark-haired girl who laughed gently as she helped him untangle

74 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

whiskeys and "hash-hazed parties" as the Scene unfolds before us. We are introduced to Kip, "Ichabod Crane on mushrooms," the hard-drinking muse of the operation. We meet a former New York City magazine editor who "knows everybody" and even once took a piss with Vaclav Havel. We see the kids bribing government officials with liquor, rushing off to cover the war in Yugoslavia, brainstorming in a cold, crowded office that looks like "Valley Forge on acid." These people are making history and they are stoked.

It seems that in Prague, such an enterprise entails either more hardship or a more extreme understanding of subjectivity than the average Czech is equipped to deal with. In fact, the only natives we meet are a crowd of anarchists shouting "Fuck You" and "No Future" at the cops.

But our young heroes are Americans-in fact, as is hinted time and time again, they are our equivalent of the Lost Generation. Half-lost, one might say, in the sense that entry-level America has failed them. They are not at all lost in the sense that they have struck out into the world bearing that peculiar brand of American know-how: lifestyle dynamism. We see American ingenuity in all its luminescence. Mastering technological deficiencies. End-running bureaucratic pile-ups.

Thriving on chaos. Making the scene.

Doing what they have to do to get by but

ultimately playing by their rules. By applying these typical American attributes with aplomb, this rag-tag bunch demonstrates again the efficacy of the free market and stakes a beachhead for that most American of ideals- individualism. As one of the group puts it, "In Prague, everything is so open you can reinvent yourself every day." This, then, is the American Dream, circa 1992.

Prague of the 1990s, Paris of the 1920s- what is the difference for the editors of Details, a slick leisure magazine for the upscale professional man-abouttown? Each scene has its historical content sucked out and its stylistic husk vacuum-packed and put on a shelf next to the Great White Hunter and the Rebel Without a Cause, as well as a multitude of other mythical evocations, where they sit waiting for Wall Street's libidinal tourists to come browsing. Copeland's imaginary Prague is, for twentysomething youngsters with ambitions that an ailing American economy cannot accomodate, a blank lifestyle slate, a place where they can act out whatever cultural fantasies fit their current tastes, where they can reinvent history and spon a different wardrobe, a novel identity, each and every day.

• • •

Sky fits heaven, so ride it.

Child fits mother, so hold your baby tight.

Lips fit mouth, so kiss them

the kite from the trees. "Didn't you see Strung Oufs article on tails?" she said, gently admonishing our hero. "Twice the length and half the width is the general rule - that is, of course, unless you want to go higher. .. " As they climbed he caught a glimpse of her "Air Flights" shoes (specially designed for kiting) and lingered on her formfitting kite shorts. He admired the knowing way she handled even his simple batwing. He burned with jealousy.

"Why, no, I didn't see the article," he finally managed. "I don't...subscribe. Say, maybe we could talk about this over a Canfield's in the boathouse."

Sensing something in his manner that suggested an ability to adapt to new trends, she agreed to join him for a can of the unusual soda. later she invited him back to her apartment in the upper East side. Prominently displayed on her coffee table were four or five of the latest mags covering the kite scene: Australia's Strung Out, the British Cloud-9 and the French Cerf-Volante!. While she watched, Gedney examined them greedily.

Here were the secrets of the trend, laid bare for him. As he fondled the glossy pages, the new product's possibilities opened in his mind. He began to conceive a look, an amalgam of Hemingway and Norman Maclean: he would be a Rugged Kitesman, a soloist, the guy who always edged a little further out than the other models in

Baffler • 75

the photo-spreads. He also quickly saw the sport's fashion potentialhe could special order kite fabric from his favorite desinger, Thierry MOgler.

Over the next few weeks Gedney honed his kiting skills with dozens of new purchases and, via his literary connections, began to attach himself to the underground kite scene that thrived on the fringes of the trend. This elite of the elite called themselves the Radical Franklins, part of the sport I protest movement thilt had sprung up after a faction of Team Rollerblade martyred themselves by skating down the side of the SI. Louis Arch.

The entire nation had been transfixed by the televised images of that horrible moment: the flashing orange of their Iycra shorts and the cans of Sunkist clutched defiantly in the Team's hands as they plunged screaming into the Mississippi. Gedney knew the image was marketable, and he resolved to stay close to the Franklins in preparation for the ultimate media moment he was sure would come.

On a night late in April, Gedney looked for rain as he awaited a call trom the Franklins' leader. Finally the phone rang, and a muffled voice told Gedney to rendezvous at the entrance ot the Woolworth building, that mysteriously gothic skyscraper. The Franklins showed up at midnight, after the wind had picked up and a heavy rain had begun to tall. Armed with a professional-model video camera,

76 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

The jeans that fit like a glove, like an old lover Coming back for more.

These verses by Gap poet laureate Max Blagg, which he reads in recent television ads for the casual-wear outfitter, epitomize a trend among marketers of upper-middlebrow consumer goods to render the most mundane of objects into ready-made "classics" by means of picturesque but depthless evocations of aestheticity and historicity. As it turns out, in real life Max Blagg tends bar in Manhattan to make ends meet. And why not? Who better than a demiurgic barman understands the mysteries of carnality to which our Gap jeans will be witness? Max is a service industry employee with enthusiasm, enthusiasm for Life, for eternal verities, for carefully antiquated blue jeans that seem to have been cast in the very smithy of his soul. The advertising world's domesticated "art", charming but tinctured with self-mockery, is crucial to the production of ready-made classicity. It simultaneously pays compliments to the educated bourgeoisie for its taste and alleviates its anxiety about cultural sufficiency.

Anyone lucky enough to receive the catalogues put out by a number of mailorder houses, or to anyone who reads Esquire or Vanity Fair or the New York Times Magazine, knows that the upscale consumer faces a multiplicity of discrete

historico-social wardrobe ensembles. He may choose not only the clothes of the gritty urban poet, but also those of the Waspish gilded youth, the cowboy, the leather clad outsider, the jaded lounge lizard, the trippy rave refugee, the outdoorsman, the imperialist adventurer, the Deadhead, the farm laborer/homeless person, any sort of athletic enthusiast, and even the grungy slacker.

U sing a telephone and a credit card the consumer may avail himself of entry into virtually any subculture; he may don any of these outfits to suit mood or occasion, or he can signify his more deviant desire to resist classification by promiscuous bricolage of the parts. He is encouraged- challenged- to create his own personality using the tools our designers have put at his disposal. And if the wooing glances of Madison Avenue befuddle him in an embarras de richesse, he need only turn to the benevolent counsel of the modish faction of the mainstream media, with its what's-hot lists and celebrity bios. In what seems to be the progressive homogenization of middlebrow journalism into hip and disengaged collegiate 'tude, for example, Newsweekechoes Sassy in recommending Doc Martens boots as a fashion must. Here, in these slick and seductive arbiters of middle-class taste the upwardly mobile consumer can obtain information he can bank on.

The symbiotic relationship between

Gedney followed them to the 60th floor balcony of the building, where they produced elaborate box kites out of backpacks and began to assemble them. As the Franklins worked the electrical storm intensified, lightning struck close nearby, and, soaked to the skin, Gedney began to feel twinges of fear.

Nonetheless, he held his ground, filming the group and asking the questions he was sure the fans who weren't there wanted to ask.

"What material is that kite made of? Who built it for you? Aren't you afraid?" And, "how much did SkyHigh pay to get their logo printed on the vertical stabilizer?" Shouting answers to Gedney's questions, the Franklins' leader let his assembled kite out nearly two hundred yards, seemingly unfazed by the potential for damage to his expensive apparatus. Then with a full-throated howl he began to dip the kite between buildings, coming dangerously close to lightning rods in the storm .

Afterwards, Gedney was able to sell the footage to MTV Sports, as well as an article about the event to Cerl-Volante!. His suspicions had been justified: the kitepublicity business paid well. With the money he made, Gedney special-orclered twenty-five double tetrahedron box kites from Weatherman in Taos and took off for Prague.

Within two weeks, Gedney had situated himself in the new capital

Ba.tJler â&#x20AC;˘ 77

of cool. Despite the language barriers, he had managed to score an apartment, an Indian motorbike and a small store front off the Old Town Square. The store was, of course, an upper-bracket kite boutique, catering to only the trend's innermost cognoscenti. Gedney had raised extra capital lor the venture by selling a bunch of his Razzy jeans and a green sweater he said he had stolen from Kurt Cobain at Nirvana's last show in N.Y.C. The sweater had been a particularly useful item, netting him over 30,000 crowns at a club called Bunkr, where the patrons were encouraged to take monoxide hits off the tailpipes of old Ladas. Gedney had indulged in this peculiar practice, although he found the aftertaste a bit much.

Shorn of his Razzys, Gedney was able to create a new look that blended an environmental activist style with elements of bondage as seen in the works of Versace. He wore a vest covered with buckles that was made from a coarse weave of palm tree bark. His trousers tended towards a baggy, lightcolored campesino look. Now that he was an expatriate he began to favor the bulky, practical shoes of the American working class, and on certain days he wore a real hardhat, cocked whimsically to one side.

Gedney had painted his kite shop entirely blue with a few clouds here and there, giving the overall effect of having entered the

78 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

the media and the fashion world bespeaks the growing marketability of lifestyle creation. Smooth turnover requires a welloiled machine, and there is money to be made by everybody. The slavish publicity granted to newly invented styles is complemented by the sarcastic savaging of those that are out of date or patently out of place, like Ted or Heavy Metal.

These are everybody's straw man, and we at the Baffler have no interest in them as such. What intrigues us is the way in which the arts dovetail with fashion and advertising in the consumerist paradigm.

Indeed, our own darling artists of the last thirty years have admitted with no compunction that there is no difference between art and fashion. It is no coincidence that they are very rich men.

Lifestyle can be thought of, as Bourdieu has pointed out, as something like taste, "a certain propensity or Cl(XlCity, imparted through education, to appropriate a given set of classified, classifYing objects." Because this propensity is the product ofeducation, one's likstyle is very much determined by one's class. One sees this very clearly in the most class-soatiÂŁied societies, like Britain. And yet the tyr.mny ofofficial taste, partirularly dass-based taste, often spurs a rich assomnent ofwhat has been called "speaarular subrulcures", subcultures which through symbolic assaul~ on authoriry in clothing, language

and behavior, attempt to disrupt the prevailing notions ofclass positions in society. TIle clearest example ofthis is is the profusion ofsubrulcures

in postwar Britain: teddy boys, mods, skinheads, punks. Common to all these, to gloss over the more or less important distinaions, is the roncrere understanding ofclass position, an aniruIation ofprorest expressed through a peculiar mode ofronsumption ofgoods. But since it involved such a weIl-<ie6ned look, the alienated ptmk rockers' gearWJS bound to be &tilled into lifestyle accoutrements for suburban American teens. As obvious as this Eta is, it strikes surprisingly few people as odd that the vety grottiest emblems ofworking-dass identification are being sold at overblown prices in hip boutiques to prosperous lifestyle refugees.

But then, subculture operates in the leisure sphere, and the devdopment ofthe leisure industry has been the economic salv.ttion for not a few regions in the late capitalist world Lifestyle preference amongAmericans in the end reduces mostly to their spending power. European sociologists have done detailed studies demarcating the aesthetic preferences of the d.i.flerent social classes in their rountries, aesthetic preferences vatying widely primarily because of longstanding traditions ofeducating the classes differendy. The same, to a far lesser degree, is uue ofthe United States, Americans abhorring elitism as they do. But the greater class homogenization here serves merely to illustrate the absurdity ofsuburban American teens appropriating the subcultural praaice ofworking class British or Jamaican youth.

It has been argued that by recontextualizing commodities, by subverting their ronventional uses or inventing new ones, one escapes the de-

store at about 500 feet up. The complicated and expensive models he had brought from the States hung proudly from the ceiling, joined now by some European makes. A profusion of high-tech spinners and the latest twines were on display in a glass case. Near the cash register Gedney kept a cooler filled with genuine Green River soda. For radicals, Gedney stocked copies of the Franklin's manifesto. He also carried a full array of wearable accessories: shoes, shorts, hats, sunglasses, and jackets. which as often as not were bought by non-kiters seeking to approximate the look. The rear of the shop was filled with books on weather patterns and gauges for predicting conditions. Most serious kiters no longer trusted the official weather bureacracy, especially since it had falsely predicted hail during last fall's peaceful kite demonstration along the Vlatva.

Gedney's canny lifestyle moves since he had left New York had paid off handsomely, bringing him to his present state of exaltation. Prague was certainly Gedney's type of town. The beer was plentiful and the literary scene lived up to the enthusiastic articles back home. The preponderance of expatriates made knowledge of Czech unnecessary, and prices for everyday necessities were so low Gedney could easily save up for larger purchases special ordered from home. But still there was something missing for him: he had

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 79

not really been able to gain the type of respect he needed with the right elements of the American artist colony. To this much admired but ever-so-exclusive group there was only one magazine that had any real credibility, and that was prognosis, the arbiter of the expat lifestyle. Gedney turned his attention to the kite contest being sponsored by this, the hippest of journals.

Tying on a fifth reel of twine, Gedney knew the post-Communist record was within his grasp. He adjusted his sunglasses and grimaced for the cameras. After twenty more yards, he called for measurements. A tripod was brought over, and Gedney was declared the winner on the spot.

There was much gnashing of teeth among the other competitors. The prizes weren't much: some accessories which Gedney already had and entry into the all-Europe competition in Tirana the next spring.

But victory also automatically made our hero the guest of honor at a party being thrown that night by prognosis. Gedney had finally exploded into the big time.

Preparing for the party that night, Gedney strapped into his bondage gear and his "'I:' cap and headed out the door. His Indian sputtered primitively as he raced along the Narodnf trfda, the wind rushing through his hair. On the way Gedney tried to take a fax from his accountant, but it blew out of

80 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

tennination originally intended in their production. However true, this is ultimately irrelevant.

1be creation and diffusion ofnew sryles is inexttiClbly bound up with the capitalist: process of production and cirrulation.1bey are mediated by the fashion, music, and publishing indusrries.

In other words, the law oflifesryle is, "Have capital, will navel."

And lifestyle is naveling, with a vengeance, across borders and from continent to continent.

In any monograph you read on the subject of postmodernism, and by 1995 even Bob Greene will have written one, a favorite theme is multiculturalism. Like most such buzz-phenomena, multiculturalism has more than one face. T edmologyand capital acannularion have mowed down most cultures and thrown the clippings to the wind, so that insular culture of any son is is well nigh impossible. Much ofthe multiculturalism we see in music, in cuisine, and in fashion is little more than the domestiCltion of Otherness, a badge of sensitivity to wear on one's sleeve. In shon, it is a lifestyle ornament.

1be apol<>getia ofmulticulturalism is invariably self-rongratulatory, promoting an irritating and self-righteous softheadedness. To embrace multiculturalism as a value is to risk becoming, like Susan Sontag's cultural anthropologist, "psychologically, an amputee."

Moreover, the very tenn multiculturalism is a misnomer. It is in fact MONOCULTIJRALISM: just another facet ofthe stylistic undulations of the international business culture. In any so-called multicultutal manirestation, we are no more experiencing another

rultl1re than we an: living the life a sharecropper when we wear fashionably oversized and weathered coveralls. Nor is it historically new for an empire to assimilate rultwal praaices and arrilam from subject peoples. Nonetheless, we an: led to believe that such a lad as World Beat is somehow demoaatizing access to the lucre of pop stardom, when in faa it is 6lling the coHers ofthe ponytailed latter-<lay conquistl1dores ofthe recording indusuy.

We must begin to derive our rultwal resistance from what we share, or else it will not be true. We are a society, soon to be a world, of amsuming monads. We share a sec ofsoda! relations based on the commodification ofevetything from labor to cultural produaion to the means ofour very salvation. 1bese relations are so pervasive that anything outside them is considered eccentric and unnatwal. 1bere an: two worlds, that of those who live life and that of those who purchase lifestyle. Therefore we at The BafIlerconsider worthwhile only that art which understands these relations. To those artists we despise, we will not say, "Yourplinting is bad; your music is boring; your writing is trite." We will say instead,

"Your lifestyle sucks."

his hands, bringing him brief misgivings as he rethought his decision to buy a motorcycle rather than a Range Rover. But then he slipped into one of his favorite reveries, imagining he was Brando in "The Wild One,¡ forever frightening respectable small-town people with his defiance and fashion sense. It put him in perfect form for the evening.

When Gedney arrived at the designated address, he gawked in disbelief at the filthy fifteenth century sconces and omament. "How can they party in this'!' he thought to himself, but as he passed through the doorway he was relieved to see the interior of the structure had been stripped of all traces of its medieval roots. The space was wide open, modified to appear very much like a Manhattan loft. This was familiar terrain; Gedney's confidence swelled. The walls, ceilings, and floor were painted gray. Two musicians occupied the performance space, rubbing empty Shasta cans together in a strange but enticing cacophony. To avoid offending citizens of the former communist nation, the party was without a wait staff, so Gedney helped himself to a can of Penguin from the fridge.

As Gedney drank the overly syrupy off-brand of American soda, he struck up a conversation with a girl whose enigmatic appearance suggested immediate lifestyle possibilities. Her unwashed brown hair straggled down shoulders draped

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 81

with a filthy Czech service station jacket. She wore practical, black, thicksoled shoes. Her English was halting and accented, suggesting an artist's reluctance to verbalize her angst.

Gedney sensed at once that she had the Seattle Attitude; his head filled with visions of coffee, art, grunge rock, and cigarettes. After a while he ventured a direct question, even though he knew what the answer would be. "So, are you a radical?" he asked.

"I am, yes, a radical," she responded, unsmiling. "I struggle to cleanse our nation of impure elements."

Gedney was thrilled by her environmental seriousness, and was tempted to ask her where she had gone to school (Reed College? University of Washington?) and if she knew any of his acquaintances from there.

But feeling that such lines were considered hackneyed by this cognizant crowd, he spoke instead of his kiting triumph that afternoon. She seemed impressed, although her reticence made it difficult to fully gauge the depth of her admiration.

Later she adjusted the carburetor on Gedney's motorcycle and he took her for a spin up to the Castle. As he flashed through the Prague night with this exotic girl clinging behind him, Gedney knew he had taken his rightful place at the vanguard of his generation. He was a true Bohemian at last. (to be continued)

82 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

INTERCEPTION! A lifestyle is born!

Or fabricated, that is. Just before press time Th~ BajJl~rwas delighted to receive from a publicist for the Quaker Oats company a packet of "information" detailing" a new segment of Americans called 'Granolas' -laid-back, outdoorsy, environmentally-conscious achievers of the '90s." Using the demographic tricks favored

by Faith Popcorn and admen everywhere, the expensive-looking mailing purports to clue "journalists" in to a hot new lifestyle trend, an environmentally-aware look and attitude that brings with it a whole array of product ensembles. It seems a "lifestyle survey" was recently commissioned by Quaker in order to discover just how well-heeled consumers were living these days, and guess what? - the study found they're turning nz mass~ to a way of life which entails All New Products, including a sort of chewy granola bar manufactured by our kind patrons. After all our high-minded protestations, this poorly-written little packet says more than we could ever hope to about the collusion of business interests with the the institution known as lifestyle.

Here all is made clear: lifestyle is preeminently a collection of conspicuous consumer decisions; lifestyle is something invented for us by big-money publicists; lifestyle is something we pick up one year and discard the next like so many worn-out clothes.

Thus the business of defming the public mind in our unhappy land: if this lifestyle didn't exist already, it will soon, complete with all the accessories Quaker has designated for it. The expensive-looking mailing

Th~

and~ 'ts

we received undoubtedly cost a thousand times what Baffin-will run, words will undoubtedly have a thousand times the effectiveness. Bob Greene-style . columnists and "Lifestyles" -sections nationwide will soon be praising the vision of the Quaker company to the skies, running the included "Are You a Granola? Offi- ri! cia! Test" (by which almost anyone would find themselves a representative specimen of the new way) and the cutrescent cartoon the publicist thoughtfully included. When we called the company for more information, they even offered to pay us for running the illustration.

But maybe, just mayb~, you won't fall for it.

- TCF

I

Are You A Granola?g ENVIRONMENTALLY SYMPATIIETIC COSMETICS " " DANGLY CHINESE COIN EJlRRINGS

ALIrNATURAL WNGHAlR

NO. IS

SPf

SUNSCREEN

BIO·TFSl'ED HAIR CARE PRODUCTS

" JOliN I.ENNON" - - - SUNGLASSES -

AnOMA:rIlERAPY

~AFTERSHAVE

BEVEnLY fliLLS 90210 SIDEBURNS CHEWY GRANOLA BlIRS

'T' SHlllT

WJT1I A

CAUSE SUEDE BACKPACK

FRIENDSIIiP BRACELETS OVERSIZED COTTON SIIInT

J;Ji.~1ltl~1~L-

GUATEMALAN BELT

SPORTS WATCH RECYCLED NEWSPAPERS Ii ALUMlNUM CANS REUSABLE CANVAS

ALL-COTTON / LEGGINGS

GROCERY BAG

FADED. BAGGY " TOO BIG"

JEANS

5K

RUNNING SHOES

"--- RUfF·HEWN SANDALS

Baffler • 83

TIlE LIBIDINAL TOURIST

D.M. Mulcahey

"The postmodern world is a suitcase packed with Iifestylt>.

It~

nistory, a postcard from

Vegas."

-James Hatt, The fohn-Erik Hexxum Memorial Lectures

I

The East Bloc. The Iron Curtain. The Gulag. Long lines and empty shelves. The benighted totalitarian domain where nobly longsuffering peoples live out their meagre lives in "internal exile", longing for liberation from their Godless masters. The land where an enterprising American tourist can sell his old Levis for princely sums. This is how my generation came to think of our nation's ideological enemy: a vast, expansionist empire, driven by resentment and envy, but most of all a drab society characterized by poverty and pathetic taste. In the mature years of the upward-sloping curve of postwar prosperity, what assured us young Americans of the pri-..eleged stat,us of our republic was not so much our confidence in the particular virtues of American political culture, although we had vague convictions in that direction. It was, rather, the bedrock belief that given a choice, anyone would gladly choose the bliss of American-style consumer culture over any other possible form of social organization.

In the aftermath of theSecond World War, the American left wing swallowed whole the id¢ological framework. of liberal capitalism, the fundamental premise' of whieh is that the free market system is inscribed in human nature. With that, the explanatory value of class conflict was lost. In its place we have had endless droning about the universality of the

Early draft of Diamond Dave's article on lifestyles as autographed (for real!) by Mike Ditka, Coach of the Chicago Bears.

84 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

CONSUMPTION David Jacowitz Emile was a paralegal. He knew he'd be a lawyer someday, he'd move up and become a lawyer, with his own office and his own work to do. He'd work for himself.

But for now he had to pay his dues, he worked with all the other paralegals. A cup of coffee would help.

He stood over the coffee maker, its smell every bit of air in the room. It was sweet coffee, he could tell. Not necessarily good, but sweet, some hazelnut-mocha mixed bean that the secretaries kept around. He hated the flavored stuff. "No need for sweet coffee," he thought, "But still, a need for coffee."

It was quiet in the office, except for the foreign sound of the brew filling his cup.

Normally, there were other sounds, of course, the hum of the overhead lights-always around, always loud; every once in a while he'd notice the hum of the overhead lights, but it tended to fade into the background because the office was rarely quiet.

He tasted the coffee. "1 best get to work," he thought, and then he realized that he was working- it was part of his job to make the coffee.

Voices came from the conference room, he could hear them now. One sounded like Wendy, who wasn't saying much. Horace, from building maintenance, had a low voice which made it sometimes hard to hear the individual words. He spoke a broken mumble: "It's just been one of those days; started this morning ... As usual, the alarm blared and 1 was going to slap it off. So 'Smaclcl' It was my wife's face ... then, she croaks, What the hell? Christ, 1 had no clue. Don't 1 always sleep on that side? 1 asked. No, never! she says ... l'm sure 1 do ... so, this world is driving me crazy. 1 mean, is 'hot' usually on the right, or left? 1 guess I thought it was on the right, and you'd think I'd have learned by the time I got to brushing my teeth ... Why do 1 do these things?"

People were entering the office, rapidly talking to each other and walking as if they would continue through the walls. Emile heard everything in pieces, the conversations moved around, and he felt separate from the pace of things: "So, what makes it all so difficult ... " "There's a straight line of thought in there somewhere, I just can't fmd it... " "At that hour, my brain doesn't function. It's a problem, I know, but it's not my fault."

"The conference follows the tape ... " " ... straight down Hall Street, left at the light. That puts you near the capitol building ... " "Emile got it. I heard this guy's a real loser... "

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 85

"What can you expect anymore?" " ... a half-cup of rice right into the sauce and simmer." " ... right ... " "A real problem."

"Well, someone's responsible."

"Emile? Emile?" Mr. Fareweather spoke, and the office quieted a little while the lawyers gathered around their boss.

"It's ready," Emile said. "I shot the footage this morning. No problems."

"Great," Mr. Fareweather said,"We'll see it now."

The fine suits and cologne all passed by Emile and into the conference room. He shut the door, then started the tape. The monitor was at eye level with a large puffY stubble-coated face on the screen peering out at the room. Two eyes pointed in slightly different directions through greasy hair, and as the camera panned back, the head got sm,aller but a full body cast grew from below its neck. There was a man in full traction in a hospital bed, "Well, Mitch was going on about how expensive jeans are, blue jeans, just clothes, but you know how sometimes the mind can wander ... " Emile was standing still. Everyone faced the screen, drawn to it like sunfish, swaying casually in their chairs. The flickering lights from the video, with the sound pressing through, struck him as the only motion in the room.

"This cast is torture. I feel like I've been stuffed into a coffin, one-size-fits-all, Hal I may die in here yet .. .look outside the window, look at all those people. They must be going somewhere- that's the torture of it. I don't know where I'm going, but there they go."

People use their fmgers when they're bored; some hands on the table, some in laps or pressed against chins.

"Certainty! Like this eight-ball, this fucking eight-ball toy that my kid gave me last year. It's plastic and water, but it works. You ask it, 'What's up?' shake, it answers-no problem, no explanations. Simple answers: 'yesl nol try again.' Well, I was thinking, 'Should !?' and it said 'sure' and I went out and bought the biggest thing I could get my hands on: a car. The biggest one they had: a two-tone convertible, about twenty years old, from the seventies."

Emile knew he was just a mechanic, but he liked to think, not so much about his work but about everything else. He liked to see things connect, the wires plugged in and working. It made sense.

"Well now I'm sitting in this giant beauty with the goose next to me in the front seat. The damn thing squawked a lot at first and I had to tie one leg to the door handle where it settled down eventually. Yeah, it flopped around on the turns and tried to fly away. I wasn't hurting it any I don't think; though it started to make a kind of grunting sound, 'g-g-g-g-g ... ' here, in the back of the throat, like this, 'g-g-g.'" His head was bobbing, "I figured it was happy."

"So I'm driving down this new stretch of the highway where they don't have any lines painted yet- A real hazard! Yeah, and I'm shaking the eight-ball and asking

86 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

whether to tum right or left next. I mean, I could have gone to Canada I was thinking. Then I look up and see these big white letters, 'J ust ... Do .. .It!' I'm heading right at them.

"There was a terrible crunching sound. I couldn't feel a thing, but I could hear all that noise. It hurts to think about it. You know, the first policeman on the scene later told me there were still feathers floating around after he arrived. Poor goose, didn't even have a name ... morphine ... I think I need morphine ... where's the morphine?"

Everyone was amused and talking, but Emile was drawn hypnotically to the television hum. Emile found himself gripped-like a staggering shot in the arm, it was painful and comforting. It squealed in his ears.

"That's great!" said Mr. Fareweather. "Emile, you're irreplaceable, truly."

Mr. Fareweather had a gurgly voice and smiled a lot. "Emile, I'm sorry," he said, "But I'm going to have to send you back to the hospital again. A new call this morning, but you've done good work." Mr. Fareweather smiled. He pointed a finger like a gun at Emile, but before he pulled the trigger the staff formed a train leaving the room, talking about the video, and Mr. Fareweather followed.

"My father had a beautiful Ford convertible in the 60s. God, I miss that car ... " "guh-guh-guh!" One said cocking his head back, then laughing. They left in a line.

Horace walked out to the reception area and saw Wendy typing. She was one of the other paralegals and she sat in front of the typewriter, loading it with paper. "Dear Louis Palmer... " she typed.

"Tick, tick, tick... " Wendy typed from a handwritten sheet that told of a wonderful settlement. Emile couldn't see this, but he knew where the spaces were, where the paragraphs went, and when the lines ended.

"Tick."

Sometimes Emile had to type, too, and he never read any of it- it just went through. He could hear the mistakes, he could feel the "typos," he could see the words, but he couldn't read them, not enough to grasp them. It didn't work that way.

"See ya Wendy," Emile waved at her as he left the room.

"Tick, tick... " Emile was gone, but the room continued buzzing.

Emile had gotten to the right floor in the right hospital, and room C-74 was nearby. A small piece of paper was attached to the doorknob, "Tum clockwise," was written on it, and then, "Why are you in the hall?"

Inside, little yellow paper flags were on everything. Emile moved towards the bed where a woman was lying in a heap with a pen in one hand and a pad of post-it papers stuck to the side of her leg. She snored gently, sometimes skipping a tum. By the time he had reached the side of her bed, he noticed a few of the papers stuck to the bottoms of his shoes and bunched up in little piles around his feet. He pulled them off, read

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 87

what ones he could: "Water turned off?" one said.

"No more smoking! If you have to smoke, ask for nurse-push blue button beside head of bed, the head of the bed is against the wall, push blue button for a nurse ... if you want to smoke. " "Nothing's in here. What did you think was in here? ... push blue button for help," was posted to a desk.

He knew Edna was sick, mentally, but he did not know how severely. The issue was insurance; her daughter's house on fire. The file said Edna did it, and the firm was handling the case.

"Are you Geraldo?" she asked.

"Huh?" "They said 'Geraldo.' Are you Geraldo Rivera? You don't have a moustache. They said Gerald<:> was coming. Who are you?"

"Emile, from Fareweather, Cleary, and Kline."

"Well Emile sounds close, but it's not Geraldo, is it? You say the weather is clear?

Well open the curtains if the weather is clear. I want to look nice. Is that a TV camera?"

"No, no it isn't" Emile said, "It's for the law firm." Edna grunted, and Emile repeated slowly, "It's for a law firm, Fareweather, Cleary, and Kline."

"You think I'm stupid, don't you? I heard you, 'for firmness' you said. It's about time, I've complained about these mattresses before, really." She sat up in the bed.

Emile set up his stuff, pulling a chair over to the foot of the bed and brushing away the notes stuck to the seat and the arms. "Oh, you're not dumb. I wouldn't listen to you if I thought you were dumb." He was condescending to her, acting like she was a child, while he busied himself, playing with cords and equipment. "I want to hear your story."

"What story? Geraldo always has a story ready. Why should I give you a story.

Hey! This is my room. You give me a story!"

"Well, let's talk about the fire at your daughter's house. I'm interested in the fire."

Emile wasn't interested in fire, in fact it scared him, but the story was his job.

Edna looked all around the room. "My daughter?" she asked. "Her house?" She was trying to remember. "Oh, oh! Wait a minute. I have something. I do have something." She opened a drawer next to the bed. It was full of papers, and note pads, and books.

Emile panned the room with the camera, picking up papers, "Pull down, wait for click. Let go, wait for light ... Thursday, 15th, 2pm, call daughter. Say, "I am fine, but I could use some good food. The nurse a bitch, get another ... I love Paris in the springtime ... I am not stupid or crazy and it isn't just as easy to handle insanity as she thinks ... Why oh why do I love Paris and know the words, but can't remember the tune?"

Edna could not find it, "Damn it. Damn it to hell! These sedatives is what it is.

88 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Witch doctors! I don't need this."

"O.K., O.K.," Emile tried getting her attention. "Not to worry. No worries, just tell me what you know. What do you know, Edna?"

She looked at him with authority, "GeraldQ, I know people."

He centered on her face.

"It's people-they don't need love anymore, they just need to survive. That's why I'm here. It's not a matter oflove. Today's topic: 'Convenience, Not Love'."

"You caused an accident," Emile interrupted. "You need to be safe."

"Don't you tell me safe! I lived it. Gerry... " she paused, jutted her chin, stared at the ceiling, "You must understand that life has done its time in this body. I go through these sheets, I go through hospital after hospital, doctors and doctors, but I'm still here and these things still pass on. The house is burnt, so now my daughter has a burnt house, but it is still a house. This bed: new sheets, same bed. Do you see?

See this bed?" She slammed her hand down, "Ooh! Can't they do better than this? I think they can, but they don't. They don't, and I won't-" she stretched, "So, can I smoke during this?"

If she was addressing Emile, he didn't notice. He was caught by the way she looked around, as if seeing ghosts, watching every bit oflint in the air. She looked at the carr.era, "Now, I remember."

Sliding herself from the bed, she went to a lamp hanging from the ceiling near the window, and she went to it, pulling the cord up and down, the light going on and off, while she looked around the shade. "Let's see. Hmm. Somewhere ... " She pulled once more and the light came on, even though there was enough coming through the window, she left the light on. She turned her head to the camera, toward Emile, and still holding the cord, "Yes!" she said.

Walking to a landscape print painting on the wall, her feet scraped the floor, dragged a pile of crumpled yellow notes ahead of them and under them. Behind the painting was a pack of Carltons. "Ah, yes!" She was happy. On the edge of the bed, she lit one cigarette with a match she had drawn out of a pocket in her gown. She lit it, the match, and let it fall to the ground still smoking. "Mmm, Ah yes, my daughter." She stared out the window. "It's a beautiful house she has. Have you seen it?

Beautiful, you know. I can't exactly recall," she dragged once more on the cigarette. "I was in bed," her hand moved away from her mouth, and she set it on the bed, leaning on it. "It's just my memory. I don't remember." She pulled a note offofher shoulder.

The cigarette, pointing decidedly from her hand, was no longer lit.

"It was about this time though. This time of the day," she yawned. "There was a bunch of kids outside, throwing bricks or something. I just wanted to take a nap, and they were making all this noise. The sun wasn't out, exactly, but then there was this smoke."

Smoke was surrounding her head as she delivered the details, sputtering out words with bits of spit. "Yeah, that's when the smoke came." But, the cigarette was no longer lit. The smoke carried up from the side of the bed where the tip had fallen,

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 89

lighting some papers on the floor. She saw this and started laughing, some smoke had gotten in the shot and there was a trickle rising out of her nose.

"Yeah, the smoke!" She was pointing at it, "See, see the smoke, here it is. Hal I told you about the smoke!" Emile was looking for the blue button near the head of the bed, Smoke was coming from her slippers and ash was in the air. She had proved herself.

Late at work, Emile watched the tape of Edna, making sure all of the equipment was properly hooked up. He wasn't feeling well. While piles of colored cable surrounded him, he considered taking the next day off. The screen was showing the part where Edna pulled the lampcord up and down, on and off- her overexposed face being most of the picture, over and over.

He was the only one in the office with every fluorescent light in every room turned on. The brightness was supposed to keep him awake, but instead he found the glow soaking through every thing in the office. It sucked up air and crowded the space. He felt his lungs sucking in light, and Edna's face was pressing through the screen, blowing smoke.

"Air. I need more air."

Emile drove with all the windows down in the cold air; the battering wind sound came from all sides. His beaten, beige Plymouth Duster was not a conspicuous car.

People on the sidewalks didn't look to watch him drive by, police usually didn't bother him, it took regular gas, and it moved slowly. When Emile finally calmed, he pulled into the nearest parking lot, the one at the hospital. An enormous wall of pink concrete inscribed with windows was towering over the lot and he could only imagine how many rooms it must have. Most of the rooms were dark, some flickered with television light as iflit by candles. Some were fully lit, people moving around in them, working and fawning over patients, passing shadows.

"Patients," he thought. "Draining away slowly." A mist rose from nearby car exhaust and filled the scene. It was an eerie scene with the parking lot almost silent, but his thoughts weren't morbid, really, just thoughts. He didn't think of mangled bodies, or blood; he thought of a slow drowning, no strength to keep the air from compacting his body. No thoughts his own thoughts, but the feeling still strong. He could hear a faint noise, a knocking, some construction to the building, and he saw forms moving across the massive body of the hospital. People were walking in orange suits.

"Tick ... tick ... " and he was aware that all these things were around him, surrounded by three walls.

And, he was aware that it was getting late; he was tired and he'd soon have to pay for parking.

The office was buzzing. Morning traffic was heavier than usual; so to make up for lost time, much of the staff was working fast. The smell of coffee and perfume swept through the office, feet pounded the carpet, voices and coughing were trapped in the

90 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

small space, and the various copying machines and computers all ran loud. Wendy sat typing while on the phone, and Emile had isolated himself in the conference room with some of his equipment.

He was trying to order all of the cables and wires with the proper plugs. He taped and labeled, "blue cable IN ... blue cable OUT ... AUX thru ... " he began mumbling as he worked, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Wendy was passing back and forth, carrying papers, asking questions, gathering signatures. Once she passed the conference room and waved at Emile. She could hear pieces of what he was saying through the hall, "green cable for audio ... audio for sound ... screen for viewing ... "

"Air ... " He put a piece of tape on the monitor where it said "1V ON." He wrote his initials, "E.G. ON." He continued mumbling, "Jimmy Grimaldi ... " he said. It didn't make much sense to her. She knew no Jimmy. When Wendy passed the room again, Emile had come out, and she handed him a paper. "I need ten of these," she said. Through the doors, she saw that the windows were open, it was cold, but he kept pulling at his collar.

"Fine," he said, "Fine, ten. Good." The paper shook in his hand.

Someone had smudged the copier. A wide fingerprint smeared across the text as Emile inspected ten copies of a legal document. Each one had the faint image of a wide fmger on it. But, there were no lines; the fingerprint had no lines in it. He looked at all ten, they were all the same. Exactly the same. "How could they be?" he thought.

On his way out the door, he passed Wendy's desk. "Bye," he said. She thought she heard him say something else, too, but he was gone before she could get his attention.

The doors to the conference room were shut. As she appro.:ched them, she noticed and picked a bit of tape ofT of one of the brass knobs. "Turn counter-clockwise and PUSH," it said. Voices were coming from the rest of the office: ''I'd love to help you ... " "Hot is always on the left side ... " "It doesn't take a genius ..."

"Responsibility?" Someone said.

Wendy plugged in the VCR, and it started to hum. The room was covered in bits of tape and paper with words and letters all over them. Labels clothed the stack of equipment whose long torso rested on aluminum legs and was topped by two blue screens. A dozen cable tentacles wrapped around in spirals. A picture came on the screen, and she stared as the room filled with colored lights.

Next door Andrew Barnett told a musician client that you can't copyright something as vague as "four-beats-per-measure," but if you make four-beats-per-measure with an insttument, then you can try copyrighting it. It's the way the law works. "It's not the idea," he said, "It's what you do with it."

Ba.tJler â&#x20AC;˘ 91

Teen Idol, Found O.D.'d You were a marvelous infant, a golden Aussie egg, your falsetto destined to saturate fern bars worldwide. You grew to hear yourself pour out doors on Dodge City Drive, and your reverb washed over the mermaids in Santa Maria dei Miracoli. You said yes to everything, a porous stone in Eden, and poppies filled the sky until it rained fields you cooked white in a spoon over Zippo light.

Andy Gibb, you're gone from the radiowaves. You surfed out of your skin and got caught with Callisto (Zeus's lover-turned-bear) in the constallations: remote echoes of earth that lack the click of ursine claws, Farrah Fawcett hair, K-Tel's soundtrack of "The '70s," the halo of common air.

- Angela Sorby 92 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

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Barrett Heaton Baffler • 95

Downtown On The First Warm Day The air unclenches, buzzes, swells the city like a blush, cracks the ice around my lungs. There are colors to breathe again. I suck them in: a voice, the blue pull of the crowd, her breath red on my hip once. Below, the river sparkles as if about to sprout fountains.

The bridges hum and pulse, anticipate. Thousands of faces glance, pass on forever or look, speak; and out past the darkening windows of "Grill" (where six diners and counter men are drunk or speaking Greek) the towers shine: crystal candy and blueberry neon, lights orbiting them like clustered angels. The sky blue thickens and puddles above, deepens and spreads like a warm sleep, or knowledge of some lost object; the faces stay lit, remain. The days continue.

- Alec Dinwoodie

96 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Spheres There is a globe of rainy air clasped in the fingers of a tree outside a balcony. Squadrons of bees cruise through in formation, humming with a cool yellow majesty. Squirrels thrash at branches beyond, spin around in panic at the pale slivers of sky. The tree rustles this secret at the balcony, as if demanding attention.

The earth crawls in place, behind the sky's back. The sky ignores it, whirls around in all directions, peering out into space. Cities-scuffs fraying on the surface-submit embarrassed to the motion, falling sluggishly forward under shadows and flickers with downcast eyes. Citizens look up appreciatively, write poems.

There is a bubble where water can tumble and be swallowed, where mouth roofs throat. Sometimes wrinkles will shrivel it, twisting the skin like an old balloon. Water shies from the red splits between them, sucks down and away. They dry and tighten.

There were five orbits around me, a cloud of eyes and hands pulsing like a five-sectioned hean. They came to decay, obscure my vision, passed too close, collided. Now one tumbles by occasionally, askew like a comet.

There is blue porcelain that contains white air. It seals itself, steams the air vivid and blue. Dry spaces within soften, loosen, hang fresh and open; pores expel wires, shed them. At the core, I know the living pans of myself. I know myself whole, alone.

- Alec Dinwoodie Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 97

Watching the Zamboni Mike Newinh "Why do I love what fades?"

- Mark Strand The offices of the Univmity Wukly are socketed within the highest garret of a lonely old hall, once the women's club, now fallen into ornate disuse above the first floor cinema. One frozen January evening, I ascended the formal staircase to reach this remote suite, the ring of my workboots resonant as I climbed past the wide, empty rooms. I paused at the top, lulled by the wind's searing flute through the stone finials; threads of snow in the clotted diamonds of my boot treads trailed back the way I'd come, mirrored zigzag in the gleaming black wood of the stairs. I had walked eight blocks to stand here, my unscarved face scoured salmon-pink beneath the glittery night; now I was winded and thin veins of sweat were pooling underneath my red thermal shirt. Two nights previously, I had taken Christine's hand in the midst of a garish, blaring adventure movie, and afterwards we kissed, me holding her tight in the deserted cinema parking lot, our silhouettes iron beneath the sodium lamps. All today I'd dozed through classes, wandered dazedly, the word "girlfriend" a question on my gummed lips.

An abandoned formal hall lay between the newspaper office and where I stood, lit only by shards and splinters chipped from the streetlamps lining the boulevard and the headlights of cars hurrying past the quadrangles, towards the slums. This random illumination broke upon the polished stone floor, snagged in the warped old windows; the open door of the newspaper office was an oblong well of commotion and glare set gemlike into the enormous room's darkness. Figures jittered back and forth through the lit frame, rattling sheafs of pasteup, their gestures a pantomime of quarrel, insult. Christine was there, white light winking off her round spectacles, poured through her long blonde hair. She was tensely engaged with Joan, the editor-in-chief; there was a crisp viciousness to her movements, her hand slicing the air with a chrome fountain pen, bringing all my thoughts to a stall at the yearning to take her within my arms, to halt that intense motionness, if! even could.

I padded ghostlike through the gloom, meaning to surprise her, but Christine saw me as she whirled away from Joan, her lips icily compressed as if to deny the editor even the dignity of her response. Then her face lit up with an excited smile, the contempt instantly thawing; a warm red glow rose into her cheeks. She stepped from the office to meet me; she was still so new to me that her sudden closeness made me start.

She took my hand, tugging off my glove, and led me onto the landing of the narrow

98 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

back stairwell, steeped in true darkness save for the crimson glow of an EXIT sign.

She unzipped my coat, and with her dry palms she pushed me against the broad carved railing. We stared at each other in the bare tinted light; her eyes glinted, and 1 saw in her grin the same huge anticipation that 1 felt shuddering within my chest, just beneath where she'd laid her hands.

Christine's narrow face was graceful as a sailboat's bow, and charged with the burnished shine of steel silhouetted against night. 1 opened my mouth to stutter and she leaned forward and kissed me deeply. 1 awkwardly snaked my arms around her.

The unhurried dip of her body towards mine swayed me off balance and charred the memories of every other kiss I'd ever shared with a girl, the best seconds of the past now adolescent groping. 1 shook with want, my arms itching to tighten and wrench her close to me. My palm rested in her spare lower back, gutless to explore the full map of her curves, as the careless trill of her fingers upon the back of my neck suggested my trembling amused her. When she broke off the kiss, 1 missed it as I'd miss my own breath.

She leaned back in the sling of my arms. Her spectacles gleamed. "I wanted to do that so bad," she purred. 1 smiled dumbly. "I hope it won't break your heart if! lose my mind tonight," she said with a definitive flip of her hair, a soft blonde halo in the gloom.

1 chuckled uneasily like a virginal punk, then blushed, but she didn't notice. "Has it been really bad?" 1 asked.

"Christ," she said, sneering. Her voice roughened. "Charlie, 1 could just kill her.

Do you know what she tried to do?" she asked, her pretty mouth suddenly a mean gash, eyes wide. 1 shook my head, almost flinching. "Well, never mind! I'll tell you later," she muttered, staring sullenly off over my shoulder.

1 wanted to crush her to me then, know her as empirically as everything else 1 was then surrounded by - ice and snow and stone, the measured rise of quarrel and the silence of the sprawling sonorous hall, reflections of my last days in the classroom.

Clenching Christine in that dark stairwell, all 1 knew trembled like a weight on a wire between stupendous lust and the nearly shameful flood of pride that comes with desire's impending fulfillment. 1 had no idea at that moment how much anger and foolish sorrow lay just ahead for me to stumble through, a hailstorm of rage choking the sprint towards the end of this time in my life.

She kissed me once more hard on the lips, quick as the blur of an ascending bird, and turned away. 1 reached out to hold her a moment more, managing only to brush her smooth blouse; she eluded me like a dream slipped back into the past upon waking. Blinking, 1 followed her into the harsh light of the office.

The student newsies looked at me curiously, then quickly dropped their eyes to their computer screens or the pocked blue walls. Christine busied herself at a composing table with a splay of flimsy layout sheets, scribbled with pleading blue pencil slashes. She pushed through them, sorting with furious accuracy; the white lamps beneath the table's glass surface blazed up at her, robbing her cheeks of their flush.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 99

Her slim body tensed up as she worked, and she pressed the lips I'd kissed into a seam, faceted and chapped in the light.

Feeling like a loiterer, I wandered across the room. Christine's friend Sam looked up at me from his desk and grinned. "Hey there, Charles," he chirped. "You want a beer?"

"Sure," I said.

He reached over to a little fridge. "Christine?" he called. "Do you want a beer, Chris?"

She looked up, irritated, then glanced at me, her smile flashing quick as a signal lamp's shutter. "No thanks, Sam," she said shortly.

Sam opened two Bud longnecks and handed me one. I turned to the narrow leaded-glass window, feeling through the old panes a touch of the brutal winds outside. Below me and across the car-clogged street, the broad boulevard stretched, a sunken field glazed with a glittering crust of accumulated snow, flawless except for a few scraggly trails made by hardy students with boots, punching their way across beneath a galvanized sky. Upon the wind-scoured surface their tracks looked like the last trails left by the drowned and vanished. With winter the boulevard became a place abandoned, except for one portion upon which the university in a rare show of whimsy erected a ragged green shack and then flooded for skating. The crooked shack was dark; the only movement upon the arena's glassy floor was that of a Zamboni crawling across, bulky and serene as a mammoth in the cold and blown snow.

I wanted to be left alone, but Sam lingered at my side. "Check out that fucker out there on the tractor," he said. "It sure sucks to be him, right?"

It's a Zamboni," I said.

He looked at me, still grinning, but puzzled. "What'd you say?"

"It's a Zamboni; it's used to groom ice for skating. It's not a tractor at all."

"Oh-h-h-h." Sam's head bobbed wisely up and down; he swigged from his bottle to hide his smirk. "Hey, Christine," he called. "I bet you don't know what a Zamboni

. "

IS.

She glanced up again, her face grooved with impatience. Watching, I saw him wink broadly at her. She looked exasperated. "Shut up, Sam," she muttered, returning to the composing table's glare.

Chastened, Sam stepped away, returning to his glowing computer screen. Sipping the dregs of my beer, I turned again to the window. The Zamboni was a few hundred yards away, but the chill filled the night with a sparkling clarity; calm as I was, I sensed the pleasure that comes with seeing and comprehending everything. An old machine, its blue and white metal flanks were pocked from years of grit and ice chips, seams ragged where the paneling barely sheathed the enormous engine. The cab was open, leaving the driver cruelly exposed. Somehow he appeared relaxed, slouched back in the snow-streaked vinyl seat, one hand languidly gripping the tiny wheel, the other on the gearshift. He wore a skewed White Sox cap, and no gloves; his dark skin gleamed against the frozen white night like a vein of something warm and human

100 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

mined from the snow. Moving at a clip, he swung the Zamboni around in a sharp are, and I could see his chiseled, impassive face, focused only on piloting the machine forward into the swirling night.

I felt no empathy for the driver as I watched him from that office, hectic with bright light and disembodied hostile chatter. I imagined the surging racket of the wind mixed up with the low churning grind of the giant bladed wheels, slicing fine smooth grooves into the ice, imagined the dissolved ice spraying invisibly all round him with the sting of fine sand; none of it touched me. I was warm and privileged, and halfway to falling in love; I had hope as well that I was approaching the border of being wanted, being loved. I was so glad to not be that man driving the Zamboni across the empty and frozen boulevard. Later that winter I'd remember him, think of him going home after a ten-hour shift to a South Side basement apartment, to a game of whist and a heavy meal cooked by a woman who'd later take him into their bed and hold close to him until he had to leave again.

My good fortune in mind, I turned around. Without wanting to call her name, I very much wanted to see Christine's face. Her posture stiff, she was gazing down into the composing table's hot white haze, chipping at the skin of the scrambled pasteup sheet with a small razor knife. Her face was locked up in anger, her jaw square. At that moment she was not beautiful, but to call out to her would have been suddenly awkward, breaching the trust I'd signed on for when we unsteadily embraced, her tongue slid gracefully into my mouth. I looked away from her, again gazed from the frosty window. All round me the fortresslike stone building hummed as though in memorial to the romantic rituals of the museumed past.

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 101

What a Kiss Could Involve And then I started to kiss from nothing, out of nowhere, for some kind of passing thrill like eavesdropping or trying on a stranger's underwear, And you did it, too, everybody did it, we could see them in the bushes, under veils of leaves, exchanging small hollow oaths then moving on.

But I didn't know what a kiss could involve, what I could taste on your tongue, the intimacies, your mother's cooking smells, the picked scabs of your childhood, the warm coils of your intestines, the whispers when the lights were out. And what you licked of me, your tongue like a shelless snail in my mouth carving out a home, slipping under my door, peeling back my lips like covers, lingering over a pink crib and then pushing back still further, into the womb where I thought I could be alone.

- Wendy Kagan

102 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Honey You opened your mouth and I let myself in breath... lips ... tongue shirts and keys and couch Next to you I dreamt of you You opened your mouth and said I do Yes, my darling, I did too Yes, I remember that You opened your mouth screaming--but I was There Remember that, too?

I love him, just like you It's good for him You opened your mouth You had to say it?

I couldn't help it then I didn't love you You opened your mouth I guess you had to I didn't mean to hurt You just don't shut up You opened your mouth I can see you put them all in and gulping the water looking at your sweet little mouth

-A. P. Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 103

continu~d.from pag~ 31

The housemate makes a strangling sound as she forces the load from her cheeks to her stomach.

Sarah smiles. She glances at the housemate. then back at me.

I say. "We can give you a mole."

The housemate says. "Whatl" "It's a simple operation. I'm sure of it."

"Give her a mole?" says the housemate.

"Right here." I reach over and touch Sarah's lip just above the corner of her mouth. She draws back. "Not really a mole. A beauty mark" "You're crazy." This comes from the housemate. "It's true. You're off your nut."

My glance holds the coldest indifference. "If you'll excuse us." I say. "we want to be alone."

"With p~easure." The housemate struggles from her chair. her eyes bulging like eggs. She lifts her tray and begins squeezing toward a table where more of her friends shovel recycled garbage into their necks. She twists back toward me and wrinkles her face searching her vacant skull for more profane abuse. At a loss. she sticks out her tongue. I wave graciously.

"Wally?"

Sarah is at three-quarter profile. Her eyes flicker through her blond bangs and then drop to her salad. "If! have a mole. I'll look exactly like my sister."

"That's right. It's very simple."

"What if I don't want to look like my sister?"

It hasn't sunk in. The simplicity: the ease of the maneuver. She hasn't grasped my control of the situation. "It's a very simple operation." I say.

Her eyes are on me now. "You didn't answer my question."

Like a trauma victim. she needs to be humored. Sometimes good fortune is as hard to accept as tragedy. I smile and nod my head. "You already look like Megan.

Sarah."

"I don't have a mole."

"She just got the luck of the draw. Marilyn Monroe. Madonna. Cindy Crawford.

Megan Precious. The most beautiful women the world has known. They all have a mole on the upper lip. And you should too. You will. It's very simple."

"Evan said he likes me without one."

"That's because you're his wife's sister... You talked to him?"

She turns now. her eyes very green in the gray light that filters through the pane.

"He visited me."

"When?"

"He said you asked him to. Did you ask him to?"

"Well ... I said if he had a break in the filming ... Since he was in Boston. But I didn¡t .....

"Why. Wally? Why did you want that? You know I don't like him."

104 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

And there it is. Surfacing finally like a splinter through layers of skin: the cause of all the discomfort over the past 12 hours.

"That's what's been bothering you," I say. "Evan."

"And you're surprised that he doesn't tell you." She's gone again. Her focus, gone, out the window. "Surprised. The most obvious things."

"What do you mean?"

No response. Maybe the slightest suggestion of a shrug.

"Sarah?"

"Evan's not the angel you want him to be. He's not a model of all that is honest and true."

Now, I know how Sarah feels about Evan, and I know her propensity for judgment, but I can't let this pass. I say, "He's as dose as a man can come."

"No he's not, Wally. He's not dose. If you opened your eyes you would see that."

"He's the man who made my life possible. He opened all the doors for me."

"Wally, maybe he opened the doors because he wanted to step through and sleep with your mother."

Her face turns while she says this, and we stare at each other for a considerable amount of time, during which her expression shifts from violent and angry to sad and maybe tired, probably in response to something she sees on my face which I am mercifully spared from viewing.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"It's okay" I shake my head and grin. "You're not the first. I mean, when he lived with us people thought... and I can see how it might have seemed ... People have a hard time accepting that a person can be as selflessly considerate as Evan was to us."

"I know , Wally. It was stupid of me. " "Sarah! Please. Really. It doesn't bother me. I know the truth. And I know that you love me and would never say anything to intentionally hurt me, and it's my fault for asking Evan to check on you because I do know that you don't like him, and it's amazing how dumb I can be when I'm only trying to ... " And the rest of my words are muffied by the shoulder of her sweater because she's holding me, now, and we're holding each other, clinging like koalas.

This has been our first spat. I hold her tighter. True lovers with a lover's spat. And now the inevitable sweetness of reunion that follows.

My father died when I was eight. His death was quite simple and straightforward as far as water deaths go. He drowned. He was one of the victims who contribute to the statistic about boating accidents which expands every year. Evan didn't own a boat yet, this one was rented. I don't remember the trip, although I know I was there.

Perhaps I suppressed the memory, or perhaps I just slept through most of it, as I tended to do on those trips. It happened at night, in late fall, the water was cold. Perhaps my father was drinking, as he and Evan tended to do on those trips. It's all speculation now, nearly fourteen years later. There's no going back. The events of the past

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 105

recede with every heart-beat, until they become as insignificant as movement at the wrong end of a telescope.

I had adj us ted to the sudden disappearance of my father with remarkable elasticity. Everyone was impressed. At first the psychiatrist to whom my mother sent me insisted it wasn't real. He was convinced that I was suppressing the pain and that it would effect me in other ways until I released it. But my life continued on course. I progressed in school. I had friends, I played sports, I contributed in the third-grade reading circle. I didn't cry excessively but I didn't never cry either, which would have been just as suspect, no doubt, to my psychiatrist. Finally he was forced to shrug his shoulders and relinquish my case.

I'm smart enough to know that the reason I adjusted so quickly and completely to the loss of such a powerful part of my life, was because Evan filled the space. I knew the difference, of course. I had experienced Evan with my father enough to recognize differences Peyond the physical. But he worked at it, and I worked at it, and between the two of us we managed, somehow, to ftIl the gaps ... to keep the picture whole.

It's true that Evan lived with us for a period after the accident. He wasn't married.

He had no connections except for his job, and he thought it might help my mother and myself. His room was the living room. His bed was the pull-out couch. I know this because I remember the period and I remember, specifically, pushing the couch back together so that I could watch television. This was the price I paid to watch television. I had to flip the sheets and blankets together and fold the couch back into itself.

Evan and my mother spent a lot of time together during the first two years after the accident. They always seemed to be getting ready to go to this or that event in the city. An embarrassing memory I have is of one time accusing my mother of neglecting me for Evan. I can't remember how I said it, or exactly why, but I can remember her reply word for word, and how her eyes misted when she said, "Waldo, I can't believe you would judge my only friendship after all I've been through. I let you have your friends don't I?" She certainly did. Often she would be the one arranging for me to visit some schoolmate or other. I spent many nights at sleep-overs, watching late movies and having pop-corn fights just like the other kids. My mother was right. I had no business judging her life when she tried so hard to supply me with a normal up-bringing.

But on the nights when I remained home, when my friends were away, or busy, it was difficult, lying awake and waiting for the sound of Evan's car to roll into the gravel drive, the sound of their giddy voices, maybe laughter, subdued so as not to wake me.

Then he didn't live with us anymore. He was still there much of the time, but he didn't spend the nights. Maybe he had found a girlfriend and was living with her.

Perhaps he was simply working more. I'm sure he was struggling toward becoming the pivotal figure which Pierce and Shully made him. And he was only thirty-two or thirty-three years old. My mother didn't talk about it. She was lonely, I know ... I knew even then. And tense. Once I asked her where Evan had been the previous week

106 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

and her voice was very strained as she answered, "Not here."

It was during this period that my mother began to date Mr. Humphreys. When Evan found out about it, he came over and there was a fight on our lawn. Mr. Humphreys drove away. I heard my mother screaming and worked my courage to the point where I cracked the door for better aural access. Evan said, 'We're still a family, Rose. I won't allow you to destroy it."

"A family?" My mother's tone rose toward hysteria. "We? A family? He might have married me. Are you ever going to marry me?"

I held my breath. I knew that if Evan married my mother and our worries would vanish. I crossed my fingers. But the only answer was the sound as the front door opened and then closed, and through my window I watched Evan leaving again. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how difficult it must have been for Evan to maintain a respectful distance from his dead brother's widow.

This event marked the end of Mr. Humphreys, but not my mother's dating career. I grew accustomed to fmding strange men in our living room. My mother was still a very attractive lady at thirty-two years of age. The men became progressively more attractive and progressively younger, but they each only lasted, at most, a couple of months .

That fall, I turned fourteen and went to Hotchkiss with partial scholarship. Evan paid the rest. During breaks I would sometimes go home, but more often I would stay on campus. It seemed easier than dealing with my mother and her boyfriends. On rare occasions, Evan would allow me to stay with him in the city. He had a large apartment, on the twenty-eighth floor of a Fifth Avenue building, with a doorman, a guest room, and a glass wall overlooking the park. Usually there would be a woman staying with him, usually a younger woman, always breathtakingly beautiful.

The summer after my freshman year, I lived at home with my mother and her latest companion in Ashton, Connecticut. We spent the time in perpetual alternation between fighting and ignoring. It was a period of such tension and stress that I swore to never return for an extended time, and I kept this promise during my remaining three years at Hotchkiss.

My sophomore summer I stayed at Seth Drivel's house in South Clinton. Seth lived by railroad tracks, with which he liked to experiment. We would balance coins on the smooth metal and later find them, spit to the side, round as a wafer, flat as copper paper. Sometimes we would lie on the embankment, dose to the tracks, when trains whipped past. And then it would be gone, more suddenly than a nightmare, leaving a sunny summer day and two children dazed and gasping in its wake.

It was during my first summer after Hotchkiss that my life began to take course. I convinced Evan that I wanted to intern at Pierce and Shully. I told him that I had nowhere else to go. This was the truth. I told him I would only go to New York Uni-

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 107

versity, ifhe allowed me to stay in the city for the summer. Evan let me stay in his apartment. He had reached the point where he was fully in charge of a production crew, and had begun traveling, shooting commercials in various locations. I kept his apartment clean and acted as his answering service. I also worked at the Pierce and Shullyoffices three days a week, typing copy and filling forms. Once, in August, between major shoots, Evan brought me to watch the fIlming of a Chanel spot. He introduced me to the model, his current girlfriend. She said. "So, Waldo, are you going to be a director, like your father?"

I looked at Evan, but he just shrugged his shoulders and raised an eyebrow.

I said, "Yes. Ma'am, I certainly hope so."

I stopped smoking cigarettes, which I had never enjoyed. I drank Scotch from Evan's liquor cabinet. I sat by the glass wall, in Evan's leather chair, and watched the summer sun warm Central Park. I sipped Scotch and talked to Evan's friends as if! knew them. I was wildly happy.

In June, soon after I had moved in, Evan had a gathering at his apartment, both in celebration of my graduation from Hotchkiss, and to acquaint me with his friends from Pierce and Shully. My mother showed up. She wore her hair twisted on the top of her head in a style I had never seen before, but then again I hadn't seen her since the previous Thanksgiving. She wore a tight dress. She wore lipstick the color of blood and pearls around her neck. The man who's arm she held was tall and square and bored. He sat in a chair and chewed gum and only moved to finger his hair from his forehead. He didn't look much older than I was.

When my mother left, not long after she arrived, Evan nudged one of his associates and said, "Chippendales?" Evan's associate smiled into his cup. "Nah," he said.

"Dial-a-hustle. " And, although I didn't get the joke, I laughed with them because when she first arrived, my mother had said something which had sent my mood spinning toward euphoria, and which gave anything said or done the happy hue of serendipitous potential.

When she first arrived, my mother abandoned her escort, and came directly across the room to where Evan and I were standing. I let her hug me and then she stepped back and studied my face. She said, "Is this what you want, Waldo? To be here?"

"He's a grown boy, Rose." This came from Evan. "He makes decisions."

She ignored him, watching my face until I nodded. Then she drew a breath and looked up at Evan. "Well, you got him," she said. "What you wanted." She looked at me, then at him. "A virtual clone."

I graduated from New York University with dubious distinction in my major of Media Communications. Dubious because, besides my advisor, I don't think one of the professors under whom I studied would have known me by name. Of course, that fact has become incidental. I did the work. I received the degree. The piece of paper is

108 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

tangible and permanent proof of the academic success which helped to secure my fulltime position at Pierce and Shully. All other possible pasts are nothing but maybe and might-have-been. It all fades beneath the surface of now. And now I am happy. I am strong. I am in love. Tonight will be the night I reach for my destiny.

Sarah leaves me to attend a class.

I say, "What sort of class meets on Saturday?"

She says, "Acting. It's an acting class, and we meet whenever the teacher returns from New York."

I say, "I thought you didn't like acting."

She says, "It's in my blood. I have to act."

I say, "I thought it was in your sister's blood. Not yours."

She shakes her head, disappointed in my lack of imagination. She says, "She's my sister, Wally. My twin. We share the same blood."

After she leaves I wander the campus until the thought that I might be mistaken for a student drives me indoors. Soon I find myself dialing a phone in the student union. "Hello." A generic male voice.

"This is Waldo Kimbal. Can I speak to my mother, please?'

"Who?" "My mother... Rose. Can I speak to Rose?"

Pause. "Hold on." His suspicion is tangible. I hear him breathing, still holding the phone to his ear, listening for clues. Then the rustled sound of movement, and I hear murmuring, low murmuring, and then another pause, and louder rustling, and my mother's voice comes amplified into my head like a bad hangover.

"Hello? Waldo? How are you? How's you're mother? I haven't talked to her for ages?"

I say, "Mother?"

She drops her voice, hissing venom through the wires. "I told you not to call me here."

I say, "Mother, I have to ask you something."

"Well what is it?" Raised again in sing-song duplicity. "Of course you can ask me."

"Mother. Did you ever sleep with Evan?"

"What?"

"Did you and Evan ever sleep together? When he lived with us?"

Sing-song. "Oh Waldo, silly. You know the answer to that."

"Mother. Did you?"

"And how is Evan? I haven't seen him in simply eons. It's been so long."

"He's fine. Did you, mother?"

"Well tell Evan I send kisses. I'd love to chat but really, Waldo, I'm so rushed."

And then, hissing through the wires, "Why don't you ask him, Waldo. If you don't

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 109

believe me."

I say, "I believe you, Mother." But I'm speaking to plastic. My voice curls uselessly into my own ear.

She's right. The question is rhetorical. I know the answer. I remember folding the couch to watch television. I even remember Evan on the open couch, wrapped in sheets and snoring into his armpit. That was where he slept.

So I don't know why I dial his number. I watch my finger pressing the sequence and then I listen to the ring, the phone ringing in his apartment in Manhattan, with dull detachment. When his machine answers, I listen to his recorded voice, then the beeps, and then the silence reserved for my message. I had nothing planned. Even if he had answered, I probably would have remained mute and unconnected.

I convince Sarah to abandon campus for our evening meal. I say, "Anywhere.

Anywhere you choose. Price is no object."

We wind up at a pseudo New York cafe, with wobbly wooden tables, stained-glass sculptures, and local art work on the walls. The menu boasts an array of open-faced sandwiches as well as homemade vegetable soup and eggplant lasagna.

I say, "Is this what you want? Are you sure this is where you want to eat?"

"This is exactly what I want," says Sarah.

She's still mad. It's obvious. Still resentful of my patriarchal concern. It was downright stupid to ask Evan to drop by her school. But there's nothing to do now but to wait with optimistic patience. I finger the crushed velvet box in my blazer pocket. My ace in the hole. But not yet. The moment will present itself.

"So order whatever you like," I say. "It's practically free food. Get one of everything. Or perhaps you would rather that I buy the whole place."

There's a window beside us, and the dusk light reflects gray in her eyes. Her hair is cool and pale like her skin. She pulls her bangs to the side and slides the longer strands behind her ear. "You don't have that kind of money," she says.

"But I have credit. Spotless, unbounded credit."

She closes her eyes, relaxes her whole face, and then opens them, and says, "You sound just like Evan. You both think you can buy the world."

"Ah, but he really can."

"Look, I just don't want to talk about Evan. All right? Is that okay?"

I've blown it again. How could I speak positively about the man who is cheating on her sister? I clench my teeth and stare at the menu, searching for a permanent change of subject.

"And that goes for you too. I don't want you to think about him anymore. You're obsessed with the man. Just let it go. No questions."

I know her reference. I look up, and she's watching me. Her eyes are set with conviction. I say, "Sarah, he has to tell us. It affects us all."

"How does it affect us, Wally?"

"She's your sister. What affects her affects you affects me."

110 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

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"What ifI asked you, Wally? What ifI asked you not to pursue it? For her sake.

What if I said I don't want my sister to get hurt."

"But Sarah ... I thought you wanted her to find out. You said once that it would serve her right. " She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, opens them. "Drop it for me, Waldo. Will you do that? Please?" Her head tilts urgent imploringly. Her eyes are wide and beseeching. There is nothing I wouldn't do for this woman.

I say, "Of course, Sarah. If that's what you want."

And I mean it. I won't ask him. There's simply no need. I won't ask him about the voice in his apartment last Wednesday night, and I won't ask him about his relationship with my mother. The past is gone. The past has no bearing on our lives today.

And yet I remember the boat. I remember the feel of the wind, and the hiss of the hull through the water. I remember the heavy canvas of the sails. I remember that when I slept, at night, sometimes, I could hear my father and my uncle on deck. Perhaps we were anchored in a bay or inlet. Perhaps we were still sliding through the night. I could hear them above me, drinking and laughing ... or sometimes fighting.

One of them always at the wheel. The feelings I felt during those trips are hard to describe and vastly contradictory. When it was good, my father and Evan created a space of perpetual harmony, with complete understanding of each other and the world around them. When it was bad, they became two identical magnets, both negatively charged. During those times, the air scraped against itself and split with lightning. Their feet stomped the deck and their shouts crashed like recalcitrant rams.

When it was bad, I cringed in my bunk. It seemed the universe could not contain such dueling passion.

When I come back from the bathroom that night after brushing my teeth, the housemate has appeared. She's sitting on Sarah's bed with her arm around Sarah's shoulders.

"What's going on?" I ask.

The housemate scowls at me. Her eyes fling flagrant accusation. "I think Sarah wants to be alone for a few minutes," she says.

I say, "What did you do to her? Why is she crying?"

The housemate says, "Would you get a clue?"

The audacity of the statement compounded by the context shoots pure hatred through my bloodstream. I step forward, and then Sarah raises her face. Her cheeks shine with moisture.

She says, "It's not her, Waldo. I'm okay. I'm just...nothing. I'm okay."

I look from one to the other, both of them watching me, and everything slides into place. It all makes sense. The common denominator behind Sarah's moodiness and her reluctance to talk and her lack of appetite and her distance. Even her lack of passion. It's a female thing, the oldest one in the book. The monthly curse.

112 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

I take a step back, and nod my head. I say, "I understand. Say no more."

So they head for the bathroom and I pace her room feeling like a fool. How inconsiderate can a person be? How out of touch? And then I remember my final redemption. The time has come.

I place the small red box in the center of the pillow, in the center of the bed. It belongs on a pillow, floating.

Sarah comes back into the room, and she sees it right away and she stands there, staring at the box on the pillow as if she were to blink it might vanish. Then she looks at me. Her eyes are wide and revealing in a way I have never seen. She shakes her head in disbelief.

"Go on." The words wheeze between the beating of my heart.

And she does. She crosses to the bed and she lifts the small box and rubs her fingers against the crushed velvet.

"Open it," I say.

She shakes her head, not looking at me. She's in shock. Locked in disbelief. Mraid to accept. She says. "I can't."

I abandon my speech entirely. I can hardly breathe, never mind orate. I say, "I want you to marry me, Sarah."

And then she looks at me and I'm afraid she might start to cry again. Her face displays complete vulnerability. Her eyes are dark and ancient. She says, "I'm not the person you think I am, Waldo."

Now I remember the night it happened. I remember the storm that whipped rain against the sails. I remember clearly the fighting, the shouts. I still hear the splash of a body hitting salt water. As clear as a movie I emerge from my bunk to see Evan's face illuminated by the compass light, dripping rain water, twisted with rage. The wind heeled the boat and he had one foot braced against a side cleat, and water sizzled around us. I remember the blackness beyond our foaming wake. Blackness as solid and eternal as the loss I would refuse to accept.

I remember his voice then, and I remember knowing, instinctually, that a shift had occurred. A transfer of power under which I was to live indefinitely. "Stand by to come about," he said. "Man overboard."

Behind the apartment where Sarah lives is a line of scraggly trees, and a grassy bank which drops down to the train tracks. This is where, at night, they reconnect freight for its next destination. I sit on the rise, with my arms wrapped around my knees, crying like I've never cried before. Like I'm trying to suck the sky into my stomach.

My whole body contracts and shakes as I swallow air. I lie in the cold grass and relax myself to great, heaving sobs, and then I'm not really crying anymore. I'm an agent for something larger which flows through me like water.

Since this isn't a commercial juncture, they don't bother to mediate the coupling

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 113

of the freight cars. They simply reverse at a moderate speed until the car slams into the line. Men dance and jump, dark shapes on the tracks, securing connections. Then the engine wrenches away with a sickening screech and trundles toward the next objective.

When I feel like I can stand, I plant my feet and lever myself from the grass. I'm weak, but erect. I descend the embankment, to the tracks, and then along the tracks, away from the trains. Gravel crushes beneath my feet. I step over the rails, crossing to the far set which aren't used for rearranging connections, but which are reserved for the trains which come thudding periodically past, intent with speed. The metal of the rail is smooth and cold and trembles beneath my fingers. I balance the ring in the center of the rail. The gem shines a glimmer of faint objection but I turn away.

114 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

Baffler • 115

The Packaging of a Literary Persona The world's only negative review of The Secret History by twenty. something superstar Donna Tant, Knopf, 524 pages.

By Maura Mahoney I'm Nobody! ! Who are you? ! Are you Nobody - too? ! Then there's a pair of us? ! Don't tdl- they'd advenise - you know! ! How dreary to be Somebody! How public, like a Frog! To tell one's-name-! the livelong June ! to an admiring Bog!

Surely you've heard of Donna Tartt? Judging from the hoopla surrounding the publication of her first novel, Th~ Suut History, Tartt is definitely a somebody.

Which is not to say that she would disagree with the sentiments in Emily Dickinson's paen to obscurity. Tartt's ever-so-eccentric love of privacy - it's right up there with Michael Stipe's - naturally received plenty of press. In fact, Tartt could probably recite the poem for you. Her ability to recall reams of poetry ("I know 'The Waste Land' by heart. 'Prufrock.' Yeats is good") is extolled with high seriousness in one national magazine's typical profile of the 28-year-old author - evidently to convey some sort of demonstrable Girl Scout badge of intellectual virtue.

But it's hard to imagine her quoting the decidedly unglamorous Dickinson. The Tartt media blitz made it abundantly clear that Emily simply doesn't rate as a literary model. In order to appeal to glossily literate, expensively educated consumers (usually neo-yuppies hearkening back to undergraduate intellectual purity), publicity packages like Tartt's (and Mcinerney's and Ellis's) must espouse a canon more narrow and more predictable than anything anywhere outside the campus of St. John's College.

To get Sam and Libby to put down the N~ York", tum off PBS and shell out the cash for a work of fiction, the book-hustlers present today's promotable "bright young things" as s"ious artists. It is a role which, spurious or not, cannot help but ring false - not only because it is premature, but because it is so clearly prefabricated.

This reification of the writer requires the author/product to pose on the literary landscape cloaked in ennui, incessantly (but carefully) invoking artistic influences, establishing an aura of painstakingly consumer-friendly intellectual sophistication. The strategically chosen literary references the young writers spout reveal that the paramount goal is not artistry, but marketability, because the allusions consistently smack

116 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

of cafe conversation - they're deep, but not too deep. They entice, rather than challenge.

The publicity frenzy that has lifted Tartt and her colleagues to the top has established a literary hierarchy for the ad pages. It has created a world in which neophyte authors vie to be the Fitzgerald of the generation, a world in which indeed all writers from the Twenties reign supreme, where Twain and Shakespeare (perhaps because they are so surpassingly famous) manage to get an occasional nod, and where Ayn Rand is actually considered to have merit. The result is an unquestioned triumph of personality over art, image over intellect. Donna Tartt, a budding literati, cannot possibly invoke Dickinson to demonstrate possession of a lonely artistic soul. She has to stick to Salinger.

Writers have always cultivated a persona, of course. But Tartt, who received a $450,000 advance from Knopf, is not your ordinary first-time novelist. A Bennington College chum of gross-out-hack turned First-Amendment-martyr Bret Easton Ellis, she is represented by his agent, ICM's Amanda Urban. Her book soon grabbed the attention (and the cash) of Alan Pakula's Pakula Productions, which snapped up the screen rights. The novel has been eclipsed by the event of its publication.

With all this money on the line, Tartt's handlers could not simply tout a "hotly awaited highbrow chiller" alone. Instead we are getting a full-blown portrait of the artist as a sort of post-punk, brainy Holly Golightly in the pages of Mirab~lIa, hople, Entertainmmt Wukly, Vanity Fair, Esquir~, et al., and even in the more "serious" publications. She's what every swooning English major ever wanted to be - she's intellectual, and she's hip. She dresses in college-bohemian high style. Tartt may well turn out to be the best thing that's happened to vintage clothing since Cyndi Lauper - in one spread she's prancing about in a black frock, long pearls, and of course, Doc Martens ("the author's winsome pose masks a wicked intelligence"), elsewhere she's sporting a severe tailored suit complete with trendy polka-dot necktie ("if her appearance offers any hint of the darkness within, it's in the way her pale face is framed by her nearly black hair, a contrast suggestive of something vaguely gothic").

Happily, no one quite brings up Louise Brooks while publicizing Tartt, but Vanity Fairs James Kaplan does his best, describing her as a kind of boy-girl-woman in her lineaments, with lunar-pale skin, spooky light-green eyes, a good-size triangular nose, a high-pixieish voice. With her Norma Desmond sunglasses propped on her dark bobbed hair...and her everpresent cigarette, she is somehow a character out of her own fictive creation: a precocious sprite from a Cunard Line cruise ship, circa 1920-something.

All it then takes is talk ofTartt's answering machine, on which T. S. Eliot intones 'The Waste Land,' (!) and Kaplan is quite swept away. He breathlessly repeats much of the poetry she knows, mentions that she was a quirky, formal child, who used "I

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 117

Pop-

Tartt

Richard F. Kolbusz, Jr.

I have just become a part of the pUblicity campaign for Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History. The book has been demanding my attention - not because of ~s content, of which I am safely ignorant, but its cover. I had to make a second trip to the bookstore to confirm that the cover was actually the way I remembered it. I picked up a copy of the novel and ran my hand over ~ as if it were a Gianni Versace suit. The book looks damn good in ~s jacket. It may, in fact, have the periect jacket, a cover which symbolically represents not only the work but the promotional campaign behind t The dust jacket of The Secret History is transparent. The mle, borders, and blurbs are printed onto clear plastic that hovers over a gold-tinted photo of a Greek statue's head. Slip the dust jacket off, and only the photo remains. It is, in effect, a disposable title.

While clear covers can of course have a certain aesthetic potential, I see no artistic principles being upheld in the cover

118 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

should like" instead of "I would like," (Tartt smugly comments about this riveting evidence of precociousness: "It was starting even then. Child is father to the man") and rhapsodizes about the "small, hard-drinking, southern writer, a Catholic convert, witheringly smart, with an occluded past, sadness among the magnolias."

In case readers don't get the message, the article is titled "Smart Tartt. " And the role is played out everywhere: her "eyes, animated by the pleasure of a good phrase, widen out of their squinty concentration into a clear and guileless green" as she confides her love ofT. S. Eliot answeringmachine message to Mirabalds Paul Gediman. She asserts that her life "is like Candide's," talks "cheerfully of life and death, dread and evil, in a voice both high and smooth, tuned to a fine Mississippi pitch," and carries on a determinedly post-modern conversation that "teems with references from Stephen King to Niewche_" Whew. Donna Tartt is likely to remind one of nothing so much as an English grad student who's been studying too long for her comprehensives. She was actually a classics student at Bennington, and her book is about a group of classics majors with distinctly Dionysian interests. So why not record her quoting Virgil at length (I'm sure she could) or photograph her standing beside a Doric column or a wine-dark sea?

Because, faster than you can say Thucydides, someone in publicity recognized that Suetonius will lose to Stein in the image marketplace any day. There are a lot of former English majors out there, and Tartt is being served to them as a reminder of the good old days when they, too, sat around and read the NortonAnthology. She is the embodiment of the post-collegian's intellectual fantasy.

This cultivated image does a great disservice to Donna Tartt, and to Th~ S~crd History. She is unquestionably one of the most gifted members of the new gliterati, and her book is an elegantly written, fast-paced read. Richard Papen, the narrator, gives the lyrical confession of a group of classics majors at a small Vermont college who idolize their professor and resolve to repli-

cate a bacchanal. Four of his friends succeed in attaining Dionysian ecstasy, but their orgiastic embrace of the sublime results in the inadvertent slaying of a passerby.

When it looks as though one member of the group may squeal, the others, with Richard, calmly plot to murder him. Undoubtedly, the novel is nothing if not sensational.

But a lyrical prose style and attention-grabbing plot cannot make up for serious literary deficiencies. The book is flawed by a pronounced lack of credibility. It is simply inexplicable why drippy, weak-willed Richard whose (what else?) suburban upbringing is supposed to be enough reason for his desensitized soul, not only would be drawn to this arrogant, smart-aleck lot, but also why he would go along with their chilling plans and what, for that matter, any of them would see in him. The characters' putative glamour is a donnee in Tartt's eyes, but not in the reader' s. We are informed of their charisma but do not experience it, in great part because the characters are remarkably cliched; for example, it will come as no surprise that the Southern twins are (again, what else?) incestuous. The clique's hubris is utterly manufactured, and its fall therefore never transcends abstraction. Ultimately, what is meant to be a tale of innocence lost, glamour tarnished, and intellectualism gone berserk succeeds only as a pageturner, and as 1992's recreational equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons or Th~ D~ad Pods Sociay.

And though Th~ S~cr~t History is certainly a testimony to the love of learning, what is intended to be viewed as the group's high-minded devotion to scholarship often merely comes across as irritating pretentiousness. The characters are lifeless imitations of what smart people are supposed to be like - and Tartt is far too impressed with them. Her frequently gratuitous classical and modern literary allusions could have been less grating if Tartt had injected even the slightest hint of self-knowing humor, but her tone is consistently reverent and annoyingly superior. You know you're in trouble when an author prefaces her list of acknowledgements with an apology that she's running "the risk of sounding like a Homeric catalog of ships."

01 The Secret History. Perhaps everything contained on the dust jacket - the logrolling blurbs, the Donna-Tartt-aged28 photo - is meant to be ephemeral. Remove them and you have only the cover design and the book's "permanenr t~1e printed on the spine, the way one would encounter n on a library shelf. I doubt, however, that this is the case.

I may be judging the cover wUhout ever getting to the book. It doesn't mailer. The dust jacket of The Secret History is transparent and the marketing campaign behind ~ is equaUy transparent. Wrth the allied forces of agents (ICM), publisher (Knopf), and HoHywood (Pakula Productions) supporting n, this book can never be judged solely for its content. It becomes product, a disposable title, conceivably overrun and condemned to the bargain bin.

Donna Tartt has been strategicaDy placed in most of the fashion and Inerary magazines during the past month; she has been inescapable. She looks different in every photograph, mutating between periodicals, as if she were enrolled in the Cindy Sherman Wnness Protection Program. The photos suggest a formidable, mysterious glamour, like the weird women on "Twin Peaks¡ (I should state categorically that Donna Tartt is the thinking man's Sherilyn Fenn). I don't know whether or not k is important that she can drink most

Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 119

men under the table. It makes me imagine the promoters playing "Mississippi Queen" in the background at her readings and book signings. The arnounttl'.at Knopf paid for the rights, $450,000, a~hough arguably a payment for quality, stiR cOliributes to the hype and is more significant than any review or recommendation. "If Knopf's w~ling to put down nearly a haN miNion on this woman, she must be something," or so the conventional wisdom goes.

The Secret History is, like the novels of Douglas Coupland, something I might like to read; but I am nOi sure I want to support the marketing end of ~ with my cash (it costs $23). The novel remains to me a pop tart: something that tastes great, comes in an ingenious package, and is assuredly fortified w~h vkamins and iron.

120 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

(Despite all the obscure and not-so-obscure classical allusions, don't bother looking for "semper ubi sub ubi," it isn't here; this is a highbrow chiller, remember?) And while there is nothing more enjoyable than an intellectual strutting her stuff (cf. A. S. Bayatt's Possmion), "Smart Tartt" gives ample demonstration that parroting and posing do not equal erudition.

And yet in spite of all this, the sages have spoken: Donna Tartt is a star. Everybody says so. Quite simply, the praise heaped upon Th~ S~cr~t History cannot be explained away as sheer critical joy at the discovery of an elegant new wordsmith. The book's flaws make it clear that criticism itself has been thrown out the window in favor of celebrity-making. The commodification bandwagon rolls merrily along. Young, professional, liberalarts alumni, nostalgic for the life of the mind while experiencing the harsh truths of the life of the paycheck, have been targeted to consume the T arttian version of their most cherished myth - if it's elitist, it must be art.

But Donna Tartt is no Eudora Welty, at the very least not yet, no matter what the commentators pant.

The hype manifests that the publishing industry does not know - or perhaps simply does not care - to distinguish between best-sellers and literary masterpieces, between cleverness and profundity, between John Le Carre and Joseph Conrad. Market status once again triumphs over literary stature. For all its references to Pliny, Homer, Milton and others, its Fitzgeraldian glamor and mock-Eliot portentousness, and its great, big, flat-out Faustian themes, Th~ S~cr~t History is resoundingly a work of entertainment, not a work of art.

Pinning the label on the generation is one of the culture business' favorite and most profitable games. Ever since the fabrication of the initial "youth movement" by people like Pepsi and adman Peter Max, you have sought names for the young, prefab identities by which people may be molded, manipulated, and sold for the rest of their lives.

This process now seems so natural to you, the original TV-produced generation, that you have created a national pseudo-hysteria over our seeming lack of definition, publicly wringing your hands over the enigmatic youth of today, wondering if maybe you're finally on the wrong side of "the gap," and providing an enormous market for the tidal wave of magazines, movies, and sitcoms purporting to speak for the "twenty-somethings." Columnists churn out articles packed with meaningless speculation, anchormen shake their heads sadly, and 60s veterans intone gravely on the nature of youthful idealism, each contributing to the flood of silly ideas about 'generations' and how they are constituted. Ordinarily this bizarre pseudo-debate would be amusing - what with its high, serious tone and its benevolent, advice-giving posturing - was it not so pathetically and openly just the simple whining of a people obsessed with youth about to approach middle age.

But try as you may, you can't seem to decide which label really fits us. Just a few years ago we were the violent, criminal generation, raised on a steady diet ofTV crime and frightening the Eyewitness News crew with thrown rocks. Then we were the practical and conservative generation, happily corporate, voting by the herd for Reagan and voicing opinions whose lack of idealism was supposed to send Sixties People reeling in astonishment. How well we remember the colorful graphs that announced that version of the story from the front page of USA Today. But all too quickly we were the compassionate generation, the ones whose concern for the environment and poor folks, according to Newsweek, was supposed to transform the 1990s. And now we're the "twenty-somethings,Âť struggling against economic adversity, rejuvenating the record industry, providing the look and 'tude for movies like

122 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

"Singles" and TV shows like "The Heights."

The most striking thing about this confused generational soulseaching is that members of our own age group have not really panicipated in it. Oh, sure, twenty-something author Douglas Coupland penned Generation X, but this fake novel with its dictionary of nonrelevant terms was strictly a quick way to cash in on all the media hype, an effort more akin to The Preppie Handbook than The Sorrows of Young Werther. And yes, real live twenry somethings have been interviewed for articles in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Utne Reader, and a Barbara Walters special that no doubt had parents around the country holding their hands to their mouths in mild approbation. But panicipation of this kind is to be expected, as many young people are easily lured by the shiny covers of your slick magazines and will happily accept the opponunity to appear as "authentic" members of the species. They are about as credible to us as the Monkees were to you when the network dressed them up and had them sing, "we're the young generation."

No, this is your doing - you, the baby boomers - with your bottomless need to compare all youth movements, real or imaginary, to your own. Generational categorizing is one of your most beloved pa~-

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Eric Iversen The music is generically edgy, synth-poppy with a dollop of minor chords and staccato percussion - it makes clear references to all the record industry styles MTV so . benumbingly purveys, giving every target market a slice of acoustic pie to say, hey, this ~ show's for you. The scene under the credits is distinctively New York, whether the iron M , grating facades of SoHo, lower Manhattan from some angle but always including the " Brooklyn Bridge, and shot from a post-industrial perch like a rooftop or warehouse, with ;: : : a fashionably disheveled urban twenty-nothing warrior narrating from in medias res the particulars of the controversy du jour. "They were the only ones there. He says he was looking for the spaghetti spoon. She says he picked up the candlestick and was going to hit her. It's his word against his. Who knows what really happened?" Then the tide flashes, scrawled across the screen in graffiti script, THE REAL WORLD, and we're

I

m Baffler â&#x20AC;˘ 123

times, since you yourselves have been the greatest beneficiaries of it, fairly monopolizing the talk shows and news magazines for the few years in which you kept the "establishment" gasping in collective outrage at your mock-threatening antics. Predictably enough, a good pan of the "twenty-something" discourse is just plain insulting, consisting of solemn declarations by bona-fide Generation Authorities that the youth of today don't measure up to their world-shaking predecessors.

According to this understanding, we have no vision, no ideas, no shiny features to redeem us. Then turn to the fashion pages for the rest of the discussion: a flurry of stories about "grunge," descriptions of a cooptation technique so perfect that, you boast, styles make their way from "the street" to the boutiques quicker than ever before. Both understandings are backed up with a weighty array of pop psychology, pop history (focusing mainly on "influential" TV shows and fads), and, your infallible statistical divining rod, mass demographics.

We cenainly don't need this mass media affirmation of our lives, so why are you so concerned with this scrutiny?

As you learned from your own experience, youth sells, even better to oldsters than to actual young folks. But before you can penetrate the market, you must first invent an easy generational stereotype in order

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underway, exploring the and conflicts the group - GenXers, Twentysomethings, the MTV generation, take your pick - confront in negotiating the social and economic wasteland brothers Reagan and Bush have bequeathed to us.

The project was this: collect an eclectic assortment of young adults from across the land, gather them together in a SoHo loft, pay their rent, press "record" on the minicam, and watch the fur fly. An angry black man, an artsy dancey Alabama belle, a stateuniversity frat boy, a gay man who wears his baseball cap backwards, and various other recognizable twentytypes all get free New York living space and in exchange release the TV rights to their emotional, professional, and internecine crises to MTV, which then edits, dubs, overlays, and overplays their squabbles in the form of sociocinematic verite.

They call the show THE REAL WORLD, and if it doesn't resemble any world you live in, why, you better recalibrate your epistemological antennae because it is right there on the reality medium itself, television, the dispenser of the cathode ray simulacrum that has displaced our perceptions of lived experience and programmed for us better reception of the world as advertisers, politicians, talk-show hosts, and other, assorted hucksters

124 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

to properly transform the allure of youth and, ultimately, the memories of a decade, into concrete, salable products. According to you, we are what we consume. You go to great lengths to specify "our" music and "our" look - glossing blithely over any real thoughts we might have - so MY that you can invent and then mimic NIHILlSt'rt , \~:WE HAD an attractive "twenty-something"

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I DIDN" -f fvEN KNOW HE WAS THE DAY terms of the TV programswe are supHEQltb.-::::':JENNY LYN:·· posed to have watched in the 70s, the .,. BADElt ·TWENTY.' d pos d t h e pur

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S()ME1}flNG WRITER. ,: recor s we are sup e 0 av ;. chased, the gum we chewed and the clothes we wore. In your hands this is our tawdry fate: a generation of people understood as the sum total of their hairstyles; an entire decade known by the popular records of the day.

Your payoff is in the dollars and loyalty of millions of teenagers, anxious to fit in, and of any "twenty-somethings" you can convince ,

want us to see it. But back to the real world, I mean THE REAL WORLD, where our demographic melange of vigesigenarians bounce off the walls, each other, and seemingly the holder of the minicam like so many pinballs caught in a machine with flippers that never miss, fortuitously falling into scenes that dramatize the pressing issues MTV sees young adults facing today. Sex in the age of AIDS, amorphous career designs, how to cope with perfectly cast old-world parents, and so on. While these are unquestionably vexing issues, I suggest that if MTV brought their cameras into an actual urban scene of cohabiting twenty-plus-year-olds, the discourse would be somewhat cifferent. How to get the third roommate to do the dishes or take out the trash, who gets control of the TV remote, who made what long-distance telephone call, where to store bicycles in the confined space of '1ow-renr apartments, how to meet the objects of sexual attraction and preserve one's self-respect, how to stay awake past 10:30 on a weeknight, what the hell to do on the weekend on an office grunfs salary; such mundane matters confront twenties on a regular basis and form the substance of their daily lives. Of course, in the decentered, post-postmodem world, arguing about relative realities is as tenable as arguing about the angel popuation on Sinead O'Connor's pinhead, and I do not intend

BajJler • 125

who may still be able to cough up the eighty dollars for a pair of sneakers that will set them apart with the likes of Spike Lee. But even more important, and more lucrative, is selling the image to an older set, as an elixir for exorcising the demon aging. Locked forever into a self-understanding invented for you when you were twenty-something, you can conceive of nothing more crucial than remaining "in touch" with whatever the young look happens to be. Afraid that you might be nanoseconds behind the latest craze, veteran suburban hipsters line up in Gaps around the country to grab flannel shins in a show of solidarity with the Seattle scene.

All of this casting about for identity, then, is an attempt to rewrite our history even as it happens, an effort to package and market the 'youth culture' commodity to hungry consumers. More disturbing is the thought of these products being sold in the form of nostalgia years from now. We can doubtless look forward to television shows like "Slammin'," chronicling the adventures of a group of alienated Washington D.C. teenagers who use peculiar dance rituals to express their misunderstandings with their parents. "This Old Garage" will peek in on the coming of age of a homosexual vegetarian brother and his feminist sister as ther clash and co~~ together. ~n the fringes of the Seattle to make this my arena of contention.

I will restrict my indictment of THE REAL WORLD to the tenns of its engagement with its own reality, that of television. MTV has always tried to portray itself as a venue of antitelevision, with a polished veneer of deprofessionalized production values, personalities well schooled in street-smarts, and the face of a heretofore unportrayed marketing group, teen music listeners previously restricted to radio and American Bandstand. These qualities all appear in THE REAL WORLD, indeed they comprise the basic constituents of its raison d'televiser, but they only mask the truly TV-confonnist character of the show.

The dramatic axis of the program is the fonn taken by the weekly conflict between the angry black man, Kevin, and the artsy-dancey Alabaman, Julie. One week it is the argument that degenerates into the disputed threat of violence mentioned above, another week it is a plain old shouting match that grows out of a discussion of race relations. "Bigot, racisf - "racist yourself, you just want special treatmenf; and so on.

Kevin advances menacingly, Julie cowers, sometimes cries a little bit, Kevin stalks out of the apartment, Julie accepts the solace of the other apartment-mates, much soul searching goes on for the camera. Such encounters punch all the programmed buttons

126 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

rock world. More imponant than the shows will be the products sold along with them. As teens today spon the tie-dyed shins of the sixties and the bell-bottoms of the seventies, so will our children model Doc Manens, special hair-griming formulas, and knee-exposing jeans in the year 2005.

Even though the "twenty-something" debate is transparently absurd and painfully shallow, we can't simply reject 'generational identity' as a totally meaningless category: there have of course been small circles of people from countless age groups that have shared world-views in a general way. But it is senseless to expect to find meaningful common ideas held by everyone born between 1960 and 1970. And yet this is exactly what your prattling TV, your "news magazines," attempt to do, since they're interested in the clues to mass-marketing rather than in the thoughts of real live people. It's as though you think the doings of groups like the Young Hegelians were characteristic of the vast majority of their contemporaries, as though the "lost generation" had something to do with flagpole sitting, Amos 'n' Andy, and the religious revivals of the American 1920s.

When it comes to actually examining the beliefs of our generation's ....

of stereotypical, sexual! racial conflict that have festered in the American psyche since that nameless Puritan man cast a lingering glance over a comely Native American lass about 23 minutes after the Mayflower made landfall.

MTV was going to be different, a television networK that wasn't really television. It would reveal the production devices that made it a concocted reality and demystify the implicit claims to verisimilitude that TV has always made. Instead, intoxicated by the commercial power it quickly came to wield, MTV has become the chief offender in the blurring of commodified and aesthetic realities and has succeeded in transforming its viewers into twenty no-thinks. Consider one of its chief exponents, Spike Lee. Is he a movie-maker who sells jeans, a jeans-seller who comments on race relations, a social critic who sells jeans to make his movies, or what? And how to know out of which mouth he is talking when he speaks in any of his many media? The only barely unarticulated gothic sexual fascism of THE REAL WORLD panders to the same degraded, mushminded view of the world that the rest of the television viewing audience has developed.

Unfortunately, it is packaged, smelling like teen spirit, in precisely the tom blue jeans and high-top Cons that its audience is sure to buy.

BaJJler â&#x20AC;˘ 127

authentic spokesmen, to listening to our cacophony, you don't like what you see and hear. So in the same way your monotone rock music industry has ignored the entire creative outpouring of the past fifteen years in favor of warmed-over versions of the pleasantries you listened to in the 1960s, you have ignored, suppressed, or just refused to consider the true concerns of youth. No wonder you're so badly confused.

And yet perhaps your confusion points directly to the most salient aspects of our thinking. We are a generation that is, at last, wise to your game. Our paramount aim is to resist, to negate the officious everyday assault of this botched civilization you have created. We don't think about bright futures and business opponunities and the suburban spread that will someday be ours: our posture is a defensive one, as we build barriers between us and the incessant stream of lies and stupidity that is your public culture. We aim to carve out autonomous space, to somehow free ourselves from the daily drivel that drones from all sides. It's a worldview that is necessarily incomprehensible to your standardized, mass-mediated ways of knowing.

While you spin your fantasies about a generation raised solely by TV like yourselves, a youth so pliable and clueless that advenising and sitcoms are their common tongue, we have in fact been learning the utter falseness of these, your most revered institutions. You gloat that our understanding has long since been scrambled by the constant brainwash, you snicker that our identities are little more than a patchwork oflines remembered from episodes of the TV programs we watched as children.

But in fact our early familiarity with the medium has taught us precisely the opposite: the novelty has worn off for us; the pictures don't dazzle us just because they move. Our youthful vision of the world was influenced more by Minor Threat ("who's that?"you wonder) than by

128 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

the Partridge Family. We have grown to automatically distrust your alltoo-pat characterizations of us and the world; we don't believe the lukewarm homilies of your New Age, media-friendly philosophizing, even when it's mouthed by people as convincing to you as Geraldo Rivera.

We refuse to accept your central historicalltelevisual myth, the golden tale of the '60s and innocence lost, since we see it for the transparent suburban f.tntaSy it is.

You find we are lacking in idealism, but in fact all we're really missing is your farcical public display of disillusionment. Having grown up under an astonishingly mean-spirited government, we regard people who pretend to see answers or even reason in your politics, your issues, your self-righteous hedonism, as simple at best, but more likely just dishonest. To us the idiocy, depravity, and soul-crushing cruelty of your human machine is so obvious, so plain and undisguised, that we set ourselves in radical opposition to it as a matter of course. It is not the 60s rosy bromides or revolutionary posturing that rings true for us, but II 55 I 5

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young. Like so many other or· .ans of official culture. the Tlm.s has lat.ly declared a n • • found .nthuslasm for all manlf.statlons of Th. Hlp. .aunchln. a n.w "Styles of the Tim .... s.ctlon In which the looks and sounds of youth cui· tur. and of ,Isqu' arty scenes around the country are admired and hungrily commodified. On Sunday. Nov.mber 15. "Styles .f the Tim .... carried a feature .n NGrun ..... d.scrlblng the music and bands that make up that •• nr •• Itut more Impor. tantly focu ..... on the outward .spects of the n.w "subculture" .nd the In •• nlous ways In which It has ....n domesticated

by high fashion designers for th.lr upscal. - but ever·so-cog· nizant - cll.nt.I •• Unfortunat.ly. In Its. anxious scrambl. to rip off the S.attl. kids' doings. the Tlm.s also print.d a glossary of "grung •• speak" that Is. as Its originator lIegan Jasper readily admits. compl.tely fabricated. Con· vlnced that "all subcultures speak in cod.... the Time. went looking for .om. colorful argot from the Seattle rock scene and lis. Jasp.r was only too happy to obllg. them with som. of the most Inspired fake slang out· sid. of lIonty Python. Thus the Newspaper of Record dutifully repeated her comical ass.r· tlons that youth In the Pacific Northwest regularly refe, to

Baffler • 129

the quiet determination of the 20s and 30s: Harold Stearns' call for intellectual secession, Dos Passos' recognition that "we are two nations."

Nor did we have to go through a long, embarrassing, fully-televised process of coming to these realizations. The "whole world" doesn't watch us because we aren't interested in your watching, aren't eager to

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..::.::::,:::.:::::;.... . . . . . .....: because our discourse takes place not on audience-participation 1V programs or in the hidebound pages of your glossy magazines, but in the small cenacles in college towns; the sub-movements of punk rock that you'll never hear about; the little magazines and independent record labels by the score that share nothing with the understanding of the world broadcast from everywhere by :,::,~,.::

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their torn Jeans as "wack slacks," platform shoes (?, as "plats," people they don't like as "Lamestaln" or "Tom·Tom Club" or "Cob Nobbler," and that they often spend time "Swlngln' on the Fllpplty.Flop."

The prank began, Ms. Jasper recounts, when the British Sky magazine contacted her, as a former Sub Pop employee and hence a grunge expert. to help them construct a story about the Seattle youth movement they were certain existed. The British know better than any other people the commodity value of highly visible youth subcultures, especially 1m· ported ones, and naturally Sky was anxious to be the first to discover a new style that they could sell to unhappy English kids. Nonetheless, lis. Jasper

130 • Baffler

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was surprised by the various Journalists' "weird Idea that S .. attle was this Incredibly Iso· lated thing," with a noticeably distinct look, sound, and style.

The result of this credulity was that, as Ms. Jasper puts It, "I could tell [the Interviewer] any· thing. I could tell him people walked on their hands to shows." After _elng the piece In Sky and recognizing the joke, members of the Seattle band lIudhoney were careful to use all the strange words In an In· tervlew with youth mlnd·molder "elody ".ke,. which Is now planning a major feature on the (nonexistent, grunge move· ment. Later the story migrated to the Time .. which so wanted to believe there was a new youth movement underway In our provincial backyard that It

the official institutions of American speech. You would have to dig deep and listen carefully if you really wanted to know what we thought, but you'd rather hire somebody like the Red Hot Chili Peppers or River Phoenix to play the pan for you, to tell you that it's OK; that all the twenty-somethings have come up with are a few stylistic innovations, a new sound and look that can be easily and fashionably imitated.

I have read them all, hoping against hope to hear the authentic call.

A tragical disappointment. There was I Hoping to hear old Aeschylus, when the Herald Called out, "Theo, bring your clowns forward."

That turned me sick and killed me very nearly.

- Hugh MacDiarmid

You do seem to sense that we are something of an unhappy group.

But our disaffection is not simply the result of the contemporary economic crisis, as your commentators repeatedly assure you. For most of was apparently willing to forego the usual fact·checklng.

As anyone knows who has actually spent any tim. In Indl. rock or ever been to a show In Seattle, no on. actually uses these .xpresslons. But you can be certain they will soon. Play.

Ing to the cultur. Industry's dearest fantasies about youth movements, Us. Jasper's light. hearted lexicon now has a IIf. of Its own: her comic version of the "Seattl. subcultur." will soon, through media magnifica. tlon, become standard. And al· though kids In Seattl. may never actually say things Ilk. "Harsh Realm" and "Big Bag C!'f Bloatatlon," their peers and their parents will, all ov.r Eu· rope and America. Regardles. of It. origins, thl. I. the vocabu· lary the masters of Hlp have d..

cre.d you will us., and they're not about to back down now. As the Time .. plec. reads, "grung. speak" will Indeed b. "coming soon to a high school or mall near you," but not b.caus. of the witty .ff.rv.sc.nc. of those Irrepreaslbl. teenagers.

Baffler • 131

us its roots are deep and about a decade old, planted firmly in the soil of a solid suburban upbringing. As youngsters with eyes and minds we always suspected there was something deeply wrong, that the picture on the set needed adjusting. Just beneath the order oflawns and malls and home entenainment systems lay a world of despair, of unimaginable sufferings, of fantastic injustices. Though coddled as we were, we couldn't help wondering about the petty egotisms and hatreds that made human relations so poisonous; about the TV violence people just had to have, each cowering individually in their living-room cave; about why the products that had been such a thrill to purchase always seemed such a letdown once we got home from the mall. Our first brushes with the mandatory bloodlust of business, the arbitrary authority of the state, or just simple economic lack was all it took to throw your great national myths into question in our privileged young minds.

And then for each of us there came a point of revelation; a sudden, astonishing realization of the way your world worked, of the real purposes of your media, your politics, your academy. Other generations have been formed by panicular historical events, but our decisive moment came at a different time to every one of us. For many it came from rock music, from bands faithful to the spirit of 1977 (do you remember what happened in that year, Barbara Walters? Bret Easton Ellis?); from a hundred local scenes alive with enthusiasm and camaraderie and the promise of asylum. It was the sudden knowledge that the music - and, by extension, the literature, the thoughts - that spoke most earnestly and honestly to our lives were vinually forbidden, barred from the record labels and airwaves choked with 60s-style liberationist pap. Here for the first time in our lives, was both an expressive form that rang true and a means of resisting, an instrument of autonomy. Never again could we blithely file away the hours in your office complexes, listening dutifully to Madonna on the official radio. Never again could we read your newspapers uncritically, assuming their contents bore any relation to what went on in the world. Our entire generational compass was recalibrated instantly with one glimpse into the working of the machine: we were now outside, our tastes and thoughts automatically condemned by a smug alliance of hippies and businessmen.

132 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

We have lived apan from you from that day to this.

It is this experience you will never understand, nor will your cooptations, your manufactured replicas ever bring us back to the fold.

Our resistance is not a hairstyle or a Nirvana record or even a leather jacket with safety pins. You have created in us an implacable enemy of the worst kind: a foe that understands how your cultural machinery works, who you are not physically capable of retrieving.

You wonder about the nature , ' of the "twenty-somethings": ""', ,.""",,~~~',7'-"',7::' here's your answer. We are TWENTY-NOTHING, forever lost to your suburban platitudes; lost to the simple blather of your TV; deaf ro your non-politics; hopelessly estranged from your cult of 'professionalism,' the brain-deadening architecture of " """':": ..._._.-"-':.' .-:your office complexes. We no longer flinch when the tough guys on the screen point their weapons our way. Nor do we nod, stomachs growling, when your intelligentsia instruct us in the fine points of indeterminacy.

Our youth has been a classroom ': of resistance in which we have learned how to free ourselves from the grasp of your understanding, your manipulation.

Although your anointed authorities may not take it into account when they do their "studies" of the young, there is a vast cultural resistance underway. Your best and brightest want nothing to do with you.

We were too cynical too young about your motives, your politics, your TV, your bad rock 'n' roll. This is a generation that will never again cooperate, will never make your coffee with equanimity or discuss hap-

BajJler â&#x20AC;˘ 133

pity the latest doings of your favorite sitcom characters.

Thus we proclaim your American Century at an end, with a shrug of distaste rather than the bang you had counted on. We are a generation that finally says NO to your favorite institutions: not only will we not fight for oil, but we don't believe anything that you broadcast, we avoid your malls, we don't care about the free play of signifiers on your cable TV. And you can never be rid of us. Your feverish attempts at cooptation have begun far too late; too many will have defected long before your latest youth look (it's "grunge" this time, isn't it?) hits the malls this spring. However you may demographically turn matters about in the future to convince yourselves that youth just isn't capable of your sophistication, your idealism, your credit limits, we'll be out there, slowly corroding the machine, filing down the teeth of the gears, readying your historical epitaphs.

The Baffler will not win this dispute by itselE You will believe what you choose to believe, and you will go on using your telephone surveys and your public-opinion polls to rationalize it. But then again, we don't care. We know who we are, no matter what labels you choose for us. Now leave us alone.

134 â&#x20AC;˘ Baffler

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The public sharing of the very latest in critical theory, in the pages of CI has served to 'democratize' what was once an elite profession within an elite profession. There is no other journal comparable in scope or quality."

-Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Founded in 1974 by Sheldon Sacks, Critical Inquiry takes an interdisciplinary approach to bring its readers the most important critical research from leading sources and the widest varieties of methodologies.

Publishing contemporary criticism in literature, art philosophy, history, politics, film, and music, the articles in CI come from leading scholars, critics, and artists from around the world. This allows CI readers to examine a range of topics central to modern culture. The result is a rigorous, stimulating, and sometimes volatile forum.

Editor

W. J. T. Mitchell

Executive Editor

Arnold I. Davidson

Coeditors

Joel Snyder Fran<;oise Meltzer Elizabeth Heisinger Harry Harootunian Lauren Berlant

Published quarterly by The University of Chicago Press Regular one-year subscription rates: Institutions $74.00; Individuals 32.50; Students (with copy of valid ID) $23.00. Outside USA. please add $4.50 postage, Canadians please add 7% GST plus postage ..

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