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AFFLER NUlDber Seven

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TWEN TIE TH CENTURY LITE The City in the Age of Information

66The .Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge99

Rsmer Number Seven The City in the Age of Information

lOOOk Anterica Paul Lukas Forty- Two Pickup 9 Keith White Sweet Portable Lifestyle 15 Kim Phillips Lotteryville, USA 21 Robert Fiore Fire Sale 29 Stephen Duncombe Quality ofLife 47 Daniel Harris Dirty Talk 91

Civic Amnesia Diamonds Mulcahey Screw Capital of the World 81 Steve Healey Ghosts 99 Dan Bischoff Carter's March 101 Maura Mahoney Our Man in Savannah 105 Thomas Frank A Machine for Forgetting 113

The City and the 6vrhird Wave" Edward Castleton The Fifth International 35 Naomi Klein Just Deserts 36 Tom Vanderbilt Revolt ofthe Nice 61

Fiction Irvine Welsh Disnae Matter 13 Janice Eidus Why I Watch Love Connection 55 Tibor Fischer, Then They Say You're Drunk 69 David Berman Epic Freight 89

PoeDlS

Art

David Trinidad 45 Damon Krukowski 58 Jennifer Moxley 68 Peter Gizzi 87 Rosmarie Waldrop 110

Peter Kuper cover Don MacKeen 5, 17 Greg Fiering 52, 53 Joe Sacco 62, 65 Brian Ralph 104 David Berman 111 Archer Prewitt 122

Thomas Fr~ editor-in-chief Matt Weilan~ senior editor Greg Lane, foreman Keith White, editor-sans-frontieres Diamonds Muleahey.. editor-at-sea Maura Mahoney, Tom Vanderbilt. contributing editors Damon Krukowski, poetry Thom Powers.. art To say that an American city in its design and styles represented our spiritual capacity would be almost to say that we were a nation of madmen.

-Randolph Bourne, 1915 Enormous cottages of the architecture of the eighties, like warehouses, like institutions-one with dingy Ionic pillars and with a huge black gable carved with grapes and vine leaves ... ; deserted houses of gigantic bulk in which it seems incredible that anyone could ever have lived and which seem to lie so massively on the ground that they must have flattened out the hills with their weight; gulches and gullies, dingy cliffs lined with ignoble dwellings, like blackened barnacles left by a tide which has subsided and turned stagnant; a great many stained-glass windows, like the green and blue of oil in a muddy street or like the scum of stagnant water; the churches monuments of desolation; the Venice jazz cafe; the Carnegie Steel Works sending up nocturnal vapors of solid gold; the nerve-racking Westinghouse Electrical Company covering acres and bristling with machinery and lights; the Heinz factories in Allegheny; CRUICKSHANK APPLE BUTTER aloft on the bald hillside; the "inclines"; motor accidents; students fucking in the hallways of the Carnegie Tech; the unrivaled blackness of those buildings and of those of the Pitt School; the small hills razed and removed, leaving bare unsightly stumps; ... the turbid gray haze-a society smothered in smoke; an epic grimness and harshness-violence oflife-people always breaking out when they did anything at all-throwing themselves over cliffs, going on disastrous joy rides ....

-Edmund Wilson, 1923

Thanks to William B. Mallard for his theoretical expertise, Andrea laiacona for her expert theorizing, WHPK-FM, Ion Roikow, Steve Wolters, Fireproof Press, laura at 57th Street Books, Susan at SI. Marks Books, the Empty Bottle and the lounge Ax in Chicago, the Knitting Factory in New York, John Huss, Magic Hour, the Handsome Family, and the Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments.

The Baffler is published in Chicago by its editors. This one was laid out in June, 1995. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. It is distributed around the world by fine independents. Unless otherwise marked, all contents are copyright Š 1995 The Baffler.

Subscribe to The BoHler, $16 lor the next lour issues. Be warned: it tokes us a while to read through all the manuscripts we gel. Please don't write asking us what we're so angry about. No, we don't have on e-mail address. Or a telephone, either. But please send all orders, address changes, correspondence, and manuscripts to us at

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Twentieth Century Lite

Q

h, that cyber-revolution! It's turning out to be the long-awaited deliverer ofAmerican business from all the dreadful forces, riotous impulses, and malign social movements that have prevented its happy hegemony all these years. The "Third Wave," philosopher-king Newt Gingrich and his stable of third-rate thinkers proclaim, has fmally liberated the wise entrepreneur not only from the grasp of Washington bureaucrats, with all their meddling demands about workplace safety and minimum wages, but from every other social institution that once threatened him. Labor unions, for example, the nightmarish Second-Wave organizations par excellence, are openly gloated to be a thing of the past, happily ruined by the near-total freedom of capital to move around the globe at will, wherever poverty severe enough to induce people to scab can be found.

Best of all, the advent of the Information Society seems to have accomplished the very rosiest of middle-class dreams: it has freed us at last from the ftlthy grasp of the city and its teeming, huddling, criming, union-joining, welfare-cheating, liberal-electing masses. With the final perfection of the global computer net, place will be irrelevant: it will be as easy to transmit "information"-meaning all those human activities we used to call thought and culture-across three thousand miles as it is to meet a client for lunch. As the cloying youngster intoned in last year's MCI commercials, "there will be no more there." No sooner was this profundity grasped by the Gingrichites (it probably helped to have it explained by a cute little tot with what sounds like an English accent) than they were declaring the millennium to be at hand: the metropolis had been abolished. Actual physical social interaction was a relic of the benighted past.

No longer would we need to put up with the filth and dangers of the city to get our business done. This is the age of the "suburban entrepreneur hooked up to the Internet," David Brooks wrote recently in New York's City Journal a quarterly propaganda sheet for the latest Republican fantasies. "In the Gingrichian world, cyberspace replaces urban space. Conversations are conducted over the modem instead of over dinner at a metropolitan restaurant or club." Whatever doubts had lingered about the wisdom of suburbanization (a product of New Deal social planning, but we'll overlook that for the moment) have now evaporated: distance doesn't matter. The city is now officially obsolete. It has no further economic function. We "knowledge workers" can do our labor anywhere we want. Let the proles commute.

By an almost unanimous verdict, American corporate thought heartily agrees: forget the city! What business theorist George Gilder calls the "telecosm" will have no place for urban agglomerations. "I think we are headed for the death of cities," he asserts in a recent issue of For6es magazine. In the near future, the magazine continues, "people will choose to live anywhere they like while working with anyone they please on the Net; they will leave behind crime, crowds and corrupted schools; they will flee cities."

As expressions of pure upper-middle-class fantasy, there's nothing new about the anti-urban bombast of Gingrich, Gilder, and Forbes. Their chimerical cyber-visions are merely another outbreak of a chronic allergy to the metropolis, the latest installment in that favorite affluent daydream of serene Olympian detachment from production and all its complexities. For forty years Organization Man defined himself by his precipitate flight from the cesspools of social interaction, relocating himself in the fantasy BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

3

land of suburbia where he could remake himself in any image he chose. That initial postwar geographic and demographic shift-which, not incidentally, read poor and working-class America out of the the country's official collective identity and wrecked our landscape as thoroughly as the war did in Europe-has long been the inescapable foundation of national culture, the basic premise from which all events are to be understood. Our televisual world already operates on an assumption of total detachment, of a pristine bourgeois universe into which nasty events like poverty and disaster intrude only as occasional oddities. And the latest cyber-development serves merely to make the fantasy seem that much more natura4 to make the longstanding dream of uppermiddle-class secession, of gated communities and zero contact between us and them appear an utterly practicable maneuver, to make the initial flight from the cities seem miraculously far-sighted.

The now economically-outmoded metropolis-what Gilder calls "these big parasite cities sucking the lifeblood out of America" -must learn to forsake the "dole" and accustom itself to a new role: the city is to be the ultimate form of entertainment for the suburban upper middle class, better than CD-ROM even, and brought conveniendy through the wonder of electronics into our ranch homes for our pleasure and consumption. Gilder et al. have no problems with the famous image of the city as a meeting place for people of different ethnicities and walks oflife; in fact, in accordance with the latest multicultural business theorizing, they actively celebrate the kind of cultural crossfertilization that is believed to make American capitalism so vital. It's just that they don't think they should have to physically enter the city in order to partake. After fantasizing about the possibilities of big-city opera being made accessible to all through computers, Gilder asserts that "The telecosm can destroy cities because then you can get all the diversity, all the serendipity, all the exuberant variety that you can find in a city in your own living room."

In such a climate who will speak for the city? Why, Utne Reader, of course, which produced a special issue celebrating American cities just last year. But if you came to the magazine expecting some sort of reaffirmation of twentieth century American civilization, you'd be disappointed: the value of cities is that they are Utne Reader writ large, a non-stop alternative lifestyle carnival, where one can gawk at real-live ThirdWorld peoples performing their colorful culture-stunts, consume all sorts of authentic treats, question dominant paradigms at a pricy disco, and then retreat-by public transportation!-to your hip urban abode, well-stocked no doubt with all of the gritty new products designed just for your hip urban demographic. The great achievements of the American metropolis? Such consumer delicacies as coffee houses (which are, erroneously but somehow appropriately, identified with the 1930s snob term "cafe society"), street musicians, and, of course, rollerblading. The most perfect metropolis in the world, that, after considerable thought, the magazine decrees we should emulate? You know without even opening the book-it's Prague.

The issue's most telling point is its summary of the joys of Boston, Massachusetts, which reads more like an ironic scoresheet of the fundamental emptiness of urban-hip than a celebration of the city. The author declares his aff"mity for, of all places, Harvard Square, where he consumes "spinach pie" and (of course) coffee and watches the "human potpourri." It's bad enough to describe humanity in terms of a popular yuppie house fra-

4 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

grance, but it's infinitely worse to actually believe, as the author declares he does, that the street musicians who accumulate in Harvard Square-perhaps the definitive urban fakers: the very most privileged youths of the suburban heartland here to play-act at rock 'n roll rebellion for four years before taking a position in daddy's firm-are actually good Thus do Americans debate the future of the metropolis, the basic issues of how we are to live. There is no more fundamental question, and yet our most prominent dissenters can do little more than mimic the obscene verdict of the right-wing cyberfuturists: cities are places of pleasure, theme parks for the lifestyle experimentation of affluent consumers with the rest of us around to provide colorful entertainment or to clean up after them if we carlt sing and dance. The only real debate occurs over the relatively minor question of whether we should enjoy lifestyle in person or whether, as Gilder puts it, the "tdeputer" will allow us to join in the fun-filtering out all the crime and filth-from our safe, suburban, "own living room."

There is, of course, a vast critical literature on cities apart from the lifestyle-carruval tweedle-dum of Gilder and tweedle-dee of Utne. A host of enlightened commentary on our contemporary predicament sometimes finds its way into the public press: Mike Davis's writing on the curious civic culture of Los Angeles and the staggeringly gigantic blunderings of California's policy-makers; Salim Muwakkil's essays on race and urban America; David Harvey's brilliant analysis of space, capital, and consciousness; Camilo Jose Vergara's graphic documentation of urban decay; the committed essayists published recendy in Witness magazine; and Robert Fitch's devastating account of the lucrative engineering of New York's decline.

But by some weird inversion of intellectual value, this sott of responsible discussion remains marginalized while the scatterbrained ravings ofwriters like Gilder, Alvin Tomer, Tom Peters, and Jad Garreau receive the attention and plaudits ofthe people who will actually be determining our collective future. Since it refuses to make the fun-

damental acknowledgementofbusiness

benevolence that is step number one in what Doug Hemwodcalls the punditlicensing process, honest criticism can have no sayin the matter. It's either pay

your homage or get out of the game.

BAFFLER SEVEN路

5

We cannot address our civic predicament, it seems, by simply discussing problems with honesty and compassion-any such approach will be resolutely ignored. We must also identifY the disease that prevents difficult or critical ideas from crossing the screens of our national consciousness. As ever, the problem is a cultural one, the devices by which our peculiar urban culture of decay, unconcern, lifestyle, and total segregation by class are made to seem nonnal Our problems arise from a complex: of never-to-be-questioned municipal faiths, bizarre assumptions about the public-mindedness of private industry, and a thoughtsquelching climate of competition between states and between cities.

We can't understand what's happening because we suffer from a deadly form of civic amnesia, a tendency to fancy ourselves cut loose from the past; a willingness to forget about whatever it was that caused our cities to be built in the first place in a frenzied, headlong rush to attract conventions and make ourselves attractive for corporate 'relocation.' We can no longer comprehend the hard, basic urban reality of social class, we have no idea how these conglomerations of power and people which we inhabit ever came to be, and we cannot imagine our own pasts, except those happy times spent amid the jollycaperings of celebrities---cowboys and Indians, rubicundAl Capone, the homes of the Stars. To even suggest an alternative to business control of every aspect of life has become heresy unthinkable.

Even worse, the instant mobility of the "Information Age" has vasdy intensified competition between cities. Here, as it has done to almost every other species of discussion that it has touched, the cyber-revolution has transformed what was left of committed commentary into craven, desperate, panic-stricken self-promotion. Boosterism has always been an underlying urban stupidity, but in recent years it has been become the pre-eminent form of civic discourse, the omnipresent theme of every newspaper article, every business round-table, every sportsbar conversation. Cities are scurrying to transform themselves into consumer products, to substitute brand image for history, a carnivalesque "diversity" for ethnic identity, and to prosper not by, say, building things but by winning as large a market-share as they can. The waves may be lapping at the gunwales, but our officials seem to have convinced themselves that the answer is to crow loudly about how much drier it is over at their end.

Here in Chicago, the South Side steel mills continue to be razed along with the lives, generations, and neighborhoods that surrounded them (never worth much more than a two-minute human interest segment on the 1V news in the best of times). Buy a plasticized city map at any downtown store and look for the South Side on it: it isn't there. Drive around and try to find the neighborhood where the Memorial Day Massacre took place in 1937 (or better yet, find the "labor martyrs" web site); you can't. Here a tree grows through a roof, there a factory is dynamited for the cameras of a visiting Hollywood movie crew. Down here civilization is over; The City is an obscene joke.

Oblivious to it all the new order is prospering out on Navy Pier, just east of the glittering North Michigan Avenue shopping district. The city has finally completed there a monumental embodiment of its new civic vision: a gigantic ferris wheel from which the town's towers can be viewed to advantage. The city cannot guarantee that fog will obscure the smoke and fires of the South Side on every day of the week, but the wheel suffers no shortage of customers nonetheless.

-Thomas Frank 6 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

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• In addition. olherwrilers across (he co ntinent are beginning 10 nOlice our parl icular nylc of cultul'1Ii criticism. The 1iJ~.,t" Slar, for example, now openly admilS ,hat we all: "(hI' sm:l. r(C$[ :md mOSI udling magalin.: in America."

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• «Only slightly larger than R(Odrrs' Digest but with Ihe weight of:l. hand-gr.:. nade, ~ murmurs the awestruck N= y"rkn: •Writing in The Nllti"R, E1iubeth I'o<:hod;I averred that · You'd have to look ~k

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Paul Lukas

he headline on the full-page newspaper ad reads, "Times Square: The greatest retail opportunity in New York at the Crossroads of the World." The ad's text gushes over the "80,000 square feet of prime retail space now available on New York's most exciting four corners--42nd Street where Seventh Avenue meets Broadway-a new world ofshopping, dining and entertainment!" The fine print politely but firmly informs us that" Crossroads ofthe WOrldis a registered service mark ofTImes Square Center Associates."

So it has come to this: In what was once the greatest city in the world, realtors, acting with the full complicity of city government, spin ludicrous schemes to unload mountains of overpriced square footage that nobody wants in a neighborhood most sane retailers abandoned years ago. A neighborhood where nobody has "dined" in nearly three decades and where most of the "shopping" and "entertainment" revolve around peep booths. A neighborhood where every development plan over the past 20 years has come crashing down like rubble from a structurally deficient tenement. In the umpteenth attempt to transform Times Square into a silk purse, the city is now resorting to the governmental equivalent of a three-card monte game designed to dupe unwary tourists.

Tourists, as it turns out, are the key element here, for today's New York, unable to sustain itself on indigenous revenues alone, now relies increasingly on an influx of cash from wide-eyed outsiders who come to town to see the sights and, naturally, spend some dough. The sad irony, of course, is that the dismantling of the city's manufacturing base over the past few decades, which has necessitated this tourism-dependent approach, has also made New York a much less interesting place to visit. Once a city teeming with light industry (the NYC garment trade, now almost wholly absent except for a few sweatshops, once featured over half a dozen shops that did nothing but sew buttonholes), New York is now a perfect example of the country's shift away from production and toward a service economy. And the best place to see these forces at work is in Times Square.

The Square, of course, was once a tourist magnet in the classical sense: people came here to gawk because it was the center of a living, working metropolis. Like the rest of the city, it never had to aggressively market itself-local retailers and manufacturers provided a viable economic base, and if out-of-town travelers felt compelled to drop some cash during their visits, well, so much the better. At this point, however, the Square's fabled billboards and movie marquees have long since become the stuff of memories and overblown legend. The huge billboards that populate the Square today are little more than selfparodies, super-sized monstrosities that serve to institutionalize a marketing myth that few of today's young ad-agency go-getters are even old enough to remember. As for the thePaul Lukas works in Times Square and lives in Brooklyn, where he publishes Beer Frame: The Journal ofInconspicuous Consumption. He firmly believes that a service economy is a servile economy.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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aters, 42nd Street (or "the Deuce," as it is called here) appears destined to be known more for the pornographers who have taken over the movie halls in the past 25 years than for the big-budget Hollywood epics that once held sway there.

Not that the city isn't trying to do something about that, however. After years of being treated as a tolerable nuisance, maybe even a necessary evil, the skin merchants are now finding that a tourist-centric New York is a much more image-conscious New York, which means even the Square is no longer a safe haven for them. The city's recent anti-smut campaigns may play well in November, but these latest sweeps have less to do with puritanical moralism than with hardball economic concerns: as one industry after another has deserted the city, lured elsewhere by the promise of lower real estate costs, cheaper overhead, lower prevailing wages, and so on, Gotham's tax base has crumbled, leaving New York more dependent than at any other time in its history on a steady influx of awestruck tourists, a cavalcade of gullible out-of-towners who can be counted upon to stop staring up at the skyscrapers just long enough to eat a few meals, see a show or two, and buy a bunch of souvenirs. As the reality of this increasingly desperate environment began to unfold, the porn trade's adjacency to the still-lucrative Broadway theater district could no longer be tolerated-the sex-peddlers would have to go.

The crucial step in accomplishing this was the early-'90s establishment of the Times Square Business Improvement District and the Times Square Redevelopment Project, the latter of which allowed the state, acting under its broad powers of eminent domain, to begin condemning a series of Times Square properties and evict the tenants-primarily pornographers-therefrom. Not all of the pubic panderers have been given the heaveho--indeed, a noontime stroll down the Deuce or the immediately contiguous strip of Eighth Avenue still offers some very interesting variations on the Businessman's Lunchbut a fair number of the establishments have been shut down, a fact that the city, the Redevelopment Project, and the Business Improvement District trumpet to the press at every available moment. But in a public-relations mess that nobody appeared to anticipate, many of the T &A merchants simply relocated elsewhere in the city, often in largely residential neighborhoods, prompting many NYC denizens who hadn't given Times Square a second thought for years to suddenly pine for "the good old RELOCATION days" when the xxx: crowd could be counted upon to remain safely on the Deuce. The curMoving? rent mayoral administration has responded A move illnOftl than just a change of address. Many individuals now dts. covmng that with proper planning and with a rezoning plan designed to move the .....uch. the IUatyIe ""'"II"' ..quUed with a need not be painful. sex trade to the very outskirts of the city, alProfnsional relocation set\I'ice com".home and arranging the transportation of ....... They will pnMd•• rues offer auistance (usually at no dwge) _ that can ease the transition to a new area. comprehensive infonnation that though this scheme appears so unlikely to pass A relocation counselor worb with you includes dala about taxes. schools, child through your entire move. Your couaseior care, transportation and more. 1h! relocaFirst Amendment scrutiny that it can only be Wlll discuss your concerns regarding the tion counselor will maldt you with • sales relocation process, housing associate who assumed to be a cheap show of face-saving ... ""'....... typeofoo...u.g"", deoU..

The relocation counselor will stay in I I, shopping, =n;:~"::~=:V:OOCO::cultural attractions - whattouch W1th you until you are successfully ! effort for the voters. your needs may be. 1bey will also settled to ensure need.s are , II ever discuss local real estate practices and can and that you are receIVing quality servtee 1 Meanwhile, as one property after anI ilS5ist in effectively marketing your old hom all your service providers.

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BAFFLER SEVEN

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the city has been frantically attempting to lure new tenants into the Square, which explains the desperate advertisements like the one cited at the beginning of this essay. In an attempt to make the area more palatable for tourists during this interim period when the Bad Guys (i.e., the libido brigade) are on their way out but the Good Guys (i.e., anyone who can be tricked into investing in the Square) haven't yet arrived, the Business Improvement District and the Redevelopment Project have embarked on a series of programs designed to put a rosy tint on all things Square-related. In a 1993 move that bordered on the surreal, a team of conceptual artists was turned loose on 42nd Street, transforming condemned storefronts into postmodern art galleries (the worst aspect of all this: marquee after once-proud marquee displaying vacuous statements by the very annoying Jenny Holzer). How this played with the tourists from Peoria is anybody's guess, but the Redevelopment Project and Business Improvement District aren't taking any chances. In the tradition of so many unimaginative tourism boards before them, the groups have convinced themselves that what out-of-town visitors really want is a touch of artificial nostalgia-hence the plans to run a thoroughly useless trolley across town from the Square to the United Nations building. One can easily envision the Californians-hell, the Japanese.Lburning up the phone lines to their travel agents: "Listen, book me and the family on a flight to New York, pronto-I've got to ride that trolley!"

In the midst of all this nonsense it should be noted that the city's shell game has succeeded in attracting a few well-heeled saps into the fold. The New Amsterdam Theatre on 42nd Street is being renovated by the Walt Disney Corporation, a dream investor that surely fits the city's profile of an ideal partner: deep pockets, plenty of experience in the service sector, and from out oftown. The Disney honchos apparently found the Square so well-suited to their plans that they more recently announced a scheme to build a hotel/ entertainment center on the northeast corner of 42nd and Eighth. The city had hoped that the presence of the Mouse That Bored would attract other entertainment moguls to the Square. But it took over a year and the humiliating prospect of Disney threatening to withdraw their investment to force the city fathers to put together a sufficiently cushy deal to entice others into the fold. In mid-July, with Disney on the verge of pulling out from the New Amsterdam, a relieved group of redevelopers announced that the Livent theater production company would be renovating the Academy and Lyric theaters. A day later, longsimmering negotiations were completed to bring the British Madame Tussaud's and the Kansas City-based American Multi-Cinema firms into the Square. All this to reassure the Disney brass, who had already been given enough city-financed low-interest loans to cover 75% of their Deuce-related costs.

In any event, not even the Disney coup can overshadow some of the uglier realities of the current Times Square campaign. The Redevelopment Project, in its zeal to sanitize the area via ritual evictions, has succeeded in putting scores of small businessmen, and their respective staffs, out of work. Not all of these were pornographers, either-a cigar/candy shop on the northwest corner of 42nd and Seventh, for instance, had to go in early 1993 in order to make room for a pamphlet-dispensing Visitors Center, an object lesson in how the BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

11

new urban priorities cater to out-of-town money at the expense of home-grown entrepreneurism. In a move that essentially amounted to rubbing salt in the wound, the Visitors Center stayed in the space for only about 18 months, after which it was relocated down the block to the Harris Theatre. As of this writing, the storefront that housed the cigar shop is closed, shuttered, and locked.

Other non-pornographers unlucky enough to have been in the way of the Redevelopment Project's master plan include a group of about two dozen artists facing eviction from their loft and living spaces on 42nd and 43rd Streets. Armed with hand-held signs depicting a death skull wearing Mousketeer ears, the group staged a small protest at the corner of 44th and Broadway on March 30th of this year. While their claims of being owed special status simply by virtue of their creative endeavors was typical art-community claptrap, their basic point-that it makes little sense to evict them when it's far from certain that any corporate tenant will ever be brought in to replace them-struck at the heart of the current Times Square situation.

In fact, the desolate string of abandoned storefronts now dotting the Square's streets can hardly be described as a visual improvement over the way the area looked before the sex biz was given its walking papers-at least the neighborhood still looked alive then. The many establishments that now stand vacant, offering mute testimony to the Redevelopment Project's purge of pornographer and non-pornographer alike, include a popular deli on 43rd Street, an arcade and a series of novelty shops on Seventh Avenue, and a pair of taverns on 43rd, among them the venerable Gough's, which for decades served as the prototypical newspaperman's bar, second home to generations of New York Times reporters, photographers, and pressmen. Gough's, as it turns out, may have suffered the most humiliating chapter in this entire enterprise-in a classic case of adding insult to injury, the bar was shut down in early 1994 in order to clear the way for a back door to a theater being renovated on 42nd. Years from now, when the trolley is just another dimly remembered fiasco, when Disney has abandoned their experiment on the Deuce and taken their tax write-off, when the majority of the city's populace is employed selling Statue of Liberty pencil sharpeners and Empire State Building snow domes to foreigners and strangers, someone should remember the perfect irony of a tradesman's bar, a worker's bar, being displaced by a tourist trap. Welcome to the modern metropolis.

12 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER SEVEN

Disuae Matter

A

Irvine Welsh

h wis it that Disneyland in Florida, ken. Took hur n the bairn. Wi me gittin peyed oaf fi Ferranti's, ah thoat it's either dae somethin wi the dough or pish it doon the bog it the Willie Muir. Ah saw whit happened tae a loat ay other cunts; living like kings fir a while: taxis ivraywhair, chinkies ivray night, cairry-oots, ye ken the score. N whit dae they huv tae show fir it? Scottish Fuckin Fitba Association, that's what, ya cunt.

Now ah wisnae that keen oan Disneyland, bit ah thoat: fir the bairn's sake, ken? Wish ah hudnae bothered. It wis shite. Big fuckin queues tae git oan aw the rides. That's awright if ye like that sortay thing, but it's no rna fuckin scene. The beer ower thair's pish n aw.

They go oan aboot aw thir beer, thir Budweiser n aw that; its like drinkin fuckin cauld water. One thing ah did like aboot the States though is the scran. Loadsay it, beyond yir wildest dreams, n the service n aw. Ah mind in one place ah sais tae hur: Fill yir fuckin boots while ye kin, hen, cause whin wi git back hame will be livin oafay McCain's oven chips till fuck knows when.

Anywey, it this fuckin Disneyland shite, this daft cunt in a bear suit jumps oot in front ay us, ken? Wavin ehs airms aboot n that. The bairn starts fuckin screamin, gied ur a real fright, ken? So ah fuckin panels the cunt, punches the fuckin wide-o in the mooth, or whair ah thought ehs mooth wis, under that suit, ken? Too fuckin right! Disneyland or nae fuckin Disneyland, disnae gie the cunt the excuse tae jump oot in front ay the bairn, ken.

Thing is, these polis cunts, fuckin guns n aw ya cunt, nae fuckin joke, ah'm tell in ye, they sais tae ays: Whit's the fucking score here, mate, bit likesay American, ken? So ah goes, noddin ower tae this bear cunt: Cunt jumped oot in front ay the bairn. Well ootay fuckin order. The polis cunt jist says somethin aboot the boy bein a bit too keen it ehs joab, ken.

The other yin sais somethin like: Mibbe the wee lassie's frightened ay hears, ken?

So then this radge in a yellay jaykit comes along. Ah tipples right away thit eh's that bear cunt's gaffer, likesay. Eh apologises tae ays, then turns tae the hear cunt n sais: Wir gaunny huv tae lit ye go mate. They wir jist gaunny, likes, gie the boy ehs fucking cairds like that. This is nae good tae us, eh tells the hoy. This perr cunt in the bear suit, eh's goat the head oaf now, likes; the cunt's nearly greetin, gaun oan aboot need in the joab tae pey ehs wey through college. So ah gits a hud ay this radge in the yellay jaykit n sais: Hi mate, yir ootay order here. Thir's nae need tae gie the hoy ehs cairds. It's aw sorted oot.

Mean tae say, ah banged the cunt awright, bit ah didnae want the boy tae lose ehs joab, ken. Ah ken whit it's fuckin like. It's aw a great laugh whin they chuck that redundancy poppy it ye, bit that disnae last firivir, ken. Aw they doss cunts thit blow the dough Irvine Welsh is the author of the short story collection Acid House and the fonhcoming novel Marabou Stork Nightmare, both published by Norton. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. "Disnae Marter" is excerpted from The Acid House by Irvine Welsh. Copyright Š 1994 by Irvine Welsh. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

13

oan nowt. Thuv goat mates they nivir kent they hud-till the fuckin hireys run oot. Anywey, this supervisor radge goes: S'up tae you mate. You're happy, cunt keeps ehs joab. Then eh turns tae the boy n sais: Yir fuckin lucky, ah'm tellin yeo If it wisnae fir the boy here, ken, ye'd be pickin up yir cairds, but this is aw American, likesay, ye ken how aw they doss cunts talk, oan the telly n that.

The cunt ah gubbed, this bear cunt goes: Really sorry, mate, rna fault, ken. So ah jist sais: Sound by me. The polis n the supervisor boy fucked off n the bear cunt turns n sais: Thanks a lot, buddy. Have a nice day. Ah thoat fir a minute, ah'lI fucking gie ye nice day, ya cunt, jumpin oot in front ay the fuckin bairn. Bit ah jist left it, ken, nae hassle tae the cunt. Boy's entitled tae keep ehs joab; that wis rna good deed fir the day. Ah jist goes: Aye, you n aw, mate.

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14 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

11

R4,Kc Boy

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Sweet Portable Lifestyle Keith White In Our City You Can Rollerblade Near water like my dinners ethnic, my coffee latte, my gossip salacious, and my conversation wired. Not a lot to ask, you might think, but difficult to know where to find in an unfamiliar city -if one doesn't know where to look. Fortunately, despite a peripatetic life that has meant six different urban settings in three years, I've suffered no appreciable change in my leisure-time pursuits. That's because a bevy of slick publications- Washingtonian, New York, San Francisco Focus, and Chicago act as my guides, willingly exposing each city's secrets, directing me to the microbreweries and tattoo parlors that define my life.

As a nomadic member of the meritocratic class, I maintain a mobile lifestyle, flowing as easily as capital or information between the moneyed pockets of the nation's various urban centers. A loyal knowledge worker, I'm ready to pack up my rollerblades and mountain bike at a mere beeper message from my boss, to be hermetically transported to yet another hip, urban playground filled with like-minded members of my psychographic.

For my truly important consumer decisions-which sneakers, bottled water, or computer operating software to own-I take my cues from the national media. But many aspects of my urban lifestyle-which third-world restaurants, home design stores, and sports teams to patronize-simply don't lend themselves to presentation on a national scale. This, then, is the objective of the city magazine and the form of press-release journalism that it has perfected: to glamorize the handful of culture-products that go unaffected by national image advertising, to provide elaborate breakdowns of the various items that are supposed to be unique to my town. The resulting trade-off is simple: I get to feel like a savvy, life-long resident of a place, intimately acquainted with all its gritty minutiae; and local merchants, their wares enhanced by inclusion in long "best of" lists and full-color, slick-paper articles, get my business. Thanks to these magazines I can consume a city like any other packaged product.

I

A Riot 0/Same "Where do you want to go today?" asks Microsoft's new ad campaign, associating its products with the glamorous globetrotting lifestyle of a cast of cyber-corporate protagonists. This is the official version of the new bourgeois dream: everywhere they-and I-go is supposed to be wildly diverse and exciting. But the fact is that everywhere we go the diversity and excitement are always the same. The main difference I notice when I go from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury to Chicago's Wicker Park to Washington's Adams-Morgan, is whether the local Starbuck's is independently owned or a franchise. Things trumpeted as making each town unique turn out to be remarkably predictable: Guess what-

they revitalized the waterfront! And there's gonna be riverboat gambling!

With less and less to distinguish one place from the next, city magazines teach me to invest tremendous meaning into the minute differences that are discernible, like those BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

15

between my Colorado Rockies and New York Yankees baseball caps. The magazines help me see that the differences go beyond blue and black fabric: each cap is a microcosmic emissary, spreading the word of a city's personality to the far corners of the globe. Their understanding of civic culture is similar: what is unique about Chicago is, like its professional sports teams, stuff that's packaged and available everywhere, but here it comes in blue rather than green. You haven't been to Chicago, I am told, until you've seen a game at Wrigley, gotten a drink at the Baja Beach Club, and enjoyed stuffed pizza at Pizzeria Uno. A visit to San Francisco doesn't count until you've been to Candlestick, paraded through the Marina, and seen a nose ring at a street fair in the Haight. City magazines deal in counterfeit uniqueness, parcelling out life in some easily merchandisable form-sports team, celebrity, coffee shop. City culture, as understood by the city magazines, is just a decoration-and a remarkably cheap one at that, the contemporary equivalent of those old Empire State Building pencil sharpeners or Space Needle paperweights.

From Boosters to Barkers and Back Many city magazines trace their origins to the days when they were give-away house organs of local chambers of commerce, charged with promoting business and tourism.

They were fairly open about their mission, and fairly transparent as well. But with the rise to prominence of New York in the late 1960s, it wasn't long before a new, better-educated and wealthier class of Americans came to expect their local magazines to share a more urbane point of view.

Clay Felker, who launched New York in 1968, tried to "recreate the atmosphere of an upscale dinner party," echoing what the city's "well-informed" citizens felt about real esrate, art and culture. He realized that since "one of the major activities of people was being consumers" he would also run "endless lists ofwhat's the best this and what's the best that." New Yorks slick pages, filled with the ins and outs of the urban hip, became an instant success with the urban upper-middle class, and a favorite among advertisers in the local retail and restaurant communities. Identical magazines soon flourished in over eighty cities.

But New York sought to be more than just a listings book with 'tude: it was something Theressomethlngsp«lalgolngon of a journalistic success as well. The showplace of such authors as the Greater Twm CitIes Metro Area. You II notice It when you talk Tom Wolfe Gloria Steinem and Jimmy Breslin it introduced such to us. Our vOices hold lust a htnt ' , , more prtde. highly regarded neologisms as radical chic, the me decade, couch po~~~,:!~ ~:~~I~~e.!.e:!:~o~~f tato, downwardly mobile, and the brat pack, all while delivering the earn It. Our theaters. festivals. and h ' more expensIve . resr«reallon areas are beckonIng pone num bers and cred it card poIicies 0 f teh citys from the covers of more and more nallonal and International travel raurants. Felker's magazines published award winning articles as well. magazines And visitors from one end of the globe to the other ate His Caltifornia magazine broke the story ofJim Jones cult in 1972, even arriving daily by air. tram. bus, and car thOUgh the cover of that issue featured a fashion shoot by Annie Leibovitz. ~,~~;'~:~!7u:nl~t~1:t~:~~~~~ At least they had their priorities straight. ow of a metropolitan alrpon.lakeC·Ity magaZInes . bl oated successfull y t h rough t h e eig . h tIes, . untI·1 SIde r050ns iust 40 mIles from a do'e' Fonune'oo companIes and -.

I h I all b ft f a 515 b"[;on rewrdin. induwy. at one pOInt In ate 1987 even t e cu tur y ere CIty ° Ch·lcago and more live theaters than any • • • area outSIde 01 New York compet- boasted three such publIcatIons. But then newspaper edItors began to mg for attennon WIth aquatenntal celebratIOns and wlntercarnl,.ls' wise up, transforming once-droll "Society Pages" to more accessible In

16 • BAFFLER SEVEN

"Style" sections replete with local celebrity gossip and in-depth looks at local retailers.

"Alternative" weeklies constructed along the lines of the Village WJice hit even harder, grabbing advertisers by providing them with shiny little plaques proclaiming them "Best of" purveyors of everything from cole slaw to condoms. The importance of these coveted awards was quickly apparent: they determined which burrito stand moneyed suburbanites would dare to 'discover,' and could even break businesses that failed to advertise. Having succeeded in becoming the most mimicked form of local media, city magazines were fast becoming irrelevant to readers who could find their trademark civic detritis elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the retail recession that ruined Macy's reverberated through the glossies.

Once fat with ads, the city mags thinned, causing them to lose the credibility associated with being as thick and perfumed as their national brethren. In the early nineties, most city magazines found themselves on the verge of extinction, in need of a radical plan.

Never much concerned with the concept of the "editorial wall" between ads and content, city magazines became ever more aggressive in their service to advertisers. By using such pioneering concepts as the "special advertising section" city magazines invited advertisers to help plan the copy. Result? One magazine's recent look at cosmetic surgery was bordered by ads of smiling plastic surgeons, offering to enhance your appearance. Phoenix magazine has turned its ad sales around by creating "exciting new marketing opportunities for business," putting its writers to work attracting lucrative corporate-sponsored expositions to the city. South Florida magazine printed recipes and profiles of local chefs and saw an increase in ad pages from restauranteurs. One San Francisco magazine was especially creative: it bribed hotel concierges with silk ties to get them to recommend advertisers' stores to tourists.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

17

To give editorial a tweak, city magazines became "more provocative," offering extended pieces on famous local murders and sex scandals, letting readers know that their town was home to decadence on a par with anyone's. A Washingtonian cover story accomplished this goal so effectively it was cited as the country's best piece of investigative work by a regional magazine. Its shocking conclusion: teenagers in the DC suburbs were partying at home when their parents were out of town.

Buzz's Muscle The combined effect of the two strategies is intoxicating: the reader is reminded at every turn of the daring, exciting lifestyles enjoyed by their neighbors, and of the daring, exciting products available here and here only. Call it hyper-boosterism, a trait which is especially noticeable in magazines that are actually read outside their city of origin. Los Angeles's Buzz, the avatar of this new form of journalism, seems to believe its blend of celebrity worship, postmodern layout, and silly cut-size will make it fly on a national level, and has invested heavily in a direct-mail campaign aimed at the readers of national lifestyle magazines.

Maybe the particularly egregious way it has of glorifying the Los Angeles's artistic pretensions will allow Buzz to succeed. One ofits columnists compared the flowering of talent at the magazine to "a kind of literary Bloomsbury" (sid). "We're outrageous," she continued, describing writers' lunches at hip eateries. "It's like, we're the funniest, smartest women in town.

I wish somebody would tape us." With this incredibly brilliant staff, editor Allen Mayer hopes the magazine will "help set an intellectual agenda" for Southern California.

In setting that agenda, they've made some strange choices. Almost every one of their covers in the past five years has featured a movie star. This year, they found themselves embroiled in an escalating game of civic one-upmanship the likes of which hasn't been seen since Chicago built the Sears Tower. In FebruaryBuzz proclaimed the nineties the "LA. Decade" ("center stage to the ultimate fin de siecle experience"), compared the city to Vienna a century ago, and equated Steven Spielberg with Gustav Mahler. Another ar. t,!l g.;, -= ticle in that issue declared that a restaurant "was not only the best ~ ~ ~~ H deli in Los Angeles·, it's better than J. ust about any deli in New ,"~.5 ~ ~·c. ~ ~.g~ Ell' ~ ~ >! ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ York." But New York fired back with an issue entitled "Good-bye ~ ~ ~ ~~ s" t1l ] ~ H~~Hf~H~ LA; Hello, NYC," where it revealed that, along with a number of f c § ~ ~ 5' u • ~ .Ji i ~ other celebrities, none other than Steven "Gustav Mahler" Spielberg ~Hheih'!i:;' tg--= 21.2 s. ~ ~ § ~: was moving to New York.

'Q..~.l!txe-g~'" 1~ Hl~ An enraged Buzz didn't take kindly to that suggestion, and commissioned a ten page feature disputing the claim that New York was "back" and listing the different ways Los Angeles kicks New York's ass (better ghettos, more multimedia/interactive, and softer recessions). As a coda to the article, author Joel Kotkin dresses down other Los Angeles journalists less jingoistic than he: "New Yorkers realize that you don't pee in your own tent, while our [Los Angeles] media seems to specialize in it."

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BAFFLER SEVEN

City in Case But such public battles aren't needed to boost the sales of most city magazines. With most of the weaker titles eliminated, times are good. The City and Regional Magazine Association boasts 60 members, more than it had in the category's late eighties heydey.

Chicago magazine was recently purchased by K-III (owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, bottom-liners not known for their charity work) for over seven times earnings, a handsome price for a flailing monthly. Hyper-boosterism, it seems, is profitable stuff: these magazines' affluent readers are willing to pay a stiff cover price for their reading and are therefore much sought-after by advertisers.

Making no secret of whom they serve, city magazines are free to focus less and less on the cities they are named after. One magazine's "best of" list includes fifty restaurants that are in the suburbs. A recent Washingtonian magazine cover story compares the lifestyle available in Virginia to what one can find in Maryland, the implicit message being that no Washingtonian readers would consider living in the actual city. In fact, in the last two years, only two covers of that magazine have been graced by African Americans- an amazing feat in a city which is over 70% black.

With the hyper-boosterism, the craven concessions to advertisers, and the soft-cycled PR feed that makes up their version oflifestyle journalism, city magazines cater to a vision of urban life that is becoming increasingly commonplace among the affluent. Cities are consumer products, exciting lifestyle-amusement parks that come complete with marketing campaigns and brand images. Like all good products, they compete with one another for the patronage of wealthy customers and the relocation of corporations. City magazines speak openly to the often-covert forces and desires that, whether we like it or not, are transforming our cities into places of wholesomely daring recreation for one class and cesspools of neglect and degradation for everyone else.

BAFFLER SEVEN路

19

Comntunity College in the Rain Dand Berman Announcement: All pupils named Doug.

Please come to the lounge on Concourse K. Please join us for coffee and remarks.

Dougs: We cannot come. We are injured by golf cleats.

Announcement: Today we will discuss the energy in a wing and something about first basemen Ribs will be served in the cafeteria.

Pep Club: We will rally against golf cleats today.

The rally will be held behind the gymnasium.

There is a Model T in the parking lot with its lights on.

Dougs: We are dying in the nurse's office.

When she passes before the window, she looks like a bride.

Karen (whispers): We are ranking the great shipwrecks.

Announcement: In the classroom filled with dishwater light.

Share your thoughts on public sculpture.

All: 0 Dougs, where are you?

Dougs: In the wild hotels of the sea.

20 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

Lotteryrille, USA

W

Kim Phillips

at would you do if you won a million dollars? Forget the revolution; this is your ticket to the Kingdom of Freedom. No matter how many hours you log in at a fast-food restaurant or behind a secretary's desk, it's unlikely you'll ever save enough to buy a house or take a decent vacation, let alone get your hair and thighs to look like those of the Aaron Spelling actresses who tantalize you every Monday and Wednesday night. The classless sociery is happening right now, at a party at a mansion in Beverly Hills. And a lottery ticket might buy you an invitation.

In Grand Crossing, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the average monthly spending on the lottery is $60 per household. Grand Crossing lies just west of the South Shore neighborhood, home of the much-lauded community-development-oriented South Shore Bank. Jeffery Boulevard, the busy commercial thoroughfare where the Bank's headquarters are located, is lined with thriving small businesses-hair salons, pizzerias, Blackowned clothing stores. But traveling from South Shore to Grand Crossing you pass a boarded-up apartment building, an abandoned grocery store, a deserted TV repair shop. A little bit further and you come to Stony Island Avenue. The businesses here are distinctly different than on Jeffery-there's a Checkers, a Church's Fried Chicken, a Burger King; a neighborhood has started to become a ghetto. Next to a shuttered bar there's an ad for a pawn shop-"Need Cash Fast? Top Dollar for Broken Gold." Beyond the highway that passes over the neighborhood is a sudden proliferation of storefront churches, one of which, the House of Deliverance, has obviously been abandoned. At Cottage Grove there's a Currency Exchange and a store which advertises itself as selling liquor-and, as an afterthought, food. Beyond, there's nothing but ramshackle buildings, no businesses as far as the eye can see.

Only the passing of an occasional bus reminds you that you're connected to the rest of the city.

Compare Grand Crossing to Bronzeville, the famous Black Metropolis described in 1945 by St. Clare Drake and Horace Cayton, with its "continuous and colorful movement" among locally-owned businesses. A neighborhood, a city, is a concentration of people, goods, money, drawn in from the hinterlands; if much of this abundance is collected only to be dispersed again, a sizable portion remains and circulates within the closed system of the city.

Drake and Cayton describe the neighborhood's policy wheels, illegal private precursors to the lottery which were run primarily by Black syndicates and helped to amass capital within the community, to make sure a few people would always have enough to support local businesses and even invest. As a way of redistributing money within the neighborhood, policy wheels didn't work too badly. It's not a coincidence that policy was replaced by the lottery just as the local department stores and restaurants have been replaced by Burger King.

Today a monthly average of $4.48 is spent on the lottery per household in Flossmoor, a wealthy Chicago suburb where the average income is $117,000 a year. In Posen, a poor suburb where average household income is $33,000, the monthly average is $91.82. AIKim Phillips lives in Chicago. Her writing has appeared in the Grey City Journal BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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though people of all incomes play the lottery, it remains overwhelmingly true that lottery players, like the policy wheel players of the past, are overwhelmingly poor. But in every other way the lottery serves a wholly different function than its predecessor. On one hand, it scrapes up revenue for starved state coffers. On the other, it inoculates the urban poor with a stiff ideological dose of eternal possibility and personal mobility. The one thing it does notdo is collect money for local investment. In an era when Enterprise Zones and tax cuts for businesses are all that is offered to heal the wounds of the cities, the lottery is America's perverse way of dealing with the plight of its urban poor.

Lotteries are part of a long and vigorous tradition in American life, going back to the colonial period when they were used to amass funds for the construction of many of the hallmarks of colonial architecture-the Harvard and Yale campuses, Fanueil Hall-and even for getting supplies to Revolutionary troops. During the nineteenth century, private lotteries took in millions of dollars; the last of these, a fabulously corrupt money-making machine in Louisiana, was shut down in 1896. Yet even after the last of the legal lotteries disappeared, policy rackets continued to turn great profits, and instant sweepstakes like that of Publisher's Clearinghouse took the place of the lottery among the law-abidingespecially when times got tough.

The lottery returned as a tool of public finance in the late sixties and early seventies.

Today, thirty-nine states have lotteries. The Illinois operation is typical: after a few years of slow growth between 1975 and 1980 it exploded; ticket sales climbed from $98 million in 1980 to $1.5 billion in 1990. Your Illinois lottery dollar breaks down like this: about 50¢ goes back in payoffs, 40¢ goes to the Common School Fund, 5¢ goes to commissions for lottery vendors, and 5¢ goes to operating the lottery. The transfer to the school fund in 1994 was $552,111,416. An enormous sum, to be sure, but it's an accounting fiction to say that the lottery made half a billion dollars for the school fund-if the money hadn't come from the lottery it would have to have come from somewhere else in the tax structure. A more accurate way to put it might be to say that the lottery saved local property owners half a billion dollars in taxes.

Baltimore's cultural and relail corridor, the 200 to 900 blocks of Charles Street, It's misleading to think of state revenues as absolute figures; offer It.e visitor a full day or jus, on afternoon 10 toke in Jl,e city's best side. The the crucial question about state taxes isn't whether they're "high" city's orts neighborhood is clustered in this areo, and 01 the street's northern or "low," but who pays them. Since every state gets its revenue end. the Walters Art Gallery and Peabody Conservatory of Music sit adjacent 10 the from somewhere, what matters is which part of society is expected dramatic Woshinglon lVoonument.

Charles Street and the entire down. to foot the bill, a question not of bookkeeping but politics. Tax town area have benefited this past year from the Downlown Partnership of as Orange County is reminding the world, are ways of structures, Baltimore's Creon and Safe program.

Instituted 10 improve the public environdistributing financial power. Sales taxes, for example, are regresment and increase the public's comfort r~'{el, the program pUIS Public Sofety sive not only because they take a more sizable cut of a poor person's Guides and Clean Swef'lP Ambassadors 10 work on downtown's slreeft. In addiincome than that of someone in the upper-middle class, but betion to acling m Ihe eye! and eors of the police and helping 10 keep the down. cause they reduce the cumulative purchasing power of working lown area cleon, Ihey are valuable s.ources of inrormotion to v;sitor$ Thoty'n,

eosily recognizable: jusl look for the block jadels wilh the purple and gold shoulder patches.

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BAFFLER SEVEN

people and hence the bargaining power workers have over the

economy as a whole. The lottery is perhaps unique in that it is one of the only methods of raising revenue which applies solely

to poor and working people and doesn't affect business or property owners at all. In this it seems closer to pre-Revolutionary France, when peasants picked up the brunt of the Crown's bill, than to the United States before the progressive income tax. To a policy wonk it may seem absurd to bring up feudalism in a discussion of taxes, but the comparison is more appropriate than it might seem. "Regressivity" is usually used to describe a state revenue source which exacts a larger proportion of a poor person's income than that of a rich person. However, many common state revenue sources-like excise taxes on cigarettes and the lottery-go farther than this; they take a larger absolute amount from the poor than the well-off, while other kinds of tax relief programs give businesses industrial parks and factory buildings at outrageous discounts.

Despite Chicago's vast ghettos, the poor here are easy to forget. Wealth is everywhere, as immanent and unreachable as the spires of the Loop seem from the South Side-a fairy city, hovering forever out of reach. Money hangs over the city like an unfulfilled promise, beckoning in the department stores, the glass skyscrapers, the taxicabs, a whiff of expensive perfume. "Get from Grand Boulevard to Easy Street," read a lottery advertisement put up in one of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods a few years ago. "This could be your ticket out." Lottery stories sometimes eat up fifteen minutes of a half-hour news program; the ubiquitous pot of Illinois State Lottery gold at the end of a rainbow sits in the window of liquor stores allover the South Side. The message blares from the newspapers that print winning numbers, "hot" numbers, "overdue" numbers, from the hysterical screams ofwinners on Tv. Anyone can be a millionaire. You gotta play to win. Everybody gets another chance.

A chance for what? Lottery marketing firms-which make millions from state contracts-devise scenes of wealth so surreal that they could be Donald Trump's nightmares.

An ad on the New York City subway a couple of years ago showed a throne room in an island mansion, the turquoise waves of some tropical sea visible through a window behind a velvet throne; a middle-aged man in tattered bathrobe with glasses and slippers sat reading the paper while a small poodle stood at attention before him, a peculiar mixture of suburbia and imperial Russia. But at Chicago's Kimbark Liquors, a little Hyde Park establishment that sells 2,700 tickets the day before a $20 million drawing, the purchasers don't seem to be thinking about waiting poodles. "It's just a dream, something to think about before you fall asleep, something to take your mind off its everyday hassles," says Larry, a salesman at Kimbark. What people think of when they play the lottery doesn't seem to be the fancy cars, the racks of CDs, the fabulous new house, the private jet; not the freedom that comes with unlimited consumption, but instead the quieter comfort of financial security, a security that is no longer obtainable through work. A middle-aged man at Kimbark who plays twenty dollars worth of tickets every day says that ifhe wins he'll go to Georgia, where it's warm. An older woman tells me she'd just like to pay offher bills. Mike Lang, of the Illinois Lottery, says, "Winners often buy a new car, not a Ferrari but a Buick or Cadillac."

It's not being a millionaire that people long for, it's simply not being poor any more.

Statistically speaking, nobody ever wins the lottery. The chance of picking 6 random numbers out of 54 is one in 12,913,582. Philosophers of capitalism from Adam Smith to BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

23

Milton Friedman have long been perturbed by the phenomenon of people playing a game they ought to know they can't win. But sneering at the lottery as "a tax on the ignorant," claiming that people who play the lottery are poor fools, deluded and uneducated, manipulated into buying false promises of wealth, fame and glory, bypasses the possibility that maybe poor people actually have a good understanding of what their life chances are; maybe lottery players are right. At issue here is not the lottery per se but the chance of personal mobility, the question of how far you can get in life by working industriously; the lottery should make sense to anyone for whom the answer is nowhere. Lottery tickets aren't like investments in the stock market; they are tickets to a dramatically different kind of life, the kind of life you'll never be able to save up to just by working nine to five.

In fact, the lottery is a perfectly rational investment for a person facing a lifetime of drudgery and uncertainty. The dictums of the economists-that saving can ultimately buy you a better life, that accumulation towards re-investment ought to be the practice of any rational utility-maximizer-fail to take into account that money means one thing for the rich and quite another for the poor. Poor people's money doesn't work right. It doesn't save, it doesn't accumulate, it doesn't invest. For most people, money is simply a means to an end, a way to get food, clothing, shelter and a little TV on the side. It gets traded in, given away, stolen, lost. Elusive and slippery, you can't put it somewhere it will stay-like a house or a pension plan-until you can make the down payment. The working man's purchasing power is just the boss' variable capital, so the saying goes. Money, the form both take, is a neutral medium. To compare the cash hidden in the mattresses of the poor to the investments of the wealthy is to postulate a continuum where there is in fact a radical break.

As the historical progression from Bronzeville to Grand Crossing indicates, what makes a ghetto a ghetto is not so much a lack of money but the lack of institutions in which money can collect. With no local businesses through which to circulate, the green stuff disappears from poor neighborhoods into the cash registers of the few remaining chain supermarkets. It goes to the makers ofOlde English 800, to the tobacco millionaires, the fast-food chain owners, the landlords in the suburbs, the currency exchanges. The lottery is hardly unique in siphoning money out of a poor community--compared with most businesses that "serve" the poor it looks almost innocuous. If the model for the lottery isn't Robin Hood, it's not quite Ronald Reagan either-it robs the poor to give to the school system. That it goes to the state is perhaps a sign of how desperate state governments are for revenue, but for the players it's no different than other systems that suck their money away. To refer to the lottery as a swindle or a cheat on the poor ignores the basic truth about being poor, which is that you get cheated all the time.

Yet there is a lucky winner. The lottery is a painless, if extremely narrow form of redistribution, taking money from the poor to enrich one of their own. While the lottery may, in a sense, be rational for the individual, it is clearly irrational for the class. Rather than simply manipulating ignorance, the lottery teaches a sly lesson: for people in desperate situations, fantasy is the answer. Reinforcing the

24 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER SEVEN

message of personal mobility, lottery playing teaches that you're on your own, that organization and politics are loser's games. Unlike the liquor salesmen or absentee landlords, the lottery sells a vision of the future-a future imagined in terms of an unchangeable class system. The poor donate money to make one of their number rich, at which point that person and their newfound wealth pack up and move out. And the rich pay nothing for this selfcontaining system of political quiescence-in fact, they get a tax cut.

When people are laid off, budgets are tight, crime is rampant, and social dislocation is the norm, a microeconomic model explaining why this is the best of all possible worlds can't be far behind. The early 1980s found a new theoretical model afoot in the antiseptic world of sociologists and political scientists which suggested that a city is not an economic unit in its own right, much less a place where people work and live, but rather a "service provider"-a place offering skyscrapers, office buildings, three-martini lunches, shoeshine boys. The earliest theorizers applied rational choice theory to urban life: people shop for cities the way one might look at a J. Crew catalogue, ultimately selecting the town with the ideal mix of services and taxes for them. Later academics contented themselves with explaining the only important thing-why cities should be prostrate and powerless vassals before the lord of corporate money. Since attracting big business to the city, where it will create jobs and pay (some) taxes, is, by definition, good for all the members of the city, it follows that all responsible city policies aim to attract private capital, with tax breaks, infrastructure, and perks like free electricity. Cities should compete for the privilege of housing the headquarters of Sears, the factories of U. S. Steel. And any microeconomist can tell you what the result of all this competition is-a better deal for the consumer.

Debates in academia rage-do "incentives" actually attract business to an area? How much do taxes matter? What does business want?-questions that business publications happily answer. The Site Selector Handbook, for example, is quite straightforward on this intricate and difficult subject; in a recent article called "Incentive Lures: Firmly Embedded in the Location Equation," the president of a Colorado economic development council says, "I'd have to say incentives are brought up in discussions of prospects virtually 100% of the time today." Voltaire is brought in to defend the practice: ''A little evil is often necessary for obtaining a great good." And the states and localities whip themselves into masochistic lathers to demonstrate that they provide a perfect setting for your company.

"To say our state is 'pro-business' is a little like saying the Sistine Chapel is 'kinda pretty,'" reads an ad for North Carolina, touting the state's right-to-work law, its balanced budget, and its favorable bond rating. An ad for the "Gateway Area," towns in Northern Illinois, Southern Iowa, and Northern Missouri, goes even farther, advertising the "Nordic stock" of the locals-''A Work Force that Earns Its Pay"- who, despite their Old World work ethic of "not just accepting hard work, but taking pride in it", come for lower wages than any workers in the surrounding cities.

A state budget is a tricky thing to unpack, containing such oddities in its murky depths as a steep sales tax on illegal drugs so that drug dealers can be busted for tax evasion, and sales tax exemptions for all kinds of goodies ranging from manufacturing equipment BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

25

to semen used for the artificial insemination of livestock. But a number of things are unmistakably clear about the lottery and the Illinois tax structure: the state has one of the highest sales taxes in the nation (6.25%) and one of the lowest income taxes (a flat tax of 3%; of the seven states with flat taxes, only Pennsylvania's is lower.) The lottery, which makes up 5% of total state revenue, grosses about 15 times the tax on real estate transfers ($28 million a year), about 5 times the tax on corporate franchises ($93 million a year), and is gaining apace on the corporate income tax ($851 million a year.) In fact, total state revenue from all forms of gambling-riverboats, the racetrack, Bingo and the lotterynow exceeds the corporate income tax, at $864 million a year. ('~ tantalizing source of revenue," reads a brochure from the Comptroller's office.) Considering the lottery and, additionally, the variety of other revenue sources which fall predominantly on the poorsteep taxes on cigarettes, on liquor, and sales taxes-it seems evident that Illinois wants to increase taxes on working-class people, while easing up on corporations and their rich employees. But what else can they do? Chicago can't move, capital can. Rather than enact new income taxes, Illinois's politicians have decided to soak the poor.

While urban governments kow-tow to capital, local property owners have staged semirevolts at any hint of increased property taxes, leaving cities and states with a vacuum where there should be revenue. Public goods and services are needed to attract businesses and investors, and cities compete to undercut each other, each offering a better deal, lower taxes, more freebies, more docile workers. The "populist" -conservative ethic of personal responsibility and lower welfare payments dovetails nicely with the businessman's dream of a "flexible" labor market and a proliferation oflow-wage workers-workers whose pockets can also be picked, at least in the short run, to make up for dwindling state coffers. The only thing cities have plenty of these days is poor people. And the lottery is a way of exploiting that human resource, the one taxable group in a state that won't move out and whose numbers are growing.

A British academic named Barbara Goodwin has written extensively about an imaginary "just sociery" which is organized around a mechanism called the Total Social Lottery.

The lottery, held every five years, will determine which job you have, where you live, who has children, who governs. Every citizen will receive a basic social minimum-food, health care, aplace to live-and all other income will be ran__.,,";:::::.~~ domly redistributed every five years in Lifesryle Packages, which include ~~:';:_':':':::'" random amounts of cash. The first question my friends in the primitive ;~::~::.::...

1990s have about this society is not about its instability or lack of flexibil:::.::::::.::- ity, but is whether they would have to be treated by an untrained dentist .h".~"..." ", every five years. While it's similar to the kind of fantasy kids dream up in Itnwr",k"'&-NMp ; the backseat during a long car ride, Goodwin's utopia sheds a little light on ~:.::::::: our own "meritocratic" society and the dozens of belief-systems, from Andrew Carnegie's benevolent social Darwinism to the ramblings of Murray ...

- -" mil"' and Herrnstein, which it has spawned in self-defense. The basic assumptions Goodwin makes about the lack of connection between the social im-

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BAFFLER SEVEN

portance of work and the size of one's income may not be so far from the mark. After all, the function of many jobs may have more to do with discipline and profit-making than with the social importance of the work itself; people who work at McDonaids' don't make hamburgers as much as they make money for the people who own the fast-food chain.

The social philosophy played out in the daily drama of the lottery maintains that nobody deserves to be a millionaire. As in Goodwin's imaginary system, lottery players demonstrate a cunning awareness that wealth is little more than the luck of the draw.

There's a strong tendency among lottery players to use numbers which have personal or numerological meaning, which are invariably random numbers in genesis-birthdays, for example, are perhaps the most random numbers of all. Numbers can have occult meanings as well-for example, 769 equals death, which for some reason makes it a lucky number.

Images in dreams have numerical meaning; "abdomen" is 28-33-54, according to some dream-book publications, and "accident" is 4-31-50 if you witness one, 1-37-50 if you're in one. Other players seek order in absolute randomness; thousands of Illinois players let the Quick-Pick random-number generator pick their numbers for them. The world is moved by strange forces, irrational passions, dreams and the randomness of birth, and wealth is largely a matter of chance, luck and the uncontrollable variable of life-choices dictated by who your parents are. While this emphasis on the blind hand of fate which causes some people to be born rich and others poor, may obscure the logic of a social system which keeps them that way, it poses a direct challenge to any perceived link between wealth and morality, between intellect and income, between productive power and money.

The peasants pay taxes while the noblemen joust; the unproductive economy feeds off an abundance of frustrated hopes. Instead of coming to grips with the harsh realities of poverry and urban decay, our empty cities exist in a hazy dream of riches. The lottery doesn't solve the problems of the city or cure the plight of the poor, and the lottery's fog of fantastical riches can't survive forever in the harsh reality of ghetto life-which, if nothing else, may mean that someone else will have to subsidize the school system. The answer lies in the very bond the lottery tries hardest to break-the bond of solidarity, whether of class, neighborhood, or, finally, among cities. Imagine a kind of union of cities, a political unit which refused to compete for corporate relocation, instead working as a group to lay down terms for business-adequate wages for workers, laws mandating that a company remain in a given location for a specified number of years, consideration for the urban environment-rather than allowing business to lay down terms for them. The ideology of the lottery is the ideology of competition, in which each man is for himself and only one wins.

Yet the only way cities can hope to win in the future is through solidarity. To get from Grand Crossing to Easy Street, cities will have to do better than the lottery-it's a loaded gamble, a fixed game, a bet which only capital can win.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

27

Fire Sale From: Robert Fiore To: Richard Riordan Re: Opportunity Knocking Well, your honor, I can imagine your chagrin. Los Angeles having a team stolen by St. Louis-why, it's like Belgium invading Germany. It's a serious blow to our prestige, even if the Rams did hare off to Orange County ten years ago. (Now there's something to bring a smile to your face. I'll say it again: Orange County. So what did we invest in, ticket futures on the Clinton Second Inaugural?) But we should not let the shame and degradation blind us to the opportunity before us. If St. Louis is willing to spend something like $320 million to get the winners of the NFI.:s Lifetime Underachievement Award, then what we have here is a motivated buyer. Your honor, as the man who came up with the sell-the-airport scheme, you of all people should grasp the possibilities. When representatives of the City With a Really Big Arch come to finalize the deal, it behooves us to show them a few other things they might like to take off our hands. For instance ...

• The Crips: No city can truly call itself major league without a first class street gang, and no gang can capture the glamour and romance of senseless violence and socially corrosive crime like our boys-I beg your pardon-gentlemen in blue. Sure, St. Louis can, and possibly does, have one of the gang's many franchises, but there's nothing like the real thing.

For instance, the L.A. Crips still have many of their Original Gangsters, making them much more valuable on the collector's market.

• And if they're going to take the Crips, they'd certainly want to balance them out with the perfect accessory, former police chief Daryl F. Gates. Public servant, family man, radio oersonality, software designer and all around ambassador of good will, Chief Gates has that diplomatic touch that can keep an ethnic melting pot boiling. If you're looking for someone to explain controversial policies in terms that no one can misunderstand, you need look no further. And since he's presently completely at liberty he can be had at a bargain price.

• The City Attorney's Office: Keeping with the law enforcement theme, America's most notorious crimefighting team has only one weakness: the obviously guilty. Go into court with a neon sign reading "Will Kill for Money" and your chances are no worse than even.

Commit your crime on camera and you'll never see the inside of a prison. Crime being what it is these days, particularly if St. Louis buys the Crips and Chief Gates, the City Attorney's office may be the only remedy for prison overcrowding.

• Metro Rail: Nothing suits a city on the move like a gargantuan public works program, and there's no public works program in the country like L.A.'s Metro Rail subway project: Raben Fiore lives in Los Angeles.

BAFFLER SEVEN •

29

it goes nowhere, leaks like a sieve, smells like rotten eggs, drives the businesses whose taxes are supposed to help pay for it into bankruptcy by screwing up their streets for years at a time, and has an uncanny way of finding unstable earth and making the streets above it collapse. Viewers of the movie "Speed" who laughed at the notion of a subway train without a deadman switch were forgetting that this was supposed to be Metro Rail God alone knows what safety equipment will be missing by the time this white elephant is finishedor should I say abandoned? Unlike the squalid and noisy subway stations of other cities, Metro Rail's stations are clean and tranquil due to the complete absence of riders. It's a 19th centuty solution for a 21st century problem that we'll be paying for well into the 23rd, if we don't unload it now. Skeptical about St. Louis' willingness to buy such a thing?

Listen, after they've paid $320 million for the Rams, a hole in the ground is going to look like a bargain. The only question is, do we include Ron Tutor, the preternaturally wellconnected contractor who underbid everyone who actually knew how to build a subway, and then spent twice the going rate learning the trade? As the preternaturally well connected contractor was preternaturally well connected to Democrats, I don't suppose you'd miss him any more than the rest of us would, but St. Louis might have its own Ron Tutors who want to get on this gravy train. I leave it to your judgment.

• The Triforium: Forgot about this one, didn't you? Yes, the humiliation of having paid for the most idiotic piece of public art in the world has caused the population of Los Angeles to all but wipe the Triforium out of its collective memory. Allow me to refresh yours. The Triforium is a tripod of concrete boomerangs, lined with colored lights which give it the aspect of a giant pez candy dispenser. As if this wasn't aesthetic delight enough, the lights go on and off to the tune of music played through a public address system at least as good as what you would find in the better bus stations, with the whole structure reminding one of those homemade light shows teenagers used to build in their bedrooms in the 70s. When these melodies echo through the deserted concrete canyons on a foggy night the effect can be very spooky. Like the huge artificial flowers sold at the Tijuana border, the Triforium will identify the owner as a dumb tourist who will buy anything. This encourages trade. Or at least, that's what we'll tell our friends from St. Louis.

• The Clippers: In the course of negotiations you will feel the temptation to try to unload the Clippers. You must fight it. If we try to sell them the Clippers they'll know we take them for a bunch of rubes.

• Universal City Walk: As you may recall, this addition to the Universal Studios Tour complex was originally planned as an artificial Los Angeles for people who find the real thing too dirty and scary. The very concept of an artificial Los Angeles staggers the imagination. Think of it this way: when you're building your fake fake Tudor house you can't have it fake like a real fake Tudor house because then it wouldn't be fake enough and people would be uncomfortable, but you couldn't make it look like a real Tudor house because, well, it just isn't done. In fact, according to the environmental 30 •

BAFFLER SEVEN

impact report, had the project been completed as originally conceived, the resulting improbability vortex in the space-time continuum would have sucked the entire Universal City complex to the center of the Earth. This sort of environmental impact will give pause to even a developer, though a simulation is being considered as a future attraction on the tour.

As it was actually built CityWaik is a theme park version of a shopping mall, if you can imagine such a thing. Most of the retailers are chain stores you could find anywhere, and you only know you're somewhere special because it's big, predominantly purple, and you paid five bucks to park there.

• Pershing Square: Let's face it, we don't know what to do with it. It's too big to be a traffic island, too small to be a park, and in practical terms is nothing more than a manhole cover for an underground parking garage. During L.A.'s bicentennial year it sprouted a geodesic dome that the smog turned brown in about a week. The latest redesign had two objectives: 1) Create a common ground between the shiny new office tower downtown and the crumbling-into-rubble immigrant downtown; and 2) Keep the bums from sleeping there. The obvious problem is that a place too unpleasant for a bum to stay is not likely to be particularly attractive to anyone else. Grass has been banished to a few postcard-sized patches next to the street. Instead you have desolate expanses of textured concrete (uncomfortable to sleep on, you know) separated by big, blocky walls that look like those wooden Swedish toys your kids won't play with. This paradise garden is dominated by a four story bell tower playing recorded music at an earsplitting volume that would chase the fiends out of Hell.

The walls and bell tower are done in those shades of yellow and purple that to architects say FUN! and to the public say NAUSEA! The war memorials that used to be the Square's raison d'etre are exiled to a tiny courtyard, like a giant's discarded toy soldiers. The office worker's won't go there because they're not forced to. The immigrants won't go there because it looks like the kind of place where the junta would round up the dissidents to be shot. What would St. Louis do with it? I don't know. Chamber of Horrors, maybe?

• The Community Redevelopment Agenry: I read somewhere that you were planning to dismantle our fabled urban renewal mob altogether, a move that would by itself make the Riordan administration a success. With St. Louis in the picture, we can even make a profit on the deal. The CRA is like something dropped out of an early draft of 1984, an urban renewal agency that has destroyed more housing than its built. Its central operating delusion is the "revitalization of downtown." To the CRA and the rest of the downtown development cabal, the main thing standing in the way of a revitalized downtown is a Caucasian deficiency, and the solution is a downtown that's clean, bright, and has no buildings older than the sitting president's dog. When I first came to L.A. 15 years ago, your honor, downtown was certainly no Paris, but at least you had an all-night bookstore, an all-night Googie's, an out-of-town newspaper stand where you could get a bet down, the last few downtown department stores in the grand manner, and that cheerful red neon JESUS SAVES sign that used to be L.A.'s way of saying "Welcome to Gomorrah!" Now that's all gone, most of it hors d'development, and I for one am not going to listen to any "revitalization" plan that doesn't explain how we're going to make up the ground we've already lost. For St. Louis, on BAFFLER SEVEN •

31

the other hand, the CRA is the perfect solution for urban congestion. It's like the neutron bomb: in any place they redevelop all the foot traffic disappears, and by 6:30 p.m. the whole place is as deserted as the Marie Celeste.

• Everything on Bunker Hill· Now that the soon-to-be-sold CRA is finally rebuilding Angel's Flight (a cute and functional funicular railway that linked the residential Bunker Hill neighborhood with the downtown business district, dismantled in the 1960s with the promise that it would be reconstructed in a few years, after the urban renewal millenium), about 30 years after they promised to do it, we should go the rest of the way and do the job right. First we sell off everything built during the CRA reign of terror, from the Music Center, that monument to the Albert Speer era of L.A. architecture, to the skyscrapers of the California Plaza, that monument to Reaganoid dealmaking. The denizens of the uprooted buildings can move to the acres of vacant 80s-era office space below Bunker Hill, like the diurnal cockroaches they sometimes resemble. We might as well keep the Museum of Contemporary Art, as the builders had the decency to put most of it underground.

Once all this junk has been packed up and shipped off, we form all the developers into a chain gang and force them at a gunpoint to rebuild every boarding house, bordello, low dive and thieves' den they demolished in the name of the false god of urban renewal. Then they'll all be converted into chichi boutiques and coffee shops and we'll be ashamed of ourselves allover again.

• Rupert Murdoch: Or, to, be more specific, the Fox Network, which finally succeeded in destroying the last vestiges of shame in the television business. There is no low appetite it will not exploit, no superstition it will not encourage, no common denominator that it will not lower, and if you know of any they've missed, believe me, they want to hear from you. A particular offender, worse in its own way than the utterly cynical and dishonest Sightings, is The X-Files. In this series two FBI agents, one a believer and one a "skeptic," investigate paranormal phenomena. Though it is clearly fiction, it sends the American idiot two comforting messages: one, that "skeptics" will be skeptical despite massive special effects department-engineered physical evidence of paranormal phenomena; and two, that therefore beliefin paranormal phenomena is supported by massive physical evidence rather :;;~!::=;::=.=:;~:=~!~ than ephemeral hoaxes, self-deceptions and delusions. ~thaneYff.iltherimelO·ComeCelebmeOurDream.·Albost Of course, Los AngeIes d oesn'h ci<y .. ,"'I.... C.,""""O!ym"";....., .. ~=""""',... t ave a monopo Iy on tMlIIOItucitinsyeilniaourhiatOly... periodoftimethltislllOft\l_wf~,h''"ti~'"'''' Rupert Murdoch. He covers the earth like, like ... well, Dunll!: the nm two yean. Adaau.especiaIIy the downtown aru. will I'k .

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Murdoch Exchange, where various cities buy, sell or trade their shares of Rupert Murdoch. But now we're getting into ideas we don't want to sell off to St. Louis, and I've gOt a million of them. You might think that such talent wouldn't be available to the public sector, no matter how cushy the J·ob. Au contraire, your honor, au contraire . ..

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Post-Urban, Post-Industrial but never

Post-Elite an excursion through contemporary urban theory

Edward Casdeton "How are ye blind, ye treaders-down of cities!"

-The Trojan WOmen but in the spirit of John Horne Burns

O

nce, a long time ago, there was an analog world, goes the contemporary bromide of the new cyber-elite. But now, they enthuse, the world has transformed itself into a "place without space,"where time zones are more important than trade zones, and where an address on-line is a thousand times more significant than any petty street coordinate. Busying themselves with faxes, voice-mail, e-mail, and the Internet, this new class couldn't care less about where they physically happen to be. Geography and community must come to them. "Being digital" is the crucial thing, insists Nicholas Negroponte, MIT media lab guru and high priest of the new corporate age: every remnant of the analog world must bend to meet our digital needs or be abandoned. There is, for example, no difference between Sunday and Monday in Negroponte's workweek. Work follows him everywhere and he follows it, jacking in with his laptop wherever he happens to be. As for those topographic mundanities which would imply that something exists outside the solipsistic self, forget it. The digital world has freed this entrepreneurial narcissus from the surly bonds of place, class, and context-and also, if we are to believe the bombast, from the grip of those nasty relics of the past known as cities.

This should have been obvious to anyone who read February's special ASAP edition of Forbes. The magazine's cover story is a face-off over "the city vs. the country" featuring the apostle of entreprenurial overcoming, Tom Peters, and George Gilder, author of the futuristic Microcosm: the Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. Gilder is all pessimism, predicting "the death of cities" due to the dread inevitability of Gordon Moore's (you know, the founder ofIntel) Law, which asserts that because the number of transistors on a chip double every 18 months and because capital now depreciates in real value faster than ever before, there is an organic centrifuge -a "constant pressure distributing intelligence to the fringes of all networks" -out there somewhere that is breaking down all concentrations of power. The law does not seem to apply to the relationship between management and labor, but Gilder freely speculates about its consequences for the physical conglomeration of the metropolis. "Big cities are left-over baggage from the industrial era," he insists, "dirty, dangerous, and pestilential" places that only survive on a $360 billion lifesupport system courtesy of government subsidies. But with the coming of the information revolution this ultimate concentration of power can be painlessly amputated while all its advantages are retained and delivered safely and cleanly through the glories of ever-exBAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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Just Deserts And How to Avoid Them Naomi Klein

panding bandwith. The levelling of the distinctiveness of different cultural activities will bring a "culture of first choices" where you can watch operas at the Met or order books from Borders on the computer without having to move your lazy ass.

Peters, though, is all WASPish exuberance, the optimistic counterpoint in a rigged rendezvous. At first, his argument seems surprising: the city is "the perfect market" and thus the site of perfect competition. The accumulation of capital has never undermined the growth of the urban metropolis, he points out. In fact, the occurence of the one has historically been concomitant on the development of the other. Strangely, though, the proof to which Peters points is not a city in any traditional sense; it's Santa Clara County in California, the site of the illustrious Silicon Valley. Here we can experience "the ascendancy and relevence of the new city-state," a veritable Renaissance Italy of "clusters of exuberant variety" where entrepreneurship and progress arise from the interaction berween innovative high-tech Indians and Vietnamese, a tribute to the vitality ofAmerican pluralism as well as to the competitive milieu that blurs all the boundaries in the heat of "the passion to one-up the other guy." Needless to say, Peters adds, San Francisco and San Jose are not separate cities anyway; they form an enormous "zesty nerwork" ("the 50,000 person city is history"), the product of a sucessful merger, a sort of cosmopolitan joint venture.

According to Peters, human interaction will triumph over Gilder's vision of a domesticated techno-utopia. Yet the sort of human interaction he has in mind is not entirely clear. In a characteristic fit of amphetamine-fed grandiloquence coupled with his usual millenarian opacity, this consultant's consultant blurts out,

Lost year a beautiful young woman was shot to death in a Toronto cheesecake palace. It was one of those restaurants which boosts 100 different kinds of desserts, 18 varieties of coffees and is called "The Coke Lady,' 'Calories' or 'Have Your Coke and Eat ItToo: As it happened, this cheesecake palace-where the beautiful woman was shot by a man who was attempting to rob the ploce---hod the unfortunate nome of â&#x20AC;˘Just Desserts.'

You con imagine the jokes when the pun come full circle. Iworked in a cheesecake palace in the summer between high-school and university.

It was the kind of place where people who don't like to go out go out~fter on early show at the Cineplex or on a beautiful summer night when you really shouldn't stay in, but a bar? So smoky. So loud.

That summer, I learned a lot about the type of people who frequent dessert palaces, and I grew to hate their impatience, their perverse joy in sending things back: 'Too much raspberry sauce,' 'Can you heat this up for five more secA5 far as I am concerned, the greatest thing in ondsf 'Oh wait a minute what is the world would be the dispersion of the subshe eatingf 'Is this skim or 2 perurb. You should either be in places where there centf '1 didn't know this had nuts,' are two people per square mile or places where '1 wanted my whipped cream on the there are two million per square mile. I have a side: And although I had been great deal of difficulty imagining a vibrant socithinking more along the lines of a ety with no opera companies and no ballet companies, no Cafe Veronas in Palo Alto, and I doubt scathing novel, the double entendre whether we can have a cyberspatial Cafe Verona of the Just Desserts murder took on with the sweat dripping allover the machines. a special meaning for me.

It also took on a special meaning for Canadian cities; although it Never mind imagining arriviste Peters as an enthusiast of such

generic emblems of high culture as either opera or ballet-

36 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

what's really revealing is his choice of Palo Alto as the desirable "vibrant society"-Palo Alto, the seat of Stanford Univerisity and its Hoover Institute, a sterile, affluent shopping mall community that even forced its eastern, more Hispanic half (the half that cleans the toilets and does the gardening) to secede and form East Palo Alto.

For those who didn't get the message of the Gilder/Peters pseudo-debate, another hint of the post-urban future came in the next feature story, "Tele-City on a Hill" written by Peter Huber of the always-progressive Manhattan Institute. Warning any New York readers who aren't yet panic-stricken that Omaha, "the 800 Number Capital of the World," threatens to transform Gotham into just another "fly-over community" with its cheap labor, taxes, and real estate, Huber insists that the only hope for urban sprawl is to re-organize itself and interactively export its "intellectual capital" via "long-distance antennas and transcontinental glass, switches, routes and multiplexes, the eyes and ears of the electronic age." By"intellectual capital" Huber and his fellow urban theorists don't mean the editorial staff of the New York Review ofBooks. Business weeks tale of urban cyber-rejuvenation focuses on Manhattan's new "Silicon Alley" where venture capitalists can get turned on by "the most diverse pool of intellectual capital anywhere" in the form of new "edutainment" and CD-ROM game "industries."

didn't have much to do with class warfare, revenge, or retribution. It had to do with urban decay and rising crime rates, the idea that even upscale urban communities were not sale Irom, as one columnist put it, "The barbarians inside the gate: Just Desserts became a national rallying cry lor the Irightened white middle-class. II we don't ad now, Toronto-a city whose claim to lame is that it serves as a stand-in lor New York and Chicago in countless third-rate Hollywood IiImswill spiral into these degenerate cities itsell. What's next1 Drive bys?

Don't get the wrong idea: people are murdered in Toronto all the time. But there was something in the combination 01 bullets and cheesecake that struck a chord. II you're not even sale in this, the closest thing to a tastelully decorated living room outside 01 your very own home, then where are you sale?

Yuppie cales lost their innocence that night.

At the behest of Gingrich's think tank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), Gilder recently co-authored with fellow futurists Alvin Toffler, Esther Dyson, and George Keyworth, "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age," an alarming little pamphlet that encapsulates all the pseudo-emancipatory and anti-urban fantasies of the new corporate right. See, the "Third Wave" economy, whose central resource is "actionable knowledge" (e.g. "data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values"), has replaced the "static competition" of the Machine Age with "dynamic competition," "demassification," and more quality (albeit expensive) customized goods. The "Third Wave" has also millennialized the way we understand geography. Now we are to witness "the creation of 'electronic neighborhoods' bound together not by geography but by shared interests" as "Third Wave policies permit people to work at home, and to live wherever they choose"-unless, of course, backwards-looking Sec-

I'm sitting in Eek-a-Geek, a brand new cafe in a part of Toronto where retailers specialize in minute spedalties-Iresh pasta, pesto or brigh~y colored ceramic home decorations. Eek-a-Geek is the newest addition to the on-line cale stene.

There are at least 49 such cales world-wide and 24 more are scheduled to open "real soon now: like their cheesecake cousins, they all have super cute names like "CyberPerk", "Cole liberty" and "Cyber Java.'

Now, 'Spend more time in Iront 01 computer" was pretty Iowan my list 01 New Year's resolutions-a higher priority was "Visit chiropracBAFFLER SEVEN路

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tor about disturbing (Urve in spine: But thanks to the rise of Wired and Macintosh's ads featuring Henry Rollins et 01., computers have lately been transformed into a rather costly but indispensible accouterment of hip. So it wasn't long before the new culture accessory berome the latest gimmick for the hippest rofes and bars, and the espressomakers weren't even baptised before the techno-dazzled media was embracing the trend with dever headlines like'Au-lait On-line: These public net sites are really nothing more innovative than Kinko's with beverages. But the cyber-vision of Kinko's-with its prim staff in pale blue buttondowns, Gap khakis, and name tags; with its gray, freshly steam-cleaned carpets and its list of services displayed fast-food menu style on the wall-summons an image of the future that is more eighties/Cold War! IBM than nineties! Wiredpsychedelit But then there's Eek-a-Geek, where everything, including its wacky name, is designed to mask the sterility and threat of technology's pre-lilted face. The computers are embedded into the wall so you can't see their smooth gray bodies-only their groovy screen savers. They are framed not with institutional cubicles but rustic pieces of plywood and anarchist stickers-one says 'burn your user card,' another advertises the local punk band Bellygod. All the surfaces are cluttered with mini plastic smurf-like creatures and toy cars.

One waitress is on rollerblades and talks endlessly to her friends, another is warm and flaky and has a 38 â&#x20AC;˘

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ond Wave policies interfere and encourage urbanization.

Michael Vlahos, one of the PFF's leading thinkers, predicts that by the year 2020 we will inhabit a glorious realm he calls "Byte-City," ruled over by "Brain Lords" like Microsoft's Bill Gates, followed consecutively in the suburban hierarchy by "Upper Service" workers (lawyers), "Industrial" workers, and then the "Lost" people "who can't cope" and must do menial jobs. Old understandings of the metropolis give way to a city that is nothing more than "a node in the network of our lives." At a recent conference entitled "Democracy in Virtual," Vlahos presented a vision of the cyber-future in which everyone serves one another from their living rooms and the GOP dream of a meritocratic utopia has finally been achieved. '~l job worth must be proven in Byte City," Vlahos boasts, insisting that the "Brain Lords," those "kinder, gentler robber barons" of tomorrow, will not constitute a "heritable class," heaven forbid, but "will make it as individuals." Old-style cities brought anomie and caused a "loss of identity" amidst the tyranny of mass production and mass consumption. But in the next century, every home will possess a "virtu-screen" that "doesn't take us to the city, it brings the city to us. The city is in our living room, or wherever we want it to be." "There is no interface," Vlahos cryptically proclaims, for, due to the wonders of the much touted 'computer-mediated communications' technologies, "You will not hit the pavement of Byte City streets, but you will walk the sidewalks none the less."

Not that the obsequious Democrats have an alternative vision to offer while trying desperately to catch up with the Right. Announcing their findings in Business week, the same platform as the Republicans, Joel Kotkin of the Democratic Leadership Council and David Friedman, LA Timescontributor, outlined their vision of the urban future in an article entitled "Why Every Business will be like Show Business." The future, they proclaim, is to be found in Hollywood, which they portray as a place where small, non-union companies that compare themselves to "medieval craftsmen" form "loose networks" around collaborative "projects," all to produce masterpieces of high-tech American stupidity like Free Willy Il It's "Silicon Alley"! multimedia gulch redux. The heroes of their story are the prop makers at tiny firms with names like Cinnabar and the independent contractors who make customized xenon lights for the cinematic trashmen that rule the town.

These bold but miniscule innovators, brilliantly solving problems for the big producers, hail from a different race altogether than the more vulgar and resentful Second Wave type that occasionally blow up federal buildings or computer scientists.

As Jonathan Katz, the founder of Cinnabar, warmly reminisces about his first job in an uncreative unionized Hollywood, "I remember one producer saying to me, 'What is a nice Jewish boy like you doing making props? I'm used to rednecks in overalls.''' And so, because of 'intelligent' freelancers like Katz, a ship scene from Free Willy II can thankfully be shot at an outdoor pool next to the LA Coliseum: the "here-today-gonetomorrow production strategy" is manifest destiny in this age of productive chaos.

Philistines Kotkin and Friedman are not that much different from the boys at Newt's PFF: both are interested primarily in the bigger profit margins that can only come from incessant technological innovation. Countries like France that resist the importation of Hollywood product just don't understand: "France's real problem is not so much American 'cultural imperialism' as its inability to compete with Hollywood's combination of technical and artistic specialization and welloiled collaboration." They don't comprehend the new force of the pluralist "cosmopolis" which is supplanting the anachronistic mono cultural model of the nation-state that Fascism, Stalinism, and Third World Liberation movements created.

The new urban network-society accordingly thrives in an atmosphere of decentralized "diversity" where the agglomeration of different "tribes" like Jews, Chinese, Indians, and gays boost the "knowledge value" of corporate assets through hightech miscegenation. Vive la difftrance!

Apart from the fact that Kotkin's capitalist-multicultural babble is being uttered by a Democrat, his narrative of a CDROM future is nearly identical to the one given by Vlahos and the other starry-eyed pseudo-intellectuals at the PFF. But regardless of whether the new order is cultural or organic, urban or suburban, or even whether the half-baked metatheory comes from the right or the center, the rhetoric of necessity, it seems, must be invoked. Byte City or no Byte City, the important fact is that the rule of the post-analog business theorists who make up the new power elite be legitimated.

Beneath all of the Information Elite for technological transformation lies the simple need to increase profit margins.

nose ring. To balance out the slickness of the main attraction-point and click on-line bulletin boardsEek displays real bulletin boards of the ultra hectic health-food co-op variety. The kitchen consists exclusively of on espresso maker and jars of home-mode oatmeal cookies.

Eek-a-geek melds two of the most inane and over-hyped nineties crazes: coffee and the internet.

Mark Dziecielewski, a man who has devoted a disproportionate amount of time to monitoring these venues and posting the information he collects on a web site, can supply you with a startlingly long list of on-line cafes, complete with ghostly pictures of their proprietors as well as tips on how to start your own on-line joint. If you find the combination of coffee and computers particularly compelling, you can discover how much coffee there is left in a pot somewhere at (ambridge University (there's a camera hooked up to the coffee maker which updates the image every few seconds}. In OIher words, faSCinating, useful sluff. The stuff the "information age" is mode of.

When you first enter the web site, Mark treats you to brief homage to cafe culture: "Artists and intellectuals and revolutionaries such as Picasso or Sartre used to publish their manifestos in cafes'-os if to imply that by sending electronic diarrhea to your new best friend in Sydney, Australia while you both drink over-priced coffee, a similar work of genius will surely result.

I hadn't witnessed that kind of logical leap since the last time Ivisited a digital cafe. Well, Ididn't actually visit it. It was at an event BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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hosted by the Marshall McLuhon Centre ot the University of Toronto, one ofthe many" media lobs" cropping up on university campuses around our oh-so-globol globe.

Timothy Leary, who has lotely recast himself as the embodiment of technology's make-over from tool of the Pentagon to psychedelic/revolutionary toy, was going to host on interactive debote on the topic "If Virtual Reolity Is The Medium, Whot is the Messoger The trick was thot Leary, who has actually visited Toronto many times on the Leorning Annex circuit, was not going to be there. He would be ot the Interactive Cafe in Sonto Monica and we would do a video hook-up with him.

The message Leary tried to deliver was thot the new technologies are going to result in something called the "exchange of ideas," but he couldn't hong on to a single thought, let alone anything that could qualify as on actual ideo, for more than the time it took to spout yet another non-sequitur bumpersticker slogan: "The future of books is the blurb!" and "You can visit the home of a child in Cambodia from your living room!'

It's true oftechnophiles in general. They talk a good game about ideas-the exchange of them "in nanoseconds,' the creation of on ideo-based culture, about how technology isn't an end but a tool to facilitote the exchange of ideosbut they don't actually have any.

Maybe it's because before we can get to all those juicy revolutionary thin kings, we have to work out all those technical glitches. At the Leary babble, for instance, the

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Take the following nibble, tossed out on April 3 in a Financial Times article entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Office."

Britannic Tower, the second tallest office building in London, is empty; British Petroleum's HQ had decided to halve its administration and move away from expensive management structures by cutting down on office space. Societe Generale in Paris was doing the same too, moving to the ugly La Defense business district outside the city proper, to reduce its consumption of office space. Downsizing has apparently taken on a new more spatial form that sounds the death knell, ifwe haven't already heard it, of the Organization Man and his Affiuent Society of downtown offices. Urban-based corporations now recognize that it is time to move to the suburbs and experiment with such techniques as "hot-desking" (where employees don't have a fixed office space but vacillate from free desk to free desk) or, even better for cutting down on overhead, working at home. In the same vein, Business week asserted in April that the celebrated pool of 8.4 million telecommuters, which grows daily courtesy of videoconferencing, digital network phone lines, and high-speed "integrated services," allows companies to boost productivity and save from $6,000 to $12,000 a year per employee working at home.

The new system, though, suffers from the usual problem: disciplining your tele-employees. His or her domestic office or corporatized home (take your pick) must be "child-proofed" and he/she needs to "set boundaries." If that wasn't enough, Business Week includes the following bit of advice: "Dress in a particular way when you are working, though you need not put on a suit and tie or heels." The message of the piece was short, succinct, and concerned. Remember, "Home is home.

Work is work," "maintain that distinction," and stuff your work space with "comfortable, ergonomic furniture."

As for our existing cities, without their accumulated "intellectual capital" they are only dens of "welfare cheats" and other such riff-raff, places where New Age freak Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington and Texas journalism professor Marvin Olasky can go cruising the ghetto on anthropological culture runs while looking for charitable organizations to practice "effective compassion" with the funds of their newlyfounded PFF afiliate, "Center for Human Compassion."

Olasky, a virtual nobody until the GOP's 17% 'mandate' in

November, has suddenly been elevated to model citizen of tomorrow's utopia-he's white, an educated "symbolic analyst" who coaches baseball and tutors children. Insisting, as he does in The Tragedy 0/American Compassion. that neighborliness has calamitous consequences, that a sort of suburban-parental philosophy of tough love is the best stance for policy-makers, has brought him generous recognition: Olasky now gets invited to $50,000 a plate dinners with Huffington and company.

But Newt himself phrased the new vision of the city best during a televised speech in April. On the one hand, the city is dangerous and horrible: "as a father of rwo daughters, I can't ignore the terror and worry of parents in our inner-cities must feel for their children ...Within a half-mile of this Capitol, your Capitol, drugs, violence and despair threaten the lives of our citizens." On the other hand, the solution is empty block grants for those marginalized by the Third Wave while we commute across the new "borderless" world from our safe suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. And what could be a better place for a test-run of the cyber-civis than Washington D.C.: a penal colony for the descendents of slaves run by inept overseers amid Mussolinian architecture and precious boutiques for the precious bourgeois commuters to preciously idiotic Georgetown. Unable to govern itself, deregulated avant Ia lettre, and faced with a $722 million budget shortfall and junk bond status, the Capital is today run by an independent finance board which delights in lowering property taxes and voiding the union contracts of those lazy, surly, "pensioned to the hilt" city workers that live on the wrong side of the Anacostia.

But for other Third Wave thinkers, the inner city is just the place for the capitalism of the future to flourish. Certainly, it is the only part of the metropolis the business press and the mainstream press are willing to talk about, albeit with the paternalistic benevolence of a mint julep. Before the advent of the Republican rollback, the inner city could be conveniently branded as an autonomous ecosystem all of its own. Blatant geographical disparities in wealth could be dismissed as part of a larger, natural social order. But with the "end of history" the memory of urban political struggles can be tossed along with the welfare state, and the problem of urban poverty can be handed over to the mercantile experts in profitability. The vultures are poised and ready to go. Take the case of Michael (Competitive Advantages o/Nations) Porter, who argued in the

speaker's brain wasn't the only thing cutting in and out, so was the sound, the image, and then we could all see and hear him but he couldn't see us. When the organizers finally called it quits, they made no attempt to pick up the discussion where Leary cut out. We all just stumbled out and went our separate ways. Technology's promise had failed us both functionally and intellectually and this group of cutting-edge, globally-focused, economically-flexible grad students and professors were utterly helpless in the face of it.

The single, entirely predictable thought that Leary did manage to convey was that, in the looming excellent future, 'cars and office buildings will become obsolete. There will be no need to leave your house, to travel, except for pleasure.' This was presented as a good thing and at times it is indeed an appealing notion. But its meaning for most people probably has more to do with Just Desserts and whether computers will make the dty safe again for the middle doss.

In The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold argues that internet discussion groups are creating real communities where television and the suburbs have robbed us of them. He is concerned by the loss of 'third places'-(afes, pubs and beauty salons-where people once gathered to talk outside of their work and homes. 'When the automobilecentric, suburban, fastfood shopping-mall way of life eliminated many of these 'third places' from traditional towns and dties around the world, the social BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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fabric of existing communities started shredding .... Perhaps cyberspace is one of the informal public spaces where people can rebuild the aspects of community that were lost when the malt shop became a mall: But what does it mean when the still existing malt shop (or cafe or pub or laundro-mat) becomes cyberspace? What does it mean when you leave your house, go to public, urban spaces and spend the entire time ignoring the people around you in favor of finding out more about some angster in Texas named Bryon who has posted his entire diary on the internet in all of its excruciating detail, including a pidure of his ex-girl friend Sandi's cat and the heartwarming description of his relationship with his bestfriend Kriss: "We do a lot of things together, usually related to computer hardware (buying, selling, fixing): I'm thinking of e-mailing Mark Dziecielewski with my definition of an on-line cafe: "A place where you would normally go to interad with the people you are with but where you instead interad with people who are absolutely anywhere but there: The internet's claim of being the forum for thousands of mini think tanks, each cooler and more really you than the next, has enormous appeal for the unhappy high-school girl in all of us. After all, the search for a perfed designer group of friends or a like-thinking "discussion group" is a big part of what propels us from one school to the next, one bar to the next, one job to the next and one city to the next.

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May-June issue of the Harvard Business Review that poverty might have its own "competitive advantage." We need to "rethink" the inner city "in economic rather than social terms," to "create" rather than "redistribute" wealth. Condescending and "artificial" forms of urban social investment like government preference programs and mandates do not lead to greater economic activity. That, as the familiar argument has it, derive from "private, for-private initiatives and investment based on economic self-interest." The creation oflow-quality, lessthan-full-time jobs with few benefits that is so attractive to retailers and service-sector companies has a future of its own, Porter insists. Then there are the advantages of the size of the inner city market for the consumption of cheap goods: "even though average inner city incomes are relatively low, high population density translates into an immense market with substantial purchasing power." The promise of such a situation has already given rise to a number of success stories, which Porter ticks off one by one: media companies like Black Entertainment Television, various hair care products, then the repugnant story of Detroit's Universal Casket, which had $3 million in sales by specifically targeting black-owned funeral homes. "Export-led growth" comes through the recognition that "the tastes and sensibilities of inner city communities are cutting-edge in a number of respects and often become mainstream," meaning the production of commodified deviance for the kids in the suburbs.

What Porter wants (oddly, given his explicitly anti-statist agenda) is what every salesman of the future wants-more corporate welfare. Do away with the "legacy of big city politics and entrenched bureaucracies," such annoyances as "punitive" liability laws, "restrictive" zoning, blasphemous architectural codes, permits and inspections, OSHA compliance, and government-enforced union contracts. Silence those annoying community activists who "unrealistically" expect business to meet social needs. Eliminate the capital gains taxes that punish dividends from long-term equity investments.

Subsidize the corporate way of life with low-interest tax-exempt revenue bond loans, tax credits for more R&D, and corporate income tax exemptions. Reduce government to providing services for businesses and not citizens. Hand out subsidies without any anti-relocation caveats, but allowing for the sort of flexibility neccessary to transfer jobs and bust unions.

Eliminate "clawback" -style tax-abatement demands that subsidies do more than gratuitiously feed the pockets of CEOs, force companies to adequately invest in urban communities, increase wages and benefits, and enforce environmental regulation.

So confident are today's business elites in the lack of opposition to their cushy government doles that they even talk about a mythical "tax burden" under which they suffer, arguing that higher government spending on programs like Medicaid and child welfare for inner city residents leads to nefariously higher corporate taxes. Forget the fact, as Greg Leroy has brilliantly pointed out in a recent Dollars and Sense article, that the real "tax burden" is created by corporate tax exemptions. Forget the disastrous consequences of GOP fiscal strategies for "InfoCities" like New York that depend for economic "growth" on such bogus industries as financial consulting and insurance. And forget the telling anecdote of Howard Jarvis's and Robert Citron's Orange County, whose $1.7 billion in losses was directly the result of a limited tax base and too much faith in Alan Greenspan's interest rate goodwill.

Wait-is that kind of civic blunder Second or Third Wave?

The question is moot if we take this sort of corporate blather seriously: tales of corporate misdeeds do not have enough virtuality to survive the shift into the high-tech tomorrow. The point is to ignore politics altogether in anodyne waves of profitable forgetfulness. Moreover, if Vlahos's predictions of a rising cyber-elite are correct, soon The GOP's starry-eyed cohorts won't even have to appear physically in the nation's capital-politics will simply be the product of telecommuting "Brain Lords." It might be time to buy some ergonomicallycorrect furniture for your new home-office.

Butthe internet's endless web of simuhaneous discussions ensures thot you will never, even momentarily, reach your destinotion and the inanity of the discussions you do find will keep you searching. With all of this global cool kid envy at your finger tips, who cares about the person who came with you to Eek-a-Geek?

True happiness and inner peace awaits.

There is something pathetically symbolic in the spectacle of cities becoming afraid of actual cafes and turning instead to on-line cafes where they can leave behind the reality of the city itself. Someone once told me that one day we'd have no ozone layer so we'd all have to live in giant malls and never go outside. This is the purpose the internet is beginning to serve for the frightened upper-middle dass-on intellertuol suburb for people afraid of their Just Desserts.

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matador r&COfdJ 676 bfoadwoy nyc 10012 moll ordel' : Ip SQ cd S1 4 C$ S8 poslog& paid

Fluff for Lynn Crosbie

o Fluff, no one knows who you are.

You were produced for one brief year (nineteen seventy-one) after Mattel discontinued Skooter, Barbie's little sister Skipper's best friend. The toy company feared the first generation of Barbie consumers, baby boomers nearing their teens, would disappear once puberty struck. So you were invented, a fresh face to lure the next wave of greedy youngsters, pink pocketbooks full of generous allowances or hard-earned baby-sitting money, to stores with 'well-stocked doll departments, where you were displayed, a wide-eyed, cheerful, puffy-cheeked tomboy, blonde hair in twin ponytails, wearing your green, yellow and orange striped overalls. You came with a skateboard, perfect for cruisin' the park after school with your pal, Growing Up Skipper.

Mattel executives were sure that you would be a best-seller, but your short shelf life was over almost as soon as it had started. In essence, Fluff, you flopped. Moreover, today, when collectors are willing to pay ten dollars for a pair of Barbie shoes, you're not worth a lot, even NRFB (Never Removed From Box). I remember you, though. As a child, I smeared your cheeks with grease and slid you under my girlfriend's orange plastic camper.

Barbie dolls were far too mature for a girl like me to endure.

But not your flat-chested allure! tiny mechanic! The cars I made you tune up and repair!

The engines you put together!

The windshields you washed, the batteries you changed, tires you filled with air!

After work, you'd smoke a cigarette, then skateboard home in the dark. o smudged kid! 0 angry loner!

All my friends think that I'm bizarre 'cause Fluff, no one knows who you are.

o

-David Trinidad

BAFFLER SEVEN路

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SEMINARY

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BOOKSTORE The Cargest &eCection of university press and schoCarCy titCes in print.

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Quality of Whose Life?

Stephen Duncombe

I

t's a sign of the mean times. Sandwiched between a cigarette ad that incongruously promises to make us '~ive with Pleasure" and another for MD T-U-S-C-H, a doctor-of sorts-who eradicates hemorrhoids with the painless swish of a laser scalpel, is The Sign. Positioned to rest above the head of a subway rider, a white thought balloon floats on a field of black. The words in the balloon appear to drift up from the mind of the passenger below. Surely these are the thoughts of the people.

I'm SQQQQ glad I got this seat. GOOD, now I can relax. (deep breath) Haven't even seen a panhandler for a while. WHOOPS, spoke too soon.

TeRRIFic. MY LUCK he HAD to pick this car. Hey. HEY, buddy.

Over here-over my head. See that?

It says it's illegal. Come onnnnn! Can't I just SIT HERE without getting hassled?!!

Change? ....... yeah, THIS is what I'd like to change.

Actually, these aren't the musings of the masses, but a 'public service' message courtesy of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York City. Nor is it merely an isolated anomaly of social cruelty on display. No, the MTA's public service message is part of a popular political campaign that's rolling through America's cities. It's a symbol of the campaign to restore urban "Quality of Life."

Over the past five years, a number of historically liberal cities like New York and San Francisco have elected as mayors conservative former law enforcement officials. Front and center in the campaigns of what the Wall Street Journal praises as a "class of new-wave mayors" is a contemporary spin on the old Law and Order mantra. Its name this time around: Quality of Life. The first time I saw a Quality of Life Enforcement patrol car in New York I nearly keeled over laughing; I was tempted to walk over and tell the officers that I was having a lousy night and to ask for their assistance. I'm laughing a lot less now.

It began in earnest here when mayoral candidate Rudolph Giuliani-a former U.S. Attorney and present day incarnation of Eliot Ness-conjured up the bogeyman of the "Squeegee Operator" as public enemy #1. (For those yet unaware and unafraid, this "operator" is that elusive figure who darts from the shadows, wipes your car window with a dirty rag, then asks for a quarter for their dubious service.) His promise to vanquish this monster-as well as the lackluster performance of the previous mayor-sealed Giuliani's victory, and one of his first public acts was to arrest these poor unfortunates in mass. This jab for public order was followed by a one-two political punch as Giuliani and his not-toountouchable force of New York's Finest went after cars with loud stereo systems, impounding the offending vehicles; apprehended graffiti writers, publicizing a call-in campaign for BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

47

citizens to report acts of graffiti in progress; stepped up the usual sweeps of people without homes, getting them off the streets and into the tubercular shelters; and conducted a general round-up of sidewalk vendors, errant bicycle messengers, and kids skipping school.

Across the country, San Francisco's mayor, former Police ChiefFrank Jordan, unveiled his "Matrix Program," a militaristic strategy to sweep the city, grid by grid, block by block, of people without homes. Seattle and Santa Cruz, waxing nostalgic about the days of vagrancy statutes, passed new laws against public sitting in business districts. And back East again, reasoning that anyone young is a threat to safety and order, cities like Newark, Hartford, and many others set up early evening curfews for those under eighteen.

The liberal response to these offensives was swift ... and predictable. In the Bay Area, the group Food Not Bombs continued serving food to hungty people in public places and getting arrested for their trouble, and StreetWatch, borrowing a tactic from Oakland's Black Panthers, began trailing police to make sure they don't stray too far from protecting and serving while rousting the homeless. In New York, demonstrations against the new anti-noise ordinances-the enforcement of which seems to target primarily young, nonwhite kids and their cars-were held, and local Streetwatch patrols were formed. And, as always, academics churned out unreadable articles for obscure journals extolling the revolutionary "agency" of spray-painting, boom-box-playing youth.

The progressive's criticism of the law and order approach to Quality of Life is sound: you can't get rid of social problems by suppressing them and sweeping them under the rug.

Homeless people live on the street because they don't have homes and the shelters are hellholes. People beg for money because there aren't enough jobs for those who can work, and no half-way houses or de-tox centers for those too sick or strung-out to take care of themselves. The progressive rationale is also decidedly civil libertarian: protecting the rights of individuals against the power of the state.

Well and good. But the new conservatives have a logic too: the "broken windows" theoty. This theory holds that minor acts of public transgression, if not nipped in the bud, give permission for larger ones. If a window pane is shattered and not immediately reFACTS paired, soon the door will be broken down, the furniture carried .5.1"taFf"i!>lhecapilalofNewMexico.

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48 • BAFFLER SEVEN

away, and the house set ablaze.

Textbook criminology logic-however sound-doesn't win elections; the new law and order folks have public sentiment on II S'Ixty-elg . h t percent 0 fN ew vlorkers poII ed fiIve t helf"Slde as we. years ago complained about a decreasing "quality of life." Even taking into account that New York is the city that people love to hate, th is is a signifiIcant statistic. But if ib you ive in any ig city it's also no surprise: having your windshield wiped with a dirty rag doesn't endear you to either the wiper or their defenders. Graffiti, for the most part, is asinine and self-aggrandizing, and a bother to have to continuously paint over. Window-shaking music at three in the morning is an attack on any semblance of calm and quiet

that might exist in an urban area. Buying back the stuff that's been stolen out of your car doesn't win you over to the side of street vendors-even the majority of non-criminal ones-that clog the sidewalks. And although the MTA's thought balloon message isn't a big hit with straphangers, it's not because people don't think these mean and hostile thoughts; quite the opposite. Perhaps the wheedling tone of the sign misses the mark, but the sentiment does not. Very few people who ride New York's subways can say that they don't cringe when they hear the first few words of a panhandler's plaintive spiel. The sign comes all too close to articulating the dark Hobbesian thoughts that rage through one's mind all too often in an urban environment ... not something, by the way, that civilized people like being reminded of by the MTA. Forced intimacy and an unremitting assault on the senses are what make living in a city exciting and exhilarating; the slamming together of different worlds is the essence of cosmopolitanism. It can also drive you crazy. From the moment you rise in the morning until you lay down at night, your space is tightly circumscribed by forces outside of your control. In a world where so much is already controlled by others, our sense of spacephysical, mental, visual, auditory-becomes increasingly precious. The key to urban civility is understanding that space is something so valuable that it cannot be allowed to be dominated by some at the expense of others. Increasingly, however, Americans feel this space contracting, and they're pointing the finger at the most visible violators: the homeless, the beggars, the kids.

The current political climate and electoral success of conservatives sometimes seems like proof that democracy is not such a good idea after all. Conservatives have hijacked . some valid and popular ideas lately. While progressives defend the individual's right to exist and express themselves in public, conservatives have come to power-at least in city politics-by defending the public as a whole. In brief, conservatives are defending what used to be a progressive cause: Public Space.

Ever since the Enclosure of the Commons in Western Europe, the fight for space common to all and dominated by none has been a part of the progressive tradition. In Feudal times, Commons were just that: land that, although owned by Nobility or Church, was according to law and tradition to be used in common by all people. With the dawn of Capitalism more than 500 years ago, things began to change. Trying to catch up to an emerging business class, the Lords and Bishops realized that they could make more of this new thing 'money,' if instead of appropriating a share of the peasants' crops as they had for centuries, they raised sheep for the emerging woolens industry on the land the peasants had been using. All bets were off: away with the rights and privileges of the Feudal social contract (none too great for the peasant in the first place). The landlords first fenced off the common land, enclosing it for sheep pasture and calling it 'private property.' Then, in due time, desiring even more land, they began the "clearing of estates," a euphemism for giving the peasants the old heave-ho, onto the roads, into the cities, to-surprise-work in the new cloth factories.

This expropriation of common lands "is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire," as Marx pointed out, and while most of the blood was that of the peasants, BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘ 49

they didn't always take things lying down. Sure, many of the resulting rebellions and revolutions ended in defeat or disaster, but the ideal of public space free to all and infringed upon by none is firmly rooted in the liberal and radical traditions. As the 20th century draws to a close, though, something odd is happening: conservatives, under the Qualiry of Life banner, have sold themselves as the latest defenders of the public faith.

A case study of this strange inversion is the fate ofTompkins Square Park in New York City. Located in the heart of the Lower East Side, this popular park became a de facto homeless shelter in the mid 1980s. The poor and unfortunate, priced out of housing in the neighborhood by gentrification and the conversion ofSingle Resident Occupancy hotels (SROs) into co-ops, and rightfully scared of the shelter system, began to make the park their home. As a place where people now lived, the park no longer worked as a public space.

People who lived in the surrounding neighborhood often complained about feeling like intruders in someone else's private space when they came to visit the park. This sentiment was expressed less by the new yuppies-who, after all, now had spacious apartments made from the ex-SROs-and more often by their poorer neighbors who had large families and small apartments and counted on the park as a safe and open place that they and their children could go.

The issue of what should be done about the park was bitterly contested. While many in the neighborhood defended the rights of homeless people-given their other optionsto live in the park, their slimier counterparts, grouped around the local friend-of-developers City Councilman and Business Improvement District heavies, defended the park as a public space. They won.

In a move that would make Frank "Matrix Program" Jordan proud, our last mayor called in riot police who literally occupied the neighborhood for over a month. Everybody living in Tompkins Square was evicted and the park was sealed off and closed for renovations for a year. When it reopened-with newly enforced curfews to keep those pesky destitutes and loud late-night teenagers out-it was a beautiful public space, popular once again as a place to bring your kids and relax outside of your decrepit tenement.

For those opposed to the rise of conservative rule, the message is clear: we have to wrench back the issue of public space. This doesn't mean joining the blue shirts as they police the young and the poor-as our late, liberal mayor tried to do--but redefining the whole debate.

We have to continue the attack on the root cause of homeless ness, panhandling, street selling, and squeegee operating, namely poverty. But to defend the rights of the homeless to not have homes (a bizarre idea in any case) and to support individual expression that f ~ ~ j f 1 ~ violates public space will only succeed in getting most people in this ~ ~ ! ~~ ~ country to despise us; an identity which fits well with lefty rebel pos! ~ ~ ! j .~ turing, but stinks as actual politics. Instead, it is the roots of these ~ ~ things- poverty, alienation-that have to be exposed as the real at~!E~g.",()~.'i·= ~ ~ i ~... i ~. tack on public space and quality of life. We have to take the offensive .. ! ~ ~ ~ ~ 1 ~ ~ H by pointing out who the real space thieves are.

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50 • BAFFLER SEVEN

Commercial interests define, defile, and dominate our public space far more than panhandlers and graffiti writers have ever done. Art galleries, educational centers, atriums, and parks-all former public, or at worst private-charitable, amenities, are brought to us today courtesy of Corporate America. Although business sometimes does a nice job creating semblances of public space-especially when the result can be used as advertising for themselves-often their public/private spaces betray the true feelings these corporate giants hold for the public. Interrupted by only a few cold, abstract sculptures, a barren cement plaza stretches out in front of the Bank of America Building. On a nearby wall, a brass plaque informs that this space is "Open to the Public" and declares with finality that the minimum requirements of public space have been duly met: This urban plaza contains four trees, 171 linear feet of seating and cenain other features which either meet or exceed the applicable requirements as stated in the New York City zoning resolution.

Such beneficence astounds.

Dazzled by the new privatization faith and hit with a decreasing tax base as cities polarize into the poor who can't pay taxes and the rich who don't, municipal governments are turning over large chunks of what the public originally paid for and still uses to the private sphere. And the public amenities they can't sell outright are transformed into space to be exploited for commercial use. The Parks Commissioner of New York proposed selling ad space in Central Park to raise revenue for routine maintenance, and already leases Bryant Park to the fashion industry to make up for budget cuts. Public toilets, in Europe paid for by the government, are erected here by private companies in exchange for extensive advertising space in public areas. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, city officials announced that they are selling advertising space on the sides of their police cars. And in school yards across eleven cities, Van Wagner Communications is selling ad space on basketball backboards, creating a "National Backboard Network."

Public Schools seem to be a special target for the new privatization gurus, not only in terms of turning the whole school over to for-profit corporations, but in carving out commercial spaces in the old public ones to deliver up a "captive audience" of malleable minds.

Channel One, with its diet of lite news and heavy advertising is now watched in over 12,000 public schools. Not to be outdone, corporations are sponsoring their own school curriculum. Eastman Kodak and Kmart have put together a program for 2nd graders called "It's a Snap" that will teach youngsters about nature and-you guessed it-cameras. Revlon has teamed up with educational book publisher Scholastic Inc. to prepare teaching guides to help engage students in classroom discussions about good hair/bad hair days and their favorite hair-care products. Public schools, it turns out, also have surfaces aplenty for advertising messages. Colorado Springs has decided to sell ad space in the gym, hallways, and buses of their local schools. But don't worry-it's educational: the kids are going to help design the Burger King ads that will adorn district buses and lure their playmates into the realm of the Whopper.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

51

Public space is not only a physical entity but a cultural one as well, and here the privateers have been equally rapacious. New York's mayor tried to sell the city-owned public radio station to whomever would have it, and the Feds are trying to privatize PBS (although with commercials in between each show and the continuing shift rightward in editorial stance, I'm not sure we'd ever know the difference). It's also now almost impossible to visit an art exhibit, a symphony, or a play without seeing the logo of tobacco giant Philip Morris someplace. And this isn't noblesse oblige. Recently threatened by a proposed no- smoking ordinance, Philip Morris called in their chips, asking the New York arts community to lobby the City Council on their behalf-which they did. Veni, Vidi, Vici, as the company's logo proclaims.

The idea that all public life is material to be exploited for commercial possibility has become so natural to us that when Spy magazine, in an elaborate hoax, approached sixty corporations with an offer to have President Clinton endorse their goods on national TV via 'product placement' in a public address, not one company caught on to the gag, and only one refused outright. All of this relatively recent marketing development builds upon a century of commercial colonization that we now take for granted: billboards on our highways and streets, advertising on our buses and subways, and public airwaves clogged with radio and television commercials. This unbound commercialization is, by any criteria, far and away the most invasive appropriation of public space. And yet it remains unmentionable, a non-issue in the mainstream debate on Quality of Life.

Corporate dominion over common space affects the public's quality of life in other, less visible, ways as well. Although corporations would have us believe that it is through their generosity and because of their civic duty that they bestow upon us these new private/public sites, they lie. Quite simply, they are subsidized in their colonization of our own space by us. While

52 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

both worker productivity and corporate profit margins have risen, corporate taxes fell from from one-third of total federal revenues in the early' 50s to less than 10 percent today. And this official rate hides the fact that through tax abatements and charitable write-offs most corporations pay almost nothing come tax time. Every art exhibit, every atrium, every 'learning center' is a tax break, and this means less money flowing into the public coffers from corporations and more from us. Less tax money means less public spending on housing, parks, libraries, schools, and mass transit systems; less spending on those things which form the foundation of a public sphere and really do affect our quality of life.

Privatization makes a mockery of the very idea of public space. When you shoot hoops courtesy of Nike, go to school to be persuaded that you're part of the Pepsi Generation, watch public TV sprinkled with ads for Mobil, eat lunch at a public space where rules are set by a real estate company, visit an art exhibit courtesy of the cancer czars, call a cop covered in advertising, and are told what to think on the subway by Newport, MD T-U-SC-H, and the MTA, are you going to consider any space "public"?

People really aren't stupid.

Kids who put a marker to subway walls don't see this as a desecration of public space, but of space they don't own. In a society where intrusive advertisements and corporate logos are the lingua franca of identity-of asserting that you're somebody-is it any wonder that young people advertise themselves through tags on walls or their choice of loud music blaring out of the back of a car? To use advertising jargon, they are simply trying to cut through the clutter. If the law and order "broken windows" theory of social decay is credible, it must be understood that Corporate America smashed the first window of public space.

As the public sphere contracts, the rest of the urban citizenry turns inward toward private comforts.

Never straying far from the soothing sights and sounds of the TV/ VCR/CD home entertainment BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

53

command center, social circles shrink to the immediate family and a few close friends, and public interaction is limited to phone sex and wandering the Internet. Achieving a pleasant quality oflife means surrounding yourself in a warm, safe cocoon constructed from whatever consumer capitalism produces and sells as a panacea for our eviscerated public world.

Meanwhile, conservative politicians, acknowledging that public space is rapidly disappearing, tap into the anger that people feel and then shift the blame away from the corporate elite and onto those least powerful: the young and the poor. Hiding their own culpability, they give the public a target for their rage and an outlet for their frustration: kick those beneath you. As "Quality of Life" becomes just a polite term for policing the poor, and the contours of "the public" are shaped to fit commercial imperatives, we are becoming a nation of post-enlightenment barbarians: privatized, atomized, and mean.

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~y I

Watch Love Connection Instead ofToking Prozac" An Interview widt J. E., The Audtor

byJ. E. J.E.: (clearing throat) J.E., I'd like to establish up front that I watch Love Connection, myself, just to reassure you that this isn't going to be one of those holier-than-thou interviews. So what's your main reason for watching Love Connection?

J.E.: It's on during my dinner hour. Which means I'm usually waiting for a pizza delivery from Ralph's, or Chinese from West Side Cottage, or Mexican from AribatAriba! I hate to cook. But I get really hungry. I love to eat.

J.E.: Yet you're not overweight. Why is that?

J.E.: I swim. Anyway, I'm voraciously hungry. I can't concentrate. I can't even talk on the phone. I feel helpless because I have no control over how long I'll have to wait for the delivery. Twenty minutes, or forty? I once waited ninety-five minutes.

J.E.: Ninety-five minutes? Wow! J.E.: But that's not all. I can't control whether the food will arrive hot, lukewarm, or ice cold, or whether it'll even be my order. Will it be egg drop soup, notwonton? Mushroom pizza, not onion? Bean burrito, not beef Bean, I say. I spell it out. B-E-A-N. They deliver beef one out of every three times. I haven't ,eaten red meat in years. I can't eat a beef burrito. I'd get sick. I call the restaurant. They argue with me. Beef, they say, you said beef I argue back, Why would I say beefwhen I don't eat red meat? I wait another thirty minutes for them to return with the bean burrito.

J.E.: To return to Love Connection? lE.: Love Connection distracts me, takes the edge off. It's like a TV beta blocker.

J.E.: A TV beta blocker! Wow! Now, my next question ... it's very personal, but I think it needs to be asked. I've heard from reliable sources that you had a bout with depression this year. So I'm wondering whether the ... depression ... contributed in any way to your watching Love Connection?

J.E.: (Very long pause). I went to a psychopharmacologist who put me on Prozac. It made me worse. I shuttled around from one arrogant psychopharmacologist to another, spending a fortune, taking various pills. Nothing hel ped. Take me offallyour goddamned medication, I said. I wanted to be me again. I was so overmedicated, I was a zombie. I couldn't do anything: write a letter; make a phone call; pay a bill; walk across my living room. But I could always watch Love Connection.

J.E.: Thank you, lE., for your honesty. So, does Love Connection help you to feel better about your own life? lE.: Yes!I remind myself, while I'm watching it, that no matter how bad things may get for The interviewer, J.E., is no relation to J.E., the author and subject of this interview. She is a Special Events Planner from Woodmere, Long Island This is her first published interview. Next month, her interview with Madame Tanya, a tde-psychic from Woodmere, Long Island, will appear in The Woodmnr Neighbor.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

55

me, at least I'm not one of those desperate people who believe they'll find true love on a Love Connection blind date. I'm not the 22-year-old blonde aerobics instructor who was "immediately turned off" to her date, "the minute he stepped out of his car, because he brought me one red rose instead of, like, a dozen, which is a real sign of a cheapskate." And I am not her date, who was then humiliated on national Tv. And I am nota member of the Love Connection studio audience, that childish, sexually frustrated mass of humanity shouting, Number One, Number Two, Number Three, as they help the person choosing a date to decide among Kimmie, Kammie, Pammy, Billy, Bobby, or Buddy.

J.E.: Wow! I appreciate how candid you're being. Because I've heard you can be difficult during interviews.

J .E.: (Long pause) Difficult? Who said that? (Pause) Okay, let me guess. That guy from the right-wing Staten Island newspaper? The one who drooled and put his hand on my knee.

(Pause) Okay, don't tell me. I'm sure it was him. (Pause) Okay. Forget it. Maybe it was someone else. It's just because I'm principled, idealistic, direct, and honest. You know, Edith Wharton was thought to be difficult, too.

J.E.: Really? Edith Wharton?

J.E.: Yes. J.E.: Speaking of Edith Wharton, J.E., did you see the movie of Ethan Frome?

J.E.: Yes. J.E.: What did you think?

J.E.: Liam Neeson was great. What did you think?

J.E. Same thing. But anyway, here's another Love Connection question. What do you think of the show's host, Chuck Woolery?

J.E.: Pure, unadulterated sleaze. That absurd pompadour, those capped teeth, his snide, condescending comments.

J.E.: You don't find him sexy?

J .E.: No. Yuck. What a thought. (Long pause) But you find him sexy, don't you? That's why you asked, isn't it?

J.E.: No, I don't find him sexy.

J.E.: I don't believe you.

J.E.: This is ridiculous. Let's move on.

J.E.: You're lying. Chuck Woolery turns you on.

J.E. Please. I have one last question for you.

J.E.: Shoot.

J .E.: Off the top of your head, why else do you watch Love Connection?

J.E.: Because ... I'm immature?

J.E.: Really? I'm surprised to hear you say that. Critics call your writing highly intellectual J .E.: I don't mean intellectually. I'm pretty mature intellectually. But, here's one example. I still get crushes on rock stars. That's somewhat immature.

J.E.: Somewhat?That sounds very immature to me.

J.E.: Having a crush on Chuck Woolery isn't exactly the height of maturity, either.

J .E.: (Long pause) Let's get back to this issue of your intellectual maturity, shall we?

56 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

].E.: Whatever.

J.E.: (Long pause) Well, critics have referred to your work as co04 cutting edge, fiercely

intellectual . ...

J.E.: SO what's your point?

J.E.: My point . ... ].E.: Look, I'm not trying to be difficult here. And I'm sorry if! insulted you about Chuck Woolery. I was just being honest, speaking my mind.

J.E.: You didn't insult me, J.E., since Chuck Woolery means nothing to me.

J.E.: Right.

J .E.: Look, all I'm getting at is this-being so intellectual and all-what's the deal with Love Connection and this so-called great intellect of yours? I mean, what gives? ].E.: Well, as a co04 cutting edge intellectua4 I appreciate both irony and camp. Love Connection is an ironic, campy comment on the decline of Western Civilization.

J.E.: Oh, come on, J.E.-the decline of Western Civilization? ].E.: I'm serious.

J.E.: Well, what about feminism? ].E.: Are you asking me if feminism is an ironic, campy comment on the decline of Western Civilization? What a weird question.

J .E.: No, that's not what I'm asking. What I'm asking is-some critics have described your work as having a feminist stance. So where does Love Connection fit into that? That's what I want to know!

J .E.: There are moments when feminism enters the world of Love Connection, like the time the travel agent from Venice Beach was enraged because her Love Connection blind date expected her to go into the mosh pit with him in her high heels.

J.E.: He wanted her to go into the mosh pit with him?

J .E.: Yes. In her high heels. But there's one other thing I have to say about why I watch Love Connection: There's something unfulfilled within me, a part of me that's always yearning, although what it is I yearn for, I don't know. But for thirry minutes, Love Connection temporarily appeases my yearning, in a way that Prozac never did.

J.E.: That's a powerful statement, ].E. I think this is as good a place as any to wrap things up. Thank you! Really! This has been a fine interview. I apologize for being defensive about Chuck Woolery. (Laughs) J.E.: (Laughs) Way to go, girl! Way to go!

J.E.: This interview should certainly put an end to those rumors that you're difficult.

J.E.: Like I said, they called Edith Wharton difficult, too. ].E.: By the way, J.E., I just loveyour earrings. Where did you get them?

J .E.: One night, when Love Connection was over, the yearning returned. I took a long walk.

I passed a street vendor. I bought these from him, and at that moment, my yearning was temporarily appeased. ].E.: Well, they're great, especially with your Louise Brooks haircut. What are they made of?

J.E.: Papier mache.

J.E.: Wow! They're better than Prozac, too. (Turns off tape recorder) BAFFLER SEVEN路

57

Holding Pattern over Providence For new things one necessarily chooses new words. Call our adepts

spiritists, our teaching spiritism, our reading books ofspirits. Forget the past-one cannot know everything-the spirit loses memories to become itself The veil is the return to bodily life.

Divine angels, you expected, predictably enough, these corrections which I implore you to make in the manuscript. Mad as a tripod, and difficult, I dictate nothing more, all else will derive from actors' games. Play Les Scythes as if it were La Philosophie dam Ie boudoir, and Les Scythes will have an effect of cold, of nonsense, of fabric cut against the grain.

We have only volume two; how can we be responsible for ratcheting our faults beyond the limit of the past? How can we profit from experience acquired in forgetfulness? There are gaps or things missed out in this account. To make up for something forgotten or for a lapse or oversight that cost him his life.

I can't remember whom I should warn.

I have not forgotten the guide, kind sir who at each new level of existence surveys the mistakes committed, judges the given position as just, makes amends for what has leaked out along the way. He looks for proofs analogous to those we learned before, and asks the spirits who are his superiors for help in this new task, intuition, piecework I'll do in my own good time.

-Damon Krukowski

58 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER SEVEN

You've Always Been Wrong is a collection of

prose and poetic works by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Written between 1928 and 1930, You've Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal's

Been Wrong

thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism.

Thomas Vosteen's nuanced translation provides Englishlanguage readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author. $25 cloth

RENE DAUMAL Translated by Thomas Vosteen At bookstores.

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Revolt of the Nice

Edge City, Capital of the 1\venty-FU'st Century

W

Tom Vanderbilt

ith its lonely office towers standing sentinel on the side of 1-94, Hoffman Estates, Ill., seemed like the last outpost of ,activity before the billboard-dotted stretch of farmland that eventually becomes Wisconsin. It was a familiar sight for anyone driving north of Chicago. But what was Hoffman Estates? For a number of urban scholars and sociologists, there was something about Hoffman Estates and similar developments that make them more than suburbs, yet not quite cities, and they flocked to the drawing board to sketch its form. A slew of interpretations followed: Robert Fishman called them "technoburbs," for their high-tech companies and facilities; Kenneth Jackson called them "centerless cities;" "middle landscape" was suggested by Peter Rowe; while Edward Soja favored "exopolis." Others weighed in with more clinical terms like "multinucleated metropolitan region."

But it was Joel Garreau, with his 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, who seized the zeitgeist and captured the imagination of journalists and opinion makers busy reporting the forces at work in places like Hoffman Estates. Edge City, a new brand name for a phenomenon urban scholars had long been trying to name, was born, and Garreau became brand manager. Since writing Edge City, Garreau, a Washington Post reporter, has built himself a virtual cottage industry of post-suburban boosterism. In magazines from American Demographics to Inc. to The New Republic to The Edge City News, Garreau blankets the intellectual turflike a propaganda pamphlet drop, issuing new installments in his paean-in-progress to Edge City-those curious corporate campus towns with strange hybrid names like the Katy Freeway -West Houston Energy Corridor or the Reston-HerndonDulles Access Road Area, which sometime in the 1980s went from being outposts of managerial synergy and decent parking to, in Garreau's mind, full-fledged urban entities.

For Garreau, Edge Cities are not merely another soulless expression of corporate relocation and disposable exurban sprawl. Nor are they suburbs in new clothes. Garreau identifies his product as any place that has at least five million square feet ofleasable office space, at least 600,000 square feet of leasable retail space ("the equivalent of a fair sized mall"), "more jobs than bedrooms," is "perceived by the population as one place," and was "nothing like 'city' as recently as thirty years ago." Given this liberal definition, Edge Cities can be portrayed as the creators of most of the wealth and employment in the U.S. today, and in their jumbled agglomeration of mixed-density retail and often indistinguishable office towers Garreau sees the future of America itself Garreau's odyssey from objective chronicler to Edge City partisan is an unlikely one, as he recounts in the introduction to his book. When high-rise office buildings began to appear near his home in the Virginia suburbs, putting "Houston" cheek-by-jowl with the pastoral glens of Fairfax County, he set out to find out "who was doing this to us." Somewhere along the path of investigating this "clear and present danger to Western CivilizaBAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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tion," he met the "enemy," he says, and the enemy "was us." Heading in to the heart of blandness, steaming slowly upriver past New Jersey malls and California planned developments, Garreau began to see order amongst the chaos, hope amongst the natives, a glimmering future in the wilderness. In short, Garreau began to like Edge Cities.

Somewhere between a food court in Newport Beach and a chunk of Class-A office space in Atlanta, our trusty Marlowe became Kurtz.

Now, as a "principal" in The Edge City News (an expensive newsletter designed to deliver "need-toknow" information to Edge City decision-makers) and a "stakeholder" (TECN's term. for what used to be called "citizens") in Edge City, Garreau delivers his by-nowfamiliar pitch: Edge Cities are the bustling new frontier of America, the next wave in the process by which "we": first, moved to the suburbs to escape the city; then, moved the city's marketplaces to the suburbs for convenience's sake; and now, in a triumph of democratic will, have "moved our means of creating wealth, the essence of urbanism-our jobs-out to where most of us have lived and shopped for two generations." There are, as he points out, 190 Edge Cities larger than Orlando; but only 40 downtowns the size of Orlando.

Edge Cities make up the top 13 spots for median 1990 household income, and 18 of the top 40 largest job centers in the U.S. are in places like the Santa Ana Freeway/Anaheim or the Dallas Galleria/LBJ Freeway Area. Edge Cities now house the bulk of the nation's population, create the majority of jobs, have less crime, are safer and more comfortable, and are the standard residence of choice for most Fortune 500 headquarters. These developments, by all reasonable estimates, seem destined to continue.

Like other historical modes of urban life, Edge Cities are expressions of the prevailing economic order. Today business theorists chatter about a world without boundaries, a world

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of non-particularity, a world of "telepresence" and the "virtual office," a world of dispersed corporations. As Garreau admits, "the reason there are no 'Welcome to' signs in Edge City is that it is a judgment call where it begins and ends." The Edge City model is sweeping Europe as well, Garreau writes excitedly, despite "immensely different" political, economic, and cultural systems; what he fails to consider, however, is that the corporations creating these complexes are units of the same multinational parents--IBM France, Colgate Palmolive, British Petroleum-that create Edge Cities in the U.S. Is it any wonder that as corporations become less site-specific, relying on an abstract global labor force and "universal brands," the enclaves they construct should be any less homogenous?

Edge Cities are where corporations go to "re-engineer" themselves, free from the labor unions, tight regulation, and tax burdens of traditional downtowns. According to Garreau, it is also where people go to reinvent themselves, free from the rigid structures of the city, which maintain fixed and frozen relations between the very poor and very rich. Garreau writes enthusiastically that "Edge Cities are for entrepreneurs, while downtowns are for old-fashioned Organization Men." But out here in the supposedly classless and fluid Edge Cities, Garreau says, "we invent new institutions to create community, new ways to connect with each other." But as he concedes, it's a tenuous and contradictory notion of communiry upon which Edge City is built. The entrepreneurial flux and rapid growth that gives economic life to Edge City is the same force that undermines the notion of a stable community. Community, in the sense of those seeking to preserve a set way of life they have established for themselves, thus becomes "the enemy of change-and the growth of Edge City." Edge City is fundamentally hostile to community in a more concrete sense as well-it is aggressively designed to keep others out. Christopher Lasch calls it "a revolt of the elites" and Robert Reich a "secession of the successful": what Edge City boils down to is not only an economic and cultural distancing from people of a different race and class, but a purposeful withdrawal from involvement in and responsibility for the greater politic of the city. In Edge City, the architecture perfectly embodies this principle of detachment. Driving across the George Washington Bridge from New York into the Edge City of Fort Lee, N.]., one faces straightaway the intimidating specter of defensible corporate space: the dull-metallic reflective armor of one tower sits atop on its own stacked parking garage, a fortress unto itself; while nearby another building-resembling a vertical ice cube tray-looms like a violent and utterly alien blemish on the landscape.

The "associations" whose prevalence de Tocqueville once marveled at have now become homeowner associations, another expression of what political scientist Evan McKenzie calls "privatopia"-the privately run and financed developments that make up most of Edge City housing. For Garreau, homeowner associations are innovative solutions to the problems of life on the frontier. A less charitable view would see them as an attempt to localize government so it only serves a small number of homogeneous residents; and, as they contract out for services, an attempt to render the city obsolete altogether. A letter in TECN from the chairman of an Atlanta Edge City coalition exemplifies this: "Seventy-five chief executive officers of major firms joined together (paying annual dues of$5,OOO each) BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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to substitute for and supplement governmental actions affecting quality of life... funding equipment needs for mall policing, lobbying for improved roadway access, providing support for the public high school, marketing the community through an annual guide book. .. " And what becomes of public expression in the privatopias of Edge City? Garreau apologizes for the censoring of free speech in Edge City shopping malls ("public spaces that are really private property," he says, seemingly without irony) by saying "it's a question of how much we value safety and comfort." Shopping malls, for Garreau, are actually a sign of cultural vitality, modern day public squares where the classes can mingle, if not shop at the same store (or on the same floor). In his usual booster tone he waxes enthusiastic about a mall in Bridgewater, N.J.: The mall's a doozy. The first floor (The Commons Collection) caters to the affluent with Brooks Brothers, Laura Ashley, Godiva, and major-league indoor trees.

The third floor, by contrast (Campus), is neon "under twenty-five" heaven. It has an enormous Sam Goody's record store, a store that sells nothing but sunglasses, a store that sells nothing but artifacts from cartoons ... (You want village green? You got it. Squint a little. This is what it looks like in the late twentieth century).

So an authentic and vigorous civic life is now built around the promise that a store exists that sells "nothing but sunglasses." In his grand civic delusion, Garreau can call a mall a village green if he likes-but remember, ifjt looks like a mall, has a Body Shop and a Banana Republic, and has security guards who would escort anyone out who so much as brandished a political flyer, it's probably just a mall. Unlike the village green, the mall is designed to orient the consumer in one direction: to consume. It is built for no other reason.

But there is one thing that has kept Edge City from meeting its true realization as an urban place: culture. Culture is the Holy Grail of the inscrutable Edge City category Garreau calls "Nice." The elements of the "nice"-lakefront vistas, schools with "astonishingly high SAT scores," golf courses, country clubs-are why Garreau says Edge Cities arise where they do, for if cheap development were the only issue blue-collar white ethnic suburbs closer to the city would suffice. The pursuit of the "nice," which often stands in the way of building the ideal corporate post-industrial infrastructure (e.g. parking lots) of Edge City, is a key challenge for Edge City. Garreau knows that many people find Edge Cities aesthetically and culturally appalling. But he is optimistic. "Edge City is the creation of people with money," he writes. "If they want 'culture,' they'll get it." In American Demographics, Garreau continues excitedly that culture is beginning to arrive: seven of the top 10 places with the highest ratio of bars-to-employed people are Edge Cities (all ten are in Texas). You know the sort of place they are. A franchise "theme" bar where the highlight of the week is Goldschlager night and maybe jello shots and karaoke; where junior symbolic analysts can imbibe the European flavored-vodka-of-the-month and pass along to day's O.J. joke as funneled through the emerging markets desk; the kind of scene the New York Observer once described as "full bars, empty minds." In the Edge City of Irvine, the owners of the first bar to open there described it to the Los Angeles Times as an "upscale, traditional Jamaican plantation ...where patrons can graze on appetizers including fresh oysters in-

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jected with Stolichnaya. " (One is loathe to speculate where the indigenous labor of a "tra_ ditional plantation" fits into this scheme).

But that's not all. Edge City professionals now have a variety of "fragrant, intriguing, and tasty cuisines" at their disposal. This thanks to Vietnamese and EI Salvadoran immigrants-the ones many suburban voters would like to send back but whose economy increasingly can't seem to do without. Beyond bars, ethnic restaurants, and malls, Edge City culture gets a little hazy. TECN describes a New Age ritual in which people gather around the Quorum office complex near the Dallas Galleria to watch the vernal equinox (''And people say Edge City has no soul" they chuckle); leaving one to wonder if the ancient Druids might not have some leadership secrets to pass along. Edge City is affluent: the rest will follow. "You want rich. You got it," crows Garreau.

Garreau also likes to trot out the transparent claim that by giving people a place to flex their entrepreneurial spirit, Edge Cities actually revitalize downtowns, since those moneyed Edge professionals can spend their disposable income as tourists to the city's museums, theaters, and retail centers. Actually, the effects of Edge Cities on traditional downtowns have been much more profound. The architectural and planning lessons, the mass retailing strategies, and nascent "shadow governments" of Edge City are, in a brutal twist of irony, being reapplied to downtown. From New York's South Street Seaport to MeA's CityWalk in Los Angeles to Baltimore's Harbor Front, the metropolis of old is rapidly becoming a retail museum (or a living museum gift shop), adenatured festival marketplace inorganically grafted onto an old industrial district.

In New York, the private security and maintenance forces of Edge City are used to patrol the business improvement districts in enclaves across town. Residents can even inhabit their own Edge City preserve, the decidedly Dallas-like Battery Park City. The pseudo-

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culture of Edge City now infects New York as well, as themed restaurants offering generic food and pricy merchandise sprout up to offer safe havens for Edge City tourists. The whole spectacle recalls what Henry James called "the hotel world," that great cultural contrivance at the pinnacle of American civilization in which an entire environment is created, based not on nature and history but on satisfying and elevating desires.

Now that Edge City has entered the "real city," its effective triumph on the world stage of history would seem to be complete. But there are cracks in the facade. As Charles Lockwood reported in the Wall StreetJournal, some Edge Cities, or "suburban downtowns," are having the economic problems long associated with decaying urban centers. Lockwood argues that American corporations are finding that with telecommuting and "hoteling" that they no longer need the massive 1980s-style office complexes of Edge City. Other corporations are pulling up stakes in favor of ever more distant realms, some even relocating back to downtown (with Boston's vacancy rate dropping to 12% from 19% in 1991).

Indeed, the notion of the flight of jobs and industry to Edge City, while often taken as a fait accompli, can be misleading. Just recently, the Prodigy Service Corporation, a leading on-line provider exemplary of the high-tech Edge City landscape, announced it was relocating from White Plains, N.Y., to New York City; apparently to be closer to the multimedia companies growing in the downtown area. There is nothing in natural or economic law that says business must move away from downtown into the great sprawl beyond. Inner cities are not by their own logic bound to fail: they are pushed into their problems by business's concerted withdrawal into their private sanctuaries of nice. When movements like regional tax sharing try to redirect some of the fruits of "nice" back to the less privileged segments of the metropolitan region, Edge City cries "backlash." As the TECN notes: "Many people, including Edge City stakeholders, view such redistribution of revenues as in effect penalizing neighborhoods that work in order to bolster districts-and, in some cases, policies-that don't." Edge City thus justifies itself in moralistic terms as a "community that works," as if this were some inherent condition apart from the billions of dollars in corporate investment that makes Edge City viable.

We can glimpse an Edge City future different from Garreau's optimistic vision in the problems that are now plaguing many old suburbs. Mike Davis, writing in the Los Angeles Times, lists a number of inner-ring suburbs that are now faced with the same problems of crime, homelessness, and unemployment as the inner city. As Davis argues, these Whether you're here suburbs, which once took jobs and revenues from downtowns and were heralded to visit the Mall or with the same enthusiasm that Edge Cities are now, have in turn seen their jobs America. to attend a and tax revenues move to more favorable elsewheres. The decline of the older convention at the suburbs triggers a new kind of populist resentment towards the new suburbs, whose Minneapolis Convention Center, or sparkling postmodern towers stand in contrast to the tract housing of yesterday, are simply traveling for which suffers from what Davis calls "premature physical obsolescence." business or pleasure. we're There is something particularly sad about a dying suburb, or a struggling eager to share our metro area Edge City. While Garreau and others contend that Edge Cities are "works in with you. progress," raw and ragged like the frontier cities of the past, and that in time,

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they will blossom into virtual Venices, this now seems unlikely. In Edge City there is no vision beyond the immediate production and distribution needs of corporate America.

Nor is there any history, apart from highway rest stops named after heroes from the past. h is not merely their newness that makes Edge Cities so ahistorical, for built into their very structure is the blanking of history: the ruthless casting of light onto the historical negative. They are direct projections of managerial capitalism, places of innovation and obsolescence. Like the outmoded computer chip oflast year they-and their Information Age residents-will be deemed vestigial as soon as they lose their competitive edge.

Planners argue that, to prosper and flourish, Edge Cities require "fill-in" development, the kind of mixed-use, high-density public places that would create some island of community amid all the parking lots. But lacking a viable governmental structure, bereft of any semblance of "civic pride," restrained by scant tax bases and devoid of any overarching vision, it is hard to imagine such development happening. While it is true that nineteenth century American cities had governmental structures as fragile as Edge City, they at least had the public works projects of millionaire industrialists, who, robber barons though they were, felt some impulse to create civic structures. The high-tech captains of industry in Edge City share no such feeling of responsibility. Rather than a Rockefeller building art museums for collective enjoyment, we have a Bill Gates building for profit an Internet system that allows people to download digitized art images into their own homes.

And if some unimaginable economic or social 'destabilization' someday renders Edge City hostile to the corporate agenda, business will simply relocate. But here, unlike traditional downtowns, citizens will scarcely feel compelled to save what is left behind. The motto of Edge City's scorched-earth development policy could be, 'destroy the village to save the company.' The shortsighted efforts of planners and the disposable exoskeletons of aesthetically appalling office parks will simply be abandoned. Walter Benjamin's writing on 19th century Paris begins to seem especially prescient: "In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled."

However inspired he may seem, Garreau is as banal and moribund as the suburban downtowns themselves. In breathlessly evoking the quantitative superiority of Edge Cities, Garreau becomes the tiber-booster, ignoring the democratic decay and the triumph of marketplace values that these developments represent, enthralled with a corrupt form of populism that paints Edge Cities, because they house and employ so many people, as the undistilled American spirit. But unlike suburbia, which spawned a litany of jeremiads, Edge City has settled across the landscape with little more than an acknowledgment that is has done so. h is as if critics, leery of being labeled elitist, were afraid to challenge what is construed as the popular will: people are living there, so they must like living there. But as Herbert Muschamp has written, Edge Cities are founded on the eradication of the popular will, built beyond planning, beyond government, beyond taxation. In the great DMZ of deregulation they sprout, in baleful testament to the failure of municipal politics and the triumph of the corporate ethos.

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Night Train to Domestic Liftng Arrangements In my own mind you have put me beside compunction. Re-worked this mourning room where looking smacks of mother may I though to this day I falter when you hold tow.

Throw me over your deep end with some faith next time, as if to lend some bother to the vex.

I've always wanted to be grown up like a bureaucrat, a berth-rider ordering night caps over the Rockies.

But you keep insisting on day planners, bodies flat out. Which means, for example, a random plea. Do some dishes and get back to me. I'm waiting at the ripping point breast in hand, a broken spine like any sign of care.

-Jennifer Moxley

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Then They Say You9 re Drunk

T

Door FlSeher

he morning's nutter was there.

Brixton, Guy decided, must have more headcases per square inch than any other place in the world. He had sojourned in the great cities of the continents, had seen some sorry, deformed, trashy sights, but for multitudinous loonies Brixton was unassailable. It was a pity he couldn't find a way of profiting from it: then it occurred to Guy that since so many of them ended up in custody as clients ofJones and Keita, he did make a few quid off them.

Today's guest nutter was massive. Could easily bounce into any bouncer's position.

That was the other thing about Brixton, not only was it plentiful in barkers, it had the biggest barkers he had ever encountered.

Walking up to the bus stop Guy reflected that someone with his trousers around his ankles, trying to eat his shirt wouldn't normally have troubled him much. It was the size of the shirt-eater rather than his activity that was perturbing. Six three and big, big, big; they obviously didn't spare the carbohydrates at the bin. What concerned Guy was that if the shirt-eater wanted something to wash down his victuals, and mistook Guy for a can of Tennent's and tugged firmly on his ring-pull, Guy couldn't do much about it, apart from croaking pathetically. The shirt-eater was huge enough to do anything he wanted to.

They were very keen on taking off their clothes. A week ago Guy had peered out of his window and spotted another whopper obsessing outside. Guy found using the window very stimulating; it was an eventful view: riots, accidents, robberies. The strapping loony had been fastidiously garnering items from dustbins and then arranging them in the interior of a car belonging to a neighbour; having installed the objects, he climbed in and joined the rubbish, sitting there peacefully in his pinacothek.

Phoning the police was the usual concomitant to looking out the window. Working for a solicitor and asking the police for help was a mite odd; it seemed unnatural. Guy had been especially reluctant to phone for the law on that occasion because he hated his neighbours, and the owner of that car in particular.

Whether it was his job or merely living in Brixton, Guy found himself painfully short of warm, goodwill-like emotions. He'd watch his neighbours and get extremely annoyed by the way they walked. He hated Brixton, he hated his neighbours, he hated the clients and the truth be told, he wasn't too keen on himself.

Although he had been longing for the refuse-arranger to cause some expensive damage to the car he was in, because the nurse's car was next to it, Guy had phoned the police.

The nurse was ensconced in duodom, but you had to plan ahead. If the refuse-arranger wanted to extend his display to the adjacent car, there was nothing Guy could do about it Tibor Fischer is the author of the acclaimed novels Under the Frog and The Thought Gang, both published by The New Press. He lives in London.

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on his own, and bearing in mind it took the police half an hour to turn up (the police station was ten minutes' walk away) it was best to book in advance.

Two police officers appeared: a policeman (five seven tops) and a policewoman (five six) with nothing in the girth department. Guy estimated that between them they could just about restrain one limb. They tried reasoning, not having much choice. Guy had time to make a cup of tea and another phone call while they implemented mateyness and coaxing. The refusearranger refused to budge and responded by pulling off his clothes. Guy observed the policeman speaking into his shoulder to summon reinforcements. Four larger policemen dragged off the refuse-arranger while the original pair retrieved the strewn clothing.

On the bus, one stop closer to Peckham police station, Guy watched a drunk attempting to buy a ticket; Guy wasn't late yet, but the drunk had been fiddling in his pockets for four minutes in a search for coin, holding everyone up, until the passenger behind him volunteered to pay his fare.

Guy had been convinced that the drunk had been sent to multiply the unpleasantness of his trip to Peckham, but the drunk latched onto an Mrican woman sitting towards the front, and leaning forward in the confidential manner drunks have (despite their shouting), battered her with his breath. The woman tried for the wrapping-all-her-senses-inone-small-spot technique, however the drunk was so on that Guy was sure that even sober he was unbearable. "But I don't want to BOTHER you with MY PROBLEMS," the drunk promulgated with projection that would have got him a contract at the National.

In his coat pocket, Guy checked for his knife. Despite being overfamiliar with the law on offensive weapons, he had started carrying a flick knife. Not in case of being mugged. If anyone wanted his money, they could have it. He wasn't going to risk injury over a few quid. No, what worried him was being selected for ring-pulling by one of the barkers.

Guy entered the reception area of the police station. And waited while the constabulary deigned to acknowledge him. In the streets, in the courts, in the newspapers they might have to take it, but here, this was their domain. "Solicitor's rep," Guy announced when they felt they had let him ripen enough, "in the matter of Scott."

With most of the clients, you discerned a batting average in favour of criminaliry, that there would be a few months of good living before they got nicked; he always had the intention of asking the Scotts why they did it, because they were always caught. They were dependable clients, and had even started asking for Guy by name.

Part of the reason why Guy hadn't asked the Scotts why they did it, was because, despite their always being caught, they always claimed they hadn't done it.

In an age where family bonds were often sundered in ugly fashions, or simply didn't exist, it was rare to see a father and son so close. Scott senior and Scott junior were unusual in other ways. Street robbery was suited to the nifty. It was an offence much favoured by failed athletes, those who hadn't got it right at county level, but who were happy to have a chance to pur their training to use.

Scott junior wasn't right for this line of work. So fat he wobbled like a water bed (born too late for success in freak shows), you couldn't imagine him crossing even a bathroom

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with speed. This was where Dad came in, providing a chauffeur service.

Peckham police station, after one of their early (if not initial) forays, was where Guy had first encountered them. No charges were preferred because Scott junior had attempted to snatch a bag from a lady who turned out to be his former PE teacher (he obviously hadn't recognised her from behind otherwise he might have recalled her judo classes). His PE teacher did recognise him, and apart from loudly naming him tautophonically and clinging onto her bag, she had thrown him to the pavement and having pronounced "this isn't school, sonny," knowingly started to kick him senseless. Dad piled in and simultaneously joined his offspring on the pavement.

The Scotts were rescued by the police. Scott senior's version was they had been assaulted by a demented woman and was outraged that a number of witnesses maintained that Scott junior had made a grab for the bag. Taking their contusions into consideration and the feeble nature of the snatch, they were cautioned.

In one respect, the Scotts fitted the profile of street robbers-they were exceedingly dim. Bag-snatching was not a crime which attracted the calculating or imaginative. There was some craft in finding the right sort of victim in a favourable environment: small, skinny females with no fondness for the martial arts or a predilection for carrying concealed weapons-in a badly lit car park or sequestered side street or secluded subway. The technique didn't require much study: the handbag was grabbed and the victim pushed or thumped to the ground (though there we~e those who esteemed the method of shoving the victim to the ground first and then grabbing the bag). If nothing else, you could envisage Scott junior excelling at the shoving part.

Then came the Balham high street job. Scott junior plucked the bag cleanly, leaving bagless lady gaping, and jellied his way to the car. The Scotts sped off chuckling and turning the corner drove into a police checkpoint (a biannual event). No tax. No insurance. No MOT. No licence. No brake lights. No tread on the tyres. Arguably, they might have fronted it out if it hadn't been for Scott junior sitting in the passenger seat with the contents of the crocodile skin handbag spread out, scrutinizing a powder compact.

Patiently, Guy had listened while the Scotts had protested that the bag had been thrown into the car by a mysterious stranger who had hotfooted it out of their lives. They had just been making their way to a police station to hand it in. They were stumped as to how the woman's description fitted Scott junior perfectly, down to the "whip me and cum on my tits" logo on his T-shirt.

Out on bail, they had another whirl. The snatch went okay, the getaway was okay, but the car broke down on the way home. By the time they returned by bus, the police were waiting for them, after surmising from the description furnished by the victim ('out of work Sumo wrestler') who the culprits were. The Scotts: fit-up, victimisation. The jury: guilty. The judge: suspended sentence. Moral: get good wheels.

Finally admitted, Guy had a word with the arresting officer, who had that very jolly bearing policeman have when they have a perpetrator on the charge sheet within hours, and have the perpetrator so bang to rights that the entire legal profession working in un iBAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘ 71

son (having resurrected and roped in every lawyer that ever lived) couldn't do anything about it.

The Scotts were improving; they got the bag, got rid of it, and got home without incident. They went unrewarded for their improved efficiency since the crime had been recorded by a new high-quality colour security video camera, and the Scotts had been instantly recognised by the investigating officer.

The Scotts were very popular. There was nothing the police liked more than criminals who caught themselves. The officer was very chatty, revealing that the Scotts had disposed of the handbag but luncheon vouchers had been found on the sofa and (here the policeman gave a contented snigger) the victim's credit card had been discovered in a coffee jar.

Guy instructed the Scotts to go no comment, because that was usually the best policy, doubly so with the dopier clients, who would invariably create more work for counsel if they detoured from those two words. And it was a stance you couldn't be faulted for; it might not always be the best, but it was never wrong. You could always talk later if necessary. The Scotts would be better off putting up their hands in light of the videotape, the handbag's contents making themselves at home in the Scott's home and the victim's vivid recollection of Scott junior's "Kill them all and let God sort them out" T-shirt.

Yet the Scotts clung onto their innocence like a pit bull to a favourite leg; somewhere, by someone, a long time ago the Scotts had been advised never to cough and this motto had stuck in their minds, like a hunk of hair blocking a drain, blocking out any prudent assessments of their predicament.

There were, Guy reckoned, three main categories of stupidity. First the nervy types who still reverberated from the shock of school and who liked to keep out of people's way in case anyone asked them to add up something or tested them on the capitals of South America. They only got involved in crime by accident since they knew they would fail.

Then there was the more practical group who realised what their limitations were and worked round them. Lastly, there was the category that the Scotts were domiciled in, the too stupid to realise they were stupid, those who spent all their time wondering why everyone else was so stupid.

The conference with the Scotts was affable, apart from their inability to comprehend why Guy thought bail was unlikely.

The Scotts had fitted in with unprecedented convenience. Guy strolled down the hill leisurely with time to spare before his appointment at Brixton prison. He popped into a shop and bought some cigarettes for Bodo. The Scotts had been disappointed that Guy hadn't been able to offer them a smoke. Guy usually carried ten Benson and Hedges, but it had given him a surge of pleasure to have been without them.

Further down the hill, there was a fresh drunk with the question-mark posture of the profoundly inebriated. He held a can of blue-label and guttural in the gutter was declaiming "and then ... and then people say to you, you're drunk."

They were relaxed at the prison. They normally were unless someone had gone over the wall in the previous week. Guy sat down in the interview room and waited for Bodo (currently

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the favourite client) to appear. Bodo's problem: close association with seventy ks of marijuana.

From Augsberg he had come to London to play guitar. Short of readies, he had met a man in the pub one evening (no, he really had). The man got chatting with Bodo and offered him three hundred quid to make a delivery. This was one of the reasons Guy liked him, it was such an easy mistake. Bodo knew perfectly well what was involved, but had thought, one run, three hundred quid. Guy sympathised with him; he had been in a similar situation when he had met Gareth who had persuaded him to try outdoor clerking for his firm. It could easily have been the man in Lewisham who had hired Bodo.

Duly arrived at the rendezvous, Bodo had found an edgy van-driver who wanted to rid himself of the bales as swiftly as possible. Bodo had been flabbergasted to find the transfer being conducted in the open, to wit, the car park of a McDonalds and that the bales weren't even disguised, just wrapped with a few shreds of newspaper. Bodo was greatly worried about the sloppy packaging since only a few of the bales fitted into the boot of his car and the rest had to be stacked up on his passenger seats.

Shaken, Bodo started off for the address he had been given (verbally), having been also told a car would be following him. Bodo watched as the red Lotus, which had been cruising twenty feet behind him, sped past after he had been pulled over by the police who wanted to talk to Bodo about the red light he had burned. ("I didn't even notice the lights, I was checking the map.")

The prospect of Bodo, sweating in conditions close to freezing, and a car replete with gargantuan bales of marijuana roused the suspicions of the police officers: "Can you tell me what these packages are, Sir?" ''A very long jail sentence, I think," replied Bodo in the way to win policemen's hearts.

It didn't look good for Bodo. He had put his hands up, though in a situation like that it didn't do you much good. One kilo, you could pretend it had been planted or that someone else had left it there, but with seventy, you just had to start shopping for a good five year calendar. Bodo had barely had room to drive.

It didn't look good at all. He had all sorts of disadvantages. University education.

Un divorced parents. No history of sexual abuse. No history of substance abuse. No history of alcoholism. No illegitimate children. No criminal record. Flawless English. Skills. Nothing to mitigate whatsoever. The judge would throw the book at him.

In he came, wearing his "Legalize It" T-shirt. "Wie geht's?" asked Guy always eager to exercise his one German phrase, because it made him feel European and because that night with a German girl in a youth hostel in Rennes hadn't been in vain.

Bodo was trying to be tough about his forthcoming sentence, and being partially successful. He was settling into it; though he had some problems: he wanted to try for bail, but the only people who had that sort of surety were his parents and he hadn't shattered their serenity yet. Essentially, Bodo wanted bail for a last fling with his girlfriend. He wasn't fooling himself that she would be waiting for him when he emerged a much older and wiser man.

They discussed bail and other business. There wasn't much to discuss. Guy had attended mostly for Bodo's sake, to try and cheer him up; he knew there couldn't be much to BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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occupy him in HMP Brixton. It wasn't as if he could learn anything: a virtuoso guitar player, a PhD in astrophysics, and he spoke and wrote better English than anyone else in the nick (the governor included).

Bodo was focusing on the future. "1 will go back to Augsberg. Teach guitar. No more big cities. No more adventures. Everyone will know me as that boring Mr. Becker, and no one will believe 1 did crazy things in London." He pulled on his cigarette with lag-like intensity.

"You know, by the time 1 get out it probably will be legal. Perhaps 1 should do something to speed up the campaign."

They got up and waited for the warder to collect Bodo. "1 was looking at the moon last night," Bodo said. "You can see it very well from my cell. 1 was looking and 1 thought one day there will be people there and they will have jails there, because they will have arseholes on the moon. Wherever there are people, there are arseholes. Be careful, Guy, you never know when you may turn into one. Look in the mirror often."

He got home and ran the bath. Guy locked both the locks on the door and placed his longest kitchen knife (with a nice serrated edge) on the toilet seat cover. It was unlikely, almost impossible for anyone to get in, but Guy found it hard to trust the universe these days.

He missed the police.

They had turned up the night Guy had complained about the noise next door. It had been four in the morning and Guy had learned there was something outstandingly annoying about a mighty salsa beat passing through a wall. Most styles of music he could handle, and he had nothing against people having fun, but this jarred. The police had the same effect as him: none. Either the neighbour couldn't be bothered to answer the door, or the music was too loud for him to hear the furious bangings.

The police officer had commiserated with Guy, who had resolved to reciprocate the gift of insomnia by going out and slashing his neighbour's tyres after the police had gone. The police officer had looked out of Guy's window. "You've got a good view here, haven't you?"

So Guy found himself with a surveillance unit in his front room. His citizenship wouldn't have gone that far normally, but there had been early mention of a few quid being bunged his way for inconvenience.

It was the hairdresser's they were interested in. It had impinged a little into Guy's thoughts too. The hairdresser's seemed to be closed more than was generally considered beneficial for a business, with its shutters firmly pulled down. Even when open, it didn't seem to be doing any better than when it was closed. Nevertheless, parked around the premises were a number of cars that shouted affluence.

"Is it drugs?" Guy had asked.

"We don't give a toss about drugs anymore," the DC had replied. "They're flogging guns." The police left after a week, looking dissatisfied. Dissatisfied, Guy gathered, because nothing of a bang-to-rights nature had been attained, and because while they had been doing some close-up work in The White Horse, Guy's flat had been burgled and their

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cameras stolen. Guy lost nothing; they didn't take his television or video, which was rather insulting. They were old but serviceable.

The most grating thing was that his door had been kicked down. Guy had spent time and money fitting extra locks on the door. The locks had resisted admirably, but the door itself had disintegrated into toothpicks.

The company had been good though. Guy had enjoyed swapping tales of iniquity and vileness.

He was pleased to see his reflection in the mirror. He was going to Hampstead, that should give him a break from all this.

Strolling to the tube, Guy watched a Tennent's drinker (discharged squad die variety) lob his empty can onto the top of the entrance way of Lambeth's Housing section, and then proceed to urinate lavishly against the building while his girlfriend gazed on in a myhero fashion. You got tired of people distributing rubbish everywhere and dispensing substances that were not intended for public inspection, but it had to be acknowledged that it could never be wrong to hose down a Lambeth Council office.

At the tube, Guy broke through the cordon of evangelists (chiefly Christian, but with Islam closing the gap, some equipped with luggable speakers) and the selection of purveyors of politics (chiefly communist). Brixton underground station had a mysterious quality, the trait of congregating people who wanted to change your life, mostly noisily, by taking your money. And people who wanted you to change thei; lives, by taking your money.

Through the ticket barrier Guy was confronted by a sunglassed walkmanner walking up on the first segments of the down escalator (in effect, on the spot), drink in hand. Guy paused for a second to see whether the pacer wanted to walk off or whether he would work out that he was supposed to go down. But he carried on striding happily as if the underground station were his private gym, a perception provided by wonky mental machinations, or perhaps a simple craving to infuriate those who wanted to descend to the platforms.

Guy didn't care what cortical flamboyancy had licensed this. Living in Brixton gave you a superb ability to distinguish between irksome eccentricity and hazardous lunacy.

The drink was a complete giveaway-orangeade. Everyone knew real nutters and lovers of GBH drank Tennent's. Besides he was quite small. Guy shoved him out the way without bothering to add "sorry."

On the up escalator, an Australian surfing expertly on the handrail, glided past Guy. With the train rattling away, Guy opened up packets of annoyance and determination. He was annoyed because he had been thinking for months now how attractive Vicky was, and how despite her being agenda'd, he wasn't warming up her skin.

He hadn't been able to understand how she had been able to go out with that twentieth century non-entity, Luke. Despite taking a pride in his amorous resources, Guy recognised, there were males who were stronger, richer, tanneder, excitingly employeder; he wouldn't have liked it if Vicky had been dalliancing with one of them, but he could have understood it. He had wanted to say "If you're not interested in me, fine, but at least let me BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘ 75

fix you up with someone proper."

Patience was Guy's speciality: he was prepared to wait, a rebuff or two wouldn't put him off, he was prepared to stay in touch without any physical remuneration, he wasn't disheartened by polite conversation.

However, Luke had gone back to his home town ofIpswich for what had been billed as a long weekend, but hadn't come back. What had appeared in his stead was a piece of wedding-cake in a flowery box, with an invitation to his wedding (that previous weekend) to an old childhood sweetheart (whom Vicky had long assumed relegated to the sporadic Christmas card league), accompanied by a short note: "I think it best if we don't see each other for a while."

What had amazed Guy was Luke's cruelty. Or humour. Both had seemed beyond him. Luke, a sound engineer, seemed to have such enormous respect for sound that he hardly ever uttered a word, and it wasn't even as if the words he did utter carried extra pith to compensate for his long silences. Over and over again, Guy had been through his memories to verify his impression of Luke as tedious and nondescript. He took up about eleven stones' worth of space, that had been his chief characteristic. Though of course the most vivid memories of Luke were the ones he didn't remember but could see, those of Luke grimacing and groaning as he compressed Vicky's buttocks.

Vicky had discovered that she had been matrimonially outflanked on Monday; Guy had discovered that she had discovered on the Wednesday. Congr~tulating himself on his diligence and the efficacy of his intelligence network, Guy had phoned instantly, ready to supply commiserations.

To his shock, he had found Vicky far from disconsolate, but about to move to Hampstead where she had acquired a position as house sitter in a four-bedroomed wonderland (sauna, jacuzzi, gymnasium, satellite TV) as well as some chef from a Korean restaurant who was taking her for long walks and who was talked about in tones which conformed with someone who was verging on a buttock-compressing position.

She had sounded very chirpy, indeed, the only rain cloud that appeared in her vocal firmament was when Guy proposed a meeting. She reeled off excuse after excuse, so it was only now, a week later, that Guy was getting his slot, since Vicky was having a drink with two Dutch female friends. Guy was buoyed up by the idea of the company, although he was rather worried he was falling in love with Vicky.

Guy found them in the pub, and noted that Vicky greeted him with that total lack of interest that too often signified a total lack of interest; similarly the two Dutch girls were perceptibly unexcited by his presence. Far from feasting on his words, as women who are intent on a holiday liaison would, they scarcely paid any more attention to him than to any of the other people in the pub.

Studying Vicky, Guy surmised that he was part of a batch job, that she had had to take the Dutch out for a drink, and he had been tacked on to kill two birds and one unacting actor with one evening in the pub.

Guy bought a round just in case the ladies were aroused by generosity and then they

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sat down at a large round table which had already acquired a hardened pubber (old single ex-door-to-door salesman variety), who sat there serenely with the tools of his trade, the never-diminishing half-pint in a pint glass, the roll-up with almost a cigarette's length column of ash, alcoholic hair, and a smile that was confident it knew what was what.

The conversation rolled on without any aid from Guy, who was sitting next to the pubber. After a couple of minutes, the pubber with the ornate diction of those trying to disguise their drunkenness, asked Guy ifhe had a handkerchieE Guy replied that he hadn't, because he didn't. The pubber then tripped up the girls' conversation by canvassing them for a handkerchieE They were unable or unwilling to provide one.

A few moments later, the man asked Guy again for a handkerchief, with a trifle more urgency and an insinuation that Guy was holding out on him. Guy repeated with bonus firmness, a firmness he hoped would penetrate the boozy padding, that he didn't have one.

What was beginning to irritate Guy was that it was a three-second walk to the bar or the toilet where, if his need were that great, a tissue could be obtained. The man seemed determined on annoying someone into fetching a handkerchieE The Dutch girls were now listing with Vicky (rather insensitively it seemed to Guy) which actors would be most welcome in their undergrowth; the actors they named didn't have more talent than he did, Guy felt, but they did have advantages such as immense fame and wealth. He'd like to see how they would fare opposite the girls shorn of their celebrity and riches; probably the same as him. This enumeration of carnal preferences boded badly for him, since the girls clearly felt they were amongst girls-it was the soundtrack of a failed evening, when their mouths ran out of words and Guy was aware they were staring past him with the blanched visages of road-accident viewers.

He glanced over his shoulder. The reason the man had been pleading for a handkerchief was now abundantly clear. A strand of snot, a foot long, dangled like a dipstick from his right nostril.

For any Brixtonian this was rather elementary stuff, and Guy wasn't hugely bothered.

Unexpected in Hampstead (what was the point of paying millions for your home if you had someone growing mucous tendrils in the local?) but in Brixton they would have tried to lasso you with it. The pubber was progressively more and more amused as the pendulum parabolad over a larger and larger area.

"Am I upsetting you?" he chuckled. It wasn't upsetting, Guy analysed, but it was incredibly irritating. He hadn't travelled all the way across London for this, and he wasn't giving the pubber the satisfaction of knowing he had added another layer of unpleasantness to the evening. Guy shut him out of his mind, having checked that the pub (which wasn't that busy) had no other rump havens.

Shortly after, alened by the extra work of the revulsion muscles on the women's faces, Guy revolved to witness the pubber escorting with two fingers the strand onto the carpet. This eased things a bit since he no longer had to worry about the swinging adventures of the snot.

However when Guy was tactically agreeing effusively with Vicky about the importance of a united Europe, he espied horror having another outing on her face. Guy lefted BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

77

his gaze to perceive a three-incher worming its way of its hangar. There was another request for a handkerchief.

"Why don't we go outside?" suggested Vicky.

They went outside and sat at a plastic table. It was the end of May but cold. Not cold enough to prevent them from sitting outside, but cold enough to prevent them from enjoying it. Guy didn't see why they should be outside catching a chill. This was all too English for him, someone inconveniences you, so you help them make things even more inconvenient for you.

Things weren't right. There had always been revolting drunks, the insane had always been partial to public transport, but Guy recalled in his teenage years it had been out of the ordinary. You saw one in the street and you went home to say "there was a really revolting drunk in the street" or "what a nutter we had on the bus today." Now it would be striking if half the passengers on a bus aspired to civilised behaviour. Though perhaps he should try moving out of Brixton.

Guy's reverie was terminated by the figure of the pubber lurching our of the doorway, the man with the metronomic catarrh. We're in for a reprise, guessed Guy. "Hope you're... enjoying yourselves," he said as he zigzagged past, with an inflection that broadcast that was the last thing on earth he would want. Perhaps he had been on course for home because he took a few more steps, but the group's provocative lack of response caused him to tarry. He established himself a short distance away from their table (but more than a flob or a fist away) and started emitting abuse. They tried not paying any attention, but this didn't impede the invective, in stock, blunt and unimaginative terms, but with a remarkable hatred.

And here we are, mused Guy. In a dying city. Where else would you spend your day being polite to morons whose only talent is burning up others' money in benefits, legal and penal costs? Wading through beggars, spending an hour crossing the place, only to be ignored by women and to end up sitting in the cold being sworn at by a man whose secretions are no longer secret?

On one Dutch face Guy saw a look that said the man needed help and understanding.

On his face Guy imagined there was an expression which maintained that the man needed to be kicked in the head vigorously, ideally until he was dead. He was close to snapping.

The trouble was that the inveigher was old, puny and drunk; Guy would simply be beating him up. In a way this was the most galling aspect-that the pubber was sheltering behind their notions of decency. Furthermore, Guy's familiarity with the law conjured up charges of assault or manslaughter.

Besides which the ladies wouldn't approve of any laying on of hands. Women were funny about things like that. And there was no point in reciprocating the insults, that would only fuel the harangue.

"Some people aren't very nice," continued the pubber, "some people are... " he went on using the verb that has proved most popular on city walls since city walls had come into being.

They opted for drinking up. Guy wondered if there was a country anywhere where

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individuals like the pubber would be executed and if he could emigrate there. However, just as they were getting to the bottom of their glasses, the pubber shuffled off.

The Dutch contingent was staying with Vicky and Guy accompanied them back home so that if anyone else wanted to swear at them he could assist them in ignoring it. In addition to which, Guy prided himself on not giving up. The possibility of the three girls unrobing and having a yearning for aromatic balms to be kneaded into their flesh existed.

But as so often happened, it didn't happen.

A minicab was called for Guy. Having missed the last tube, he was now rounding off with an expensive trip down South. The driver was a Jamaican. Guy had barely been in the car ten seconds when the driver asked him ifhe could seek his advice. The driver recounted how, back in Jamaica he had met a girl, got married: he had brought her back to live in London but she had absconded after a week. "So me had 'er deported." All well and good, but then he had been back in Jamaica again where he had patched things up and now he wanted to bring her back again. He was thinking he should ring the Home Office.

Guy could see the Home Office relishing the call. Guy could see the driver walking into the office at Jones and Keita and asking for advice; like most of their customers he seemed to be in contention for some international award in imbecility. The driver must have had an age with a four in the front and Guy could see the wife with an age that still had a one at the start; a young lady no doubt older and wiser after her deportation who would either fit in her supplementary intubations while her husband was out on the road, or who would do a more thorough disappearing act next time.

Yet, perhaps because he was feeling tired, it glinted less like stupidity, it was simply part of the on-going. What people do. And apart from the airfare, what was the difference between going to Kingston or Hampstead?

"Give it a try," said Guy. "Oat's what I say, give it a try."

The minicab broke down halfway along Acre Lane. Guy waited patiently for a while in case the driver had the ability to revive it; then he paid, ready to walk the last ten minutes. "Good luck with your wife," he said, surprised that he meant it.

He looked up for the moon, but couldn't see it anywhere.

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Screw Capital of the World Diamonds Muleahey Rooting Out the Reds On the afternoon ofJanuary 2,1920, police detectives, sheriff's deputies, army intelligence operatives, and federal agents swept through the factories, union halls, and homes of Rockford, Illinois, to conduct the largest mass arrest in the city's history. The hunt yielded 180 men and women, almost all of them foreign-born, who were suspected of belonging to communist labor associations. This was one of dozens of "Palmer raids" (sonamed for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) carried out across the country to rid America of what the Rockford Morning Star called "the menace of alien radicals."

In Rockford, cops and G-men pulled dozens, mosdywomen, from an afternoon meeting at a communist union hall on the city's working-class southwest side and then raided neighboring taverns and pool halls, arresting patrons and proprietors alike. The zero-hour for the raid had originally been planned for later in the evening: But as the cops had jumped the gun in a similar raid in Chicago the day before, it was feared that the Rockford reds had been tipped off, giving them time to destroy incriminating documents and to go into hiding. So the lawmen decided to net whomever they could at the city's factories at 4 0' clock as they were preparing to leave work.

The first day of raids met with great success. The city's police department didn't have enough paddy wagons to haul the arrested, so taxi cabs were commandeered. The following day, the Rockford Daily Republic ecstatically reported that truckloads of equipment, documents, and "blood-red literature" had been seized in addition to the scores of dangerous aliens. As if to underscore the fanatical peril from which Palmer's goons had delivered the city and the nation, the paper quoted the sinister defiance of the local communist "king bee," Misha Shinkerenko: "I support the Soviet government both in Russia and in America. Kill me if you will, but the Soviet lives forever!" Shinkerenko, the papers revealed, was a ringleader of "an elaborate plot of the Russian Bolshevist government" that employed a bogus Society of Russian Agricultural Instructors as a front for subversive activities. The Republic even allowed itself a bit of perverse civic pride: Rockford, it crowed, had been the very center of red conspiracy, "a veritable breeding place for those who plot the overthrow of the United States by force."

In the days following the raids the city newspapers listed the names and addresses, along with occasional thumbnail biographical information, of 136 of those taken in the sweeps, including those released after questioning. The entries, though brief, adumbrate their tragically summary fates: Herman Johnson, 620 East Street. Here 12 years, declarant. Sang "Red" songs at meetings. Authorities to act to revoke first papers and deport.

Edwin Johnson, 1329 Seventh Avenue. Here five years, alien. Most friends, he says, are I.w.w.s or Communists. Expecting deportation, as he refused to BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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register for the draft and spent some time at Bridewell. Married and 24 years.

Held for deportation.

Stanislavas Dyokas, 607 Union Street, communist three years. He and his wife have a two year old child. The wife is as radical as Dyokas and will be looked after as soon as the disposition of the child is decided upon.

Several dozen of the arrested were Swedes, and the rest were Lithuanians and Slavs. In total, 58 of those netted in the raids were deported and twelve were tried for sedition; of these twelve, one, a Swedish glazier, was successfully defended by Clarence Darrow, and the other eleven were subsequently acquitted. As months passed, alarm over the red menace gave way to scandal-mongering, as local newspapers followed the trials of a former alderman and a free-thinking society scion. The raids' chief result was to end the brief influence in city politics of the Swedish Socialist Workers Club, then Rockford's most influential radical organization.

History does not record the revolutionary designs, much less the particular motivations and grievances, of Shinkerenko and his mob, their "blood-red literature" having disappeared without a trace. And that is hardly surprising. Rockford's Palmer raids seem parodically insignificant in comparison with such postwar social-industrial crises as the police strike in Boston or the general strike in Seattle, themselves evenrs barely remembered and little examined in the official narratives of the American Century.

Smiling Screw Town Rockford has always been a factory town, but with a difference: working class culture has always borne the stamp of the skilled elite. Situated 100 miles northwest of Chicago, the city was almost from the start an industrial center, home to a number of enterprising tool makers and to a large reaper factory that for a while competed successfully with McCormick's. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century the city became a major center for furniture manufacture, an industry which resisted large-scale mechanization until well into the twentieth century and relied on larger than usual numbers of highly Althouihthedtysrewotllwardand skilled craftsmen-in Rockford's case, almost exclusively Swedish away from the faUs and mUls in the :~~:~.;.,:~=~~ immigrants. The workers were anything but typically proletarian: ~~;~I:':~t:;I:~~:kec.:~~lr during the early period of Rockford's capital formation, skilled furplace alonpkie 20th Century archl·.

• I I'k I .

By teeture. mture workers were Cralr y ley to own th e means 0 f pro d uctlon.

As word spread about the opportu1893 there were 26 major furniture factories in the city, 21 of which nities In this new land. newcomers 0/ nearly every color. creed. and were cooperatives owned by large groups of workers who had pooled race settled In our elcht-county metro area In the 1800s. Germans. their money together. These business ventures were easily started 5cancUnav1ans and Irish may pre-~~J.~::'~~~:r~~:;~i;ll~i:'m_ and often quick to expand, but they survived financial panics and plifted by ouroldesr: residents • I S cr .

I fi I k f NatiYeAmericans.andournewest recessIOns onI·th y WI great d'ffi I ICU ty_ urrenng acute y rom ac 0 - Southeast Asians. d i iqui d capital reserves, most were eventuall y d riven by th e eep or Now that the rest of the world has discovered us, we're eager to share our lifestyle. attractions. events. and natural beauty. We know seeine all we have to offer could take a lifetime. So while you're enjoying your visit here, why not plan your next one?

82 • BAFFLER SEVEN

vicissitudes of the business cycle to resort to the assistance and ultimately the control of the city's richer industrial barons_ Adding to Rockford's high concentration of skilled labor was the parallel development of the tool-making industry. Although the

pioneer tool-making factories remained large and dominant, the same pattern of cooperative ventures seen in the furniture industry broadened the playing field and bolstered the ciry's prosperiry for most of the twentieth century. Demand for heavy machinery created by the First World War made giants out of the modest start-ups, so that on the eve of the Depression Rockford was the nation's second largest machine tool manufacturer. World War II took the industry to a higher level still, with orders from defense contractors quadrupling local tool production in its first year. After 1945 production continued its pace, thanks largely to the Korean War, a booming domestic economy, and the weakness of European and Asian competition. Fastener manufacture, another industry that had been established locally to supply the furniture makers, grew and prospered with the postwar housing boom to such an extent that Rockfordians sryled their ciry the "Screw Capital of the World."

Songs ofInnocence and Abundance Oddly enough, Rockford's rise to industrial significance coincided with the decline of its erstwhile bellwether industry, furniture manufacture. In a turn of events that would presage the city's economic fate at the end of the century, local furniture makers had by 1950 been all but driven out of business, unable to compete with the cheap labor and mechanized factories in the South. But its new industries were more than adequately taking up the slack, drawing large migrations of workers from other parts of the country. By mid-century Rockford had become one of the fifry largest cities in America.

At its high-water mark after WWlI, Rockford had even become a showcase for American prosperiry and sound social order: it was one of three models for Universiry of Chicago sociologist W Lloyd Warner's composite "Jonestown" in his Social Class in America, exemplifying the prosperous, middle American ciry. Following his lead, Life magazine profiled Rockford in a 1949 photo essay on class in the United States. "The phenomenon of social mobiliry," Life assured its readers, "is the distinguishing character of U.S. democracy and the thing for which it is famous and envied throughout the world." As if to prove the point, the essay presented the biographies of carefully picked representatives of six classes (two tiers each of lower, middle, and upper classes) in ascending order. Between the extremes of poverry and wealth-a casual laborer with few prospects, on the one hand, and the heir to one of Rockford's original industrial fortunes on the other-Life proffered four variants of the American archerype, the common man on his way up: the poor immigrant who found work as a machinist, bought a home and raised a family; the former A&P stockboy who bought his own grocery; the man who worked his way through college and became an accountant; the bookkeeper who became president of the the company.

Rockford's example proved, Life cheerily explained, that American democracy is a ladder anyone can climb. Of course, no mention is made of falling off the ladder, or indeed of having those on the higher rungs pull the ladder up after them, such reflections being strictly beyond the pale at Luce publications.

For a Rockford native with the benefit of half a century of hindsight, it is amusingand more than a little sad-to see the great promise with which Life viewed Rockford, to read its postwar version of the myth of the Midwest as Arcadia, the sentimental heartland BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘ 83

and lifeblood of the American spirit. At the core of this myth was an earlier agrarian idealism, a narrative of pragmatic, self-reliant immigrants subduing nature through hard work and ingenuity. But whereas the earlier idealism was fiercely regionalist and anti-corporate, the happy citizens Lift portrayed were more subdued and clung to an upright, quiescent morality suited to the industrial order; the ideal of living by the fruits of one's labor was transformed into "an honest day's work for an honest day's pay." In an era of a rapidly expanding economy, that wasn't such a bad conclusion.

By the time Calvin Trillin visited Rockford for a New Yorker essay in 1976, the children (and grandchildren) of the Rockfordians featured in Lifts profile were preparing to begin their working lives, and the Arcadian myth of the Midwest still colored all thinking about the city's past. Trillin came to cover the debate over funding for Rockford's public schools, but his story revealed far more about the city. Rockford, he wrote, exemplified a class of medium-sized midwestern cities where the ills of the big cities were thankfully absent, a place which "does not suffer greatly from poverty or the drain of sub urbanization or the turmoil that often accompanies drastic shifts in racial composition." Trillin could hardly have guessed it then, but within a decade all of these "big ciry" problems-and many more-would overwhelm Rockford.

Trillin also noted something anomalous about Rockford: it was a blue-collar Republican town. The people there, whether business owners or workers, he observed, clung to an old-fashioned individualism and suspicion of the intrusions of big government. What Trillin failed to mention, however, was that Rockford's prosperity had largely been established by intense, prolonged government defense spending. Moreover, Rockford's industrial exporters, like those of the rest of the nation, had enjoyed a rather charmed post-war life, relatively free from foreign competition. This anomaly, the blue-collar Republican town, so proud of its work ethic, had been built along the lines of a war-time economy. As the Cold War wound down, it became clear that the feast would end. Trillin left town a few years before the bill arrived. r-------,--,.

Had Trillin returned to Rockford five years later, in 1981, he would ] I ~~ have found general pessimism and despair among Rockford's industrial t ~ ;~ workers, skilled and unskilled alike. Had he returned ten years later, in :; l Ifl ~ 1986, he would have found those unemployed skilled laborers had blown ~I ~ÂŁ town for better prospects elsewhere. He'd have found the unskilled exactly t~ where he left them-fighting to bring home an ever-shrinking wage. He ~~ ~ 1!iI~ would also have noticed a greater social cleavage between the unskilled and skilled laborers, managers and technicians lucky enough to be working.

QI That cleavage is evident in the "ills of big cities." And make no mistake: ~i ~~~ these are ~ow structural problems that show no sign of being abated, much t~ less ofbemg addressed.

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84 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

Midwestern Republicanism in an admirable, if pathetic, third-party run for the presidency. He went down in flames: Reagan aimed straight for the vanity and fears that had made Rockford a Republican stronghold to begin with, and trounced him. In Reagan's first three years, Rockford changed forever. Like any industrial town, Rockford was used to bumps in the business cycle; during the post-oil embargo recession of 1975, for example, one in ten workers was thrown out of work. The nearby town of Belvedere, considered to part of the Rockford metro area, intermittently saw its unemployment rate touch double digits during the slow periods for its largest employer, a Chrysler assembly plant. So in November 1980, when unemployment surged to 13 percent, people were concerned, but not necessarily alarmed.

Then the bottom fell out. In November 1981 Chrysler again laid workers off, spiking unemployment rates to 15 percent, the highest level in almost two generations. As the recession deepened, orders to Rockford's tool manufacturers ground to a halt, spurring more layoffs. Unemployment rates over the next year ratcheted upwards, so that Rockford led the nation in joblessness by July with 19.3 percent. By November 1982, only a year after the second spike of layoffs commenced, 26.3 percent of Rockford was out of work, nearly matching the figures seen at the low ebb of the Depression.

Meanwhile, average individual and family income, wealth distribution and poverty rates grew worse every year. Rockford's increasing reliance on lower-paying service jobs had serious consequences for the overall standard of living in the area. According to a report released in 1986 for the United Way, Rockford's per-capita income ranking among the 305 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. slipped from 44th in 1979 to 131st in 1983. Even Rockford's labor aristocracy, the employees of the areas three solid defense contractors, shed some workers for the first time in their 70-year history. The final indignity came in 1993, when Money magazine rated Rockford the worst place to live among the 300 largest U.S. cities, citing poor employment prospects, widespread poverty, and a surging crime rate.

Like much of the Rust Belt, Rockford is now said to have "recovered." Midwestern manufacturing has returned, in aggregate, to the levels it reached in the boom years before the recession of the early 80s. In the bloodless vernacular of policyspeak the economy has been "restructured." Those firms that could do so invested heavily in labor-saving technology, enabling them to cut their costs significantly. Those that could not avail themselves of technology, or that could only partially do so, resorted to other means to attack the wage: increased overtime or the use of the "contingent workforce" of subcontractors, temporary or part-time laborers. The net result has been a general downward pressure on the wage. As the economy struggles to "restructure" according to the imperative of productivity, labor markets ebb and flow in sometimes unpredictable ways, shakeouts migrating from industry to industry and region to region. But only two types of job-hunters show much prospect for demand: low-wage, low-skill workers and those possessing advanced technical training.

In this single sense, then, Rockford has recovered. But in every other sense Rockford has not recovered, nor will it ever. The human cost of economic shifts in the 1980s can be expressed in a variety of statistical ways, but perhaps they are best understood in terms of BAFFLER SEVEN路

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the sheer degradation of an underclass that inhabits my hometown. Trillin's assessment of what ails Rockford has been stood on its head: Rockford's problems are big city problems.

Its more prosperous citizens, including a core of the working class whose jobs have been secured by government fiat, are abandoning the west half of the city for suburban developments, leaving in their wake high concentrations of gang crime, poverty, deindustrialization and racial polarization.

Rooting Out the Memory ofRooting Out the Reds The economic shock of the Midwestern depression is in a sense over. An accounting has been made: Those hit hardest have either moved on or acclimated themselves to a future of lower expectations and struggle. The psychological dislocation will linger for a long time to come, but those who remain are perhaps further than ever before from making sense of their plight. Consider the following warning issued in a newsletter published by the Rockford Institute, a conservative think-tank that stands, sadly, as the city's only intellectual institution of any stature: [Tlhe forces of radical change, although once numerically insignificant, have multiplied and have come to exercise such a strong anti-capitalistic influence upon the beliefs and the priorities oLcitizens that the whole private enterprise system is being jeopardized.

In 1978, the year those words found print, it is likely they sent shivers down the odd Rotarian's spine. Today it is difficult to imagine them being met with anything but derision. Yet the Institute, funded by the city's antediluvian industrial elite, has evolved only slightly from the paranoia of its 100-Percent American forebears, shedding its cold-war rhetoric in favor of "family values" atavism and racist defenses of "American civilization."

In any rational political calculus, an upheaval like the one experienced in the Rust Belt in the 1980s should have forced the likes of such reactionaries into the hills. Ironically, the reverse happened. In the face of a palpable assault on the wage, ordinary Americans cast their lot with the "free market." At a time when the demands of work were putting unprecedented strains on the life-world of the nuclear family, they clamored as never before for the return to the repressive norms of "family values." And at the hour they needed it most-at the time when their livelihoods and those of their children depended on it most-they repudiated the role of big government.

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Several Vistas Of death. And even that crust of representation they belong to, falling asleep in a bus station, uncertain that this was all there is, all one waking reverie, the only hint of actual existence, sayan office window, is no longer your friend, but is itself become abstract, squinting your eyes to find your way, look further into the shower of years. Yes, you are small but then who isn't, brushing themselves off at the turnstile.

You have come a long way, that comforting refrain metallic in your ear, click. click. and then the next thought finds you happy and bursting with flowers, what a day it was munching your greens on the verandah. The view from here is becoming obtuse and you return to your garret, smoke filled, waving a red book. So many tableaus to choose from, you exclaim, wrenching a beret over flashing eyes. And this scene too is growing wan, tired of watery soup and wavering arias.

Try to stay put in your plot the voice-over says, mapping a course through several vistas, the day is punk and night portends an expansive eclogue where you don your mittens, put away your notebook, and unbind that lovely aspect of boy.

-Peter Gizzi

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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Epic Freight Dand Berm.an Michael rowed the boat ashore and moored it to a gnarled stake. He reached into the fold of his turtleneck sweater and pulled out a map drawn on the back of a wallet-sized photograph. In a clump of cattails he found the beat-up giftbox marked "Dirt Towers," his orders attached. Pulses of fear weakened his arms. They felt like tubes of cortisone. He flipped the map over to the photo of his lady-in-waiting and drew strength from her thick healthy hair, the color of almonds and saddles.

A wide plain stretched out before him like an old document encased in glass. It was beautiful space, downhill, south. A rickety black carriage, contaminated with rubella, waited for him nearby. He climbed in and massaged the inoculation marks on his arm as the rig perambulated across the bare ranchland.

After many hours he arrived at a hacienda. He was led into a room where a spectrum of fruit and meats the color of makeup were spread across a rough table. Michael ate slowly, at the pace of his own thoughts, staring out the window at a gang of shimmering black retrievers playing in the distant grass.

He slept further down the road in the shack marked on his map. It was set in a chaparral of short dry trees. Inside, there w~ a strong fire going and two sets of tracks on the floor. One walking backwards dragging the other's heels through the dirt. Michael sat down on a bench and closed his eyes. Saw a timber wolf shattered on "a rock slide. He lifted his head. The shack was wallpapered with Sears catalogues. Black sewing machines floated like deathships on the walls.

In the morning he traveled further into the countryside periodically reading his printed instructions which began "Our chief resolve ... " At midday he arrived at the forest's edge. A campfire smoldered like the ruins of a medieval city. A few minutes passed during which he knew he was being watched by his contact. Finally a gaucho emerged from the foliage astride a giant Appaloosa. His hip holsters held two large aerosol canisters. The gaucho introduced himself as Manuel and handed Michael one of the cans.

"What is this for?"

"Every object in space is a memory system. You will need it."

Michael let it pass. Manuel dismounted and explained that his horse was named Treinta y Tres after Uruguay's thirty-three founding fathers. He tied her to a fallen log.

He lifted up a heavy bough as ifjt were a tent flap and motioned for Michael to follow him into the woods.

"What about the box?"

"Leave it."

They entered the woods and walked silently apace. There was no variance to the forest.

Every hundred yards seemed to repeat the features of the last. Pendulous hives and sad little BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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creeks appeared rhythmically as if the landscape were a primitive computer program.

"Manuel, can you tell me why I've been sent here, what the purpose of my mission is?"

"Only that people have been waiting for years."

Manuel quickly changed the subject to the Battle of San Cosme Gate which was fought in these woods. He illustrated the flight of arrows with his fingers and traced battle plans on his palms as they walked. This took many hours and brought them to a clearing where a large white meetinghouse or church drew the woodlands all around it.

It looked deserted. Cats circulated the building like worms about a skull. Michael grabbed the gaucho's arm.

"Manuel, please prepare me, tell me why I am here."

He wrested his arm from Michael and shook his head darkly.

"The world doesn't have a name, my friend. You have seen the signatures fade."

Michael pulled out his map and instructions. He gasped. The paper was blank.

They entered the dim meetinghouse. Curved benches filled with peasants surrounded a small sand-covered stage. They took a seat in the back just as a man in a black turtleneck mounted the stage with an acoustic guitar.

"Who is he?"

"He has come to tell your story."

The audience looked like they had been waiting for years. The musician adjusted his chair in the deep sand. He looked up into the rafters for a moment, searching for more time. When there was none left he began to sing.

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Dirty Talk Danielllarris Parental guidance suggested.

TI

o factors have made dirty talk one of the most distinguishing features of sex in the '90s, second only to the condom, a device with which dirty talk shares a number of similarities as a requisite prop of safe sex. Voices can also function as condoms, as aids to the masturbatory fantasies that various health officials have encouraged, often with proselytizing fervor, as a substitute for the exchange of bodily fluids. The fear of AIDS has led us to seek out new ways of having sex, of circumventing the necessity of actual contact without at the same time compromising our erotic experiences, a requirement that compels us to use our voices and imaginations to simulate physical acts that are often safer to talk about than to perform.

Almost as relevant as the AIDS epidemic to the recent interest in narrating and verbalizing our sexual desires are developments in computers and telecommunications technologythe proliferation of900-numbers, voice mail, and computer bulletin boards. Such inventions have reduced the inefficient, complicated, and unreliable business of meeting other people to phone calls or even key strokes, elementary procedures on household gadgets that have ushered sex into the Information Age, radically simplifying' the methods by which we trick, pickup, socialize, and cruise. Marketers are now busily catering to a wide variety of sexual interests, from "vanilla" sex to hardcore S&M, by providing services that are, as one company advertises, "niched," "tailored to your needs," "your type," and thus allowing customers to fulfill one of the highest priorities of the contemporary sexual agenda, "to save time."

AIDS and technology have collaborated to produce a kind of "virtual" sex, a form of intercourse by modem in which the telephone and the computer terminal serve almost as an electronic prophylactic and in which people copulate, not with their bodies, but with their voices. The pornographic film Man Talk presents an apocalyptic image of the artificiality of this "virtual" sex by arranging each of its scenes around a steamy phone call that eroticizes the telephone itself. Grinding the receiver into their crotches and then telling the person on the other end what they want to have done to them, the actors use the telephone as a vibrator or dildo, obsessively running it over their bodies like a scanner, as if it were actually capable of transmitting the sound, temperature, and feel of their skin.

In an era in which people are increasingly having sex by engaging in illicit, longdistance liaisons through the miracle of fiber optics, they use verbal fantasies to supplement (or even, in the case of the most cautious adherents to safe sex, to supplant) acts with which they are no longer comfortable. Physical intimacy is therefore more at the mercy of the conventions of dirty talk than it has ever been before. And yet the lurid recitations with which people degrade, coerce, bully, and cajole their partners are full of fallacious assumpDaniel Harris is writing a book on gay culture for Hyperion. His essays appear in Harper's and Salmagundi.

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tions about obscenity and desire, myths that profoundly affect our sexual routines. The expletives that provide the basic script of our verbal scenarios misrepresent sex so completely that they don't so much enhance it as create a highly abstract and ultimately punitive standard of the nature and intensity of what we should, ideally, be feeling.

Although many porn stars provide a running commentary on the sex they are having, some are raunchier than others. One in particular, Jeff Stryker, the reigning idol of gay films, is so endlessly inventive that he has become the sex industry's preeminent improvisationist, an unacknowledged poet laureate who delivers a lewd rap in a hokey Texas twang. Take the following passage from Powerfol II, in which Stryker, who is as massively endowed as a figure out of an Aubrey Beardsley print, ravishes a man who is forced to speak through clenched teeth in a vain effort to keep up with his partner's steady stream of orders and obscenities. Stryker tells his partner: You like it up your tight little asshole. Oh yeah. Take all my fuckin' cock. Come on, take it. Look at it makin' your fuckin' cock all hard. You like this big dick, don't you? Yeah. Take it in that tight little asshole. Take it in that sweet little ass.

Yeah, squeeze it like that. Tight little hole. I like fedin' my balls slappin' against your ass. Let me reach down and fed your cock. Oh fuck. Let me hold that big dick while mine is ramming in and out of your ass. Oh fuck. Yeah. Fuckin' swallow that cock. Swallow it with your tight little asshole.

In the baroque flights of fancy of the most extravagant, wordsmiths, dirty talk becomes a kind of found poetry, a highly stylized form of speech full of repetitions and rhetorical questions, of absurd adjectives and archaic diction, all of which conjure up images of convulsive climaxes and thrilling extremes of excitement. Far from being a way of communicating our desires and preferences when we are actually making love, the muddled language of sex, with its rising octaves of ever more impassioned exclamations, often has nothing to do with the situation at hand but serves as an irrelevant voice-over, the distracting narration of an observer rather than a participant. Solecisms abound as the linguistic momentum rises to a delirious and self-sustaining pitch that leads even a seasoned orator like Stryker to fumble over his words, telling his partner in one scene to "fuck my cock" or, more incongruously still, to "suck my cock with your legs."

Perhaps the most revealing evidence of the problematic relation between speech and sex can be found in the dense clusters of commands that are the basic syntactical units of dirty talk. In the speech quoted above, Stryker issues so many instructions that his partner's body loses definition in the blur of orders, becoming in the confusion a vague yet voluptuous landscape ofshifting protuberances and interchangeable orifices. The following passage from Stryker's fum Busted consists almost entirely of a sequence of rapid-fire commands meant to suggest insatiable desire, as well as a selfish insistence on immediate gratification: Lick your way up to my fuckin' asshole. Kiss it. Fuckin' kiss it. Oh, Gino, you little devil. Stick your tongue in my hole. Yeah, tongue fuck me! Yeah! Tongue fuck my hole. Suck my cock too. Bob up and down on my cock and suck my hole. Yeah. Put that cock in your mouth. Come on. Bob up and down on my

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fuckin' cock. Slide under here and let me fuck you in the mouth. Oh yeah. Take my fuckin' cock, take my fuckin' cock. Yeah. Let me fuck you. Stick that big fuckin' ass up here.

The extraordinary thing about this passage is that the passive partner is actually performing all of the acts specified before Stryker tells him to, so that the commands become a highly figurative way of intensifYing or narrating these acts rather than requesting them.

Stryker's orders are obeyed before they are even issued and thus stand in a chronologically absurd relation to the action they are meant to elicit. They are not only repetitious, given the number of times they are spoken, but they are nonsensical, given that they are delivered after the fact, as a fictional enhancement of the scene rather than as a set of practical instructions. In our verbal fantasies, commands rarely serve the same function they serve in ordinary conversation, especially in pornography where the enthusiastic obedience of the passive partner utterly negates any need for orders.

This paradoxical inversion of commands and actions expresses not only a linguistic problem but a problem inherent in our understanding of sex itself. On the one hand, we fantasize about a pornographic utopia in which there are no impediments to the will, in which the acquiescence of our partners can be taken for granted, and in which our desires are fulfilled with such cheerful readiness, such blind and selfless subservience, that our needs are anticipated before we even need to ask for what we want. On the other hand, the very notion of such a utopia contradicts an opposite belief. that the most arousing sex involves an act of assault, of aggression. The tough-talking drill to which we subject our partners suggests rape and coercion, a world in which the will is constantly opposed by a reluctant partner whom we must goad into action by threatening to exercise brute force. In other words, dirty talk expresses rwo contradictory pornographic impulses. It creates a world of unconditional obedience but nonetheless constantly alludes to nonconsensual sex. The desire for unquestioning submission, for a libidinal paradise where our sexual whims are never opposed and where we are fawned over by a grovelling slave, exists side by side with the need to transform sex by means of rhetoric into an act of compulsion, of subduing an insubordinate partner. The results are these disembodied commands, which maintain a feeble pretense of coercion by superimposing a kind of mental sex on real, physical sex, a charade of intimidation ludicrously belied by the eager acts they accompany.

If the commands we issue during sex are curiously out of sync with our behavior, so are the questions, which are transformed by means of the grammatical amorphousness of dirty talk into derogatory statements, demeaning attempts to put words in the mouths of our speechless partners, whose answers are not only irrelevant but often unwelcome. A disingenuous rhetorical question like Stryker's "you like this big dick, don't you?" (a line that differs only minimally from "you like it up your tight little asshole") is an accusation in disguise, a judgment rather than a genuine attempt to find out if the passive partner is enjoying himself. Its answer-yes!-is emphatically implicit in the tone of gloating selfsatisfaction, disgust, and contempt with which it is asked, a tone full of the negative connotations that transform the rhetorical questions we pose during sex into indirect repriBAFFLER SEVEN路

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mands that berate the person for liking something he shouldn't like, something that it is wrong and repulsive to like. These running interrogations, which are so basic to the plot of dirty talk and which usually follow the formula "you like that, don't you? ," thus reveal that the recreational language of sex is highly moralistic, full of a feigned disapproval that eventually takes on the character of a disgusted parental scold of the passive partner's enjoyment. Far from being liberating, guiltless, and uninhibited, dirty talk is tendentious and sermonizing, qualities one would expect to find in the language of a sanctimonious prude rather than of a foul-mouthed hedonist.

The moralistic nature of dirty talk becomes especially clear on the very few occasions when the dominant speaker insists that his lover actually answer his rhetorical questions, as is the case in an extravagant example of pornographic kitsch, the film Prince Charming. In the following passage, the evil brother of the King rapes Lester the Jester on the throne while bellowing out gothic obscenities like "fee, fi, fo, fum, suck my dick and make me cum": Evil Prince: Beg for my cock.

Lester the Jester: Please, my lord.

EP: Choke on it, choke on my fucking cock. Say "please."

L}: Please.

EP: Does it feel good? Tell me how it feels.

L}: It feels so good.

EP: How bad do you want it?

L}: I want it bad.

EP: How are you going to suck it?

L}: I'm going to suck it good. I want it in my mouth.

EP: Are you sure?

LJ: Yes. EP: Choke on my fucking COCK! Does it feel good? Tell me how it feels. Tell me you want my fucking cock.

L}: I want it.

EP: Tell me you want my fucking cock.

L}: I want your fucking cock.

EP: You know what this cock is going to do? Why do you want me to fuck you, you little whore?

L}: Because I'm a little whore.

EP: Are you listening to me? Get it nice and hard. How does it feel?

L}: Feels good.

EP: Where do you want it?

L}: In my mouth.

EP: Say "please."

L}: Please...

EP: Do you want it? Tell me what you want.

L}: Fuck. Fuck me.

EP: Beg for it.

L}: Please.

EP:Why? L}: Because I'm a whore.

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Dirty talk often infantilizes the passive partner in a crude burlesque of the parentchild relationship, a game in which the person who poses the questions assumes the role of an exasperated tutor instructing a wayward child, who stands before him penitently in tongued-tied silence, obediently repeating the lesson of "please" and "thank you." The passage is typical of a recurrent verbal fantasy in which a debauched parental surrogate acts as an inquisitor grilling his lover about his innermost desires, prying out of him, through relentless cross-examination, shamefaced confessions of secret longings. As this scene suggests, the ultimate degradation of dirty talk is not, as one might expect, the indignity of being forced to remain silent while we are called names but the even more compromising punishment of actually being forced to talk back, to answer those nagging rhetorical questions, questions that the passive partner, who is usually allowed to playa shadow role in dirty talk as a compliant but invisible participant, generally acknowledges in contrite, albeit mortified, silence.

Although it is tempting to interpret these rhetorical questions as a genuine effort on the part of one lover to achieve access to the subjective state of the other, the interrogatory mode of dirty talk in fact expresses the dominant speaker's utter indifference to what his companion is feeling, a callous disregard that manifests itself in the way he deliberately deprives his partner of the right to speak on his own behalf and to articulate reactions that may be separate from, and possibly contradictory to, his own. In the following passage from Inch by Inch, Tony Steffano, the Greta Garbo of gay porn (who appears to have prematurely abandoned his promising career as a dirty talker and retreated into tightlipped seclusion after only one magnificently verbal performance) punishes the thief he catches lurking under his bed, a frightened young preppie who broke into Tony's clothes hamper in order to steal his dirty underwear and then sell them to the menopausal pantysniffer down the street: Does that taste good? Like that big juicy dick in your mouth? Taste good? ...

Lick my asshole. Like the way that asshole tastes? ... You like eatin' that hole out for me, don't you? ... Bet you like to feelin' my cock up there. Let me see you move that ass. You like to feel a real big cock up that fuckin' hole, don't you? ... Yeah, you want that dick up that hole. Feel that cock slidin' up there. That fucking hole being screwed.... You like that. Like gettin' your hole fucked ... . You really want it. I'm gonna let you have it real good. You're gonna enjoy this one. Fuck that ass real good.

By means of dirty talk, Steffano subordinates the preppie's erotic responses to his own, thus serving as the principal narrator of the scene, the man in charge, not only of the action, but of the commentary on the action as well. The passive partner's sensual experiences are dictated by his interrogator's questions rather than elicited by them, imposed on him from without through a form of ventriloquism in which Steffano acts as the mouthpiece of his lover's desires, making prescriptive statements that categorically prohibit disagreement, either telling him what he is feeling or informing him what he shouldbe feeling. In this way, the passive partner is paralyzed by his inability, or reluctance, to tell BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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Steffano what he wants done to him, what he enjoys, the basic assumption being that, in the sexual utopia of dirty talk, lovers experience complete unity of response, so that the one is fully capable of acting as the self-appointed spokesman of the other. By depriving the passive partner of the capacity for self-expression, the dominant speaker demeans and objectifies his speechless lover whose reactions are reported second-hand in a way that denies his sexual independence.

This strange sense of being both the principal actors of the dramas we create from sex and the principal narrators suggests that dirty talk is the invention of a culture accustomed to experiencing sex through its representations in art. The heavily scripted scenarios we act out in our bedrooms borrow freely from pornography and are thus the product of a culture that increasingly models its behavior on the behavior it sees on the screen, having relinquished control of its fantasies to the professionals employed by the sex industry. In order to simulate real sexual encounters in film or literature, the director or writer must find some way of communicating to his audience what the actor or character is feeling at any given moment, much as a radio sports announcer narrates a game, providing his listeners with a vicarious set of eyes. Dirty talk fills this need by supplying a harshly objective and visual form of art like pornography with an internal dimension, a dimension that would be lost to the viewer if the actor didn't function as his own narrator, his own emcee. One of the ironies of modern sex is that verbal conventions that were developed expressly to overcome the artistic difficulty of representing the otherwise unrepresentable element of subjective physical pleasure have been gradually eroticized through repeated use until they have become arousing in and of themselves. Real sex has thus been tainted with vicarious sex, with conventions of narration that, while serving a function in art, are superfluous when we ourselves are the participants. Dirty talk is a symptom of a very modern form of detachment from sex, a 'dissociation of sensibility' caused by our heavy consumption of pornography. In a culture saturated with literary and cinematic images of people making love, it is impossible to respond to sex in an entirely physical way, free of the representations that spur us on to narrate our physical encounters even when there is no audience that needs our narration.

To laugh at the plain silliness of dirty talk, the staggering idiocy of its quaint costume dramas, is to miss what might be ironically referred to as its pathos or nostalgia, the desperation it reflects to rediscover the titillating sensation of shame, an emotion whose intensity has significantly diminished in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. Dirty talk represents a frantic search for the obscene in a culture that has largely eliminated obscenity as a special linguistic province, a culture in which our daily conversations are strewn with obscenities, and in which our most esoteric desires are freely discussed in forums as open as talk shows, classrooms, and workshops. The verbal fantasies we play out in the bedroom do not, as we might expect, derive from our guilty sense of the naughtiness of sex but from our growing and intensely disillusioned sense of its banality, its lawfulness as a wholesome game or, as it is so insipidly described by sexologists like Dr. Ruth, as a psychologically hygienic source of emotional nourishment. In the face of such permissiveness, nostalgia

96 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

for the illicit leads us to take absurd measures to recover our fading belief in the everelusive quality of the obscene. Struggling harder than any culture has ever had to struggle to preserve our capacity for lewdness, we wield whips and don knee-high boots much as we drop our g's and speak illiterately, indulging in the class-regressiveness and grammatical primitivism of expressions like "suck them balls" or "pinch them tits good." In our frenzy to regain the inhibitions we have abandoned, we comb dialects for antique expressions ("schlong," "plunger," "knob," "horn," "poker") and choose diction that is so deliberately exotic that dirty talk is constantly plagued by language that verges on the obsolete and the ridiculous, sinking into bathos as we attempt to rehabilitate our vanishing sense of the profane, of the forbidden. Because the obscene is no longer sealed off in its own protective vacuum outside of the realm of ordinary speech, it is now quickly absorbed into our daily vernacular and is thus always growing stale, losing its piquancy, its freshness, its outlawed quality as linguistic contraband. We fight to maintain the sensation of illicitness by making a continual series of updates and revisions, trying one word and then the next to avoid the obsolescence that is in some sense the fate of dirty talk. For this reason, there is an undercurrent of alarm in the outlandish rhetoric of Stryker's accomplished monologues, an awareness of the futility of efforts to prevent our culture's cooptation of the obscene, to stave off the inevitable loss of this indispensable category of speech, and to police the linguistic boundaries of a land of recreational inhibitions, of the taboos we cling to as aphrodisiacs.

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Ghosts Steve Healey

I

'm living in Athens, Georgia, thinking about ghosts and the continuity of time. It's hard to be in this town without feeling a kind of historical gravity pulling at your shoes. Around every corner, vestiges of the past are waiting: a civil war that erupted more than a century ago, a rock music scene that erupted more than a decade ago. What once happened persists, but it doesn't stay the same. A ghost is not what it used to be. Events and ideas are reshaped, revised, repackaged. The past is what the present wants it to be.

They say General Sherman spared this town as a favor to an old friend. Most of the South, including Atlanta, wasn't so lucky, but that's an old story. Now antebellum architecture still stands here as a document, a frosted memory, and many of the grandest mansions have become University of Georgia fraternities and sororities. Imagine Athens at the end of the war, an untouched island in a sea of destruction, the townspeople carrying a little guilt, not having suffered as much for the cause.

The front page of yesterday's Athens Banner-Herald tells how the Post Office received a ticking package, so they notified the police, who decided "to proceed with the utmost caution" and assume it was a bomb. They brought the package to a vacant lot, attached to it a small explosive, took cover and detonated the thing (a large color photograph depicts the moment: two police officers hiding behind their vehicle while a box explodes in the distance). It turned out there was n~ bomb inside, but there was a toy piano and a note: "Dear Michelle, Hope you like this. We'll send you a bigger one next year." The note was from the little girl's father.

They'll have to explain to him what happened, what they thought or didn't think it was.

How do you define a town? If you were to define Athens by its collected places of consumption, by what it sells, you'd likely conclude that it's a standard college town targeting college students and recent graduates. The main incoming highway is flanked by strip malls full of discount department stores, grocery stores, liquor stores, fastfood joints, movies theaters, auto repair shops, and the like. Downtown you'll find a predictable assortment of bars and clubs, eateries and cafes, clothing boutiques, book stores, record stores, stores selling useless knick-knacks and UGA paraphernalia, and more ATMs than you can shake a stick at. It's all very convenient and it's yours for a price.

There's a welfare office across the street from my house and all day I see the young black women coming slowly down the street to pick up their monthly income, not so much walking as being pulled by a gravitational force. Sometimes they come in pairs or threesomes, sometimes with children in tow, sometimes very much alone. And then they exit, check in hand, and they walk back up the street, and time begins to accelerate, and their feet move a little faster.

Many years ago the Japanese brought a leafy vine called kudzu to America, and we were impressed by its ability to prevent soil-erosion and to cover up ugly stretches of ground.

Steve Healey plays in the band Frances Gumm.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

99

Now kudzu has spread throughout much of the South, and Athens is no exception. It grows voraciously, swallowing up the landscape, giving it uniform texture. Not only does it travel horizontally but venically up and over entire trees, entire banks of trees running along roadsides. What you see are enormous human figures draped in a deep green blanket.

Someone won the Georgia lottery: a thousand bucks per week for a lifetime. Even the losers can share the experience vicariously (being absolved of want forever). Meanwhile, in southern counties of the state, it's been raining too much. Rivers are flooding. Entire towns are underwater. Caskets disinterred from their graves are floating away, hundreds of them sailing past rooftops and treetops. You can see them on the news. Authorities say it'll take months, maybe longer, to match each body with its plot of ground.

In front of City Hall there's a double-barrelled cannon that stands as one of Athens' most prominent historical monuments. It was invented by a local man during the Civil War and is the only known one of its kind. A plaque there tells its story: "Cast in the Athens foundry, it was intended to fire simultaneously two balls connected by a chain which would 'mow down the enemy somewhat as a scythe cuts wheat.' It failed for lack of a means of firing both balls at the exact instant.. .. the lack of precise simultaneity caused uneven explosion of the propelling charges, which snapped the chain and gave each ball an erratic and unpredictable trajectory.... It was presented to the City of Athens where, for almost a century, it has been preserved as an object of curiosity.... " I'm sitting on the 7th floor of the UGA library watching the grounds sprawl below. Tiny, brightly-colored people walk the paths, mechanical as action-figures. The stadium on the edge of campus lies like an enormous dormant reptile curled up for the season. Farther away the whitish debris of afternoon haze begins to settle on surrounding hills. Everything is as it should be. Everything is under surveillance.

More than a few women in this town use umbrellas to shade themselves from the sunsomething I recall seeing only in old movies about the South. But so far this summer the sun hasn't been very intense, so these women must be making a statement, projecting an image of class, cultivation, character, grace. It's the continuity of time. A five dollar umbrella can still take you places.

I met On in the backroom of a burrito shop. You may remember him as the off-kilter guy who introduced the famous video, ''Athens, Georgia-Inside/Out," the documentary of the town's musical heyday when bands like REM, the B-52s, Pylon, and the Bar-B-Q Killers were just becoming household names in alternative households nationwide. Most of those bands have broken up, or they've become much larger than this town, but Ort is still a fixture here. He's a consummate storyteller, animated and articulate, and it's clear he's honed and polished these stories over the years. That night his swirling beard was flecked with beer foam, and he told about traveling the country, sending postcards to his girlfriend while she'd chan his journey, matching up his postmark with its place on her maps. He became determined to find the most obscure town, one found on no maps, and was eventually sent by a postal worker to a small spot in Alabama that was indeed supposed to be such a town. So On went there as if it were 100 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

the sacred destination of a few faithful pilgrims, and from there sent a postcard. But alas-his girlfriend found and charted him anyway. I think by then I'd already lost the story's point.

Carter's March

The grasshoppers here are a rare hybrid variety nicknamed "lobbers." They're strange primitive things, mostly black with a few bright red stripes. Legend has it a few of them escaped, years ago, from a UGA lab-an experiment that got away.

And they proliferated insanely, almost to plague-like proportions, and now you can walk down certain streets and see herds of them lying lazily in the sun. Each one is a little beautiful fugitive.

There's a man in my neighborhood who's been seen in his frontyard wearing a short silky robe, sucking up lobbers with a vacuum cleaner. Just like that, he erases them from his property, but no doubt they'll be back again tomorrow.

Atlanta is the quintessentially amnesiac Amerimn city. Confronted by unpleasant truths, its post-war (and there has on~ been one War down there) founding heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, would say, "I can't think about now, I'll think about it tomorrow'which pretty much expresses the city's allilude toward urban planning. Nothing illustrates this better than the history of its oldest and preHiest neighborhood, Inman Park.

While the rest of Atlanta has been razed, 'dozed, and paved with aspha~ pools that fail to relied the new imitation-Mansard roofs above them, Inman Park has been left relatively intoct, an old Southern neighborhood of shady pecan trees and bench swings that hang on wraporound verandas.

If there is any architecture in Atlantll--ilny, that is, that can stand ered without the benefit of steel reinforcing rods and poured concrele-il is here among the homes bui~ in the city's first suburb between 1880 and the mOs. The original Candler mansion, a brick pile with Corinthian columns raised by the founders of the Coca-Cola dynasty, stands on a corner 101 on Eudid Avenue here. Scores of even more imposing homes, many sporling sun parches and Tiffany stained glass in their hallway lunelles, are relics of pre-segregation luxury which the modern city has mooted off with expressways and rail lines. Inmon Park still has the musty air of old ladies in white lace gloves who serve divinity on silver trays; Driving Miss Daisy was filmed here, and for good reason.

The town's hippest coffee-shop is called Jittery Joe's, a cavernous, ill-lit space full of vintage furniture and cigarette smoke. On the walls hang fairly confrontational works oflocal art (at present they're looming nudes), and through overhead speakers spills a fairly edgy selection of jazz and rock music. The bathrooms are covered with graffiti: quotes from Freud, light philosophy, paranoid rantings, etc. One room connected to the coffee-shop contains a tattoo parlor; another contains a small bookstore/art gallery. Time magazine would love this place; it's a little shopping mall of alternative culture. Under one roof you can purchase a double-espresso, a Paul Bowles novel, and have a chained angel engraved forever on your forearm. It's open 24-hours for your convenience and you're sure to find the place packed with what Time would call Bohemians, wide awake and drinking caffeinated products at 2 A.M. on a weekday night.

I was in a farmer's market looking at the fresh spinach. A woman with a cane hobbled up beside me, eyed the produce momentarily, then asked if spinach is anything like poke salad.

I told her I've never heard of, much less tasted poke salad.

She said: "Well then you must not be from around here. Everyone in these parts eats poke salad. It's poisonous, but if you boil it enough then you'll be okay. I boil mine once, then drain it and boil it again, then drain it and boil it a third time. Then I pray over it. That usually does the trick." So the trick, according to this broken Southern prophet, is to avoid death (in three easy steps).

Dan Bischoff

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

101

Today it is reduced to little more than five square blocks populated by old money and white gays, bracketed on two sides by rundown bllKk neighborhoods and the Metro trocks. To the east is Little Five Points, sometimes¡ desaibed as "Atlanta's Greenwich Village"-I guess bemuse it's the on~ district with sidewalk murals and a headsho~while to the northeast rises the steep hill from which General Sherman watched the shelling of the city in 1864, now occupied by the Jimmy Carter Ubrary and Presidential Center.

Inman Park's long struggle ta surviva the soulless mardi of Atlanta is inlimate~ tied ta Jimmy Carter's 00reer. At the height of urbon renewal fever bock in the 1960s, Georgia's rood building powers were able to rut a swath wide enough for a four-lane highway (aimed at mnneding downtown with the anlidpated tourist trap surrounding the Confederacy's Mt. Rushmore on Stone Mountain) right through the center of the neighborhood. That destroyed dozens of old homes, the likes of which will never be buih again, for any amount of money. Astrong grassroots opposition movement gathered strength, deaying urban renewal's depredations, and in 1970 then-Governor Jimmy Carter joined with those groups and hahed the proposed highway.

There was talk of turning the empty ribbon of land left behind into a park, but money never seemed to be available for that. As rece~ as 1991, you muld walk over the slate patios and kudzu-mvered foundations of old mansions all the way from the Downtawn Connedor expressway to POIKe De lean Avenue, your whole 102 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER SEVEN

I walked through the largest local cemetery-it's very old and has a kind of tiered layout, like an enormous birthday cake for the dead. Winding through it is a heavy red river that resembles Willy Wonka's chocolate river. Here you can see the grave of that guy from the B-52s who died of AIDS a few years ago. I've heard the band is trying to make a come-back without him, and it's probably the right time to do so. Anyway, someone told me this cemetery is for white people only, unofficially of course. So not many people know that in fact there is one black man buried here. His grave is off to the side, away from the others, obscured by brush and trees, but he's as present as any of the other dead.

I finally got up the nerve to visit the Ragpile. It's a mountain of used clothing piled in the back of a downtown thrift-store, and for weeks I'd been hearing about it from those who prefer their fashions recycled. It's a black hole of polyester and acrylic, a chaos of dead garments, an unsorted accumulation of the past. I entered the store and approached the monstrous thing, witnessing its dimensions, absorbing its profundity.

Perched on its heights were three old women, each rotund and bespectacled, each sitting in her own territory, picking through the ruins. One of them noticed my intrusion and called out in my direction: "It's Wednesday and that means it's Senior Citizen's Day at the Ragpile, and that means only Senior Citizens are allowed on the Ragpile all day. And we're Senior Citizens." I stood in bewildered silence for a moment, then thanked her for the information and departed. It's not everyday history will have you in its folds.

UGA is about to commence classes and yesterday was the season's first home football game. The town was inundated with rabid fans who spent the pregame hours driving around waving Georgia Bulldog flags, tooting their horns and generally whooping and hollering. Postgame they spilled from the stadium and much of the town became an enormous party: fraternities and bars full as cattle-barns, streets full of sauced Southerners waving open-containers. It was epic. Now it's the next morning and everyone's waking to the grim reality of the recent past. A cleaning crew comprised of three young shirtless black men is cleaning up the party debris on the vast, elegant grounds of a UGA ftaternity. A large Confederate flag billows in the background. The sun presses down like a warm peach.

The current music scene in Athens is much like the scene in most other college towns: some good bands-plenty of not so good bands. The sounds being generated can't be reduced to a single categoty, which is to say the bands don't all sound the same. In a given week you could witness the inspired arithmetic of Harvey Milk, the smouldering nakedness of Vic Chesnutt, or the wiry wanderings of The Jack-O-Nuts, all fine musical experiences in their own terms. None of these bands sound like REM and none of them weep for the glory days of the early 80s. But that time and reputation did exist, and you can't deny its persistence in the town's collective consciousness. The legendary 40-Watt Club (where many of those early bands cut their teeth) seems to make most of its money now holding late-night discos, often with a nostalgic focus on the music of a particular past decade (i.e. 80s, 70s). These events are well-attended, and seeing the kids lined up outside, waiting to get in, clutching their currency, it's hard not to think how it's come to this.

Out driving around today-a 90-mile triangle of red clay and kudzu. Black men napping on crappy couches in weedy frontyards. Baptist churches the size of toolsheds. Satellite dishes separate the poor from the very poor. Thick air. Sinewy sky. Profound boredom everywhere.

Not long ago I was downtown, inspecting a chewed-up sec; tion of my front bicycle tire. An old man leaned down and said: "That tire looks like it's about to have a cardiac arrest.

Let me tell you a story. When I was a kid I had a tire that looked like that. I took all the air out, taped it up real good and put some air back in there, and you know what? It worked-it held, and I didn't even have that fancy tape they got nowadays."

Every story is an indictment against the present.

path shaded by persimmons and immense, ancient oak trees. Maybe it wasn't Frederitk Law Olmstead's idea of an urban park, but it was a long sight better than an oil-ramp. What had been batkyard garden perennials grew wild among the weeds.

In 1976 Carter berome President, and in 1979 he sent Bo Gritz into Iran to save the American hostages, whith left him an ex-president in searth of a library site. Sherman's Iookoutwas still an empty lot, so in 1986 Carter spent $23 million in private money to build his memorial there, overlooking the town that was his springboard to Washington. All he wanted from the city, he said, was a nire little $13.3 million expressway through the renter of Inman Park, allowing visitors to zip easi~ in their air-ronditioned limos straight from the sprawling airport hub on the other side of downtown to the Carter Center.

It was dedicated last year, almost exactly a quarter century alter the populist Jimmy Carter had stopped the first highway, and now what is left of Inman Park is bisected by a strip of concrete that oozes ozone and combustion noise into both remaining halves. The persimmons and the oaks and the wild gladiolas are gone. (The kudzu, of course, is still there, threatening the guardrails.) But because Atlanto is "Too Busy To Hate,' as the current slagan goes, they don't officially call the expressway "Carter's March,' as do most local wags-instead, it's called Freedom Parkway.

Summer is verging on autumn and I'm almost out of time here, the way most experience conforms to time, comes to a theater near you, continues in a long line of moments. The sun is setting pinkly on the horizontal shelf, obscured by distance and atmospheric dirt, but more defined than it was at noon. No doubt it will rise again tomorrow, and the day after that. There's a hunger everywhere, but every hunger is not the same. Athens is a town of survivalists without an apocalypse, and many of them are good people. It's a town whose history is larger than itself, filling up spaces that don't exist, ghosts that don't exist, but are beautiful nonetheless.

BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

103

104 •

BAFFLER SEVEN

Loeal ColorTM Maura Mahoney For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace ... its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.

-John Berendt I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

-Flannery O'Connor

I

n the early 1980s, wracked by the ennui of yet another high-priced Manhattan vealand-radicchio dinner, Esquire columnist John Berendt turned his eye to the South and began spending his disposable income on supersaver fares to Savannah, Georgia, instead. Captivated by the haunting allure of what author Margaret Mitchell once called "that gently mannered city by the sea," Berendt started living in Savannah part-time. He spent seven years writing a nonfiction narrative, Midnight in the Garden a/Good and Evi4 about the town and its inhabitants, and faster than you can say Prince a/Tides, the book became an enormous success. It spent l,llore than sixty weeks on the bestseller lists, was called "perhaps the publishing phenomenon of the year," and was one of three finalists for the nonfiction 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Savannah locals also love it, and why not: although the cemetety statue that graces Midnight's cover had to be removed due to the armies of tourists erampling the nearby graves, the book has boosted tourism in Georgia and Savannah by millions of dollars. In face, according to the Georgia Department of Trade and Tourism, tourism in Savannah, the "Hostess City of the South," is up 46 percent since the book's publication.

Midnight in the Garden a/Good and Evil certainly seems to have all the right ingredients for a postmodern Southern Gothic success: take one wealthy cosmopolite caught up in the lurid murder trial of his homosexual lover. Add one mild-mannered lunatic recluse; one vibrant, teetotalin', Baptist singer; one voodoo queen; an irrepressibly charming bon vivant/con artist; and one transsexual drag queen who crashes cotillions. Toss in assorted aging Southern belles and slightly batty society matrons, a famous poet with a tragic childhood, and a pinch of Civil War history. Keep stirring until you have just the right mixture of tradition and kinkiness. Garnish with Spanish moss, moonlight, and magnolias.

The only thing missing is someone named Beauregard.

It's not that Midnight in the Garden a/Good and Evilisn't an entertaining enough read.

The book tells the story of a sensational murder case and the resulting scandal, which serves as a crucible for the manners and mores of a community where decadence is inextricably intertwined with propriety. So why not enjoy the book, and (to paraphrase Georgia's most famous pop culture icon), worry about the cliches and caricatures tomorrow? Just because the aging Southern belles constantly seem on ehe verge of babbling about "white BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

105

woods" or you keep confusing the local recluse with Boo Radley is no reason to quibble with the bestsellin' bandwagon.

But should your languor wear off, you may find yourself thinking that Midnight in the Garden ofGood and Evil is essentially a New Yorker's evocation of Southern local color, or perhaps more precisely, of what Southern local color is supposed to be. In other words, Savannah is a place where the nuts aren't annoying, they're eccentric; where the rich are comfortingly venal, in an entertaining, harmlessly indolent sort of way; and where the standard of gracious living is hospitable yet insular enough to be enjoyed and condescended to simultaneously. Instead of a joyless Rainbow Coalition of resentful interest groups, Savannah's population resembles a delightful Mardi Gras, where even outsiders can join the party. No wonder tourism is up: ultimately, Savannah comes across as a sort of Sophisticate's Southern Fantasy Town.

As Berendt points out in Chapter II, in addition to writing for Esquire, he was the editor of New York magazine for three years, and his book unquestionably plays to an analogous yuppie audience. Like that magazine, which showcases the latest in luxury consumer goods in the ads it runs alongside articles on the hippest elite getaways, Midnight in the Garden ofGood and Evil performs comparable services in its instruction in matters of taste and lifestyle, all the while transmogrifying Savannah into the perfect commodified city. The city's elegance, sophistication, and conviviality reflect well on the aficionado, and unlike New Orleans, its tastes, fortunately, don't especially appeal to the masses. There's no French Quarter tackiness here, and there doesn't seem to be much fear of running into fat tourists from Ohio, wearing neon shorts and screaming "Hey mister, gimme some beads!" Berendt refers to other out-of-towners only vaguely, as "busloads of tourists" who appear in his narrative merely to get sanitized anecdotes from their guides. "Bless their boring little hearts," says a native. In contrast, Berendt casts himself as every tourist's dream - the cool outsider all the cool insiders take to their hearts. He's accepted and welcomed into all layers of sociery, and best of all, by the elite. He alone sees the "real" Savannah, the exotic, undiscovered ciry, which he both celebrates and reduces to a consumer object at the same time.

The world he depicts is all very aristocratic - those Savannahians may be wacky, but they sure are rich! They live in elegant mansions in elegant, tree-shaded squares, and save themselves from dullness by carrying on behind their elegant facades with quintessential Faulkerian decadence. It's a town where joie de vivre is elevated to an art level, and good taste is the ultimate redemption. Joe Odom, the perpetually delightful rapscallion, may not pay his bills, but he certainly knows how to decorate, as Berendt admiringly details: "On the parlor floor I saw a fine English sideboard, several good eighteenth-century oil portraits, a pair of antique silver sconces, a Steinway grand piano, and two or three impressive oriental carpets."

The yuppie fantasy finds its epitomization in Jim Williams, a country boy who made millions in savvy real-estate investments, buys the grandest mansion in town, throws the best parties, and completely dazzles Old Savannah. He's got both money and sryle, and everything about him conveys it. His eyes are so black "they are like the tinted windows of a sleek limousine," his house occupies "an entire city block," he travels to Europe on the

106 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER SEVEN

QE 2, sends home "whole container loads of important paintings and fine English furniture" and goes about indulging his taste for grandeur. "What I enjoy most, " he opines, "is living like an aristocrat, without the burden of having to be one. Blue bloods are so inbred and weak... It's only the trappings of aristocracy that I find worthwhile - the fine furniture, the paintings, the silver - the very things they have to sell when the money runs out.

And it always does." Berendt's audience, reading those words while taking a break from the daily rat race for acquisition and status, caught up in the pervasive American love/hate relationship with the upper class, can feel a shivery thrill of admiration for Williams's blase disdain. Williams's first speech, significantly, is a disquisition on the difference between new money and old, and how he's been able to pass himself off as the latter. "How does it feel to be nouveau riche?" one of the blue bloods snidely asks. "It's the riche that counts," Williams retorts, winning that round, Berendt's readers know, thanks to his wallet and his connoisseur's eye. His exquisite taste is established in the first chapter with impeccable credentials: not only has Architectural Digest devoted six pages to his home, but none other than the century's very Icon of Class, Jacqueline Onassis, once paid a visit, caressed his Faberge trinkets, and coveted his possessions. Jackie 0 liked his stuff! It doesn't get any better than that. Even after his conviction for shooting his 21-year-old lover, Danny Hansford, Williams comports himself with nearly unruffled sophistication and sang-froid: he conducts his antiques business from jail, dines on Nanking export ware while awaiting his verdict, and never gives up his King Edward .cigarillos.

Given the overwhelming snob appeal of the first chapter, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Berendt doesn't include a whole lot of the hoi polloi in his book. He spends most of his time with the rich and risque. Anyone who doesn't obviously have a lot of money, like Emma Kelly, the Baptist piano player, or Luther Drigger, the recluse, is assigned the part of a "local character." It somehow starts to seem appropriate that the only redneck of any significance, Danny Hansford, gets shot. Too many others would spoil the glamour of the moss-hung oaks and the house preservation societies. Berendt may have left New York, but his milieu remains resolutely sophisticated. Overpriced, old-hat radicchio may have driven him to seek new adventures, but he evidently never has to switch to the closest Southern counterpart, iceberg lettuce, all the while he's sub-Mason-Dixon, and he certainly never stoops to grits.

It's also noticeable that most blacks are accorded similar treatment. Martin Luther King, Jr. called Savannah the "most desegregated city in the South," and racial relations, Berendt says, are remarkably civil, although he points out that the high black-on-black crime rate is indicative of the despair that lies beneath the apparent complacency of the black community. But for all Berendt's sympathy, the blacks who make it into his book seem to be there primarily for atmosphere. The two most important black characters, Minerva the Voodoo Queen, and Chablis, the drag performer, are also undeniably the zaniest. They're meant to be screamingly funny; yet they come across more as emblems of the author's tolerance and as totems of the city's decadent exoticness. The most moving portrait is that of Dr. Henry Collier, the first black doctor to perform surgery at the local hospital, who dreams up the black debutante cotillion in the 1940s and continues to run it BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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with great dignity. But other blacks are relegated to walk-on roles, most literally in the person of Mr. Glover, a (what else) former Pullman porter, whose employer left him ten dollars a week in his will to walk his dog. Mr. Glover, in collusion with the local judge, has been "walking the dog" long after the canine's demise. How eccentric! How Gothic!

And so Berendt holds up the city as a shimmering bauble, a Fitzgeraldian "eternal Carnival by the Sea." The ever-lasting party in Savannah continues in all its glamour and wackiness, with the tunes of native son Johnny Mercer as a soundtrack. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil appeals because it showcases a place that is at once foreign and familiar, time-locked and timeless, and, of course, beautiful and "grotesque." Berendt's portrait emphasizes what people like about the South, and down plays what they can't abide: Savannah is presented as a microcosm of delightfully dissolute and effortlessly genteel "characters"; devoid of Ewelis and Snopeses and other, members of the trailer-park set; and fairly free of unpleasant reminders of racial discord. The whiff of decay about the magnolias just makes it all the more alluring to the cosmopolitan reader, conveying the acceptable vision of the South - romantic Dixie with all its charm and eccentricity intact.

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Vigilance A pen against the force-field of reflex. Rapid weather. Old wounds. The tasks of air. Apart from sex, a lucky charm in someone else's pocket. The hands of biologists. Around the waist, presence is attenuated and the past shows through.

Many aptitudes such as shooting never reach a high degree of perfection until the necessary movements are carried out unwittingly. Blind graft on kneejerk. Taste of nothing in the mouth. The concept of death slides down the barrel. The cement takes on consistency.

How to stretch involuntary muscles as far as the Mediterranean when the reflexes reach such marvelous complexity in damp climates. She wanted to mend his clothes. Eat steamed dumplings. Hear music in the middle of a clearing. Age in the female voice, moved by the richness of what exists. Ends of yarn. Pebbles. Bus tickets. Plenty of animal forms.

Reverse punctuation. Repressed instinct never ceases to strive for the perfect dividend.

Muddy boots. The tone of flexor muscles pricks no ear. The vigilance with which the higher neural levels activate tattered maps. Where time runs back on itself with sufficient distance we advance into the buried incomprehensible. They wrote in knotted threads suspended from small sticks. Midden splendor warped with silence.

A ball of thread equals solution. Animal hair, leaves, pods. Woven.sun. The compulsion to repeat stored in a closet. He concentrates on his socks. Thrust himself into her surprise.

Inextricably. The needle moves through the labyrinth, the pen across voltage levels. Ways of knitting the world, surreptitious news in the air. And almost walking on it.

-Rosmarie Waldrop

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JONATHAN KOZOL JANE HAMILTON JOHN SAYLES ROBERT STONE FRAN LEBOWITZ ETHAN CANIN WILLIAM GASS KAYE GIBBONS DAVID MCCAULAY ROBERT COLES ALICE MUNRO PETER CAREY MARIANNE FAITHFULL ALLEN GINSBERG EDMUND WHITE JANE SMILEY GLORIA STEINEM REYNOLDS PRICE RUSSELL BANKS LANI GUINIER SANDRA CISNEROS JANE WAGNER JIM HARRISON KINKY FRIEDMAN ANNE LAMOTT BARBARA KINGSOLVER ISABEL ALLENDE AMY TAN TOBIAS WOLFF LAURIE ANDERSON SUSIE BRIGHT ALBERT FRENCH ALL THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TO BARBARA'S. ANDREW VACHSS NTOZAKE SHANGE WILLIAM BURROUGHS JOSEPH CAMPBELL GLORIA NAYLOR MARTIN AMIS WALTER MOSLEY J.G. BALLARD KATHY ACKER KAZUO ISHIGURO CYNTHIA HEIMEL SPALDING GRAY PAUL AUSTER BEBE MOORE CAMPBELL ANNE RICE ART SPIEGELMAN CAROLYN FORCHE PENN AND TELLER NAOMI WOLF TIM O'BRIEN EUGENE IZZI NICHOLSON BAKER BILL BRYSON BRENT STAPLES RICHARD FORD W.P. KINSELLA ROBERT OLEN BUTLER STUDS TERKEL SHERMAN ALEX IE DAVID SEDARIS ANCHEE MIN MICHAEL ONDAATJE SUSAN SONTAG MARK LEYNER FRANK CONROY JERZY KOSINSKI KAREN FINLEY RICHARD BRAUTIGAN JOHN LYDON ANNIE PROULX ERIC BOGOSIAN NAT HENTOFF DOUG COUPLAND MARITA GOLDEN BUCKMINSTER FULLER JOSEPH HELLER LI-YOUNG LEE SHERWIN NUL AND MARK HELPRIN ARMISTEAD MAUPIN WILLAM GIBSON ABBIE HOFFMAN HAVE YOU?

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A Machine for Forgetting

Kansas City and the Deelining Signifteanee ofPlaee Thomas Frank In those days the distances were all very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas Ciry was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true.

-Ernest Hemingway, "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen"

O

ne wall of the office lobby of the]. C. Nichols Company, the Kansas City real estate firm, is decorated with an enormous cartoon map of the famous Country Club District, the company's greatest accomplishment and the nation's first fully restricted, fully-planned automobile suburb. The map, dated 1930, is a singularly strange one. Not only is its geography quaintly distorted, but it seeks to situate the Country Club District in time as well, with "A Pageant of Kansas City" that would put any Whig historian to shame. The map enumerates the region's successive inhabitants: dinosaurs, bison, Spanish, French, and settlers from the South and East. Although men in mohawks are depicted hunting the buffalo and the map is dotted with an occasional wigwam or hatchetwielding brave, the thousands of years of American Indian civilization go unmentioned in the text: they constituted little more than decoration, it seems, the source for the quaint street-names and subdivision monikers of which Nichols was so fond. This oddly telescoped vision of the past gets even stranger once Western civilization appears on the bluffs over the Missouri. In one panel the railroad is depicted arriving here; in the next the Nichols company gives a nod to the city's treasured status as a (minor) Civil War battlefield; in the very next one suburbia is being constructed. The years from 1864 to 1907, which saw the city's riotous heyday, its overnight transformation from river town into metropolis, the rise of its famous political machine, and a series of savage battles between its responsible businessmen and various species of midwestern radicals, are simply not part of the story. By 1930, this placid suburbanized history implies, the city's past was safely complete, bounded in a little ring of "curved streets, golf courses," and "safeguarded by the most scientific protective restrictions known." Through the wonders of this elaborate system of planning, the high plateau of true culture had been reached, and the Country Club District was duly "recognized as the world's finest and most beautiful home development," the object of admiration of "the foremost city planning authorities in the world."

Dinosaurs, settlers, Civil War, and then with suburbia history is done. The]. C. Nichols company, postmodernists before their time, may have come closer in 1930 than any of our contemporary cultural theorists to approximating our present-day civic myopia.

The canonical story of the city is an elementary drama of order over chaos, of human imagination triumphing over unruly nature. It pits Greeks against Barbarians, finds walled European towns resisting the ravages of the Huns, and celebrates the taming of drunken cowboys or range-mad badmen by sturdy Western sheriffs. Our contemporary dream of BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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civic order, though, finds the forces of civilization set against a different foe: the vast, ungovernable tides of human memory itself.

It is a commonplace of urban literature to describe American cities as being at war with their own pasts. They have proceeded through the years in a frenzy of building, razing, and reconstruction, continually wrecking and then reconstituting themselves elsewhere, expanding over the surrounding countryside like an ever-spreading infection. But this new battle against memory involves more than mere physical growth. It derives from the character and design of the new metropolis as well as the razing of the old; from the civic values that guide the rebuilding as well as the indiscriminate destruction of obsolete buildings and neighborhoods. Our culture of forgetting has brought with it an elaborate new blueprint of urban organization, of metropolitan culture, and of social order; a blueprint that, though first sketched out a century ago, has only been fully implemented in the last forty years.

The workings of this new metropolis, engaged in its battle with memory, are visible everywhere, but in few places are its effects more remarkable than in Kansas City, Missouri, the town where the battle began. Kansas City, a sprawling metropolis of some million-and-a-half souls that stands at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas rivers, is one of those Midwestern towns where the local media is fond of terms like 'average' and 'heartland.' It has fallen in succession for every single one of the urban-salvation myths of the last twenty years-convention center, riverboat gambling, cyber-revolution-and it is a microcosm of.America in a hundred other ways as well, many of which the local Chamber of Commerce will be glad to tell you about.

More importantly, Kansas City has long served as a testing-ground for several of the forms of urban planning now in use across the country. Like other cities it has experienced the trauma of the conventional variety of civic forgetting: its old downtown is a study in vacant lots; the river banks from which it initially sprang are now inaccessible to civilians; the showplace neighborhoods of the turn of the century are decaying or have simply vanished. But Kansas City is also the proud birthplace of the new polis. It is the site of the both the nation's first fully-realized modern suburban development, the Country Club District, and its first architecturally-unified shopping center, the Country Club Plaza, built to serve the new suburbanites in 1925. Nowhere has the gospel of beautification and city planning been more enthusiastically embraced, or the cultural and political effects of such planning more completely realized.

Were you to write the city's bureau of tourism, read about Kansas City in a glossy magazine, or sit through a yuppie-romance movie set there, the hyper-planned Kansas City is the one you would see: a land of mansions and fountains, a town that is invariably spoken of as being good for families, a place that regularly wins plaudits in the various urban surveys conducted by business magazines. Richard Rhodes, whose 1987 Harper's magazine essay on Kansas City remains the best account of its aggressively nice civic culture, calls it "Cupcake Land" where all is "pleasantness, well-scrubbed and bland." The critical feature of Cupcake culture, Rhodes suggests, is its haste to disconnect itself from its past. "Kansas City renounced its heritage when it pledged allegiance to Cupcake Land," he 114 â&#x20AC;˘

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observes. "To obscure its bawdy history," the town's elite "lays claim to an ersatz nobility."

The Kansas City-based Hallmark corporation, Rhodes points out, shares a crown as its logo with the baseball Royals; the city's annual horse show, an otherwise strong link to its agrarian past, is called the American Royal.

Kansas City's pleasant image is an ironic one. In earlier days the town was notorious for its sprawling, rapacious breed of capitalism, its political corruption and friendliness to vice of all kinds, its mysterious colonies of millennial reformers and psycho-Christians, and, above all, its intense and vibrant cultural life. Composer Virgil Thomson recalled the characteristics for which Kansas City was once notorious in a 1966 essay: One block on State Line Avenue showed on our side nothing but saloons. And just as Memphis and St. Louis had their Blues, we had our surely older Twelfth Street Ritg proclaiming a joyous low-life. Indeed, as recently as the 1920s H. L. Mencken boasted for us that within the half-mile around Twelfth and Main there were 2,000 second-story hotels. We were no less proud of these than of our grand houses, stone churches, and slums, our expensive street railways and parks, and a political machine whose corruption was for nearly half a century an example to the nation.

Kansas City's culture was popular and distinctly regional: Count Basie and Thomas Hart Benton rather than the formal attainments-art galleries, symphonies, ballets, zooswhich give. contemporary civic elites such satisfaction and fill the pages of attractive, fullcolor city guides.

Its past was anything but moderate. In the 1930s Kansas City gave the country Harry S. Truman and the Ford Motor Company its first sit-down strike, events which are still vaguely recalled here in occasional sepia-tint spreads in the Kansas City Star. A little more difficult to remember are the years of full-throttle corruption of the 1920s and 30s, the reign of Boss Tom Pendergast and the unparalleled flowering of jazz which launched figures like Jay McShann, Lester Young, Hot Lips Page, and Charlie Parker. Absolutely dropped

off the horizon of civic memory are the outbreaks of wild Midwestern radicalism that preceded: the IWW free-speech fights of 1914, the frenzied enthusiasm for the reforms that William Jennings Bryan seemed to promise, the climb to prominence of the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, the caterwauling of the Populists, and before that the utterly unthinkable-civil war between bloodthirsty Missouri slaveholders and equally determined Kansas abolitionists like John Brown.

That Kansas City always existed alongside the more familiar place: the city of the booster, the speculator, the developer, the responsible businessman; people concerned with no reform except for those that would put them solidly in charge of city government; no 'culture' but that which would increase property values. From its earliest days the town's newspapers and planning departments were dominated by figures enamored of the City Beautiful ideal, men who dreamed of a rigidly planned metropolis and who built for KC an elaborate system of parks and boulevards that, in the pre-zoning era, were the best they could do to contain the riotous ways of the other Kansas City.

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Most American cities have experienced similar battles between wildly conflicting visions of the good polis. And it's no surprise that the civic elite won out here-they did everywhere. What amazes about Kansas City is the overwhelming degree to which one of these incommensurable visions triumphed over the other, rooting it out wherever it continued to appear, and declaring war on the human faculties that permitted it to survive. In the years since the Depression the city's Best Men have reigned triumphant politically, socially, and also in a diligent campaign to efface the town's insubordinate past. The city's history can be almost entirely summarized in terms of this elementary cultural struggle and its totally lopsided outcome: in no other American metropolis is the local elite so openly boastful about their power and so proprietary about their domain; in no other large metropolis does boosterism and civic optimism still retain such a totalitarian grip over local expression; nowhere else is such vicious class conflict papered over by such simple strategies of denial and segregation.

The significance of Kansas City, then, is not any particular aspect of its culture, but the mind-boggling mechanism by which it has made culture irrelevant. Today it is a center not of jazz, but of greeting cards: the home base of the Hallmark company, crafters of platitudes and emotional fakers to the millions. It is a hotbed not of the radicalism personified by the Iww, the Populists, John Brown, or even the tamer rendition offered by Bryan and Truman, but "Cupcake Land," with its immaculate lawns and elaborate Christmas-lights displays. Kansas City's transformation, though, was not an act of economic nature, part of the 'normal' development of the American city. It derives from the unrelenting application by civic leaders of a very specific-and very peculiar--conception of the good city: its geography, its business, its architecture, and most of all, its understanding of the past.

Far out on the Kansas Prairie, in the small town of Lucas, stands an artifact of the now unimaginable political convictions once held by people in this desolate region of the continent. A Civil War veteran, one J. P. Dinsmoor, was moved to construct on his property an elaborate illustration of the condition of mankind, building over the years a tableau of concrete statuary he called "The Garden of Eden." Biblical stories are intermixed with standard Populist iconography: here is Cain, just having slain Abel; there is "Labor Crucified" and surrounded by his tormenters-doctor, lawyer, preacher, and capitalist. But toil as he might to provide for the generations of Kansans to come a graphic illustration of man's inhumanity to man, Dinsmoor's creation is now understood not as a monument to the holy cause of Reform but as a prescient nod to the wisdom of Bob Dole. Marvelling at the glorious oddness of finding such images thousands of miles from the centers of American power and hundreds of miles from the nearest liberal, I inquire about the meaning of a sculpture depicting a monster grasping at a map of the Americas, with one tentacle reaching menacingly across Panama. Although for Dinsmoor the figure doubtless summoned Populist dread of American imperialism, the caretaker explains that he had in fact anticipated the treasons of the still-hated Jimmy Carter, who gave away the canal. Populace? Never heard of them. And so the wind shrieks across the empty fields, the town becomes a few blocks of houses, some satellite dishes, and a gas station, and the howling 116 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

millennial assertions of one strange old man decay mercifully into a jumble of re-bar and some oddly-shaped shards of painted concrete.

Back in Kansas City, a well-maintained statue of a satyr and a pair of antique marble urns depicting a bacchanalia decorate a nicely-landscaped traffic island in the Country Club District. No doubt the developer who acquired them in some far-off land and installed them here was familiar with Keats' famous ode, but their placement makes it virtually impossible for others to marvel at the urns' bacchantes, much less duplicate their revellings: not a soul can be seen on the immaculate lawns of the surrounding mansions, there are no liquor stores for miles, and the nearly complete absence of sidewalks in the surrounding neighborhood makes pedestrian access to the island precarious. Good Kansas Citians do not wonder What Attic Shape; the satyr and urns are clearly supposed to be little more than a flash of ancientness glimpsed from the window of a car speeding by, another reassurance that their still-new town has a classy and super-elegant past, and that it's by no means what you think it is.

The great turning point in Kansas City history carne in 1939, when a coalition of respectable businessmen and suburbanites finally threw off the yoke of the Pendergast Machine. And when the reformers cleaned up Kansas City politics, they cleaned up its culture, too, eventually transforming it from an agriculturally-grounded sin city into an urban amusement park of a different kind-a fantasy land for the aspirations of the middle class.

Jazz was the ~ost noticeable casualty of their efforts. Downbeat's 1995 survey of the best places for jazz performances includes features on Seattle and Minneapolis but conspicuously-and appropriately-omits Kansas City. Living, organic jazz simply is not practiced here any longer. But that doesn't mean the city has no use for the corpse of its longdead legacy: on the contrary, "jazz" is endlessly trotted out here by the heirs of the men who destroyed the KC jazz scene whenever an emblem of the city's pretensions to cultural sophistication is required. Today two of the city's most successful shopping centers (one owned by the Hallmark Company, the other by J. C. Nichols) and a suburban office complex sponsor popular "jazz" concert series, always featuring sanitized hipsters like Kenny G and Chic Corea, brought in for the occasion from wherever it is that produces such entertainers. An announcement for this summer's jazz program that ran recently in a local newspaper is an almost unbearably telling document of Kansas City's tranformation: As if the office buildings glittering like mirrored monuments in the woods weren't enough, there's art and jazz in those woods. Corporate Woods, that is. And it's Johnson County's classiest business address.

Even more stunningly ironic is the municipal government's attitude towards its now-vanished cultural inheritance. Even as one of the city fathers' predictably catastrophic urbanrenewal schemes was destroying the town's last original jazz club-still tainted by those unforgivable memories of the Pendergast years-City Hall was engaged in creating a "Historic District" from the utterly devastated area around 18th and Vine, complete with plans to erect a jazz museum (!) and dump untold millions of city dollars. Jazz as a living thing is BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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out of the question in Kansas City. But "jazz" as a lifestyle accouterment, a disconnected signifier of upper-middle-class cool, is worth vast sums here. The city's Economic Development Corporation, a glorified Chamber of Commerce charged with convincing out-oftown corporations that KC enjoys "all the amenities of big city living" has even taken as its logo the silhouette of a cat sending with his sax.

Students of the "Soft City," the urban accretion that exists without attachment to place, often assume that what they are describing is a natural phenomenon, an outgrowth of ever-so-normal market conditions. In Kansas City the opposite is manifestly the case: the survivals of the old saw the coercive powers of civic authority arrayed decidedly against them; meanwhile new and improved venues--whether fakejazz, replica barbecue stands, or lifestyle deviance palaces--are showered with civic favors of all kinds. So remarkable is city hall's record in this regard that it often seems they must have on fIle somewhere a secret oath to which every Mayor and City Manager has sworn himself: "I will seek out the authentic and destroy it; I will discover whatever it is that has given this city life and I will kill it; whatever it is that people in these parts do well, I will package, contain, commodify, and render boring."

Milton Morris's nightclub was the final outpOSt of Kansas City jazz, a tiny glorious box at 32nd and Main that stared down the surrounding blocks of urban desolation with live performances, night after night. I began attending Milton's as a student in high school, undertaking a rite of passage from the Country Club District into an unmentionable Kansas City. The place looked forbidding at first, with its battered exterior and 1940s neon sign. Every other building on the block was abandoned and securely boarded-up; storefronts nearby carried faded advertisements for long-forgotten joints like the "Kon Tiki" and the "Boom Boom Room." But Milton's persisted among the rubble, driven by an esoteric spark: a strange kinship between its clientele; its one, beautifully sympathetic waitress; its bartender, constantly digging around in the finest jazz record collection I have ever seen for exactly the right side; and the fatally self-absorbed combos that played there nearly every night. Milton's was intensely dark, a place where you could easily get lost despite the fact that it was only one small room. It was fixed unapologetically in time, with its ancient recordings, deep battered leather couches that had been fashionable in the Depression, and walls covered with backlit wooden cut-outs depicting jazz musicians in the strange stylized manner of the 30s. Milton's was a cultural relic, a gorgeous, creaking, human relic that defied the city's pasteurizing determination to establish itself in some never-never land untouched by urban baseness.

When it was finally wrecked down in 1991 to make way for an (as yet unbuilt) urban strip mall, Milton's disappeared with little mourning from a city media busy chronicling the goings-on at official cultural events like Impressionist exhibitions and the visit of REM. The club's end was hastened, perhaps, by the fact that Milton Morris was also an outspoken naysayer towards the city's dreams of proper improvement. He appears in a documentary film about Kansas City jazz, 'The Last of the Blue Devils," complaining that something has gone terribly wrong with the new Kansas City, that with the dethroning of Pendergast some drastic mistake had been made. Milton even ran for governor a few times 118 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER SEVEN

himself, aiming to right the situation with strange pro-vice schemes and anti-family-values legislation. "If you're a metropolitan city in a metropolitan state, you ought to act like one," he told one (out-of-town) reporter. "At one time, we were known as a swinging town. Now they fly right over us like we weren't even here." Needless to say, Milton's opinions and strongly-expressed aesthetic preferences grated against the sensibilities of the new Kansas City: to Cupcakes, for whom "jazz' is something you listen to at a shining suburban complex of some kind, Milton's stood out like a nasty boil on an otherwise pleasanclysmiling nordic face, a troublesome memory of some drunken indiscretion long ago.

Kansas City's peculiar brand of civic amnesia can ultimately be traced to the promethean efforts of a single individual in the early rwentieth century, a developer and urban visionary named J. C. Nichols. All through the declining years of the last century the town's leaders embraced the total-planned vision of the City Beautiful Movement as a means of instant tranformation from frontier squalor into solid, investment-worthy metropolis. By the 1880s, only ten years after the railroads chose Kansas City as the place to bridge the Missouri, the dream of large parks, wide boulevards, and rigid delineation of affluent neighborhoods had become a sort of civic mantra, a recurrent political issue and the mono theme of editorials in the local papers. But here, as everywhere else that the City Beautiful held sway, the authorities' ability to rewrite their town's geography was limited. J. C. Nichols's contribution was the discovery of what is now the obvious solution to such an impasse: restart the town elsewhere, with all-new neighborhoods, rigid restrictions, and no poor people. Imagining himself more a "city-builder" than a mere realtor, Nichols constructed fully onetenth of Kansas City and in the process gave the world its first fully-realized modern suburb as well as its first shopping mall. He remains the single most significant figure in the city's history, a heroic warrior in the eternal battle to reign in the barbaric impulses and chaotic ways of the human imagination.

The man who initiated the suburbanization of Kansas City was obsessed, ironically, with exerting human control over the very phenomenon which suburbia is often accused of accelerating. J. C. Nichols craved Permanence, an end to the incessant wrecking and building that characterizes American metropolises, the moving about and fluctuation in real estate prices that always deprives house-buyers of their investment. Eternal stabilityof land values, of tastes, of the neighborhoods inhabited by the various social classes-is the high goal to which Nichols dedicated such careful and rigid planning: as early as 1913 a pamphlet for the Country Club District declared his intention "to so maintain this property that it will permanently remain Kansas City's best residential district ... assuring buyers of home-sites that the high standards established will be forever jealousy guarded and protected against all undesirable conditions or any civic neglect."

But Nichols' effort to press the ordering capacity of human intelligence onto the riotous whirl of urban life had curious cultural consequences: Permanence was not a state hospitable, say, to the jazz subculture, to the tastes of the working class, or even to the city's traditional economic base. It was, rather, a scheme for reinforcing conventional hierarchical order when all the verities of bourgeois civilization were melting rapidly away, a vision BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘ 119

that expressed itself with constant references to the distant European never-never lands of social regimentation. Permanence was a far-reaching scheme for the stabilization of society, a device for explaining the ways of Power to Man. The Country Club District, a ten-square-mile area to the south and west of downtown that Nichols planned, constructed, and sold from 1908 until the 1940s was the realtor's lasting accomplishment and remains the definitive American statement of the suburban ideal: winding, tree-shaded streets, enormous lots with understated, solid-looking mansions, curious bits of old-world statuaty dotting its immaculately-landscaped public areas, and vast open spaces (private golf courses, not parks) separating it from the surrounding metropolis on all sides.

The Country Club District is an astoundingly effective machine for forgetting, for the making of solid, investment-worthy citizens. Nichols himself recognized this explicitly.

He was not merely a builder, but an ideologue of suburbia. While others might plan and build subdivisions, Nichols saw himself as a maker of cities in a larger sense, an architekton of values and folkways as well as of houses. The "Realtor," he told the 1925 convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, should be in the business of city planning on the grandest scale. "In every study of the city's transportation or traffic system; in every housing, sanitation, or building code commission; in every industrial survey, population density study, or investigation of freight rates affecting the city; yes, in every educational, cultural, and recreational activity," Nichols asserted, "the Realtor should lead." For the Realtor was a civic father, not merely a crafter of neighborhoods. "Are you creating the proper standards for developing the best child life in your community-for the future citizens of your city?" he asked his fellow developers. "Are you teaching them to be observant of the beauties and joys of life, appreciative not only of home, but of the ... right order of things in neighborhood and civic development?" (emphasis added) Nichols had great plans for Kansas City itself. As his "authorized" biographers note approvingly, he aimed to "transform Kansas City from a cowtown into a midwestern hub of culture, education, business, and transportation." ~~ Ii ~§ ~ ~~ ~ ~ § Ii; Fortunately, Nichols had a brand-new identity ready to go as the ~1H~ ~H3!2!;i~ old one was left discreetly behind in the smelly old neighborhoods ~~~u~~5~~~~~ h ii E~ ~!: ~ ;,g ~ iil '" above t e stockyards. You notice it as soon as you enter the Country .l!.g H ~ ~ ~E ~g.c,2 3 "ij"Cli Ii: Club District: antique columns, Renaissance well-heads, gigantic bird~"K~'iii~"'3 ~ 2 -a~ ~ ~ 5~ H§ ~ baths, sun-dials, and other bits of generic baroquerie are everywhere, .ss ii~~~ ~i ~ E.;;~ 09 flan· ki ng street entrances, perched in the middle of busy intersections, E u ~ .Q~", i5 ~;f~·B.~~~~~~9 c. · :;;· •• ,,2 ~.,; ~."f3 mounted·IncongruousIy in some bd' 0 ys lront yard , giving th e entlre 0

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district an overpowering Europhilic reek. '~ywhere but here!" screams its architecture. Its houses, set on streets designed after those of rural England, replicate (with but two striking exceptions) every architectural style but the local: Tudor, French provincial, and Spanish-there are even three copies of Mount Vernon. The nearby Country Club Plaza, the first shopping center to be built in conjunction with the surrounding suburb (and to provide parking lots), is designed entirely

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in a peculiar red-tile roof Spanish style, complete with a half-size replica of a tower in Seville.

And if you still have doubts, Nichols company publications quote a number of outsiders (most notably Andre Maurois) as testimony to the beauty of the Country Club District.

In constructing his new, idealized Kansas City Nichols was extraordinarily thorough.

A detailed examination of his developments can be positively hair-raising: there is literally nothing here that is not pretense or false front. No buildings not cluttered with un con122 â&#x20AC;˘

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vincing ornamental references to something that we imagine exists in a more sophisticated land far away; no natural-looking landscape that has actually been left unaltered, no roadside ancientness used for its original purpose. Nothing here rings true. Here stand some carefully-preserved fake ruins from the time when fake ruins were stylish in Italy; there rises a dummy bell-tower. Even the street names, which invariably refer to Spain, Italy, or fake-Indian whimsy, are in many cases not shared with the surrounding metropolis. "You should avoid using the name of a street which is extended through your property if the character of the property on that street further downtown, or elsewhere is of poor quality," Nichols informed his fellow realtors in 1939. ''A street name should have a ring of dignity and a certain exclusiveness .... " As he appears in a recent adulatoty "authorized" biography, Nichols himself seems to have been congenitally incapable of authenticity, endowed with a mysterious sixth sense for the various fakeries he so sedulously sought out. Two of the largest civic ornaments with which Nichols decorated Kansas City illustrate his curious melding of fakery, elitism, and amnesia that he offered to the world. The Liberty Memorial is the nation's largest First World War monument, a gigantic civic project completed in 1921 under the leadership of Nichols and some other local businessmen. The structure itself is ludicrously oversized and almost comically phallic, a full 217 feet of column flanked by two squat museums filled with memorabilia from that brief, ugly, and jingoistic war. Nichols' biographers insist first that he argued, "It should not be a monument to the dead but rather to Liberty," which would have made him just about the only person left in the nation who still believed in Mr. Wilson's hollow crusade. But, as they soon admit, the monument was designed strictly for show, like his other projects. The important fact was not an empty abstraction like "Liberty," but that the memorial would occupy the hill opposite the city's new and grandiose train station, and that Nichols had believed "that the first impression that visitors received when arriving by train was important to Kansas City's image and what was good for Kansas City was good for the]. C. Nichols company, and vice versa." Ordinarily monuments are instruments of civic memory: this one is more a testament to the past-effacing europhilia of the city's businessmen than to the fallen of World War I. A vast painting of the structure's dedication that adorns one wall of the flanking museum depicts the Kansas City powerful clustered around elaborately-decorated military representatives from glorious Europe, graciously bestowing the blessings of the Old World on this raw place. The faces of the Kansas Citians who were there that day are painstakingly rendered, and an accompanying diagram points out exactly who each one is-a sort of visual Social Register for establishing the bona fides of the local elite.

Concerned for the souls of his clients, at about the same time Nichols built a Country Club Christian Church to go with his Countty Club District. It's hard to imagine a more gratuitous mixing of pretension and fakery than the one described, with astounding ingenuousness, by Nichols's biographers: In 1920,]. C. Nichols himself. reared a Presbyterian but not a regular churchgoer, joined with 11 other millionaires to found the Country Club Christian BAFFLER SEVEN â&#x20AC;˘

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Church. Members first met in the community hall of the Brookside Shopping Center, while planning and then erecting a cathedral-like stone church building with a Sunday school on a large Ward Parkway site at Huntington Road.

Dr. George Hamilton Combs accepted the call to be its first minister. Highly literate and intelligent, a compelling speaker and leader, Dr. Combs served for more than 30 years a large congregation that probably included more influential and socially prominent individuals than any other church in the city.

J. C.'s son, Miller Nichols, who has steered the company since the elder Nichols's death in 1950, assumed his father's strangely unerring eye for fakery as a matter of course.

His biographers intersperse admiring accounts of his anti-union political activity with appreciations of his taste for whimsical statues of penguins, his construction of public monuments to friends and family members-always featuring Italian or Spanish do-dads, and his brand-new house, which boasts an equestrian cemetery for someone else's horses, a cupola salvaged from the house that used to stand on the site, and a wrought-iron fence taken from St. Joseph, a dying town to the north of Kansas City that has had to face the end of the century without elite shopping centers, penguins, Country Club Christians, or even new mansions. And when Nichols fils decided the Plaza needed a statue of a farm animal (there are numerous heroic renderings of cows in Kansas City), he acquired one of a boar-in Italy.

Towards its conclusion the Nichols family's "authorized biography" dwells ever more obsessively on the cultural accomplishments of the Nichols clan. Gawk at the Plaza's cowboy statue or its rendering of Ben Franklin, its quaint stucco bridge lined with "lovely seasonal flowers," or the cute penguins incongruously "decked out" for the wedding of the Prince of Wales in London. One photograph of the book's protagonists depicts them in the company of some of the-various third-rate celebrities who occasionally pass through Kansas City, stars in the tired productions that make up the fare at the various Nichols-sponsored cultural institutions. This, then, was the bargain undertaken by Kansas City in the frantic race to make itself palatable to the outside world, the fruit of fifry years of Cupcake and Country Club: we traded Charlie Parker so that the "Power Elite" could hobnob with Carol Channing.

Every "world class" metropolis worth relocating to must have its own glossy magazine as a matter of course, a lifestyle guide for the transient upper-middle class. Ingram's, the journal "for successful Kansas Citians," offers something extra: a cravenness and obsequiousness towards wealth that is unrivalled in the region. The publication openly and proudly takes for its duty the identification, delineation, and deification of the area's haute bourgeoisie, publishing every year a special issue entitled "The Power Elite," complete with a detailed listing of "the hundred most influential people in Kansas City."

Such a crass celebration of social standing is bound to raise some objections, but, since nine-tenths of the joy of elitism derives from being publicly revered as an elite, these came mainly from people who expected to be included but weren't. In 1991 the editor gleefully recounted the unease the article's omissions had caused in certain rarefied quar-

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ters, but made no mention of its more glaring offensiveness to democratic sensibilities. Ingram's has now repeated the feature five times, as yet with no apparent recognition that there's anything even remotely amiss about such sycophancy, or that the very title they have chosen, "Power Elite," also graces C. Wright Mills's damning study of the American ruling class.

In Kansas Ciry, no such considerations are necessary-hell, the thought never even crossed our mind! As the annual "Power Elite" listings strive so reverently to imply, Kansas City's betters run the town like a feudal domain. A coterie of leading businessmen who called themselves the "Monday Morning Group" even chose and backed a sufficiently pliable mayoral candidate well in advance of a recent municipal election. To the lickspittles at Ingram's the doings of the the Monday Morning Group carried but one relieving message: "Power" had at last been liberated and finally "came out of the closet."

For all this unabashed arrogance, the "Power Elite" are staying in power, and for a simple reason: there are no major media outlets in Kansas City that will permit any sort of questioning, even the most indirect variety, of the omniscience of business and business leaders. As the town's purpose has changed from producing and trading things to convincing large corporations to move here or, at least, to send their employees here for conventions, boosterism has begun to exert an almost totalitarian influence over the city's public expression. Other cities and regions boast to prospective transplants about how docile local workers are, how they have passed strict anti-union or open-shop laws; in Kansas City these are joined by an astoundingly docile media, willing to do anything to foster that irreplaceable "pro-business climate," as a Chamber of Commerce document calls it.

Boosterism has a long record here, as elsewhere in the region: over a century ago the thenregnant "Power Elite" hired themselves a newspaper editor for the sole purpose of luring the railroad through town. Today, though, the cultural climate of boosterism is more pervasive and suffocating. Almost every aspect of the city's public life is conducted under the omnipresent goal ofliving up to the world's scrutiny, convincing Cupcakes from elsewhere that KC can provide them with all the amenities to which they are accustomed. The Star bursts with stories of regional accomplishments, lists of the ways in which we stand high among the nation's cities (lists in which the escapades of the baseball Royals and football Chiefs always figure prominently), reassurances that KC is one of the best places for any corporation to relocate. Even crime can be transformed into an adjunct of civic pride, with the attention of Los Angeles gangs testifYing, like the attention of a French Nobel laureate or a multi-national company, to the town's significance.

By contrast, criticism of any aspect of Kansas City (except for the immoral ways of its poor, of course) is treated as something akin to civic treason. The Star recently carried a column bemoaning the decline of downtown; the writer was promptly and publicly scolded by the paper's business editor for letting down the mask. Even stranger, the booster attitude has now permeated society from top to bottom, with loyal Kansas Citians dutifully shushing one another when they stray towards less-than-upstanding thoughts. In writing this article I was constantly warned by friends not to badmouth my home town, that loose lips might sink the gold-bearing ships of conventions and relocation.

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Such intense boosterism assumes, perhaps correctly, that the life of cities is a fragile, delicate thing, a matter of expensive sculpture gardens and art fairs, an ornamental plant that must be carefully cultivated and coddled if it is to survive. The earlier Kansas City aesthetic, of course, assumed exactly the opposite: that cities were hardy creatures, the outgrowth of vast movements of industry and agriculture, the product of titanic struggles between capital and labor, farmers and nature.

A recent piece of architectural journalism in the Kansas City Star begins with a classic invocation of the urban spirit: the author is lounging at a cafe, watching "the human comedy blowing by," and wondering "whether city living gets any better than this." The midwestern Champs d'Elysee where he is able to strike such a posture, though, is in fact not "city" at all but the Country Club Plaza. Something about the article seems nauseatingly tragic as I reread it a few weeks later in the South Side of Chicago: such perfunctory boosterism from a once militantly-independent paper; the insistence that the pleasures of the "city," the very things that old Milton Morris used to accuse the town of abandoning, are in fact readily available in J. C. Nichols's fantasy land; the guileless mistaking of mall for city, of shopping for civic activity, of the gaudy lifestyle display of the city's upper crust for diversity-all of it described by the writer as though these were the most natural things in the world, as though the substitution of Nichols's reactionary civic dream for the metropolis of the past was now, seventy years after the Plaza's founding, as normal and unremarkable as air.

As the Star writer attests, the anti-historical dream of}. C. Nichols continues to lie at the center of our strange civic culture. Nichols's Permanence now appears to have been accomplished: his Country Club District has become history in its own right, with the parvenu fantasies of the 1920s having been legitimized through passage of time. Today the Plaza is the city's foremost symbol and tourist attraction. Its annual Christmas-lighting ritual, a simple publicity stunt which takes place on Thanksgiving night, has become the city's most important civic event, with as many as 150,000 people from across town gathering to gawk at the palaces of consumption whose success over the next month will determine the future of their Cupcake way of life.

The aftermath of the Second World War provided Nichols an unprecedented opportunity to become a "city builder" on an even larger scale. With .help from the Veterans Administration and a massive infusion of populist sensibilities, Nichols was able to open the pretense and instant forgetting of suburbia to everyone. In the vast building boom of the postwar years, the Kansas City suburbs went sprawling to the south and west, across the Kansas state line, over farmland fifteen miles from the old downtown, from where it has proceeded at a rapid clip ever since. And though the new construction is now far beyond the reach of the city's puny bus system, the suburban race continues, a new neighborhood for each generation, with the Nichols company joined by a host of others, each of them dutifully professing the Nichols faith of Values and Permanence, enforcing the Nichols litany of strict zoning, lease covenants, tyrannical homes associations, winding streets, and segregation by class.

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But perhaps the most significant fact determining Kansas City's ongoing battle against memory is the one noted in a recent Nichols company pamphlet: in some years a full 30 percent of "homebuyers" in Kansas City come from out-of-town, transferred here by their corporate employers. The appeal of Nichols's fiercely deracinated, fiercely europhilic vision of the good polis to this new tribe of wandering 'professionals' is immediately obvious: to become a member of the "Power Elite" here requires nothing-especially no familiarity with the city's past-except a massive outlay of cash. Pretense runs correspondingly high, and in the real estate literature promoting the new subdevelopments one finds references not to mere houses but "estates," "farms," "manors," or even an occasional "grand chateau elegant." Announcements for new subdevelopments invariably trumpet the "elegance" and the "luxury" of the "exclusive" or "prestigious homesites" up for sale, and one of the most hotly desired suburban developments in Kansas City today is actually named "Patrician Woods."

In no case are these developments to be thought of as part of the city: geographical evasion-even more pronounced than that of the Country Club District-is as crucial a selling point as historical pretense. Suburban promoters invariably boast about the isolation of their pre-planned homesites' from the surrounding civic elements, using cul-desacs and deliberately winding roads to deter through traffic. Leawood, Kansas, the showplace burb of the 1980s, has taken this strategy of detachment to a brilliant but inevitable conclusion: although it stretches for 72 blocks along the Missouri border, only 12 streets penetrate through the suburb from this direction. The model for civic organization favored in Kansas City is not the city but the exclusive country club, and the more pretentious, the better. Advertisements for Hallbrook Farms, the greeting-card family's own entry in the suburban competition, boast of its "rate commodity-old-fashioned neighborhood spirit," but it is intentionally organized around a golf course, a far more appropriate locus for the social interaction of the "Power Elite" than a mere shopping center orshudder-downtown.

Under Nichols's mastery Kansas City was able to transform itself into a city cut loose from place and time less than 75 years after it was founded; to tear itself away from Pendergast's river bottoms and then to forsake its downtown for the placid parking lots of the Plaza. Today a sprawling Edge City at 119th Street promises to repeat the cycle. Not only do its residents no longer commute downtown; many of them have never been there.

For these newest arrivals, accustomed as they ate to a suburban life even more massified and detached from the particularities of place and time, the old Nichols developments of the Country Club District and Plaza constitute what is unique, what is lasting about Kansas City. Attend a happy hour at their favored mall-bars, Applebee's and TGIFriday's, and you quickly discover that many of them apparently believe that the Plaza, the country's first suburban shopping center, is downtown, that the Country Club District is an 'old' (or "olde," as real estate ad sheets like to put it) neighborhood now menaced by the urban hordes. The dream of Permanence at 147th Street has made the dream of Permanence at 47th Street a little less tenable.

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We drive past raw, treeless settlements called Wynnefield, Sylvan Lake At the Village, Charlemagne Manor, Nottingham Forest, a brand new street mysteriously named Town Centre Road, and get ourselves horribly lost amongst the cul-de-sacs at Treesmille before we find the one for us: Timber Bluff, ''Another Sam Ferris Community." "Did you just transfer here?" the salesman inquires as we enjoy a cup of complimentary coffee in the model unit. He regales us with tales of the great Sam, maker of cities, preserver of values, both family- and property-. "Sam's been a developer since he was twenty-one," the salesman confides. "He's the deep pockets behind the community." We test the cultural waters by uttering one cfNichols's favorite meaninglessnesses: ''Are the homes exclusive?" "Some of them are," he acknowledges. Then he shows us the layout for the three models from which we can choose, each of them wildly oversized and flimsily constructed from simple board-and-bat. With each one we get to select one of four landscaping plots, mixing and matching rose bushes, lilacs, and hyacinths. "Sam's a class act," the salesman explains.

"What if some guy wanted to move in next door and have grass all the way up to the building?" Such behavior would be strictly prohibited in a Sam Ferris community, he assures us, as would the building of fences other than the five approved models.

The road on which the home sits ends about fifty yards down, pavement gradually giving way to mud and a pair of tracks across an empty field, where sit two idle bulldozers, fresh from their duties at the Milton's site. The sun beats down mercilessly, since the Sam-approved trees have yet to hit five feet and all the ones that grew here before were, n~turally, destroyed to make way for Sam's bucolic vision. Today is lawn-unrolling day at Timber Bluff, we notice.

From here we can also see the ill-fated mansions of the KeebleBerry development, last year's community of middle-class choice turned to this year's TV tabloid horror story when the units' particleboard exteriors and landfill foundations began melting away in a typically extreme week-long Kansas City downpour. Two of them are visible from here, their backs broken, their walls jutting at uncomfortable angles through terra-cotta skin, their roofs settled alarmingly low over their just-installed windows, their contents burst out over the still-muddy hillside behind. The homes' unhappy owners, last night's news program noted, had recently been transferred here. They didn't yet know anybody in Kansas City, and were forced to abandon their brand-new, rigorously-exclusive, golfcourse-accessed, fully-landscaped, $500,000 manor houses for the respite of the climate-controlled Marriott Corporetum at the Edge City just a short highway drive away. Neither the builder nor the owners of Keeble Berry (it wasn't Sam or]. C.) could be held liable for the damage, since it was foundational. But the realtor did pay for their lodgings, the newscaster noted happily, and each homeowner was graciously granted a free upgrade to concierge class.

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