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There was something peculiarly medieval in the faiths which sustained the business government in America. In the first place, men, with that astonishing abiliry

to

shut out realiry characteristic of group thinking,

actually believed that it was not government at all. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the United States Steel Corporation were "individuals" who "owned" their industries. Such intangibles as morale, a trained personnel, institutional habits, public acceptance and good will, indeed all the elements which distinguished a going concern, were thought of as private properry, owned by an intangible individual, just as it was once thought that the King of France "owned" the State.

-Thurman W Arnold, The Folklore a/Capitalism, 1937

Oamer NUlDber Eight The Age of Cultural Miracles T. C. Frank Gold Diggers of1996 3 Tom Vanderbilt Miracle on Ice 13 Edward Castleton Class Struggle in France 15 Jennifer Brostrom Taylorism Redux 17

Arts and Leisure in the Inverse-1930s Music Artie Shaw Music Lesson 71 Aaron Cohen The Death ofthe Cool 79 Negativland Shiny Digital Plastic and Aluminum 29

Film Gary Groth Tarantino? 33 Ray Carney Or Cassavetes? 41 Daniel Harris The Money Shot 51

Lifestyles Chris Lehmann The Dustbin of Theory 91 Andrea Codrington Trouble in the House of Cliche 101 Owen Hatteras Prank Prospectus 110 Tom Vanderbilt The Gaudy and Damned 120

Fiction James Meek Something to be Proud Of 25 Robert Nedelkoff On Deadlier Ground 38 David Knowles Inter Office Mail 105 George Logothetis Helping Hand 116 Mike Newirth Give the Millionaire a Drink 125

Poetry Michael Warr 28 Clayton Eshleman 49 David Berman 65 Alec Dinwoodie 87 Jennifer Moxley 119

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Archer Prewitt cover, 30 Don MacKeen 7 David Berman 23, back cover Jeff Wong 35 Brian Ralph 40 Patrick Welch 57-62 Hunter Kennedy 64, 103 Greg Fiering 89 Russell Christian 94, 95 Jessica Abel 107-113 p.t.t. red 124-125

The Cultural Miracle Tom Frank

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ave you heard? The "affluent sociery" is over! Virtually every respectable organ . of public opinion has now officially acknowledged its demise: the warm old world of general prosperiry is gone forever; poverry and economic insecuriry have made a triumphant comeback; the wealth of the nation has concentrated itself rapidly into fewer and fewer hands. Meanwhile every innovation in public policy further impoverishes those who work for a living: 'welfare reform' turns out to mean creating an army of docile, low-paid 'workfare' proletarians; so does any change in labor law; so does 'free trade'; so does the explosion of the prison population; so does the growth of the temp industry. But for our cyber-masters, displaying their lifestyles in the New York Times Magazine's special issue on "The Rich," things just keep getting better and better. Tiring of our lo-res problems, they have decided that it's best simply to secede from second-wave notions of public responsibiliry altogether, to seal the perimeter of the gated communiry, climb into their skyboxes, and jet off into the fully-secured sunset.

For all its great cable channels, the excellent new global cyber capitalism is turning out to be a lot like the simple, grinding, exploitative capitalism of a hundred years ago.

The astonishment that so many commentators express at this fact, however, is in one sense profoundly dishonest: only the most naive can be surprised when a decade of policies designed to crush organized labor, enrich the rich, and render our entire nationallife subservient to the whims of the market achieve exactly those ends. But in a broader sense the alarm that is now so commonplace on the editorial pages of wellmeaning publications is genuine: as we learned in the "Deprivation Theory" unit back in Sociology 101, inequaliry of this kind always begets social upheaval. It's virtually a mathematical certainty: immiseration brings radicalization. We're walking blithely down the road to disaster; we're asking for a replay of the 1930s, for strikes and interfering brain-trusters; we're pushing what's known euphemistically in this country as "the middle class" to the known limits of its complacency, and this time it won't just be a bunch of suburban kids flipping us off and smoking pot when we told them not to.

And yet the seismographs of public opinion show barely the faintest signs that Americans are preparing to redress what's been done to them. Instead, we on the receiving end of the new inequality are turning out majorities that reaffirm the very politics that have so afflicted us, we are tuning in enthusiastically to hear millionaires and their hired spokesmen p~se as rebels, revolutionaries, defenders of the forgotten man. We're arising as one, a song on our lips, to strengthen the hands of those who smite us; we're up on the rooftops of our flooded homes praying fervently for rain; we're offering smiling shoeshines to the people who have come to take possession of our foreclosed farm.

Were the man in the sl<ybox inclined to view events in long-term perspective, perhaps he would be more impressed by th~ world-historical cultural wonder of which he is the beneficiary. Perhaps he would get on his cell-phone right now and pledge ten or rwenry thousand to the local televangelist. For this is the doing of the Almighty Invisible Hand as surely as were (he "economic miracles" of posrwar Germany and BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Japan, a deliverance from the fate of the strife-and-strike-fatigued Mexicans, French, and British that is so ineffable it can only be attributed to divine intervention. By some act of economic providence the American population seems to have become incapable of acting on its own behalf; 'rational choice,' at least for us sub-CEOs, has disappeared without a trace from the sociological radar screen. Every day the market commits some new outrage, offers some new demonstration of its worthlessness as a way of ordering human civilization; and every day the organs of official opinion respond with louder and louder declarations of faith in the providence of the market, tributes to the glory of the global economy, zealous denunciations of any organization that would check the market's omnipotence.

Call it, then, the Cultural Miracle, an unprecedented unlinking of economic cause and social effect: a parting of impoverishment and action, of social reality from political consequences. It's the cultural equivalent of the economists' "black box": in one side go the objective circumstances-the most vicious attack on the public well-being by private wealth in decades; and out the other comes the mysterious response-the most abject reverence for private wealth to characterize our public culture in decades. The nation's owners are free to do their worst now: there's no longer any substantial force out there that can counterbalance, challenge, or even question their choices. The only political 'incentives' we have created encourage them to make things worse for us still: layoffs and lowered wages not only increase profits, they appear to translate directly into hosts of new converts to the Limbaugh Legion, fresh ranks of grumblers vowing revenge against the 'politically correct.'

We've all heard about the problem of conformity in flush times. The Cultural Miracle, though, is complacency in years of economic privation; it is the spectacle of both parties in free-fall to the right; it is Cold War military policies that, though now lacking any external justification, continue to propel themselves along for no reason but inertia; it is armies of temps and junior executives and blue-collar workers who imagine that the correct response to their own newfound economic precariousness is to smash what's left of the welfare state.

The Cultural Miracle is the Great Disconnection of the American intellect, the virtual extinction of popular thinking in terms of social class at the exact moment when social class has made a most dramatic return. It is a prodigious uncoupling of the language and imagery of everyday life from that whole plodding Second Wave world in which 'interests' were organically connected to action and in which economics provided identifiable 'motives' for social behavior. We've come loose at last, slipped the surly bonds of history, geography, and social reality itself Even economics, it seems, is no longer concerned with the production of things but with the manufacture of imagery, with the health of a culture trust whose every arcane fluctuation or celebrity-swap receives the instant scrutiny of both 'business' and 'lifestyle' editors nationwide. Culture causes and simulacrum is in the saddle of everyday life to a degree that perhaps only Jean Baudrillard can imagine, that the laughably archaic studies linking TV to 'real-world' violence can only begin to suggest. Notions of'objective social reality' have themselves become objects of easy retro derision, as distant and cliche as the strange impulses that once prompted our ancestors to a((empt to control the world around them.

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What desultory feelings of discontent that manage to penetrate the veil quickly assume a savagely retrograde aspect. As in previous hard times, the language of rebellion, of class resentment, and of egalitarianism have taken center stage; once again the elemental battle of the People against the Elite is joined. But don't look for a Clifford Odets comeback or a Eugene Debs postage stamp anytime soon. The characteristic political expression of these miraculous times is a stunningly misguided variant of the old populist formul,; this time turned neatly inside out. When we talk about the People we're talking about businessmen; when we heap scorn on snobbish Elites it's those meddling unions and their pals in the government who are our target.

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Vox Mercatus, Vox Dei

ight-wing populism has a long history, marked prominently by the racism with which earlier leaders sought to turn the working class against its own interests. But whether its current avatar is Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Newt Gingrich, or Rush Limbaugh, the Cultural Miracle is driven by a different and far more powerful ideological fuel, an antiintellectualism that is almost metaphysically resolute in its hostility to ideas. However its various nostrums and slogans-the flat tax, the Contract with America, the gold standard, the protective tariff-flicker across the national media consciousness, the guiding impulse of the new cultural dominant remains the same: to think about exerting human control over the marketplace (unless you're a CEO) is somehow elitist. Sometimes, of course, the language that its Republican devotees use is familiar Jacksonian stuff: rantings against effete Harvard, ravings against treasonable experts and their values-eroding expertise, and boasts of their own offensiveness to established policy institutes and schools of government administration. And, as usual, they make their announcements of cultural mistrust not in smalltown PTAs and letters to sundry editors, but from positions of real power: magazines and newspapers subsidized by some of the largest fortunes in the country, radio and 1V programs that reach vast audiences, the floor of the House of Representatives.

But the latest bearers of the proud tradition ofJoe McCarthy, Billy Sunday, and Davy Crockett unleash their powerful new version of the assorted old prejudices not simply against thinkers or the college-educated-many of the inquisitors hold assorted PhDs and MBAs themselves-but against particular kinds of thought. Nor is it merely 'tradition' or that Old Time Religion that they want to defend from the ravages of modernity: on the contrary, for the new Right these are Second Wave ideas as obsolete as ink and paper. The adepts of the Cultural Miracle are fundamentalists of a different sort, prophets not of the angry God of Jonathan Edwards but of the omnipotent market. Read a handful of the sharp-edged editorials of the WaD Street Journal through which the faithful are called to action; scan the pages of the latest business advice books: the market is eternal, the market is unchanging, the market is all-solving, rhe market is all-seeing, the market is everywhere.

The market is both the natural condition of mankind and the unique blessing of the American Eden. The market is also synonymous with democracy: since it gives the People what the People want, the market is, by definition, the incarnation of the People's will.

Those who speak for the market speak with the V&X Populi. Most importantly, though, the market is a fantastically jealous god, deeply offended by the puny efforts of mere mortals to improve on its creations with government, tariffS, unions, or culture.

Having replaced God with the market, the new anti-intellectuals take on targets more colossal than their forebears could have ever imagined. For Gingrich and Co. the BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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elitist enemy is not mental ability per se but Enlightenment itself, portrayed now as the exclusive affectation of bureaucrats and professors, as an intolerable affront to Nature and the omnipotent market. The heresy which must be rooted out is the basic notion that people can control their world, can, through exertion of human intelligence, improve their situation; the bedrock value with which it must be replaced is a Zen-like doctrine of no mind, of bodily and spiritual attunement to the deep rhythms of the market. Buying and selling are holy acts, the source and end of human meaning; all else is empty sophistry and deceptive tricks by which scheming professors propose to get themselves ahead.

This, then, is the new consensus worked by the Cultural Miracle: the market is natural, normal, and irresistible. Efforts to control its vagaries, however, are artificial, dictatorial, arrogant-and undemocratic. One can watch the new faith that buttresses the Cultural Miracle emerging in documents like Terry Teachout's reworking of H. L. Mencken, in which the great scoffer is no longer the hated tormentor of the booboisie, but the ally of the market-wise peasants in their eternal battle against the verbal prestidigitations of the know-it-all bureaucrat. Or in Rush Limbaugh's recent statement of theoretical principle, borrowed almost verbatim from the stripped-down 1880s social darwinism of William Graham Sumner: nobody has any obligation to anyone else, under any circumstances (unless they've signed a contract). With one contemptuous snart he dismisses a hundred years of social theory as so much airy fantasy, needless complexities taking us away from the straight and true faith of Gilded Age capitalism.

Or consider the bizarre speech given a few years ago by P. J. O'Rourke to the Cato Institute, the thinking hun's think-tank, in which he declared himself for "no political cause whatsoever" and hailed the group's dedication to "nothing," all of which he derives from a hostility to intellect and a relativism that should make those hated deconstructionists envious: I don't know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for me.

We don't know what's good for mankind. And it sometimes seems as though we're the only people who don't,

But while the public is coached with a steady chant of stop thinking, the market proceeds on its benevolent way, unhindered by the corrosive disbeliefs of the New Right: It does know what's good for us. The errant ways of bureaucrats and the hubris of policy makers are to be excoriated in resentful small-town editorials without number, but the market moves serenely along, now and forever, beyond our earthly powers of reckoning. Its booms and busts are as natural as earth and sky, and our duty is not to engage in insolent schemes by which we might control the market, but to reconcile ourselves to its majestic ways; to make our own culture as "flexible" as Third Wave capitalism demands, to offer up unquestioningly the prosperity of generations when "competitiveness" calls. To appease the market we will surrender every vestige of self-government, abandon the ways and beliefs and tastes and faiths of centuries, turn our cities into warehouses of the "amenities" by which the mobile, transnational yuppie can be served. And history is the baggage least needed of all, the dethroned god whose every trace the zealots of the market seek to efface, rationalize, or enclose conveniently in a glass display case. And in the wake of the market's workings lies a trail of cultural and social devastation that the Enlightenment's most grandiose makers of theoretical systems could only dream about.

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It's a strange species of populism that declares the people's will to be the destruction of the people's way of life. But the crowning mind-fuck of this panorama of intellectual obscenity has to be the perversity of the label fancied by the architects of this chaos-they like to call themselves "conservatives."

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Twilight ofthe Patriarchs

ven the best-established proverbs of American democracy are rendered obsolete by the strange politics of the Cultural Miracle. Back in the days of the great liberal consensus, historians would relate for their bright-eyed young charges the tale of the titanic clashes berween founders Hamilton and Jefferson. Their mythical battles and the continuing struggles of their heirs afforded eternal lessons in the modalities of the American political character: Jeffersonian democracy squared off against Hamiltonian aristocracy, the will of the people against the interests of an economic elite. Of course the realities were always much messier than this neat parable implied.

Progressives and New Dealers looked back to Hamilton's vision of a powerful state in order to legitimate their egalitarian plans, and the central elements of Hamilton's economic scheme-Federal Reserve system, regulated industry, managed debt-eventually became the sacred causes of public-minded reformers.

Historian Clinton Rossiter proposed one last version of the old Hamilton-Jefferson formula in the early 1960s just before the market for such metaphors collapsed permanently. Both democratic

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and capitalistic, he wrote, American civil society has combined "Hamiltonian means and Jeffersonian ends."

To describe the America of the Cultural Miracle one might invert Rossiter's maxim: we live in a time in which the accomplishment of the ugliest of Hamilton's aristocratic fantasies is legitimated with the purest ofJeffersonian principles. In his later years Hamilton lived in constant dread of the menace posed by the Jeffersonian mob to his beloved wealthy friends. That the two classes were eternal enemies he took for granted: Give the general public the slightest voice in national affairs and the next thing you know they're making off with the public treasury, they're ransacking your palace, they've got you in a tumbril and you're on your way to the guillotine.

Hamilton's Republican heirs, though, know better. Today the majestic will oIThe People is summoned constantly to endorse the entrenchment of the overclass, to cut offassistance of any kind for the destitute, to disembowel whatever workplace legislation still survives from the 1930s, to tar liberals and union leaders as the worst sort of elitists. The rhetoric of the triumphant Republican freshmen and their journalistic boosters returns again and again to this point with the kind of glibly intransigent conviction we were once taught could only be found among the commissars ofViemam and North Korea: there can be no conflict between Hamilton's market and Jefferson's people because the market is the people; business leaders incarnate the General Will with an earnesmess and devotion unimaginable in a self-serving politician of the older variety. Hamilton had no reason to worry about what the people wanted. It has turned out to be exactly what the corporations give them.

But unlike his ideological descendents, Hamilton believed in limits, even for the capitalist class he was so anxious to inaugurate. Bringing fiscal responsibility to the errant and impossibly short-sighted new nation, for example, was the premier goal of his labor as Secretary of the Treasury. Today, though, the idea is as foreign to our new breed of Hamiltonians as anarcho-syndicalism. One fine day a few years ago the nation's CEOs woke up and discovered that something had changed, ineffably, inexplicably, miraculously: They were the dreaded People! Corporate interests were by definition public interests! And there was no longer any power on earth that could prevent them from doing just whatever the fuck they wanted. Drunk on their apparent command of the popular mind, Hamilton's heirs have engaged in a spree of looting and liquidating and permanent-replacing that would have made the hated Jacobins envious.

So while poor old Hamilton worked tirelessly to payoff American debts and regarded what he quaintly called 'repudiation' as the most dangerous and subversive of political misdeeds, his descendents in Orange County just say 'fuck it! not to blame!'

Hamilton saw the government's credit as the nation's greatest asset, the bulwark of aristocratic affluence: Gingrich and company prepare to impeach another secretary of the treasury for believing the same. "Shut it down!" his colleagues cry. Fuck 'em all!

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Gold Diggers of 1996

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f the characteristic political maneuver of the Cultural Miracle is a Buchananaesque transformation of inchoate public resentment of business depredations into support for pro-business policies, its characteristic intellectual maneuver is even more counterintuitive: endless lessons in the esoteric logic by which the uncoupling of the economy from the public well-being should prompt us not to get angry, but to reconcile ourselves to the wisdom of the market. The cover story of the January 8 issue of

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Newsweek, a choice bit of pseudo-history penned by journalist Robert Samuelson, offers a useful glimpse of the mental processes of the Cultural Miracle in action.

Things have gotten worse for ordinary people in the last few years, the pundit admits. But the problem is not business ("what we today call 'the market,'" Samuelson notes in a pious aside)-it's us. All these years we've been thinking about things wrong, expecting too much, waltzing irresponsibly through an ''Age of Entitlement" during which we believed that prosperity was somehow our right. Most importantly, we never understood "the market" correctly: for years we thought of it as a big "machinery" that we could adjust and control. Ah, the folly of yesteryear!

Now we know better, Samuelson smugs. The mark.et is not a tool for human advance, but an elementary and irrational force of nature, "a vast river" that floods and recedes, and over which we can exert no control. But it's a well-meaning deity, if its ways seem whimsical: when it fires people, puts others on twelve-hour shifts, and smashes wage scales, we must remember that it is acting in the best possible interests of all, that "the process can be harsh and crude, and although some suffer, more benefit." Our response to these petty misfortunes should not be to challenge the market's omnipotence, but to reconcile ourselves to its overarching wisdom. And there is a long litany oflessons that we must re-learn as we humble ourselves, do our penance, and prepare to resume the path "toward reality" that was forsaken after World War II: everything from shopworn notions about "human nature" (you know, that basic acquisitive urge that never, ever, ever changes) to the entrepreneur-worship of Tom Peters to the fundamental tenets of the new apostle's creed: Government cannot help and must stop ttying; if we're poor, it's our own fault. Thankfully, there's a New Right out there teaching us these lessons, although Samuelson admits that even they aren't going far enough in their attack on backward-looking welfare-state policies.

More importantly, there are a few historical facts that we must forget. We must not think about where we came up with this mistaken social system in the first place: apparently it just happened one day after World War II when that abstract and irresponsible entity, Big Government, started promising people things. Above all we must not remember that social change happened because people organized themselves in unions, co-operatives, and political parties and made them happen; that the non-rich once had power because they took power. Such behavior is doctrinally impossible, and any evidence that it ever occurred must be ignored: only the market has the ability to act with historical effect. And we must strive to erase any recollection of events that were not filmed in color, to convince ourselves that Big Government is a product not of the 1930s but of the misguided generosity of the postwar boom; now that prosperity has departed, so must that Government.

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The People, Sort Of. ill the Day I Die, a predictable populist fantasy written by Clifford Odets in

1935, is a drama of economic information, its concealment, its display, and its forgetting. The play opens with a scene in which a group of German communists surreptitiously crank out leaflets with which to plaster Nazi Berlin. One hero boasts to a comrade that "This particular leaflet's going to make some of our Nazi friends perspire once it gets into the workers' hands. Workers might like to know... wages are down one-third and vital foods are up seventy-five per cent." The Nazis, meanwhile, BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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maintain their grip on power by keeping such inherently explosive facts from the people and by torturing to the point of mental collapse those who dissent openly.

Information is connected unproblematically to unrest in Odets' world; if the people know what is happening to them, the people act.

The Cultural Miracle is Odets' 1930s turned upside down, information severed from action and populism itself tamed and in the service of its old archenemy. The people can have all the data they want, but it turns out they'd much rather have the sappy Hollywood photoplays Odets was eventually hired to write. The culture of the 90s looks a lot like that of the 30s, with all the old genres intact but-just as the daily terrors, political battles, and strange passions of that time now seem as mysterious to us as events on another planet-with the poles of meaning neatly inverted, the symbols and the metaphors magically reversed.

It's not that we don't feel anomie: just as the audience at the first performance of Odds Waitingfor Lefly joined the actors chanting "Strike!", we can be easily worked up against the mysterious forces that make life so unfulfilling. But for us rebellion has come disconnected from the tangible change it once promised. Now it only appears publicly as an existential thing, a sort of limp craving for self-expression so closely associated with consumer products and brand loyalty that we are virtually incapable of imagining it without a corporate sponsor of some kind: finding our own road in a Saab, dreaming of all our best liberatory moments in a Volvo, plowing through a mud puddle in a sport utility vehicle. It is Reebok, not the union, that lets you be you, Red Dog that permits you to be your own dog, and Nike-hell, Nike offers all-out revolution, just like Newt Gingrich.

Just as in the 1930s we push the envelope of 'realism' ever farther, but 'reality' seems to work differently now. Bigger Thomas reappears as Clarence Thomas, surviving a persecution mounted by crazed leftists this time. Studs Lonigan is back as a character on Cops, a selfish union worker being gratifyingly taken down by the market he tried to defy. Forget the millionaires who run the place; what we want is TV vengeance against the poor Lonigan next door, we want his union broken, we want his unemployment benefits stopped, we want his health care taken away, we want stifflaws demanding that he behave just so, we want him locked up; and we want to watch the resulting tragedy on television, see him hauled off half-naked and bleary from drinking too much Colt 45, pleading pathetically with some stern law enforcement officials.

Broadcast demagoguery, never in eclipse for long, has made a triumphant comeback. Limbaugh battles Buchanan for Father Coughlin's old market niche and the antidemocratic nightmare from Frank Capra's Meet John Doe is acted out in real life, with thousands of 'common folk' crowding into convention centers and mouthing empty slogans at the behest of some power-mad millionaire. But the Cultural Miracle does Capra one better-not only are the millionaires no longer required to conceal their involvement or hire "John Does" to do their populist fronting, but we find it hard to imagine mass movements (or magazines, for that matter) that have arisen without a responsible millionaire at their helm. Being men of the market, millionaires are the people, and we cheer them ecstatically as they ascend their skybox to watch the performance of the Gary Cooper character, played by Bruce Springsteen, of course.

The saga of Everyman continues during the commercials, filmed always in Olym10 â&#x20AC;˘

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pian slow-motion as he relaxes on the jetplane, gazes out the window of his office, carries the way of the market to all those benighted lands that have yet to experience American culture. It's hard times, so the thing to do is to get those CEOs up on those pedestals as fast as possible, take that federal government apart as quickly as we can, surrender any notion of controlling the market, and learn our place in the great global scheme. And through the miraculous intercession of its 24-hour radio prophets, the market is calling its people back from their effete and complex ways, back to the paths of righteousness. The marketplace, in its gracious bounty, will provide all-from Pearl Jam rebellion to 9 mm security-and all that it asks in return is loyalty, the cessation of thought, the forsaking of all those other gods like tariffs and government and workplace organization. You'll get that raise when you stop thinking about that union.

And after the new Ma Joad reconciles herself to the loss of her farm, congratulates her son for killing that Red agitator, and takes up the fulfilling life of a transient worker in next year's remake of The Grapes o/Wrath, she will no doubt turn her thankful eyes to heaven and announce, "We're the people, we keep on a-movin, just wherever that 01' market wants us next."

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Miracle on Ice Tom Vanderbilt

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piritual enrichment of the non-monastic sort comes in all variety of human packages these days, from the mud-streaked weekend shamans who pass "talking sticks" to the readers who faithfully run up the best-selling statistics for The Celestine Prophecy.

I quickly find myself amongst a small minority, however, when I declare the hangover, that much-maligned malady of the engorging classes, to be the clearest window onto my inner self, the one device through which all my pretensions in the material world are brought to a crashing halt-when I realize that the phlegm-sodden sack on the bed is me, and will continue to be me, until I take the soul-strengthening steps necessary to overcome my inner malaise; and, moreover, that it is some higher power that has paused all my aspirations and human potential, and not without reason. Suddenly, seeing the error ohny excess, I am "embraced by-the light," as another best-selling New Age book puts it, and I begin to think of all the steps I could take on the road (less traveled) to self-actualization, if only I didn't feel so god-awful.

That's why Skyy vodka, the recently introduced brand with the astonishing claim of being "hangover free," so rankles my sensibilities. Granted, the makers of Skyy have secured a rather obvious marketing hook. After all, one could hardly succeed with an ad slogan that guaranteed a hangover-just imagine: "Tanqueray: How Refreshingly Debilitative." But for some hardy souls, who find meaning in the staggering headache that comes after a night of expansive drinking, who seek redemption and atonement in the cruel morning after, and who rejoice in what Kingsley Amis called the "metaphysical hangover," Skyy threatens to disrupt a ritual as cyclical and necessary as nature itself.

Like non-alcoholic beer, decaf coffee, low-tar cigarettes, and self-help books like Eat More, Weigh Less, Skyy vodka is built on that distinctly American quest to find magic formulas to indulge more and suffer less. It's the Laffer Curve-that Reaganite shibboleth of raising revenues while cutting taxes-charted in the barroom. Had the brand not been introduced so recently, in fact, we c~uld say with some assurance that it must have been Skyy that inspired our z~ro-consequences friend Arthur Laffer to the legendary act of penning his supply-side Ponzi scheme on a cocktail napkin.

Skyy is an enticing solution to a problem that need not exist in the first place.

But in the world of marketing, the success of any nostrum depends on its seller's ability to package the supposed disease-as well as the remedy. What else, aside from its blue bottle, could distinguish Skyy from the already saturated vodka market? Certainly not the name, which smacks of suburban heavy metal bands and the faintly Scandinavian frigidity to which all vodkas aspire.

No, the makers ofSkyy have gambled on a peculiarly 90s vision of drinking and its aftermath. In fact their ads don't actually use the dread term "hangover." Instead, one ad begins "If you've ever had an alcohol-related headache ... ," which cleverly and subtly shifts the burden of responsibility for the hangover away from the user-it's the alcohol's fault! It's not that laughable. Someday you too may find that when your pathologically beaming neighbor walks over and asks, "Why, what's the matter,. old BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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sport-feeling a bit hung over?", it's far more empowering to retort haughtily "No, in fact I am a victim of an alcohol-related headache, which means I am also suffering from severe desiccation, heightened surliness, etc. etc .... " It may be the poor cousin of chronic-fatigue syndrome, but it has a pale hue of respectability.

Skyy is the tonic for our times. Martinis are back in, the papers tell us, and the hip in Manhattan now make Thursday the high point of the week. But you can't show up on dress-down Friday morning carrying a recreation of the Battle of Agincourr in your head. So drink Skyy. Lounge singers are back, MTV tells us, part of that latest breakaway republic, the insurgent "Cocktail Nation." We are all getting real jobs, real benefits, and, thanks to the good graces of national marketing campaigns, real drinks. And we want it all, without the damning consequences. Thus the brand's name itself becomes a badge of white-collar hip, as in the "Skyy Blue Martini," a curacao-tainted, carnivalesque drink the color of blue sno-cones. I had one the other night sitting in a vastly overdetermined bar-fake books on the wall, a Belgian bartender, and more recently acquired lifestyles than you could shake a swizzle stick at.

It was a kind of Starbucks for the young fogey set, an archly contrived den of decadence where young achievers sat earnestly discussing memorable cigar purchases.

Skyy's marketers, touting the intensive purifYing techniques used during ~he distillation process, would surely like us to believe they are marching lockstep with the drive for clearer and more natural products. But if one is being healthy and moderate why even worry about a hangover? Let's face it-if an evening cocktail leaves you saddled with a hangover, you probably shouldn't touch the stuff in the first place.

No, Skyy vodka hints at larger appetites. Make every weekend a Lost Weekend, Skyy promises, but still crawl into the workstation on Monday morning and hang with the highly effective crowd. It's the liquid equivalent of the rave culture's favorite drug, Ecstasy, whose concentrated high burns off quickly, leaving no marks or thorny trips to wriggle down from: the perfect flexible, manageable narcotic. The hangover, on the other hand, is an inconvenient relic of an age of questionable habits.

There's certainly nothing pious or heroic in a hangover. But, trapped in its clutches, you can begin to see it as a wonderful counterbalance, an essential link in the rhythm of life, a stern ebb to an indecorous flow. The hangover is what prompts you to vow, as you fester with your cell mates in that island sanitarium of the demetabolized, "I will never drink again." Without its vengeful wrath, only guilt would be left to direct us to moderation. For Jack Kerouac, Dylan Thomas, and countless others whose lives met premature and tragic closures, the end may have come even sooner had they never had to cruise the ghastly straits of detoxification. And what of the proud, local folklore of the hangover remedy, or the pathetic morning embrace of the "hair of the dog?" Would the word that has been used so aptly to describe the aftereffects of sprees like Laffer's 1980s slowly lose its resonance and vanish?

The hangover is a rich but undervalued element in our culture. In the literature of every age it provides a handy narrative device for slowing down the action and bringing the most elevated characters to a place we've all been. In Lucky Jim, for example, Kingsley Amis expertly captures the moment as the novel's cheerfully bumbling protagonist awakens after a sordid escapade:

14 â&#x20AC;˘ RAI'I'I FR EIGHT

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again.

A dusry thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Aux Barricades, Fonctionnaires!

Edward Castleton

When more than two million people mount street protests against their government in a foreign countryon any given day, the constraints of the journalist's profession can Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of make some ugly demands.

During the mass strikes in France the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcenlast November and December, most dent qualities-to find, if you will, the spiritual in the American journalists foiled to ask spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical why public -sedor workers were so affiiction, but a "unique route to self-knowledge and selfangry about the new government's realization." This is usually lost on sufferers of the "physi- fiddling with their pensions and cal hangover," obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. health insurance, and opted instead But as they spend the morning shuffiing through the Sun- for the familiar American formula: day supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, whenever trade unionists voice a drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room grievance, ascribe it to their recalcifloor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, trant inability to accept "the future: and shame-the metaphysical hangover. The best, and The fad that the unions in question were French made the task all the really the only, cure for this condition is to simply aceasier. Stuck between the fiscal reknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather alities of European monetary unifithan attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or cation and their archaic revolutionto your relationship. As Amis puts it, "He who truly be- ary heritage, "the French" could be lieves he has a hangover has no hangover." depided as problematic adolescents And those who believe they do not? Rousingly will badly needing to grow up-a they go on, with no dues to pay save for one giant install- people unlike us more mature ment down the road, when all those painless mornings Americans, who fully understand the come crashing down in the finality of a doctor's prognosis. need to balance a budget, who have wisely deprived most government But to Skyy's chagrin, those jackbooted thugs over employees of the right to strike, and at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms took who have given state sandion to issue with the vodka's hangover claims. Now Skyy's ads striker replacement in the private must take a cheeky libertarian posture and refer to how sedor. they can't mention what the vodka won't do to you.

Hoving fitted the story into the The makers of Skyy would have us believe that he- stereotype images and vacuous gendonism is a one-night, dispos:lble affair without reper- eralizations their readers have come cussion. But all vices have their consequences, and see- to exped, the journalists felt free to ing the hints of physical discomfort in those conse- dispense with the fads. On December 4th, in the midst of the largest quences lends them much of their delicious appeal. By strike wave France has witnessed taking away the drinker's spiritual pilgram age back to since May and June of 1968, Time good health, Skyy leaves its users with a strange sense of magazine published a special dosemptiness. That glass ofSkyy the bartender pushes your sier on the nation's contemporary way is only half-full. tribulations. Readers could learn BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

15

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16 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER EIGHT

The Time Management Gospel Jennifer Brostrom

I

n the old days, we made random lists on sticky notes, forgot meetings, and preserved our sloth through completely unplanned time. But there was a brushfire of technological change and team-based productivity blowing through the land. The officers of our company were quickly converted by consultants and hucksters who terrified them with nightmarish tales of "lean, mean companies" whose ruthless speed-to-market and inhumanly efficient employees would make short work of our slow-moving operation. We were warned that the only way to save our jobs was to "reinvent" ourselves and implement a "fast-cycle-time" environment, in which a!l activities that "are not directly adding value that a customer will pay for" are the equivalent of "deadtime." Clearly a day planner would be necessary to organize the demands of this new world, but not just an ordinary day planner. We needed a superior "time-management tool" imbued with a message of hope and outrageous promise to cut through the fearful atmosphere.

In short, we needed Franklin Planners.

It was like receiving a Bible after a long and uncomfortable process of confirmation into a church for which we had the utmost skepticism. We had endured the brainstorm sessions and the planning meetings, the pep rallies, the rituals that were part of our company's reorganization. At the end of it all, we were each pres~nted with a spanking new Franklin Day Planner to initiate our newly productive, streamlined lives.

At first, we couldn't believe that our penny-pinching company would buy us such an elaborate assemblage.

We were given two large binders-one for daily use, and one for "storage"-hundreds of pages with various calendars and graphs, a hardcover book entitled Time Management, and an audiotape on "How to Use Your Franklin Planner." My company did not go so far as to send us all to one of the day-long Franklin time management seminars ($195.00 per person), but we were strongly urged to study the Franklin literature in order to learn the principles and habits of the Franklin system, which promises

about France's "fading glory: its "Cyrano syndrome: its "national identity crisis,' and the way its "powerful vested interests" (Le. unions) were attempting to block "refarm" (i.e. deregulation). The text made frequent references to those aspects of Gallic culture said to be under siege: wine bottles and corks, grapes, baguettes, perfume, cheese, and other luxury items Americans fantasize about when they imagine Frenchifying lifestyle. Charming, but no match for the forward march of globalized American culture. Aphoto spread of Parisians eating fries and drinking cokes in a brightly lit American-style diner and of French teenagers playing video games at the local arcade proved the article's point.

NewJweeksoon followed with its own analysis of "The End of the Good life: another plaintive and nostalgic tale of the demise of de Gaullestyle statesmanship, Sartre-style philosophy, and the boulangerie; of how there is too much red tape and not enough venture capital. Readers unhappily discovered that "lovers still rest in the corners of the poorly heated cafes on the Boulevard Sf. Germain, but fewer and fewer have the time or the money to linger lovingly over their wine." More to the point, the magazine offered plenty of titillating human interest-style anecdotes to confirm 10 decodence, like the interview with a distraught managing director of a Parisian advertising agency who whined about how she is "terribly, terribly lonely" but that she would rather "be alone alone than alone with somebody." Or even better, a successful Parisian banker and graduate of the elite school of public administration-in short, the French everyman-who somberly concludes that "there is less joie de vivre. You see it in how people BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

17

work, dress, eat. You have to adapt or be pushed aside." France, it seems, begins and ends in Paris in the company of morose yuppies. But none of this alters Newsweek's prescription for the country's ills-the same medicine Time, the IMF, and the World Bank recommend: austerity. France is "living beyond its means" and "financial markets demand it."

Like other European countries with misguided welfare states, France will suffer Mexican-style capital flight if it doesn't comply.

Only the more honest financial press refused to confound culture with cash. The titles of Europe stories that appeared in the Wall Street }ourno/during the December strikes were truly refreshing in comparison to the newsweeklies: "Crippling Strikes test France's commitment to Monopoly Reforms"; "As Juppe's intransigence angers strikers, investors may see it benefit French stocks"; "French markets surge, Dollar Declines, US stocks climb." Then there's ubiquitous lines like "While the strikers binerly complain that Prime Minister Juppe isn't negotiating some key points, that may be good news for the Paris bourse." What lillie analysis could be found was familiar, of course. France is plagued with "resistance to reform" and "runaway government spending." The main obstacle to combatting unemployment is-surprise!-a minimum wage that is too high (the second highest in Europe alter hash-addled Holland's). But only when we get to the solutions offered by the financial press does the arrogant logic of capital become fully apparent.

"France has to change,ÂŤ The Economist announced on November 25th.

"In a competitive world, it cannot continue to tax its citizens significantly more heavily than those of 18 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

productivity increases of as much as 29% (although the exact nature of the improvement is not specified).

Time Management, by Franklin Quest co-founder Richard Winwood, lays out the theory behind the revolution, fusing aspects of the self-help, inspirational, and business genres, and declaring time-management and self-esteem to be the keys to personal fulfillment and skyrocketing profits-as if the two were somehow interchangeable. The ideal man that emerges from its pages is one of exquisite mediocrity, despite Winwood's claim that the Franklin philosophy is the key to the realization of idealistic dreams. Our hero is lucky to live in such a convenient century in which all sorts of calendars and digital instruments are available for measuring time, because these things help him produce more. But in fact he's not much different from other men who have lived before him, even in ancient times. They too, being capitalists at heart, simply wanted to produce more, "to get more done," and thus, began to study the heavens and the seasons with an eye toward profit.

But his mind and soul are a grab-bag of vague philosophies and desires. This is his problem. He has no definition, no control. He's settling for less, which, for an American, is virtually a sin against nature. Gradually, however, with the help of the Franklin system, he can put his mind in order. First, he can prioritize each of his values, and then mold them into affirmations: "I am productive," "I love my family," "I serve others," "I am frugal," "I love God," "I am physically fit," etc. Being of rather dull and conventional character, the Productive Man has no problem selecting the most important values (presumably passed on to him by his parents, school, and church), and writing them in his Franklin Planner, where they will provide the basis for his newly emerging mind. Luckily, none of his values contradict one another.

His new mind-a Franklin mind, or "productivity pyramid"-assumes the simple shape of a triangle. It is an aerodynamic mind. Uncluttered by passion or confusion, it is driven like a missile to achieve its goals. The Productive Man documents specific long-term and short-term goals in his Planner, and from these he formulates the pointed tip of his consciousness-his Daily Task List. This will give his existence structure, direction, and meaning.

Luckily, the goals he has selected for himself are in perfect harmony with his company's goals, although it's unclear what his job actually is from his "Daily Record of Events," which serves as an example in Time Management. "New procedure for handling petty cash; Bphase prototype on sched.; Inventory of alum. back plates in question; Mentioned dislike of Paul's attitude at mtg." His "Daily Task Lists" are a combination of business and household chores: "Reading-20 minutes; Clear in-drawer; Do expense summary; Prod. committee mtg.; Take in dry cleaning; call mom reo dinner; Clean hall closet." From various examples, we gather that he has a wealrh of basements and closets to organize, and being the nice, clean sort of person he is, he keeps himself busy with these nagging tasks rather than dallying with the devil's handiwork. Occasionally, he even spends some time with the kids: "Talked with Julie tonite reo basketball et al."

Once in control, our hero is on the lookout for the "dysfunctional interruptions" and "time robbers" that will attempt to lure him away from the achievement of his daily objectives. He skirts ingeniously around "lengthy, unproductive social calls" with a "cheerful, outgoing greeting" calculated to make his co-workers get directly to the point without the unnecessary exchange of language formerly known as conversation. ("Hi Lynn. I'm trying to finish this report for the finance committee. What can J do for you?') His thought processes are governed by "return on investment" analysis that determine the priorities that structure his life. In this way, he remains in control, which elevates his selfesteem, which in turn increases his productivity. Higher productivity means he feels even better about himself.

While his psychological profile increasingly resembles an addict's, he has confined his addiction to the legal drug of time management.

The tape-recorded voice of Franklin CEO and Chairman Hyrum Smith surges and wanes like a televised sermon throughout his seminar on "How to Use the Franklin Planner." The rhetoric of power and control dominate the seminar: "[With the Franklin method] you'll not only scare yourself, you'll intimidate everyone on your block!" He chides an employee who earns $600,000 with the comment, "Well, if you ever got or-

most other rich countries. Nor can it offord, even though it is rich, to spend so much on social welfare: either it must find jobs for the unemployed or it must be less generous to them." Q.E.D. The only real question is what will happen to risk premiums or the yield spreads of French over German bonds. And for that, the "specialists"-{urrency traders and chief economists from Paine Webber or Solomon Brothers-ore there to provide on answer.

All this gorgeous logic was lost on the public, though, and the strikes continued to gain popularity. In the provinces, doily numbers 01 protesters outdid those of 1968. But journa ists kept on talking about a "France held hostage." On TV the search for a universal vidim whose extreme desperation might command more instantaneous sentimental cachellhan a militant proletariat abandoned by the "end of history" hod no limits. News programs featured interviews with annoyed pedestrians tired of being without public transportation, angry small businessmen frightened by declining sales, tragically cancelled ski vocations, endless traffic jams, solidarity between desperate urban hitchikers and those generous citizens with cars, not enough people in the hair salons ...all without the slightest attemptto gouge whether or not the strikers' grievances were legitimate.

"Corporatisme" became the key word to hurl at the unions and the French public service was transformed by a paranoid media into a cruel and belligerent institutional apparatus stuck somewhere between the gulag and Auschwitz. Some pundits even went so far as to suggest that if the strikes continued to spread into the postal service, the selfish public-sedor workers with all their BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

19

juity benefits would prevent the unemployed from getting their welfare checks. Even the homeless hod a brief moment on camero, with their postoral innocence contrasted polemically with the professional vanity of state employees. The very nature of the closs struggle hod changed, some revisionist journalists declared. It was now a contest between on authentic wretched of the earth composed of on impotent, nomadic lumpen and a scurrilous "post-industrial" working closs. That white collar workers should remain comfortable always was token for granted. . The desperate hunt for on even more victimized victim whose plight would allow the governmentto morally outflank the strikers took some pretty ridiculous turns. On December 4, the Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial page included on essay entitled "Witness at on Antistrike 'Manil' in Paris." The author, one Robert l. Pollock, a Brusselsbased consultant, happened to be in Paris for the day long enough to catch by occident a protest rally against the public sector workers' strike. Without bothering to exit his cor, Pollock felt pretty definitive about things: "The working people of Paris hod token their day off to show just what they thought about the civil 'servants' interfering with their lives. It seemed a more honest and spontaneous expression of popular opinion than the staged media events (whose times and places were announced by the papers) that were the 'official' demonstrations. Maybe, Ithought, the currenty traders were excessively pessimistic about the French: Never mind the lact that the 'working people of Paris' were not "taking the day off" on a Sunday, or that Pollock was in 20 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

ganized, you'd really be dangerous." While cliched appeals to aggression flood the business world, Smith's power rhetoric is remarkable in its pettiness. "[What] gives you power," he drones, is "knowing where the information is [in your Planner]." Forget charisma and daring; the Franklin system extols the robotic-mindless efficiency, synchronization, and precision.

In one example of what he apparently considers to be an impressive managerial show of force, Smith suggests that a supervisor could "stun" an employee by successfully following through on a promise to call him in ten days at exactly 8:43. "Will you be thinking about that call for the next ten days? No way. It'll resurface in the Planner," he says. Smith takes a slightly sadistic pleasure in the ability to annoy people with perfection. "Actually, you'll start to drive people crazy," he says cheerfully. "You won't forget anything."

Not one to risk being accused of neurosis or compulsion, Smith reluctantly admits that sometimes "we need to vegetate for an hour or two," although he blithely assumes that "we're constantly fighting the emotion of guilt all the time we're doing it." Fortunately, the Franklin Planner also provides absolution for time management transgressions.

Witness the case of the executive who arrives home after a long day at work only to discover a family crisis that demands his undivided attention. What a dilemma! He had several tasks already planned for that evening! What to do?

Not to worry, says Smith. "The first thing you do is go to the planner and move the tasks [to another day] .... You're still in control" By forwarding tasks to another day in the Planner, he claims, "the guilt goes away."

As I completed Time Management and Hyrum Smith's seminar, the feeling of induction into an unconvincing religion became overwhelming. There is something familiar yet bizarre in the combination of capitalism, traditional family values, and idealism that pervades Franklin Quest. Something quintessentially Americansimultaneously wholesome and insane. The company's rhetoric evokes a world of maternal secretaries with perfect nails, serenely separating their boss's appointments from those of their children with different colored ink in their pristine Franklin Planners; of men with names like Tom Green and Bob Garflanding great deals on expensive cars and trying to squeeze in a bit more time for "the wife and kids" in their Planners. It depicts a world of

church picnics and corporate takeovers; of Donny and Marie and Senator Orrin Hatch. Not surprisingly, the Americana, the "traditional values," and the doctrines of unlimited profit and growth promoted by Franklin Quest bear a distinct resemblance to the culture of America's best-known home-grown religion.

A great-great-grandnephew of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Franklin CEO Hyrum Smith is well-versed in the corporate savvy that plays an essential, even exalted, role in the Mormon Church. In contrast with the cultish and blasphemous image that dogged its tumultuous beginnings, today the Church of Latter Day Saints enjoys a conventional, nonthreatening, all-American reputation. But beneath its bland surface, many assert, the Church aggressively pursues economic and political power. The theological basis for this materialism is the Church's postmillennial doctrine, which holds that the Second Coming is quickly approaching, but that the Mormon Church must first prepare the world-economically and politically, as well as spiritually-for the arrival of Christ, and the subsequent establishment of a theocracy.

Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Franklin Quest is one of many multi-million dollar success stories that contribute to the Mormon corporate empire. Although all its donations to the Church are made on a private, individual basis, they are known to be enormous. And as corporate theory became more evangelical in recent years, Hyrum Smith was poised to make millions. Like the frenzied "soul gathering" crusades that used to sweep through the states of the northeast, Franklin Quest spreads the good word about time management, appealing at once to the uncertain identity, greed, and superficial morality of the business community.

no position to judge either the "honesty" or 'spontaneity" of any social phenomenon from the seat of his car.

Ignore the fad that there were only 1,500 "antistrikers' at this demonstration, while, that same day more than 30,000 angry civil 'servants" filled the streets of Prime Minister Juppe's hometown of Bordeaux.

Above all, forget the author's concern for the well-being of the speculators. Cruise back with Pollock to technocratic Brussels and you have grasped the extentto which the market-driven media was concerned with France. Pollock finishes this remarkably revealing piece in an appropriately flippant, media-saturated overclass tone. Catching a glimpse 01 a hitchiker out of the corner of his eye, he thinks twice about offering him a ride. "He looks OK, I thought," Pollock concludes. "But I had seen one too many scary movies to offer a ride.'

Despite the varieties of elite disapproval, throngs of people continued to congregate in the French streets to defend those few social benefits they had managed to keep alter fourteen years of deregulation.

And the opinion-poll popularity of the strikes made the ideological disparity between the press and the public seem almost eerie. You could go out onto streets of Paris every day and watch or march with the thousands of demonstrating workers and then return home to see an entirely As the central role model and marketing image for different story on television. For the journalists, the strikes were all about the Franklin Quest Company, Benjamin Franklin is both the preservation of anachronistic and an appropriate and ironic choice. The Franklin promo- selfish interest groups. But during the tional literature proclaims, "The same powerful prin- marches, it was obvious to any obciples and techniques that made Franklin one of the server that the strikes were about most productive and respected men of his time can now much more than some dilatory dehelp you reach your goals and achieve success and ful- fense of a doomed class. Rather, it fillment in your own life." The supposed principles and was a spontaneous outburst of distechniques in question originate from a brief section of gust for all the destructive pro-marFranklin's Autobiography in which he relates a youthful ket policies of the past decade. FiBAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

21

nally, people were willing to acknowledge that the decrepit Socialist Millerrand was more than just a bad dream beller left forgollen after his indispensable funeral. As one railway worker put it in an interview that appeared in Le Monde: We understand why the Socialist Party is sickly. The street is in the process of contesting all the institutional puppets.

For ten years, the Socialists in power have made the industrial restructurings that the right had dreamed 01 doing but never dared to do. And now, the right has proposed to us those reforms which the left dreamed of doing if only it had had the time. We thought we were electing politicians; in the end, we got accountants .. ..In 1968, we were up against reactionaries; it was simple because we knew who we were. Today, we are up against people who say they are' open: partisan to dialogue.

II we say we don't agree, they respond that 'you haven't understood: as il there was no such thing as ideology, as il all problems were technical, and it was up to them to 'explain.' The split would be between those who under¡ stand and those who don't. In fact, there is only one ideology: theirs.

France's public intellectuals were also shocked by this spontaneous revulsion. Although making a predictably big deal of the strikes' carnivalesque aspect (as if the demonstrations only consisted of a bunch of red necks chomping sandwiches and waving flares), they did not know what to say once it became apparent that their modish cliches about vibrant civil societies perpetually in conflict with tyrannical states no longer held true. What happens when the workers so long cherished by the Parisian intelligentsia no longer work in the paradigmatic factory? What if they work for the faceless state itself?

If they openly reject the cosmopolitan utopia of a United States of Europe? If they don't give a shit about

22 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

"quest for moral perfection," and describes his plan to keep a "little book" in which he employed an elaborate system to record his daily success or failure to maintain the "virtues" of Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility.

Franklin's many subsequent allusions to his various indiscretions, though, give the lie to the Franklin Institute's suggestion that Franklin succeeded to any degree in upholding the virtues he advocated for himself. Franklin was a notorious flirt, for example, especially during the years when he served as emissary to the French court.

Furthermore, while it is true that Franklin carried a "little book" in his pocket in which he made appointments, it is unclear whether he in fact arrived at his engagements on time. During his political mission in Paris, he was reputed to be punctual only for dinner invitations.

Pierre-Georges Cabanis, a French physician who became a close friend to Franklin, observed: "[Franklin] would eat, sleep, work whenever he saw fit, according to his needs, so that there never was a more leisurely man ....

[His house] was always open for all visitors, he always had an hour for you."

While Franklin's exhortations to industry and frugality in such publications as Poor Richard's Almanack may have had an important influence on American identity, the Franklin Institute's rather priggish Benjamin Franklin bears only a shadowy resemblance to the highly paradoxical man. In addition to historical inaccuracy, the marketing image of Benjamin Franklin promotes a superficial and dehumanized conception of what it means to be a "successful" American. Franklin's respect for productivity is deified, while the philosophical inquiry, experimentation, humanism, inspiration, and lack of regimentation that characterized his life are ignored.

It has become a very different world at my company since our initial baptism into the world of Franklin Planners. As far as I can tell, most people don't spend any time with the sections on values and goals, but their daily task lists are full of notes attempting to structure their ever-increasing work loads. There's less "meaningless" conversation and more stress, but this unites us in rueful sympathy and co-dependency. A typical exchange in elevators and hallways: "How are you doin'?" ''I'm so

a single currency? busy!" "I know, I'm so fried!"

There is more than one way to I begin each work day in quiet meditation with my Franklin Planner, the all-important "planning period," look at contemporary France. But for the media and policy-makers there during which tasks for the day are listed and prioritized is only one standard of judgement: in detail. After establishing the most important work to that of the omnipotent market. Willbe done, I typically begin with what I most feel like iam Safire took the designated line doing-a definite violation of the system, which is de- when he reassured skeptical New York signed specifically to encourage the hard logic of busi- Timesreaders not to worry during the ness priorities and ambitions to supersede the soft leth- strikes. Things are actually pretty argy of human moods. My "Daily Record of Events" is simple, he explained : "What should a combination of industrial jargon and inappropriate America learn from France's budget outbursts, which, along with my non-work-related "val- anguish?..In the United States, investors know that the impending budget ues and goals" make it imperative that my Franklin Planbalance will lower interest rates, and ner never falls into the hands of a co-worker. confidence in that has boosted stocks In the world of fast-cycle time, the Franklin Plan- and bonds." Forget workers; forget the ner becomes a savior, or at least a security blanket. Many way people live: "listen to what the of my co-workers believe that they would be completely markets say." lost without it. One employee, describing her habit of hiding the Planner in her car to protect it from potential kidnappers, commented, a bit too seriously, "I would have to commit suicide if I ever lost my Planner!"

When the unthinkable happens, and a Franklin Planner actually does depart from its corporate home, there is much grieving and a generous extension of sympathy. Great emotion is vented, in contrast with the nervous and tentative office apologies that follow the death of grandparents and other relatives: "Oh my God! You poor thing! I would be so N 0 Si~" y~t . lost without my Mv~t y kiJh" Franklin!"

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BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

23

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"This collection of numbers and graphs is both more interesting and "As pols rush to prove their moreconservative-than-thou credentials, more disturbing than it sounds."

-Los Angeles Times some still maintain that what's wrong with these United States is not 'too much government' but 'too much unbridled corporate power.'

[It] supplies information and analy· sis that the targets of Gingrich's contract will welcome."

NOBODY OWNS US

24 •

BAFFLER EIGHT

-Booklist

Something to Be Proud Of James Meek

I

n Edinburgh an American looked up at the castle, if it was the castle and not a housing project. He saw a crowd of citizens and tourists beginning to gather against the railings on the other side of Princes Street. He crossed the road and looked down into the park. Nothing exciting was happening.

After a time a tremor ran through the crowed and he followed their eyes up to the castle battlements. A row of figures appeared. They were standing on the very edge of the wall. There were ten of them. It was hard to make out details at such a distance, but their bodies were unnaturally bulky. He turned to the man standing on his left.

Is there going to be some kind of display? he asked. The man glared at him.

I supposed you think we all wear kilts? he said. Fucking Americans. Fucking tourists. I suppose you think we're all really quaint? I suppose you think the fucking royal family's really great?

I didn't mean to be rude, said the American.

If there's one thing worse than fucking Americans ... hang on, I don't mean that.

Right. If there's one thing worse than bloody Americans, it's the bloody English. He raised his finger into the American's face. I remember the Prince over the water.

Charlie. Bloody English chopped his head off. After we beat them at Culloden. They made the Highlanders walk home. Without a pension too. What a way to treat the inventors of the postage stamp, eh? Makes you think. And the Americans. We give them their independence and what do they give us? Bloody missiles. And us the inventors of the television set. God, if John Knox was alive today, there'd be none of these pape's missiles stirring up hatred and dissension. And John Maclean! What a man! Dead like the rest of them. And him the inventor of toothpaste. Oh flower of Scotland we'll never see your like again, no, no, no. Och but the people need a leader.

Man from the tenements. Up the close, out the yard, down from the hills. Like Robespierre. Or Lenin. He was Scottish. I was at school with him. I was. Aye! Aye. I'm sorry, I can't understand a word you're saying, said the American. He turned away and lifted up his camera, which had a powerful zoom lens, and looked through it at the figures on the ramparts.

It was a line of men in camouflage uniforms. They were standing to attention, about ten feet apart, their faces hard and expressionless. They were big men. They wore khaki berets and each had a pair of green canvas wings strapped to his arms. As the American watched, the figure on the far right appeared to shout something. The ten opened their wings in unison, held them stretched, then lowered them again.

The crowd got very excited.

Standing erect and aloof near the American, with his hands behind his back, was a tall, middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket and a kilt. He had a silver moustache, James Meek is from Aberdeen, Scotland. He is the author oftwo novels and a collection ofstories, all published by Polygon Books in Scotland.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

25

a striped tie and a Rotary Club badge on his lapel. He turned and spoke to the American.

Should be a good display, he said.

Oh, it is a display, then.

Aerobatics! said the man.

I've just arrived, said the American. Who's going to be flying?

It's myoid regiment, the Clackmannans. Battle honours go back to the first Afghan campaign.

You flew with them?

We don't call it flying in the army, said the man. We say "winging it."

I see.

Or "doing the grouse."

Right.

Or "walking Johnny cloud." Yes, I was an officer in the Fifties. Saw action in Suez.

My cousin was in the air force, said the American.

Aeroplanes have a place, I suppose, said the old officer. I never had much truck with the things myself.

Are these just ordinary soldiers?

This is our crack team! The Red Dragons. Not often you see a soldier's arms in canvas these days. Things aren't what they were. Clackmannans had fourteen battalions on the Somme. Like starlings.

So what do you reckon they'll do in this display?

Well, said the old officer, gesturing with his hands, I should think they'll start out with a couple of circuits of the castle in diamond formation, then probably a series of loops, and round it all off with a Lomond inversion. That's quite a favorite with the public.

Sounds real exciting, said the American, setting the exposure on his camera.

Why are they called the Red Dragons?

Before the old officer could explain there was a roar from the crowd. The soldiers on the ramparts were checking their equipment. Finishing the jerky sequence they spread their wings again. A hush fell. Traffic on Princes Street stopped. All eyes were on the castle walls.

The soldiers bent their knees and moved their wings slowly up and down. They looked at each other, a few words were exchanged, a strap was adjusted, and they were ready. They sprang into the air and flapped their wings fiercely, hung in the air for an instant, then, seconds later, hit the gtound at the bottom of the cliff, one after the other. Through his zoom lens the American saw them break and crumple. In the end they lay strewn, dead or dying, on the grass, their uniforms spoiled with blood, red as red dragons.

The crowd cheered wildly and waved little flags. The old officer clapped, hard and slow, his eyes moist, then turned and walked away. The American looked round.

The man he couldn't understand had a look of exultation in his eyes.

Best fucking soldiers in the world, he muttered, gripping the railings. Best fucking soldiers in the world.

26 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

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You've probably noticed by now. People don't publish stuff like this in America. It just isn't done. From here to Details the business of America is booming the latest variant of fake hip or competing to produce the most fervid declaration that this year's rule-breaking product is the real thing at last, the genuine trend that finally puts you on your own road and lets you be your own dog. If it wasn't for The Baffler you'd just have to sit still and gnash your teeth every time you see another article upping the ante of verbal praise for Tarantino or read about the latest maximum rebel style in some hip rule-breaking magazine published by some hip rule-breaking millionaire's hip rule-breaking son.

If this is your problem, it's solved. At the Baffler, we think there's more to dissent than hip millionaires finding their own road. We're committed to information-age muckraking, to deflating our culture of fake rebellion, and of doing it intelligently, unsparingly, and explicitly.

The Baffler is now on a more accelerated publishing schedule. Stay with us as we explore those avenues of dissent where resistance means more than drinking Sprite instead of Pepsi.

Subscriptions for the next four issues of the Baffler are $16, for the next eight, $30. Please let us know if you move; the Post Office does not forward Bafflers.

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27

The Theory of Subtlety ... a beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.

-Thomas Henry Huxley

... then there is this scene in "Alien," where evil attaches its slimy self to an unsuspecting crewman's face, wrapping its tail around his neck for traction, sticking its space thang down his reluctant throat, violating, impregnating with a big, gray, killer sperm.

Poetry has been known to get that ugly.

Leaping out oflife's incubator.

Sucking up the public's gullible face.

A 30-pound albino leech, bloody with truth.

Truth that Sons of Stepford Wives Do not want to hear.

"The words had no subtlety"-The Editor explained.

The words had no subtlety 'cause when the L.A.P.D. bashes brains in they do not do so politely.

There is nothing subtle 'bout being fucked over, no matter what position you get it in, it is still getting lUcked when you don't want to be fucked.

There is nothing subtle 'bout being the national testing ground for the democratic distribution of crack.

There is nothing subtle 'bout being black.

"Strange Fruit" could never be subtle, never in Macon, Georgia.

Billie Holiday wombs out the song: "Southern trees bear strange fruit.

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

Have you heard her voice distort with elongated pain at the end of that sad-ass song?

28 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

"I don't care how many Negroes are in trees, or prisons, or the Supreme Court.

1 want subtlety," the Editor whined, from his moutain desk in Tibet.

"Where is the confusing metaphor, you are not meant to understand?

Where the puzzle of enigma challenging our vast Protestant wisdom?

Where the Sunday New York Times' crossword puzzle style of poetry to decipher over bagels, before throwing the answer away?

The poetry is too emotional, too moral, too correct, too pedantic, too frantic."

Children splattered over burgers.

Time to be frantic before you run out of time.

"Strange fruit" hanging off street corners.

This is not the time to be subtle.

This is the time to be loud.

-Michael Warr

Shiny, digital, plastic and aluminum Negafivland

W

hat's a music industry to do when its new crop of rebels just aren't convincing enough to obsolete the old?

Such was the situation in the early eighties, when sales of vinyl, cassettes, turntables and cassette players were "flat." Granted, music sales weren't foiling, but for the manufacturers of our culture that wasn't quite good enough. They needed a new angle. A new way to sell music and the stuff you play it on. Luckily, someone at the Phillips Corporation (owner of PolyGram Music and Island Records and one of the world's top defense contractors) had the bright idea of introducing not merely a new style, but an entire new format complete with a new machine to play it on. This was a strategy that had been tried before, with the introduction of the 45, the LP, the cassette tape, and the 8-tracki it didn't always work, but when it did the payoff was enormous. A change in format promised an answer, for example, to that long-vexing industry question: how can you sell that aging baby boomer a copy of "Deja Vu" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young when they already have one?

Thus was born the compact disc in all its shiny, digital, plastic and aluminum glory. It s maximum playing time, about 75 minutes, was chosen because the president of the Phillips company wanted something that could play his favorite piece of music, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, all the way through without stopping.

At' first compact discs weren't too successful. For one thing, their price was far too high, due to the facts that they were mostly being made in Japan and that they had a high defect rate, with approximately one out of every three discs being tossed out before even leaving the CD factory. Early on, these problems led to an industrywide decision to continue paying recording artists a royalty rate based on the $8.98 or $9.98 list price of vinyl (or achieved the same end result by using contractual tricks like "packaging deductions") instead of the higher sale price of compact discs.

And nobody was buying those new CD players either, because they were just too darned expensive. CDs just weren't catching on.

But then, in the spring of 1989, something wonderful happened for the music industry. Everything changed! Almost overnight, CDs were everywhere! Suddenly they were a huge success and it became almost impossible to get anything on vinyl at all.

This must have been because it was what the consumer wanted ... right? We live in a market-driven economy, which every schoolkid knows is synonymous with "democracy," and the market was demanding more of those excellent, highest-possiblefi compact discs ... right?

Hardly. In fact the music industry simply decided it was time to back the flagging CD revolution with force. Record stores and the seven major music distributors Negativland make records. video. radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. They have been sued twice for copyright infringement and, since 1991. have aggressively advocated significant reform ofcopyright laws. AU their work now appears on their own label They can't afford to release their stuffin more than one format. so it aU comes out as CDs. BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

29

had long agreed on a flexible return policy-i.e. stores could "buy" something from a distributor, and if it didn't sell, they could return it. This allowed stores to take more chances on new releases or on things they were not familiar with, because if it didn't sell, they could always send it back. But in the spring of 1989 all seven major label distributors announced simultaneously that they would no longer accept returns on vinyl and they also began deleting much of the vinyl versions of their back catalog. These actions literally forced record stores to stop carrying vinyl. Record retailers could not afford the financial risk of carrying anything that was on vinyl because if it didn't sell they would be stuck with it. Very quickly record stores had to convert to CDs. Now the consumer no longer had a choice because the choice had been made for us: high priced compact discs were being shoved down our throats, whether we liked it or not. .

As CDs took over, as the majors all acquired their own domestic CD pressing plants, and as the defect rate dropped to almost zero, the cost of manufacturing compact discs dropped dramatically as well. One would have expected the price of CDs also to drop and for the profits now to be split evenly and fairly with the musicians who were making all the music.

This, of course, never happened, and herein lies the genius of the CD revolution: costs are now both higher for consumers and lower for record labels. CD prices have continued to rise to a now unbelievable $16.98 list price (soon to be $17.98!) while manufacturing costs have now dropped to less than it costs to manufacture a $9.98 vinyl release. A CD, with its plastic jewel box, printed booklet and tray card now costs a major label about 80 cents each to make (or less) and a small independent label between $1.50 and $2.50. CDs should now cost the consumer less than their original prices over a decade ago, not more. But apparently consumers got so used to the idea of paying the higher price (and the labels got used to the idea of their higher profit margin) that nobody ever complained. And the musicians? Why, they're still paid royalties to this day that are based on the list price of vinyl. That extra 4 or 5 or 6 bucks goes right into the pockets of the record labels. It is not shared with musicians. And of course, we all had to go out and buy CD players if we wanted to hear any of the music on this "popular" new format.

In the following year, 1990, when our economy was in a recession, the music industry had its biggest profits, ever!

And why have you never heard about any of this and why was no antitrust action ever taken against major labels and distributors? Simple: most of the reporting on the inner workings of the record busi-

30 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

ness appears in the music press and the music press is almost totally dependent on the advertising dollars and good will of the business that they're writing about. Since not even the most hardened journalist wants to "rock the boat" or anger the folks who bankroll their publishing ventures, this story went, and will remain, unreported.

So what's next? How can they get you to buy another copy of your favorite Pearl Jam release when you already have it on CD? Don't worry, they'll come up with an answer for you soon.

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"RECKLESS GIVES MORE CASH OR CREDIT FOR TRADE-INS:" -Goldmine Magazine

A Dream of Perfect Reception The Movies of Quentin Tarantino Gary Groth

sr

Americans love junk; it's not the junk that bothers me, it's the love.

-George Santayana

entin Tarantino is today's feel-good movie director, the Frank Capra of the '90s. Moviegoers are as elated leaving showings of Pulp Fiction as moviegoers must ave been leaving Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or It's a WonderfoL Lift. But whereas Capra's movies were jolly life-affirming affairs, Tarantino's are jolly deathaffirming ones. And whereas 1938's audiences identified with political reformer and populist Jimmy Stewart, today's audiences identifY with petty criminals and murderers played by Harvey Keitel and John Travolta. This says considerably more about the state of our culture than it does about Tarantino. So does the fact that he is the most critically lauded, even fawned-over director to emerge in the last few yearsand a commercial powerhouse as well. Tarantino, in short, has it all: the approbation of the taste makers of the popular press, the adulation of movie-goers, and the consequent clout that is so cherished in Hollywood.

In his short career, Tarantino has written four films, two of which he's directed himself (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), the others having been directed by Oliver Stone (NaturaL Born KiLLers) and Tony Scott (True Romance). The critical establishment, such as it is, instantly crowned Tarantino an auteur upon the release of Reservoir Dogs and certified his exalted position with an effusive reception for Pulp Fiction.

Movie magazines have trampled each other to rush obsequious profiles into print over the last two years, each chronicling his rags-to-riches story from movie enthusiast and video store clerk to Oscar-winning Hollywood whiz kid, his encyclopedic knowledge of movies, his excitement for all things filmic. He apparently talks faster than anyone this side of Camille Paglia and is a genuine connoisseur of trash. We are clearly living in the cinematic age of Quentin Tarantino.

But the age of Tarantino is Santayana's nightmare come true: here is an American who doesn't merely love junk. but who prosletyzes on its behalf every chance he gets. While he may be skilled as a writer and director, Tarantino's most important talent, the ability that has catapulted him to the top of the critical heap, is as an agent for commerce, a booster for the commercial values of industry product, a symbol of Hollywood Triumphant. The rare combination of mass popularity, critical acclaim, and industry adulation afforded his films represents the triumph of an economic! cultural order that aims to reduce both producers and consumers of film product into blithe and giddy Tarantino replicas. On the talk show circuit he prattles enthusiastically about a life spent watching and adoring junk while his movies are featurelength advertisements for products that you can watch on TV or purchase at toy stores. Tarantino is the perfect shill-hip, comforting, and infectious-for both the Gary Groth is the publisher 0/Fantagraphics Books and the editor o/Comics Journal.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

33

passive ideology of spectatorship that the Information Age requires and for the product its leading industry manufactures.

It would be a different matter if Tarantino's movies were not empty rearrangements of Hollywood banalities. Despite his rule-breaking reputation, Tarantino's aesthetic is entirely predictable in its use of cliche and reverse-cliche: every film must include (a) a grisly torture scene in which a witty monologue is usually delivered by the torturer to the great discomfort of the torturee; (b) intense violence alternating with goofball humor that more often than not derives from the characters' arcane knowledge of American junk culture; (c) an unending stream of "homages" or ripoffs of dialogue, scenes, or premises from a vast array of American and European movies; and (d) a Mexican stand-off in which everyone or nearly everyone dies.

Scratch the surface of one of Tarantino's dramas and the flimsy layer of moral electroplating that holds the story together disintegrates. The conflict that gives Reservoir Dogs what little human resonance it has-the struggle to reconcile an amoral life with moral impulses-seems almost intentionally shoddy when compared to a movie like The Wild Bunch (a Tarantino favorite), which is animated by the same moral conflict. The two films share similar bloodbath conclusions in which lone moral outlaws are slaughtered by overwhelming force. But it's the differences that are instructive. Unlike The Wild Bunch's climactic eruption of violence, the moral backdrop to the actions in Reservoir Dogs doesn't convince. It is unlikely, for example, that the professional criminal played by Harvey Keitel would so obstinately jeopardize his safety or break with his old and trusted friend Lawrence Tierney, who's convinced (for good reason) that the Tim Roth character is a cop. To set this implausible situation Tarantino has Keitel exhibit a jerry-rigged paternalism toward Roth, (wrongly) claiming that, "It was my fault he got shot" and "The bullet in his belly is my fault."

Keitel's sudden burst of profound moral responsibility seems more like a plot device mechanically inserted because Tarantino had seen the same theme used in another movie rather than because it makes any internal sense.

But the moral conflicts that run through The Wild Bunch are organic components of the film, attentively developed by director Sam Peckinpah, and consistently embodied, in various degrees, in the characters themselves. The film gets its meaning from the conflict between the decomposition of William Holden's gang and the moral imperative expressed in his exhortation, "When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that, you're like some animal!" The much-celebrated violence in The Wild Bunch is explained as a matter of survival, but in Reservoir Dogs it is used purely to shock, to make for an effective scene or to crank up the tension: Michael Madsen's torture of the cop, Roth's pointless killing of the civilian in the car, Chris Penn's irrational murder of the cop in the warehouse. And while the wild bunch's last act is one of willful redemption, Keitel's is a simple act of vengeance; it is both grandiloquent and trivial. So phony is Tarantino's moral attitudinizing that one begins to realize that the only reason he includes it in the first place is because it's the custom in Hollywood movies; it's how the product is made.

A glimpse of Tarantino's thinking about violence can be found in his response to questions regarding his repetitious use of the epithet "nigger" in Reservoir Dogs and, even more frequently, in Pulp Fiction. "L.feel 'nigger' is one of the most

34 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER EIGHT

volatile words in the English language and anytime anyone gives a word that much power, I think everybody should be shouting it from the rooftops to take the power away," he asserted. By taking this same promiscuous approach to violence and callousness, he succeeds in draining any power or meaning they may otherwise have had as well.

His films are a succession of torture scenes, murders, and toughguy talk until the only possible response is one of disaffection. When Travolta's Vincent is machine-gunned by Willis' Butch in Pulp Fiction, one feels nothing because Tarantino didn't bother to sculpt Travolta's character into a human being we could care about. When Butch expresses indifference, even contempt for the opponent he just killed in the boxing ring, the audience easily accepts, maybe even enjoys his callousness; when he goes back to help Marcellus, the audience applauds his decency. One means no more or less than the other, the contradictory impulses nullifying the character's interest as a human being: he is no more than a plot convenience. When Samuel Jackson's Jules finds God, and gives Tim Roth his revelatory speech at the end of the film, we realize even God has been trivialized and reduced to a character in a sitcom.

T

arantino is well-known to be a most undiscriminating media buff. Consider, for example, his giddiness over the TV show Baywatch: "It's like, such a great show.

I've been lamenting the fact that exploitation movies don't exist any more, but they do-they're just on television." He gushes about his favorite movie shoot-outs, listing The Wild Bunch, Dillinger, and John Woo in one breath-"And this has to be mentioned," he adds with dramatic urgency, "the restaurant shoot-out in Year of the Dragon. A true masterpiece of filmmaking." His familiarity with movies and TV has served him well; indeed, it's the application of this storehouse of knowledge-the references, "homages," characters, plot devices, etc.-that constitutes the reality of his films.

Tarantino learned a few things about name-dropping from his hero, Jean-Luc Godard. But while Godard has always kept his cultural references on the high end of the scale (Dostoevsky, Novalis, Same, Bakunin, Malraux, Apollinaire), Tarantino BAFFLER EIGHT路

35

keeps his overt references decidedly low. His characters speak of Elvis, the Beades,

The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Bewitched, I Dream ofJeannie, Superfly, The Guns ofNavarone, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, Lee Marvin, Sonny Chiba, and so on. When Tarantino's characters aren't invoking the names of movies or TV shows, they quote from them (such as Christian Slater in True Romance quoting John Derrick's nihilistic line from The Harder They Fall), or enact scenes that echo other movies. The prizefighter played by Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction is a slick, witty, glamorized version of Robert Ryan's tragic prizefighter in The Set Up; Butch's and Marcellus' predicament at the hands of the rednecks is straight out of Deliverance (the difference, of course, being that in Deliverance the rape created the film's central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely "the single weirdest day of [Butch'sllife"); True Romance's voiceover and accompanying music is lifted from Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven; the structure of Reservoir Dogs owes a debt to The Killing, the much-praised looping narrative of Pulp Fiction is similar to Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (including tide cards for the three separate stories); the mysterious attache case in Pulp Fiction glows when opened, an homage to Aldrich's Kiss Me, Deadly (or to Repo Man). Even small gestures and routine camera placements are suspect. Madsen's funny gun gesture is the same motion used by a crook in City on Fire (from which Tarantino stole much of Reservoir Dogs) while the tracking shot of Buscemi running from the jewelry store is identical to tracking shots in City on Fire and Los Delous. And when he isn't knocking off characters or imagery, Tarantino's paying "homage" to dialogue from other films. Compare these excerpts from his oeuvre to Don Siegel's Charley Varrick: (From the screenplay of Natural Born Killers:) Movie Mickey: Listen ro me, Jimmy Dick! I want cash, lots of it, cars, fast cars! And I want it now! Not later, now! I wanna wail, baby, wail!

(From Charley Varrick:) Harmon: I got something I want to hang onto you, Jimmy-Dick! I've been waiting all my life to make a score like this, I ain't waiting no more.

I mean, I'm gonna wail! And I'm talking about chicks, cars, clothes, a box at the races, and beefsteak three times a day!

(From Pulp Fiction:) Marcellus: I'm gonna call a couple pipe-hittin' niggers, who'll go to work on homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.

(Ftom Charley Varrick:) Boyle: They'll strip you naked and go to work on you with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.

After a while, all the scenes, references, dialogue take on an arbitrary cast: they're pieced together not from life but from 20 years of watching movies. Tarantino's characters-and Tarantino himself-inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product. Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac-he literally can't help himsel( Movies, TV shows, and ad jingles are all that there is on his earth.

Dialogue that goes nowhere; scenes borrowed in their entirety from other movies; endless invocations of TV past: the Tarantino aesthetic is a concentrated and streamlined rendering of the larger aesthetic of the culture industry. Like mass

36 â&#x20AC;˘

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culture itself, which mutates opportunistically with the transient Zeitgeist but stays always the same, Tarantino's films are always hip but scrupulously content-free.

Literary critic James Wood writes that "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus voiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies (rather than to contain or comprehend). Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest." And yet it's this very vacuousness, this disconnection from anything remotely resembling moral or emotional issues, that Tarantino's admirers love. One of these insists that Tarantino's "greatness lies in the fact that his movies don't need the real world. Tarantino's head is already crammed ... with a complete, distinct universe, which has its own reference points and its own moral compass"a "distinct universe," a set of "reference points" and a "moral compass" that are all lifted from other movies.

This curious disconnection is true of his characters as well as the moral dilemmas that they so glibly confront. They inhabit a world bounded by movies and television. And when they are not defined by their own constant references to media, they are themselves characters familiar from other movies-gangsters, cops, prize fighters, talk show hosts, etc. (Though there aren't many et ceteras; that list pretty much covers the gamut of characters in Tarantino's four films to date.)

It would be one thing if Tarantino were using these filmic references and icons to comment on films or television, but one gets no sense that (unlike his idol Godard) he is engaged in social criticism or even has a discernible point of view. Nonetheless, he has endorsed the proposition ("one hundred percent") that "on one level [his] movies are fictions, but on another level they're movie criticism, like Godard's." His hagiographers tend to concur. But while his movies are certainly about movies, elevating them to the status of "criticism" would require distance, irony, and judgment, qualities of mind Tarantino has never displayed. When he writes a dance number for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, he's not commenting on Saturday Night Fever but recreating it, and indulging in the ultimate dream of a movie buff.

P

erhaps I'm misreading Tarantino entirely; perhaps I'm holding him to inappropriate standards. Perhaps his films are comedies, as many of his fans claim. Oddly enough, Tarantino himself denies this: "I always stop short of calling my work comedy," he has been quoted as saying, "because as funny as [Pulp Fiction] is, there are things you're not supposed to be laughing at. It takes the seriousness away from it if you describe it as comedy or black comedy. .. " Two points are worth noting in this astonishing comment: 1) Tarantino does not think comedy or black humor is serious, and 2) he considers Pulp Fiction serious apart from its humor.

The neologism "comedy-drama" was coined by Columbia's publicity department to promote Capra's It Happened One Night. The film's success proved that naturalism and humor could coexist, creating and resolving a tension that seamlessly enhanced the possibilities of both modes. Lubitsch's masterpiece To Be or Not To Be had a similar effect. "One might call it a tragi cal farce or a farcical tragedy," the director said- "I do not care and neither do the audiences." Great comedy, includ-

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ing black humor, is always serious on some level: think of Chaplin and Keaton, Sturges and Cukor, or films like My Man Godfrey and Private Lives. In these films humor articulated the characters' social and political relationships, revealed their moral and emotional lives, and crystalized their conflicts. And their success grew from audiences' sheer joy in watching the play of wit at the service of universal human questions-love and When the old Spy magazine death and the right way to live. Both required less folded in 1994, itlelt Hollywood a slavish mimesis than the creation of a world more columnist Celia Brody tempoor less analagous to our own, held together and made rarily out of work. Before it was believable by an exquisite equilibrium between comrevived later that year, she and edy and drama. Strictly speaking, they weren't realI briefly planned to launch an istic or naturalistic, but they were always emotioneight or twelve page newsletally, psychologically, or socially truthful. ter like the ones investment Tarantino's comedy, though, is mostly a cheat. counselors sell for $300 0 year to clients, except that we would It is centered not around the doings of people we target ours to 'players' in the recognize from life or of archetypes extrapolated picture business. The interview from life, but the rarefied milieu of walking genre that begins on the opposite cliches-serial killers, Walter Mitty-adventurers, page was to appear in the first gangsters. Stylistically, the humor in Pulp Fiction is issue of The Brody Letter. It a hodgepodge of schtick, stand-up comedy roucame about when Iwas visiting tines, black humor, screwball comedy and anything my sister, who lives in Trenton, else he can get away with. Far from balancing huN.J. I was telling her about my mor and drama, his technique is to throw so much plans for the newsletter when my brother-in-law interrupted of this anarchic mess at the viewer that any critical and said "You know, there's an apparatus is quickly dulled. old law-school classmate of In one revealing episode, Uma Thurman's mine who's got a story you may Mia overdoses on heroin, thinking it's cocaine (a want to hear." He got on the case of mistaken identity, a classic screwball comphone forthwith, and I shortly edy device!), and Vincent and his drug source have found myself hearing an abbreto slam a needle full of adrenalin into her heart in viated form of the following inorder to revive her. It's a grotesque episode, but it terview from Ryan G. doesn't suggest the complex wit or the rewards of Bronaugh, who had no objections to the publication of the screwball comedy so much as the kind of zany story, providing his given name premise one expects from an episode of I Love was changed (as he put it, Lucy. more sit-com than film art. Nor does the "Some of my current clients story bear any relationship to the rest of the filmkind of look down on show soon afterwards Mia is just dropped. Then there's business"). I got in touch with Tarantino's attempt at the blackest of black huCelia, who had picked up some mor-when Vincent accidentally blows someone's very vague rumors about head off in Jules' car, and the boys have to clean Bronaugh's work already, and up the mess. But black humor requires more than the interview was conducted in April of 1994. Hope it proves of mere goofiness to touch an audience; it demands interest to Baffler readers. an authorial point of view, a moral position staked out and defended by the filmmaker, or at the very -ÂŁliT. Nomi least, a normative anchor from which we can get

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our bearings: Kubrick's Dr. Strangelovewas clearly opposed to the madness of MAD just as M*A *S*H was opposed to priggish authoritarianism and hypocrisy.

Cary Grant's and Raymond Massey's moral extremes provided the ballast that allowed us to see the irony in Arsenic and Old Lace. But there isn't any countervailing moral presence in Pulp Fiction to serve as contrast; since everyone in the film is a self-serving scum bag and everyone's motivations are selfish and sleazy, nothing is at stake and the humor is just momentary exercises in empty guffawing.

But whatever the mode, Tarantino seems determined to prevent his humor from cohering into a meaningful, thematic whole. It exists only in isolated or compartmentalized scenes and his dialogue is usually spit out furiously by actors who are so constantly "on" that they appear not to be talking to each other, but directly and self-consciously to the camera in a kind of Bogosianesque routine. Ultimately it serves no function greater than as a bridging device berween the violence, so the audience can chortle one minute and squirm the next, never bored. Having passively absorbed the "realities" of TV and movies, Tarantino regurgitates his favorite cliches and formulas, sometimes with a wink, sometimes with a straight face, sometimes with wit, but always with an unconditional love for the cliches and formulas that precludes the possibility of Godardian criticism or even incisive observation.

On Deadlier Ground An Interview with Ryan G. Bronaugh

Celio Brody: Before we start talking about the work you did on this campaign for the Senate that Steven Seagal was contemplating, I wont to find out about your background. What led up to all of this?

Ryan G. Bronaugh: Not too much to tell. I was born and roised in Toms River, here in Jersey. Big Irish family, always big on politics. I was passin' out flyers at the precinct booths when I was still in Pampers. Every summer in high school, I was compaignin' for a cousin or on uncle who was runnin' for something. It was a natural line of work for me.

CB: So prior to this Seagalthing you hod just worked in Jersey?

RGB: That's right. Now, I hod gone out to LA for college, atloyola Marymount, but I didn't even run for the student government there. Just studied and surfed, you know. Graduated in '83, come bock, worked for a year at this electric shop one of my uncles hod. 1984, I worked in Bob Morris' lost campaign for the Senate. arantino is now everywhere, as ubiquitous as CB: Bob Morris?

RGB: Famous guy in Jersey polipopcult itself, on talk shows, directing TV episodes, licensing his movies to a schlocky comic-book publisher, tics. He's from Jersey City. Big Redstarting a production company to make television com- hunter in the forties and lihies-he worked on this Senate committee that mercials 0), script-doctoring trashy Hollywood movies.

Joe McCarthy was on, and McCarthy Yet the New York Times (November 13, 1995, "Ah, the wonted him to be the counsel on his Perils of Overexposure") informs us that American own committee in '53, but Morris hod movie-goers' love affair with Tarantino may be reaching just been mode a judge in New York its merciful conclusion. so McCarthy hod to get Roy Cohn inBut there is no real danger of Tarantino's retire- stead. So Bob Morris kind of changed ment from the public stage any time soon. He and his history there, not being available for audience are as one insofar as they both demand of that. He ron for the Senate in New their entertainment shallowness, ease, familiarity, and Jersey in '58 or something, lost in the primary, moved to Texas where he was as much sex and violence that an R rating can accompresident of some Catholic college modate. Not only does Tarantino deliver these ingrethere-he was a pol of Cardinal dients, but he makes the public feel good for wanting Spellman's, by the way-ron lor the

T

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Senate, was beaten in the primary by George Bush. Came back to New Jersey about 78 or so, got kind of a smallscale conservative think-tank going, and ran for the Senate again. I knew his kids from spendin' summers at my grandma's place which was down in Mantoloking where he lives, so I kind of gat roped into his campaign. He lost in the primary, as usual-I think he was runnin' against Millicent Fenwick.

CB: The model for lacey Davenport in Doonesbury.

RGB: That'sright. So that was the only Senate campaign I'd worked on before Seagal called me up. The only other national-office thing I'd done was a campaign for a friend of one of my uncles who was runnin' for the House. He didn't win either. '84 to '87,

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them in the first place. He is too valuable a symbol, too useful a metaphor, to be dumped anytime soon.

In Tarantino and the enthusiasms of his audience the architects of the Mind Industry see their most fabulous aspirations made concrete: he represents the audience with its critical guard down forever, sucking it all up without reservation, commiting it to memory, building their lives around it. In Tarantino the titans of the Information Age see the world re-made in their terms, with their cliches, according to their formulas.

He is pointing the way to a golden future in which there is no longer any difference between what people are told they want and what they think they want. In his frail, hyperactive body the industry sees the two great functions of 'creative' and 'marketing' coalesce seamlessly and ooze with sincerity; making, selling, and living junk; the dream of perfect reception fulfilled.

Pulp Affliction The Sorry State of Contemporary Film

Ray Carney "\Vf\1yare the movies so awful? Are there really people W out there who haven't seen enough gangster movies with exploding automobiles that Scorsese felt he had to rush off and make one more? We probably have Francis Coppola and Pauline Kael to thank. As far as I can tell, it was her gushing about The Godfather that started it all.

But I guess as long as people keep buying it, the studios will keep churning this stuff out. These movies exist for one reason, and one reason only: to take $7.50 out of the pockets of as many people as possible. There are no values in them beyond the value of making money.

The studios would make a movie celebrating the joys of mass murder if they thought it would rake in the bucks.

Oh, I forgot. Oliver Stone made that one already.

If you go out to Los Angeles, at least they are honest about it, they call it "the industry," as if they were manufacturing steel or paper plates. If you are dumb enough to refer to "art," they smile. Everybody knows the accent falls on the second word in show business.

What's really inexplicable to me is that the film professors go along with the whole thing. They actually show schlock like Fatal Attraction, Alien, Thelma and Louise, and Silence of the Lambs in their courses and invite the directors to speak to their students! If we insist on showing these movies in a course, we should at least take them our of the arts and humanities and screen them in the Business School where they belong. We should study how they were financed. Discuss how the casting, the writing, and the ad campaigns were coordinated. Analyze them as wildly successful marketing coups-since that's what they are. Twentieth-century snake oil. And while we're at it, let's get the library to re-catalogue all those books about Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, and Ivan Reitman, so that they are shelved where they belong-next to the books on mass-marketing and public relations.

Ray Carney is a proftssor offilm and American studies at Boston University and the author of The Films of John Cassaveces, recently issued in paperback by Cambridge University Press.

, was in law school.

CB: In Jersey?

RGB: Yeah, Seton Hall. , graduated, moved to Trenton, and started workin' for a lobbying firm that handled all kinds of clients, mostly with business in Atlantic City-newsstand owners, contractors, concessionaires. A regular wine 'em-the legislators, that is--and dine' em thing. So about the end of '88 some guys in the contracting business invite me to this bash in Atlantic City-can't remember which hotel it was at-and that's where I met Seagal the first time.

C8: This would have been right after his first picture came outAbove the Law. RGB: I guess so. , hadn't seen it then, still haven't. Anyway, "m watch in' the races on this big-screen lV, and this guy with a ponytail comes in and sits down with us.

CB: No Kelly LeBrock?

RGB: She wasn't on this trip, no.

So one of my hosts comes up, says "Ryan, this is my friend Steven Seagal, visitin' from the west Coast."' say hello, shake hands, and , say, "You do movies, right! He says, "Yes, that's right."

And I left it at that. , hadn't seen his movie, like ,said. I'm kind of old school as far as these action pictures go. If Clint Eastwood's name is on the box, I'll rent it. Same goes for Schwarzenegger.

Don't really follow the rest of 'em. Finished my drink, went down to playa couple hands of poker, and forgot about it lor four years.

CB: So then what jogged your memory?

RGB: Well, right toward the end ol-must have been September of '92-' was in Mantoloking for the weekend, sittin' on the beach, watchin' the boats go by. My grandma comes out of the house, says, "Ryan, somebody's calling long distance for you, a Mr. Seagol." Well there was this BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Erwin S-e-g-a-II knew in the newsstand business who lived in Stone Harbor, which is long distance in Jersey, so I thought that was who it was. Iget up, head to the house, and get the phone.

But it wasn't the newsstond guy. Instead, I get: "Ryan Bronaugh, this is Steven Seagol. We met a few years bock in Atlantic City, remember?" Well, as it happened, I'd just watched Outfor Jusliceat my brother's house the weekend before, so Irecognized his voice. Isoid, "I remember, Mr. Seagal: He soys, "No, call me Steven: Sa then he says, "I'm looking to do something in the way of politics, but I'd rather not get into it over the phone. I'd like to meet with you out here in California. When is the earliest you can get out herer I soy, "We got to tolk about expenses first: He says, "Will a cashier's check for $50,000 cover your limo to Newarkr I soy, HI guess so: Next day, a messenger arrives with the check and the plane tickets. I say, HI am in business: (laughs) CB: So you flew out to LA? RGB: Flew out and was met at the airport by bimbos with the biggest tits that side of the Rockies wavin' signs soyin' "I'M RYAN'S!" We get in the car, I say, "What are you gals doin' tonightr They say, "Talk to Steven first: We go to some office building, I walk in, and there he is with a turtleneck, an Italian-cut jacket, and a tan.

We sit down. He says, "So Ryan, you know politics. Should Iget my hands dirty in itr Isay, "Steven, whether or not you want to get your hands dirty, the first thing I want to know is if you mean to win if you're goin' to run for somethin'. I've worked for my share of losing candidates, but they all wanted to win and they'd have walked over their own grandmas to win, like the soying goes. Ican't work for a candidate who's just runnin' in order to pile up stories he can tell five years

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The film professors try to lend intellectual legitimacy to their taste for trash (and keep their Deans off their backs) by talking about these works as examples of popular culture. But these movies are no more expressions of the hopes and fears of the people than a Big Mac is. They are products created by multinational corporations to turn a profit.

Have we really lost the ability to tell the difference between The Flintstonesand Stonehenge? Between The Blues Brothers and the blues? Culture, high or low, is not something you manufacture.

The academic fashion these days is to discuss how we "negotiate" these texts, how we find whatever we want in their flashy images. But while the Cultural Studies types fight it out about alternative models of "viewer positioning," they neglect to mention how irrelevant all their discussions are to the facts of cultural production or to any of the real problems in America. These critics change nothing. They aspire to change nothing. In a sense, they are doing the same thing the works they discuss are doing: They are playing games. They are distracting us. And yet their credibility as academics helps to support the system and lend an aura of importance to its products. It's a wonder Hollywood publicists don't put them on the payroll.

Much of the academic film critics' apparent lack of taste and judgment can be accounted for by sheer pusillanimity. Like most other academics, film professors are incredibly reluctant to make value judgments-at least in public. Partly due to their situation (if you hang around 18-year-olds long enough, you start to mimic their 'Tm OK, you're OK" reluctance to judge) and partly due to their temperament, they are afraid to "exclude" anyone or anything. Being "sensitive to otherness" means never being able to tell the truth about experience. If you point out the boy's-book sappiness of Malcolm X or Philadelphia, you're in danger of being accused of racism or homophobia. People confuse the movie with the people and events it depicts-and filmmakers like Spielberg, Lee, and Stone, shrewd businessmen that they are, milk the confusion for all the box office bucks it is worth. From the accolades he received after Schindler's List, you would have thought Spielberg did something dangerous and heroic, when all he did was merchandise the Holocaust. He made money by selling pictures of it. That out-Benettons Benetton! You

eliminate the sweaters, and just sell the ad campaign.

There's almost no debate about any of these issues at film conferences. Since everyone lives in a glass house, no one dares to throw the first stone. Everyone knows that if general questions start getting raised about the intellectual legitimacy of one professor's favorite films, there is no telling on whose neck the institutional budget-cutting axe might next fall. In fact, instincts of selfpreservation have prompted film studies to attempt to enlarge its turf (and its budget) by mutating into something called "media studies." MIT devoted a conference to this dubious idea a couple months ago and you could see the film professors almost salivating at the prospect of largesse from IBM and Microsoft to sing hymns to the Internet. Not one speaker at the sessions I listened to expressed reservations about the idea. It was sort ofspooky.

A group of film scholars was administering the Last Rites to film studies, and no one shed a tear. Instead they fought to s~e who could be first in line to sellout.

The justification for studying bad movies is their popularity. The theory is that if a work is popular, it must be important. By the same logic, our music conservatories should teach Barry Manilow, and our an departments should sponsor seminars on Norman Rockwell. Populariry proves nothing in the arts. You don't vote on the masterpieces. It's not politics. Henry James is still Henry James even if nobody reads him.

And Oliver Stone is still melodramatic hokum, even if everybody falls for him. In fact, real art is almost guaranteed to be unpopular. It forces you to ask fundamental questions about your life. It doesn't allow you to put the blame somewhere else. Popular art is the opposite.

It's devoted to reassuring us. Movies like SchindLer's List and Philadelphia are successful because they refuse to confront the viewer. Instead they flatter us. We can congratulate ourselves that we're not like the bad guys in them. Their hell is populated entirely by other people.

Hollywood films offer 'lite feelings,' weightless emotions, low-impact emotional work-outs. We can feel good about feeling bad, without ever having to reassess our experience. Nobody ever gets really hurt or wounded. It's all set in a fantasy land off to one side of our real lives. Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, and most Hollywood directors are masters at plugging into the emotional fad of the moment. They whip up

from nowata cocktail party." Steven says, "Yes, I mean to win if I run. And what Iwant to know is, if Idon't have a chance to win, are you gOing to be honest enough to tell me, right then and therer I say, "That's always my pradice." He says, "That's why I flew you out here. There are a lot of guys who would say, 'Steve, baby, you're dOing great. landslide, sweetheart!'-who'd be saying that just to get my weekly paycheck. Now, I've hired some people to do preliminary polling, and I've got the results right here. If you want to go over them, you're hired." He pats these folders on his desk, then shoves them over to me. I look through 'em and say, ¡Steven, Ican work w~h this." He says, "Name your budget-what kind of payroll you need. The limo will take you to the condo you'll work out of."

CB: Where was the condo? Beverly Hills? Brentwood?

RGB: No, Tujunga.

CB: Tujunga?That's pretty for off the beaten track.

RGB: I knew just enough about LA from loyola Marymountto know thaI. But what Seagal said was, "Ryan, I really want to do this on the q.t. I need you to work somewhere where people don't care about the industry or about politics, where you won't be perceived as any kind of 'player.' So that was my setup. Isat in a condo off Foothill Boulevard in Tujunga, right by 1-210, and worked the phone. I hired four people, one gal and three guys, who I'd worked w~h on the two races in Jersey. We split the state into four part~ssentially, San Diego to Orange County, LA County to San luis Obispo, Monterey to Sonoma County, and north to Oregon. The four then hired three people each to work phones, and hired an aide each and wentthere to do in-persan interviews.

CB: You hod sixteen people workBAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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ing under you and you were still able to keep this quiet?

RGB: Well, Steven Seagal has that, whatever you'd call it ... mystique that really helped out in that respect. We'd just say to the shitworkers, "Steven would appreciate your keeping this in confidence: and it worked. Also, when my people from Jersey decided on someone, I personally interviewed 'em to make sure no space cases ended up in the organization.

(B: What kind of questions were you asking voters?

RGB: Well, Steven wanted me to concentrate on appearance, first and foremost. He said, "Issues are OK. I've got nothing against them. But what the voters really give two shits about is whether Ishould or should not have a ponytail in the Senate. I could be Warren Beatty and say that the bureaucratic infrastructure is what they care about, butI'm a realist: So that was my job. We broke the voters down into categories. And our findings were sort of surprising.

(B: So was it ponytail or no ponytail?

RGB: Nat as simple as thaI. We found out early there were degrees. I started with two photos of Steven-a still from Under Siege, where he doesn't have the ponytail, and a phato of him with the standard ponytail.

Then I had an artist retouch the sec0nd photo to make four more pictures where the ponytail was four different lengths, and we did surveys with the sixphatos. Now, we found that women, by and large, wanted a longish ponytail. The younger ones, up to about the 35-40 age group, wanted a long one, the kind that would really flop around and keep the flies off his back.

Older than 40, they went for one about as long as what he usually has. Men over fihy didn't want a ponytail at all,

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the same sort of instant, artificial, stock emotions that the Super Bowl does, cycling the viewer through a series of predictable, cliched feelings. But it's all just a bad simulation: The ideas are prefabricated, the experiences are formulaic, and the emotions are superficial. Which is why it's all forgotten a few hours later.

The superficiality of the experience is in fact what many viewers love about Hollywood movies. They take you on a ride. You climb into them, turn on the cruise control, and sit back. Not only are the events, characters, and conflicts entirely predictable (most movies are their rrailers), but there is nothing really at stake for anyoneactor, director, or viewer-in any of it. It's an amusement park ride-a few pre-programmed thrills and then all is well. When it is over, you leave the theater and go home untouched and unchanged. That's what Antonioni meant when he said Hollywood was being nowhere, talking to no one, about nothing.

Look, I'll admit that I have the same visceral responses everyone else does to Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, and Pulp Fiction. I squirm. I cringe. I could hardly watch the screen while the Bruce Willis character in Pulp Fiction went back to his apartment. Even no-brainers like Speed and True Lies can leave you breathless with their propulsiveness. But is that supposed to be a profound insight into the human condition? These films are the best roller-coasters (in the case ofTarantino, the best haunted houses) ever made. But if that's what you want, you might as well go to Disneyland. That's what's so maddening about the Tarantino cult. Fawning critics claim to find his films dangerous or subversive, when in fact there is little more to them than button-pushing and game-playing. They're a big goof.

We have trained a generation of academic critics who never ask fundamental questions about the ultimate value of a work. In fact, they regard such questions as illegitimate. The value-neurral methods of sociology and anthropology are the academic ideals. Criticism becomes a branch of the social sciences. The only problem is that if you don't ask any hard questions about why it all matters, cleverness and stylistic display pass for genius and a filmmaker like Tarantino passes for an artist.

Tarantino's a lightweight, a flash-in-the-pan. The Tarantino cult will disband in a few years and search for another Messiah, once he predictably fails to live up to

his "early promise"-just as the James Toback, Joel Coen, Brian DePalma, and David Lynch cults did. In three films-running something like seven hours in all-he has managed not to express one interesting insight into human emotion or behavior. If it weren't for daytime television, it might constitute some sort of record. All there is in his work is the Grand Guignol campiness, the chiller-diller suspensefulness, the kicky twists and turns of the plot and reversals of expectation. It's not much to go on. In a word, his scenes are boring. All he has to keep them interesting is the pop-schlock tones and effects. There is not a single conversation in Pulp Fiction that is interesting enough to stand on its own without some comic-book effect to jazz it up. Without the harum-scarum jokiness and thriller plot, even his teenage admirers would be bored out of their minds.

Anyway, haven't we had enough movies about movies?

Aren't we overdue for a movie about life?

It's sometimes said in Tarantino's defense that his movies are witty, bur the humor is too shallow and too trivial. The great comic masters-Chaplin, Mike Leigh, Elaine May, Mark Rappaport-know that comedy is a deadly serious form. In their works, we laugh from the shock of recognition. We see ourselves in extremely complex ways. The comedy is a way of suspending a viewer within the complexity. Tarantino never uses comedy that way. It's always merely for a cheap laugh at some easy irony or obvious incongruity-usually a sudden change of mood. The comedy doesn't reveal anything interesting. In Pulp Fiction, when the druggie couple unexpectedly flips into their Ralph and Alice Kramden argument with the body lying on the livingroom floor, it shows us nothing. It illuminates nothing. It's just done to surprise and shock us. It's a cheap trick-a circus stunt like when the tight rope walker pretends to slip and everyone gasps. That's not art, it's the Ice Capades.

In Chaplin, May, Leigh, and Rappaport the comedy draws us into states of intricately multivalent sympathy with the characters, while in Tarantino, it just makes us feel superior to them. The one kind of comedy makes things more complex; the other kind, Tarantino's, makes them simpler. Like Altman, Tarantino reduces and demeans, but above all he simplifies.

If you want a crash course on the difference between gimmicks and revelations, watch Pulp Fiction and

generally. Gay guys split down the middle between a very short ponytail-one that you could just put a rubber band around-ond about a five-inch ponytail. Straight guys went for about a four-inch ponytail. they didn't want it too long. eB: Any difference by ethnicity?

RGB: Not really, exceptthe rutoff point for Hispanic men as far as no ponytail goes was 40 instead of 50.

CB: By the way, which party was Seagal going to run in? What year?

RGB: What Iwas told, at the start, was that it was going to be 1994,against Dianne Feinstein. He would run as a Republican, but a different kind of Republican--on environmentally committed one. When Ibegan work on this, AI Gore's book [Earth in the Balance] was being talked about. Bush was dissin' Gore, and it was helping Clinton.

My surveys showed that except for the far Northeast of the state-kind of a logging area, as you know--the environmental issue was very good for Steven. We were talking about thirtysecond spots where he'd give kind of a compressed version of that speech he gives in On Deadly Ground CB: Was that picture an outgrowth of this campaign?

RGB: Not at all. Steven had been looking at that script before I came on the scene. But while it was in preproduction, there was some thought given to kind of tying it into a 1994 Senate campaign. The speech at the end, in fact, is pretty close to what would've been in the stump speech that Steven would've been giving if there had been a campaign this year.

But then again, by the time they were ready to shoot the movie I was done, and Steven had decided not to run.

CB: What were his reasons?

RGB: Well, by that time, we knew Huffington was going to go up against him, and we knew what kind of money BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Huffington was going to spend in the primary. I was told that he and the Greek babe [Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington] were ready to go up to $7 million in the primary. Steven was not willing to spend more than $2.5 million in the primary, five in the general election.

CB: That's kind of low, if he wanted to win against Feinstein.

RGB: The numbers we were looking at indicated no real problem. If he went out there with a four-inch ponytail, he was going to go 53-47, at least, against Feinstein in November. And that was conservative. My view was that he could beat her by ten points. Sure, she could put spots on lV. But does she have videos for rent? And how about her family? Put 'em up against Kelly LeBrock and Steve's kids? ('mon. [Note: This interview was completed before Kelly leBrock filed for divorce against Steven Seagal-ETN] CB: Did you see much of Sea gal's family?

RGB: Iwent over to his house about three limes. No other guests, reallyjust me and him and the family. We'd eat sushi--I mean, he's very much into Japonese stuff, all the way around, and a kid from Jersey like myself hadn't exactly had much experience with raw octopus and that shit. He used to look at me putting a little too much of that green horseradish poste on my chopstides, then he'd just break into this big grin when Ihad to grab the Kirin. Then we'd go to his living room and watch a movie-general~ some adion pidure from the '60s with the one Japonese ador I've heard af, Toshiro Mifune.

CB: Dubbed?

RGB: Not even with subtitles. He'd translate the dialogue far me every now and then.

CB: So, to get back to the campoign.

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Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky on successive nights. May creates characters who have a superficial similarity to Tarantino's in their guttersnipe jitteriness and scenes that similarly switch tones and defeat our expectations. She doesn't do this to astonish us, but to show us astonishing things. She doesn't hold our interest with gimmicks but by showing us interesting things about our emotions. She doesn't use suspense to scare and surprise us; she gives us a scary, surprising conception of who we are. She imagines experience as having a mercuriality, onwardness, and open-endedness that is more exhilarating and terrifying than any of Tarantino's tricks. Like Tarantino's, May's scenes can be both shocking and extremely funny, but the difference is that in her work these feelings are side-effects of the insights. In Tarantino, the shocks and the jokes are ends in themselves. They reveal nothing. They are all there is. Mikey and Nicky does what great art always does: it invents a new language of feeling. That's what Henry James, Emily Dickinson, George Balanchine, and Robert Kramer all do. They find ways to say things that have never been said-or known-before. They reveal magical new forms of experience. They discover new forces and endow us with new powers.

Many viewers prefer flash to real insight because flash gives the illusion of insight without requiring the actual effort of learning anything new. It's a fact of psychic life that our ideas and emotions are organized to resist fundamental change. Real art is always resisted because its experiences will never neatly fit into pre-existing categories. It makes us work. We can't just sit back and take it in. We have to wake up and scramble.

Truth is messier and more complex than a trick.

Art doesn't give us pre-cooked, pre-digested experiences, but raw, rough, unclassifiable ones. Real emotions defy verbal summaries. And they leave us more confused than analytic. In fact, if you can say what emotions you are feeling while you watch a film, you probably aren't having an emotional experience in the way I mean. Thinking in a new way is more likely to bewilder than to enlighten us, at least at first. If an experience is truly original, it puts us in places we've never been before and may not want to be. In this sense, art can point a way out of the traps of received forms of thinking and feeling. It reveals the emotional

lies that ensnare us. It opens new and potentially revolutionary understandings of our lives.

Most film professors simply don't ask enough of movies. They've seen so many bad ones that they are absurdly grateful for a moderately interesting and mildly intelligent one. Is it any surprise what makes the A-list? Citizen Kane, 2001, Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction. The professors want easy knowledge-knowledge that will snap like Legos into place with their preexisting world view. They want quick, portable knowledge-something they can get at a glance, and carry away with them when the movie is over. They want painless knowledge that won't make any real demands on them, that won't cost them more than the price of their ticket. In short, they want fake knowledge. They don't go to movies to learn or feel something genuinely new, but to have their received ideas and emotions confirmed. Their real problem is they have already decided who they are and what life is.

John Cassavetes' Faces is a great example of what art can do. It simply leaves behind most of the ways other movies organize and present experience, as if Hollywood had never existed. At a stylistic level, it literally shows us life in a new way-ignoring all of those old cliches about how scenes should be shot and edited: all that stuff about using intercut shot/reverse-shot close-ups for conversations; star system hierarchies of importance for actors; melodramatic conflicts and confrontations berween the characters to generate drama; and an action-centered plot to keep the nonsense zooming right along.

At the level of experience, Cassavetes shreds most of the myths that American life and film are organized around: the worship of personal glamour and power; the myth that actions and material rewards are what matter in life; the belief that we validate ourselves by competing with each other. That's what it means for a film to reject old formulas, cliches, and myths and present new forms of understanding in their place. The problem is that films like Faces make demands that most viewers simply won't sit still for. Cassavetes asks us to think and feel in fundamentally new ways. He denies us easy answers and knee-jerk responses. His movies get under our skin. They assault and batter us. They get in our face. Cassavetes puts us on screen and forces us to come to grips with what we are. Our cultur.e teaches us to blame others, but Husbands, Faces, and A WOman

RGB: As Isaid, Steven flnally 86'd the race against Feinstein when it became obvious that Huffington would be gain' up against him in the primary. But the last time I talked to him before I went home, he said he was still very seriou~ythinkin' about running against whoever won Pete Wilson's old seaIwhich turned out to be Barboro Baxer.

(B: Do you think he could get the seat in '98?

RGB: If Boxer won the primary, and Steven got the Republican nomination, he'd stomp her in the general election. No doubt about it. I would say as much as 70-30.

(B: 70-3D? Against an experienced politician?

RGB: An experienced ultra-liberal I mean, the numbers I was lookin' at told me Sonny Bono could beat any Democrat who ron. Of course, Bono would first hove to win the Republican primary-{Jnd he wasn't much of a match for Steven in the polls, even among Italian voters.

(B: Do you think Seagal's actually going to take a shot at it? And il he wins, what's the next step?

RGB: I am not going to give any delinites on this, but my gut leeling is that he'll do it. And if he wins, Idon't see what would keep him out 01 the White House in 2000. The most popular President we've had since Kennedy was an actor, y'know. And Eisenhower, who was probably even more popular than Kennedy or Reagan, was kind of a martial-arts figure, being a general.

The intellectuals liked Kennedy, and Seagal does have that Eastern philosophy side to him, kind of like Jerry Brown except more appealing. So I think he could do it. If you're handicapping, you should keep him in mind.

Me, I'm juststayin' here in Trenton and gain' bock to the statehouse. II you know how to play the game, there's a lot more money in state politics than national, believe me.

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Under the Influence won't let us locate the stupidity or cruelty somewhere else. They have neither heroes nor villains, but only in-between characters, because that's what we are. In short, Cassavetes is not Altman. He doesn't flatter us and allow us to feel superior to his characters and events. He doesn't offer easy ironies or intellectual shortcuts to knowledge.

Altman is the master of cheap shots and quick knowledge. He and Cassavetes both present eccentric characters and situations, but that's where the resemblance ends. Oddity in Altman is always used to make an easy, satiric point; in Cassavetes our individuality won't be reduced this way. Behavior stays much more complex. Cassavetes appreciates the eccentricities of his characters. He watches them in amazement and wonder. He learns from them. He respects their mystery. But Altman, like Hitchcock, has decided what he thinks about his figures before he ever walks on the set.

Cassavetes denies himself the luxury of reclining into past forms of knowledge, just as he denies his viewers easy, pat, preformulated understandings. This makes his work ultimately much harder to "figure out" but much more fascinating to "experience." Save us from films we can understand in the Tarantino and Altman way! Save us from films we can understand at all.

Cassavetes' films are difficult only if you refuse to give up your old ways of knowing. They're frustrating only if you refuse to learn from them. His truths seem fierce only because we resist them so fiercely. If we allow ourselves to learn from them, rather than fight them, his movies are joyous, spiritually exultant viewing experiences-because they open the door to the discovery of new truths about ourselves.

Do I need to add that twenty years later, many ofCassavetes' greatest works still are not on video? Neither Faces nor Husbands, for example. So much for the brave new world of video that those film professors were waxing poetic over at the MIT conference. Let's see how far they get trying to convince Bill Gates to release Ice or Milestones or Local Color or The Scenic Route in digital form!

Now, fans of films like Schindler's List will claim that they reveal new truths too.

But I can't see much difference between Spielberg's so-called serious movie and his boy's-book movies. Schindler's List simply rehashes Spielberg's inflatable, one-sizefits-all myth about how a clever, resourceful character can outsmart a system. Is that what the meaning of the Holocaust boils down to-Indiana Schindler versus the Gestapo of Doom? Schindler is a Hollywood producer's self-congratulatory fantasy of how giving people a chance to work for you is doing them a big favor. What real courage did it take to make this movie? What new understanding of the Holocaust did it reveal? Spielberg could have made a really courageous film if he had dared to make a movie sympathetic to the SS, a movie that deeply, compassionately entered into the German point of view in order to reveal how regular people with wives and children could be drawn into committing or silently consenting to such horrors.

How about a movie that showed that, at least potentially, we are them? A film that didn't locate the bad guys in an emotional and historical galaxy far away? Of course, Spielberg could never make that film even ifhe tried to, because it would require too much insight on his part. And ifhe did make it, it would not get Academy Awards.

It would require viewers to think. And thinking, real thinking, is always dangerous.

Audiences might be forced to confront truths that they would rather avoid. Instead

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of affording them another opportunity to revel in their own virtue, they just might be made to squirm a little.

It's a curse of our culture, this addiction to smartness and knowingness. It's not just Tarantino. Look at MTV. Look at Spy magazine. Look at the ads in The Sunday Times Magazine. Wnat's so great about being so knowing, so smug, so cocky? Why do we want to be cool and ironic? Why are we so afraid of emotion? It's an American disease. Our emotions can help us out of our traps. Emotions are the way of truth.

We need works of art that defeat our intellectual and emotional habits, that force us to see and feel freshly. We need an education in emotion. That's why we have artists.

They can be our teacher, if we are willing to let them.

This essay is adapted from the unedited transcripts of interviews with Ray Carney which previously appeared in edited versions in Visions Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Boston University Today, and Movie Maker Magazine.

Dire Choir Life diplodocuses.

Monday crouches against the nerwherwell of Sunday and we spring to action, workers on the grand backward-dashing conveyor.

There are nightcrawlers, big tough ones, moving across the darkened firing-range toward targets of silhouette men, heart areas blown out.

No wonder the barbequeing neighbors are singing "Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts oflife!"

-Clayton Eshleman

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50 • BAFFLER EIGHT

The Money Shot Daniel Harris

I

f pornography once served mainly as a mood enhancement for sex and cruising, the AIDS epidemic has made it an outright replacement for sex, both for those of us who have chosen celibacy and those of us who have made an uneasy truce with our libidos by settling for the tepid pleasures of mutual masrurbation. AIDS has radically transformed the function that pornography plays in gay culture, elevating it from its former role as an aphrodisiac, a way of whetting our appetites before we ourselves plunge into the act, to its present role as a wholesale substitute for sex, a safe alternative to the perils of the meat rack. We are rapidly becoming a culture of voyeurs, a society that delegates its sexual experiences to a special class of proxies, of stand-ins and understudies, who, like stunt men in action films who leap from careening automobiles and dive through circles of flame, hurl themselves into a deadly battlefield of viruses where they take upon their shoulders all of the sexual risks that we ourselves are unwilling to assume. AIDS has turned us into cowardly bystanders whose knowledge of sex is increasingly second-hand; something we indulge in vicariously, safely ensconced on our sofas; an absorbing spectator sport that we participate in only with our eyes. As intercourse becomes an exclusively visual event, our pornography begins to cater solely to peeping toms who watch sex more than they participate in it, looking but never touching.

Long before hard-core porn films became available to the general public in the 1970s, small audiences of venturesome gay men defied the vice squads and gathered together in stifling, unventilated rooms to watch what were called "smokers," the silent, 16mm shorts produced by a handful of underground pioneers during the 1950s and 1960s. In these smoky, improvised theaters, guilt-ridden men feasted their eyes on such unspeakably obscene things as naked teenagers skinny-dipping in mountain lakes, bare-assed cowboys in g-strings and Stetsons tackling unsuspecting Indian braves, and pensive artists sketching nude athletes in the tasteful poses of classical discus throwers. In The Captive, a short film from this period, a Roman centurion taunts a disobedient slave in a tiny cache-sexe who, like a damsel in distress, pleads to his captor for mercy as he unconvincingly yanks on the chains that bind him to two teetering plaster pillars. In Marble Illusion, a melancholy Pygmalion chisels away at a Herculean figure who miraculously comes to life, strutting about the studio in a scanty "posing strap" and gazing benevolently at the sculptor who swoons girlishly over his flexed biceps.

No matter how arousing gay men may have found vintage erotica (which the modern audience laughs at as little more than puerile kitsch), the films of such studios as the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), Zenith Pictures, and Apollo Films fell far short of actual pornography. They contained no penetration, no erections, and, most importantly, no frontal nudity, at least until the mid-1960s when a Supreme Court Daniel Harris is writing a book on gay culture for Hyperion. This is the second article in a series on the subject for The Baffler.

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ruling allowed them to offer parades of jiggling penises. Even something as innocent as touching was presented in an extremely stylized manner and was sanctioned only if it were masked in one of three ways: (1) as a maniacal tendency on the part of the actors to engage in unmotivated bouts of wrestling, the adolescent rough-housing that, in the absence of more intimate contact, serves as a form of surrogate sex; (2) as "appreciation" by an admiring artist who revolves around a static, muscle-bound figure on a pedestal, squeezing his arms and tentatively prodding his taut stomach; and (3) as a homoerotic form of rescue, as in the many drowning sequences in these films or in scenes involving heat exhaustion on African safaris where one parched beauty collapses limply on the shoulders of his heroic companion. Embracing was rarely permitted as an expression of affection, let alone of desire, bur was allowed only in the form of mindless aggression or if one of the actors is defenseless, immobile, unable to touch back, paralyzed as a living statue or as a semi-conscious accident victim languishing helplessly after a close brush with death.

When gay directors finally made the leap from erotica to pornography in the very early 1970s and abandoned such sophomoric sex substitutes as wrestling and posing for actual penetration, plot suddenly became much more central to the entire stag-film industry. The ironic result was that, as erotica became more raunchy and less euphemistic, it simultaneously became more artful, more literary, more narrative. The use of plot was, in one sense, a purely practical response to the political pitfalls involved in filming explicit sex acts, which were liable to incur the wrath of vigilant censors unless directors carefully padded their films with a perfunctory quotient of socially and artistically "redeeming" material which could withstand in court the scrutiny of pious public officials. Plot was also essential to the misguided psychology of arousal basic to these films. Assuming naively that the audience would become more excited if the sex scenes were staggered throughout the movie, separated from each other by long sequences of inaction, pornographic filmmakers used plot as a form of striptease, of narrative foreplay, a way of deferring gratification until the viewer was worked up into a feverish pitch of impatience. Throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s, directors produced baroque monuments of inertia and aimlessness, Last Year in Marienbads of dreamy, somnolent filmmaking, as in the 1972 film Left-Handed, which consists largely of arid stretches in which the characters stroll through the streets of New Ymk or take leisurely Sunday drives through the countryside, followed by trance-like moments of presumably transcendent love-making blurred by the effects of pot and mescaline. The directors of such films set out, in some sense quite deliberately, to bore their audiences, for boredom was crucial to their tactics of delay. Plot served not to grab the interest of the viewer, but precisely the opposite, to make him restless, to make him champ at the bit, to sit on the edge of his seat until his lusts could be slaked in the highly desultory moments of explicit sex that followed lengthy sections of sluggish narrative prick-teasing.

The use of plot as an instrument of delay is not the only factor that makes early gay films difficult to watch. The obstructive presence of narrative is heightened by the bad lighting of early pornography, which frequently envelops the actor's entire body in impenetrable shadows, obliterating his cock and ass which, at the most crucial moments, disappear altogether from the screen. Despite the fact that directors

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used close-ups obsessively, they had great difficulty throughout the 1970s and even into the 1980s in overcoming the darkness of the regions surrounding the groin, which were made even more mysterious by the long hair of the actors which draped over blow jobs like curtains, hiding erections from the audience. Because of bad lighting, the asshole also remained largely unfilmable until the early 1980s, hidden away under a bristly fleece of coarse hair which prevented all but the briefest and most unsatisfactory cameo appearances of a barely discernible puckered opening buried in a thicket of frizzy curls.

In part, the funereal gloom of the films made during this period was simply the result of incompetence and the technical limitations of the medium of film (as opposed to the much brighter and more adaptable medium of video). But bad lighting also served a specific ideological function: it contributed to the decadent atmosphere with which directors linked gay sex in an effort to incorporate the forbidden and illicit nature of homosexuality into the very mechanism by which they aroused their audience. When sex occurs in many of the films produced during the 1970s, we enter what might be called a dreamscape, a hypnotic, ill-lit world suffused with a highly moralistic sense of sin, in which the characters exist in a timeless state of drugged arousal, floating disembodied through indeterminate landscapes that have no clear physical reality. In one of the darkest and most brooding films of the 1970s, Destroying Angel, a priest experiencing religious doubts is chased around Manhattan by a demonic twin who appears at his bedside when he is making love, stepping out of mirrors and cackling with sinister glee over his brother's ungodly abominations as Hitchcockian scores of dark cellos and screeching violins reach deafening crescendos.

The sex of early gay pornography often occurs in a setting that is explicitly demonic and otherworldly, an illicit realm in which perverted acts, engulfed in the misty vapors of fog machines, are filmed in slow motion or in diabolical shades of red. Moody, Dantesque twilight zones crop up even in the most realistic films: the characters no sooner pull down their pants than they leave the bedroom behind and enter a trance-like state of sexual rapture in which the normal operations of space and time are suspended. As the characters make love, the viewer is transported out of the everyday world into a vague and kaleidoscopic no-man's-land divorced from reality, a delirious mirage where the ravenous fingers of faceless phantoms snatch at wayward undergarments slipping down rock-hard thighs. The final scene of an otherwise quite naturalistic film, the 1976 production Kansas City Trucking Company, for instance, takes place in a bunk house for truckers so dark and so permeated with a sense of shame that it is impossible to tell if the whole nightmarish episode is not in fact a figment of the characters' feverish imaginations, a fantasy in which headless truckers, tormented by unnatural lusts, lunge at the protagonist's defenseless body with an air of starving desperation.

In the years immediately following Stonewall the neogorhic strain that taints many gay films appealed to homosexuals' belief in their own moral turpitude, a stereotype that pornographers exploited by arousing their viewers with images of decadence and degeneracy. Over the next two decades, however, the eroticizing of guilt lost its grip on our sexual fantasies as homosexuals acquired greater confidence about the healthiness of their preferences. In fact, the entire history of gay self-acceptance BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

53

since Stonewall can be summed up in the changes that have occurred in the lighting of gay films, ftom the gloomy and spectral settings of the 1970s to the brilliant, clinical illumination of present-day films which take place in spaces free of guilt, of the erotics of sin. Contemporary pornography is anchored in the here and now, in real bedrooms and real cars, rather than in indeterminate fantasy realms whose flickering light and dramatic chiaroscuro provide an almost allegorical representation of the stealthy conditions under which homosexuals were once forced to meet and cruise.

The misuse of narrative and the mistaken belief that darkness operated as an aphrodisiac were just two of the factors that make early gay pornography virtually unwatchable. Many of the films produced during the 1970s were also undermined by the heavy editing of the sex scenes, which were shredded into ribbons, sliced up into shots as brief as one or two seconds, and then scrambled into a sort of cubist collage. Well into the 1980s, the viewer was presented not with intact bodies that we are allowed to examine in their entirety, but with a mosaic of details. A shot of one lover's arm would be juxtaposed next to a shot of the other's thigh, a nipple next to a foot, an eagerly lapping tongue next to a curling toe, or a mouth drooling in anticipation next to clawing fingers raking down a frenziedly thrusting back. In the course of 60 seconds of a particularly chaotic sex scene in Destroying Ange4 for instance, the director makes a total of 37 cuts, or one cut every second and a half, a staggering number that results in a garbled patchwork of incoherent close-ups stitched together in such a way that the viewer cannot even determine which cock belongs to which character. Contemporary pornography, by contrast, tends to present an average of only four or five shots every minute, a number that produces far less fractured images than those found in the mangled episodes of older films, which seem to have been invented from scratch by splicing together random loops of film on the editorial chopping block.

The medleys of body parts in early gay pornography were not simply a reflection of the director's ineptitude but of his conviction that an endless succession of rapid jump cuts and tumultuous sequences of blurry, dismembered shapes contributed something irresistibly erotic to the sex scenes. Pornographers believed that they were filming two people, not in the act of fucking, but of merging, of coalescing, a process that involved the dissolution of their separate physical identities as they melted together, losing their definition as individuals. This high-flown and extremely sentimental idea had profoundly detrimental consequences for the visual clarity of early gay pornography. Sex was supposed to effect a mystical union of two lovers whose spiritual integration in the heat of passion was represented aesthetically by actively confusing their bodies, carving them up into small pieces, and then grafting them back together in intricate visual puzzles.

The fragmentation of sex scenes from the 1970s was also the result of the context in which they were watched, a setting that changed dramatically when the home video revolution of the mid-1980s liberated viewers from decrepit burlesque palaces with sticky floors and dilapidated seats plastered with wads of gum. Until the last decade, pornography was a communal event which took place in darkened cinemas where restless audiences migrated from seat to seat in a game of musical chairs, knocking knees, playing footsie, and gathering together for sex in the cramped stalls of

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bathrooms or on abandoned balconies. Because the vast majority of people watched pornography in a public setting, early gay films really served more as a backdrop for cruising, a form of visual Muzak for sex, than they did as an end in themselves, as engrossing full-length features that monopolized the viewer's attention to the exclusion of all else, holding him spellbound as they meandered at their own exasperating pace through rambling and convoluted plots. In its early years, gay pornography was more glimpsed than it was watched. Its splintered images were designed for die most careless and intermittent attention, allowing the viewer's eyes to dart back and forth between the screen and the audience, the fidgety and restive spectators who function as the unstable subtext of early pornography.

In the mid-l 980s, the nature of the audience's involvement with sexual imagery changed from the glance to the stare, the absorbed concentration of the man on his sofa who used pornography, not as an excuse for staging impromptu orgies on ruinous mezzanines, but as a masturbatory aid. Over the next decade, pornographers attempted to accommodate the spectator's new level of alertness by dramatically cutting down on the amount of editing and the number of confining close-ups, thus presenting more intact bodies for viewers who, undistracted by the heavy cruising going on around them, were increasingly devoting their undivided attention to the television screen. When pornography fled from a communal to a private setting, from the theater to the living room, the blurry and inchoate images of early pornography snapped into sharp focus, the pieces of the shattered bodies were reassembled, and, with the flick of a switch, the stage settings in which sex was filmed were flooded with light as unsparingly brilliant as the incandescent lamps of a surgical theater.

Well into the mid-1980s, the unreality of the pornographic dreamscape was heightened by the absence of sound and the practice of dubbing sex scenes with voiceovers of disembodied groans and echoing tirades of expletives. The action was also set to music, to inappropriately lighthearted supermarket jingles that skipped merrily along, totally at odds with the thrusting pelvises pummeling each other on the screen. When the ghost-like inhabitants of misty purgatories began to speak and groan in their own voices, however, and to do so in instantly recognizable settings presented without the perceptual distortions that make older films so hallucinatory, the viewer suddenly achieved the feeling of what might be called "presence," of being Twelve Days in the City by Patrick Welch

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in close proximity to the sex. We moved from the ecstatic love ballets of the earlier films, in which sex transcended the realm of the physical, to the films of the last ten years which, far from being dreamy and trance-like, aim for something infinitely more mundane and down-to-earth: "hot" sex, sex that is rooted in the physicality of actors who remain firmly planted in the locations in which they make love rather than lofting up into an otherworldly state of euphoria where they convulse and shudder through acts of sodomy and fellatio. We have gone from rapturous pornography to crude and exclusively carnal acts of unapologetically obscene fucking and sucking; from transcendent sex, which was primarily an emotional and spiritual experience, to sex that takes place in the very incarnate realm of beds with creaking box springs.

And yet the decline of disincarnate sex and the arrival of "hot" sex created as many problems as it solved for the modern pornographer: as porn came down from the clouds, it became difficult to conceal the characters' egregious acting, their intense anxiety, and their lack of excitement. When the viewer is finally permitted into the room where the sex is happening and is forced to listen to dopey blond surfers and burly numbskulls dressed as plumbers deliver their dishearteningly hammy lines, he comes face to face with the theatricality of pornography in a way that he had never experienced before. He realizes immediately that pornography seldom evokes fireworks but more often resembles a stroll through a lifeless wax museum in which talentless automatons flog each other with limp pricks, all the while howling, grimacing, and gnashing their teeth. Ironically, the realism of modern pornography is its downfall. The more lifelike the films become, the more phony they seem, haunted by the insufferable inauthenticity of actors chanting "oh baby" and "take it" even as they stand before us trembling and impotent, professing with nauseating fervor the burning p3.ssions they clearly do not feel.

It is not only the sex that has become clearer since the video revolution, bur the locations in which the action occurs. Up until the mid-1980s, the backgrounds in gay films were usually irrelevant, consisting simply of someone's cluttered living room strewn with dirty socks and old newspapers or their grungy garage slick with pools of coagulating oil. These settings were chosen solely because of their availability and not because some well-paid scour had scoured the neighborhoods in search of the perfect location. It is precisely because of their irrelevance that the details of these backgrounds are so conspicuous today, luring our eyes to the peripheries of the scene, to the hideous nonessentials that dwarf the sex itself: the appalling knickknacks on the

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coffee table, the half eaten jelly donut on the chipped plate at the foot of the plaid sofa, the orange shag throw rug lying on the pea-green wall-to-wall carpet, or the filthy high-top sneaker left on rop of the red vinyl ottoman.

Throughout the 1980s, directors became as sensitive to the aesthetics of their backgrounds-to uncoordinated patterns of upholstery or walls with peeling paintas the cinematographers of commercial Hollywood releases. Unlike the "found" locations of older films, the tasteful decors of contemporary pornography are actually meant to be seen and appreciated, to be processed along with the sex, creating a seductive ambiance of well-heeled elegance that exerts as strong an influence on the audience as the sexiness and stamina of the actors. Surrounded by original works of art and tasteful antiques, characters now make love in sleek, uncluttered environments, beside marble hearths crackling with romantic fires or in living rooms that look almost unoccupied. Affluent, footloose bon vivants, fresh from Waikiki, now dally in luxurious swimming pools and then screw their way through every room of the entire mansion, taking the viewer on a kind of guided tour, from the ultra-modern kitchen, where they copulate over islands of gleaming appliances-espresso machines and chrome juicers-to the master bathroom, where they make love in the jacuzzis and walk-in showers.

The revolution in the decor of recent pornography is a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the emergence of a new gay archetype. X-rated films were once in perpetual flight from the subculture and therefore celebrated such non-gay figures as truckers, construction workers, and policemen-blue-collar studs whose "authentic" masculiniry tantalized their effete admirers. But with the rise of the House Beautifol aristocrat whose sexual adventures function both as pornography and as a fanciful tour of a prime piece of expensive real estate, we are witnessing the rise of a new sexual hero, one that originates from within the subculture rather than from outside; from the ranks of homosexuals themselves rather than from the elusive proletariat whose uniforms and mannerisms gay men once imitated. While porn films still celebrate the primitive laborer who screws in the cabs of tractor trailers, over wooden trestles at construction sites, or on bales of hay in the lofts of barns, these comely plebeians are gradually being crowded out and the viewer is watching sex between idealized versions of himself.

In one sense, the use of sexual models who come from within the subculture represents an advance in the education of the homosexual libido. Many gay men are

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no longer at war with themselves, turned on exclusively by the act of self-cancellation that informs older films in which homosexuals have sex with the Other, with grease monkeys and horse wranglers, assiduously avoiding their emasculated subcultural counterparts. But in another sense, the fact that porn films increasingly revolve around posh and gentrified images of gay men marks an insidious shift in the psychology of pornography. In recent films, viewers and actors are compatriots, accomplices, brothers-in-arms, and the man on the screen is not simply an object of lust but one of imitation, a model rather than a sex object, a figure who represents the bland summit of gay materialism. The porn star is increasingly the embodiment, not only of the gay man's sexual desires, but of his social and economic desires as well, his aspirations to lead the carefree life of a lounge lizard swimming in disposable income and basking in the sun around his crystalline pool where beautiful boys in bikinis silently skim the leaves from the waters and then succumb wholeheartedly to his sensual whimsies. As a result, pornography now eroticizes an entire lifestyle which has become as sexy as the sex itsel( In the 1989 film Two Handfols II each scene is set apart, for no apparent reason, by lingering shots of such high-priced appurtenances as Louis Vuitton wallets, disc-man players, high-tech electronic gadgets, and bottles of vintage Chablis. While turning away from the cult of the macho Other may represent a small step towards selfacceptance, when we begin to choose our archetypes from within our own ranks pornography begins to exert a degree of control over us that it has never had before, shaping our social and professional aspirations as well as our sexual ones.

In addition to providing an economic model for the gay community, the rich new playboys of recent pornography also provide an intimidatingly unrealistic physical model.

Throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the bodies of the actors were so fractured or seen at such close range that the viewer often didn't have a clear sense of which leg belonged to which man, let alone what each character looked like or how wellendowed he was. The erotics of coalescing produced a style of pornography that was profoundly indifferent, not only to the luxuriousness of the settings, but to the identity of the star, who was usually not a magnificent specimen but simply an average man off the street, a slender but not necessarily gym-toned person with bad teeth, bony knees, and a boyish paunch. Because the actor's personal appearance was all but irrelevant, collage sex was the porn of anonymity, a style of filmmaking in which the central character was simply a man, any man, unlike the ambrosial youth, the autocracy of ectomorphs, now promoted by studios like Falcon or Colt, which groom and cultivate

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entire stables of actors, paying their gym memberships and issuing decrees about the length of their hair and the darkness of their tan lines.

The rise of such embodiments of the new gay archetype as cult stars Jeff Stryker, Ryan Idol, and the late Joey Stephano contributed to an obsession with fitness that jeopardizes gay men's sense of physical and sexual well-being. Homosexuals have always been concerned with their appearances, but it is only with the spread of pornography that we have stampeded into gyms where, out of intense inadequacy, we attempt to sculpt our flaccid bodies into shapes they were never intended to assume. With the onset of the sexual revolution, which triggered the proliferation of such glossy beefcake magazines as Honcho, Mandate, and Blue Boy, gay culture was saturated with a coercive body of masculine iconography, the luscious images of the buffed, bionic males who now strip in our clubs, strut down the runways of our fund-raisers, sprawl spread-eagle in our calendars, and leer suggestively, in all of their hairless splendor, from virtually every page of our newspapers. During the 1970s, gay men began to ingest massive quantities of prescriptive images that idealized an unreal and unattainable individual, forever outside of our reach, inaccessible to all but the most conventionally beautiful people. The censorious and moralistic culture that preceded (he sexual revolurion thus had at least one distinct advantage over its modern, hedonistic counterpart: its squeamishness prevented the free dissemination of (he sexual images that now provide the punitive standard by which we measure the mediocrity of our own sex lives, as well as (he inferiority of our bandy-legged, stooped-shouldered bodies. Gay liberation inadvertently liberated us into a new state of heightened sexual self- consciousness, placing an aspect of our lives that had been relatively immune to the forces of commercialism at the mercy of the marketplace, which quickly began to bombard us with photographs and films depicting an all-powerful sexual elite.

The new gay archetype is not only wealthy and muscular but also untouchable, a cold-blooded creature whose primary purpose, like the immaculate suites of palatial bedrooms and lavish solariums over which he presides, is largely ornamental. If the directors of older pornography created out of two separate individuals a single montage that was intended to suggest spiritual fusion under the surreal intensity of lust, recent films strive just as conscientiously to keep the bodies of the actors apart, to prevent them from coalescing. Directors now limit their characters' interaction in order to showcase the stunning physiques of a parade of prima donnas who are not having sex so much as they are striking flanering poses, mugging for the camera, and

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flaunting the results of the gruelling hours they spent torturing themselves at the gym. We have come full circle to the old AMG films in which living statues, tastefully slumped against Doric columns, were meant to be admired from a distance, like works of art that could be seen but not touched. Just as wrestling once served as a surrogate for sex, so sex now serves as a surrogate for posing. Whereas the men in pornography from the 1970s clung to each other like barnacles, contemporary directors rarely permit full-body embracing for more than a few seconds. Horizontal sex, in which one character drapes himself over the prone body of the other so that they become virtually indistinguishable, is strictly forbidden on the grounds that such extensive contact would impair the audience's vision of the showpieces on display.

The cameraman manipulates intercourse to create a schematized, televisual sex in which the bodies remain as detached and thus as photogenic as possible. Unlike older pornography, in which anatomically incoherent and ill-lit ensembles of entangled limbs writhed to the dulcet strains of Muzak, sustained body contact in the films of the last ten years is so minimal that the actors are joined, like Siamese twins, only at the single point of entry where one character's penis penetrates his partner. As a result, for purposes of clarity, the characters in contemporary pornography do not make love with their entire bodies but touch each other with their genitals alone.

This desire to maximize the exposure of the bodies in order to allow the audience the best possible view results in a number of strange sex mannerisms: the actors often appear to be pulling away from each other, shrinking back rather than rushing forward, as if their partner in some way repelled them. When kissing, for example, porn stars often seem absurdly diffident. While people in real life kiss by pressing their faces together so that their tongues can explore deeply within each other's mouths, the tongues of porn stars frequently do not enter the orifice but simply touch at the very tip, flickering in the air like serpents so that this most apocryphal of cinematic kisses can be captured by the camera. Directors also choregraph anal sex in a particularly stilted manner: the active partner places one hand behind his back in a strange Napoleonic pose that simultaneously shows off his wash-board stomach and prevents his erection from being hidden by his forearms as he clasps his partner by the hips. Sex is also an occasion for exhibiting massive quads and bulging lats as actors indulge in more literal forms of posing: folding their arms voluptuously behind their heads; flexing their biceps; and doing pushups while drilling the mouths of their lovers who lie helpless beneath them, serving as human fulcrums for these impressive

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acrobatics. Even the harmless slaps the actors often give each other, pounding their partner's pees with their fists or playfully swatting their rear-ends, are not masterful S/M slaps meant to inflict a pleasant sting, but a means of demonstrating to the audience the tautness and tone of the bodies, which the characters take turns displaying as if they were car dealers showing off the special features of their merchandise, kicking their tires and adjusting the luxurious bucket seats.

But perhaps the moment that reveals most clearly that the real subject of modern pornography is not sex but a prurient examination of the sculptural perfection of spectacular physiques is the eccentric manner in which orgasm is represented. Astonishingly, what industry insiders call the "money shot" seldom occurs during intercourse, from friction with another body, but is relegated to separate scenes in which the actors suddenly stop having sex altogether so that each man can bring himself to orgasm through masturbation as the other simply sits back and watches, offering feeble words of support and encouragement, like a midwife presiding over a difficult birth. Instead of having simultaneous orgasms, which are relatively rare in gay pornography, the actors politely take turns, spelling off in such a way that only one man assumes center stage at a time, thus allowing the viewer to savor the thrill of each cum shot individually. At the very moment when the two lovers should be merging in mutual satisfaction, they are most alone, withdrawn, and independent. The money shot is a metaphor for the pathology of modern pornography as a whole: Highly solipsistic and opposed to the idea of merging, these films aim to display champion thoroughbreds whose beauty can best be appreciated without the obstructions of intimate contact. Contemporary pornography is at war with its very subject, sex, an act that involves a type of communion now anathema in films more concerned with the appearances of gorgeous specimens than with the quality of their interaction.

Older pornography looks as chaotic as it does because directors were trying to show sex from the point of view of the characters, whose excitement they mimicked in a reeling, vertiginous series of jumpcuts meant to provide the objective equivalent of a highly subjective state of arousal. Its makers assumed that the audience would get excited if the pornographer could devise a sufficiently compelling image of what was going on inside his actors' heads, of the intensity of all of the tactile impressions being experienced in the character's consciousness. In the course of the last twenty years, however, directors have abandoned the notion that pornography works by empathy, by the transference of pleasure from the consciousness of the actor experiencing it to that of the audience watching it. While older films focused on what the actors were feeling when they had sex, more recent films focus on how they appear when they have it. Pornography has gone from being intensely, inscrutably subjective to alienatingly objective. Old pornography was about pleasure, about how pleasure feels. New pornography is about aesthetics, <!-bout how pleasure looks. The point of view of pornography has migrated from the actor to the audience, from the first person to the third, from their perspective as participants to ours as passive spectators loitering on the sidelines, experiencing the scene from the outside, watching an activity that has become a visual event rather than a sensual one.

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The Minus Times Hunter Kennedy RANDOl" AX: ----"They was trying to get the

Intruders force man to take drugs, then set house on fire baby."

Finally. Pruitt said. a truck came .VlRDEN, N.M. - Two intruders

forced a 60-year-old man to snort and swallow drugs at gunpoint. looted his home and set a fire that killed his wife.

Two deputies investigating the case were shot. Later, two suspects were arrested.

down the dirt road. He scooped up the hoy and put him in the bed of the truck then turned to see his fiancee .Iying •on the ground with a dog on top of her. The other dog was dragging the little girl up an emhankment.

"All I can see is my little baby getting drug into the woods," he said, his voice breaking. Uby a Rott· weiler. I can't even say it."

For the next two years, he remembers, some 15 to 20 prisoners were trucked every Wednesday to the Buenos Aires airport, put on a military plane, and then dropped, drugged .but alive, from a height of about 13,000 ft. into the Atlantic Ocean.

• Someone stole 20 pounds of eye medicine from the front • A caller told a 65-year-old seat of her car parked outside Ricefields woman she had won Howdy's Fireworks when she $50,000 and it would be sent to dozed oft'while waiting for a teleher as soon as she wired him phone call around 9:30 p.m. her 19-year-old boy$2,500. The man said he was Elton Jones and was calling for friend ripped oft' her shirt and dragged her through the gravel American Clearinghouse in Las in the parking lot of Charlie's Vegas.

Nitelife at knifepoint at 2 a.m.

He arrived at the house by boat The woman said teenagers around 9 p.m. Sept. 27 .and said his ex-wife beat him with a broom. also threatened her with two His country doesn't have foothalI, sticks and damaged her eye glasses. with all the wind and waves.

Sept. 30:

Sandy Island

COUPLA STORIES:

. She says she thinks someone has a key to her apartment. when she returned home at 4:50 a.m.

Beds had been slept in.

The hat was found between two beds.

When deputies arrived theyfounda television in the yard, They were told to stay away from each other until they see a judge.

DISCUSSIONS WITH A PSYCHIC

Lids drooping, she slowly ran her fingers across the old picture f,ame I had given her. ''Westward motion, ]a te in the century, ending somewhere in the Trans-South," she announced in a quavering voice. "I see a gunrack behind a desk, someone offering him a gun from there, and they go into a Broad valley. Wait. He becomes lost, struggles through creeks, across ridges, snowy woods, and he is fearful of his life slipping away. I see new ghost towns in California," she hissed, "cities without a light. He is there in the western dust, a single spark ••• " She remained silent for a little while more. "You dont remember what you have seen or done, do you?" she asked. The trailer shook with a passing truck. "I really don't," I Sighed. Looking away from her to the German Shepherd chained to the tree, I admitted, "I don't give a damn about the man in the picture."

MONEY CAN'T BUY Two years out of college I won the 'l'exas Lottery on a 11rednesday night.

After the dust settled, I took a year lease on a city block of a dilapidated little town in SC, bought sone second-hand GerMan film equipment, and set up shop with a couple of my friends from school. '7e picked a cast from the locals and threw in a couple of strippers from Charleston barely out of high school.

Word got out that we were doing porn, but when I brought the sheTt!f around he cooled out and asked for a bit part. After four months of those kinds of negotiations, I had a movie called "Pineville Shotgun". I took i t to Poland to edit and lost it on a train there one night. I rode the trains for weeks after, cussing.

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from

Cantos for James Michener David Berman XCVI. He wasn't sure how the bathroom mirror worked but decided it must be powered by the razor blades and aspirin he found in the engine compartment.

It was a matter of relearning everything after he surfaced from the coma.

The hospital chapel had bought a battered fog machine from a local heavy metal band that broke up after disagreements about Viking iconography.

Sitting in the back row, he began to pray for his hospital roommate, who was suffering under the byzantine complexity of back pain.

He said it felt like he was laying on top of an architect's model of a small town whose five-storey bank building commanded a view of the plains.

Clouds of steam drifted around his ankles.

CI. The jets move slowly through the sky like they'll never reach Denver or wherever they're going, and I have the feeling that people are high fiving nearby, spontaneously, like a saloon brawl where everyone suddenly starts fighting as if each man has a preconscious knowledge of which side he's on when he enters a crowded room.

And this fight starts with a Polish joke that a man at the bar begins to tell, but it's not funny as it concerns a stillborn child and an alcoholic slain by the last European wolf, and even after three hours there is no punchline in sight.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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When he reaches the part where a Polish scientist who has been navigating through millimeters of wilderness discovers sub-atomic temples in a rust sample, none of the men are listening, they are thinking about their own childhoods about the deep embarrassment of scoring on your own team and the view from falling behind.

CII. The waiting room across the hall was filled with hostile stepsons.

He was studying their faces when his favorite nurse came in to show him an x-ray of a scarecrow she had found in the chapel.

Someone had written "the unborn God of the C RH I7 NO 4S Indians" on the bottom.

"Here, this pill should make you feel like a turtle tangled up in a dry cleaning bag."

The nurses are so beautiful, he thought.

Try to remember that they are covered in germs.

Cv. He woke up at 12:34 and saw the Mirrornauts standing by the full-length mirror in their chrome uniforms.

Their scouts had already crossed. They were going to war on the other side. To fight for the stranger's right to know, for the models in the picture that comes with the frame, and all others who seek freedom from liberty and movies about movies about movies.

"The room in the mirror is full of carbon monoxide.

That's why we cannot pass without these chrome suits.

If the other side looks identical, study closely, you'll see an object that's not in the room you're standing in. Like a lute on the dresser, partially hidden by compacts and atomizers."

The Mirrornauts vanished into the glass.

We are living in unwritten Bible stories, he thought.

66 â&#x20AC;˘

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That God created forest clearings so he could spy on the Indians.

CIX. The Smokers were encamped on a rivulet in the south forty.

Their leader, a tall housewife decorated with medals from the Virginia and North Carolina state legislatures, sucked on a menthol 100 as she scanned the cured fields.

I whistled when I got within earshot to let them know I was coming. The Smoker children ran out to meet me and I passed out nicotine gum and colorful matchbooks.

I lit up and approached the oak tree where the leader's tent was pitched. She stared at me contemptuously as she opened her bathrobe. I sucked on each breast for a second and then she motioned for me to sit on the beer chest.

It was my land they were camping on but it sure didn't feel like it. She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and I jumped up to light it.

"Sit down," she said. "Did you bring the scratch tickets?"

"Here they are."

"What are they saying in town?"

"There are rumors of a sale."

CXVII. Deep within the interior of a Polish joke where time slowly reduces the stairs into ramps and men with hospital haircuts sit in focus groups discussing the algebra of back pain and the "Power of Not Caring."

Here in some mother-in-law's version of Poland where even the magicians are regulated by the state.

He walked to the window and said "Night, you fucking challenger, here I am."

Through the mirror he heard the warcry of the C SH17N 04S Indians.

His back hurt.

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CXXVI. From our upstairs porch I watch my neighbor, a small town accountant with a voice like a toy keyboard, begin his walk to work in his navy blue Botany 500 suit, bought used in an L.A. consignment store while visiting his widower son-in-law and blind granddaughter, and according to my neighbor, formerly owned by Gene Rayburn, the semi-retired game show host whose grotesque aura still haunts the seven o'clock time slots of my body's internal clock along with Merv Griffin, Don Rickles, Cloris Leachman, Bert Convy, Wink Martindale and the tenants of every Hollywood square, those horrible hucksters, sickening adults/hyenas who seem to have had their proteges on every Main Street, the men with perms, tight gray curls erupting over the alcoholic topography of their oiled faces, a legion of salesmen ruined by bad translations of an already disastrous California ideal, their eyes stinking like boiled cocktail onions as they emerged from "sleek" 1980 Thunderbirds, all marinated teeth and snowplow mustaches, fresh from invigorating divorces, dragging tawny S-shaped girlfriends by the wrist to wooden gargoyle waterbeds where stereo systems built into the headboards played "Eye in the Sky" by the Alan Parsons Project endlessly through the night.

These :nen quietly disappeared sometime during the first Reagan Administration. If the Mirrornauts did come for them, then they must have leapt down through the bedroom ceilings, and the men must have woken up screaming as their carpeting was ripped up, the aquariums smashed with baseball bats, and then angry, insane, "my ex-wife is behind this isn't she," obscure cuss words, now lost to us, spilling out of their fat mouths.

cxxxn.

Inside an abandoned spa where Swiss hardcore kids squat in polar rooms underneath fountains of careless feedback, or within the funeral home's fusebox that operates the violet shadows on the lawn and the digital eyes of an elk head bolted above the respirating fireplace, you, on the edge of rainshot shadows, con the world into lamenting anything until no one can recall how the true stories end.

If it existed, we'd be used to it already, the dream of important mail like trumpets crashing into men or oceans cruising through the furious night while lonely seaside dentists hasten to incorporate chocolate towers into their huge immovable desserts.

68 â&#x20AC;˘

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If we are lured into violent matinees we are only acting as the agents of coin circulation.

Like stuffed animals sharing coffee in the dorms, or interstate median castaways with wild children, we are all auditioning for a newish testament where perfect kids ride pedestals of surf onto the beach and Lake Speed's legendary hair rots west of the redrock balconies and neutral horses with fiery games.

CXVI. A man walks into a bar at sunset, takes his hat off and wipes his brow with the back of his shirtsleeve.

"After a hard day's work you deserve a cold beer," said the bartender.

"Gimme a cold beer," he said. "It's been a long day but it's all worth it now."

The rest of the work crew walked into the bar.

"We've been working hard and now working time is through," they said.

"There's nothing like a cold beer when all is said and done."

"Man this beer hits the spot," said one, "all day long, while I was working, I was imagining how good this was gonna taste."

"Yeah, there's nothing like an ice cold beer after a hard day's work," said another.

CLI. A mutt barks at the service entrance as the foursome, still using their bridge game aliases, climb up to the bedrooms.

A computer would jam under all the distractions in a watchdog's eye or, scrolling through a long list of contemporary enemies (headed by "shape shifters"), never recognize the Smokers as they scale the award-winning garden walls.

North goes down on East and the branches out the window shift like scars on a toymaker's hand.

When he's finished he gets up and walks to the b~throom where a Smoker is waiting and beats him until his body is rich with contusions.

"Getting hurt makes a doctor a better doctor," he mutters as he climbs out the open window.

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Music Lesson Artie Shaw

O

n a Wednesday evening in June, 1935, a new radio series, "Robert Neal Presents Albie Snow and his Orchestra," made its debut on the CBS network.

Featuring a small jazz band combined with a classical woodwind quintet-flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn-the first show came on over the entire network at ten-thirty p.m. after twO whole days of the longest and most grueling rehearsals ever heard of for a popular music program, especially one with no sponsor.

The second, a week later, rook even more rehearsal than the first.

People in the business agreed that the series represented a radical departure from any other musical program on the air. But there were problems. Aside from the amount of money it would have cost ro keep the show on the air for a full thirteen weeks-which was obviously an important concern ro the CBS accounting department-the thing that brought the series (0 an abrupt end was the simple issue of economic practicality. As Bob Neal, the program's producer, had remarked the day the band got together for its first rough run-through, CBS was not in the concert business. And while the programing men in the New York office were aware of the enthusiastic reaction of musicians and other such people, they knew there were not enough of them out there to warrant continuing a series that required almost two days of rehearsal for each half-hour show before its finicky young conducror was sufficiently satisfied with his band's performance (0 permit it ro go on the air. The whole project had become a thorn in CBS's corporate hide.

And so here was AI Snow (or ''Albie,'' as he was now known to whatever audience had heard his band's first two broadcasts), at age twenty-four, sitting in Bob Neal's little office the day after the second show, sipping cup after cup of stale black coffee and being told that unless he agreed to certain "compromises"-which amounted (0 abandoning the entire concept of the program ... and play more hit songs instead of all those old standards nobody gave a damn about ... and add a couple of singers to give the band some commercial appeaL.and, most important, cut rehearsals down to a reasonable schedule ... say, four or five hours, which was in fact a fairly liberal amount of time for a "sustaining show" that, as it s(Ood, no sponsor would (Ouch with a sixty foot pole-unless he agreed to all those conditions, the series would be canceled after the next program.

"But-Jesus, Bob!" AI burst out on being confronted with that ultimatum after what he had thought was a fairly good second show. "How can they expect me to agree (0 all that? I can understand why they're disturbed by all that rehearsal. And if there was a way (0 cut down on it, you know I'd do it. But there just isn't. And as for adding singers-that'd be the end of the whole thing. This isn't that kind of a program. Besides, I wouldn't do that kind of a program. Hell, rather than that I might as Artie Shaw plays the clarinet. He is the author ojThe Trouble with Cinderella, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead andThe Best ofIntentions. This story is excerpted from Sideman, forthcoming.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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well go back to being a sideman and forget all the headaches of getting a band like this to sound the way it should. The only reason I wanted to do this show-without even knowing whether I'd ever be paid for all the arrangements I did-was that I figured it'd be .. .! mean, I had no idea a thing like this would ... aah, the hell with it."

Bob sat there, shaking his head. His hair was rumpled and he looked haggard.

He had just spent over an hour and a half in Mark Royal's office with several of the top CBS management people.

"Well?" he asked after a moment. "What do you want me to tell them? I said I was sute you wouldn't agree. I knew that. But they said to talk to you and explain that if you didn't there was nothing further to discuss. Either you go along with their suggestions or-" "Su~estions?Those aren't suggestions, man. They're telling me to toss the whole idea of the show into the nearest toilet. Can't you make them understand this is an entirely new type of band, and that if! do what they want, there's no point in going on at all?"

"Don't you think I tried? What do you think I've been doing all morning? My God, Al, I want this to work as much as you do. But you don't know these guys. They just lean back in their chairs and look at you with those ball-bearing eyes, and no matter what you say they just shake their heads and go 'Yeah, well, there it is, son, take it or leave it'-and that's it."

Al said nothing.

"So?" Bob asked. "What'll I tell them?"

Al felt sick. He wanted to go someplace real quiet and lie down and go to sleep for about a month. He sat there, his guts churning with all that rotten coffee, unable to think of a thing to say. What's the matter with these damn people? he thought. If they'd just leave us alone for a few more weeks ....

"Listen," he said, "you think it'd do any good if I talked to them? You know, try to make 'em understand why I can't do what they're asking? What do you think?"

Bob shrugged. "I don't know, Al. I don't think so, I don't think anything'd make any difference. But if you want me to, I'll call Mark Royal and see ifhe'll meet with you.

But you have to understand, this guy is a vety busy man and I don't know ifhe'll even talk to you. But..." picking up the phone, "okay." Then, "Operator, will you please ring Mr. Royal .... My name is Bob Neal, I was just in there with him a few minutes ago ....

No, I don't have an appointment .... Yes, operator, but if you ring his secretary, I'm sure she'll.... No, I just want to tell him something about what we were ... "-closing his eyes and making a sour face as he listened to whatever the operator was saying. Then, sighing, "Yes, operator, I know that. Yes, of course, that's all I've been .... Fine. Thank you."

And a moment later, "Hello .. .!ris? Yeah, it's me again .... Uh- huh. Look, is the bossman free to talk to me for just one minute? Thanks, I'd really appreciate it." He looked at Al and shrugged. "Says she'll see what she can do. Ifhe's free, she'll try to-" Then, his manner abruptly changing, "Hello? Mark? I just wanted to- Yes, I just finished telling him the whole story, everything we discussed .... Well, no, not exactly.... No, no, it's just that he'd like to see you for a minute, if you can spare the time. He wants to explain something about- No, Mark, it won't take more'n a few minutes." Then, his eyebrows rising as he looked at Al, "Yes, that'll be great! Thanks a lot, Mark.... Yes, I

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understand. Fine, we'll come right over. 'Bye." Rising, he came out from behind his desk and, heading for the door, said, "Come on, let's go. He's waiting."

Bob's office was a broom closet compared to Mark Royal's suite. Iris, a tall, thin, efficient-looking woman in a gray suit and a white ruffled blouse, and another, younger woman, sat at two separate desks flanking the door leading to Mark Royal's private domain. As Al and Bob walked in, Iris rose and greeted them and told AI how happy she was to meet him after hearing so many nice things about him and his new band over the past few weeks.

Iris opened the door for them and AI followed Bob into Mark Royal's office. Mr. Royal stood up and gave each of them a cordial handshake. He was in shirtsleeves, and looked much bigger than AI remembered him from the first time he'd seen him.

There was another man with him, seated at the far end of the large walnut desk. AI recognized him as the man who had come into the studio with Royal the day the band had first got together.

Royal waved toward two leather armchairs facing his desk and introduced AI to the other man, whose name was Jim Wilson. Then, turning to AI, he said, "How are you, son. Say, I enjoyed that program of yours last night. You sure have whipped that band into shape since the time I heard it at your first rehearsal. Quite a job, I gather from what Bob tells me. Congratulations."

AI thanked him, and as they sat down Royal went on, "I understand Bob has explained some of the problems we feel we have to lick if the series is to continue.

So ...what can I do for you?"

AI was dumbfounded. Clearly Mark Royal was not the crude monster intent on destroying people's dreams that AI had imagined after what Bob had just told him.

"WelL." He hesitated, feeling as if he'd been about to use all his strength to push open a heavy door and then found it opening at the mere touch of a finger. Blurting out the first thing that occurred to him, he said, "Bob tells me you people aren't exactly happy with the band, or the music we're playing, and that you want me to make a lot of changes I don't see how"-trailing off as Royal held up a hand.

"I don't mean to cut you off, Albie, but this has nothing to do with what we want. It's simply a matter of what works for CBS, that's all. As I say, I really enjoyed the two shows, and so did Jim here. And we both recognize the amount of skill and hard work it's taken you to get a band like that to sound as good as it did on last night's program-and on your first one too. It was damned fine music, no one could possibly argue with that. But you see, that's not the business we're in. Our problem is simple. Or simply stated, anyway. We have to attract the largest possible audience we can for every dollar we spend. That's all, nothing complicated about it. And the quality, or content, of any given program has very little to do with that. Unfortunately. Personally, I happen to enjoy good music, and I appreciate what you're trying to-no, no, seriously. You see, I once played in a dance band myself. At Stanford, years ago. Tenor sax. I even fooled around with clarinet for a while. Point is, I've heard quite a bit about you, and I've listened to some of the records you're on, and I have a lot of admiration for your work. Let me assure you-Jim'II back me up on

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this-that's the reason we accepted this idea of Bob's." (Bob's? AI suppressed an urge to ask what Bob had to do with it.) "Right, Bob?" Bob gave AI a sheepish look, but all he said was, "Absolutely, Mark. That's exactly what you said."

AI had not expected any of this. He drew a deep breath. Then, clearing his throat, "I don't understand. I mean, if that's the case I just don't get it, Mr. Royal."

"Mark," Royal said. "And if you don't mind, I'll call you Albie, all right?"

"Well, sure," AI said, laughing uneasily. "Although I still don't see what was so bad about AI." Jim Wilson spoke up now. "Don't give it a thought, Albie, nobody else understands it either." He laughed shortly. "Andy Rogers, in Publicity, insisted that 'Albie' had more, uh ... intrigue, I think he said, than plain AI. Something of the sort. And since you didn't seem to have any objection, we decided to go with that."

"Yeah, welL." Al shrugged. "No, I don't have any particular objection. Albie was a pretty famous name around New Haven when I was a kid. He used to play football at Hillhouse Migh, and then when he went to Yale he became-" Mark Royal smacked his palm against his forehead. "Albie Booth! Of course. The best damned quarterback Yale ever had! Oddly enough, until you brought it up, I didn't make the connection. Well for heaven's sake .... " And to Jim Wilson, "D'you suppose Andy knew that? Nah. Andy isn't old enough to-" Then, turning back to AI, ''Anyway. You were about to say something, Albie?"

AI nodded. "All I wanted to know was, if you liked those first two shows, why not let us go on for a few more weeks and see how the band improves. I guarantee you, you won't believe what you hear if we can just keep going for a couple of weeks.

Every musician I know thinks it's a terrific idea. I've had more long distance calls from guys I've worked with around the country who happened to tune in and ... well, more than I'd have believed."

"I don't doubt it for a moment, Albie," Royal said. ''As I told you, I think it's one of the most interesting and unusual bands I've ever heard. But what we're after is a large enough audience to persuade a sponsor to pick up the series so he can reach that audience. Surely you understand that, Albie. That's what radio is all about. My personal opinion of this or any other program has nothing to do with it."

"In other words," AI said slowly, "unless something has commercial value, you aren't interested."

"No," Royal said, "I might be very interested, and Jim and Bob might also be.

And every musician in the United States. But I work for CBS, and while CBS is always interested in new ideas, the final question is, how large a share of the listening audience will a given program pull in? That's all there is to it. To put it bluntly, the expenses on these programs are completely out of line for a series that doesn't have mass audience appeal. Repeat, mass. That's the business we're in, son."

"I see," AI said. Then, after a brief pause, "I appreciate your taking the time to see me. But-do you mind if! ask you something? Of course, if you're too busy.... " And as Royal shook his head, "What I don't understand is ... you're obviously a well educated man, and a real smart one too, or you wouldn't have this job. How do you square that with some of the things you have to do? Like, cancelling a series you

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know is good. You don't have to answer that, but I'm really curious. See, I had no idea what kind of a man I'd be talking to before I came in here, but now that I've met you I realize I could learn a lot from you. The thing I can't figure out, though, is how a man like you ... how do you live with some of the decisions you've got to make. Doesn't it make you feel sort of...rotten?"

Royal had sat there quietly, smiling benignly at AI. Now he nodded and said, 'All right, Albie, let's see if I can help you with that. The point you've raised is not unfamiliar to me. You just have to remember one thing if we're going to communicate. It's an imperfect world, son. The big difference between us, aside from some ten or fifteen years, is that I've learned to accept the idea that the world is not perfect. So I do what I must to survive and try to have as good a life as I can. Or, to put it another way, I do the best I can in the circumstances. Does that help?"

Jim Wilson and Bob had sat there looking from Mark Royal to AI and back again as though they were watching a ping-pong game. AI glanced at Bob and shrugged.

Then, turning back to Royal, "No, Mark. See, I'd already figured that out from some of the things you said. You know-it's an imperfect world, and since we can't make it perfect we may as well accept its imperfections. And of course that lets us all off the hook. What I can't help wondering is, doesn't it still make you feel pretty bad at times?"

Royal looked over at Jim Wilson, then suddenly let out a roar of laughter. And as Wilson gave him a startled look and then began laughing uncertainly, Royal turned back to AI and said, "Let me tell you a little story, son. A good friend of mine, who spent a number of years trying to become a serious painter and darn near starved to death, finally decided he'd had about all the nonsense he could take about the ineffable spiritual rewards of a life devoted to fine art. He ended up a very rich man. In the insurance business, of all things. And when someone who'd known him when he was still a struggling young artist asked him how he felt now that he'd sold his soul to the Devil, he said, 'Well, you know, I hung around for about ten years waiting for the old boy to make me an offer, but he never did show up.' " He began laughing again.

AI smiled. "Your friend's got a point there all right. Would you like to hear a story I've always liked?" Royal nodded. 'This one is an old Chinese fable. A boy's father ordered him to go into the woods and pick up some twigs and branches to make a litter so they could carry the boy's grandfather out into the forest because the old man was too old to work and they couldn't afford to keep feeding him. The boy had no choice but to obey, and he and his father carried the old man way out into the forest where they set him down. The father was about to leave when he saw the boy helping his grandfather off the litter and then picking it up. 'We don't need that anymore,' he said to the boy. 'But father,' the boy said, 'we will when you get old.'"

There was a momentary silence. Mark Royal's expression underwent a subtle change. He gave AI a quizzical look, then nodded. "That's an interesting little yarn, Albie, but I don't quite see how it applies here." ''I'm not too sure I do either," AI said, "but it seems to have some bearing on the things we've been discussing. Want to know what I think is wrong with this imperfect world of ours? This may sound sort of sophomoric to you, but it occurred to me while you were talking about the mass audience and what it would or wouldn't accept. Care to hear it?"

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"Why not?" Royal nodded, but AI sensed he was getting a bit impatient. 'Tm always happy to learn things I may find useful." And with a polite smile, "Who knows? Perhaps I'll quote you at our next sales meeting."

AI laughed. "I don't think so, Mark, but here it is anyway. No matter how deep anybody buries shit, the mass audience will find it, and dig it up, and buy tons of it.

How's that grab you?"

Mark Royal glanced at Jim Wilson, then at Bob, and though his manner remained as smooth and controlled as ever, Al had the feeling he might be just a tiny bit miffed. All he said, though, was, "I can't say I disagree with the basic thrust of that, Albie, but I'd hate to believe that was all there was to it."

AI rose to his feet. "Yeah, well, that's something I can understand. I don't imagine it'd be pleasant for a man like you to accept the idea that no matter how hard he tries to make himself believe otherwise, he's using all his knowledge and energy to sell piles of shit to millions of people who don't know any bener than to keep buying it."

"My God, AI!" Bob said when they gO{ out ro the hallway and started walking toward his office. "Did you really have to make that last crack? After all, the guy does the best he can, and when you get right down ro it, what he says makes a lot of sense. I mean, Mark really knows what he's talking about. So what was the point? What'd it get you?"

AI looked at him. "What'd it get me? Nothing, Bob, not a goddamn thing. What bugs me is, maybe there is a decent guy hiding in there behind all that polish and sophistication. But he just knocked our show off the air, never mind all the thought and hard work we've put in on it. And he's finished me off along with it. So don't expect me to like him. I could understand it ifhe was some dumb shmuck who doesn't know any better. But there he is, in that great big office sining in that fancy leather chair behind that great big desk-with that stooge at his elbow ready to laugh at his jokes and agree with everything he says-and meanwhile telling me how much he enjoys the music I'm trying to make, and yatata yatata. Including that remark about having once been a musician himself, and all the rest of that horseshit. Jesus H. Kec::rist! A man like that, with all the expensive education he must have had to get where he is. And for what? To spend his life selling piles of shit? Mass audience my ass! Fuck it, man. I'm sick and tired of the whole damn mess. I'll do next week's show, but I don't want ro talk about it anymore." They had arrived at the row of elevaror doors at one side of the corridor. AI stopped and began stabbing viciously at the Down bunon.

Bob looked surprised. "Where're you going? Don't you think we ought to go back to my office and try to find some way to-" "No. There's not a goddamn thing we can do. You heard what the man said.

And he's right."

An elevator door slid open, and as AI stepped through it Bob stood there with a disconsolate look on his face. For a moment Al felt sorry for him. But as the door closed and the elevator started down he thought, Screw it, what's the use of feeling sorry? For him or anybody else? We all did what we had to. I know I did, and I guess Bob and Mark Royal and Jim Wilson and everybody else did too. Yeah, and look what happens. Talk about an imperfect world. That's what's wrong with it, all right.

Or is it? Because if not, I'd sure better find out what the fuck is wrong with me!

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SEMINARY

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Swing Shift Aaron Cohen "What an idiotic business ... The hell with it."

-Artie Shaw

N

obody ever could play clarinet like Artie Shaw. He hit unbelievably high registers and swung like mad once he got there. Shaw led crack bands from the '30s through the '50s that featured such luminaries as Billie Holiday and trumpeter Roy Eldridge.

When he wasn't satisfied with what was then considered a traditional jazz band line-up, he skillfully arranged for strings or orchestras. For many, he remains the most remarkable talent of the swing era, a virtuoso whose hit records are far more substantial than the nostalgia-soundtrack fodder produced by many of his contemporaries.

Duke Ellington's clarinetist, Barney Bigard, once told jazz critic Gene Lees that Shaw is "the greatest clarinetist who ever lived." Contemporary musicians, who inhabit a musical universe much altered since the Swing era, also acknowledge a debt to Shaw. John Carter, for example, who brought Ornette Coleman's harmonic developments to the clarinet, was a friend of Shaw's, while Hal Russell of the NRG Ensemble, who combined the intensity of Albert Ayler with the electric slam of punk rock, recorded "The Artie Shaw Suite," as a tribute before Russell died in 1992 (the tapes are still unreleased). And saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter told Down Beat in October 1995 that '~rtie played intelligent. He found another way to play."

Shaw's music is unique. It blurs boundaries between composition and improvisation, and yet it has also been enormously popular. Like swing in general, Shaw's playing is at once esoteric and populist, sophisticated and accessible. He became a huge star in the years just before World War II, and married a succession of movie goddesses. And then he decided to walk away from fame.

Shaw has always been pretty explicit about the aspects of the music industry that drove him away. His 1952 autobiography, The Trouble with Cinderella, is a sharp attack on record companies, business culture, and American ideas of success. The book is extremely short on the damp tales of celebrity doings that usually mark the genre; instead it describes a person who could grapple with the absurdities that brought him stardom without drowning in narcissism or self-pity.

His provocations were never limited to the entertainment industry. Touring the Jim Crow South with an integrated band in the 1930s, he ran afoul of angry bigots more than once. And his political sympathies earned him a disastrous appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the darkest days of the great red hunt. Afterwards, Shaw retreated to a brief exile in Europe.

Today, 85 years old and as abrasive as ever, he continues to excoriate the music industry and regards contemporary political developments with some astonishment. The man is still wonderfully choleric. And although Shaw gave up playing years ago, he actively writes for four hours a day and is planning a 12-CD retrospective of his life's work from his home in Southern California. Shaw spent one afternoon chatting over Aaron Cohen writes for DownBeat and Coda.

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the phone with Tom Frank and me about his views and career.

Listening to the recordings that Shaw made from the 1930s through his final retirement in the early '50s, it's not difficult to hear why his contemporaries praised him so highly. After cutting through a few quaint and regrettable trappings (such as the goofY war whoops on "Indian Love Call"), Shaw's beautiful and mysterious technique is still fresh today. Check out the way he screams unpredictably in and out of "Nightmare" while the band, seemingly oblivious, tromps through its basic rhythmic scheme. In one of the gems of Shaw's later years, "Love of My Life," he shows how an alluring solo can be built on concentrated restraint. The compilation on which that song appears, The Last Recordings, demonstrates the influence on Shaw of such varied figures as Bela Bartok and seminal jazz craftsman (and onetime Shaw roommate) Bix Beiderbecke. Another reissue, The Indispensible Artie Shaw, vol. 5/6 (which covers the years 1944-1945) is a terrific presentation of his orchestral works and his famous small group, the Gramercy Five.

Shaw maintains there were no blueprints for his constant switching of bands and formats, a tendency music scholar Gunther Schuller notes in The Swing Era. "I can only say I did what I had to do and what I felt like doing," Shaw says. "I mean, I don't think you can go and ask a composer who writes for symphonies why he wrote sonatas. Beethoven wrote 111 sonatas, and he wrote songs for string quartets, and he wrote symphonies, operas, overtures. You get bored doing the same thing if you're trying to grow as a human being, which some people insist on. Other's don't.

Guy Lombardo bragged that he never changed his music in his entire life, and it worked for him. But that's like Henry Ford saying 'We're still doing the Model T.' It doesn't make sense to me. So I never thought about why I did it. I only knew that I was bored and I had explored one thing as much as I needed to and then I decided to change into something else. It wasn't a matter of 'creative effort.' Those are not terms you think of. You do the best you can and when you're doing the best you can, sometimes you approach it and sometimes you don't."

Shaw believes that the multi-disc set that he is assembling under the tide Good Enough Isn't Good Enough will constitute the most accurate presentation of his musical career. Not only will it be a comprehensive collection, but Shaw is using an unusual criterion to select the recordings-namely "those things that I did-at whatever time it was-that I thought came closest to meeting my intentions." Recording techniques in the pre-tape era, he recalls, only rarely allowed the bandleader's ideas to be translated unproblematically into the finished product. For one thing, "you had a committee.

You had 17 men, or five men, or 22 men or 40 men in a studio. They could goof, anybody could goof." And, since all recordings had to be performed straight through without benefit of remixing or alteratiorts of any kind, artists played cautiously. "You had to start a piece and there was three minutes and 15 seconds," Shaw recounts.

"Toward the end you got pretty concerned when you had a really good [record] behind you, so you tended to play safe. You didn't want to have to go back and redo the whole thing and maybe leave out a really good beginning to get a good ending."

Artie Shaw's music is remarkable, but in some regards he should be recognized for being as much a part of his time as ahead of it. The Swing era was unique in America's cultural history because some brilliant music became immensely popular, 80 â&#x20AC;˘

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and because popular artists did not shy away from open political dissent. As David W Stowe observes in his perceptive book, Swing Changes, the distinctive modes of jazz performance not only reflected but played a key role in achieving the social progress of the 1930s.

"The central cultural link," Stowe writes, "is the New Deal, understood not as a collection of legislative initiatives and alphabet agencies but as a broad-based cultural movement. Swing did more than symbolize this movement; it participated in direct, material ways. Swing was the preeminent musical expression of the New Deal: a cultural form of 'the people,' accessible, inclusive, distinctively democratic, and then distinctively American."

Stowe argues that this democratization resulted not only from the collaborative efforts of such bands as Ellington's and Basie's to bring American folk art to international acclaim-jazz musicians involved themselves in the various progressive political causes of the day. Ellington was officially investigated for his endorsement of the Ail-Harlem Youth Conference of 1938 and worked at a fund-raiser for the Hollywood chapter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Benny Goodman also worked on behalf of volunteers who fought agair;st fascism in Spain.

But Shaw's once-notorious eruptions seem particularly relevant today.

Shaw describes his decision to hire Billie Holiday in the mid-1930s as a purely musical matter, but others have noted its political significance. Music historian Stuart Nicholson writes in a recent biography of the singer that Shaw's courageous stance in presenting Billie Holiday with his band has frequently been overlooked or down played over the years, overshadowed perhaps by his own phenomenal success that was to come in the following months. His part in fighting for racial equality never received the recognition of his great rival, Benny Goodman, but Shaw employed drummer BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Zutty Singleton in his first ensemble as early as 1936. He also featured, at various times, Hot Lips Page and Roy Eldridge and featured the work of composer William Grant Still. 'I was doing what 1 could,' said Shaw, 'but 1 wasn't in a position to change the attitude of the masses of people toward black-white relations.'

Saxophonist Les Robinson recalls that once the integrated band had to be defended forcibly: when Holiday was attacked by a barroom lout in Kentucky, Shaw-in a curious anticipation of Sid Vicious-belted the assailant with his clarinet. Today Shaw disputes some of the details. "I have too much respect for the clarinet to hit somebody with it," Shaw says. "I might have kicked somebody in the head, but I doubt it."

At about the same time, Shaw was becoming a uniquely volatile critic of the growing commercialization of jazz, especially the marketing tendencies that threatened to turn over artistic decisions to outside managers. Shaw briefly quit the music industry in 1939 after a year of phenomenal success, denouncing the business as he left. The explosion was reported in the Saturday Evening Post and is recounted by David Stowe: "Any_ one can lead a dance band," Shaw insisted. 'The average band leader is only a from, a window dressing." With money, musicians, and a good PR man, Shaw boasted he could "make Joe Doakes who doesn't know a C scale from a snare drum, one of the most popular band leaders in America."

Of course, he added, bandleaders must be prepared to "fight politics, corruption, and a system of patronage" to succeed in a field that was" 10 per cent art and 90 per cent business." Today, Shaw believes, the exploitation of art by business continues unabated. "The corporate structure has a bottom line, the balance sheet," he says. "If you did well last year, you're OK. Oh, yeah, they talk a lot about 'quality,' but basically their quality comes out of the bottom line. 'Did we make it last year? If we didn't, then we gotta make some changes. Either that or we're outta business.'"

Most of this, Shaw feels, is fairly obvious to musicians, if not to their audiences.

"The culture industry speaks for itself, we all know what that is," he says. "Anybody that's got a pair of eyes and a pair of ears and can read and listen knows that the crap that's going on is beyond belie( It's a wonder we're not drowned in it. I mean, we're all up to our nostrils in it."

But towards theorists like T. W Adorno who assert that jazz itself is just another product of that industry, Shaw shows immediate contempt. "They drive me out of my fucking mind," Shaw growls. "Why don't they just shut up and listen? It's all quack, quack, quack. The gabbling of geese. They don't know what they're talking about because they've never done it."

Despite his animosity towards the music industry, Shaw lauds the basic good taste of the general listening public. "The public, over time, finds better stuff than what the music industry gives them, or wants to give them," Shaw observes. "People were always telling me what records to make, what tunes to make, but I went my own way. And my way has supported me. I picked tunes, and oddly enough they had the lasting power 50 or 60 years later. That's a long time, you know."

Artie Shaw stopped compromising with the music industry when he retired for good in the mid-1950s. But the time away from the clarinet did not diminish his bitter-

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ness. His insider account in The Trouble with Cinderella of the difficulties faced by a touring band, especially under contract to a major record label, should strike a familiar chord for Baffier readers.

Well, a thousand dollars a week may sound like a lot to you. But just try putting together even the worst band in the world, let alone any group of that size thtough which you can even distantly hope to get to the top of the band business. Try to go on operating from week to week, improving your band, constantly bettering the quality of the arrangements you']] have to have in order to improve the band itself Then try to payoff nineteen people out of nine hundred dollars a week, which is what you're going to have left after you've paid an agent ten percent of the thousand for getting you the thousand to begin with.

Shaw's contradictory cultural position at the time he retired-his concurrent stardom and disgust for stardom, his vast popularity and musical sophistication, his status as an industry darling and his dislike for the industry suggests a powerful counterpoint to the fetishization of 'jazz' then being articulated by the Beats. Naturally, Shaw shared those writers' reverence for black culture, but he refused to regard black musicians as the earthy exotics or primeval existentialists that they were to Allen Ginsberg or Norman Mailer. The Harlem figures from whom Shaw learned his craft-Willie "The Lion" Smith and Chick Webb-were not just natural talents or a mysterious, shamanistic 'other,' but disciplined virtuosos. Shaw's time with them was spent in an intense nightly workout-rather than the drugged frenzies or speeding cars preferred by Jack Kerouac-through which he was able to develop his own sound.

But the humanitarian faith Shaw evokes in Cinderella takes on a bleak resonance as he relates how he hid his Jewish backround (he was born with the name Arthur Arshawsky), partially because of the ethnic hatred that was hurled at him during his lonely childhood in New Haven.

Cinderella echoes many of the larger themes articulated by Jewish-American writers of Shaw's generation. His vivid account of growing up in the Jewish working class and being osBAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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tracized for his race and intellectual curiosity reflect the same largely forgotten world as the late Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Shaw also describes fame with the same kind of mocking horror that Nathanael West so effectively conjured. And Shaw's continuing encounters with anti-Semitism-later among American hipsters in the 1950s-informs his 1965 collection of novellas, I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead!

HUAC tried ro do worse than merely ostracize Shaw when they subpoenaed him to testifY in 1953. After his deposition to the committee, a New York Times headline declared, "Artie Shaw Says He Was Red 'Dupe,' " but the bandleader remembers that day differently. HUAC was "looking for prominent people," Shaw recollects, and "I had joined a lot of organizations." Membership in these liberal groups, according to the political logic of the day, was enough to cast one's patriotism into doubt. Grilled by the committee about his activities as a member of the innocuously-named "Peace Congress," Shaw replied, "I see nothing wrong with having a bunch of people from different countries coming together and talking about peace."

"Don't you know that was a Communist fronted party?" persisted his inquisitor. "If you tell me about a Republican fronted one, I'll join that," Shaw replied.

Shaw adds that his previous outspokenness may have been part of why HUAC called him in. "Capitalism deserves to be debunked," Shaw says. "You go to war with a country for a few dollars, but you won't go to war for a citizen's life. We're out there to protect capital. That's why I was hauled before HUAC. .. , because I made the major mistake of thinking. Don't ever do that, at least not in a public way, and unfortunately, I was a public figure at that point."

The HUAC episode gave Shaw a bad taste for Cold War America, and he exiled himself to Spain shortly afterwards. The ruling fascists in that country didn't seem to care that an American officially accused of communist sympathies had fled to their midst. "Franco never knew I existed," Shaw recalls. "Spain, when I was living there, was one of the few countries in the world where nobody knew where you were or who you were. I did a lot of fishing, a lot of thinking, and some writing." But after a few years, Shaw returned to America. ''I'm not cut out to be an expatriate," he says. "I don't like wine that much."

Since his resettlement in the U.S., Shaw has untertaken a string of disparate activites. For a while he ran a rifle range and manufactured guns. He even placed fourth in a national marksman's competition. According to Fred Hall's Dialogues in Swing, Shaw imported foreign films and "almost bought Columbia pictures at one point." While working on the reissue package of his records, he has also taught courses in aesthetics at Oxnard College and written a plethora of short stories, some of which were published in the 1989 collection, The Best ofIntentions.

Nowadays, Shaw is working on that 92-chapter autobiographical novel which, in Dostoevskian fashion, he intends to be the first part of a trilogy. "Generally I get four hours of writing in, or editing," Shaw says. "I've been on this book for 15 years.

I go to lectures, hear other bands, but not that often, there's very few that are good enough to listen to."

Shaw also observes the contemporary cultural and political scene with resignation. "It's very hard for me to take anything seriously. You've gotta be very young to think you're going to make much of a dent." Shaw, of course, made a rather sizable

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dent. "I did make a small difference," he concedes, when we protest his claim of insignificance. "I was in World War II, and went around the Pacific playing for the troops, but there was this enormous conflict. I was one little tiny flash in all that."

Despite this sense of withdrawal, his 1979 account of surviving McCarthyism is, if not a rallying cry, then a welcome consolation for a time when a crop of young Republicans are reviving the religious Right: I'm convinced that the thing that saved me, the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was sheer downright orneriness, the fact that I was just too damned mulish to lie down and oblige a pack of righteous idiots who believed they'd cornered the market on truth. Besides, I was curious to see what might happen next. Who knows? (1 kept thinking) there may be a sudden outbreak of mass sanity. Hey, don't laugh. It may happen yet.

Listen, anything is possible.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Through in-depth examinations of six representative films-Jaws, The Deer Hunter, The Manchurian Candidate, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day- Rushing and Frentz examine how we rework Western myths and initiation rites in the face of new technologies.

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The Manly Apocalypse l. Two-Fisted Tales

A cowcatcher jaw splinters the door.

"Jack Ginch, you slants!" The opium den clears.

Strike a match-so much for that sinister laundry.

Three roundhouse rights seduce the blonde hostage.

Jack leaps to mount the fleeing V-boat.

"Need a light, Fritz?" Jack applies the blowtorch.

"Round here we vote for the master race."

Now back to H Q for a fistful of Scotch.

2. Liberte, Egalite The Davester brands the keg with a delta.

Azure bandanas bandage pledge haircuts.

Kilt party, motherfuckers! Blow my fucking bagpipe!

Big Brad surreptitiously sizes up his delts.

3. Cop on the Edge Colson stalks from the shakedown room.

Veterans pound their desks. Paperwork!

Rookies scald the Chief with coffeejust what he needs when his wife's found Krishna.

Colson surprises the jet ski smugglers.

Bayside warehouses go up in flames.

The Lieutenant takes credit. Meanwhile, Heather bustily re-educates warring multi-ethnic street gangs.

4. The 01' Flea-Flicker Kohart posts through the beer commercial.

Whiteman throws long with his broken arm.

The director writes it in, but Vanuatu stumbleshe takes out a Plowgirl; the pom-poms fly.

Kohart thinks fast through his broken neck.

Plowmen move faster; Ko's head severs.

Woof! Woof! Woof! It splits the uprights.

Kohart spikes it and reclaims his helmet.

5. Battle Royale The Giant swings his fifty-pound skull.

Hacksaw Jim's two-by-four snaps like a matchstick.

Chief Strongbow won't war-dance tonight, kemo sabe.

Shredded turnbuckle litters the ring.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Superfly Snuka toes the cables tightthe Giant's distracted with Hacksaw's corpse.

Super fly kicks. The arena goes dark.

The Star-Spangled Banner rises from the ashes.

6. Forced Merger The company chopper rises from the squash court.

Lawson dons his Armani shades.

He checks his Rolex. Time to deal, sucker!

He dials himself on his mobile phone.

It rings. He won't answer. He yanks the antenna.

He grins at himself in the polarized glasslet him wait. Then he clicks off the phone with a wink.

No mercy. He cuts himself out of the loop.

7. What Thundarr Said Rogue comets reverse the spin of Earth.

The moon hangs in halves. Rising from the cataclysm, Thundarr glowers out of his hairshirt.

Ookla thunders in on his dinosaur horse.

Princess Ariel wryly looks on. "Lords ofLight!"

Serpentine necks lift from the water.

The Sun Sword buzzes. Heads litter the riverbank.

Dynamos, robots, whirlybirds, slot machines creak and falter with an oath and drop-kick.

Thundarr isn't finished. "Ookla! Ariel! RIDE!"

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-Greg Fiering BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Excerpted from The System by Peter Kuper, published by DC/Vertigo. © and ™ 1996 Peter Kuper 90 •

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The Dustbin of Theory Greil Marcus' Hipster Historicism Chris Lehmann

E

very age produces its own characteristic interpretation of history, and it seems entirely appropriate that in the America of the late twentieth century, ours should be the brainchild of a rock critic. England had its Macauley, France its Micheletnow America, a nation whose relationship to the past has never been the most stable thing in the world, has, standing expertly athwart the sensibilities of the sixties insurgents and the postmodern cultural elite, its Greil Marcus.

Not that Marcus is actually essaying much in the way of American history, mind you. Keeping a sense of history steeped in the fashionable maxims of the present makes for a difficult tension, so Marcus is something of a temporal and geographic bricoleur, assembling pertinent bits of culture and context where it suits him to find them. But that, too, seems entirely fitting-aren't we by now officially in the era of the new global economy, in which place and time have all the permanence and cultural specificity of an MTV jump cut? And aren't the old histories, as Marcus himself argues in his recently published collection of essays, The Dustbin ofHistory, awfully shopworn, tainted by their own cabal of "interested" compositors? "The legend we use for history," he argues in a postmodern shibboleth as tired as it is vague, "is a master-narrative, a narrative that cannot be easily interrupted, revised, or seized, but can only, in certain moments, be replaced .... Any sociery's master-narrative is by definition an untruth. It is an interested construction rather than a literal, all-seeing account of what really happened."

Marcus' recent forays into history, in any event, are extremely revealing cultural documents in their own right. The most ostentatiously learned of rock critics, Marcus long ago won a spot on most hip American Studies syllabi with his 1975 book, Mystery Train, which likened, among other things, the career of Elvis Presley-a great white wonder indeed-to that of Herman Melville. For many years Rolling Stones book critic, Marcus cultivated an air of eclectic sophistication in the interpretation of popular culture. In later years, as he published in such estimable culture organs as Artforum and The Threepenny Review, his subject and audience grew more esoteric and highbrow. Everywhere he published he showed a growing eagerness to link up his aesthetic judgments with full-blown theories of historical change.

This impulse found abundant expression in Marcus' mammoth, reputationmaking study of the avant-garde aesthetic and political roots of punk rock, Lipstick Traces. Published in 1989 by Harvard University Press, Lipstick Traces was no standard fan's history. Rather, it interpreted the punk movement-or, more precisely, the career of the Sex Pistols, upon whom Marcus is strangely fixated-as the latest eruption in what he calls the "gnostic myth of the twentieth century."

This, needless to say, required a good deal of explaining, and it is in the course of this explaining that Marcus reveals how completely his idiosyncratic theories of hisChris Lehmann is Managing Editor ofIn These Times.

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tory and culture reflect the pernicious fin-de-(vingtieme) siecle American impulse to privatize both the past and political present. To understand the appeal of this singularly ponderous and unpersuasive book, though, requires a brief look back far beyond the twentieth century. The philosophical hero of Marcus' book, gnosticism, reached its peak influence as a rival creed to Christianity when the Roman empire was inching toward oblivion in the second century A.D., and has long exerted appeal for heretics both religious and cultural-the sort of people Marcus admiringly describes as "cranks." It's a bewilderingly complex body of belief, easily distorted and conscripted in the service of the crank-of-the-moment, and periodically rearing its head in new forms as a heretical tendency within the Christian Church.

For all that, however, it was, in its day, an entirely coherent theological system, based chiefly on the profoundly depressing notion that humanity resided in a colossal cosmic error, desperately alienated from its proper spiritual place. Gnostics held creation to be the handiwork of a diabolical (if clumsy) semi-divine agent known as the demiurge---and all that flowed from it, from the grain of the field to the human body, was irredeemably corrupt and doomed. The true home of the suffering spirit, gnostics believed, was a realm of unconditioned Being called the pleroma, where a tiny minority of adepts schooled in gnosis (the Greek word for knowledge) would find repose ar..d communion with the true God. Gnosticism, in other words, is a deeply world-denying faith, one that affords obvious parallels to the sensibility of our own age. The most able summary of the movement, Hans Jonas' 1958 book, The Gnostic Religion, found many affinities between gnosticism and existentialism-an overlap to which Jonas, a former student of Heidegger, was keenly attuned. Subsequent commentators, notably the conservative philosopher Erich Voegelin, have claimed to locate in gnosticism the ur-heresy that engendered the elaborate crypto-totalitarian philosophical systems of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx. Contemporary gnostic revivalists, such as literary critic Harold Bloom, meanwhile, see the gnostic anxiety to repudiate creation and achieve rarefied spiritual repose off the world-historical stage as a deeply American impulse.

They can't all be right, and yet there is a sense in which they are. The gnostic flight from worldly being-and perhaps especially from all the sordid tales of human error and delusion that history tirelessly inventories-has become a signal, if littleremarked, motif in modern intellectual life. Consider, for example, the severe judgments on history pronounced by Hegel ("a slaughtering bench") and Marx ("a nightmare" and "an Alp" weighing on the backs of succeeding exploited generations).

And gnosticism occupies, if anything, a still more privileged place in postmodern philosophy and criticism. Thinkers as diverse as Jean-Fran<;:ois Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard routinely announce the ultimate unreality of any sustained sense of historical continuity. Baudrillard, in particular, has gone Marx and Hegel one better by denouncing the reality of the present-most notoriously in his apparently earnest proclamation that the Gulf War never actually occurred, but was, like most choreographed media spectacles, a mere "simulacrum" of a real event.

Baudrillard's delusional pseudopolitics is but one limit of the gnostic tendency to view the cosmos as a terrifYing, uninterrupted nightmare, opaque to any effort to force it to disclose meaning. Likewise, a spiritual and absolutist notion of "negation"-the

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principled refusal to accept conventially ordered daily life-unifies the successive avantgarde movements of dada, situation ism and punk rock that Marcus threads together in Lipstick Traces. But Marcus' understanding of gnosticism is a curious one: when speaking of dada, for example, Marcus identifies "the gnostic myth" as "the conviction that there was something in the twentieth century that could never be controlled or understood." By denying the "ubiquity of sin," Marcus continues, the historical gnostics asserted "there was no necessary separation of human beings from God ... because even as God created human beings, human beings created God and whoever achieved this knowledge became 'not a Christian but Christ.'"

That this is a preposterous reading of gnosticism is not so much the pointthough it does bear noting. The gnostic outlook is profoundly dualistic, wedded at its core to the dramatic separation of God and humanity. This austere ethos of absolute, metaphysical separation is what makes gnosticism resonate so strongly with the nihilistic temper of our own time. It also explains why the efforts of critics like Voegelin and acolytes like Marcus to depict gnosticism as a primitive communist sect break down. Indeed, gnosticism resembles nothing so much as the hermetic isolation of the contemporary consumer-mediated, to be sure, by glimpses of carefully choreographed psuedocommunities (daytime tabloid TV, talk radio, the Internet). But Marcus believes exactly the contrary, that the gnosticism of his feverish imaginings acts as a sort of universal philosophical solvent, cutting through every form of human separation-to be precise, those of "patriarchy, aurhority, hierarchy, the division of humanity into rulers and ruled, owners and workers, the separation of every individual from everyone else, and oneself from oneself."

Here is where Marcus' gnostic speculation accelerates from misguided antiquarianism into full-fledged liberation theology. Lipstick Traces, a sort of Women Who Run with the Wolves of hipster culture, beholds the buried gnostic tradition in every avantgardist impulse, beginning with the Reformation and the French Revolution and culminating (for now) with the snarling heresies of the Sex Pistols.

It's a disheveled tale, to put it mildly, with overlapping ephemera standing in for historical argument. For instance, Johnny Rotten's real name, John Lydon, resembles that of John of Leyden, leader of an Anabaptist insurgency in sixteenth-century MUnster. Mere coincidence, you ask? Why, yes. But Marcus, liberated from the flatfooted empiricism of mere historical analysis, elevates such coincidences into grand gestures of resistance to the coercive master-narratives of the past.

And wrapped around these gestures are serious, and rather extravagant, claims about the nature of history. Chief among them is the typically gnostic conviction that the past does not exist, in any real sense, at all. In one utterly representative outburst, dadaist Tristan Tzara-one of the dramatis personae Marcus dotes on in Lipstick Trace5--announced, ''I'm not even interested in knowing whether anyone existed before me." With a great deal more theoretical sophistication, Marcus' beloved situationists-who furnish the (for him) critical link to the Sex Pistols via secondhand situationist slogans and literature filtering down to punk impresario Malcolm McLaren-express the same deep distrust of history. Situationist leader Guy Debord made this plain in an address (ostentatiously delivered in tape-recorded form) to a class of Parisian sociology students in 1961-even as he invoked "the BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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historical" as a category of change. "The revolution in everyday life, breaking its present resistance to the historical (and to every other kind of change)," he proclaimed, "will create the condition in which the present dominates the past and the creative aspects oflife always dominate over the repe;titive." (Italics in origirpl.)

Many of the situationists' political and critical impulses were quite sound,ibut the avant-gardist affirmation of pasdessness is, ultimately, profoundly reactionary.

The erosion of any sense of historical continuity is one of the signal triumphs of consumer capitalism, not a weapon to be turned against it. Pasdessness not only creates an abiding ignorance of the past as such-of genuine (as opposed to elite aesthetic) movements of resistance and opposition; it also suffuses the perpetually weak and decentered self of the consumer. The purchase of new commodities, after all, is rarely predicated on anything more than their novelty, the illusion of which can only be maintained by continually destabilizing the forces of personal and collective memory. Inverting Freud, advertisers have adopted the creed, "where there was ego, let id be." By announcing their intention to overthrow history, the leaders of dadaism and situationism only further cleared the ground for the triumph of consumerism.

But then, both movements were also deliberate and self-conscious collaborations with the leisure society to begin with, denying the need for work and celebrating both the leisure "revolution" of youth culture and the economy of consumer abundance. In the mock-subversive "detournements" of situationism, for examplein which figures from ads and comic strips are incongruously outfitted with ideological slogans or dry political criticism-one beholds the forbear of the coritemporary advertising motif in which traditional pitches are undercut with a self-serving irony that flatters the viewer's hip sensibilities while creating the meaningless perception that the advertiser is somehow coolly subversive. In this respect, the situationists were avant-gardists indeed.

In seizing on these models of hipster ahistoricism, Marcus supplies an invaluable case study in what misapplied aestheticism does to the interpretation of actual history. For example, the campaigns of state-sponsored mass extermination that have characterized the past hundred years provoke in Marcus, as they have in avant-gardists everywhere, a posture of studied deadened response. "The history of the twentieth century," Marcus announces glibly, was to be the account of the creation of reality through its erasure: through killing people, through the extermination of subjective objects, of realized or potential individuals as forests to be cleared. The triumph of this work can be found in the fact that we have neither art nor language to translate it-that when we tty to think about those who were exterminated in Europe in the 191 Os and 1940s (Hider, 1939: "Who remembers the Armenians?") or in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, in China in

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the 1950s, Indonesia in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s (out of the ashes, the New Man), we can't think of these people as such ....

When Hugo Ball wrote of the need to erase everything that had been written, when Tzara said he didn't care if anyone existed before him, when [dadaist Richard] Huelsenbeck chanted "The End of the World," the dadaists fed on this impulse, even as their disgust over its wastes brought them to life.

In this remarkable passage, one can discern virtually everything about Lipstick

Trace.f--and the scores of kindred critical theory and cultural studies works that enthusiastically adopt the same rhetorical stance-that cries out to be repudiated. First, there is the instant resort to to abstract paradox ("the creation of reality through its erasure") that invites the reader to read the ensuing litany of atrocity as aesthetic irony. Then there is the measured descent from the threat of vivid detail ("the killing of people"), to more leaden, rhetorical paradox ("the extermination of subjective objects"), to strategically self-distancing metaphor, compounded by the cadence of abstraction ("of realized or potential individuals as forests to be cleared").

The reader then encounters the much-repeated claim, itself now a banality, that no representation of such events is possible in art or language (this despite Marcus' own clumsy effort to do just that in the preceding, egregious "forest" metaphor).

Then the rapid-fire litany of historical terror and genocide, punctuated only by the quotation from Hitler and the coy paraphrase of the Khmer Rouge's crimes, both intended ironies that fall bathetically flat. (It is revealing, as well, that Marcus, in his posture of overcivilized fatigue, is content to hold forth the authors of genocide as its historical interpreters.) Penultimately, the confession of a failure of moral imagination, rendered in a tone of affected world-weariness: "We can't think of these people as such," a sentiment that has, in various forms, served Western policy makers well as they, too, sought to establish a self-serving distance from mass slaughter in the Balkans.

Finally, we have Marcus' bid to subsume the whole notion of mass extermination to aesthetic gestures, by appealing to the power of self-dramatizing, pseudo-creative amnesia. This, too, is depicted as yet another paradox-as though anyone who has seriously pondered mass extermination could be brought to care that "the dadaists fed on this impulse, even as their disgust over its wastes brought them to life."

The Marcus view of history, in other words, is aestheticized ro the point of claustrophobic narcissism. The artist gazes into the void and asks, "Who's the fairest of them all?" Nor is this outlook confined to the past. Explicating the random textand-image detournements of situationist Joseph Wolman's 1979 tabloid Duhring, Duhring, Marcus enthuses:

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It is a shaggy dog story. If one puts down Wolman's all-purpose gazette and picks up any other, words and faces leap out of their official contexts, current events and settled history now a scrabble of BrezhnevinvasionUncieScroogeNapoleonstruggle, all referents dissolved inro a meaningless whole. The only irony-the tail that wags the dog-is that if this is a picture of public speech, and public speech is babble, that babble rules the world.

Trippy. Note the inversion here, one at the very methodical heart of Lipstick Traces: An aesthetic statement about the news becomes, in Marcus' hands, interchangeable with the news. History happens to other people; the challenge facing Western avant-gardes is to interpret it in as clever and disorienting a style as they can muster.

Here, too, the gnostic label fits Marcus in ways that he never would acknowledge, ifhe understood what gnosticism was. The corollary of the gnostic repudiation of the world is that deliverence from it is only accessible to a tiny spiritual elite, those vouchsafed the higher truths of gnosis. Likewise, the aesthe~ic elite to whom Marcus relegates control of history can only regard it as an undifferentiated field of polymorphous perversity, at most supplying the "reversible charge" (as Debord calls it) for the occasional rude situationist or punk gesture of scorn. The rest of the worid, gnostics and avant-gardists agree, can remain in hell. This isn't exactly the vanguard of a democratic social revolution.

This gnostic insularity of vision-"all referents dissolved into a meaningless whole"-also helps explain the tremendous appeal of Marcus' book among the elite of art journalists and Cultural Studies commissars who reviewed it. Critics hailed it as a dramatic new moment, a clearing of ground in the study of "radical" culture. "In legitimizing the shooting stars of history," Gail Caldwell wrote in The Boston Globe, "[Marcus] expands the field of vision through which we view the world." Artforum's Diedrich Diederichsen described the material of Marcus' counternarrative as "a series of more or less heroic, more or less criminal attempts to get outside the fatality of the social, outside the system." Interview (well positioned to appreciate the world-historical elevation of aesthetic elites) marveled that "every few pages 'a book about movements in culture that raised no monuments, about movements that left barely a trace' can remind and convince you of Rilke's line: 'There is no place here that does not see you. You must change your life.' " Even Elle got into the act. In an outburst of phony radicalism perfectly aligned with the selling of cosmetics, the magazine's critic Mary Ann Staniszewski intoned that the book was "an examination sensitive to the invisibility of ideology and the issues of power implicit in writing history."

Clearly Lipstick Traces, for all its prodigious failures as political critique and historical narrative, served a more immediate and (to some) a more useful purpose. What passes for the intellectual left these days has become so thoroughly inured to thinking of itself as a vanguardist elite that it couldn't help but regard a tale like Marcus' as beguiling, nay, flattering. The logic went something like this: You can be both Frederic Jameson and Johnny Rotten; you can have tenure and your situationist revolutionary credentials all at once. Such wish-fulfillment fantasies have long been symbolized by the proliferation offaux-daring leather-and-black getups at scholarly conferences; Marcus simply supplied what was universally taken to be evidence that hipness-nothing more

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than the pose of pop-culture fatalism nominally left theorists had been cultivating all along-is the liberating path out of "the fatality of the social."

To judge by Marcus' latest book, The Dustbin a/History, this pose is now being worked up into an all-purpose interpretation of events and artistic expression. Perhaps the most frightening evidence of Marcus' newfound historiographic cachet is "Myth and Misquotation," the text of a commencement address he delivered to the 1988 graduating class of the UC-Berkeley history department. The address, like many voguish postmodern declarations, revolves arround the vacuous claim that "power writes history," a glib bastardization of the researches of Michel Foucault. And Marcus further elaborates that, yes, "events outside the normal circuits of legitimacy... are resistant to history, because history does not know how to account for them." Such an event instead gets "swallowed by the imperatives of history, which are partly the imperatives of myth. History is a story: we want a story that makes sense, is poetically whole, that fits what we already think we know." (Marcus' chief examples of these distortions are a Berkeley speech by Mario Savio, hero of the mid-'60s Free Speech movement and the killing of Meredith Hunter at the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway, both of which allow him to trump later chroniclers with the countercultural calling card of authenticity: He reminds his audience, in so many words, that I was there, man.)

The casual elision of history and myth, like the prior avant-garde campaign to assimilate the past to the present, requires a fundamental misunderstanding of historical thinking. Like his dada and situationist forbears, Marcus opts for aesthetic terminology, tacitly appealing to the largely spurious association of the words "history" and "story." What William Appleman Williams felicitously called "history as a way of learning," on the other hand, requires a maturity and humility of spirit; the ability to imaginatively forsake the narrow boundaries of one's own existence to comprehend the unfulfilled struggles of earlier generations to introduce a modicum of sense. and even justice, into a life that was often deeply senseless and unfair. At the height of the dada rebellion, for example, there was an abundance of culturally influential figures, no less attuned to the age's tragedies, passionately struggling with these questions in public discourse: In this nation alone, Randolph Bourne, Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, WE.B. DuBois, and John Dewey all come to mind. Not one of these figures would be worth trading for the whole self-dramatizing dada contingent.

Qualities such as humility of spirit are now so conspicuously absent from our common world that one scarcely speaks of them without a sense of embarrassment.

The move to aestheticize the past, meanwhile, requires only the monolothic fiction of history as "power"-an especially absurd conflation in the United States, where neither history nor historians have ever exercised a decisive sway on the popular imagination. It is a vision of a past in which human agency is futile by definition, except for the consolations afforded the charmed circle of the liberated artists and theorists who obsessively call attention to that very futility. The opacity of this vision must produce a carefully cultivated narcissism, lest it succumb to full-blown despair.

Why dwell so long on the erring history lessons offered by a rock critic? How influential can he be? A short answer can be provided, of course, by pointing to the imprimatur of Harvard University Press. But the real reason is less obvious, and much BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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more disquieting: Any interpretation of history inevitably colors our understanding of the political present-and Marcus' is influential far beyond the critical-theory elite it panders to. Marcus' refined conspiracy-mongering has obvious affinities with other fixations on the hidden forces of government and history that echo across our blighted political culture-from the well-documented ravings of the militia movement to the total resignation masquerading as worldly hipness that Marcus correctly detects but uncritically celebrates in much of our popular art, literature and cinema. (In addition to Marcus' case studies, the overblown conspiracy cinema of Oliver Stone, the mannered paranoia ofIV's The X-Files. and the smarmy nihilist fiction of Douglas Coupland, Nicholas Baker, Kathy Acker and Will Self are all obvious cases in point, but other examples could be multiplied at numbing length.) All the while, of course, the most appalling political crimes of our age are the most overt: the sustained assault on the public sector, well into its second decade, whose ideology is trumpeted openly in the daily press and the Congressional Record; the all-too vivid, implacable upward distribution of wealth that critics like Michael Lind have labeled the Brazilianization of the U.S. economy; the rampant privatization of social goods, such as education and the access to information, once deemed central to the democratic experiment in America; the relentless narrowing of political participation in a polity openly governed by the access to money. The chill wind of gnosticism blows unacknowledged through what remains of our public life, offering-just as it did in its original incarnation-spurious, cold comfort to the indifferent citizens of an empire in decline.

DUSTY GROOVE A

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Revolution in Cliche-land Andrea Codrington

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here is unrest in the empire of visual cliche. For years American purveyors of "stock photography" presided over a contented realm of jolly milkmen, smiling moms, and satisfied customers. Today, though, it's all teenage temptresses and homelessness. What's happened in the happy house of cliche?

Generic by definition, stock photography has been used since the 1920s to achieve instantly recognizable symbolism in advertising, magazines, annual reports, and industrial brochures. Stock agencies provide Madison Avenue a cheap alternative to expensive shoots, union hours and temperamental talent, collaborating with the ad world to form the backdrop of that phantasm, the American Dream.

A glance through catalogues of stock photography, past and present, provides a fascinating visual guide to this century's marketing cliches-from the surreally waxen tableaus of '50s and '60s white suburban America (the weenie roast; dad playing catch with junior) to the Armani-wearing Masters of the '80s Universe. But today the cliche experts are veering into strange territory indeed: "social realism" featuring staged violence, drug abuse, and sex in Hollywood-like quantities.

Welcome to the "reality revolution," the latest creation of stock photo agencies that know their clients' bottom line cultural requirements: the consumer utopia of the past no longer sells, except perhaps in a recycled, ironic "Nick-at-Nite" kind of way. What moves units these days is dysfunction and dystopia. After all, it was an implied kiddie-porn casting call that revived Calvin Klein's flagging jeans empire, and the disaffected ad campaign of Coca-Cola's OK soda that heightened its appeal to so-called "Gen-X" consumers.

Now, having so long embraced the language of happy consumer utopia, even the stock photo houses are replacing the Vaseline-smeared soft focus with the harsh light of day, the mother-and-child cuddle with a crack baby's wizened face. FPG International, one of this country's largest stock photography houses, would have us believe that this change heralds a coming to terms with the nature of contemporary society, warts and all. Utopia may not sell in today's tough market, but real warts sell even less, so the chances are there's more than just the love of truth behind the company's recent release of Real Life, a stock photo catalogue whose many offerings purport to take into consideration the current atmosphere of "social upheaval, shifting values and an environment on the brink of collapse."

"Instead of skirting controversy," writes FPG chairman Jessica Brackman in Real Life's introduction, "today's ads address it. Real issues. Real emotion. And a style of visuals that capture the essence of our time." But whether the catalogue's photographs take as their point of departure stylized emotion or emotionalized style, one thing is certain: real life, as lived by real people in real situations, is something they do not depict. (For one thing, the people depicted in stock photography are, by and large, paid models who must sign a model-release form before the phot6griip"h begins its commercial circulation.) The "real life" to which the tide refers is the reality of market research, fed back to the consumer via ersatz commercial experience.

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Traditional stock photo catalogues were divided into generalized categories such as People, Industry, Animals, Travel, and Nature to help art directors or account executives locate a particular image. FPG, though, has taken what could be called a more philosohical approach to displaying its latest offerings, with chapter headings that begin with Birth, Childhood and Adolescence, then work through Adulthood, Family, and Aging and finally, for good measure, address such hot topics as Health, Education, Work, and Community. Rather than allowing the photographs to speak for themselves, FPG has jazzed up their presentation by interspersing contemporary buzz words ("natural childbirth," "pre-natal care," "disposable diapers," and "crack babies") with faux-alarming statistics ("50 years ago, a baby born in America grew up in a country that was 90 percent white").

A young girl looks out at the camera, head tilted vulnerably to the side. She has been crying, and the side of her cheek is streaked with tears. She has a shiner that is the same mottled purple as the indistinct backdrop behind her. She is featured, along with a bevy of swollen-lipped, neglected-looking children, in Real Life's Family section, which offers ad execs quick-reference subcategories like Abuse, Divorce and Split-Shift Parenting. But is this social realism or just a shift in cliche? In the 1950s a little girl would have appeared in stock photos with lips painted an innocent, albeit fetishistic, lollipop red; today the pictures resort to the visual language of brutality for effect-the murky background, the pouty sadness and the carefully-painted black eye. While such an image is more likely to be used by non-profit or health-related enterprises, the commercial vernacular of physical and sexual abuse has long been a mainstay for the world of fashion advertising and magazine pictorials.

The "Alternative Lifestyle" subcategory of Real Lifes section on Adulthood is also revealing. Featuring a page of exclusively white, upper-middle-class-looking gays and lesbians engaged in tender (i.e. non-offensive) moments of hugging, hand-holding and Eskimo nose-rubbing, it is testimony more to that demographic's disposable wealth and image-savvy rather than-as the New Right never tires of accusing-its widespread acceptance. Although shot in a number of locations using various color and black-and-white aesthetics, the three photographs meant to represent gay male relationships on one page all depict the same couple dressed in the same clothing, give or take a blazer or overlaid sweater. One black-and-white shot shows them sitting on a staircase, engaged in laughing conversation, arms wrapped lovingly around each other. Flipping ahead 25 pages to Real Life's chapter on Health, subcategory AIDS, one finds the same couple sitting in the same stairwell, only now they are sad and comforting each other-the implication clearly being that one or both have contracted the deadly virus.

Real Life revels in the obsolescence of older stock images. A favorite tactic of its compilers is to juxtapose images of church-going, McCarthy-era America with those of the gritty now. In the catalogue's final chapter on Community, a hokey '50s photo of a smiling girl wheeling her bicycle across a school crossing-aided by a kindly traffic cop-is dwarfed by a grainy black-and-white shot that reveals the blurred outlines of a school bus in the background and a crime scene blocked off with police tape in the foreground.

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Clearly the cliches have changed. But the stock dreams of our consumer culture have not. Apocalypse and social deterioration may be the Next Big Thing-"the single parent, the disillusioned executive, the medically uninsured," as FPG recounts in its catalogue-insecurity has always made a strong sales pitch. But the market itself chugs along unquestioned, unexamined. Whether it's a jolly milkman or a menaced child who appears on the billboard, it's the life defined by products that's being endorsed.

Consumerism, like communism, controls the cliches. Perhaps that's the key to its strength-and also to its ultimate undoing.

Jimmy

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Inter Office Mail David Knowles

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s of this moment I am practicing the letter. Sitting alone at my kitchen table, tonight, ten-thirty, I am practicing how to write the perfect letter with my brand new Bic ball-point pen and stolen company stationery. The problem is that there are so many ways to write this particular letter. In fact, I am licking my chops at all the perfect ways that I can write this letter to my boss, Timothy Billings. Timothy Billings, who just yesterday I caught in the act! Timothy Billings, who is now in the palm of my hand. Timothy Billings, who I never did like just even a little bit as a human being, let alone as the boss of me.

Dear Mr. Billings, It is amazing to me that you should be my boss and I your employee, because really it turns out you are so incredibly stupid, because all the time you are really such a stupid moron. Timothy, today, which is Monday, when I walked into the office not more than one minute late and watched you check your fancy gold watch at me, which of course you wanted me to see you doing, today after you checked your fancy watch when I asked you how was your weekend, and you said, "Relaxing," like you had some kind of monopoly on the goddamn word, I couldn't help but laugh. You probably wondered why I laughed, laughed and then just walked away. Well the answer is that you are nothing but a liar, because I happen to know for a fact that your weekend wasn't relaxing at all. No, not at all relaxing if I understand the meaning of the word, and I think I do.

This is how the letter will begin, probably. That is if I send him a letter at all.

Maybe what I should do is Xerox a copy of the photos, yes, I said photos, the line of four wallet-sized, photo booth photos that I so treasure at this particular time, and just send that, the Xerox, no letter or anything, just a copy of the photos. Photos of Timothy Billings and his little smart-ass secretary, Donna Wilford. Oh, Donna Wilford, how I have waited for this moment! How I have waited for the opportunity to have you here between a rock and a hard place. After two years now of every day waiting outside Timothy's office and watching you twiddle your thumbs, watching you play with rubber bands and paper clips, watching you purposefully avoid any eye contact with me like I wasn't worthy even of a single glance. Like someone as supposedly pretty like you shouldn't even waste a single glance on someone as supposedly ugly as me. Well, I say to you tonight, Donna, that the tables have turned, not that I mean you are still not as pretty as ever, in fact I'd say you're as beautiful as I've ever seen you, but not for the reason you might think. You see, Donna, right this moment I am looking at a photo of your naked breast. Not bad, Donna, really not bad at all, except that I am also looking at Timothy Billings's hands all over your chest, pulling your blousy blouse away from and exposing your left breast. Strangely, I do not see a bra. I am checking again, and still I don't see a bra on you, which strikes me as odd considering that many times in the office I made a mental note about the outline of David Knowles is the author ojThe Secrets of the Camera Obscura BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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your bra underneath those silky blouses you wear, and also that you are a woman, as is plainly evident in the picture in front of me, with rather large breasts that might require the kind of support of said bra. So I ask you, Donna, why no bra? What am I to make of this Ms. Wilford? What is Mrs. Billings supposed to make of this?

Yes, Ms. Wilford, it is important that I see Mr. Billings right this minute for your fucking information, and I want to speak with you a little later, too, if you don't mind.

Maybe you and I could discuss what it is I want to talk to you about over a nice little dinner.

Dear Mr. Billings, As I said before, that you are anybody's boss is a real crack up. That you are married is a hoot. That a married man would take his pretty little secretary in broad daylight into the Woolworth's on Fourteenth Street, all the while his arm wrapped around her shoulders, all the while whispering some dirty little secret into her ear, and waltz right into the photo booth without first checking to see if anyone from the company might be buying pens and envelopes on his day off is just about the most absurd thing I have ever heard. In fact if somebody were to tell me that their boss, or that their husband actually acted that way I might have to tell them they were lying to me. But do you know what? Do you know what is even dumber than that? Do you know that the dumbness doesn't stop there, but even gets so much more intense? Mr. Billings and Ms. Wilford do I have your attention? I'll tell you then. Such out loud laughing and kicking of the orange curtain out into the aisle like a couple of junior high school kids, and me there watching, only a few yards away. Me realizing right then that you were both drunk, not just a little bit tipsy, but full-fledged drunk.

Drunk on a Sunday, no later than four in the afternoon, and me standing there watching with my manila envelopes and my twenty-five Bic ball-point pens.

Flash, one photo. Then you. were not laughing, then everything inside of the orange curtain fell somewhat still. Flash, another photo, then some readjusting. Flash, flash. Me being me, I knew four photos to a session, so I retreated back behind another aisle, but kept an eye on you two none the less.

Dear Mrs. Billings, I think I should ask you to sit down before I say what it is I have to say.

Dear Mrs. Billings, I don't know how to put this. Well, you see, it's about your husband, my boss, Mr. Billings. Mrs. Billings, maybe you'd better just have a look at these pictures.

Please excuse all the interruptions, Mr. Billings. Oh, I am so sorry for keeping you waiting! No longer, not even for a second, will I keep you waiting. Let me continue now, with no further ado, the writing of your own personal letter. Now, Mr. Billings, if it was me, and I've just finished a steamy photo session like that, I'm going to wait around for the pictures to pop out of the slot. Me, I'm not going to move as much as an inch away from the slot. In fact, if there are other people around, which there were, I'm going to get so close that the other people won't be able to peek at the freshly popped-out photos before I snatch them from the slot and walk out of the store. Mr. Billings, that is how a normal person goes about retrieving their photos. In fact, I'd say that that's how ninety-nine percent of the educated people of the world would go about retrieving their photos. So maybe you can answer me when I ask you 106 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER EIGHT

why it is that you think it's going to take the whole five minutes for them to be developed when it clearly says on the machine three to five minutes developing time?

Because I heard you say to Ms. Wilford, "Takes five minutes," like you actually knew what it was you were talking about. Five minutes is the maximum, Mr. Billings.

Three to five does not mean five, it means three to five. Five they are saying just to be safe, just so the customer won't get bent out of shape when three minutes rolls around and the photos haven't shot out into the slot. It certainly does not mean five minutes only, five minutes absolutely. Mr. Billings, you are one of those people who refuses to read the directions, aren't you?

The sight of you taking Ms. Wilford by the hand and leading her past the luncheonette, stumbling drunkenly down the aisle, sloppily drunk, away from the photo booth, filled me with such a mixture of emotions. Disgust, first of all, at such a pathetic display. Do you remember once saying to me, "Is this how you represent the company?" because I managed to tell what most people considered a few funny jokes.

Well now I put it back to you, Mr. Billings. Now I put it right back to you. But then just as quickly as the disgust rose inside of me it was replaced by overwhelming joy.

I checked my watch, Mr. Billings, just like you check your thousand dollar watch in the mornings when I am not so much as a minute late, your one thousand and six hundred and fifty dollar watch, because I did check the price once, Mr. Billings, don't think that I didn't check the price once when I happened to be at Macy's browsing one Sunday af- ~3~i~liii:~llfI~ ternoon. The way I see it, Mr. t ~~1!l[!l~ Billings, your watch can't be all ~~~ that special if just anybody, like me, some nobody like myself could just walk into a Macy's and pick one up. Sure, it may F=''''''=~_ be expensive, but I will tell you ~~~~..;!S ~~~il~~~ai~~~ one thing, that that watch is not ~ altogether unique, not by any means. So to continue, I started the stopwatch function on my I own ten dollar, bought right off 1:;2!;;;--~::= the street for your information, digital watch, and then I peered out into the aisle to see you walking leisurely, absentmindedly, towards the baCK of the store, stopping here and there along the way. At one minute and twenty seconds you picked up a pair of polyester panties and handed them to Ms. Wilford. Oh boy, you both got a good laugh out of that one, BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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didn't you? What a funny guy you are! Polyester panties, right? Pretty tacky, right Mr. Billings? Can you imagine? I have never heard such a funny thing before as polyester.

Who would ever wear such things? Certainly not Donna Wilford, not Donna SilkQueen Wilford, no indeed. One minute and forty-two seconds, Mr. Billings, and you're still strolling farther and farther away from me, still laughing about the panties. It is killing me that still you're walking away from the photo booth. It is like I just can't believe my eyes.

I remember things, Ms. Wilford. You could say I have a memory like an elephant. For example, I remember: "Ms. Wilford, I would like to see Mr. Billings."

"Is he expecting you?" you said without even bothering to stop filing your nails.

"No he is not," "You can't go in without an appointment. He's a very busy man."

"And so am I, Ms. Wilford. As busy as a bee." ''I'm sorry, no appointment, no admittance."

How many times have I had to put up with "no appointment, no admittance?"

Hundreds. And hundreds of "you know the rules." How I hate "you know the rules."

At the two minute mark on my stopwatch I am thinking to myself "you know the rules," Mr. Billings. I am thinking new rules. I am thinking that I will make Ms. Perfect Nails my new secretary.

Two minutes forty-three seconds, Mr. Billings, you lAII~A, THe glanced back, craned your neck I Toof( A CA~ ,-0 ~CtiOOL-, AND THe. CAsBle WM TA-/,I( IN6 A-SOIIT" ~w ~U(;H and saw that the slot was still f41~ DAUGlfreR WA-NreD ,0 ,ee- MONeT, empty. Then you continued, SilT tiE c.0VL.ON'T BIT IICl<trr~ W6u... I f !tAD TO G6r SoMe ~rVfF picking up a couple of bad minfROM THE oTHeR SclIL.DING, ;0 He ton rackets, swatting away at WAlfeD Wltlt.~ I RAN VP~TAIIl~1 AND I Gor A COUP/...G TICI<~~ our OF TtiE imaginary birdies. I took the opST)tcK IN MV DE'SK AND GltvE' portunity to move out into the open, my back to the both of you, and made a pass by the machine, but the receiving slot was empty, then I turned right up the stationery aisle, circled and made another attempt.

Dear Mr. Billings, Let me try and describe the moment when I realized I had you in the palm of my hand.

Me, walking down the now vacant aisle, my leather-soled shoes clicking away a solitary rhythm, and there in front of me as I turned the corner, freshly shot from the slot,

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waited the curved strip of four photos which would forever change my life. With a deep breath I composed myself, and in one fluid motion swept past and snatched the beautiful little things from their holder. Out the door and onto Fourteenth Street, immersing myself in the anonymous sea of people out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon.

Timothy, may I call you Timothy? This morning I truly enjoyed watching your face rwist into a grimace when I asked you, "How was your weekend?" When I kept pressing you "for details all day long on what you did, on where you went, all in that phony at work voice which I normally so despise. "You didn't do anything special, Mr. Billings?"

"No," you said. "Why? Should I have?"

"Oh no, no, no. Just curious. I thought I remembered you telling me you had a big weekend coming up," "Why would I tell you that?"

"You probably didn't."

All day long, Mr. Billings, giving me the sideways glances. Like I was up to something. Did you perhaps see my back when I walked out of the Woolworth's? Or were you too drunk to even tell it was me? Probably you didn't notice at all. Probably you stood in front of that machine for a half an hour, and then contacted a clerk.

Probably, knowing you, you tried to get your money back.

My kitchen table is now filled with drafts of the letter. It is filled with drafts of plans of THe DAY A-Fr~~ flte- SHOW letters, and drafts of straight out CLOS6p, 1601 TO WO/{I< , ifNI> A MAN CitU.fD ASklNG,'ANV WAY Ie ....,., plans that do not involve letters. eET A TlCl<fl TOVAY?' AND I TOl-l) HIM; Unlike Mr. Billings I will act ~Irt. I'M ~oRRY nIl' SHoW' C("c~~D Ye!:carefully, thoughtfully. I will TERPAY. AND I+e SAYS', 'IT'S HeRe, I KNOW IT'S' tiERe, I kNOW VOU CAN GEr ME IN.'take my time and savor each AND {JVST SIirY AGAIN ntH If'S GONE AND HE ~A-'I5, HOIAI AlIVe-WilE Voll SCIlt..PIN, step of the way. I will take pho- nlfM FOrt.? I'LL. PIIY! GOODItIllMIT, GEr A4£ tographs of the photographs A ,'C/<I<I! (JUST WANT A Gt..IMP~~ of IT! and have them enlarged. Per- Au.. I C.OVL-/) Do WAS REPEAT, SIR, I'M SO~R'IJ 6vr TltE: stlOw'S' haps I should tape them to my C/'tJseDj Ir's GONE. AND so refrigerator door. Perhaps I will HE: SA'iS, 'wfit..t.. FVC./c.. VOV THE/V,' "ND HANG~ vp. wallpaper my bathroom with them. It is killing me how many things I could do.

Dear Mr. Billings, Where shall I begin? You being my boss and all I should probably ask your advice. Timothy, what would you do if you were in my shoes?

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Pelf and Powder Blue Owen Hatteras

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itcom Ellen is at an art gallery. For a reason known only to the TV show's writers she's brought her philistine pals with her, and they're now capering doltishly around, making embarrassing remarks without any respect for the art on display. Ellen makes one last, exasperated attempt to bring them back into line. This is a multimillion-dollar painting! she exclaims. The flower of civilization! Behave yourselves as you would in any comparably important financial institution.

Being a nation of Ellens, there was little danger that we might misbehave at either of the rwo great Impressionist exhibits-Caillebotte and Monet-that swept through the Art Institute of Chicago last year. The Monet spectacular, in particular, was a marvel of bourgeois self-restraint: a file of art-lovers, at least five abreast, snaked patiently through the entire length of the museum, out the entrance hall, and onto the sidewalk. Once they had endured several hours in this line, a second queue waited inside, this one winding around the inner courtyard of the exhibit rooms. In the galleries themselves, jammed to capacity with awestruck white people, hovered an eerie, hyper-decorous silence. Without coaching of any kind, a vast throng of strangers had reverted to the rules of conduct normally associated with libraries or tombs or cathedrals-literally no one spoke.

Monet-and Impressionism generally-is a cultural miracle-worker capable of triggering pious, near-unanimous wonder on a scale Americans rarely encounter anymore. Decades pass, the economy slips, but Impressionism remains the golden genre, the magic formula capable of drawing the sturdy bourgeoisie of our homeland up in reverent mannered lines stretching placidly around the block. In those soft-focus Victorian scenes we catch a glimpse of that prelapsarian time when the rebel yawp of modernism-later to become so menacing and theoretical and satanic-resulted in nothing more threatening than pastel colors and nice renderings oflawn parties.

The appeal ofImpressionism is a simple thing, really.

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any other cultural offering available in America today, Impressionism brings the two most potent elements of consumerism-safeness and rebellion-together into a commodifiable whole duly certified by almost ridiculously sanguine market approval.

This is why it's the lawn parties and flower gardens of Monet and Renoir that win the public's plaudits-never the dark Communard tones of Courbet-and why any exposition of their works must always make loud and public declarations of their subversive, radical, even revolutionary, daring.

Naturally a TV commercial gets to the crux of the matter most efficiently. A recent ad for the Oldsmobile Aurora insists that the car "could be described as a radical new art movement," as "audacious as Monet was in creating the Impressionist movement."

A typical Monet picture is shown hanging in a gallery to help us understand his radical audacity: nice white people relaxing in the soft French countryside. "But he was such a non-conformist," reads a subsequent title, to which the announcer adds the crucial final element, "Yeah, but have you seen what his paintings are going for lately?"

The audacious nonconformist Monet and his valuable, valuable pictures: this is the golden combination our economy celebrates, whether in art or in automobile design.

Despite their hundred-year dash to startle, defY, and violate decency in every imaginable way, the avant-garde has never been able to evade the almost mathematical relationship between transgression and market-value, to shock the bourgeoisie enough to make them stop buying. No matter how they twist and turn, spit and spite, artists cannot seem to escape that throng, waiting patiently five abreast in the lobby, whose lavish spending and childlike enthusiasm increase with every new outrage. Just as the advertising industry finds it effective to promise that a given product will deliver us from the everyday, will "break the rules" or "resist the usual," so it is that an artwork's cultural value, and ultimately its investment value, is directly related to its subversiveness. So just as the appeal of Red Dog beer is enhanced by the militaristic commands of those who would prevent the Dog from being his doggy self, and as Pepsi moves units with visions of the conformist losers who drink that other product, so the Reader's Digest, a vigorous denouncer of offensive art, also doles out huge sums to artists every year and displays prominently in its offices a BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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group of large photographs by none other than Robert Mapplethorpe. Gossip around Pleasantville has it that the photos appreciate every time Mapplethorpe is blasted in the Digests pages.

Of course there have been certain instances in which artists fulfilled their imperative of annoying the bourgeoisie so adeptly that the bourgeois in question was actually inspired to bite back. In 1932 the Rockefeller family commissioned thenfamous muralist Diego Rivera to decorate the entrance to the RCA Building, part of their great family edifice in midtown Manhattan. Rivera, though, didn't just aim to shock the Rockefellers by making a bold statement on two-dimensionality or the nature of spectatorship; considering his target carefully, he decorated this monument to capitalism with some doctrinaire bits of Popular Front propaganda. The Rockefellers didn't give the painting's resale value a second thought: they promptly had it destroyed, and the vagaries of the art world quickly put an end to Rivera's celebrity status. Sixty years later the deed is almost fully forgotten.

But Monet will never suffer such a cruel fate. The magic of impressionism, the secret formula that keeps its prices so eternally high, is that it gets it both ways, enjoying the eternal approbation of both Oldsmobile and art professor alike. On the one hand it is nice art, profoundly appealing to the very people artists strive endlessly to offend. (Reiax with the smiling soft-focus ladies of Renoir, always enjoying a vacation at some modest pleasure spot. Luxuriate in the pleasant pastels of Monet, those rIi&~~P=--- -:="'IQ:::::::;~~5;::Z;11 soft pinks, purples, blues, and turquoises that can be found to match any suburban bathroom.) On the other hand, just as the Red Dog never appears without prudish tamers ofsome kind for him to defy, one never reads a discussion or sees an exhibit ofImpressionism that neglects to mention over and over "'"'"'- ... ~=o again the Impressionists' exalted status as the very first bourgeoisie-shockers, orthodoxy-resisters, and rule-breakers. Their famous rejection by the French Salon is viewed by many as the starting point of modernism, the original cosmic exchange between intolerant patriarchs and rebel bohemians. With Impressionism you can have nice pictures of flowers and fantasies of persecution by an intolerant establishment, all in the same package.

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The two make for a potent combination, and you can be sure that the Ellens of the world will never tire of the Impressionist double whammy. She can both enjoy the pictures on the most uncomplicated level of all-they're so pret"o/-and feel like a nonconformist standing up to the Man for doing so. The working of this strange logic was particularly noticeable at the exhibit of Caillebotte's pictures, which rank among the all-time libidinal favorites of the American middle class. You know the ones I'm referring to: nice-looking people in top hats and umbrellas wandering along the streets of Paris in the soft European rain. For many viewers the appeal is placid reassurance, no more.

But the text that accompanies the paintings is scuffed not with references to Caillebotte's affirmation of the bourgeois vision, but with homages to his subversive daring, his positive defiance: we read of "Caillebotte's readiness to challenge the norms of picture-making," of his "unorthodox viewpoints and radical compositions," of his desire "to subvert traditional themes and challenge even the norms established by the Impressionists," of how "Critics denounced this painting... because it was seen as subverting the natural order of male-female social relationships."

But the long lines of suburbanites waiting to purchase Caillebotte product at the gift shop gave me an idea. Perhaps, through their enthusiasm for the soft niceness of the Impressionists, the investors have put a formidable weapon in the hands of the artists. Perhaps, at long last, artists can shock the bourgeoisie and make it stick.

The underlying weakness of the position of the bourgeoisie is that ultimately they must rely on artists and critics, their putative arch-enemies, to tell them what to buy. Investors are terribly ashamed of their underlying boorishness, and they require the services ofless materialistic experts to reassure them of their acquisitions' value. They only buy stuff when they know its critical track record is spotless. As the British financial publication Investors Chronicle noted in 1993, "The longer an artist has enjoyed critical approval and the higher the reputation, the more secure his market value.

Rembrandt, for instance, is critically unassailable, though since 1968 the academically weighty Rembrandt Research Project has been busy reattributing dozens of 'Rembrandts' to his pupils BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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with disastrous consequences for their prices." Since it is subversiveness and audacity that determine the prices of so many modernist works, and since artists are our acknowledged authorities on subversiveness and audacity, well then ....

Armed with the power of their sanction and aided by a little organization and disingenuousness, the avant-garde could easily wrest control of the art world from those they so profess to loathe. They could administer a fearsome fiscal spanking to the Rockefellers and anyone else who has bought art over the last 20 years, could cause a mighty crash on world financial markets, and could punish the international haute bourgeoisie so severely that they would stop investing in and otherwise annoying us for a long time to come. If revisionism is the lingua franca of the art world, let's do a little coordinated revising and agree on one critical premise: "Impressionism sucks." Repeat it to yourself a few times. Now add the words "banal," "shallow," "suburban," "confectionary." And then try this one: "Even the mature works of Monet are visually less sophisticated, less aware of the two-dimensional, and at the same time less willing to confront the social orthodoxies of the Second Empire than the casually carnivalesque drawings of, say, a playfully subversive figure like Alexandre Cabanel." Ouch! Such a line, repeated in enough museums and art journals, would cause the world's leading banks to collapse overnight.

As a gesture of good faith, I'll take the first step myself: I can't stand the Impressionists. I hope I never have to stand in front of one of their pretty purple pictures ever again.

TOM: PSo TIME; The Monet exhibit? Revoltingly L-lTrL-f KIO~ OFTeN Tttf 1::)(";81 whitebread. Caillebotte? SickWI: ~Ao AT t.. MT ONe; VMIITER A WEE". . , ONt~, W~ "FOIINP AN A -C"l.. ~ DUMP makingly safe. 10 rather go to a IN ,IUS fH.6VATOR. ~ SOME OtJ IS shopping mall and spend the day V" c.ovt..DN'T HoL-O WAS A I DoN I reading Hallmark cards. And as long as we're at it, let's go all the way: Diego Rivera? A true subversive. Warhol? A desperate conformist, probably on the payroll of the CIA like all those others. / The unknowns who illustrated all those WPA buildings? Dynamic revolutionaries in the raw, questioning every inherited piety of the 20th century (too bad you can't get those murals off the walls and sell them). Anyone who's ever executed one of those teeth-grindingly stupid ads for Absolut vodka? A certified commercial charlatan. Get thee to an ad agency.

Shock the bourgeoisie?

Hell, we'll have them on their knees.

I'

";

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Guy of the Year, who will It be?

Johnson holds a bachelor's degree in the Bible and a diploma in aeronautical technology from LeTourneau University. He has been a youth pastor and camp director and has a full-time music ministry.

Church Powers

Church Powers, 18, of Barnwell

has been named a fmalist in Teen Magazine's 1995 Guy of the Year contest.

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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Helping Hand George Logothetis

I

was never meant for this nocturnal stage, this sickening sabbat spun out of control. I am a creature of the daytime, engineered to delight housewives, to charm the Oprah-fed minions with my engaging deformity. Only through cunning have I insinuated myself here, become part of your "Super Bowl," as you so reverently and ridiculously call it.

I am one of a thousand apparitions passing by tonight. Commercials, you call us.

Crafted mendacities, million-dollar playlets evil in our intent: to hoodwink, unsettle, connive. Here, at this foul pageant, we assemble: sneakered slam-dunking giants, soda-crazed polar bears, alcoholic frogs, interrupting bunnies, all of us. Each year the festival swells, growing more bloated; each year we revel in sheer glorious excess.

But I care nothing for your spectacle. If possible I would hide my hideousness from all of you. No, I have journeyed here for a reason.

Revenge against Gittis, the smug adman from whose feeble mind my monstrosity sprang.

Tonight, like his partner before him, he shall die at my hand.

I am a grotesque, a wan sea anemone-like appendage with fingers sprouting skyward in a gross Gorgonian parody. My mouth, frozen in a carved smile, is a tight slit, a puckered gash. Anchored beneath my middle digits, under slanted brows, are two black pupil-less eyes that burn with unmitigated hate. Most humiliating of all is the red bulbous clown nose-no doubt a snickering afterthought-planted solidly in the center of my palm.

I am the Hamburger Helper Helping Hand. A minor deity, but surely you have seen me. Among certain demographics I am quite popular.

I was born to sell, to dance and sing in degrading productions, to peddle carton after carton of noodle mix, a pandering, pathetic oaf For this I have Gittis to thank. Smug, preening Gittis, master hack, the bane of my existence. I was born in the ruts of his imagination, conjured without regard, as if my life were but a trifling amusement. DeFiorio-his partner, his art director, the ponytailed poseur who sat snickering as I took my first timid steps at the animation house ...

At first, I was cast in the image of a human hand. I had five svelte digits. My eyes were ripe, happy. Then Gittis, that blundering philistine, took up his sketch pad.

With the sickening godliness so typical of his profession, he changed me, engineered me into what he thought I should be. Gittis amputated my pinky and plumped my remaining fingers until they resembled four fat phalli. He hacked out a mouth, stuck on a shnozz, and soon I was a beady-eyed claw suitable only for derision. Gittis smiled. DeFiorio smiled. Even Whitslaw, their client from General Mills, smiled. After McGee the media planner figured my demographics, I was ready for the airwaves.

George Logothetis is The Baffler's operative on Madison Avenue. He is writing Tube: Tales of Media and Mayhem.

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My inaugural performance ran during Days o/Our Lives. I waddled before my co-stars, a wide-eyed domestic and her two foolish offspring, who marveled as I sang "Hamburger Helper helps your hamburger" in my cartoon voice, and packed their faces with fatty noodle.

As the years passed, the campaign turned more humiliating. Gittis swaddled me in ponchos, stuck a mustache on my lip, assigned stereotypical ethnic guises to hasten the sale of spin-off products like Hamburger Helper BeefTaco and Zesty Italian, even-I gag-Tuna Helper. My rage grew, and I sank further into self-loathing.

Then one day, enlightenment. I looked at the beings around me, the M&M's, Toilet Ducks, and morphing Lifesavers, and I realized none of us were here by choice; we all existed through some grand, infernal design. We were not to blame for our fates; we were only pawns, automatons controlled by multinational forces. Slowly, over time, my anger shifted from myself to the race of men who had ushered me into this foul life. I resolved to strike back.

But only when I closed my eyes and saw his accursed face-that fat chin and set jaw-did I know the target of my rage.

Gittis.

In the land of image there is no substance. We flit about, spirits riding static skies, dashing from one porthole to the next in the billion-screened Panopticon surrounding all things. We glare at your world, at your sedentary hell.

Each day I saw you; each day it was the same. Your families sitting mesmerized, sunk into couches. Your bleary eyes, glazed with obsequiousness. I saw you suckle the glass teat and slurp its banal milk; I saw you feed at the electric trough. I saw it all, and I hated you for your weakness.

The more I hated the more my powers grew. With each pathetic human I saw, another part of me strengthened, another limb tightened, until I pulsed, throbbing with energy. I knew then that your photon shackles and cathode cuffs could never hold me. Already I could feel myself loosening. It was only a matter of time.

As my powers mounted, I hunted Gittis, confident that the sight of him would spring me from my electronic prison. I searched, all the while plotting his demise, with no success. Then one day I found not Gittis, but his partner in crime, the other author of my being.

I did the usual song and dance, half-glancing at my audience, when I detected a presence among the throng. I uttered my lines, looked closer and saw a face. Anger crackled atop my fingers-it was DeFiorio, snoozing on a sofa, surrounded by snotted, balled-up tissue! Somehow I'd stumbled onto him.

Fury rose until it seemed I would explode, and in the full force of my rage I hurled myself from the phosphorescent sea. (My presence would not be missed-I had fifteen seconds until my next on-camera shot.) I landed on DeFiorio's sofa. Stealthily, so as not to arouse him, I scaled a nearby shelf, where I seized a heavy gold figurine: his precious Clio statue. Seconds later I loomed over him.

"With this foul trophy I defile you!" I screamed, echoing the late-night gladiator epics I'd seen on TBS. Before he could stir, I smashed the Clio into his brow. He kicked and flailed; I struck again and again, blind-mad, and finally, after a last penBAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

117

etrating blow, he moved no more. I dropped the Clio on the floor.

"Best Consumer Package Goods: Hamburger Helper-1983," it read.

I dove back to the screen, ho~ling with delight.

Gittis, though, proved an elusive foe. For months I searched, gazing into your living rooms and bedrooms, your squalid apartments and rotted duplexes, every crutch where humanity dwelled. I scanned the vast arena of faces, but not once did I see him.

Then I realized the toot of my failure: I only ran during the day. For me to find Gittis, he would have to watch daytime television, an impossible scenario given the office duties required by his conniving craft. As long as I aired during mornings and afternoons, I would never find him. In fact, the only reason I'd found DeFlorio was because he had called in sick! I considered waiting for Gittis to fall ill, but left that for a more dastardly solution.

I reasoned that if Gittis would not come to me, I would come to him. But how?

Despite my ability to shuttle between realities, I could not break free from the chains which bound me to specific programming-the brainless reruns and soaps McGee had figured. To find Gittis I had to deliver myself to another program, one during the nighttime.

But which one? Seinfeld? Sea Quest? And how ,:,ould I know he'd be there? The only solution was to pinpoint the precise show he'd be watching. I racked my brain, but only as the foul event drew nearer and I heard others of my kind discussing it like some vile proJV. they hoped to attend, did I realize where I'd find him.

The Super Bowl! That shitstorm of media hype and chip-crunching idiocy! Yes! Of course Gittis would be watching-as an adman the event was sacred to him!

But there was one more hurdle: how would I, a lowly package goods creature, reach that lofty stage? The only way was through a subversion of the Hamburger Helper media plan, the document that determined my placement on the networks. I would have to find and alter it, no easy task since I knew nothing of the intricate schedules.

No, some flunky must do the deed. I knew instantly who. McGee-the media man who sold me to the airwaves. Quickly, I concocted a plan: I was fortunate enough to recall that on occasion, McGee left a television set on in his office, to be lulled by its soothing blather as he went about his figuring. All I had to do was wait until the set came on, and hope no one saw me.

When it did, I leaped forth, ducked a secretary, and rifled through the papers atop McGee's desk. Hurriedly, I scrawled a note: BobWhat about Ham Helper on the Super Bowl? Lots of single men will be watching.

-S.W. "S.W," of course, referred to none other than Stanley Whitslaw, the General Mills client for whom McGee, Gittis and DeFlorio worked. I knew that McGee, like all agency drones, would do anything to appease the whims of his queen bee client.

He immediately wrote the plan, and bureaucracy did the rest. No one changed it, no one questioned it, the whole deal went undetected.

118 â&#x20AC;˘

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All that remained was the grisly denouement.

So here I am, on this vast, limitless plane, this shimmering vale of static and light, this mediated Elysia.

Clearly, I do not belong in this august assemblage. The creatures here are different from me: they are icons, slick celebrities, super-athletes and techno-animations, beings of pure image. My deformity is a throwback, a reminder of simpler, less manic times. Now it is all ego and showmanship, mirror and smoke, glitter and braggadocio: chip-dipping politicos, sky surfers, beer bottles with tiny football helmets rammed onto their necks .. .it is insane. What have you done?

We straggle on. One by one we reach the stage, acting our splashy dramas. After the Bud bottles it is to be my turn.

Shaq dunks. A chimp swills cola. Innocuous young people bond inexplicably over a malted beverage called Zima. The bottles stage their contest; an announcer speaks; a logo rises. I scuttle forward, my heart soaring.

Metallic rays splinter into tubes of gray and gray-blue and I take the stage, all of America gazing upon me.

"Have I got a meal for you!" I sing, over the homey hamburger theme.

Then I see that fat chin, and pounce.

When in Rome No, I will not fondle you willingly centurial world nor stroke your shred of decency, I hold no candles or so you broadcast, ever since you kissed my world weary decadence.

Hey soldier, go flaunt your swags and jabots elsewhere this girl is bowing out, full to the glands with garlands and Democrats, the truthful and bad will eventually see my way.

My webbing or weaving grows thick with all your travel plans you tree trunk, you bile monger, you ghastly gew gaw bereft of Metaphor, this time your ignorance will kill you once and for all Centurion.

Didn't you notice your hundred years are up.

-Jennifer Moxley

BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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the gaudy and damned A tour of the fin-de-siecle by Tom Vanderbilt Somehow the pursuit of the American Dream is always most poignant in California. When it crashes here, it seems to do so with epochal fury. "California," Joan Didion once wrote, "is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

A similar suspicion hung palpably in the air during my August visit to Orange County, Cali(, the storied locus of virile, "B-1" Bob Dornan conservatism and entrepreneurial might which at that late summer moment lay inconceivably mired in its eighth month of fiscal insolvency.

Here, in this theme park of a county (the theme, as one tourist brochure put it, is "you can have anything you want") the meeting of boom and loss was playing itself out in the daily papers: in the Orange County Register, the most reliable barometer of local opinion, one could read stories only pages apart that contrasted life under the penumbra of bankruptcy against the place in th.: sun that we had always known Orange County to be. Tales of personal depression and "bankruptcy blues" cast a shadow on the passing parade of upbeat economic indicators that everyone else seemed to be enjoying.

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Nowhere was that "uneasy suspension" more strikingly manifested than the Crystal Cathedral, the immaculatelymaintained headquarters of televangelist Rev. Robert Schuller, set in the modest, Eisenhower-era suburb of Garden Grove, where the John Birch Society once sold its pamphlets in the Knott's Berry Farm amusement park, and where Newt Gingrich's book now sells briskly in the Richard M. Nixon Memorial Libary and Birthplace. The Cathedral, in the shadow of Disneyland, is a metaphorical motherlode in the otherwise inscrutable terrain of post-suburbia. Walking through the parking lot, past the silver railings and concrete of the private family gardens ("offering the finest in memorial property"), my first thought was of the Cathedral's fidelity to the environment outside. Designed by Philip Johnson, it is an immense building of white steel trusses and glass-paneled walls.

Its mirror exoskeleton glares crisply, like anyone of the corporate headquarters ringing the highway interchanges near Irvine. Flanking the Cathedral is a giant "Tower of Power" made up of steel tubes thrust upwards into the sky, terminating in a set of sharp, jagged points, their metal surfaces glimmering menacingly in the sun like a phalanx of missiles at a desert military installation. Inside, a smooth piece of crystal set in a larger mass of unpolished rock, rotates under glass like

a jeweler's display in Fashion Island, one of the county's more exclusive malls. An inscription marking the 40th anniversaty of the Crystal Cathedral (1955-1995 A.D.) that is situated nearby reads like a distillation of the history of suburbia itself: "this was also the era of the birth of television, the building of nuclear weapons of warfare, an age of hope and fear."

The Cathedral is a sprawling "megachurch," with all the trappings of mass entertainment: indoor stadium-style seats for 2,862 (but not-at least not yet-skyboxes), Sony JumboTrons adjoining both sides of the pulpit, and an array of broadcasting equipment used to beam Schuller's "Hour of Power"-the country's most popular religious program-to its estimated 3 million weekly viewers. Just past the church entrance lies the "Drive-In Worship Center." On that day it was empty parking lot, but each Sunday it swarms with Schuller's vehicular flock, who watch from their cars as the Cathedral's 90-foot high doors slide open; a peculiar homage to the preacher's first house of worship, a drive-in movie theater. In the gift and book shop one may find Crystal Cathedral cocktail napkins and keychains, a "Motivational" book section, and myriad postcards and t-shirts bearing Schuller's copyrighted homilies, the most popular of which seems to be: "Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do!" Unlike his more inflammatory neighbor in Anaheim, the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, Schuller is interested less in morality and sin than a libertarian inspirational uplift, designed to soothe those who have reaped the rewards of success and console those who haven't yet; hinting broadly that economic salvation is just round the corner. It's a message worth millions of dollars a year from

viewers, and one which he delivers across the country in places like Flint, Michigan, where he is shown in Michael Moore's 1988 film Roger and Me pronouncing his regenerative slogans to a room full of unemployed autoworkers.

In a local library, I found what was perhaps, in light of the county's fiscal catastrophe, the most ironic piece of the Schuller merchandising empire, a slim volume called The Power of Being DebtFree, written by Schuller and an undistinguished economist. After thanking Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, and a number of others in the introduction, Schuller notes that the book began over a dinner with Robert and Elizabeth Dole.

The national debt, it seems, had been vexing him, so he set about drafting a recovery plan based on his self-help doctrines; the book, accordingly, is a litany of exhortations and bold pronouncements, a forest of exclamation marks interspersed with statements like: "America is a superpower with superpeople who have superpotential for superproductivity."

But outside the library, Orange County seemed gripped not by "super" anything but rather the less empowering dynamic of "hope and fear." Under the bankruptcy, the county seemed to inhabit a dual world; one a gray dystopia of uncertainty and falling property values; another, the accustomed bright and buoyant showcase of affiuent citizens who were forming start-up software firms in small industrial parks and shopping at Coach and Hermes. It was home to one of the country's most profitable Mercedes-Benz dealers, yet ominous talk loomed of massive cuts in bus service to help bailout the county-and just how would those nannies and gardeners from Santa Ana make the daily commute to Big Canyon BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

121

Villas or Belcourt? In Orange County, such paradoxes run deep and jagged like irrigation ditches: only there did it seem to make sense that the soft-spoken and earnest editor of the new "alternative weekly," itself housed next to those software firms in a commercially-zoned office park, would meet me for lunch wearing a three-piece suit, and then drive me in his BMW to a cafe at "the Lab." Known as the county's "anti-mall," the former canning factory is a perfect fabricated bohemia-with rusted post-industrial debris as strategically chosen as the "environmental" music at the county's real malls-made possible through the generous cooperation of a local surf! skate-wear tycoon.

Popular ideas of Orange County still revolve around gated communities, golf villas, yacht clubs, and European signature boutiques. The picture is of a sylvan suburban paradise-just a shade less blanched than Sun City-where places like Coto de Caza, an equestrian risingproperty-value preserve of the rich, stretch for miles along the breathtaking backdrop of the Santa Ana mountains.

Media coverage of the bankruptcy focused on this sort of opulence fixedly, with a stream of TV dispatches from high-end Newport Beach shopping centers, where the point that Orange County was a "wealthy deadbeat" could be driven home more effectively. But a twentyminute drive replaces the glimmering things of F. Scott Fitzgerald's imagina-

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tion with the cluttered barrios of Santa Ana, the shabby procession of strip malls selling fish tacos and "$1 Chinese food," and the repeated binary clusters of attached homes (from $85,900) in Tustin Ranch for what Richard Ford once called "starter people." Minus its two or three wealthiest enclaves, it has been pointed out, Orange County barely makes the state's median income level.

And yet it's certainly easy to find pockets of privilege and prosperity in Orange County, places where the betteroff can cocoon in relative safety as everyone else frets about the ground-level impact of the "Citron crater." One night in Newport Beach, I rode to dinner on the thirty-foot yacht of a Corona del Mar investment banker. As we motored slowly through the still waters of Newport Harbor, past the former estates ofJohn Wayne and Gene Autry, past the second or third homes of international industrialists, the banker would turn away from the wheel every so often, pointing with awe to one of the multimillion-dollar vessels resting in their exclusive berths. "That boat cost more than God!" he would gush, conjuring up immediately the entwined supplication to religion and money that Schuller's ministry also seemed to suggest.

Returning to the dock, the banker's assistant asked if I had enjoyed the ride, and then, gesturing to the panorama of bobbing boats and harborfront property, said with a smile, "See, not all of Orange County is bankrupt."

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Every Night For You

Photo by Charles Peterson

dJ

BAFFLER EIGHT •

123

p.t.t.red in disneyland Mickey Mouse bent to the side, hit! One day full of exuberance, it cracked in his cheek-area, a deep dent forced its way between his nose and cheek, in his deepest interior. He could barely rise from the hit and the brief shock in order to run to the guards when it came even harder. A second hit! Only a few days ago he had experienced the gleam of the great victory when the glorious victory of Powell and Schwarzkopf marched into Disneyland. They had come from the dusty desert, freshly bathed and decorated. Powell and Schwarzkopf had waved their hands along with the heroes of the desert from the top of their war-chariot down to their people.

The crowd had all payed their money in order to be able to stand so close in the shine of the heroes and the victory. Mickey Mouse had felt a great peace in himself with so many happy children's faces beaming at him.

Just now the new numbers were published: 300 Million visitors had come to the park. In that period were sold:

4 Million Hamburgers, 1,6 Million Hot-Dogs, 3,4 Million servings ~f French fries, 3,2 Million bags of popcorn, 3,2 Million servings of icecream and 1,2 Million gollons of soft drinks. A great result! Now, on the top of that the heroes from the desert! His job seamed to be safe for the next few years and also for Daisy, Donald, Carlo and Dagobert. He had felt the cold hand of the general thrust up his big, upholstered mousehand for the gesture of victory. He never had felt more successful than on this day.

Today, a few days lader, an important day - a holiday for everyone in the country. However on this 4th of July he doesn't feel so well. He can't turn it on. There is a kid who says 'Hi', there is someone who takes a picture and now there are two guys holding a book under his nose.

He can't read the lines, it must be in some foreign language. One of them gives him a pen and asks for his autograph. He's done that a thousand times before and sure doesn't have second thoughts. He scrawls with his clumsy, plushy hand 'Mickey Mouse' in the booklet, his agreement.

He shouldn't have done that.

it was a wonderful day it was colorful the atmosphere was casual thousands of happy faces the country radiated contentment it happened quite suddenly a glimmer in the consciousnesses of attendees the most famous mask in the world dinted with a single strike with the palm of the hand between nose and cheek and sprang with a dull tone again into its original form as if nothing had happened. disneyland,los angeles, july 1991

p.t.t.red, an artists' duo from Berlin, undertook many proje:ts on,their travels between Barrow, Alaska ( project argo ~ncogn~to ) and bajacalifornia, Mexico ( project chibil kin ).

After the attack on Mickey Mouse they escaped to Mexico

by Greyhound.

124 â&#x20AC;˘

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Give the Millionaire a Drink Mike Newirfh

T

hey come from all over to the town of East Hampton, this celebrated place at the end of the island. Private jets shoot off hourly from Dallas and L.A., the chilled Porsches and Saabs arrive from Montclair and Rye, matron busloads depart the Park Avenue swelter in a huff of opera and facials, and they come packed five to a Camaro from Woodside and Asbury Park. They crowd the same streets gridded by Dutch burghers of centuries past, fill the landscape like Baptists in a church, and with their tanned arms thrown up and their eyes upon their lord they sing of the coin of the realm, of padded pockets, of the alchemical wish: I can buy this. I can pull things near to me, I levitate as you descend, I will pile the stuff of cash so high as to keep me forever out of my grave ....

Nobody could guess why the internationally known supermodel decided to piss in the bar sink at the Apex Grill. Two a.m., the hour most socially permissible for decadent stunts, barroom crowded with angular bodies and faces gone shiny with cosmopolitans and blue martinis, called for again and again with the same stubby wave. The bartender, blurred bulk in white shirt and French apron, watched idly as the tall woman with the charred gold mop of hair crawled up top of the bar, nailed hand rubbing the makeup from her face, her smiling mouth the long slot of a cigarette machine. As she stepped to the chrome rails and rucked up her dress, silk scraping silk, there were shrieks and the sound of a man slapping himself to vulgar effect, and the bartender remembered an afternoon decades past, lying in bed with his first girlfriend, she sashaying above him in his boxer shorts, giggling, this as piss of drink sprays from the center of that trained and shaped and photographed body, and the bar sink fills like a cistern.

After, a distinguished anesthesiologist, lean, leathery, hair varnished like a helmet, holds up a credit card. "Buy the lovely lady whatever she wants to drink." Cheers, applause, the bartender straightens up and, moving so slowly through time, reaches for the cassis and champagne.

Mike Newirth is a certified mixologist.

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His date, a twenty year old with an unblemished accusing Andover face: "What is your fucking problem."

"You need to be more celebratory." His gaze locked to the swaying flushed model, all the swelled faces in the long mirror, cell phone before him on the bar like a gray fish. "I already told you what you're here for."

Slow late afternoon: stray cats prowl the village dumpsters. All the good peoplethose drowning in that hearty moral sea of accumulated wealth-are stretched out at the gleaming beach. A famous comic actor known for his films of family entertainment (homespun wisdom interspersed with hilarious belches and pratfalls), and for his witty endorsements of a fine tortilla chip, walks up and down the main street carrying a large bottle of vodka. His fishing vest and floppy hat add a near-tint of gentility. The actor's eyes resemble cathode ray tubes. When his cell phone rings he shifts the bottle and flips it open, and keeps on walking. He speaks with the air that is trapped for years at the bottom of a western mine.

Three teenage girls stand before the window of a crowded shop. Stylish clothes for women, all and entirely in the color of white. Frocks and gowns and underwear, all the same hue of elegance and emptiness, the blankness of a frame, slices of nothing. Beside those white garments, the girls throb in their hiphuggers and tight striped shirts, slurping on pacifiers. Sixteen and already their faces engraved with a Russian century of bored malaise. "There is nothing I wouldn't do to spite my father," one says.

"If only I wasn't here," says another.

Tea is served on the veranda of the American Hotel to a rowdy party of options traders. Oh, they've done all the good drugs, been tapped for entrance at many velvet' ropes, they've fucked all the slim blonde women (and then watched, snifters in hand, as all the women melted together in the foamy hot tub on the moonlit deck, every last gawky white boy fantasy fulfilled categorically). But now the intrusion of china cups and pale sandwiches flusters their paid-for vacation hoohrah. Their practiced repose comes apart, up through the mucus of the bo~y's past rise the fumbling second-string ballplayers and zitty homeroom monitors. "This 'is bogus," Troy says.

"Hey. Waitress. Can't you bring us some port, or something?" calls out Ken, twisting for assurance his gold-flashing diver's watch.

"The bar will not be open until six, sir," she replies.

"Bitch," says Trevor, knocking a teacup off the rail.

At the Telephone Mama, the choice nightspot of this season, the one the Jersey tourists and Astoria orthodontists are simply better off not even knowing about, the line snakes out into the parking lot: bare thighs of celebrant applicants brushed, bruised, by the slow flow oHancy rolling metal. Who are these people? Shaky background zombies from Night ofthe Flesh-Eating Corporate Raiders, the never-made Corman salute to the rapacious 1980s? The men fluff their chest hair through the slits of silk shirts, if they have it; the smooth-skinned blondies, those delicate boys with pursed mouths disparaging, tney-are-either blood-leached and serious old money, or else homosexual. Reaching the door, three black kids from Valley Stream are turned away: "We have a dress code," says the enormous doorman. Through the door thumps a vintage Funkadelic side; inside the young women twitch like wraiths on the dance floor, white shawls slipping from their shoulders and breasts. Cursing, the blacks drive off into the night.

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In the narrow aisles of the town supermarket: a wealthy man in his fifties argues with his girlfriend, half his age. She is wearing a thong bikini, and her tanned skin is like fine fudge or mink: a thing sheiks might buy by the yard. When he sweeps his arm, his IWC chronometer and gold bracelet tick, clanking: his voice is low, savaging. She flips her ashy hair precisely, cloyingly. "I won't go," she says. "Not unless Andre goes." At the cash register a townie-belly, navel, nipples distended, jaw shameslacked, oily hair-hands over a sheaf of food stamps. The proper patrons line up elsewhere, piling their soda crackers and Pellegrino up on the other conveyor, as if something were catching.

That well-known actor loiters in the Rexall, chatting discretely with the pharmacist. He leaves, buying quantities of cough drops and breath mints. In five years, perforated liver shipping poison to his brain, he'll have taken to passing out candy from his pockets to alarmed children on the streets.

An internationally famous woman, even locally a celebrity of some substance, watches the washed-up wetbrain cross the street from within the armored capsule of her Range Rover. She feels towards him a chundering mix of contempt and fear: he's a has-been, for sure, reduced to kiddy pablum and shilling for snacks, but once he was actually a Hollywood player, the realest kind. She's on top now, the ultimate hostess, a lasery visionary of taste and purchases and decor, with magazines and recipe clubs and catalogs, a carpet-bombing of commerce spread across the hick heartland; but, you know, she doesn't really do anything which any Miss Baltimore Homemaker of 1961 could not improve upon. Behind the flat flawless heatproof glass of the vehicle, her smile is pulled into place by hydraulics, exposed teeth carved from a single block of titanium. But beyond it she's shaking as though from a palsy. Recently, one of the dowagers she courted had whispered to her the cruel, glittering news-"for your own good, dear," the withered bitch had said-that her daughter, that hard-cheeked rider of deceit and ponies, was sleeping with the contractor on her Sag Harbor cottage, with whom, truthfully (and known to none other), she had last slept not two weeks previous. Unlikely, but it could get around. Ten thousand dollars had gone towards quieting the tale of baby ducks (briefly needed for a photo shoot) murdered beneath the wheels of her vehicle. This perfect woman, no one guesses at her days of shudder and terror, what she endures to prop up this exemplary life of buying and placing. Cross me and die, this famous hostess thinks, waiting for the light to change.

July glides into August, the frictionless summer everlasting. Everybody is from England or into junk bonds or forcing themselves to vomit or working on a novel or bisexual temporarily. More telephones are stolen out of Range Rovers. Most of the dogs receive grooming. Some of the townies get laid.

It is still 2 a.m. at the Apex Grill. The supermodellurches in, shaky, bad news.

Her miniskirt offers up her sintered ass. Nobody is surprised by this, no one notices.

Bound to her shoulders is the soft black leather Prada knapsack which every woman here was required on peril of her soul to purchase for this summer. The Prada bags, shapeless, hang from the backs of the women like elegant hide pupae. But the model has replaced the Prada bag's signature gold-plated zipper ornament with a Tiffany keychain, a miniature infant's bottle in platinum. This particular Prada bag was made in Malaysia, in a factory thrown up in an enormous corrugated shed, hand-stitched BAFFLER EIGHT â&#x20AC;˘

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by women whose arms bear curing burns and knife scars, women with hair coarse as rope and stalled faces, and some weeks later the model purchased it at the East Hampton Saddlery for $570 because her agent and Country magazine had touted it as the summer's prime accessory, and of course, they were right.

"I would like a ... cosmopolitan," she whispers to the bartender. Her mind has been expertly muted to a soft blue Xanax blur. Beneath it, though, is something real: a throbbing kodachrome snapshot of the night, five years before, she sucked a photographer, somewhere in the Montauk dunes. Two months later she had a shoot in Interview, so it was undoubtedly worth it, she knows, but still ... The memory's buzz will outlast her looks and career. The bartender sets a cocktail glass before her and spills out her drink. Her fingers flutter like moths on the hard stem of the glass.

The bartender slips further down his bar, wiping spills with a white dinner napkin. He pauses before a man and two women sagged with drink and exhaustion, but the man waves him away. "We still have our menage to look forward to," says the black woman with grayed skin and drooping gold jewelery.

"Yes," the man agrees. "If only for its own sake."

"Oh, you think that's the important thing," says the other woman. She looks close to forty, as do they all.

"What I think," he says, "is it is something we are going to do. Any other definition is just somebody being intentionally morbid and obtuse, Nancy."

"Pay up," says the first woman.

"Have another drink," says the man, words leaking out through his puffy face.

"Let the impatience build a little."

"Is your head up your ass or what," the bartender says, quietly, to the barback, a pocked, stumbling local boy, who has let the ice tub deplete to meltings. "Fill that up and then go home. Get out of my sight."

He's not really a good person, this bartender.

But this is his life, East Hampton to Aspen and back, selling the best legal drug in America to the rich folk, enabling their little scenes and gaudy reckless purchasing, all that passes for history these days. His secret knowledge tends to weigh him down: that the dollar's what it's all about, and this is just a dance of fancy smoke and notions.

Out in the parking lot, watched only by the stars and valet, that sly pretty Andover girl wanders in slow, dazed circles. The anesthesiologist is long gone, back to Scarsdale.

Tonight there was a late supper with a stocky, rapacious bond trader, a manic transplant from Kansas for whom all the dollars made and spent were their own nonstop coitus. They went to Apex, where his waved credit card produced champagne. She listened to his mouth, saying things like, "Damn shit, I sure do love this Dom." He followed her into the toilet. "Let's ignite ourselves," holding out the vial of cocaine.

Then went right up her skirt, $30 panties split down the middle, her forearms bruised where he planted her against the hot air blower. The entrance of three dazed Chanel matrons gave her a chance to run. "What?"he said behind her. "Bitch," as she slipped coins into the phone. She cries, wondering only what, specifically, she'd expectedthe bastard dropped two hundreds on dinner, to say nothing of the drugs and bar tabs, the cost of it all, she knows at what sum the numbers add up-cries nonetheless, and waits for her taxi to come.

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