Cali Archives.

March 15, 2008

Jesus is My Homeboy

Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at "The Sacred & The Profane," a conference at San Diego State University.

Ted Neeley in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The Messiah as don't-harsh-my-mellow SoCal dude.

Official Blurb:

In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in '70s Southern California

In this lecture, equal parts personal essay and cultural critique, Dery---now a godless leftist---takes us on a Proustian flashback to his days as a teenage fundie---a Jesus Freak caught up in the "born-again" religious fervor that swept Southern California in the '70s. Excavating the SoCal history of that mutant strain of ad-hoc Christianity that Harold Bloom calls "the American religion," he'll deliver a fire-and-brimstone critique of the paleoconservatism, flat-earth fundamentalism, and deep-dyed anti-intellectualism that have made San Diego, throughout much of its intellectual history, not only a theme-park mirage in the Desert of the Real ("America's Finest City") but a Mojave of the Mind.

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the "situated knowledges" and "lived experiences" of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes---to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the 'Jesus People' movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted "Jesus" Neeley's infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment...

VITALS:

When: 11-6:15. NOTE: I go on at 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where:
Scripps Cottage
English and Comparative Literature
Arts and Letters 226
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020
San Diego, California 92182-6020

What:

(From the official website): "Sacred & Profane: Meditations on a World in Translation

Salman Rushdie once wrote, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions." In this interdisciplinary conference, we invite original works that explore the way we construct meaning out of historical, theoretical, and literary works.

Panels will include an interrogation of sacred texts, ranging from holy words to canonized works; the past as a sacred text; profane texts, which may challenge our definitions of literature as well as our tolerance for profanity; and issues involved in the process of translation, from one language to another or one time period to another. We invite submissions from visual artists that interpret or explore these topics."

If you drop by, be sure to tug on my sleeve. I'll be milling around aimlessly afterward, hoisting a margarita with faculty, grad students, and you.

Posted by Mark Dery at 05:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 27, 2007

Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs

We interrupt the unending torrent of comment spam ("Hello people, your site is best! Nice site look this: teen lesbians showering!") to flog our product.

The latest, insect-themed issue of the cultural quarterly Cabinet is in bookstores and on newsstands now, and includes my essay on the ginormous Jerusalem Cricket, which is, in fact, neither a cricket nor from Jerusalem. (As Linda Richman used to say on Saturday Night Live: Discuss.) Titled "Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs," the article is at once an overheated exegesis of the J.C. as myth and symbol, an eco-political critique of SoCal sprawl, and my attempt to exorcize the post-traumatic stress engendered by a nocturnal confrontation with one of these grotesque animals, an experience no Californian who has run across a J.C. in the dead of night will ever forget. (The Jerusalem Cricket, a.k.a. Stenopelmatus, ranges widely west of the Rockies but is ubiquitous in California, where sprawl's encroachment on the insect's habitat is giving rise to more and more confrontations between the insects and shocked-and-awed suburbanities. )

Look upon me and know fear, puny mortal: Jerusalem Cricket on the prowl. Photo copyright Takwish. Contact photographer at takwish at gmail dot com.

Here's a teaser...

In a jump cut, I was out of bed, across the room, switching on the light to reveal a crawling horror: a humongous insect, thicker than a man's thumb, maybe three inches in length. It had powerful, cricketlike hind legs and a caramel-colored abdomen, ringed with amber bands. Its head was dried-blood red, with the lacquered glossiness of a candied apple. It made me think of a skinned thumb, or the swollen head of an aroused penis, shiny with precum.
The creature was obscene in its ugliness. But what was it? David Cronenberg's idea of a partial-birth abortion? A stool sample from the man-eating xenomorph in the movie Alien? A nightcrawler from the cultural unconscious?
Sweeping the thing into a dustpan, I shuddered at its weight as I carried it to the bathroom. To my horror, the creature swam against the tide when I flushed, scrabbling frantically at the toilet bowl. I flushed. And flushed. And flushed. (Die, monster, die!) At last, it disappeared down the porcelain gullet. The toilet made a gagging sound. Trembling with revulsion, I laid the heavy ceramic lid of the toilet tank across the closed seat to ensure that no six-legged freak could exact revenge, even if it did manage to clamber up, out of the sewer. Not that I slept much that night. In the dark, I could still see those beady black eyes staring back at me unblinkingly as I sent the abomination swirling into Eternity with a final flush.

Sleep tight.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:25 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 13, 2005

Crossing La Linea

Southern California freeway sign.

As mentioned earlier, the Sept./Oct. issue of Print magazine includes my feature on Mexican-American visual culture.

Photo courtesy Sal Rojas.

Last summer, I interviewed cholo, Chicano, self-styled "pocho," and expatriate Mexicano illustrators and graphic designers in L.A., San Diego, and Tijuana; this article draws on those interviews, as well as an extensive conversation with the brilliant Chicano cultural theorist Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, well-known for his seminal essay on rasquachismo, a sort of Mexican-American bricolage. (I may post some excerpts from that interview—or the whole tamale, if there's any interest.)

bigote con fondo chilo (2).JPG
"Bigote con fondo chilo," courtesy Jorge Verdin.

The visuals, from nortec designer Jorge Verdin, stencil artist Acamonchi, and hardcore tattooist-to-the-stars Mister Cartoon, are too cool.

Stencil-art graffiti, Acamonchi. Courtesy Acamonchi.

Keywords: Mexican-American, Chicano, cholo, pocho, rasquache, rasqauchismo, mestizaje, graffiti art, stencil art, East L.A., San Diego, Tijuana, nortec.

As always, here's a teaser. (Note: This is a remix of the edited graphs that appear in the Print story.)

More and more, fashion, music, and design are giving props to the barrio culture of East L.A., where Mexican-Americans make up 97 percent of the population. Black-and-silver color schemes, a shout-out to East L.A.'s identification with the down-and-dirty Oakland Raiders, seem to be everywhere, these days. So does the font known as Old English—shorthand, in barrio culture, for authority, an association forged by the use of gothic script for official proclamations in colonial Mexico.
True to form, the America that ignores urban decay in the barrios (as long as their social pathologies don't spill into white neighborhoods) has nonetheless managed to mass-market that badass icon of rebel cool, the cholo, or Chicano gangmember. The mainstream sees real-life gangbangers "as frightening stereotypes: lethal, faceless, and vaguely nonhuman," writes Leon Bing, in Do or Die. But skinning the image of badness and selling it as off-the-rack rebellion is the stuff of marketers' dreams. That's why "mainstream America is learning how to say a new word: cholo," as USA Today gushed in 2003, when the trend first broke. That's why Old English lettering is cropping up on designer gringa-ware such as Gwen Stefani's L.A.M.B line, and even, madre de dios, Gap cords, modeled by Madonna. It's why celebrities such as Eminem, Beyonce, and Justin Timberlake of N-Synch (!) are making pilgrimages to L.A.'s inner-city badlands to get one of Mister Cartoon's tattoos, done in the black-and-gray "fine-line" style originated by cholo gang members behind bars.
From the other side of the neighborhood line, marketers' crossover dreams can look like cultural imperialism, to resurrect a phrase from more radical times. And for those who strike the devil's bargain of selling the look and feel of their own culture, those dreams can taste like sellout.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 06, 2005

In Search of Ancient Astronauts

My essay, "In Search of Ancient Astronauts: A Requiem for the Space Age," appears in the new Cabinet magazine, issue 18.

Key Concepts:

Ray Bradbury, "Rocket Summer," aeronautics workers in Southern California in the '60s and '70s, Tomorrowland, children's books on space travel, Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell, Lester Del Rey, the Apollo moon missions, NASA snafus, "space migration," rocketeer theology, the Jetsonian church architecture of Robert Des Lauriers, Cape Canaveral and the high-tech sublime, mummified astronauts.

"In Search of Ancient Astronauts" is my latest contribution to the self-assembling book I'm writing, a drive-by cultural critique and anti-memoir titled Don Henley Must Die (I'm open to subtitle suggestions).

By "self-assembling," I mean: Written as a series of free-floating essays, orbiting around a central theme. With luck, the finished book will feel hypertextual, rather than merely...disorganized. The idea is to avoid linear chronology, which stinks of autobiography, and to embrace a connectionist paradigm, rather than the usual rhetorical structures used in essays. Think Didion and Davis starring in a nortec remake of Almost Famous. Or something like that.

In my bylines, I call this book-in-progress a search for the cultural psyche of Southern California, where I grew up in the '70s, amid San Diego's badlands, borderlands, and suburban sprawl. Several recent essays—the seed DNA for book chapters—have appeared in Cabinet, evidence of editor Sina Najafi's intellectual courage, and of the panoramic sweep of his fascinating little magazine.

(If you're unfamiliar with Cabinet, I've written a quick backgrounder here. Or you can just wander over to their site, and poke around. FYI, Cabinet is available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, as well as other outlets, around the country. Alternatively, it can be bought directly from the publisher.)

As always, here's a teaser to seduce you into buying the magazine:

In Chula Vista, the San Diego suburb where I grew up in the '60s and '70s, rocket summer was an unchanging mental season for anyone whose father worked in the aeronautics industry, as my stepdad did.
My stepdad worked on the tailfins for the sleek, swept-wing fighter jet that knocked Tom Cruise out of the spotlight in Top Gun—the legendary Grumman F-14 Tomcat, which entered military service in 1972. He had a hand, too, in the engine nacelles for the DC-10, the 727, and the 737; the thrust reverser for the 747; the exhaust system for the Concorde; and the space shuttle boosters.
Little wonder, then, that my mental skies were crisscrossed with the contrails of SSTs and the fiery plumes of ascending moonships.
I lived with one foot in the future, a parallel dimension where supersonic travel, jetpacks, lunar vacations, and offworld colonies under geodesic domes were already a reality. Disney's Tomorrowland fueled my fantasies. Once a year, on Rohr night, when the park opened its gates to Rohr employees only, I thrilled to the space-jock jargon and simulated microgravity of the Flight to the Moon (brought to you by McDonnell-Douglas) and the Incredible Shrinking Man effects of the Adventure Through Inner Space (brought to you by Monsanto). By moonlight, Tomorrowland's aerodynamically cool monorail and spaceport architecture made the master-planned technocracies and interstellar odysseys in my stepdad's Isaac Asimov novels and Popular Science magazines seem suddenly, thrillingly real.
But Tomorrowland only literalized the Visions of Things to Come floating around in postwar America. Space evangelists such as Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun, and Lester Del Rey spread the gospel of space exploration and colonization through children's books that were equal parts edutainment, pulp SF, and boys' adventure story. Ley's inspiring tract, The Conquest of Space (1949), cut the die for the genre: ringingly romantic evocations of space travel, brought to life by the superreal clarity of Chesley Bonestell's artwork. Bonestell's views of Saturn Seen From Titan, The Surface of Mercury, and Exploring the Moon were stills from a movie not yet made, one that every schoolkid was certain he would one day star in. "The younger generation of rocket engineers is just beginning," wrote Ley, in 1951. "They are of the new generation to which space travel is not going to be a dream of the future but an everyday job with everyday worries in which they will be engaged." While my stepdad built the casings for the boosters that launched the moon rockets, I climbed Bonestell's dramatically lit lunar ridges, plumbed the depths of their shadowed craters. I teleoperated the spiderlike robots in Ley's Space Stations (1958), assembling a huge, ring-shaped spacelab high above the earth. I flew through the cosmic void in Lester Del Rey's Space Flight: The Coming Exploration of the Universe (1959), propelled by the jetpack in my weirdly medieval metal spacesuit, mechanical claws sprouting from my gloves and boots.

Image courtesy Dreams of Space website. © John Sisson 2005.
Like the rest of my generation, I was itching for liftoff. Tang was in our mother's milk; the course of our fantasies was plotted by books like Mae and Ira Freeman's You Will Go to the Moon (1959), whose perky text managed to make lunar colonies sound as cozily familiar as the suburbs:
You can see more from the top of this hill. Look! Do you see that house? That is the moon house. That is where you will live on the moon.

Image courtesy Dreams of Space website. © John Sisson 2005.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:48 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 13, 2005

Paradise Lust

Believe it or not, people are still having sex. The religious right's jihad against sexual expression hasn't put a lid on the American libido.

Erotic wallpaper, Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.

(Note: The following article originally appeared, under the same title but with different photos, in the spring/summer '05 issue of Vogue Hommes, pps. 244-7. Under the inspired, focus-groups-be-damned guidance of Editor Richard Buckley, Vogue Hommes was, for a brief time, home to some of the most exuberantly over-the-top journalism and criticism ever to bluff its way into a glossy fashion magazine. Props to Richard for the act of intellectual courage implicit in commissioning this, and to photographer Darren Smith for his atmospheric images.— M.D.)
Despite the pitchfork-and-bible brigade's crusade against gay marriage, sex ed, and that Mother of Harlots and Abominations, the smutty soap opera Desperate Housewives, pop culture's low-slung undercarriage is still well-lubricated. The mass appeal of Desperate Housewives (the second highest-rated show during the fall 2004 TV season, averaging nearly 22 million viewers a week), not to mention the success of erotica such as 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P.; Jenna Jameson's best-selling confessional, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, a photo book calculated to steam the veneer off your coffee table; and the biopic Kinsey and T.C. Boyle's latest novel, The Inner Circle (both about the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey), give proof through the night that the appetite for vicarious sex, at least, is undiminished.
America is a house divided, says Dr. Barnaby Barratt, president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. "The media are becoming more sensationalist and more titillating" even as the religious right is becoming "far more conservative and puritanical, sexually," he said, in an interview with this author.
From his vantage point as an educator, sex therapist, and psychoanalyst, Dr. Barratt looks out on an America wracked by a civil war over what pollsters call "moral values." On one side, sex-positive straights and gays, civil libertarians, and random rutters—you know, the guy who just has to have that Make Your Own Dildo kit ("Thousands sold worldwide! Just add water! Amazing detail!"), the girl who won't leave home without her Ultraviolet Jelly Rubber Butt Beads.
On the other side are Christian soldiers marching as to war against frank, factual talk about sex, especially in the classroom. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship's Sex & Censorship Committee, fundamentalist groups are clamoring for censorship of medically accurate sex education. In its place, they champion a faith-based curriculum that urges America's youth to gird up its loins against Satan's temptations, foreswearing masturbation, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, and arming themselves with abstinence (some religious curricula urge kids to bring Jesus along on that hot date, as a "chaperone").
By their fruits ye shall know them: According to a Planned Parenthood factsheet, the fruits of abstinence-only sex ed include public schools forced to host "chastity" rallies in which students pledge to God that they will remain chaste until marriage, and a seventh grade health teacher in Belton, Missouri suspended when a parent complained that she had discussed "inappropriate" subject matter in class. (The hapless instructor answered a student's question about oral sex). In Granite Bay, California, a student asked where his cervix was; another wanted to know if oral sex could make her pregnant. If a little learning is a dangerous thing, faith-based cluelessness is suicidal at a moment when, according to Planned Parenthood, the United States "has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, and American adolescents are contracting HIV faster than almost any other demographic group."
According to Dr. Barratt, "there is more opposition to sexual expression than ever" because "sexual values" are a flashpoint in the culture wars. "We now have the government attacking scientific research," he says. "The NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a blacklist of researchers who will not get funds because they are seen as being on the wrong side of the government's agenda...of abstinence-only [sex] education."
How did we get here? By the early '70s, several decades' worth of scientific studies and pop sexology, such as the Kinsey reports (1948 and '53), Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), and Dr. Alex Comfort's Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking (1972), had exposed American prudery for what it was: a fig leaf covering our guilty pleasures. The nation was ready for the guilt-sucks, if-it-feels-good-do-it ethos of the disco, the bathhouse, and the swingers' club. Celebrities, socialites, and hedonists flocked to discos such as the Manhattan-based Studio 54 (where 24-hour party people prowled for fresh meat of either gender), swingers' clubs such as Plato's Retreat (also in New York City), and utopian experiments in polyamory such as Sandstone Retreat and the nudist "growth center" Elysium, both in the hills of L.A.'s Topanga Canyon.
So how did we go forward, into the past? How can the '70s seem so futuristic while our own era seems so retrograde? Over 30 years ago, Dr. Comfort noted Western culture's emergence from "a period of moral panic into a re-awareness that there is nothing to fear," rejoicing in society's "recovery from Puritanism." Now, America is gagged and bound by the "moral values" of neo-Puritans and paleoconservatives.
What happened on the way to the orgy?
Welcome to Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
In search of some answers, I asked Marty Zitter, the former public relations director and longtime resident of Sandstone, to take me on a tour of the now-defunct utopian commune and weekend retreat. There, on a 15-acre estate in the hills of Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, a handful of couples (and hundreds of weekend utopians) shed their clothes and lived the Dionysian dream. From 1969 until the end of '73, the aerospace engineer-turned-free love visionary John Williamson and his wife Barbara, along with a flock of converts, embarked on a radical social experiment, "living in open sexual freedom and seeking to eliminate sexual possessiveness and jealousy," as Gay Talese put it in his chronicle of the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor's Wife. (Sandstone closed in '73, then reopened in '74 under new owner Paul Paige, closing for good on December 30, 1976, a victim of financial troubles.)
On a hot day in August 2004, Zitter, now 62 and retired from a career in real estate, is driving me up the cliffhanging road that zigzags into Topanga Canyon's chaparral-covered hills. At last, we come to a rambling, mission-style mansion overlooking the canyon. The caretaker, a tanned, amiable man named Alan Zellar, lets us in through the front door, where in Sandstone's heyday the exuberant, fast-talking Zitter greeted guests, buck-naked. Everyone came (one uses the verb advisedly): Timothy Leary, Peter Lawford, Bobby Darin, Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame), Paris Review editor George Plimpton, Dean Martin.
Marty Zitter greeting the ghosts of polyamorists past at Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
There was the time Sammy Davis, Jr., showed up with his wife, Altovise, accompanied by porn star Marilyn Chambers. "He grabs hold of me and takes me out to the middle of the room [Zitter, as always, was naked] and says, 'This is a warm cat!,'" recalled Zitter. "People are laughing, and he says, 'Wow, I think I'll get into this place.' So he takes off a cufflink, probably a 10-karat diamond cufflink, and drops it on the floor. And Marilyn Chambers grabs the cufflink! And then he takes off one of his diamond studs and drops that on the floor, and Marilyn grabs that. Then he lights a cigarette with his diamond-encrusted lighter [and tosses it aside] and Marilyn grabs that. And then he started doing a soft-shoe..."
Another time, a big fire swept through the hills of Topanga Canyon, in '71, and a woman swimming in the Sandstone pool slaked the lusts of a dozen or more firefighters, one by one. "She said, 'We need more fires around here,'" laughed Zitter.
We step out onto the terrace. "On a typical weekend, you'd see as many as 200 people out here on the front lawn, sunbathing or in various stages of encounters," says Zellar, with a dry chuckle.
View of Sandstone Ranch from the front lawn, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
We head downstairs, which back in the Sandstone days was wall-to-wall waterbeds and coupling couples. Hence its name: The Ballroom. In Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese describes it as a delirium of "shadowed faces and interlocking limbs, rounded breasts and reaching fingers, moving buttocks, glistening backs, shoulders, nipples, navels," all flecked with light from a spinning mirrorball.
Moving on, we come to the Playroom, a back room where "you might walk in and find 20 people all wrapped up around each other," says Zellar. A nearby bathroom features a double shower—for group showering, naturally. The wall still flaunts the X-rated wallpaper it wore in the '70s, a gold-and-white tangle of foliage and Art Nouveau curlicues that reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be inhabited by fornicating Lilliputians.
Wallpaper, Sandstone bathroom. Photo: Darren Smith.
Of course, Sandstone, whose official name was the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, was more than just a "'fuck club,'" insists Judith Boyd, 64, a semi-retired therapist who frequented the retreat from 1973-'77. "It was definitely a place of open sexuality," she says, "but it wasn't a swingers' club. And yet it was, because there was all the overt sexuality." In an e-mail, she added, "The time I spent there was worth more than several years of college in the study of sensuality, sexuality, and intimacy."
Dr. Leanna Wolfe, a professor at L.A. Valley College and a doctor of sexology (she did her doctoral dissertation on "Jealousy and Transformation in Polyamorous Relationships"), confirms that Sandstone drew a "who's who of cultural movers and shakers—highly literate people, avant-garde professionals." She notes, "Swinging today's a big business, whereas Sandstone had much to do with personal growth. Sex is powerful, sex is transformative, and Sandstone embraced those possibilities."
In Hot & Cool Sex (1972), a booklet published by Sandstone, the Farleigh Dickinson professor of social biology Robert T. Francoeur and his wife Anna talk of "a revolution in consciousness, a night-to-day shift in our sexual images"; of our fixation on genital sex giving way to the "grokking" of Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, "a kind of demi-erotic relating and interpersonal knowing in the original biblical sense." Yeah, baby. Grok me all night long. Hot sex is for the uptight; Sandstone sex is cool sex—"egalitarian, single-standard, sensually diffused and oriented towards intimacy and open relations with persons." "Sandstone is an experimental transitional TRIBAL ENVIRONMENT." Whoa! Is America ready for "the tribalization of our culture on a global scale"? Not to worry: Sandstone is "a bridge which will allow people to experience a tribal culture, then move back into our hot sex society and transform it from within." Awesome, dude! (Did somebody say "hot sex"?)
Well, it was the '70s. And now it's history. The Playroom is all played out: in the nearby bathroom, a daddy-longlegs clings, motionless, to the wall. The swimming pool, where guests made love underwater, has been drained; a drift of leaves lies scattered in the deep end. (Is there anything more melancholy than a drained swimming pool?) The "sighs, cries of ecstasy...the slap and suction of copulating flesh, laughter, murmuring" that Talese once heard in the Ballroom have faded, the people who made them gone away and gone flabby or gray with age or, in some cases, gone to dust.
Pool, Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
In 2004, when George Bush's populist theocracy is trying to turn the United States into what Zitter calls "America the monastery," Sandstone's polyamorous Tomorrowland seems as dated as the unisex get-ups and orbital shopping-mall decor of Logan's Run (1976), the sci-fi film set in a Sandstone-like pleasuredome where everyone is under 30 and free love rules.
Still, Regina Lynn, the sexpert who writes the "Sex Drive" column for Wired News, is hopeful. "It's a cycle," she writes, in an e-mail interview. "The more a group tries to repress, the more [the other] group resists and perhaps gets even more transgressive than before, sparking another surge of repressiveness. But this time Pandora's box has been nailed open, and the repressives are not going to be able to put everything back inside."
Zitter's banking on that. "I think that human evolution is going to progress in the way that Sandstone led," he says. "If you look at a [chimpanzeelike] primate called the bonobo, bonobo [society] is matriarchal and all disputes end with sex, oral as well as genital. From what I've read, it is a totally pleasure-oriented psychology." In the near future, he predicts, medical technology will zap the AIDS virus and "other party-pooping infectious diseases." Then, Sandstone's experiment in free love will become a blueprint for a better world, a bonobo-like Eden of polymorphous perversities and demi-erotic relating. There, we'll all wander naked through a kinder, gentler Planet of the Apes.
— Mark Dery (© 2005 Mark Dery).

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:34 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 03, 2005

Sunshine/Noir

Sunshine/Noir: Writing From San Diego And Tijuana, edited by Jim Miller, is out, and I've got a lengthy essay in it, titled "Loving the Alien: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Become Californian." It's an autobiographical rumination on the ontological migraines I suffered as a palely loitering lit geek, growing up among San Diego's Malibus Barbies and Earring Magic Kens.

Here's the opening graph, as a teaser:
"Born in Boston and raised in New England until I was five, I felt like Robinson Crusoe on Mars when we moved to San Diego. Marooned in a suburban development, I rode my Sting-Ray down gridded streets, past lookalike tract homes. If I squinted hard, I could almost imagine I was one of the crabgrass frontiersmen in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (1950), homesteading in some extraterrestrial Levittown. To someone from 'Back East,' the climate was alien: It never snowed, it rarely rained, and on the hottest days the sun seemed as if it was about to go nova."

The anthology also features Sandra Alcosser, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Marilyn Chin, Mike Davis (yes, that Mike Davis), Hal Jaffe, Jimmy Jazz, Steve Kowitt, Sue Luzzaro, Victor Payan and Perry Vasquez, and David Reid.

A professor of English and labor studies at San Diego City College, Jim Miller is an activist historian, hell-bent on exhuming the bodies buried beneath the Chamber of Commerce-approved official history of America's Finest City. He's fanning the flames of what passes for dissident intellectualism in San Diego, where the Life of the Mind dies screaming (or did, at least, when I languished there, as a teenager). Along with Mike (City of Quartz) Davis and Kelly Mayhew, he co-edited the trailblazing collection, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, a portrait of Dorian Gray the city's real-estate moguls, jackleg politicans, and right-wing talkshow hosts would dearly love to consign to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, if only they could.

Now, through CityWorks Press (a non-profit literary press founded by the San Diego Writers Collective), Miller has published this compendium of nonfiction and fiction writings on the San Diego-Tijuana sprawl.

"In the introduction to the anthology, Jim Miller...explains the anthology's title by pointing to San Diego's paradoxes: the city's rich history is compromised by its push to grow; no other city in California has as large a gap between rich and poor; and the carefree image the San Diego tourist industry promotes is undermined by a constant military presence," writes Kelly Davis, in her San Diego CityBeat feature on Sunshine/Noir. "Such dichotomies prompt 'attempts to explore the meaning of place,' Miller writes. The anthology seeks to do just that."

Davis also wrote the sharp, stingingly funny introduction that prefaces the big, fat chunk of my essay excerpted in this week's CityBeat, an irreverent upstart that's blowing the doors off the city's other alternative newsweekly, The San Diego Reader.

Actually, it's the cover story; how cool is that?

Read her intro to the excerpt from my essay, and the excerpt itself.

Note: If you're reading this in SoCal, there's a combine book-launch party, art exhibition, and book signing for Sunshine/Noir at ICE GALLERY, 3417 30TH ST (AT UPAS), NORTH PARK, SAN DIEGO on SATURDAY, JUNE 11, at 7 PM. It's free. Perry Vasquez writes, "An exhibition of art from Sunshine/Noir will also be on display, featuring the work of Yukimi Levas-Anderson, Michael Mesa, Mario Chacon, Eugene Brown, Hendrix Knowles, Alessandra Moctezuma, and Perry Vasquez." For more info, call (619) 244-9302.

Incidentally, Vasquez, who did the cover art for the anthology, reproduced above, is an astonishing artist and cultural activist focusing on Chicano and crossborder/bicultural issues. Check out his droll, barbed work at his site, Apollo 13 .
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:46 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
June 02, 2005

Read Zeppelin: Davis Does Zoso

Erik Davis: hermenaut; bearded Led Zep exegete.
Photo: Mindstates II website.

In Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3/ Continuum International Publishing Group), Erik Davis manages the neat trick of making Robert Plant's cosmic-dirthead lyrics sound like outtakes from The Mabinogion. (This, remember, is the man whose idea of rock poesy is "I got my flower/ I got my power/ I got a woman who knows" ("Dancing Days," Houses of the Holy).)
But seriously: Davis, author of Techgnosis (the definitive study of man, myth, and magic in the Digital Age), is one of the most consistently invigorating thinkers trespassing in that No Man's Land between the academy and the glossies, and the most engaging aspect of this irresistibly readable book is the sheer delight he so obviously takes in overreading this stuff. It's as if he went through some hermeneutic wormhole and emerged in a parallel universe where Zep's legendary fourth album is infinitely dense with significance—a textual black hole that sucks all meaning into its dark maw. (The jacket copy on the back cover calls Zoso "an esoteric megahit, a blockbuster arcanum...a thing from beyond, charged with manna.")
Part of Continuum's 33 1/3 series of small, Nintendo cartridge-thick books that pair landmark records and their most devoted writer-fans, Led Zeppelin IV deconstructs the Zoso album with a scanning, tunneling attention to microscopic detail that would be terrifying, were it not so entertaining. Davis reads the record's interrelated songs as a mystical allegory, "a single journey through a changing landscape of moonlight hedgerows and trembling mountains; a movement unified, at the very least, by Plant's anxious need to move." The author follows the hyperlinks of his sprawling erudition and far-flung interests wherever they lead him, riffing on rock history, fan consciousness, a 632-page crackpot exegesis by a Zep fan-turned-born-again-Christian ("without a doubt the most exhaustive occult reading of Zep yet attempted"), the disembodiment of music in the age of mechanical reproduction, the creepily necromantic nature of dead voices resurrected by the phonograph needle, the 19th century occultist Austin Osman Spare (whose concept of the sigil unlocks the deeper meanings of those inscrutable Zoso glyphs), and the terrifying true nature (now it can be told!) of the "five seconds of pulsating electronic spooge" that opens "Black Dog." In wry, courageously candid asides, he uses unapologetic reminiscences from a '70s adolescence spent in Southern California, "surrounded by the spent fuel rockets of the spiritual counterculture," to restore the record's lost historical context, and what it meant to teenage fans like Davis, there and then.
From the lyrics and music to the cover art to the moldering 18th century house where the band recorded Zoso to the Satanic verses allegedly lurking in the music to the cryptic messages scrawled in the blank vinyl near the spindle hole (did I mention the 19th century magus Eliphas Levi, and the historical roots of "When the Levee Breaks"?), Davis deconstructs Zep's fourth at a deliriously obsessive level, reminding us that "fan" is, after all, short for "fanatic."
Mark Dery: I'm interested in this notion of overinterpretation as a conscious critical strategy (if that, in fact, is what you're up to). When does textual exegesis shade into self-parody? In other words, when do the obsessive attentions of fanboy critics, excavating Deep Meanings from a hunk of disposable pop culture, start to look bathetic, as a result of the contrast between grand ambition and the silliness of the object under scrutiny? Don't get me wrong: By the book's end, I was more or less persuaded by your argument for Zoso as a mythic quest, rich in intertextual connections to medieval allegory, Celtic myth, Page's Crowleyite magick, and Plant's pre-Raphaelite fantasies of medieval idylls, equal parts Tolkien and back-to-nature hippie utopianism. But even if we grant the Barthesian premise that meaning is largely in the mind of the beholder, a product of our engagement with the text, is there a point at which a text is simply so inadequate to a critic's claims for it that it collapses under the weight of those claims? I mean, Thick as a Brick isn't Finnegan's Wake. Or is it?
Erik Davis: Let me answer your question in a couple of parts, one a general comment about (over)interpretation, and one more specifically focused on occult materials. I am very interested in obsessive interpretation, in interpretation as a form of creativity. I suppose I got this in part from the deconstruction that was drilled into my brain when I studied literature in college, although most deconstruction struck me as anemic in its creation of the "text," and so often seemed motivated by a resentment of or suspicion about the imaginative power of texts. I was more interested in enhancing and clarifying the imaginative power of texts, in criticism as an intensification, a line of flight. Connections are more important than critiques. That's why I always loved Deleuze the most, and still do.
I love the cosmological function, how the mind engages with images and myths to build a world, not just a fiction, but a world. For me, genuine obsession can make the most tawdry objects revelatory, and so I am fascinated by marginal but manic "readers" of all stripes, and with most sorts of text. The conjunction of a brilliant reading and a tawdry object strikes me as very profound, precisely because it is trivial. If the mind reading Thick as a Brick was creative and audacious, I would probably be able to go along with a breakdown of Jethro Tull's abiding genius, at least for a spell. I can't do sports though; I find organized sports fandom at best benignly boring, and at worst repulsive, unless the sport is something obscure like curling or that shamanic progenitor of polo that the Afghani warlords play with a goat head.
I believe the interpretive imagination is "open," and that a responsibility to one's creative daemon, and to questions of ultimate meaning, is as fundamental as a responsibility to history or the disenchanting function of the intellect. This interest in imaginative overreading underlies my abiding fascination with religious revelation, the occult, and "visionary culture" of all stripes. In my view, the occult is peculiar in that it is almost designed to elicit creative overinterpretation—it encourages the reader to start connecting x and y, planets and roses, and drawing links between different texts until an immense quasi-conspiracy of signification arises. This process, once unleashed, takes on a life of its own, and takes one on a journey from which you never altogether return. Because the occult is designed for this sort of hermeneutics, one no longer needs to speak about the intentionality or ultimate value of individual texts. Random information—want ads, comic books, stray conversations—can be transformed into grand cosmologies through the occult imagination, a process that ultimately leads to psychosis but underlies scores of great fictions as well. I don't believe Plant and Page consciously put a lot of the stuff in that I describe, but I believe the creative imagination did. In other words, I allow the creative imagination a sort of agency because that's the ticket to get into the door, an animism of consciousness. So I'd like to think my mythopoetic reading of a goofy rock record is both legitimate and perverse, and sustained—like the performance of magic—only by its own ability, or not, to amuse, instruct, bewitch. I am drawn to a sort of "sacred irony": irony not as a simple dodge, but as a deeper turn of the screw.
MD: I'd be curious to know if you're at all influenced by the hyperinterpretative excesses (let's call it the Casaubon School of Obsessive Hermeneutics) of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Harold Bloom, Steven Shaviro, Hillel Schwartz, fan writings on the Net, wingnut religious screeds, or—?
ED: Some figures more than others—Bangs and Bloom for sure, and also religious fanatics and mystic paranoids. For me, interpretation has always partly been about the imagination, in a fairly classic sense of the term. I am both drawn towards "texts" (writers, records, art, religions, etc.) that are characterized by a brazen and novel imagination, and by an interpretive approach that tries to enchant the reader with some imaginative figure—sometimes only half-revealed, even to myself—as well as convince them with argument. I like that kind of excess, so easy to get away with in fiction, and so much harder to pull off successfully in nonfiction. Greil Marcus, for example, has written some really brilliant texts in this way, but a lot of his more recent stuff seems kind of gassy to me. That said, I recently saw him speak about Dock Boggs and Son House, and there were a few moments when I felt a moment that I recognize from some of my favorite visionary poets/mystic teachers/apocalyptic raconteurs, etc.: a kind of vertical stab of "immanent transcendence"—a kind of interpretive epiphany that approaches gnosis. And it is in this Bloomian sense that I am most gnostic.
MD: To what extent did mining meaning from lyrics and the legendary record covers of the '70s influence your evolution as a cultural critic? I've often thought that a '70s adolescence spent in a beer-bong haze, penetrating the mysteries of, say, Tales from Topographic Oceans, or the gatefold imagery of Yessongs, was the Talmudic proving ground of critics like yourself and Julian Dibbell and maybe Simon Reynolds.
ED: I can't speak for those fine gentlemen, although I would certainly include yourself in the list as well! I know that I am, on many different levels, a child of the '70s, even though I didn't become a teenager until 1980. But, in a way, that makes sense. At that age when mythologies are strong—late childhood, early adolescence—I absorbed the hazy, mystic, paranoid vibrations of mid-'70s white SoCal coastal culture. I bought cheap used metaphysical paperbacks, SF, and occult books loosed on the world through the hippie mystic boom. In the early '80s, my best friends and I were relatively retro. We had fun, but we felt ourselves to be "seekers," and part of what we were seeking was the essence of the cultural generation that immediately preceded ours. Though we liked contemporary bands as well, drugs were a kind of Wayback Machine, driving down to some earlier moment of visionary communion hinted at in Yes album covers, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Dead lyrics, Ziggy Stardust, Heavy Metal comic books, Moebius, Roeg's Performance and Man Who Fell to Earth, that whole "pregnant image" culture of '70s heads.
What was so satisfying about writing about Led Zeppelin was my ability to indulge and commune with this early layer of cultural consciousness. As I write in the introduction, it was like temporarily giving the 14-year-old weirdo I was the reigns of a man's mind. Led Zeppelin was such a touchstone then that I found myself tapping into parts of myself I had forgotten. I even had a couple of "heavy" symbolic dreams that featured Jimmy Page! It was actually kind of profound, but with the goofiness included.
MD: You mentioned Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most enduringly fashionable French philosopher of the past few decades. Baudrillard and Foucault have taken their places in the cultural Burgess Shale, alongside Dwight MacDonald and C. Wright Mills and other intellectual fossils, but Deleuze's stock just keeps going up. That said, I have a confession to make: Reading Deleuze and Guattari, for me, has always felt like breaststroking through quick-drying cement. I mounted a spirited assault on Mille Plateaux and emerged from the book a beaten man, staggering down from the summit snow-blind, oxygen-deprived, fingers gnawed to stumps by frostbite, like one of those godforsaken climbers in Into Thin Air. Nomadology, the Body Without Organs, the machinic phylum, the rhizomatic whatever: I grasp the nub of these ideas, or think I do, but clawing my way through the briar patch of D&G's Gallic prose leaves me exhausted and bleeding. What am I missing? And how have Deleuze's ideas enriched your critical methodology, exactly? More generally, why do you think Deleuze's ideas have struck such a responsive chord, in recent years?
ED: That's a big Q. I'll just stick to my own work, since I really haven't tracked the Deleuzian scene in a while. "Back in the day" I was a total maniac for the stuff, and moderated a fascinating listserv devoted to D&G. I think I was attracted to their work because, of all the French poststructuralist thinkers I felt compelled to "master" during college, D&G were by far the trippiest—and the funniest. But I think my own take is rather different from the perspective of many, uh, "orthodox" Deleuzians. I believe Mille Plateaux is a psychedelic text. I think they were trying to write and think a sort of perception, where every aspect of mind and culture are seen as expressions of a mutant probing Tao that is constantly congealing and liquefying as it moves along. Delanda, one of D&G's most interesting interpreters, is occasionally explicit about their psychedelic dimension, though I interpret this dimension in a more explicitly spiritual/Dionysian/Taoist manner that Delanda or most Deleuzian thinkers. The spiritual key to their work is in the chapter "How do you make yourself a Body without Organs"? It is all about Tantra, although they do not use the term.
Many of the things that interest me are not "Deleuzian." I am still too devoted to cultures of transcendence, and I do not have the intense yen for extreme, near nihilist deterritorialization that, at one time anyway, passed for a properly Deleuzian ethics (incorrectly, IMHO). But the way I think and write is, I like to think, influenced by D&G's method—not the crazy jargon and over-the-top erudition I aspire to but will never reach, but the notion of writing as a connection-machine, a network of intensities, points of resonance, pregnant echoes, etc. The power of the text emerges out of the positive energy developed from those connections. In my own relatively pop way, that is how I proceed. In that sense, I am not really a "critic," because I don't spend a lot of time in the critical or negative mode, in the dialectical sense. I build connections and links without worrying too much about causality or overanalyzing the source for my passions. Like most intellectuals, I am enchanted by disenchantment, but I am also inspired by the object under my gaze, and trace those juicy flows while following my own.
MD: You've invoked the '70s as something like a floating world, a Temporary Autonomous Zone, a beer-bong utopia, here and elsewhere. Can you give me a free-associated thick description of how the '70s feels and what it means, in mythic terms, for you? I lived through them, but am always stunned by the obvious revelation that culture regresses as much as it progresses. Do you ever feel, as I do, that the '70s was a more permissive, more libidinous, more ecstatic time? For example, masculinity was a much more fluid concept then, from the shag-haired ephebe David Cassidy to the skinny, slim-hipped athleticism of Mark Spitz (a far cry from today's steroidal athletes) to the moonage androgyny of David Bowie to, yes, the pre-Raphaelite femininity of Robert Plant, who for all his crotch-grabbing machismo wore girls' puffed-sleeve shirts and toyed limp-wristedly with his Botticelli curls, onstage. Where do the coordinates of the '70s lie, in the timespace of your imagination? What do they stand for, in your personal cosmology? And how do Led Zep's gender politics fit into that lost world? (Is it too obvious to point out Plant, with his girlyboy posturing, served as a surrogate for the sacrificial virgin—a screen for the projection of a largely male teenage fandom's fantasies?)
ED: I have always been inordinately fond of the 1970s, especially the early 1970s. For one thing, it was the era when I achieved self-awareness, and my memories of that time are bathed in a twilight glow, a doubled twilight of nostalgia and the era's own post-'60s fade. I have been blessed and cursed with a powerful zeitgeist radar. (I say cursed because it has made the last four years hell.) So when I was a little kid, I feel like I picked up all that post '60s spiritual wanderlust, anomie, and funk. I also believe it was the only time in American history when the culture was actually dominated by the negative—by pessimism, paranoia, and doubt. This is fascinating, and crucial to look at it, especially as things grow grim. All the goofy shit that people fetishize about the era cloaks an existential and political abyss. At the same time, the utopian, transformative, ecological strains were there in force, expressing themselves in all sorts of wild, and sometimes rather effective, ways. Then there's the libidinal profile of the time, which was a more permissive and more "feminine" era. Masculinity tended towards the flared and droopy and fringed rather than the straight and narrow. This gives it a utopian tinge, for sure, at least for those of us who like such things loose. But equally important to the era's libidinal profile is a kind of melancholia, the melancholia of the hedonist who realizes that the full degree of pleasure does not fill the hole in the soul, maybe even makes the hole wider and darker. Think of the Ice Storm. I believe the turn towards spirituality is part of the same movement as this hedonic excess. Spiritual hedonism is a key to the era. Iaon Couliano talks about the connection between sex and spirit in his book on magic in the Renaissance, where he points out that attitudes and even fashion were more voluptuous in the Renaissance, when the cultural and explanatory power of magic was waxing. As we get into the 17th century, shit starts to get tight, although pretty soon you get all those wacky-assed wigs. That connection is also why Led Zeppelin, the most powerfully "mystic" major rock band around, was also the most profane—not just in their loud and urgent riffs, but in their behavior, or at least their rumored behavior (for we are in the realm of images here more than facts). They were also "manned," so to speak, by one of the most deliciously androgynous figures in rock, a man whose femme side was, for me, both more fascinating and more attractive than Mick or Bowie or Lou Reed. Plant did not have the sense of irony and sophistication those fellows did, but he was also, for all that, strangely wholesome, a naivete that makes the whole shtick even more charming. Let's not forget: Zep dressed in drag on the sleeve of Physical Graffiti years before [the Rolling Stones'] Some Girls.
MD: "I melted into a profound and adolescent reverie," you write, early on, establishing the emotional atmosphere of a book steeped in nostalgia.
I recalled a childhood dream of Nordic fjords, and a particularly skunky bongload beneath the California stars, and my most incandescent high school crush, a blond named Barbara Zinke whom I half-believed was a white witch.
What role does nostalgia play, in your writing? And what are the politics of nostalgia? Is reminiscing inherently conservative, in the literal sense that it wants to conserve the past? American men are sometimes pilloried for their arrested adolescence, for channeling their Inner Teenagers way too often: think Jack Black in School of Rock, Kevin Spacey's flashbacks to his eight-track days in American Beauty, even Homer Simpson's fond reveries of his platform-shoed youth. If you buy my premise that this sort of back-to-the-futurism is a Guy Thing, why are American men (especially boomers) drawn to such flights out of time, teleporting ourselves into the Excellent Adventures of our pasts?
ED: On one level, reveling in this kind of cultural nostalgia seems neither more damaging nor more interesting then watching those nostalgic representations in the first place. Nostalgia is a kind of personal TV, like an iPod playlist with all the songs you once loved but now see through but listen to anyway. I watch TV like this, at least sometimes. But in general I don't particularly enjoy this sort of nostalgia, the attempt to buy back or dress up or repeat. I don't think it's very complex: we turn to adolescence to recover a sense of self, of an earlier nexus of possibility. At the same time, by reveling in the goofiness of the anachronisms we can remind ourselves that all those dreams were a bit misplaced. Or that second move never occurs, and we just live in a skipped CD repeat or plugged into the same classic rock countdown.
What interests me about nostalgia, though, is the sharper emotional call it conceals, the sense of something calling from afar, of voices from the past whispering of what is to come. This deeper, self-aware nostalgia is unfulfilled by the trash of the past, and it can be a gateway into sacred forces, to a sense of self that refuses nihilism while acknowledging our basic, constitutive lack, and rejects all the things that normally and only provisionally offer satisfaction. This is the nostalgia, not for a specific time in one's past, but for a general past, for roots perhaps, or an informing tradition. And yet there is this sense in deep nostalgia that what is being longed for is not in time at all. Not to be corny, but that's what I think Plant stumbled into with the line about the feeling he gets when he looks to the west, the feeling that his spirit is crying to leave.
Certainly there is a relationship between nostalgia, whether personal or spiritual, to conservative or reactionary politics, which is one reason progressive or avant-garde circles often reject the autumnal glow of nostalgia as false consciousness. But I think in our intensely mutating world, the instinctive reaction against classic conservatism is, like most things, too simple—after all, our "conservatives" these days are anything but. Today's Republicans are globalist revolutionaries who use a fabricated and deeply contemporary Christian "traditionalism" to create an untraditional politics of moralistic marketing and idiot affect that blocks or displaces what should be legitimate anger, resentment, and resistance at what aspects of our shared world are being sustained, or conserved, and what is being crushed beneath the engines. A genuine conservatism—I am not trying to recuperate the word, just play with it—would be interested in maintaining certain lines of development—cultural, biophysical, genetic, etc.—against the Frankenstein monster of nihilistic posthuman capitalism. That is why I still think that the problematic idea of tradition still has tremendous value, because the progressive intellectual attempt to be purely contemporary, to jettison all nostalgia, leaves one with very little ballast against the flattening dominant paradigm of posthuman mutation. It cedes the whole rich and potent field of past meanings to reactionaries, rather than cultivating its convulsive spark.
MD: You touch, at points, on the dazzling gatefold album covers of Hipgnosis and other '70s graphic-design groups as a sort of virtual reality. As well, you image the '70s album as "a concrete talisman that drew you into its world, into a frame." And you quote Page on the subject of music as what we would now call acoustic cyberspace—a psychological geography that we traverse while listening to it, a psychoacoustic space with a sense of place. What is the relationship between sound and image, in '70s rock, and how essential was that relationship to the total experience of inhabiting what the Like, Wow crowd called an album's "headspace"? (Instructive term, that.) More generally, what are the connective threads, conceptually speaking, between, say, looking at a landscape painting, a Roger Dean record cover, the jackets of the old Lord of the Rings paperbacks, black light posters, M.C. Escher calendar art, a videogame like Myst, and virtual worlds, if any? What is it about the ape mind that wants to project itself into imaginary landscapes, and what memetic role did the '70s album cover, the music that was its soundtrack, and the imaginary geographies they constituted play in the construction of the "wraparound sensorium" (McLuhan) we now inhabit, as residents of the Matrix?
ED: "Head" to me has always been a more interesting cultural category to me than "hippie." One way into the headspace of the heads is by brushing off the hoary old term Imagination: the faculty of producing and synthesizing images, which is something we use all the time, in ordinary life as well as in dreams, but is amplified through certain practices, such as guided visualization, taking drugs, occult practices, staring at clouds, and drawing fantastic landscapes. One way of characterizing the '60s turn is that it staged a gaudy return of the romantic Imagination into a new technological milieu. The formal mutations in the media of the 1960s—in stereo recording, offset printing, FM radio, etc.—created a new and undefined space that called forth the fecund, erotic, and magical powers of the imagination. The rise of the occult, in this view, was simply a response to a formal shift that prioritized right-brain drift, synchronistic associations, image overload, and a sense of virtual transport—all that stuff that McLuhan talked about. What you have with something like Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans is an ultimately synesthetic gesture, where title, lyric, music, recording "space," and visible package all contribute to the construction of a space of the imagination—that is, a work of mixed media seeking holism. The relative loss of this psychedelic undertow for the decade and a half following the mid-'70s head world simply represents the codification and absorption of this space, one in which the synthetic function of the imagination is increasingly supplied by the apparatus. It's an old dynamic, but an intense one, which continues today. Instead of text-based MUDs, which once called forth mental images the way fantasy books like The Lord of the Rings did, we have immersive, visually claustrophobic and unambiguous imagestreams, worlds that threaten to take over the real, in a Matrix-like fashion. Part of the nostalgia for '70s head media—at least, for my own—is that it reflects our current order of virtuality in a quaint, almost storybook fashion.
MD: You oppose critique and connectionism, arguing that "connections are more important than critiques." I find this angle of attack fascinating, for several reasons. First, the prevailing intellectual winds seem to be blowing your way. The cottage industry in Deleuze studies notwithstanding, critical theory (in the '80s, French-postmodernist sense of the word) has lost its sex appeal. "Theory" is in route, with "criticism" following close on its heels. The media theorist McKenzie Wark has called critique to account for fetishizing the very power it decries—making "an ornament" of power, he memorably calls it. Recently, he told me that was more interested in winkling whatever useful morsels he could out of the object of knowledge under scrutiny, rather than immersing it in the acid bath of critique.
I take all of these points, but worry that, at its most unreflective, this position is either too uncritically celebratory ("If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it at all") or that it's simply a rhetorical miming of the associative nature of the brain's workings. At their most fashionably affectless and blithely apolitical, pop semioticians such as Robert Rauschenberg, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson teeter on the brink of this latter category, stringing together free-floating images and weightless one-liners in a signifying chain whose circular logic leads us nowhere and illuminates next to nothing.
None of which is to say that your point doesn't get a lot of traction with me. Like Deleuze's writings, with their fractal branchings and far-flung conceptual leaps, essays that embrace the Digital-Age paradigm of the Garden of Forking Paths rather than the Enlightenment-era paradigm of the linear argument seem right for our times. As McLuhan noted, "When information is brushed against information...the results are startling and effective."
But doesn't a rhetorical paradigm founded on the link run the risk of merely forging a Derridean chain that never reaches a conclusion, but merely hopscotches from one allusion to another, world without end? And what is the aggregate effect of connectionist writing? If the argument seeks to persuade—THIS proves THAT—what does the associative essay seek to do? Reference a reference that references a reference that...? If the one is too linear, is the other too circular—a mental maze without end where the Meaning of It All is always just around the bend, but forever deferred.
Another thought: Isn't the associative essay inherently nostalgic, in the sense that it relies on the neurocognitive mechanism of memory—THIS reminds me of THAT, which reminds of THIS, which...? If so, the specter of solipsism haunts the whole endeavor.
ED: Well, that's a lot to chew on. I have thought about this issue some, and I am frankly basically flummoxed. Your concerns are acutely stated. In drifting away from critique, from the negative, hell, even from Truth, connectionism represents a move towards improvised, provisional, and contextual associations that may mirror the general dumbing-down of public discourse, which tends toward an almost sensory array of intensities rather a more linguistically or narratively defined sense of meaning. For me, however, the connectionist method, whether of James Burke or Thomas Pynchon or Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant than the Sun , reflects the way I actually think—when I go too far into critique, in arguing an opinion, indeed in "argument" at all—I feel like I am wearing an ill-fitting set of clothes. For me, the way to avoid the Derridean abyss is to pursue resonance, a rhetorical effect that for me acts as a gateway into a deeper engagement with mystery, whether that mystery be nostalgic, or prophetic, or just uncanny. Juxtapositions strike me as more life-affirming, and funnier, than argument and critique. Part of the fun of the Zeppelin book was to see how far resonance could take me.
I also believe that there are sources for us that lie beyond the rational, beyond the skin-encapsulated ego, and that we are entering a period of history that is so recombinant and novel that synchronicities are as likely to save us as anything. I have a certain faith in McLuhan's "startling and effective" juxtapositions of information, if not to clarify as much as straight critical argument, which so often sounds like a broken record, than at least to deepen our engagement with the complexities of the moment. In this sense, associational thinking is not inherently nostalgic, because the logic that ties together juxtapositions can be quite surprising and odd—against the grain, as it were, and therefore potentially as much about the future as the past. "Solipsism haunts the whole endeavor"—what else does it mean to write? Posted by Mark Dery at 10:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 17, 2005

National Psychogeographic

My essay, "Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California," appears in the new Cabinet.
This is the latest in a series of essays I've been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late '60s and '70s.
If you're unfamiliar with the magazine, it's a wonderfully arcane compendium of critical theory and personal essays, combining the braininess of, say, October (but not its effete, '80s theory-jock snobbery) with, say, the omnivorous approach to cultural commentary of, say, The Believer. No, no; that's not right. Oh, hell, just buy the damn thing.
(FYI, Cabinet is available at bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, as well as other outlets, around the country. Alternatively, it can be bought directly from the publisher.)
Each issue has a theme; this one's is The Sea. Besides my essay, there are articles on "The Sunset Coast: The past within the present at the English seaside"; "The final voyage of Horatio Nelson"; "The Generation of the Jolly Roger"; "The science of rogue waves"; and "Utopia Beneath the Waves: Narcis Monturiol's submarine dream." Plus, there's an awesome postcard of a Kraken, the legendary giant squid of Scandanavian mythology. Too cool. Here's what you get, in this one-time, satisfaction-guaranteed-or-your-money back essay:

Tales of growing up "in the Silurian age," in San Diego's South Bay
an homage to the prehistoric seascapes of the Czech scientific illustrator Zdenek Burian
an exhaustively close reading of prog-rock artist Roger Dean's '70s album covers that wrings more hermeneutic juice out of Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans than Rosalind Krauss could squeeze out of Matthew Barney's entire goddamn oeuvre (I interviewed Dean at length for this section)
a meditation on the influence, on Salvador Dali's soft watches and lobster telephones, of the "grandiose geological delirium" of the micha-schist formations of Cape Creus, near his home
and some apocalyptic, here-comes-the-flood premonitions of SoCal buried under a biblical deluge, when the polar caps melt.

And here's a teaser, to seduce you into buying the magazine:

According to Dali biographer Ian Gibson, one writer concluded, on visiting Cape Creus, "that Dali could only be fully understood if one took into account this extraordinary landscape that had shaped his thinking."

An instructive phrase: "That had shaped his thinking." It makes us wonder: Which came first, the neurotic or the rocks? Do landscapes touch off sympathetic vibrations inside us because they resonate with childhood experiences, remembered or not? Dali once observed that his "mental landscape" resembled "the protean and fantastic rocks of Cape Creus." Did the vaginal clefts, phallic spurs, and fecal blobs of its tortured, metamorphic rocks mirror his sexual psyche, a battleground of (barely) repressed homosexuality, ravenous orality, and shameful anality? Or was Dali, in some weird way, shaped by the landscape he grew up in? The Situationists coined the term "psychogeography" to describe "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Is there a psychogeology—a study of the psychological effects of the rock formations we grew up around? Are there igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic personalities? Is there a stratigraphy of the soul, a petrology of the psyche?

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:58 PM | TrackBack