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Floating Signifier Archives.

June 04, 2009

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.

Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 01, 2009

Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque (Giftware #2)

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.

Posted by Mark Dery at 11:07 AM | TrackBack

March 25, 2009

Delirious Urbanism

"I knew Sterling when he was an Aztec pimp": the SF writer and Fine Young Ballardian Chris Nakashima-Brown, quoting William Gibson talking about Bruce Sterling. Neither of us could parse Gibson's one-liner, but it had a certain corkscrew logic to it.

La Nave de los Monstruous. (Ship of Monsters)

Nakashima-Brown and I were in Mexico City last week, along with Sterling, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, and Linda Nagata, for "Parallel Worlds," part of the venerable Festival de Mexico en el Centro Historico. (I gave a lecture titled "Myths of the Next Five Minutes: A Science Fiction of the Future Present," which used Ballard's 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash as a jumping-off point for some speculations on the cultural role, and literary possibilities, of science fiction after the extinction of the future and the obsolescence of utopia.)

Outside the Tlaltelolco conference hall. L-to-R: M. John Harrison, Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Chris Nakashima-Brown, your host, Christopher Priest.

Mexico City is the capital of the 21st century, to borrow the subtitle of David Lida's First Stop in the New World, an addictively readable, pants-splittingly hilarious dérive through the world's second most populous city (Tokyo is the first) and undeniably one of its most vibrant. Lida's book is an intellectual luge ride through The Labyrinth of Solitude; a videogame for virtual flaneurs, based on Benjamin's Arcades Project but relocated to the D.F. (Distrito Federal), with a nonstop Mex-tec soundtrack.

Lida was gracious enough to take me on a taco crawl through the streets of the D.F., where we gorged ourselves on tacos of, er, mixed grille (slaughterhouse sweepings, by any other name, but delicious nonetheless---I loved the tacquero's droll touch of plopping a fist-sized pig's heart amid the scraps of mystery meat on the grille, to be cleavered into bite-sized pieces as needed); fried tacos with a schmear of pig's brains; tacos de carnitas (braised pork, so meltingly delicious it's almost erotic); tacos plump with sweetbreads; and of course the signature Mexico City taco, tacos el pastor, which chilangos (roughly, Mexico City homies) heatedly insist is a local invention, to the consternation of their countrymen in nearby Puebla, who just as heatedly claim that distinction. One thing is sure: This sublime concoction---pork spiced and tinted a traffic-cone orange by the liberal use of Annatto, then roasted on an upright spit and shaved into a corn tortilla, where the tacquero tops it off with pineapple, onions, and cilantro---draws its inspiration from the shawarma introduced to Mexican gastronomy by Lebanese immigrants.

The Cult of the Pig, as David Lida calls it, imported from Spain to the New World: For your pleasure, las manitas ("little hands"---in this case, pickled pigs' hands)---at Restaurante Nuevo Leon (Nuevo Leon 68, colonia Condesa). Texture, it turns out, is a key factor in the reaction, equal parts gut reflex and visceral aesthetic, that we call disgust. I managed a few bites of this clammy dish, slithery with glutinous gelatin, then succumbed to cultural alienation. But, as always, I'm glad I tried it. Photo: Chris Nakashima-Brown.

D.F. cuisine, like the self-assembling megasprawl of the city itself, is a mash-up of traditions and trends, ideas and images, riffs and themes: pre-Columbian, or at least (as Lida noted) imagined pre-Columbian, elements (such as the cactus grubs, gusanos de maguey, and red-ant larvae, escamoles, that I ate for lunch at one white-tablecloth restaurant); the colonial legacy (the Spanish influences of the conquistadors, always and everywhere, but also the gallic shadow cast by the French Intervention of 1862-67); and immigrant strains (Lebanese influences, of course, but also such improbable imports as the pasty, a meat pie brought to Hidalgo in the 19th century by Cornish miners, which lives on in the form of tinga- or mole-slathered pastes---an inimitably Mexican dish, in the minds of the locals).

Escamoles ("ant caviar," a.k.a red-ant pupae) and gusanos de maguay (worms of the maguay cactus) at Restaurant Los Girasoles (Tacuba 8, Plaza Manuel Tolsa, Centro Historico).

Walking with Chris through what our urbane host, the Mexican writer and translator Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, described as a yuppie neighborhood, I was fascinated by Mexico City's gene-splice of first-world, cosmopolitan sophistication---easily the equal of most American big cities, the D.F. thumps with club life, media buzz, and boho creativity---and third-world squalor, corruption, and crime, both petty and spectacular. Gabacho tourists ask, inevitably, about the arcane system for determining which taxis are safe and which will speed you to the inevitable hour of reckoning with a kidnapper. Eating tacos at night, I was accosted by a cringing teenaged beggar straight out of Mayhew's nightmare snapshots of the Victorian underworld, his matted hair and caked skin so dark with grime he looked like a shadow come to life (or, at least, undeath), peering at me with half-dead eyes. In First Stop in the New World, Lida notes that the world's richest man lives in Mexico City, as do millions of the planet's most wretchedly poor.

There is something here of Gibson's sprawl, and of the "mongrel metropolis" of Blade Runner's panethnic, polyglot street rabble. Yet there is something as ancient, here, as the Aztec pyramids that still wait, out beyond the city's metastasizing edge, for the wink of the obsidian knife and the splash of blood on their thirsty stones. An archaic futurism. A sense that this place has Always Already been postmodern, a re-mix of cultures and empires and ages, and thus is well-prepared for the fluid dynamics of chaos culture, where the only steady state is nonstop turbulence. Mexico City, capital of the 21st century.

Tellingly, the Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos countered racist disdain for Mexico's racially heterogenous culture with what Donna Haraway might call an "ironic myth"---his sci-fi vision, in 1925, of La Raza Cosmica, a "Cosmic Race" ripped and remixed from the genetic riffs reverberating through Mexican culture (the Indian, the Caucasian, and the Black). Parrying social Darwinian theories of pureblooded nordic superiority with a 21st-century ciencia ficcion about a panethic superrace whose racial hybridity is its strength, Vasconcelos dreamed of a "fifth race" that would build a new civilization, Universopolis. Not a utopia so much as a heterotopia. I've never seen renderings of it, but in the Richard Powers pulp landscapes of my imagination, Universopolis is a cross between Hugh Ferris's gothic megastructures and, say, the Aztec pyramid of the Sun and Moon. (Wait---isn't that what the Tyrell pyramid, in Blade Runner, is?)

There is a glimmer, in Vasconcelos's vision of Things to Come, of all those post-structuralist hymns to hybridity, partiality, contingency, and of the feminist worship of the post-colonial cyborg as a household deity. (Was Frida Kahlo, patron saint of gabacho feministas, a cyborg? Did the Virgin of Guadalupe embark on a space odyssey, across the wounded galaxies, from El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras (Planet Of The Female Invaders) to her assignation with Juan Diego? And what about that escapee from The X-Files, Santa Muerte?) Ineluctably, El Presidente of Universopolis will be the lucha libre (masked wrestling) star Tinieblas. In Lourdes Grobet: Lucha Libre, we find Tinieblas's official backstory: "He is the prototype of the Mexican science fiction superhero: a survivor of a superior pre-Hispanic race that cultivated physical, mental and intellectual powers; a civilization bonded by the magical energy emanating from the universe. His name is Tinieblas...a direct descendant of beings from another world, who, mistaken for gods, arrived with our forefathers. One of their vessels that reached the Earth, a pyramid-shaped spacecraft, was covered by boulders somewhere in the southeastern jungle..."

Tinieblas, with his furry-faced dwarf sidekick. From Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling: The photographs of Lourdes Grobet.

I imagine Presidente Tinieblas in full Aztec Pimp drag: a couture version of Burroughsian cut-up that accessorizes the Saville Row bespoke suit with pre-Columbian body modification (nose plugs, ear piercings, jade-inlaid dental grilles) and tops the whole enchilada off with a lucha mask and gold-lamé wrestler's boots. Seated regally atop a high-tech skyscraper that is equal parts Teotihuacan and Abu Dhabi, El Presidente gazes out at the multitude thronging the plaza at his feet: Aztec mummies, mad scientists, evil midgets from space, scantily clad vampire women, a Frankenstein monster with a goatee, and of course masked wrestlers beyond count, some of indeterminate gender. With a languid wave of his bejeweled hand and an evil gleam in his eye, he dispatches El Santo, Blue Demon, and Mil Mascaras on a covert mission through the time portal, into the past. "Bring me the head of Mel Gibson!," he bellows, and the crowd goes wild.

Pre-Columbian crowd control in Apocalypto (2006).

Mexico City, in fact Mexican culture in toto, is all about hybridity, partiality, and contingency; about rejoicing in the recombinant, and the brash, exuberant spirit of bricolage that suffuses the colonia (ghetto) culture and is trickling up, into the boho vanguard---rasquache, the hacker-ish spit-and-duct tape improvisation one sees everywhere in Mexico, but especially in the shantytowns, where in Tijuana for example, American garage doors are sold as "walls" (the better to make houses out of) and people pry hunks off the million-dollar border fence---literally appropriating pieces of Fortess America's Maginot line---and incorporate them into their shacks.

For the well-educated, well-traveled Mexicans rolling their eyes at the crypto-colonialist subtext of this freely improvised post, right about now, let me be clear: This isn't to romanticize Mexico's own taxonomy of racism (expressed, most notably, in 18th century casta paintings), which Lida anatomizes in painful detail, nor to glamorize the abject poverty, brutality, and pestilential filth of the colonias. But there's an electric vitality, the unmistakable crackle of a cultural power on the rise, in Mexico City, and even in narco-gang killing fields like Tijuana, where the San Diego architect Teddy Cruz goes for inspiration.

"Where others saw poverty and decay, he saw the seeds of a vibrant social and architectural model, one that could be harnessed to invigorate numbingly uniform suburban communities just across the border [in San Diego]...Developers in Tijuana would build entire neighborhoods of generic 400-square-foot houses, 'miniature versions of suburban America,' Mr. Cruz said in an interview. 'What I noticed is how quickly these developments were retrofitted by the tenants.' Informal businesses like mechanics' shops and taco stands would quickly sprout up on the front lawns and between the houses, transforming them into highly layered spaces.'"(The New York Times.)

In my magical-urbanist fantasies, Lebbeus Woods goes nortec. Piranesi jettisons his panoptical paranoia, gets over his carceral hangover, and reinvents the colonia. Archigram tries its hand at Mexican SF. Constant designs a retirement home for crossdressing luchadores. The "liquid" architect Greg Lynn and his Deleuzean bootboys make a run for the border, and never return.

"In a patchwork of plywood hovels, auto repair shops and hasty additions, Mr. Cruz has found a humane model for rethinking America's suburbs. He has been pushing that vision as an antidote to the gated communities that have sprouted from Southern California to Israel to mainland China in recent years. [...] In Mr. Cruz's view, such projects are a sterile and soulless counterpoint to Tijuana's labyrinthine ghettos, cobbled from the residue of a wealthier echelon. As Tijuana has expanded into the hilly terrain to the east, squatters have fashioned an elaborate system of retaining walls out of used tires packed with earth. The houses jostling on the incline are constructed out of concrete blocks, sheets of corrugated metal, used garage doors and discarded packing crates, much of it brought down by local contractors and wholesalers from across the border. Once such a settlement is completed, it is protected from demolition under Mexican law, and the government is eventually obliged to provide plumbing, electricity and roads to serve it. In Mr. Cruz's view, the process is in some ways a far more flexible and democratic form of urban development than is the norm elsewhere. [...] It's not that he romanticizes poverty: he recognizes the filth and clutter, the lack of light and air, that were the main targets of Modernism nearly a century ago. But by approaching Tijuana's shantytowns with an open mind, he can extract a viable strategy for development that is rooted in local traditions."(The New York Times.)

There's talk, online, of shantytowns springing up across America, and of belt-tightening suburbanites and even urbanites tilling their own backyards and in some cases raising their own livestock, rediscovering the world before agribusiness. There's talk, too, of re-thinking consumer culture and the vicious cycle of planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption, the American gospel of infinite resources and the inexhaustible landfill. There are fever dreams of going hyperlocal in the most profound economic, agricultural, and maybe even political senses. (There are dark mutterings about the obsolescence of capitalism itself; in some corners of the ideological map, the dread word "socialism" has even been mentioned, in all seriousness.) There's talk of growing your own, embracing the "Maker mindset" of DIY culture. On our tumbleweed frontiers, where the scrub is reclaiming the crabgrass of exurbia's sprawl and coyotes obligingly help thin the growing population of abandoned pets, it may be time to translate rasquache strategies of appropriation and ad hoc-ism, re-purposing and re-skilling, into the American vernacular, crosswiring them with the Edisonian tradition of basement tinkering and the hacker ethos of cracking and open-sourcing. As Mike Davis puts it in his essay of the same name, it's time to start learning from Tijuana:

Tijuana's bootstrap brand of urbanism ADOBE LA points out is antipodal to the monolithic utopias advocated by Le Corbusier and other modernists, where the city is the outcome of a single magisterial vision. In the Do-It-Yourself City, bricolage supplants master-planning, and urban design becomes a kind of art brut, generated by populist building practices. If only by default, the masses become the city's true auteurs, and architecture is not so much transcended as retranslated through its dynamic vernacular context.

The boho romanticism of another gabacho Marxist? Perhaps. But as we teeter at the top of the rickety, ominously creaking Coney Island rollercoaster of our historical moment, gut clenching before the inevitable sickening plunge into yet another economic trough, we might want to consider that our neighbors to the south have been here before, and before that, and before that. They earned their sea legs, long ago, on the slippery deck of a culture that never stops pitching and rolling, and just might have something to teach us, if we're smart enough to start listening.

It's late. I'm walking down the street in that yuppie neighborhood with Chris and Mauricio. I sidestep an ankle-snapping pothole in the road. On the wind, I catch a whiff of Mexico City: the ever-present smell of exhaust from some of the D.F.'s four million cars (by Lida's reckoning), a hint of vegetable decay that translates to my gabacho nose as jungle rot, the smell of something sizzling in oil, and of concrete dust, and somewhere down in the bass register, the unmistakable reek of raw sewage. I ask Mauricio if the American perception of Mexico as a nation only recently arrived from the Planet of Slums is racist myth or everyday reality or a bit of both? How valid is the Cancun fratboy's perception of the place as a tragi-comic post-Third World-but-not-quite-ready-for-prime-time country where the phones and the power and mass transportation and the government and the cops may work, on a good day, or then again may not? He smiles. "It's a miracle this city works at all," he says. But, against all odds, it does.

M. Dery, with the mask of the luchador known as Hysteria.

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:31 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 10, 2009

Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns (Giftware #1)

Recently, while ego-surfing GOODREADS, I stumbled across a review of my 1999 meditation on millennial America, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium:

"i re-read this book and enjoyed it as much the second time. its focus is really on some of the darker threads of the fin-de-millennium american culture. end of the century apocalyptic schizo kinda stuff. killer clowns, branding, post humanism, aliens, and conspiracies. it is just as relevant now as it was when i first read it at the end of the 90's. it confirms to me that somewhere near the end of 2001 time started running in reverse..."

Naturally, the thought that everything old is new again gives hope to those of us midlist authors languishing in the remainder bin of history. Then, too, there is an almost '90s-style sense in what was once referred to (in all seriousness) as our American empire, that the gyre is widening, the center cannot hold, and the tassel-loafered Wall Street swine jostling for space at the public trough should be driven off the nearest cliff. On bOING bOING, Dan Gillmor sounded a portentous note:

"Like lots of folks these days, I find myself speculating about whether we're heading into something worse than a bad recession, such as the kind of calamity that tests civilization. Back in my younger days I played music for a living. [...] At one point, gloomier than usual about humanity's future, I wrote a song about how people like us would (or wouldn't) get along when the apocalypse happened, something I feared might be imminent. It wasn't, then, but I'm wondering again."

Deep in the comment thread, a reader named Dainel wrote, "All this talk of doom reminds me of 1999. Don't anyone remember that? Is every one here less than 20 years old?"

True, the militia movement seems to have switched into dormant mode (although white supremacists still fantasize about bringing The Turner Diaries' Mother of All Race Wars to a bloodbath near you). And the omens of millennium that darkened American dreams a decade ago---alien autopsies, black helicopters, Heaven's Gate suicide cultists, Timothy McVeigh-style Angry White Guys, Unabombers who just wanted to watch industrial society burn---have given way to a low-lying despair, the deepening sense that the United States of the near future is going to look a lot like the Weimar republic in its last, hyperinflationary days, when people were using banknotes as wallpaper and postage stamps had a face value of 50 billion Marks.

Still, Wired is once again waving the techno-libertarian flag, though its triumphalism is a bit frayed around the edges and looks depressingly like garden-variety neo-liberalism (with a dash of Gladwellian screw-the-spotted-owl contrarianism to validate its cubicle-warrior coolness quotient). 24 is the new X-Files. Unfrozen CyberGuy Kevin Kelly---who was wondering, not so long ago, "Say the Dow hits 100,000 by 2010. Would that surprise you?"---is back with yet more musings on the Unabomber. The inimitable Terence McKenna is no longer with us to hawk his '90s vision of the Coming Singularity at the End of Time™, but a flock of McKenna epigones---the Marjoes of the magic mushroom set, the Robert Schullers of psychoactive alkaloids---are barnstorming the Esalen hot tub-and-Burning Man circuit with suspiciously familiar-sounding talk of a zodiac mindwarp in 2012.

What better time for me to catch the last wave of the '90s revival, disaggregate The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, and offer up a few chapters for your delectation, in PDF form, courtesy Scribd?

Here, then is, my first donation to the Creative Commons:

"Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns," from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

(I still hold copyright to this essay, obviously, but encourage readers to re-post and re-publish it at will, as long as you add the following boilerplate:

©Mark Dery; this essay originally appeared as a chapter in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

A link to the online bookseller of your choice, or to the Pyro page on this site, would be the right thing to do.)

In the Scribd blurb, I synopsize it as follows (in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.

Keywords: evil clowns, clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, Cacophony Society, culture jamming, Batman, The Joker, R.K. Sloane, Shakes the Clown, Jim Knipfel, The Fool, Stephen King's IT, Quentin Tarantino, American pathologies, Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, Arkham Asylum.

"Can't sleep, clowns will eat me..."

(Thanks to Gareth Branwyn, for his kind words about my essay---the inspiration, in part, for my decision to donate it to the Gift Economy.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 02:42 PM | TrackBack

February 20, 2009

Always Crashing in the Same Car

All together now: "Warm leatherette/ Melts on your burning flesh/ You can see your reflection/ In the luminescent dash ..."

For the fervent Ballardians, especially the obsessive completists among them, who enjoyed last week's post, I've archived PDFs of the various versions of my lengthy, in-depth interviews with JGB and director David Cronenberg, published in 1997 to coincide with the American release of Crash, Cronenberg's film of the Ballard novel of the same name. (The files in question are actually housed on the free, brutally cool document-sharing site Scribd, which David Pescovitz of bOING bOING brought to my attention. (Thanks, David!, as they say on bb.))

Image courtesy Peter Ginter/Getty Images; all rights reserved.

The Director's Cut of the two interviews, so to speak, appeared in the late, much-lamented Australian cyberzine 21.C. (Apologies for the minuscule type, but I had to reduce the magazine's already flyspeck-sized font even further in order to photocopy the article before PDF-ing it. Vexing as it is, this will separate the Ballardians from the boys. Pour yourself a generous scotch, wait for the "friendly microclimate" (Ballard) to envelop you, screw in a jeweler's loupe, and tuck in. The attentive reader will be well-rewarded.)

Like many ink-stained hacks, I doubled my fun by cannibalizing these same interviews for two articles published, more or less simultaneously, in the States, where they wouldn't compete with the Australian version. My interviews with Ballard and Cronenberg appeared, successively, in the almost indescribable Rage, a mind-clenching blend of Adbusters-style anti-consumerist polemics; X-rated cartoons of eye-gouging awfulness (both in humor and execution), calculated to set the functionally illiterate aroar; political journalism; and, incalculably, softcore porn---accompanied, in some ill-conceived attempt at "culture jamming," by captions that sneered at the silicone-injected models in the photos and snarked at the reader for oggling them (a strategy sure to increase the magazine's market share). Did I mention that the magazine's design was so groaningly amateurish it would have given Tibor Kalman an irritable bowel?

Of course Rage was published by Larry Flynt.

Of course it died, and not a minute too soon.

But it paid well, during its brief, grotesque life, and it must've left skidmarks on the minds of some of the hapless tools who thought they were buying a cheaper, sleazier Penthouse. Only in Rage could the unsuspecting reader turn the page from my Mensa-approved interview with Stuart Ewen, a cultural critic whose talk is thick with references to Lukacs, Bakhtin, and Benjamin, to what was indelicately referred to, in the locker rooms of my hairy palmed youth, as a "split-beaver" shot. (The reader averts her eyes in horror, for which: my apologies. Is there a more discreet term for this visual convention in hetero porn?)

Of course, it's misbegotten monstrosities like Rage that make capitalism great. Where else but America would someone like Larry Flynt cast focus groups, branding experts, and coolhunters to the wind and, fueled by his porn-mogul millions and a pathological contrarianism, floor his desires, headlong, into the immovable bollards of the mass mind?

Image courtesy Louie Psihoyos/Getty Images; all rights reserved.

Posted by Mark Dery at 10:40 PM | TrackBack

February 12, 2009

J.G. Ballard: Pathologist of the Postmodern

J.G. Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy. All rights reserved.

My review of J.G. Ballard's nonfiction memoir Miracles of Life is out, in the L.A. Weekly.

Read it here.

"Nonfiction," meaning: scrupulously factual, a distinction one makes in the wake of bogus confessionals such as James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Margaret B. Jones's Love and Consequences, and in light of Ballard's bestselling autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun and its less-than-bestselling (but by my lights more lyrical) sequel, The Kindness of Women, both of which are forthrightly fabulist.

Ballard's latest account of his Shanghai boyhood, his wartime years in a Japanese-run internment camp for British civilians, and his postwar exploits, playing the discreetly subversive Marcel Duchamp of New Wave SF (to Michael Moorcock's gonzo Salvador Dali) while raising three children single-handedly, may be his last, or at least his penultimate, book. As devout Ballardians know, the 78-year-old author is battling advanced prostate cancer. Ballard's longtime agent Margaret Hanbury is reportedly shopping a report from the cancer ward, Conversations with My Physician (mordantly subtitled The Meaning, if any, of Life), but Ballard's condition casts doubt on whether he'll have the strength---or time---to midwife the manuscript through the publishing process.

I've corresponded with Ballard, at intervals, ever since the mid-'90s, when he gave me the thrill of a lifetime by graciously consenting to blurb my first book, Escape Velocity, and then, no less thrillingly, lavished praise on my second, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium.

William F. Buckley loved to repeat the anecdote that, when asked by a Playboy interviewer if in he'd discovered any "novel sensual sensations," in middle age, the crocodile-smiling apologist for American empire recalled the experience of being summoned to the Oval office by Nixon for a debriefing. Buckley, a former CIA operative, had been going to and fro and walking up and down in Saigon. "My novel sensual sensation," he told Playboy, "is to have the president of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him." (The revelation that Nixon, as twitchy-eyed a war criminal as ever perverted the constitution, took notes from the conscienceless conservative would explain a lot.)

My "novel sensual sensation"---I'd call it a New Drug, a reference Buckley, who admitted to a fondness for pot, would surely appreciate---was the sight of an incoming Ballard fax spooling out of my machine, and the subsequent buzz of deciphering the quintessentially Ballardian tropes and bon mots encrypted in JGB's galloping, Hancockian scrawl. Fax technology being far inferior to the papyrii of the Middle Kingdom, most of those '90s faxes have faded into illegibility. Still, Ballard's old faxes are talismans I can't bear to throw out; I'll keep them until their loopy scribbles have vanished altogether, leaving the pages blank as the day they were born.

Recently, I discovered another Novel Sensual Sensation: admission to the charmed circle of correspondents permitted to address JGB as "Jim." I had sent a sympathy note to Ballard about his cancer, offering to take up a collection on his behalf via fansites such as Simon Sellars's Ballardian. With his usual, pitch-perfect combination of British reserve and social grace, he politely declined, saying that while he appreciated my offer to pass the hat on his behalf, he wasn't in such dire straits, at least not yet.

In response to my inquiry about who would be bringing out Miracles of Life in the States, and when, he replied (with exasperation mellowed by resignation) that the book wouldn't be coming out in America because---my paraphrase, not a direct quote---he was well and truly fed up with American reviewers' middlebrow moralizing and pop-psych insistence on Deep Feelings over astringent ideas. American critics complain that his characters are crash-test dummies; that his books are plotless film loops, obsessive-compulsive meditations on the pathologies of everyday life in postmodernity.

Ballard's point exactly, as he writes in his incomparable introduction to the French edition of Crash (a virtual graduate seminar in a few pages, richer in insights into the postmodern condition than all of Lyotard's books laid end to end):

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century---sex and paranoia. [...] Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
[...] Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th-century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?
[...] I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind---mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

Which Ballard has done, with a psychosurgeon's steady hand and a clinical eye unmatched in contemporary fiction. Of course, Ballard is no more a novelist than Freud was a scientist or Marx a political economist. Adopt the parallax view, and everything makes sense: Freud and Marx were, in fact, gothic storytellers in the tradition of Hoffmann and Stoker; Baudrillard and Haraway are among our greatest sci-fi writers (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues a similar point in his essay "The SF of Theory"); and Ballard, as I note in my L.A. Weekly essay, is one of our foremost postmodern theorists:

Long before deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida were slinging around references to the "decentered" self, Ballard is talking, in his trenchant introduction to Crash (1973), about "the most terrifying casualty of the century: the death of affect" and about "the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods." Before postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard were announcing the Death of the Real and its unsettling replacement by uncannily convincing media simulations, Ballard is claiming that "we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind"---advertising, "politics conducted as a branch of advertising," P.R. "pseudo-events," et al.---where "Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality." And before neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis were pondering the deeper meanings of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Frank Gehry's Hollywood library, Ballard is pondering the psycho-spatial effects of the built environment: the experience of swooping around a freeway cloverleaf; of walking through a cavernous, empty multistory parking garage; of waiting, alone, in an airport departure lounge; of walking the privately policed streets of an obsessively manicured exurban community. How, Ballard wonders, is our sense of our selves as social beings and moral actors---our very understanding of what it means to be a self---being transformed (deformed?) by the whip-lashing hyperacceleration of technology and the media, the blurring of the distinction between real and fake? Ballard was the first to ask how we became posthuman.

Posted by Mark Dery at 09:25 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

February 10, 2009

Alabama Song

Birmingham, Alabama. Photo: Samm Bennett. All rights reserved.

Roomful of Ghosts, the new release from Samm Bennett, is pure awesome, a sob and a chuckle and a whoop and a yowl, dredged up dripping from the mucky riverbottom of his bi-cultural bad self. ("Bi-cultural" because Bennett, an ubiquitous presence on the New York downtown music scene of the '80s, was born in Alabama, studied African percussion in Nigeria, and lives in Tokyo.)

now the mayor tried to shoot me and the governor called me dumb but the president gave me a banjo string and a piece of chewing gum

how do i love thee baby
i'd like to count the ways
but all the reasons they keep going
in and out of phase

Call it slumdog gagaku. Or gutbucket p'ansori. Or a black cat moan wrapped around a lonesome train whistle, cured in Tokyo fog and nailed to some grotesque African fetish, deep in the swamp dark. If that's too clever by half, let me just say that I love the unvarnished honesty of this stuff; the pensive moodiness of "I Burned This Song"; the heart-stoppingly beautiful stillness-in-the-middle-of-a-fast-moving-boxcar vibe of "Until You Kiss Me"; the loping, hypnotic gait of "A Thousand Rhymes."

And the lyrics! They're uncut brilliance, reminiscent of the electroconvulsive blues of Captain Beefheart or Rauschenberg's droll "combines," Pop art mash-ups like "Monogram" (you know, the stuffed Angora goat with the tire around its middle). They're a distillation of Robert Zimmerman (the Robert Zimmerman of "Fixin' to Die" and "The Ballad Of Hollis Brown" and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"), swirled together with essence of Robert Johnson and the John Lee Hooker of "Tupelo," a jigger of Southern gothic (Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Harry Crews), and a dash of Ralph Stanley and Roscoe Holcomb, spiked with a shot of Bennett's obscure wit. Drink straight up; rinse, repeat as necessary.

the wolverine is ticklish
so keep your fingers on the badger's tail
there's a card game going in the back room
you could win yourself a bucket of snails
put the caterpillar back on the abacus
take the monkey off the astrolabe
here's a bone from the tombs
of the cappuchin monks
throw it in the river babe

None of which really gets at the buried roots of the thing, because Bennett's narrative voice is inimitably his own, and this reflexive rock-critical habit of describing an artist's work by concatenating a string of references or influences (largely imagined) is too often a self-serving display of the prodigious (!) sweep of the critic's own frame of critical reference, or a desperate attempt to say what something is by saying what it's not.

On Roomful of Ghosts, Bennett manages to fashion something truly new, truly his own, out of the American idiom, and more specifically out of the Southern Experience (he was born and raised in Birmingham). Bennett's music incorporates shaky, hand-held footage from his dream life; archetypal images from the blues; the rhythmic singsong of Southern speech (white and black); and the backwoods hoodoo of the Mythic South, as well as the equally eerie placelessness of Alabama's geography of nowhere: the chain stores and big-box outlets and strip malls full of little mom-and-pop operations that have crawled there to die, fleetingly glimpsed in the blurry footage of the video for "Until You Kiss Me."

see that alligator head
i got it down in new orleans
it keeps smiling at me
as i sleepwalk through my scenes
that big old toothy grin
i think i know what it means
cause i used to ride that train
i used to ride that train

Do I feel as if I recognize the images in Bennett's impressionistic little vignettes because they're landmarks on some Mapquest directions printed out from the pop unconscious? They remind me, obliquely, of post-mortem daguerreotypes and William Eggleston's color snapshots and an abandoned house I pulled off the road to explore, in Maryland, a long time ago, and the tour-de-force passage that ends Thomas Harris's Red Dragon, a meditation on the ineffable Otherness of nature, set in Shiloh on the shore of Bloody Pond.

But why compare? Is that the only way we can express that which cannot be effed---by conjuring up a tag cloud of allusions to outline the empty space of whatever it is we're trying to talk about? Isn't that a tacit admission of language's inability to pierce through to the essence of anything, especially music? Or just one erstwhile rockcritic's belated confession that he always did lack what the best music writers have, that Lester Bangsian ability to channel the music through typewriter keys?

One last try: Roomful of Ghosts is somehow like Robert Frank's cover for Exile on Main Street and somehow like Wisconsin Death Trip and somehow like Brother Where Art Thou? and somehow like nothing at all.

Which is, of course, the whole point.

Samm Bennett playing a ghostly jaw's harp. See him play the real thing here.

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 19, 2006

Unpacking My Library

A while ago, the technoculture writer David Pescovitz---whose mind was probably elsewhere at the time---rashly asked me for a reading list. He was curious to know what was on my nightstand. (He'll rue the day he asked, before I'm done.) Typically, I have a half-dozen books I'm picking up and putting down, in my desultory way, reading a few pages here, skimming a chapter there. The presumption, at least subconsciously, is that this hodgepodge will form a sort of montage in my mind, inspiring intertextual conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities. (At least, that's the theory...) Literary ADD meets Freudian free association.

For example, I recently buzzed through Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen's Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, a panoramic study of racial stereotyping in Western culture. For the Ewens, Baroque cabinets of curiosity, social Darwinism, eugenics, wartime propaganda, and pop culture (Roget's thesaurus, King Kong, minstrel shows) are vectors of transmission for racist fables of genetic predestination.

Every night, after doing some deep-breathing exercises with the Ewen book, I'd relax before sleep with some intellectual Fluffernutter. One night, while listening to an audiobook of Sherlock Holmes stories, I was fascinated to hear fictional echoes, in Holmes's snap judgments of human character, of the Victorian racial science critiqued by the Ewens.

Holmes's X-ray visions of the evils lurking in the minds of men are at once gothic in their morbid obsession with the ever-present past; Freudian in their sense of a libidinous self, at odds with the superego; and social Darwinian in their insistence on Victorian assumptions about gender, race, and ethnicity. The physiognomies and body language of Conan Doyle's criminals are indelibly stamped with the stigmata of inborn criminality, reminding us time and again that heredity is destiny. Of Holmes's would-be assassin, the murderous Colonel Moran, Dr. Watson observes,

I was able at last to have a good look at our prisoner. It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature's plainest danger-signals" ("The Empty House").

Moran exemplifies Holmes's theory that ontogeny recapitulates familial phylogeny: "The individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors...[becoming], as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family." Likewise, Holmes's arch-nemesis Moriarty is of "good birth and...endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty," yet the man is inescapably blighted by "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind," instantly apparent in his creepy habit of "slowly oscillating [his face] from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion" ("The Final Problem"). From the Italian jewel thief Beppo, a "simian man with thick eyebrows, and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face like the muzzle of a baboon" ("The Six Napoleons"); to the vengeful Jonas Oldacre, "more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being" ("The Norwood Builder"); to the mad scientist Professor Presbury, whose use of a rejuvenating elixir (think: Victorian Viagra) extracted from "the great black-faced monkey of the Himalayan slopes" turns him into a missing link ("The Creeping Man"), Conan Doyle's stories are fraught with the anxieties of his age---the Xenophobic fear that the English gene pool was being contaminated by bestial immigrant strains; devolutionary nightmares inspired by Darwin's revelation that simians and Homo sapiens are branches of the same evolutionary tree; Max Nordau-ish worries about the moral degeneration of the ingrown nobility. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities.

It gets weirder: Another night, I downshifted from the Ewens by reading The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror. The title story, by H.P. Lovecraft, is a gothic sci-fi story about a meteor whose otherworldly influence, somewhere between radiation sickness and nameless evil, turns the farm where it landed into a "blasted heath" and the hapless family that lives there into "grey, twisted, brittle [monstrosities]." The Mark of the Devil, in Lovecraft's story, is color---ambiguous color, its promiscuous blending of pigments the outward manifestation of an unspeakable evil. Inside a fragment of the meteor, investigators find "a large coloured globule" whose color "was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all." On the poisoned farm, where mutant flora worthy of Three Mile Island has sprung up, "no sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen...but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone..."

My curiosity piqued, I dialed up the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, and found the Ewens whispering in my ear again. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities: According to Wikipedia, Lovecraft's fiction is shot through with racist sentiments. He expounded on racist themes in poems such as "On the Creation of Niggers" (1912); in his story "Herbert West---Reanimator," the author experiences a shudder of almost self-parodic revulsion at the sight of a dead African-American: "He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling forelegs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life---but the world holds many ugly things." Too true, too true, and one of the ugliest stared back at H.P., out of his shaving mirror: According to his ex-wife, a stroll through the mongrel metropolis made Lovecraft apoplectic. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," she wrote, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind." Little wonder, then, that for the self-appointed Scourge of the Mud People, color---the multiethnic face of an ever more racially mixed America---should be synonymous with horror. In Typecasting, the Ewens sketch the background for Lovecraft's fulminations, a historical moment in which racial segregation is the law of the land, eugenics is sober science, and expert testimony before congress helps push through the Immigration Act of 1924, a bulwark against the pollution of Aryan DNA by inferior breeding stock from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Just two examples, Constant Reader, of the hypertextual connections---the intellectual crosspollination---encouraged by literary channel-surfing.

Which brings us, by twists and turns, back to The Reading List. Here, then, are some gleanings from recent readings.

Note: Some of the titles that follow are books that have always intrigued me, but which I have yet to read. Nothing odd about that: Some of the best books are the ones we haven't read. Some of the most cherished volumes in my library are titles that have gone untouched since the day I bought them, no less loved for that. Anatole France, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida are thoughtful on this subject. Asked if he'd read all the books in his library, France famously replied, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?" In his essay, "How to Justify a Private Library," Eco writes, "The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: 'And more, dear sir, many more,' which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration." Derrida's zinger, in the documentary Derrida, is more gently witty: "No, I've only read three or four, but I've read them very, very well." Of course, I have every intention of reading the books in question some day; I bought many of them out of the neurotic fear that the dissident and the deviant will be black-market commodities in the not-so-distant future, when a home-schooled creationist ascends to the presidency with the 10 Commandments in one hand and a Left Behind potboiler in the other, exhorting the faithful to start readying the lighter fluid and the faggots for the secular humanists and their godless, sodomite lit.

To the stacks, then.

1. A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen. Never read it. Love the fact that there's a painstakingly scholarly study devoted to boredom, with every op cit and ibid spit-shined to a blinding luster. Even better, the book is by all accounts gripping. An edge-of-your-seat deconstruction of the deeper meanings of boredom! What could be better? Unbelievabll, there's another book on the subject: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind by Patricia Meyer Spacks. Unfortunately, it's "actually, well, boring," in the words of one Amazon reviewer.

In any event, I love these obsessive-compulsive social histories of little-studied subjects, such as The Encyclopedia of Stupidity by Matthijs van Boxsel, and The Anatomy of Disgust by William Ian Miller (and its conjoined twin, On Disgust by Aurel Kolnai, Carolyn Korsmeye, and Barry Smith).

Speaking of the disgusting, the Miller and Kolnai/Korsmeye/Smith books are scholarly studies, whereas Dominique Laporte's uneven History of Shit and Paul Spinrad's incomparable, inexhaustible RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids engage more, er, viscerally with the subject at hand. By contrast, Wim Delvoye: Cloaca (which I also haven't read) with contributions by Dan Cameron, Dieter Roelstraete, Gerardo Mosquera, Georges Bataille, and Milan Kundera (!), looks suitably bizarre, while Divine Filth: Lost Writings by Georges Bataille and Filth: Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, bring a scholarly approach to an abject subject.

2. Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities---The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765, edited by Dr. Irmgard Musch. Another breathtaking wonderbook from the German publisher Taschen. From the Amazon blurb: "In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen [in his wonder closet] and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection---from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. [These] illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original." Once seen, never forgotten, these hand-painted dream photographs from the Baroque capture, with stunning vivdness, the aesthetic of wonder.

3. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux. Theroux is a gossipy, waspish writer who never misses an opportunity to flaunt his (admittedly prodigious) erudition, sneer at the booboisie, name-drop, or score-settle (especially with his vastly more celebrated brother, for whom he nurses an undying grudge). Bitchy, affected, and too clever by half, his style aspires to Oscar Wilde but more often approximates Paul Lynde. For all that, The Strange Case is an addictively readable book, stuffed with scandalous morsels of gossip, witty table talk (Gorey and Theroux were friends), and sharply perceptive insights into the mind and art of the incalcuable, eccentric Gorey. A poisoned bon-bon of a book.

4. J.G. Ballard: Quotes by J.G. Ballard; edited by Mike Ryan, V. Vale. Slapdash in comparison with the indispensable RE/Search #8/9 (the Ballard issue)---"unknown" is a too-frequent citation, and the loving inclusion of every possible variation on a given quote, culled from decades of interviews, is calculated to appeal to the devout fan only---this is nonetheless a bottomless font of insights and inspiration from the incomparable Ballard, a visionary novelist whose black-comedic critique of the postmodern condition is more trenchant, and wittier by far, than anything French philosophy has to offer. Read Baudrillard and Virilio as science fiction, and Ballard as philosophy or, better yet, self-help guru for the irreparably disaffected. I begin every day with a quote, chosen at random, from this book of daily affirmations---or, more properly, daily negations---and go forth with a spring in my step, intellectually well-armed to do battle with my local megamall, multistory parking garage, and other Ballardian horrors come to life.

5. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture by Regina Janes. The fact that there's an entire book devoted to this subject gives meaning to my life, and almost convinces me there's a god.

6. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi. The Two-headed Boy, And Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. The Last Sideshow, a book of photographs by Hanspeter Schneider. Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of Carnival Midway, text by Bruce Caron, photographs by Jeff Brouws. Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann, edited by Michael Mitchell. As these titles remind us, we've lost the ability to stare without Puritan guilt or the intellectual agonies of Political Correctness. In these pages, we find ourselves face to face with the Utterly Other. Stare, and stare some more, and be forever changed.

7. My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel. As sublimely dry and sophisticated as the martinis whose virtues he extols, the great Surrealist's breezy, effortlessly charming memoir is a time capsule from a lost world, when conversation over cocktails was an art. A master raconteur and wicked wit, Bunuel regales us with tales of Dali, anti-clerical bon mots, and profound insights into the filmmaker's art. Before you know it, you've reached the bottom of the martini shaker and the book is over. What's not to love about a chatty, self-deprecating autobiography that includes an entire chapter on the vital importance of the martini in the creative process and a detailed recipe for the author's own variation on that immortal theme, the Bunueloni? Favorite passage: Bunuel's description of the ideal martini, in which a shaft of sunlight passes through a bottle of Noilly Prat and thence into a brimming glass of Bombay gin, as "the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin's hymen."

8. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. One of the strangest little books ever published. From the Amazon blurb: "Bizarre and utterly fascinating, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is a dark and disturbing photographic journey through criminal cases and the mind of Frances Glessner Lee--grandmother, dollhouse-maker, and master criminal investigator. Photographer Corinne May Botz stumbled across the "Nutshell Studies" while making a video about women who collect dollhouses. On the suggestion of a collector, she visited the Baltmore Medical Examiner's Office, where Lee's miniature reconstructions of crime scenes were on display. The macabre dioramas fascinated and repulsed her: "I was entranced by the details: the porcelain doll with a broken arm in the attic, the grains of sugar on the kitchen floor...I was also riveted by the miniature corpses. Shot in bed, collapsed in the bathtub, hung in the attic and stabbed in the closet; all were eternally frozen in miniature rooms that had become their tombs." Can you believe it has a competitor? The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes by Thomas Mauriello, Ann Darby; photographs by John Consoli.

9. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice. A mordant masterpiece, in which the author invents a genre all his own: Nature Gothic. The chapter titles---"Tarantula," "Recluse," "Mantid," "Black Widow," "Rattlesnake"---tell it all. Fascinated by the alien ways of the nonhuman world, Grice combines the sardonic deadpan of noir fiction with the best naturalists' unsentimental scrutiny of animal behavior and a rural midwesterner's applied knowledge of the predator-prey relationship. A Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.

10. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston. Recently, I had an inexplicable craving for this book, which I first read when it was assigned by a high-school Teacher Who Changed My Life. In the name of time famine, I opted for the abridged audiobook version, read by Michael York---a fateful decision, as it turned out, since the contrast between York's plummy, uppercrust English accent and Jung's retelling of his "personal myth" (not his life, but his inner life) is as uproarious as it is surreal. Shove one of these tapes into your car stereo and let the man who channeled the Collective Unconscious, psychology's answer to Lemuria---a consoling fiction that laid the cornerstone of the New Age (and obliterated beyond repair the notion that psychology was even remotely scientific)---provide a wonderfully incongruous voiceover to the geography of nowhere (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco...) as it flashes past.

Thrill to Jung's formative childhood dream of a giant, one-eyed phallus sitting erect on a king's throne---a monstrous thing "made of skin and flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upwards." Gird up your loins for a week of fear-crazed bedwetting: "The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me." The one-eyed trouser snake of locker-room lore, as reimagined by H.R. Giger! Pure terror! Listen, in rapt fascination, to the account of the female patient who believes she travels to and from the moon, where the moonpeople are threatened by a hypnotically beautiful vampire, who turns out to be a buried memory of sexual abuse, risen from her childhood nightmares. Laff until the tears run down your cheeks as Jung recounts the Battle of the Titans, in which he and Freud struggle for control of the historical narrative of psychoanalysis, each interpreting the other's dreams as maliciously as possible---as evidence of sublimated sexual pathologies, death wishes toward the father figure, or worse! (Profoundly unsettled by Jung's interest in the then-recently discovered mummies of pre-Christian "bog people," Freud is convinced that the Swiss analyst's obsession with "these corpses" masks a death wish toward him, and faints dead away at the dinner table.)

Jung's account of his childhood crisis of faith is worth the price of admission, all by itself. In it, we accompany the author on his way to school. Rejoicing in the chirping birds and exquisitely blue sky, he offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Creator God: "The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and...and...and..." Suddenly, our narrator is struck with A THOUGHT TOO MONSTROUS TO THINK! Tormented for days by this soul-shriveling blasphemy, he finally decides, after much agony of mind, that God must have intended him to think this scaldingly sacreligious thought. This revelation "liberated me instantly from my worst torment, since I knew that God himself had placed me in this situation." Abandoning himself to divine will, Li'l Jung allows himself to think the unthinkable: "I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hellfire, and let the thought come." (Pregnant pause by York.) "God sits on His golden throne, high above the world and under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder." (That, Virginia, is why they call it a throne.) "I felt an enormous and indescribable relief; instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss." (Where are the Farrelly brothers when we need them? Do not go in there!)

Let that be a lesson to the morbidly religious among you---not to mention those bibliocentrists who turn up their noses at the obscure pleasures of the audiobook.

Posted by Mark Dery at 04:28 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

October 28, 2005

Axles of Evil

Courtesy Propaganda Remix Project; all rights reserved..

What with pound-of-flesh gas prices; Bush's tax incentive to stimulate SUV sales, unbelievably; an anti-terrorist driving school offering tips on high-impact ramming techniques and high-speed evasive maneuvers for dealing with death-racing terrorists (or just garden-variety road ragers); and the cheese monkeys' recent eco-vigilantism against our gas-slurping behemoths, my 2004 essay on the relationship between America's love affair with monster cars and its oil-dependent foreign policy seems more relevant than ever...

(This is the extended dance remix of an essay that appeared, in shorter, substantively different form, as "Axles of Evil" in the fall/winter '04-'05 issue of Vogues Hommes. I later revised and expanded it for a lecture I gave in Mexico City. This is yet another version of it. And why not? If Raymond Chandler didn't blush at "cannibalizing" his work, as he called it, why should we lesser mortals? — M.D.)

Courtesy Ron English; all rights reserved.

Go ahead, indulge yourself. Give in to the guilt-free nastiness of hating someone or something that richly deserves it. It's one of life's little pleasures. WordSpy.com calls it "hathos," the journalist Alex Heard's term for the giddy headrush we get—equal parts hate and happiness, laced with pathos and bathos—from hating things we love to hate.

For conservatives, that means Janeane Garofalo, PETA, Michael Moore, the ACLU, scent-free "womyn-friendly spaces," and group hugs. For liberals (whose godless legions include this writer), it means the Fratboy-in-Chief, "El Rushbo" (Limbaugh), the NRA, Anne Coulter, bible-belt troglodytes like the "10 Commandments Judge" Roy Moore (the Alabama Chief Justice who displayed God's Laws in his courthouse, in defiance of federal law), meatheads who do that fist-pumping U.S. Marine "Huah!" thing and, always and everywhere, the SUV and other so-called "light trucks." (The light-truck classification enables manufacturers to drive SUVs through a regulatory loophole, deftly evading fuel-economy regulations and many emissions rules).

Sure, fulminating against SUVs, Hummers, and other members of the Axles of Evil is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, for many, these four-wheeled behemoths are just too obvious a target to ignore. Satisfying, too: The pure, uncut hathos of a good Two Minutes Hate directed at SUVs and the people who love them is Crack Rock for the Liberal Soul. Tim Robbins, Earth First!, and the shoot-your-TV gang over at Adbusters magazine couldn't have dreamed up a better bull's-eye for greenie spleen.

Courtesy Ron English; all rights reserved.

And there's spleen to burn, in the post-9/11, post-New Orleans, mid-Iraq United States. The culture wars are threatening to escalate into a blood feud. Partisan rancor and ideological bitterness have given rise to what the Pew Research Center described, in a 2004 study, as a political landscape split by "rising political polarization and anger," a nation "almost evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values."

In such a supercharged atmosphere, people and things that catch the media eye often become semiotic attractors, accumulating meaning in the eyes of defenders and detractors alike. This is especially true of the car, a potent symbol in the American mind since the postwar economic boom of the '50s, when easy credit made the dream of car ownership a reality for middle-class consumers. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 helped midwife the birth of suburbia, giving us the Auto America we know and love.

Of course, our veneration of the car as a household deity and our eagerness to raze whole neighborhoods (provided they were poor) in our alabaster cities and pave our fruited plains to make way for its asphalt temple, the highway, has earned us the blessings of smog, deforestation, and the cultural kudzu known as sprawl.

Nonetheless, the American obsession with cars—the bigger and badder the better—continues, seemingly unchecked by soaring gas prices and a moribund economy. According to a May, 2004 USA Today story, SUVs accounted for 30 percent of the new vehicles sold in 2004, a 3 percent jump from 2003, and sales of the biggest SUVs climbed by more than 10 percent in the first four months of 2004. And why the hell not? Driving Detroit's answer to a Tyrant Lizard from the Late Cretaceous is every American's god-given right, goddamit, second only to the right to hunt deer with armor-piercing rounds or to make a mockery of Old Europe by repackaging her culture, American style. Triscuit® Bruschetta, anyone? Slim-Fast® Cappuccino Delight Shake? Now tell those cheese-eating surrender monkeys to get the hell out of the global fast lane, before they end up in The Road Kill Cookbook.

Then again, the daily death march that is each morning's news—the horror stories, live from Iraq, of Army humvees or civilian SUVs ripped apart by rocket-propelled grenades or improvised explosive devices—has ratcheted up the hostilities between the pro- and anti-SUV factions. When the family friendly light truck first lumbered onto the cultural landscape (the debut of the Jeep Cherokee, in 1983, is as good a starting point as any), critics saw them as muscle cars on steroids, the embodiment of yuppie materialism and hard-bodied masculinity in the age of Rambo, Robocop, and Reagan. To bomb-the-suburbs punks and slackers, soccer mom-mobiles such as the Chrysler minivan (which also rolled out in '83) were symbols of Stepfordian conformity: in his novel Snow Crash, the cyberpunk writer Neil Stephenson derided them as "bimbo boxes."

Now, in post-traumatic America, where we live our lives on orange alert, we take our big cars seriously. If we are what we drive, big cars such as SUVs and Hummers are the embodiment of all that is right or wrong with this country, in the mass imagination. To its devotees, the SUV is a "safe room" on wheels, a bunker with beverage holders. "Sometimes the road ahead is paved with anything but good intentions," warns an ad for the Jeep Grand Cherokee—a tagline with an unintentionally (?) ominous subtext at a time when grotesque images of four American military contractors, dragged from their burning SUV and torn to pieces by exultant Iraqis in Fallujah, replay themselves in American nightmares.

In his book High and Mighty—SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, Keith Bradsher quotes Clotaire Rapaille, a psychologist whose work with car-owner focus groups has led him to believe that the American fear of violent crime is an important factor in the psychology of big-car appeal: "People buy SUVs, he tells auto executives, because they are trying to look as menacing as possible to allay their fears of crime and other violence." Marshall McLuhan's observation, in Understanding Media (1964), that "the car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man," is truer than ever in locked-down, wartime America. All phallic power on the outside, reassuringly womblike on the inside, SUVs are armored cocoons for an Age of Anxiety.

Courtesy Propaganda Remix Project; all rights reserved.

To some, though, the road ahead still looks like the "thoroughfare for freedom beat/ across the wilderness" evoked in "America the Beautiful." In this light, that Jeep Liberty or that Ford Escape you're driving is the incarnation of the pioneer spirit, the freethinking individualism that made this country great (or so the story goes). Screw the tree-huggers and their Al Gore-in-a-hairshirt jeremiads about hydrofluorocarbons! We're revving up our Chevy Trailblazers and our Ford Explorers and our Nissan Pathfinders and we're lighting out for the territories. And if we run out of road, we'll make our own.

"Refaced" billboard.

John Bruno, Jr., manager of Hummer of Manhattan, knows a bit about the mythic appeal of big cars. "People just love this truck; it's really uniquely American," he says, driving me around New York City in a hulking 2004 Hummer H2. He's sold it to all types, he notes, but "the target demographic was successful achievers, entrepreneurs, rugged individualists, outdoorsy people, executives who've made it for themselves and want to make a statement about it." Intriguingly, Bruno claims that some of his buyers are veterans of the war in Iraq who "want to buy [Hummers] just to keep identifying with the car."

For others, of course, monster trucks like the Hummer are rough beasts slouching, at 10 miles per gallon, toward Bethlehem—poster cars for American Empire at its most nasty, brutish, and supersized. Bruno knows this better than most: He's friends with the owner of Clippinger Chevrolet, the West Covina, California Hummer dealership that was fire-bombed in August, 2003 by the Earth Liberation Front, a decentralized group of guerrilla environmentalists who espouse guerrilla warfare. The inferno reduced 20 Hummer H2s to blackened carcasses and damaged another 20. Some of them flaunted mocking slogans, such as "I'm a greedy little pig" and "I love pollution" and "Fat lazy Americans." Ironically, says Bruno, the toxic fumes belched out by the burning Hummers "was some ridiculous amount of times more than any of those cars ever would have made if they'd burned gas for 200,000 miles every day for the next five years," an assertion more or less confirmed by West Covina Fire Chief Richard Greene, in an LA Weekly story about the attack.

Fire-bombed SUV, Clippinger Chevrolet. AP photo.

Obviously, torching 20 Hummers in defense of Mother Earth and unleashing 20 lifetimes' worth of toxic spew in the process wins the Homer Simpson Hole-in-the-Forehead Award. Even so, the ELF's ritual sacrifice of these battle-ready gas-guzzlers is just the Unabomber version of a riptide of rage that is churning beneath the surface of American society. A significant number of Americans is infuriated by what they see as the rogue-state lunacy of the war in Iraq and the crony capitalism and anti-environmentalism of an administration run, in their eyes, by draft-dodging hawks, corporate kleptocrats, and a president widely perceived to be dumb as a bag of hammers ("Nobody would ever enroll him in a quiz show," conceded David Frum, Dubya's former speechwriter).

These are the people who look at the big, black SUV, its tinted windows inscrutable as Darth Vader's faceplate, and see the hated symbol of an evil empire. They ponder its gas-hogging fuel inefficiency and reflect on the swinish selfishness of a nation that, as Bradsher notes in High and Mighty, "has 5 percent of the world's population, but produces nearly a third of all greenhouse gases from automobiles." They think about the my-way-or-the-highway arrogance inherent in SUV design—the way their Brontosaurian bulks cut off other drivers' sightlines; the way their Xenon headlights flood the cabins of smaller cars, turning rear-view mirrors into eye-frying spotlights; the way their drivers can't see the Camry they just forced off the road, exploding into a fireball, because they've got more blind spots than a glaucoma convention. To some, the SUV is a living parable about the menace to global society posed by our go-it-alone "exceptionalism," here in what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz likes to call the New American Century. They mull over the grim statistic that SUVs, because they ride high and typically have stiff fronts, without protective crumple zones, are nearly three times as likely as ordinary cars to kill the other driver in a crash, a fact that accounts for 1,000 needless deaths annually.

Courtesy Propaganda Remix Project; all rights reserved..

Thinking on these things, they divine in the SUV a bleak fable for our age. It's a fable about the apocalyptic threat of a rogue superpower that brakes for no one. Were the exploding Hummers in West Covina a harbinger of Days of Rage that will rip apart a nation "evenly divided politically—yet further apart than ever in its political values"? None can say. But if every age has its emblematic artwork, ours is surely the Chinese-American artist Sarah Sze's stunning 2001 installation, an exploded SUV spilling its mechanical innards down a flight of stairs. Its title? "Things Fall Apart."

Exploded SUV. Courtesy GasPig.com; all rights reserved.

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June 17, 2005

Dismemberment of Things Past

Stuck on fast forward, we've accelerated to the point where our multitasking, instant-messaging speed tribes are experiencing an eerie nostalgia for the present—an ironic world-view in which every experience is framed in air quotes.

Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.

(The following is excerpted from the lecture I delivered at Cabinet magazine's "Nostalgia" conference, in Mexico City. If Cabinet decides to publish an anthology of papers from that conference, as Editor Sina Najafi has hinted it might, a radically revised, substantially expanded version of my lecture will presumably be included in it.)

"Obsolescence confers instant bygone status," writes David Lowenthal, in The Past is a Foreign Country. He quotes Bevis Hillier, who believed that "'history was being recycled as nostalgia almost as soon as it happened.'"

The psychological state I've called "nostalgia for the present" is a close cousin to the anticipatory nostalgia experienced by the character in the Margaret Drabble novel Jerusalem the Golden who savors "a honeysuckle-filtered, sunny conversational afternoon" because she knows she'll savor it all the more, in years to come, as the source of "the most sad and exquisite nostalgia." Writes Drabble, "She was sad in advance, yet at the same time all the happier...for knowing that...she was creating for herself a past."

But our nostalgia for the present is more melancholy than Drabble's, shadowed by the inescapable feeling that, at a time when styles, trends, and media phenomena seem to spring up, wither away, and decay at time-lapse speed, everything around us is already "history."

Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.

The endpoint of this existential perspective is the feeling that we're living in an archaeological dig, a museum diorama. Looking at our appliances, we're able to foresee the moment, not far from now, when they're quaintly out-of-date, like the bulbous toasters and heavy, enameled mixers of the 1940s that inspired Michael Graves's retro-cute housewares for Target. And, if we squint hard enough, we're able to see our labor-saving gadgets as ancient artifacts, which, thanks to the giddy runaway of technological innovation (urged along by the market-driven doctrine of style obsolescence), they almost instantly are. (Of course, in the culture where fads, fashions, intellectual trends, and even people are consigned to the dustbin of history with the sardonic expression, "That is so last five minutes," antiquity is a relative concept.)

Nothing captures this sense of living in a ghost world better than Bill Morrison's elegiac movie Decasia: The State of Decay (2002), a jittery dance of death collaged from decomposing nitrate film stock taken from movie archives all over America. Utterly unlike anything you've ever seen, Decasia is a tone poem on the theme of decomposition—what the Victorian photographer William H. Fox Talbot called "the injuries of time." As the flickering of the sprocket holes keeps visual time along the film's edge, blobs boil across the scene. Holes gape in mid-screen, devouring the faces of smiling people. If you're inclined to Rorshach blots, you can see ectoplasm, amoebas, suppurating wounds, or intergalactic wormholes in these patches of disintegrating celluloid. The footage is old, older than time, salvaged from antique travelogues and melodramas and industrial films. Dervishes whirl in a blizzard of pocks and scratches. Rocket cars orbit a ride at Coney Island's Luna Park, vanishing into a roiling mass, then reemerging intact, then vanishing again, endlessly. A couple embraces and dissolves into each other, like mannequin lovers in a wax museum fire. True to its name, Decasia swarms with decay, a decay so frenzied it is, paradoxically, lively.

Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.

In his New York Times Magazine article about Morrison's movie, Lawrence Weschler describes the slow-motion decomposition "afflicting virtually all nitrate film stock (and nitrate film stock was the medium for most filmmaking until the 1950's). Because it is chemically unstable, cellulose nitrate film stock begins decomposing the moment it is manufactured, a process that accelerates with the passage of time." The luminous, silver images borne of nitrate become discolored, the emulsion turns sticky, "exuding a brown frothing foam (known to conservators, quaintly, as honey)" and, ultimately, hardens into a brittle mass, then crumbles into a reddish powder, so combustible it has been known to burst spontaneously into flame. No one will ever see Greta Garbo in Divine Woman or Thea Bara in Cleopatra again; both films, along with more than half of the 21,000 feature films produced before 1950, are presumed lost. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.

Which makes poetic sense, given that filmic images are by their very nature scenic postcards from the afterlife, home movies of the living dead. Photography is about suspended animation, the living flash-frozen in mid-breath; cinema is about reanimation. Photography is painless taxidermy, performed on the living; the movies are a branch of necromancy. Photography traps the soul behind those unblinking eyes that meet our gaze or, even more uncannily, follow us around the room. Hence the morbidity of the daguerreotype, an open-casket creepiness exploited to powerful effect in the gothic chiller The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001). When a pair of precocious children stumble on a 19th century post-mortem photograph of their family's domestics, they realize with a shudder that the servants are, in fact, ghosts. Of course, to the modern eye, the unsmiling, sepia-toned phantoms that stare fixedly out of Victorian photographs look as if they're already dead; the daguerreotype simply dramatizes the fact that all photography is post-mortem photography.

A photograph can preserve its subject forever in an instant of horror, like the suspected Viet Cong terrorist being executed by a South Vietnamese police chief in Edward T. Adams's famous photograph. Point-blank murder by a pistol bullet to the head is horrific enough, but if there is a fate worse than death, it is being sentenced to spend eternity imprisoned in the split second of your death. True, the V.C. whiplashing from the bullet's impact is dead and gone, never to know the media half-life of his disembodied image, but we do, and therein lies his fate, the kinder, gentler cruelty of the media age.

"[P]hotographs actively promote nostalgia," writes Susan Sontag, in On Photography. "Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. [...] All photographs are memento mori." Scratch the surface of nostalgia, and you'll find a deep strain of necrophilia, just beneath the melancholia. The dream of stepping through the daguerreotype, into the past, is the dream of undeath, of traveling back to an embalmed time, where things move in slow motion, or not at all, forever freeze-framed.

Still from Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002). Courtesy Decasia website.

The nostalgia index tracks the anxieties of any age, and our age is more anxious than any decade in recent memory. "In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is a no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world," writes the cultural historian Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia. "Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals." In the 21st century, the movie screens of the mass unconscious are haunted by nightly news images of jetliners jack-knifing through the Trade Towers, abject hostages begging not to be beheaded, cars exploding into oily fireballs in downtown Baghdad. Like the inhabitants of the doomed planet in the old Star Trek episide "All Our Yesterdays" (1969), who use a machine called the Atavachron to flee into the past, we seek solace in other times, any time but ours. Irony of ironies, our desperate insistence on clinging to lost moments is dragging the then and there into the here and now, overcrowding the present with spectral yesterdays.

—Mark Dery (© Mark Dery, 2005.)

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April 05, 2005

Pontification

The incorruptible cadaver of Saint Bernadette.

Swiss Guards in Renaissance finery; solemn monks holding candles; a male choir chanting in the occult tongue of Latin; the anguished faithful, wracked with grief, clasping their hands in prayer or seeming to clutch at the passing bier; and, at the center of this deeply pagan drama, the flesh made word—the dead pontiff, caught in mid-flight between the mortal and the marmoreal, the all too human and the already hallowed. Joel-Peter Witkin, eat your heart out: Nobody does High-Gothic spectacle like the Vatican.

"Smells and bells," believers call it: the ritualized technologies of mass mind control. For centuries, no institution was more masterfully skilled at manufacturing the consent of the illiterate million than the Catholic church.

In Rosemary's Baby, the friendly nieghborhood Satan-worshippers, Roman and Minnie, are thoughtful on this point:

Roman: No Pope ever visits a city where the newspapers are on strike.
Minnie: I heard he's gonna postpone and wait till it's over.
Guy: Well, that's show-biz.
Roman: (chuckling) That's exactly what it is. All the costumes or rituals, all religions.

Borne from the Apostolic Palace, through St. Peter's Square, and into St. Peter's Basilica, the earthly remains of John Paul II looked, for all the world, like a prop in a gothic opera, his kabuki-white features contrasting melodramatically with his blood-red vestments. Robed and mitered, he looked doll-like, a chess-set bishop sculpted in life-size proportions by Madame Tussaud, an unstrung puppet with his "feet turned outward awkwardly, the skin of his face chalky and drawn taut," as the New York Times correspondents Elaine Sciolino and Daniel J. Wakin put it, in their wonderfully poetic description of the scene.

Under John Paul II, Team Vatican's inquisitional intolerance for self-abuse, sex before wedlock, birth control, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and other works and ways of the Devil cost it global market share. According to an op-ed by Thomas Cahill in the Times, "The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads."

Even so, who can deny that, when it comes to ritualistic pomp and circumstance, Roman Catholicism simply knocks the spots off Religion, American-style? A devout agnostic to the death, I stand, nonetheless, with the splenetic contrarian Camille Paglia, who never misses an opportunity to rant against what she perceives as the church's clueless attempts to rebrand itself, from Vatican II onward. "My dissatisfaction from American Catholicism, which partly began during my adolescence in the late 50's, was due partly to its increasing self-Protestantization and suppression of its ethnic roots," Paglia told the Buffalo News, in April, 1995. "Within 20 years, Catholic churches looked like airline terminals: no statues, no stained-glass windows, no Latin, no litanies, no gorgeous jeweled garments, no candles, so that the ordinary American church now smells like baby powder."


German stigmatic Theresa Neumann. Photo courtesy Living Miracles.net.

Indeed, the understated grand guignol of the pope's posthumous procession, equal parts medieval mystery play and prime-time spectacle, offers a timely reminder that these are the people who brought you Saint Bartholomew, the flayed martyr with his skin flung jauntily over one shoulder, and the beatified truckstop waitresses Saint Lucy and Saint Agatha, serving up their plucked-out eyeballs and severed breasts on platters, like blue-plate specials.

Yes, the pope has that futurrific little popemobile, and yes the Holy See's website is the bitchenest thing in online branding for Bronze-Age belief systems. And yes, the Vatican e-mailed and IM'd the bad tidings about the Holy Father's death to a breathless press. (What did you expect? An archangel with a flaming sword?) Even so, Catholicism, at its thorn-crowned, gore-dripping (sacred) heart, amounts to an inescapably pagan take on Christianity. With its martyrs and its miracles, its relics and its stigmata, its exorcisms and excommunications, the Holy Roman faith is the Christian Gothic.


Natuzza Evola, stigmatic.

Is this why Catholics and lapsed Catholics are overrepresented in the congregation of Gothic novelists? The famously Catholic Flannery O'Connor wrestled with theological demons against a Gothic backdrop, and Anne Rice, the Mother Confessor of palely loitering goths everywhere, was raised in a fervently Catholic household and once dreamed of being a nun. Ironically, the Gothic aesthetic sprang from the brow of anti-Papist Protestants such as Matthew Lewis, who associated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages with inquisitional cruelties and a dogged hostility toward science and society's first, feeble gropings toward the Enlightenment. (Go figure!) Lewis's novel The Monk (1796) chronicled the secret, De Sadean depravities of one of God's Servants, who boinks his pious groupies, dabbles in witchcraft, and conjures up abominations in the consecrated crypts beneath his abbey. (Ah, well, who are we to be critical? "We are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags..." [Isaiah 64:6].)

Of course, Catholicism inherits its Gothic tendencies from its parent religion. Christianity worships a revenant stiff, for God's sake; its devotees wear an instrument of capital punishment around their necks, and its most sacred rite is a blood feast that reads like Anne Rice fanfiction at its most lurid ("Whoso...drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day"). Catholicism is just Christianity with its graven images showing, Christianity with one foot in the chthonic.


Stigmata Diaboli ("Mark of the Devil")(1960), by the renegade Surrealist Clovis Trouille. Courtesy Musee virtuel irreligieux.

Which is the larger part of its charm, of course. In stark contrast to the extruded, suety Christianity retailed in megamall megachurches like Robert Schuller's happy, shiny Crystal Cathedral, Catholicism offers the uncanny consolations of mummified Capuchin monks, the preserved head of Catherine of Siena, the Stations of the Cross (the Iron Man Decathlon of sadomasochism), the homoerotic agonies of Saint Sebastian, and the dewy browed ecstasies of Saint Theresa, pierced by the immaculate unit of Our Heavenly Father. Did I mention a lifetime's worth of gnawing guilt (see: "We are all as an unclean thing," etc., etc., above), temporarily expiated through the breathy, phone-sex ritual of whispering your juiciest True Confessions through the grillework of a Gothic phonebooth, into the eager ear of one of the Eunuchs of Heaven?

No wonder that four out of five enfants terribles ask for Catholicism by name when they get tired of playing whack-a-mole with plaster saints and revert to bourgeois form. Consider Salvador Dali: A virulent anti-cleric like much of the French avant-garde he ran with when Surrealism was the New, New Thing (think of the priests mocked as beasts of burden in Un Chien Andalou, dragging a piano full of rotting donkeys), Dali ended up a theatrically pious Catholic, his Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951) a gift-shop staple.

Likewise, consider the pilgrim's progress of Patti Smith, whose 1975 punk-rock anthem, "Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)," is a symbolic profanation of the host. Drawling snidely about how Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not hers, Smith kick-started punk rock (and her career) with the time-tested tactic of bitch-slapping the bourgeoise. Sex and sacrilege set to a dry-humping rhythm, "Gloria" was cannily calculated to give The Catholic League of Decency a cardiac event. What better way to certify your street cred?

Fast forward to "Wave," on the 1979 album of the same name, where we find Patti having a Hallmark Moment with the pope. In an adenoidal little-girl voice that bears an alarming resemblance to Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, Smith goo-goos about an imaginary audience with the Holy Father:

i saw i saw you from your balcony window and you were standing there waving at everybody it was really great because there was about a billion people there, but when i was waving to you, uh, the way your face was, it was so, the way your face was it made me feel exactly like we're it's not that you were just waving to me, but that we were we were waving to each other. really it was really wonderful... ...goodbye. goodbye sir. goodbye papa.

(Cue footage of New York's balding punk alumni, Class of '75, flinging themselves lemminglike into the East River.)

Why would the woman who snarled, in "Babelogue," that she hadn't "sold herself" to God start slinging the papal bull? For the same reason that the market-smart Dali traded in his gently used Surrealism for the Holy Roman faith when Surrealism's shock appeal went from cult to cute. What's an aging avant-gardist to do, once there are no bourgeoisie left to epater? Epater the bohos! Scandalize lockstep nonconformists everywhere by going normal! Shock the been-there, triple-pierced-that, Disinformation demographic that wears its ennui like a designer trucker's cap with your ironic embrace of a normalcy so insistently normal it's downright creepy.

Strapping a lobster to your head and fantasizing aloud about the sensuous curve of Hitler's buttocks no longer landing you among the boldfaced names on Page Six? Tossing off zany bon mots like "the only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad" not setting the table aroar the way it used to? Tear a page from the Dali playbook: Declare that the academic realist Meissonier could paint circles around Picasso, insist that Franco's fascism saved Spain, and—if you really want to pin everybody's ears back—convert to Catholicism and start cranking out Lourdes gift-shop chromos like Crucifixion (1954).

Sure, you can always grow a Van Dyke, cultivate a morgue-slab pallor, and join the Church of Satan, but how transgressive can a cult be that claims Sammy Davis as one of its charter members, for chrissakes? Besides, Satanism is just a backwards-masked version of Roman Catholicism. It still kneels at the same altar; it just does it backwards, buttocks bared, hoarsely bellowing hymns of praise to Cthulhu in its best Norwegian death-metal growl. Why settle for a lame mullethead parody of the ultimate goth faith when, for a song and a prayer, you can have the Real Thing, replete with swinging censers, severed fingers, extreme unction, uncorruptible saints, and transubstantiation (in which the consecrated host is miraculously transformed, as it slides down your gullet, into the flesh of God Almighty)?

Of course, Vatican dogma is a lot less tragically hip than its Hammer Horror stagecraft. Sure, the Pope's posthumous processional blew the vestments off the drive-through McRituals, awash in self-help homilies and feelgood ecumenical mush, that pass for Christian worship in America's supersized suburban churches. But John Paul's doctrinal positions were Gothic in a less fashion-forward sense. Not for nothing did Molly Ivins call him the greatest mind of the Middle Ages.

For the next 15 media minutes, of course, anti-Papism is the new anti-Semitism. As Philadelphia Inquirer commentator Ken Dilanian helpfully points out, "the media are doing now what they did when former President Ronald Reagan died in June: reducing a deeply controversial figure to a warm, grandfatherly caricature."

Well, forgive me, Father, I know not what I do. I'm going to risk being tarred as Jack Chick Jr. by issuing an encyclical of my own: A Holy Father who orders his billion-member flock to eschew birth control, at the gunpoint threat of excommunication, even as AIDS rides a pale horse through their hospital wards, is guilty of child abuse on a global scale. According to the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, "in Africa, where HIV infects millions—20 percent in Kenya, 40 percent in Botswana, 34 percent in Zimbabwe—Catholic clergy, who oppose condoms as they do all contraception, are actively promoting the myth that condoms don't prevent transmission of the virus and may even spread it." AIDS is slaughtering the innocent and the sinful alike, yet this Pope insisted that the faithful adhere to a suicidally misguided doctrine straight out of the Dark Ages. This is genocide, plain and simple. L.A. Weekly firebrand Marc Cooper minces no words:

I firmly believe that the Church (and religion more generally) are medieval institutions that celebrate and propagate fear and ignorance. The positive record of the currently-deceased Pope is well known. But it hardly balances out the sheer inhumanity of Church dogma that he steadfastly defended. I personally could give a flip if women are or are not allowed into the priesthood (an institution that should be abolished). What I do care about is the AIDS infection rate world-wide and the vast, staggering complicity of the Church in its preaching against condoms and, alas, birth control. Suffering, says the Church, is God's great gift to man. Nice words from those who inhabit gilded palaces and reign as Rome's greatest landlord. Any truly great Pope would do to the Church what Gorbachev did to Communism—hasten its extinction.

By all accounts, Karol Wojtyla was a nice man. But is niceness next to godliness? Doubtless, he lifted the spirits of the anxious pilgrims who knelt to kiss his ring or hoisted their babies aloft for a benedictory peck from the Bishop of Rome; where's the harm in that?

Even so, I'm as convinced as any godless agnostic can be that when we die, we all go—good and evil alike—to the same worm-turned earth. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe John Paul is riding his popemobile triumphally through the City of God, even now. From here, though, his earthly legacy looks like a Cloud of Unknowing, and a toxic one, at that.


L'Age d'Or (1930), Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

Posted by Mark Dery at 12:10 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 03, 2005

Brinkmanship

Having just returned from the grand tour of the Grand Canyon, I can say with authority that Edmund Burke didn't know the half of it.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818).

Burke never visited the vertiginous abyss that, more than any other natural wonder, embodies his belief that terror is the voltage from which the sublime draws its jolt. "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature...is astonishment," he wrote, in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful (1857). "And astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror."

To stand at the brink of the Grand Canyon is to thrill with dizzy horror at the mile-deep plunge mere inches away. Not for nothing is this bottomless pit called an "upside-down mountain": Adjectives collapse. Exclamations go clunk. Attempts to wrap your intellect around the illimitable vastness of it all die stillborn in the brain. John Muir's rhapsodic essay, "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado" (1902), soars highest, but even it falls dead to the floor when the reader sees the canyon with her own eyes. Nothing compares.

It's an infinitely dense, endlessly collapsing hole in the psyche as well as the ground, this 277-mile long chasm, and you can almost feel its awful magnetism pulling you toward its edge, begging you to lean further...just a little further...that's right...keep going...just another inch, over the spidery rails that keep you from plummeting into the infinity at your feet.


Trail sign, Grand Canyon National Park.

This is the sensation Poe nailed in "The Imp of the Perverse" (1850). A proto-Freudian meditation on the id (77 years before the father of the unconscious dreamed of that "dark, inaccessible part of our personality"), Poe's philosophical fiction confronts the "radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment" that "has been...overlooked by all the moralists." This sentiment insists on the cathartic release of the primal desires and infantile impulses suppressed by civilization. Irrational and "with certain minds, under certain conditions," irresistible, Poe's imp flouts drawing-room taboos, indulging itself in petty provocations that flirt with social suicide. At other times, when its fatal attraction to self-gratification overrides even the hardwired logic of self-preservation, the Imp of the Perverse risks self-destruction in the more literal sense:

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss---we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. [...] It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall---this rushing annihilation---for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination---for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Close cousin to Poe's delicious terror is the nagging urge to help some deserving soul through Zion's gates with a short, sharp nudge, over the edge. Watching a bubbly twentysomething snapping photos of her boyfriend, oblivious to the canyon's breathtaking splendor, as he videotaped her (a scene that Baudrillard would have written, if it hadn't happened), I found myself willing her to step back, back, just a silly millimeter more, toward the oblivion that beckoned, just outside the camera frame. Admittedly, the milk of human kindness was curdling in my veins, that day, soured by one too many braying, supersized sightseers. But tell me true: Who among us hasn't wished one of the camcorder-clutching herd piling off that tour bus—stereotypes come to life, with their fanny packs and their overstuffed Dockers—would take one step too many while trying to locate Brianna in the viewfinder?

"What is it about us human beings—how we feel that, in any contest with nature, we're fated to come out on top?," writes Susan O'Neill, in her Amazon review of Michael P. Ghiglieri and Thomas M. Myers's Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon, an enlightening compendium of fatally brainless hijinx, freak accidents, murders, and suicides, staged in a landscape of ineffable beauty—and terror. She attributes this hubris to, among other things, "a false sense of safety because, hey, we're in a National Park, and surely a National Park can't be any more dangerous than Disney World..." Ghiglieri and Myers's gripping accounts of killer flashfloods and rockslides, of marathon runners found brain-dead in the broiling heat of the canyon's desert floor, of a model capering inanely at a precipice's rim while a photographer snaps away, only to capture the gut-clenching blur of something falling, read like Old Testament parables, newly revised for the age of reality TV. They're cautionary tales for wired apes whose closest encounter with wild nature has consisted, until their pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon, of the concrete limbed-and-vinyl-leafed flora and Audio-Animatronic fauna of Disney's Critter Country.

"Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth's wonders, new and old, spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, [...] spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam, abolishing space and time and almost everything else," wrote Muir, in 1902. Worried, as generations of Rousseauvian discontents after him would worry, about the End of Nature, Muir lamented that the "tender, pulpy people...may now go almost everywhere in smooth comfort," bringing with them, presumably, a Disneyfied vision of nature as the blue-screen backdrop for witless antics. I'm channeling the genocidal misanthropy of the Deep Ecologists, here, I realize, and the Luddism of Edward Abbey at his most Kaczynski-esque. Still, it's hard to suppress the gag reflex triggered by our relentless anthropocentrism, our petulant insistence on reducing the irreducible to proportions manageable to the cortex of a self-important ape. How reassuring to think that here, at last, is a hole big enough to swallow our hubris, if we will only take the plunge.



Darwin Award Honorable Mention: An allegedly un-Photoshopped image of Ron L. Toms performing the allegedly unfaked "Grand Canyon Leap of Faith." Photo: Dana R. Watson.

- © Mark Dery 2005

Posted by Mark Dery at 02:27 PM | TrackBack

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