Wolves amongst the wolves

These days I've been reading The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, whose exhilarating Lipstick Traces should be required reading for everyone who considers him- or herself still in possession of a fighting soul. In Shape, he tells the story of a depraved America, an America equally as loathsome and rotten as Orson Welles' lawman in A Touch of Evil as it is as pious and thoughtful as Atticus Finch. There is a particular quote he uses from David Lynch which sums up the tone of the book: "We're in a time when you can picture these really tall, evil things running at night, just racing. The more freedom you give them, the more they come out and just race, and they're running in every direction now."

Marcus quotes Philip Roth in talking about famously dead Laura Palmer of "Twin Peaks": "She was totally corrupt and totally innocent... The extreme innocence was the corruption"; imagine such a thing! America's greatest secret, the secret that Marcus is poking at, is that the underbelly is actually not under- at all, it's right there on top. It's as if a teenage boy plagued by acne were to pick it all away, only to find that the acne itself was the face. It reminds me of what Thorstein Veblen wrote about the hucksterism of the American small town, which mirrors Lynch's comments on it; in Lynch's movies, small towns have dark secrets, but rather than being behind the scenes, they are the scenes. The small town is indeed pure, but its purity has the character that would be equally at home greeting one's neighbor as deliberately exterminating the Indians, equally at home pitching in at the local food bank as fleeing Hurricane Katrina one to a car.

America is not a conflict between good and evil, it merely is good and evil, each accomplice to the other. The myth of the honest, hardworking businessman who rises to the top needs the corresponding myth of the corrupt, backstabbing shark who leaps there, not because the two oppose each other, but because they are in union. Cartoon characters like Two-Face or stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are tropes aimed at fostering the belief that evil can be vanquished and good can triumph, that one's "bad side" can be suppressed and the reins handed to the "good side." In reality, everyone is ethically capable of almost anything at any time, from ghoulish depths to noble heights; as Marcus says, the only real freedom left to Americans is moral freedom. American Psycho demonstrates this very well; in some ways Patrick Bateman was not free not to be rich, young and successful, but he was free to kill. Well, now it's 2007 and our liberties are severely constrained at best, our class system quickly solidifying, and our opportunities shrinking, but nothing binds our inalienable American right to be as good or as evil, or as both, as we see fit.

Rudie can't fail

I overheard an interesting conversation at the bank one day. I was standing in the predictably long line that forms just before closing time, there on a work errand. Two WASPy men behind me struck up a bit of idle chatter. One recounted a previous time he waited in a long line at this bank, next to a woman who, bored, twirled her pen in such a way as to repeatedly come close to hitting the mans shirt with it. One man said, "You know, at a certain point in time you have to ask, 'Is it a lack of culture, or the prevailing culture?'" This stuck with me. Now, I always secretly take pleasure in my appearance whenever I go there; grease-laden and sweaty, I feel like the humble laborer sticking out starkly in this polished house of commerce. But this feeling never enters the realm of rudeness. I was raised to have decent manners, and my parents were moderately successful; except for my habit of fiercely picking my nose at any time, I would consider myself polite. And it's not as though I would begrudge this man his right to take offense at the girls wayward pen. But standing there, intently eavesdropping on the rest of their exchange wherein they lamented, in a pompous way that would make T.S. Eliot proud, the Decline of Culture in America, I couldn't help siding with that crass girl. When the elite in society claims a monopoly on taste, what could be more powerful as a political expression by the underclass than being just plain rude?

Irony is for suckers

You've done this before. You walk down the street with a few friends, chatting, perhaps with somewhere to be but little hurry in getting there. Passing another small group, or maybe just one person, you glance at their most American item of clothing: the t-shirt. What it says (and it always says something) doesnt especially matter here. But it has an effect on you, forcing you to communicate it to your companions. Once sufficiently out of earshot (or not), you gasp to them, "Did you see that shirt? Amazing."

"Amazing". When did we all become so amazed by everything? Return to the previous paragraph; whether we thought the shirt was aesthetically pleasing has very little to do with its being amazing. More importantly, we say amazing whether we look down on the wearer or admire them. The sentiment, and the word, is disingenuous in all cases.

Such is the scourge of irony. Once the only aesthetic weapon of the disaffected, irony has become the calling card of the smug and the self-satisfied. Lets not forget that Oscar Wilde, one of the most famously ironic people in history, died in prison for being gay. He wasnt shopping in vintage stores looking for twenty dollar threadbare Foreigner shirts, he was fighting for his life. And now you have those with the least to lose co-opting underclass aesthetics. Mullets, moustaches, Steve Miller Band t-shirts, these have all become in-jokes made by rich kids at the expense of the working class; whether you can still associate these things with the working class in terms of taste is really beside the point.

This class issue to me is the keystone. If you consider irony as an expression of class conflict, the reason we can say, "Amazing," and mean nothing is that a key aspect of irony itself, its heart, is the sly airing of a grievance. With nothing at stake, ironic expression is at best an empty gesture. Lacking any grounding, one can't determine whether they actually like a particular thing. Frightening? When we've become saturated in irony, its hard not to respond ironically, because we wouldnt necessarily know where to start if somebody asked us to give an example of something we genuinely liked. Sincerity would sound too starry-eyed and, well, uncool. Its almost enough to make one pine for the days of the commodified Che Guevara; at least the simpletons who coughed up for overpriced Che shirts thought they meant it. Almost. Now everyone's Thora Birch in "Ghost World" (that movie made me sick), picking on everyone without ever having to hold an opinion.

But here's what gets me. I had a mullet, or whatever you want to call it, for a couple of years. I had a rat-tail before that (it came from behind my ear and it was braided and since I can't braid for shit I glued the top of the braid so there was a dread there after a while). I liked these hairstyles. I thought they suited me. Right now I have a moustache, and I'm trying to decide whether the same is true. But two questions bug me. For one, how am I to be believed when I say I like a thing? "I like Earth Crisis." (Few do; I am one or them.) Couldn't I just be acting ironical (I've always wondered if that was a word; the mathematician guy says it in "Good Will Hunting," a movie I love unironically and frequently causes me to cry)? Second, how can I even tell myself? Maybe it seems aesthetically pleasing to me as a part of this constellation of ironic behavior I take part in.

I feel like Clement Greenberg in his diatribes against kitsch, a withered old square railing against the young whippersnappers. But the reason this has me on edge so much is because when conversation turns to taste the participants become cagey poker players. Irony absolves you of ever having to commit to a preference, and its adherents can dance around the question of liking something without ever touching down on it. Can't we admit to liking some things that it would be uncool to genuinely like? How about coming clean about how we don't really like some of the things we say we like, we just say so to make fun of people who actually do like them? I love Jesus Christ Superstar. I won't fucking shut up about it, and anyone who knows me will verify this. I hate R. Kelly's "Trapped In the Closet," and I watch it only to laugh at the possibility of taking it seriously. Who's next??

Still apolitical?

Today at the record store just plopped down between aisles I found a crate of old issues of Maximum Rocknroll, the monthly bible of my teenage years, the virtually undisputed voice of punk culture. I thumbed through the big stack and ended up picking up a few of them, each by the list of bands interviewed within. Scrotum Grinder, R.A.M.B.O., Tragedy, The Oath, etc. (I was looking for a Spits interview but no luck). Yellowed newsprint from the years of punk that I missed, too busy at being a mature college student. I sat down with coffee to read them, not for nostalgia’s sake or a quarter-life crisis thing, but because I still like punk rock, maybe more now than I ever did. Punk, it seems, has survived irony when it seems like nothing else has been spared.

Maximum Rocknroll isn’t really known for its variation: MAXIMUMROCKNROLL, invariably, at the top, a list of bands inside, sometimes a special feature; “Marriage, Mortgage, and Punk” for instance. Always newsprint, always black and white, always left. I didn’t really notice until I flipped through them that one of the issues I bought was from November 2001. On the cover, the band list, usually dominant, sits tiny, right beneath the title; rather than somebody screaming into a microphone, the main image is of a standing soldier with no helmet, loosely holding a rifle, looking down, with the words “still APOLITICAL?” This was the first issue to go to print following the World Trade Center attacks; the second, now better-known, infamous September 11th on record.

I won’t be the guy who talks about what that day was like. Honestly, I was bored. But reading the news clippings in MRR now five years later, ones like “Bush is Walking Into a Trap” and “Terrorism, Television and the Rage for Vengeance,” I feel l ike even the biggest pessimists, the most strident anarchists, and the most zealous critics at the time undershot how wide in scope American vengeance would reach. Over the past five years the global war has ground on and deepened, each step seeming more normal than the last even as many of us resisted. Now that we seem to have grown used to the Iraq war, like one might grow used to the worsening cough of a terminal disease, are we still undershooting how much worse it can still get? We’re still apolitical..

I'm a nuclear/nucular bomb

In the chorus of the song "Nuclear Bomb" by the Spits, two vocalists trade the following lines:
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
A: "I'm a nucular bomb"
B: "I'm a nuclear bomb"
And then in uni son:
A + B: "I'm a nucular, I'm a nucular bomb!"

But get this: they each deliberately pronounce it differently, and then sing it in unison, again differently. This might not seem that noteworthy to most peopl e. For instance, when I called Mary about it at 7 AM once, I was halfway to my parents' house in Virginia, driving on the D.C. beltway:
John: "No, but the one guy says 'nuclear,' and the other says 'nucular,' and then they sing it together, but they still pronounce it differently!"
Mary (tired): "Okay."
John: "But the syllables kind of collide when they say it together."
Mary (tired, unsure of why I'm calling so early about this): "Huh."
Coffee (in the form of John's body): "But it's so DUMB! Why would it be so dumb unless it was on purpose and therefore more awesome than anything ever?"
Mary: "Are you driving safely?"
John: "Oh, well there's a traffic jam. A tanker exploded on I-95. Isn't that crazy? Oh, you know what else? That first song on the Turbone gro record is about pizza!" (sings a few bars)

As you can see I'm a very good conversationalist. But the point here is that the conscious choice to have the correct pronunciation of a word (especially one which often proves to be such a point of contenti on) collide so awkwardly with its misfit twin, in such a doofy context, this cannot be underestimated. These might literally be the dumbest lyrics in history, but so meticulously calculated... well, I hate the band Sublime, the word 'sublime,' and the people who use it so earnestly, but I'm going to have to bow to it this time...

Three phrases that have got to go

1. "Dear reader"
Maybe a hundred years ago writing this in a novel was, well, novel. Back then we didn't have to watch all these movies about how overwrought writers are and how they obsess over every last detail. Books and stories just sort of floated down as a gift from the gods. Now we see the writer as a sad person who's trying desperately to connect with the world, so of course the reader is now the one in charge. Also, more people can read now than ever before (although it's hard to tell), so we don't feel special anymore when the writer addresses us "personally" (who, ME?). "Esteemed reader" is out too, but if you somehow allude to the reader's stupidity then we're talking.

2. "With apologies to..."
This is an easy one. Most of the time when somebody writes this they have way more to apologize for than they thought. It's also most frequently used when the premise has already been laid bare, like if someone alters a Shakespeare sonnet to be about, I don't know, their hamster (shudder). If one were to s urvive reading that kind of thing, they would already know what the writer had referenced and the quiet pain in which they lived; the apology is inherent. Defiance is more satisfying anyways. For instance, Crass never apologized for naming their albums "The Feeding of the Five Thousand" or "Stations of the Crass," and those were things Jesus did, so if they didn't neither should we.

3. "But I digress"
It's clear that the writer is digressing when this phrase appears, that's why we're not listening any more. This phrase peaks in annoyance when used in conversation more so than on paper, but even on the page all one really has to do is have a new paragraph ready to skip to if the tangent is boring. If it's a trick and the plan is to return to the digression, either that's a literary device that the writer is using to make it "challenging" for us, or we're just shutting the book right now. Probably both. On the other hand, it's like a fun puzzle when the writer marks off the spurious topic (and spurious topics within) with loads of parentheses (see Rev. Norb's killer columns (most of which had more within the parentheses than without (and the real gems were tucked away beneath many parenthetical layers)) for Maximum Rock'n'Roll in the late nineties), so more of that is welcome (see? it's easy)..