Generation Bubble
Archive for December, 2010
American Psycho: U.S. Still Crazy After All These Years
Even Mr. End-of-History himself, Francis Fukuyama, admits (albeit in a cautious, highly qualified manner) that the great political experiment our founding fathers set in motion has essentially devolved into a plutocracy. This means goodbye social mobility, liberty, sovereignty, and just about everything else Idaho militia men find so sexy about the constitution. Money obeys only one imperative: to make more of itself. On its way to doing so it will trample everything you and I hold dear.
True Sailing Is Dead: “Horse Latitudes” by the Doors (Distant Listening #6)
Morrison seems to have sincerely wanted to launch his drunken boat like a latter-day Rimbaud, but he neglected to register that little in the cultural zeitgeist could support such a self-image. The Whiskey-a-Go-Go was not fin-de-siècle Paris; the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (on which the Doors performed “Touch Me”) was not Le Mercure de France. As much as he may have wanted to will himself into becoming a poet from another age, nobody can make the era amenable by fiat. So he became a sad anachronism.
Exchange Relations: On the Impossibility of Gift Giving
You work to buy the perfect gift, but you don’t get the satisfaction of knowing your work made another human being happy. Unless you were given direction as to what to buy, which would have made your work infinitely easier, more likely than not the receiver of the gift is not going to like it. The very surplus of goods we enjoy has allowed each one of us to develop needs so idiosyncratic that only certain brands, and the stories they tell, can satisfy any lack we might happen to feel. We are as finicky as house cats, turning up our noses as everything that doesn’t fit the idea we have of ourselves, an idea made as superficially complex and arcane as a volley of text messages.
Distant Listening (5): The Sweet Authority of The 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Simon Says”
Bubblegum at its best offers a carefully calibrated calculus of hooks and universally accessible lyrics — simple-mindedness elevated to kind of austere minimalism by egoless professionals who eschew personal recognition in order to make something limited and perfect, something that, if nothing else, apotheosizes the culture-industry commodity.
Textual Immaturity: On Books Read Too Soon and Too Late
The seasonability of reading certain books is certainly a curious notion. But when you consider it closely, it makes sense. This doesn’t simply owe to your being insufficiently advance in terms of language skills (though this may be a factor), so much as it does to your being insufficiently mature, sophisticated, or experienced. Incubated in the bulb-forcing hothouse of the American education system, we tend to lose sight of the fact that some subjects of study demand that we be prepared to engage them, and not simply in the conventional manner of having satisfied a curriculum’s prerequisites.
Distant Listening (4): Veruca Salt’s Existential “Seether”/Or
Veruca Salt existed only to consolidate the triumph of their indie predecessors as the latter came to savor the awareness that they had become the icons of the music-industry establishment. Their imitators now drove press coverage; A&R people now sought their avatars. Their backstage banter had now taken on the trappings of lore. Veruca Salt’s inevitably insignificant career was always already a footnote to the bands that managed to break out of obscurity and redefine “alternative” as a wholly integrated market segment. Even before they got national distribution, they were already destined to be that flash in the pan that signifies the complete reification of a once vibrant and organic artistic style, which afterward lives only in memory, in legend, even for the performers who have been therewith made legendary. Veruca Salt meant that from that point onward, the alt-rock vanguard could only go through the motions of their petrified genre.
So Wrong They’re Right: Conservatism, Homeschoolers, and Contemporary Cinema
There’s something undeniably appealing about American conservatism, like a sweater that, though comfortable and cozy, doesn’t really look all that flattering. I’m sure it’s great, the urge socially and culturally to circle the wagons and gather the brood around the kitchen table to dispense lessons on young earth and the divine origins of the second amendment. It offers certainty in spades, something altogether in short supply in these days of global financial upheaval.
Unchained Melody: At Home in the Consumerist Funhouse
Consumerism can make you happy. It has rectified the age-old problem of the self’s division from the world. For in consumerism’s simulated world, in the constant stream of advertisements whose narratives have become as familiar and comforting as bedtime stories, the gap between life and essence is closed. This gives some of us a peace of mind that hasn’t been enjoyed since antiquity when, as theorist Georg Lukács writes, “the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature of the stars.” The world created by consumerism is a world where meaning is once again immanent, and the devoted consumer need never wonder how in purchasing a certain item she can make reality conform to her desires and her desires conform to that reality.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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