No5

The

B AI.TERNATIVE AFFLER NumberFtve

TO WHAT?

Rock 'ti RoU is the Health of the State, page 5

TOWARD A RETRO APOCAI.YPSE The Nostalgia Gap, page 152

CONSOI..DATED DEV'ANCE, 'NC. Youth Culture Fabrication Specialists, page 159 Plus new writing by Janice Eidus, Robert Nedelkoff, and Steve Albini

66The Journal That Bloots the Cutting EdgeM

is stomach turns a somersault with the drop of the elevator. He steps out into the crowded marble hall. For a moment not knowing which way to go, he stands back against the wall with his hands in his pockets, watching people elbow their way through the perpetually revolving doors; softcheeked girls chewing gum, hatchetfaced girls with bangs, creamfaced boys his own age, young toughs with their hats on one side, sweatyfaced messengers, crisscross glances, sauntering hips, red jowls masticating cigars, sallow concave faces, flat bodies of young men and women, paunched bodies of elderly men, all elbowing, shoving, shuffling, fed in two endless tapes through the revolving doors out into Broadway, in off Broadway. Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving doors, noon and night and morning, the revolving doors grinding out his years like sausage meat. All of a sudden his muscles stiffen. Uncle Jeff and his office can go plumb to hell. The words are so loud inside him he glances to one side and the other to see if anyone heard him say them.

They can all go plumb to hell.

- John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

The Baftler

Thomas Frank, Keith White

~ ~

U...

7'

W{D~OItllMn

editors Andy Beecham-Production Greg Lane-Urim Editor "Diamonds" Dave Mulcahey-Thummim Editor

Special thanks to WHPK, Bill Boisvert and Eric Iversen for extra editing, the Crey City Journal Monocle, "Twist" White, Gill's Cut Rate Liquors, DD&S Barbecue, Buzzmuscle, Galaxy of Mailbox Whores, Sabalon Glitz, and Ashtray Boy. We also want to thank everybody who wrote to us over the last year, even though we rarely had a chance to reply.

We produced this Baffler in November, 1993 in the tiny office ofWHPK-FM, crammed in the upper reaches of the ersatz-Gothic spire of the University of Chicago's Reynolds Clubhouse. The large screen of their computer and access to their gigantic record library made the task much easier than before. The nearby roof was perfect for cookouts and drunken stumbling.

"The Hippogryph Files," the selections from ANON and S.P.Y., and "Not the Plaster Casters," are printed with permission. Everything else 漏 copyright 1993 The Baffler. All rights reserved. Our ISSN is 1059-9789. The Baffier is distributed by Ubiquity, Speedimpex, Fine Print, Small Changes, and Desert Moon.

The Baffler is published by its editors (and no one else) in the South Side of Chicago. Sometimes an unseemly long period elapses between issues (almost a year this time). But in the interim we are always up to something-parties, media pranks, newsletters, general troublemaking-which you can hear about by subscribing.

Subscriptions are $16 for the nexr four issues; single copies cost $5. Somewhat more for libraries. We strongly encourage readers to send us their essays, fiction, art, and poetry. Help us "Blunt the Cutting Edge."

But we warn them in advance that, being extremely busy with our scholarly pursuits, we tend to be rather lax correspondents. To many of those who sent us material over the past months, we apologize for having taken so long--{)r having failed-to reply. We were not prepared for such a deluge of submissions, but we promise to do a better job in the future.

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NUtnber Five ALTERNATIVE TO WHAT? Rock n Roll is The Health of the State, Tom Frank, p. 5 Eulogy: Sun Ra, Bob Nastanovich, p. 20 Making the Scene: Brain Dead in Seattle, Eric Iversen, p. 21 The Problem With Music, Steve Albini, p. 31 Rebel Rock in Moscow, Nathan Frank, p. 41 Why I am Very Angry, Seth Sanders, p. 47 A Nest of Ninniea, Selected Scorchings, p. 50 Sweet Portable You, Music Reviews, p. 53 The Name Caller, Steve Healey, p. 81 Sass Sells, Tom Frank, p. 95 World Music and You, Herbert Mattelart, p. 103

TWENTY-NOTHING REVISITED We're Marketed, Therefore We Are!, Stephen Duncombe, p. 131 BeatnikMania-Again!, Maura Mahoney, p. 149 The Retro Apocalypse, Tom Vanderbilt, p. 152

CONSOLIDATED DEVIA.NCE, INC. An Exclusive Baffler Investment Opportunity, p.159

FICTION Not the Plaster Casters, Janice Eidus, p. 43 The District Supervisor, Robert Nedelkoff, p. 59 The Grace of God, Mat Lebowitz, p. 87 A Gray Day in Ann Arbor, Rick Perlstein, p. 112 I am the Light, Dan Libman, p. 115 Gedney Goes Underground, Staff, p. 139

POETRY

ART

Gaston de Beam, p. 93 David Berman, pp. 16,85.

Alec Dinwoodie, pp. 80, 110 Joe Fodor, pp. 27, 158 James Tolan, p. 40

Scenes from a Lifestyle, Illustrations by Don MacKeen The Hippogryph Files, Patrick Welch, p. 63 What is Alternative, Chris Holmes, p. 28 Latchkey Larry, Greg Fiering, p. 155

Second printing-,June, 1994 The topic for BalRer #6 is "Business Culture and the Culture Business." Is Schwarrenegger worth a trade war with France? Will the penetration of the rule of business into every aspect ofAmerican life be as wonderful as that annoying child from MCI says it will be? We doubt it. Send us revealing memos, corporate newsletters, cultural anifucts, and whatever else you think appropriate.

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Contributors Steve Albini's band, Shellac, has recently released two singles on Touch and Go records.

David Berman was born in Williamsburg, VA. He is a sleeping car porter on Amtrak's Crescent Line and plays in the Silver Jews and the Warcomet.A1ec Dinwoodie works constantly to subvert his own poetry. He slips in and out of the American consciousness: voice of Faustus, shadow of velvet, Bert to his own Ernie. Lucky Stephen Duncombe lives in New York City where he is completing a performance piece based on the third volume of his work, The Economic Influence ofthe Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485. Janice Eidus' new novel is called Urban Bliss. "Not the Plaster Casters" will appear in Fall 1994, in Unbearables, an anthology of short fiction to be published by Autonomedia Press. Joe Fodor worked at Quayle Quarterly until the rude business of last November. Now he's the fashion editor ofHysteria. Steve Healey is in the exquisite Frances Gumm, whose CD Crnelfa was recently released by VHF. Chris Holmes, explicator of the "Guyville paradigm," is one of the country's leading Ufologists and a roadie for Sabalon Glitz. Robert Nedelkoffhas contributed to Forced Exposure and Conflict. He is a student at the Monterey College of Law and lives in Salinas, CA, with his lizard. Seth Sanders' studies have convinced him that magic and religion are based on the common man's wonder at unfair trade practices: hanc animam pro meliore damus, "we give this life for a better one;" call for escape route.James Tolan is a graduate ofJack Benny Junior High in Waukegan, IL but now bides his time in South Louisiana, sharecropping for the Man and penning the occasional vers libre. David "Diamonds" Mulcahey is thoroughly and utterly obsolete. He's waiting in virtual hibernation for the retro sensibility to reach1988, the year he won the Paris-Dakar rally. Keith White has finally torn himself from New York and returned to the birthplace of the Baffier, submerging his literary angst in dry columns of tables, figures, and bad prose; burrowing through the pages in a certain academic haunt deep in the Blue Ridge. Watch out, America. Tom Frank is not a person / you should be listening to. His application to Harvard didn't feaure a recommendation from a Kennedy.

No interests back his literary efforts, and his ideas have no influence in the Clinton White House. Nor does he exhibit the appropriate shock when blue-ribbon committees discover that the children of poor people are also poor. He has never had a job, and he has almost never had a good haircut.

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AI. TERNATIVE TO WHAT? Tom Frank It's Not Your Father's Youth Movement There are few spectacles corporate America enjoys more than a good counterculture, complete with hairdos of defiance, dark complaints about the stifling 'mainstream,' and expensive accessories of all kinds. So now that the culture industry has nailed down the twenty-somethings, it comes as little surprise to learn that it has also uncovered a new youth movement abroad in the land, sporting all-new looks, a new crop of rock en' roll bands, and an angry new 'tude harsher than any we've seen before. Best of all, along with the media's Columbus-like discovery of this new "underground" skulking around exotic places like Seattle, ~nsumers have been treated to what has undoubtedly been the swiftest and most profound shift of imagery to come across their screens since the 1960s.

New soundtracks, new product design, new stars, new ads. "Alternative," they call it. Out with the old, in with the new.

Before this revelation, punk rock and its descendents had long been considered commercially unviable in responsible business circles because of their incorrigible angriness, their implacable hostility to the cultural climate that the major record labels had labored so long to build, as well as because of their difficult sound. Everyone knows pop music is supposed to be simple and massproducible, an easy matter of conforming to simple genres, of acting out the standard and instantly recognizable cultural tropes of mass society: I love love, I'm sad sometimes, I like America, I like cars, I'm my own person, I'm something of a rebel, I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. And all through the 80s the culture industry knew instinctively that the music that inhabited the margins couldn't fit, didn't even merit consideration. So at the dawn of punk the American media, whose primary role has long been the uncritical promotion of whatever it is that Hollywood, the record labels, or the networks are offering at the time, lashed out at this strange, almost unfathomable movement. "Rock Is Sick," declared the cover of Rolling Stone. The national news magazines proBAFFLER路

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nounced the uprising to be degeneracy of the worst variety, then proceeded to ignore it all through the following decade. Its listeners were invisible people, unmentionable on TV, film, and radio except as quasi-criminals. And in the official channels of music-industry discourse-radio, MTV, music magazinesthis music and the tiny independent labels that supported it simply didn't exist.

But now, it seems, the turning of generations and the inexorable logic of the market have forced the industry to reconsider, and it has descended in a ravenous frenzy on what it believes to be the natural habitats of those it once shunned.

Now we watch with interest as high-powered executives offer contracts to bands they have seen only once, college radio playlists become the objects of intense corporate scrutiny, and longstanding independent labels are swallowed whole in a colossal belch of dollars and receptions. Now Rolling Stone magazine makes pious reference to the pioneering influence of defunct bands like Big Black and Mission of Burma whose records they ignored when new. Now we enjoy a revitalized MTV that has hastily abandoned its pop origins to push 'alternative' bands round the clock, a 50-million-watt radio station in every city that calls out to us from what is cleverly called "the cutting edge of rock." And now, after lengthy consultation with its 'twenty-something' experts, the mass media rises as one and proclaims itself in solidarity with the rebels, anxious to head out to Lollapalooza on the weekend and 'mosh' with the kids, don flannel, wave their fists in the air, and chant lyrics that challenge parental authority.

Time magazine has finally smelled green in the music of what it longingly calls "the hippest venues going," and, in its issue of October 25, 1993, flings itself headlong into the kind of reckless celebrationism usually reserved only for the biggest-budget movies and the most successful TV shows. Salivating over the "anxious rebels" of "a young, vibrant alternative scene," it is all Time can do to avoid falling over itself in a delirious pirouette of steadily escalating praise.

The magazine breathlessly details every aspect of the youngsters' deliciously ingenuous insurrection: they're "defiant," they're concerned with "purity and anticommercialism," they sing about "homes breaking," and-tastiest of allthey're upset about "being copied or co-opted by the mainstream." But for all this, Times story on 'alternative' rock never once mentions a band that is not a "co-optation," that still produces records on an actual independent label. As per the usual dictates of American culture, only money counts, and indie labels don't advertise in Time. So Pearl Jam, a major-label band that has made a career out of imitating the indie sounds of the late eighties, wins the magazine's accolades as the "demigod" of the new "underground," leading the struggle for 'authenticity' and against 'selling out.'

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Of course this is poor reporting, but journals like Time have always been more concerned with industry boosterism and the hard, profitable facts of making credible the latest packaging of youth culture than with a vague undefinable like 'news.'

Thus while we read almost nothing about the still unmentionable world of independent rock, we are bombarded with insistences that Pearl Jam is the real rebel thing, the maximum leaders of America's new youth counterculture-assertions that are driven home by endless descriptions of the band going through all the varieties of insurgent posturing. They have a "keen sense of angst," and singer Eddie Vedder feels bad about the family problems of his youth. He rose to success from nowhere, too: he was a regular guy with a taste for living on the edge (much like the people in ads for sneakers and cars and jeans), a "gas station attendant and high school dropout," who thought up the band's lyrics while surfing. But Eddie's real sensitive also, a true Dionysian like Mick Jagger, with a "mesmerizing stage presence" that "reminded fans of an animal trying to escape from a leash." In fact, he's so sensitive that certain of the band's lyrics aren't included with the others on the album sleeve because "the subject matter is too painful for Vedder to see in print."

The gushing of official voices like Time make necessary a clarification that would ordinarily go without saying: among the indie-rock circles which they mimic and from which they pretend to draw their credibility, bands like Pearl Jam are universally recognized to suck. Almost without exception, the groups and music that are celebrated as 'alternative' are watery, derivative, and strictly secondrate; so uniformly bad, in fact, that one begins to believe that stupid shallowness is a precondition of their marketability. Most of them, like Pearl Jam,

Born Down Ihe Douse of to_oDS in Your Brand New Shoes I wanted to be a Details man. I had recognized my need for bee-stung lips, carefully unkempt hair, the washboard stomach, the baggy Versace suits, the attendant awed babes, the tattoos-you get the picture. I wanted to pal around with other young sophisticates dressed just as rakishly as me, chatting about the latest trends in 'alternative' music and last week's party with Drew, Iggy, Uma, and Keanu. I couldn't get what I needed from stodgy old Esquire or pretty-boy GO. Spin might tell me how to dress and behave like Eddie Vedder, but their narrow focus-musicwould leave me in the dark about important developments in ice-climbing and seventies collectibles. And the trio of British men's fashion mags (The Face, Arena, and Sky) were simply too expensive and too derivative for my tastes. Details, with its two dollar cover price and relentlessly macho attitude, promised to deliver the new me.

I think of Details as the Pearl Jam of the magazine

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world, the glittering showplace where rebellion, individualism, and nonconformity are packaged conveniently into lifestyle and paired with a" the correct accessories. Its mission is to chronicle what I should buy, what I should wear, where I should go, what I should see, what mass culture offerings I should choose from. Details is a sort of Sears catalog with 'tude, the fabulous intermediary between the latest offerings of the nation's clothing and entertainment industries and excitement-starved people like me.

And with its utilitarian, punk-inspired typeface and its fractured post-modern layout, a reader intent on learning the secrets of youthful rebellion can be assured that Details is serious about delivering.

But my quest to become a Details man was hampered by a fear: how on earth was I going to reinvent myself convincingly month after month in order to keep up with the latest cool identities? How was I going to pass myself off as an aficionado of a" these disparate trends when I knew nothing about them at a"? Details had the answer. It doesn't just fill me in about grunge, it gives me the history of the movement, so I

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play pre-digested and predictable versions of formulaic heavy guitar rock, complete with moronic solos and hoarse masculine poutings. There is certainly nothing even remotely' alternative' about this sound, since music like this has long been the favorite of teenage boys everywhere; it's just the usual synthetic product, repackaged in a wardrobe of brand new imagery made up of thousands of fawning anicles and videos depicting them as 'rebels' this or 'twenty-something' that. A band called the Stone Temple Pilots, who grace the cover of other national magazines, have distinguished themselves as the movement's bargain boys, offering renditions of all the various' alternative' poses currently fashionable: all in one package the consumer gets sullen angst, sexual menace, and angry pseudo-protest with imitation punk thrown in for no extra charge.

Another group called Paw is exalted by their handlers and a compliant media as the premier product of the ever-so-authentic Kansas 'scene,' complete with album-cover photographs of farms and animals; their lukewarm mimicry of Nirvana hailed as a sort of midwestern 'grunge.' Never mind that the band's founders come from a privileged Chicago background and that they have long since alienated most of Lawrence's really good bands by publicly crowing that one of their number killed himself out of jealousy over Paw's major-label success.

The sole remarkable feature of these otherwise stunningly mediocre bands is their singers' astonishing ability to warble the shallowest of platitudes with such earnestness, as though they have actually internalized their maudlin, Hallmark-worthy sentimentality. But we aren't supposed to be concerned with all this: the only thing that matters is that the latest product be praised to the skies; that new rebels triumph happily ever after over old.

As ever, the most interesting aspect of the

industry's noisy clamoring and its self-proclaimed naughtiness is not the relative merits of the 'alternative' culture products themselves, but the shift of imagery they connote. Forget the music; what we are seeing is just another overhaul of the rebel ideology that has fueled business culture ever since the 1960s, a new entrant in the long, silly parade of "countercultural" entrepreneurship. Look back at the ads and the records and the artists of the preNirvana period: all the same militant protestations of nonconformity are there, just as they are in the ads and records and artists of the 70s and the 60s.

Color Me Badd and Wham! once claimed to be as existentially individualist, as persecuted a group of "anxious rebels" as Rage Against the Machine now does. But by the years immediately preceding 1992, these figures' claims to rebel leadership had evaporated, and American business faced a serious imagery crisis. People had at long last tired of such obvious fakery, grown unconvinced and bored. No one except the most guileless teeny-boppers and the most insecure boomers fell for the defiant posturing of Duran Duran or Vanilla Ice or M.e. Hammer or Bon J ovi; especially when the ghettos began to burn, especially when the genuinely disturbing sounds of music that was produced without benefit of corporate auspices were finding ever wider audiences.

By the beginning of the new decade, the patina of daring had begun to wear thin on the eighties' chosen crop of celebrity-rebels. Entire new lines of insolent shoes would have to be designed and marketed; entire new looks and emblems of protest would have to be found somewhere. Consumerism's traditional claim to be the spokesman for our inchoate disgust with consumerism was hemorrhaging credibility, and independent rock, with its Jacobin 'authenticity' obsession, had just the things capital required.

can wow my friends with my firm grasp of alternative arcana (Did you know that Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan had a fling with Courtney Love while Kurt Cobain was still sleeping on the Melvins' guitarist's front porch?) It even had a feature showing me how to alter my clothes so it looks like I've been a punk rocker for years. Like a good social matron, Details never debuts a new youth fashion movement without painstakingly delineating its rebel credibility.

Despite the whirlwind of ever-changing trends, Details retains a consistent, unifying philosophical viewpoint: the archetypal new American male is a rebel consumer. A recent issue that featured $300 silk Versace shirts also included a revealing apotheosis of Lollapalooza performers Anthony Kiedis and Henry Rollins as the qUintessential men of the 90s. These guys are "not only mUSicians, or even rock stars," the magazine affirmed, "but modern men, emblems of a new masculinity." These "Rock and roll samurai live outside the law, but are bound by their own moral codes." The words used to describe this new man were

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exciting and fresh: Explosive, individualist, all for one, selfstyled, rebellious, existential, heroic, and-most appealing of all-nonconformist. Furthermore, Details was offering to show me how to buy the appropriate gear so that I could become as individualistic as they.

Other articles further impressed upon me the magazine's guiding vision of 'alternative' as a set of consumer choices. When Details pushes expensive bathing costumes, it paired them not with suntanned frat boys, but with skinhead men dressed in tattoos, Doc Martens boots, and leather jackets emblazoned with the names of hardcore bands from the '80s. A $900 silk shirt was photographed with the instructions, 'Wear it loose with tight jeans and a rock 'n' roll attitude." Another time it let me know which expensive home video games are preferred by the members of Faith No More. It treated me to a photo spread featuring Perry Farrell, Billy Idol, and a member of the Stone Temple Pilots posing in the latest designer offerings.

Setting out right away, I got myself a few baggy suits and

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Outwent the call for an 'alternative' from a thousand executive suites, and overnight everyone even remotely associated with independent rock in Seattle-and Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, Champaign, Lawrence, and finally Chicago-found themselves the recipients of unsolicited corporate attention.

Only small adjustments were required to bring the whole universe of corporate-sponsored rebellion up to date, to give us Blind Melon instead of Frankie Goes to Hollywood; 10,000 Maniacs instead of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. And suddenly we were propelled into an entirely new hip paradigm, a new universe of cool, with all new stars and all new relationships between the consumer, his celebrities, and his hair.

And now Pepsi is no longer content to cast itself as the beverage of Michael Jackson or Ray Charles or even Madonna: these figures' hip has been obsoleted suddenly, convincingly, and irreparably. Instead we watch a new and improved, an even more anti-establishment Pepsi Generation, cavorting about to what sounds like 'grunge' rock; engaged in what appears to be a sort of oceanside slam dance. Vaniry Fair, a magazine devoted strictly to the great American pastime of celebrating celebrity, hires the editors of a noted 'alternative' zine to overhaul its hip ness; Interview, the great, stupid voice of art as fashion, runs a lengthy feature on college radio, the site of the juiciest, most ingenuously 'alternative' lifestyle innovations in the land.

Ad agencies and record labels compete with each other in a frenzied scramble to hire leading specimens of the 'alternative' scene they have ignored for fifteen years. Even commercial radio stations have seen the demographic writing on the wall and now every city has one that purports to offer an 'alternative' format, featuring musical hymns to the various rebellious poses available to consumers at

malls everywhere.

In the same spirit the Gap has enlisted members of Sonic Youth and the cloying pop band Belly to demonstrate their products' continuing street-cred; Virginia Slims has updated its vision of rebel femininity with images of a woman in flannel sitting astride a motorcycle and having vaguely 60s designs painted on her arm. Ralph Lauren promotes its astoundingly expensive new line of pre-weathered blue jeans and flannel shirts with models done up in 'dreadlocks' and staring insolently at the camera. The United Colors of Benetton hone their subversive image by providing the costume for indie-rock figure "Lois." Another firm offers "Disorder Alternative Clothing" for the rebellious grungy "few ~ho are tired of the mainstream."

Quite sensibly, the makers of Guess clothing prefer imagety of an idealized 'alternative' band, played by models, to the real thing, since actual rock 'n' rollers rarely sate the company's larger obsession with human beauty. So there they stand, in a pose that just screams 'authentic': four carefully unshaven guys in sunglasses, grimaces, and flannel shirts, each with a bandana or necklace suspended carefully from their neck, holding guitar cases and trying to look as hardened, menacing, and hip as possible, with a lone blonde babe clinging off to one side. In another ad the Guess Clothing fantasy band are picrured 'in concert,' a flannel-clad guitarist spotlit with eyes closed, stretching one hand O\.J,t to the heavens in an anthemic consumer epiphany.

But the most revealing manifestation of the new dispensation is something you aren't supposed to see: an ad for MTV that ran in the business sections of a number of newspapers. "Buy this 24-yearold and get all his friends absolutely free," its headline reads. Just above these words is a picture of the 24-year-old referred to, a quintessential' alternative' boy decked out in the rebel garb that the executives

bought a copy of Rollins' poetry to display from the pocket. I got a particularly menacing tattoo on my neck, got the sort of car Kiedis drives, purchased some of Iggy Pop's brand of underwear, wore one of Michael Stipe's characteristic hats.

While I was spending my money, I thought I'd better pick up a few packs of Excita condoms, some sex technique videos, and a few muscle-building machines (all helpfully advertised in the back of each issue). Unfortunately, all of this paraphernalia cost me $150,000, and I was still behind the times-the next month's issue had just hit the newsstand.

But my greatest disappOintment came in the most recent issue. Tucked away in the back pages of the magazine was an elaborate apologia to all the readers who had been led astray by misfires of Details' cultural divining rod.

"Hypes and Sleepers" was a year-end scorecard on how the prognosticators had fared over the previous twelve months.

Reading through the list-glam revival, cyberpunk revolution, jazz rap, girl grunge, Tabitha Soren-brought back painful memories of occasions like the

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time I had shown up at a party wearing a tight purple jumpsuit and eyeliner to find myself in a room of Beavis and Butthead manqu9s. But the people for whom I really felt sorry were the folks whose warehouses were full of space boots, minidiscs, and virtual reality machines, trends that had received countless pages of editorial as Details valiantly tried to convince its readership of their viability.

Perhaps the real secret to becoming a true Details man lies in the apology of sorts that accompanied the article: "Mass taste IS perverse and unpredictable, that's also why keeping tabs on it is so much fun."

This statement of regret seems directed less to readers than to the magazine's true clients, the real Details man-the guy who manufactures these trends. In the end, Details' message is no different from any other lifestyle magazine's: who you are depends on what you consume; and how hip you are depends on how enthusiastically you keep up with the new. Nonconformity may be the language, but fashion is, as ever, the logic.

- Keith White

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who read this ad will instantly recognize from their market reports to be the costume of the 'twentysomethings': beads and bracelets, a vest and T-shirt, torn jeans, Doc Martens and a sideways haircut like the Jesus and Mary Chain wore in 1985. His pose: insolent, sprawled insouciantly in an armchair, watching TV of course. His occupation: consumer.

"He watches MTV;" continues the ad, "Which means he knows a lot. More than just what CDs to buy and what movies to see. He knows what car to drive and what credit cards to use. And he's no loner.

What he eats, his friends eat. What he wears, they wear. What he likes, they like."

Thus with the 'alternative' face-lift, "rebellion" continues to perform its traditional function of justifYing the economy's ever-accelerating cycles of obsolescence with admirable efficiency. Since our willingness to load up our closets with purchases depends upon an eternal shifting of the products paraded before us, upon our being endlessly convinced that the new stuff is better than the old, we must be persuaded over and over again that the 'alternatives' are more valuable than the existing or the previous. Ever since the 1960s hip has been the native tongue of advertising, 'anti-establishment' the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year. And over the years the rebel has naturally become the central image of this culture of consumption, symbolizing endless, directionless change, an eternal restlessness with 'the establishment'-or, more correctly, with the stuff 'the establishment' convinced him to buy last year.

Not only did the invention of 'alternative' provide capital with a new and more convincing generation of rebels, but in one stroke it has obsoleted all the rebellions of the past ten years, rendered our acid-washed jeans, our Nikes, our DKNYs mean-

ingless. Are you vaguely pissed off at the world?

Well, now you get to start proving it allover again, with flannel shirts, a different brand of jeans, and big clunky boots. And in a year or two there will be an 'alternative' to that as well, and you'll get to do it yet again.

It's not only the lure of another big Nirvanalike lucre-glut that brings label execs out in droves to places like Seattle, or hopes of uncovering the new slang that prompts admen to buy journals like The Baffler. The culture industry is drawn to 'alternative' by the more general promise of finding the eternal new, of tapping the very source of the fuel that powers the great machine. As Interview affirms, "What still makes the genre so cool is not its cash potential or hype factor but the attendant drive and freedom to create and discover fresh, new music."

Fresh new music, fresh new cars, fresh new haircuts, fresh new imagery.

Thus do capital's new dancing flunkeys appear not in boater hat and ingratiating smile, but in cartoonish postures of sullen angst or teen frustration: dyed hair, pierced appendages, flannel shirt around the waist. Everyone in advertising remembers how frightening and enigmatic such displays were ten years ago when they encountered them in TV stories about punk rock, and now their time has come to be deployed as the latest signifiers of lifestyle savvy. Now it's executives themselves on their days off, appearing in their weekend roles as kings of the consumer hill, who flaunt such garb, donning motorcycle jackets and lounging around the coffeehouses they imagine to be frequented by the latest generation of angry young men. Of course every other persecuted-looking customer is also an advertising account exec or a junior vice president of something-or-other; of course nobody would ever show up to see a band like, say, the New Bomb

Business Ponks Bole It's Business Punks now.

Those words went through my head as I saw a broad-shouldered Armani-suited lifer shove a lesser man aside, striding down the streets of his hardrocking birthright. The city, being white or at least buying it, always buying it, but shopping smart, going hard, going out for the pass until it passes out but JUST GOING. As soon as I saw those punk emblems on his lapels, I knew the time had come for the ultimate melding of anarchy and the invisible hand, individualism to the very hard core. So this season it's spiked hair and Barney's NY Kilgour, French & Stanbury corndogvan leather cap-toes, ripped up and fucked up with ARGYLE in any color you feel like. Sid Lives, and like Mike Milken, he did you his way.

- Seth Sanders

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Turks or Prisonshake in a costume like this. As ever, Interview magazine, the proudest exponent of the commercialization of dissent, explains the thinking of the corporate mandarin who has now decided to dude himself up in a Sid Vicious leather jacket and noticeable tattoo. Punk, as the magazine triumphantly announces in a recent issue, has been successfully revived as a look only, happily stripped of any problematic ideological baggage: Maybe '90s punk is just a great high style. Some will slash their own clothes, and others will clamor after the fashions of rule-slashing designers. [are there ever any designers who don't claim to "slash rules?") If your mother doesn't like it, who cares?

If your kid is embarrassed, stand proud. If your bosses fire you for it, screw 'em. And if people stare at you in the street, isn't that the point?

So on we plod through the mallways of our lives, lured into an endless progression of shops by an ever-changing chorus of manic shaman-rebels, promising existential freedom-sex! ecstasy! liberation!-from the endless trudge. All we ever get, of course, are some more or less baggy trousers or a hat that we can wear sideways. Nothing works, we are still entwined in vast coils of tawdriness and idiocy, and we resolve not to be tricked again. But lo! Down the way is a new rebel-leader, doing handstands this time, screaming about his untrammelled impertinence in an accent that we know could never be co-opted, and beckoning us into a shoe store. Marx's quip that the capitalist will sell the rope with which he is hanged begins to seem ironically incomplete. In fact, with its endless ranks of beautifully coiffed, fist-waving rebel boys to act as barker, business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.

Interlude: Come Around to My Way of Thinking Perhaps the only good thing about the commodification of 'alternative' is that it will render obsolete, suddenly, cleanly, and inexorably, that whole flatulent corpus of 'cultural studies' that seeks to appreciate Madonna as some sort of political subversive. Even though the first few anthologies of writings on the subject only appeared in 1993, the rise of a far more threatening generation of rock stars has ensured that this singularly annoying pedagogy will never become a full-fledged 'discipline,' with its own lengthy quarterly issued by some university press, with annual conferences where the 'subaltern articulations' of Truth or Dare are endlessly dissected and debated.

Looking back from the sudden vantage point that only this kind of imageContinued on page 119

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"HOW IRRITATING" exclaimed editor Penelope Green ofthe New York Times "Styles" section when informed of the validity of Baffler #4's article on the Great Grunge Prank for which her paper had fallen (as reported in the New York Observer, March 1,1993).

The Baffier doesn't aim to make a lot of friends in the business of Big Culture. We do not wish to entertain you with amusing stories about dangerous but fulfilling sports, glossy pieces on the latest phony youth rebellions, articles about how herbal remedies and weep-therapy can prove empowering, or to fill you in on the latest doings of your favorite celebrities. Instead, The Baffier is dedicated to exposing the endless fraudulence of what passes for 'culture' in America; to articulate resistance to the Official Styles of the day; to sabotage the great machinery of mind-making.

Join us. Subscribe. You won't be alone; other people think we're pretty good, too. The Library Journal named us one of the "Ten Best Magazines of 1990" a few years ago, and Elizabeth Pochoda of The Nation dubbed our story on the farcical "twenty-something" debate "Brilliantly angry."

But the Baffier is an irregular magazine, and it's difficult to find in stores; the only way to be sure you receive one is to subscribe. We ask $16 for the next four issues. In addition, subscribers get all sorts of entertaining Baffler ephemera, like our newsletter, stickers, and copies of the prank version of Consolidated Deviance. If you are particularly impressed with our approach to American life, go one step further, and do us (and everyone who reads) a big favor by asking your local library to subscribe.

Another reason to subscribe is that older Bafflers quickly become very rare. Unfortunately for those of you who are just joining us now, there are no remaining copies of Baffler #4, the "Twenty-Nothing" issue, or of Baffler #3, the "Let's Deviance!" issue.

But copies of Baffler #2, featuring an angry manifesto and an interesting essay on suburbia, can be had for $4 each. Copies of the prank version of Consolidated Deviance (the strange stockbroker-like piece at the end of this magazine) are available for $2. We have also printed a number of Baffler T-shirts, with our characteristic logo on the front and a nasty saying like "Your Lifestyle Sucks" on the back. These are gettable for $10.

WRITE TO US.

P. O. Box 378293,

CHICAGO,

IL 60637.

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David Berman The narrator was shot by the sniper he was describing and I quickly picked up his pen.

What luck, I thought, to be sitting up here in the narrator's tower where the parking lots look like chalkboards and the characters scurry around or fall down and die as I design it.

Then I started to read the novel I had inherited, and didn't like a lot of what I saw.

Most of the characters were relentlessly evil, taken right off the bad streets of the Bible.

The narrator would interrupt the story at all the wrong times, like a third wheel on a date, and deliver shakey opinions like "People who wear turtlenecks must have really fucked up necks."

Then he would get lost in pointless investigations, i.e. Was PacMan an animal, so that when we returned to the characters many pages later, their hair had grown past the shoulder and their fingernails were inches long.

In support of the novel, I must say that it was designed well. The scenes were like rowhouses. They had common sidewalls, through which one could hear the faint voices and footsteps of what was to come.

I've lived those long driving scenes. Everyone knows how hard it is, after you've been on the road all day, to stop driving. You go to sleep and the road runs under the bed like a 6lmstrip.

I also liked the sheriffs anxious dream sequence, where he keeps putting a two-inch high man in jail, and the small man keeps walking out, in between the bars.

After a sleepless night he's woken by the phone. There's a sniper in the University tower. The sheriff stands before the bathroom mirror. Drops of visine are careening down his face.

They are cold and clear and I can count them through my rifle scope.

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semiotics mailbag Responses by Theophile, translated by Hypatia Sanders Dear Theophile: A number of books of deconstructive literary criticism, which I very recently borrowed from the Regenstein Library, were recalled. As I never check my mail more than once every two weeks for fear of the inherently terroristic authoriry of the unexpected missive, I was fined $5.00 (U.S.) and an additional $5.00 (U.S.) for late return. This penalry puzzles me.

The project of the texts in question is to establish that all readings are misreadings, all interpretations misinterpretations. The notice of penalty, in contrast, conveyed very clear authorial intention, namely that I should complete an act of symbolic exchange of $10.00 (itself a factotum of idealized exchange value). Why would these library mandarins protect property that undermines their own authority?

Please resolve this interdiscursive aporia.

Signed, penalized Dear penalized: I sense there's something you're not telling me. In fact, my greatest longing at this moment is to read the volumes that you are concealing from me. In their pages, now recoiling from your prohibited touch (although doubtless still in your possession as we read each other), I would see the charter, written in invis-

ible ink, upon which the semaphore code that signals intention is founded and by which it is virally activated. Touch the text for me. Close your fingers around the edge of a leaf, always shrinking parodically towards 2-dimensionality, always thick enough to give you a paper cut. Firmly grasping the page, rip it out. Now you owe them more money.

But it cannot end there, for, you see, by charging the books out of the library you have made the first move in a potentially (and, if you take my advice, actually) limitless game. They "give" you the book and you accept the "gift," but, as the ancient Icelandic epic had it, "you have given me gifts, but not gifts of love. If I had known what sort of gifts these would be, I would have killed you long ago." Each week their financial demands will escalate, and so must your "return": the potential inherent in the mere possession of a library card is bankruptcy, ruin. Pay it back, penalized. You know what you must do, it is written in that Blanchot book you haven't actually read yet. Burn it. Burn the library to the ground, and "society" will make the next move in this potlatch. Those books do not undermine authority, they reveal that authority is a flat, bright surface, a game-board, across which you must now walk with steps of fire.

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Dear Theo: There must be a simpler calculus for determining what "rock bands" will hold the socially revered ti tie-will be "cool"in the near future. I have looked to many different print and televisual sources, several times I have even resorted to listening to the texts themselves, but each method seems to leave me wearing T-shirts of humiliation and universal mockery. I have wondered whether this problematic is just a function of my social class, radio demographics, or personal affiniry groupings.

Am I pursuing a worthwhile goal, or am I a victim (deserving compensation) of taste discrimination?

Undecided Urn, have you checked out Plastique Bertrand?

[I was afraid this was going to happen. I think 111 have to step in here and set this meat contraption straight, as Theophile is in a Gallicfog when it comes to "Ie Rock 'n' Roll, " mesmerized by Edith Piaf Ok monkey boy, the first thing you need to realize is that the main attraction of these spectral liberatorsin-service-ofthe-man, the stars who populate MTV, comes from a kind of psychic blindsiding. They look through you into a nebulous foture-past where the hair sprouts down below. This land ofephebic yet uncontrolled production, generated by Anthony Kiedis and Janet Jackson continually grinding smooth Ken-and-Barbie genitals together, exists in the delerious gap between what you are: NOTHING, and Anthony and Janet: EVERYTHING. Total pop supremacy is an end-run into the recent past, where everything was already expected and expended: YESTERDAY'S TRENDS ARE SHITHOT. With dim feelers of lust, Seattle re18 •

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members the Chicago scene and moults its flesh, lumbering back into prehistory. Put your desires in a delay loop; you will have xray vision: open your eyes and you will be. able to suck up pure cachet through them.

Jurassic Park is open again, as a haunted house. Jeff Goldblum staggers as the Fly through the splendid control complex, relieving himself uninhibitedly on the complex equipment. You saw him coming. as you were riding like Alley-Oop on the only dinosaurs that ever existed: piles of bones. Strap on a choker, lace it with severed human heads, and confront the nearest police officer: "I'm not working for the man, I'm an Allosaurus, baby!" Because you know what the Velociraptors, by whom everyone was wet to be trampled, really are:velox "speedy" + raptor, from rapo "snatch, seize, carry off, "from which grows the modern word: "rapist." Pop is violation, violation bypre-emption. It stealsyour time and runs away with you. Everyone is always already working 4 the weekend. You asked me if yours was a worthwhile goal I got yer "worthwhile goal" right here, boy.-Hypatia} Dear Theo: I am an admirer of the defiant lifesryle forged on TV by a sideburning character who holds court in a certain zip code region of "Los Angeles." This tormented young man -let's call him "Dillon" -is struggling to resist the totalizing practices of his powerful peers and patriarchal elders.

So am I, and so is everyone I know. Many of my friends have decided to "empower," as the Republicans put it, their resistance by emulating "Dillon'''s hairstyle and his look. I would like to do the same, but it's just too expensive, and besides, I'm wondering if this might be yet another scheme for colonizing the cultural space of my ev-

eryday life. What to do?

Undecidable Dearest Undecidable: my darling translator and staunch friend Hypatia has just informed me of a fine solution to your worries. It seems that in the wake of "Jurassic culture," a permanent mark has been left on the pockmarked face of pop by a certain turgid, purple-hued reptile with an avuncular countenance and a loving soul.

Children, the ultimate protagonists of this polymorphous-perverted videodyssey

through erogenous shopping zones, know that we must ultimately escape the realm of the human in order to float in total consumption, whether eating or being eaten.

They flock to him, and some of them disappear from week to week as he gets rounder, softer, and plumper. This is the carnivorous crux of need, a way out of the "meat/non-meat" paradox.

So my advice? Shave that troubled head, paint it purple and change your name to Barney. 90210 is old hat, and dinosaurs don't wear hats, baby.

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Bob N astanovich It would be nice to know that Sun Ra rests comfortably under the ground in North Philly, or wherever it is he's buried. After all, on one steamed summer of '89 day in Lexington, Virginia, this definitive grand old man fixed my car, healed the crotchety engine of my 1981 Plymouth Champ. By merely pushing the Champ to within a few hundred yards of Coach Ra's charge, I avoided further inconveniences on a disastrous road trip that already included another speeding ticket and about four miles of exhaustive car pushmg.

I had Ii tde knowledge of Ra before I ventured from Charlottesville to the Lime Kiln Arts Center in Lexington. I had listened to lofty recommendations from jazz junkies at WTJU and broke the code of a glowing review from the jazz editor in Forced Exposure. But I am afraid I cannot think of the best adjectives to describe the performance Ra and the group of musicians and acrobats, known as the "Arkestra," stunned a few hundred people with.

They reminded me of a scared, nervous twitch that I experienced at a Psychodrama performance when I was sixteen and a Butthole Surfers Locust Abortion Technician show from 1987.

I never saw Sun Ra and His Arkestra a second time because my expectations would have been too high. They had reached out to a sick car parked a few hundred yards away and swirled things back to health. They soothed my vapor lock problem and I was too blown away to thank them for it. Now, I can only hope Sun Ra sleeps peacefully.

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BRAIN DEAD IN SEATTLE A JEREMIAD Eric Iversen Beavis: Huh huh, like, what's Seattle?

Butthead: It's this place where stuff is, like, really cool.

I start with what I take not to be a radical assertion. Beavis and Butthead are, at the very least, supposed to represent a form of humor. People, from the local TV critic to others with jobs that require actual thought, aver that in the course of watching the show laughter has escaped their lips. I do not wish to enjoin debate on the relative comedic value of the show; de gustibus and all that. I simply seek to point out that determining the genre to which the show belongs should generate little debate, and furthermore, to sharpen the focus of this taxonomical prolegomenon, I propose that we call the mode of humor operating in the show parody. Beavis and Butthead parody a type of early adolescent white American male produced by immersion in the carnival swirl of pop entertainment culture whose typical characteristics include a fetish for scatology, an affection for violence, and vigilant attentiveness to the various forms in which women's breasts come. Not to strike too glum a note, but I rather suspect that most of us easily recognize this type from our own experiences in shopping malls, movie theaters, fast food restaurants, and all the other various dispiriting venues that comprise American public space.

Now, parody typically expresses a disdain for its objects that invites the audience to identify with the author's disapproval and desire to eliminate instances of the ridiculed behavior. It is a key rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of social correction. But, because it relies on indirect modes of argument, the nudge and the wink, to make its point, the normative message can easily fail to register in the mind of an audience unaccustomed to reading implied or figurative, rather than literal, signals. Which is to say, the early adolescent white American male. And hence the peculiar and growing phenomenon of early adolescent white American males parroting the speech and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the behavior of their own parodic images, Beavis and Butthead. In the sites of public culture, the guttural "huh huh, cool" and "that doesn't even suck" sorts of Beavisand-Butthead-isms (not to mention, "huh huh, you said 'ism"') run as rampant as boom cars, Hare-Krishna-esque skate rats, and backwards baseball caps.

The genius of MTV of course has been the corporation's ability to target, neatly define, and then bring into the commercial mainstream demographic groups that have remained outside of previously prescribed marketing niches. Beavis and Butthead provides such an effective medium for creating and exploiting the adolescent white American male consumer group that the show has acquired that highest of advertising values, crossover appeal, for the mightiest consumer of all: the fully-fledged white American BAFFLER路

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male who sits colossus-like in front of the television assimilating the manufactured set of desires available to him therein that endows him with an identity. After all, without television, how would any of us know who we are and what we should want? The thing that distinguishes Beavis and Butthead, though, from other modes of subjectivity defined through television is the target audience's co-optation of its own parodic image in a literal manner. Because of their inability to detect the parodying of themselves at work in the inane, destructive shenanigans of Beavis and Butthead, the kids embrace it as a normatively positive depiction of teenage behavior, and pattern their own lives after the show. The figurative register of the show, in which Beavis and Butthead are a satirical trope of teenage experience, vanishes and only the literal register, in which Beavis and Butthead goof royally off, retains meaning. The greater the degree of this literal identification by the audience with their television models, Beavis and Butthead, the more compliant consumers of the world according to MTV and its advertisers they will become.

Under the guise of parodying teen disaffection, Beavis and Butthead domesticates the spirit of rebellion underlying teenage anomie by giving its possessors their own room in the house of late capitalist consumerism. A neat trick.

The pervasive adoption of the Beavis and Butthead personality model illustrates how immense is the power of MTV, probably the most influential agent of the artisticocommercial complex, to constitute the subjectivity of its audience. The epigraph above bears this out in an important way. The ignorance of American students in matters of geography has such a well-documented history that it has acquired the status of a truism. A survey that found 78% of high school sophomores were unable to find their way home after school would probably provoke no surprise in any quarter.

And the exchange preceding the passage above, unsurprisingly enough, reveals that Beavis and Butthead have no clue where Seattle might be on a map or in relation to wherever it is they live. But what they do know must warm the heart of David Geffen,

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namely, that Seattle is where Nirvana and other "cool stuff' are found (fill in the blank with your own pun here: ~. The Geffen Company marketing thunderstorm that rained promos of every imaginable stripe down on college radio station managers in 1991 succeeded in getting Nirvana huge airplay and in single-handedly forging awareness of a "Seattle sound" among the listeners of these stations. The video for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" presented a ragtag musical threesome in a high school gym whipping its long-haired, grungily attired, obviously disaffected teen audience of Dumpster divers, stoners, and slackers into a Dionysian state of communal rebellion and transcendent hipness, and more or less called it "Seattle," less a geographical locale than a psychic space in which surface meanings did not bear close examination, but getting next to the band became the secret to happiness.

This readily commodifiable image of Seattle rapidly became the mechanism with which the record biz pitched a lengthy list of so-called "alternative" rock bands to the new disaffected teen consumer group that Geffen's Operation Nirvana had called into being. Moreover, it came to define Seattle for the rest of the country which had theretofore pretty much left it in peace tucked away in the hard-to-reach Pacific Northwest.

Fast-forward eighteen months to Beavis and Butthead, the saliva-spewing mouthpieces of rebellious youth, happily flaunting their ignorance of geography but hitting every cue that the image mavens of the music industry could dream of programming into the minds of the good little disaffected consumerist monads snatching up any CD flying the "Seattle" flag. Seattle has given utterly way to "Seattle," an associative cultural signifier readily transferable from music to fashion, books, generational politics, whatever, that endows its host object with a patina of eminently salable deviance, which nevertheless remains firmly within the controllable purview of the most conservative corporate plutocracy orchestrating the products of the artisticocommercial complex: MTV, Time Warner (publisher of Madonna's reactionary Sex), Bloomingdale's (whose "grunge" fashion line was such a big hit ... ), and so on.

And poor, pathetic Nirvana. They perhaps could initially have laid some claim to a genuinely oppositional cultural stance in their early Sub Pop days, and dear little Kurt Cobain's erect middle finger on the liner notes to Nevermind does mark some expression of political and aesthetic independence. Even their lyrics sometimes aspire to formal subversion and satire of pop music conventions, making fun of rock star egomania and puffery, insipid song-writing, and whoring industry types who flog their derivative and tired music through album after album. But by the time they appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, with Cobain in his "Corporate rock still sucks" T-shirt, how could they possibly claim quarantine after enjoying the largesse, in the form of the most masterfully marketed album of the year, of just what they once seemed to oppose?

The very "Seattle" that they helped create has consumed Nirvana themselves, remade them into their own commodified image and effaced the original version under the veneer of domesticated deviance, sure to sell, but at the expense of their souls. Grungy, indeed.

The "Seattle" phenomenon spawned a series of imitators in the music press as well.

A phalanx of music writers set out in hot search of the next locale that might replicate BAFFLER路

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the transformation of Seattle into "Seattle." For some time, Chapel Hill appeared to enjoy frontrunner status and a spate of pieces appeared touting central North Carolina as the place to watch. Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Spin, the Chicago Tribune, Details, and Esquire (and maybe more for all I know; I got bored counting after a while} all trudged through town to get the rather picked-over story, acquitting themselves each in their own particular, vapid way. In fact, three deserve special commendation for stupidity. Esquire got around to Chapel Hill this past spring, and paid special homage to the role of the Cat's Cradle, the town's biggest club, in the development of the local scene. As every local music fan knew, though, the club was slated to close on May 19, thereby gutting the central organ of theEsquire construct of the Chapel Hill music scene. Oops. Spin came around at the end of 1992, but they must have found the crowds of out-of-town reports too close after a while, because by the time Esquire was on to Chapel Hill, Spin had settled on New Market, Virginia (I kid you not). And you thought Seattle was hard to find on a map. But the most notable of the Chapel Hill pieces was certainly Mr. Eric Konigsberg's piece forDetails. Alternately a self-aggrandizing account of his chumming around with the bedraggled lot who make up the band scene and a hymn to the superlative charms of one Kathy Poindexter, "nineteen years and 107 pounds worth of scabby-kneed horniness," singer in the band Picasso Trigger, Konigsberg does yeoman's work in fabricating a Chapel Hill to suit his fantasies of what the next happening music scene will be. "Welcome to North Carolina, where the men are grad students and the women play bass." That's cute, and might even be true of maybe an entire house here and there. "In the Chapel Hill-Raleigh-Durham triangle of sleepy, left~leaning college towns, English lit students argue structuralism on their front porches while listening to hardcore songs like 'Wheelchair Full of Old Man.'" Yes, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham are in fact replicas of the same town, and now the secret is out. Amazing that the fiction of them being distinct municipalities endured so long. And never mind that structuralism has not been a topic of compelling academic interest for thirty years, because state law does in fact mandate that the graduate stipend for studying literature include a house with a front porch. But if "Chapel Hill" catches on, Eric Konigsberg can claim credit as midwife, and what a fine resume stuffer that would be.

In response to the displays of stupidity, mental laziness, and venality that I have chronicled herein, I wish to conclude by announcing the inception of a new field of cultural studies. If all goes as imagined, this new field will catch fire as the hot new academic trend and will catapult me to fame and fortune as I collect royalties on every usage of my copyrighted term. I dub this new discipline "moronics" and declare that it will concern itself with the breakdown of the individual's ability to distinguish between lived experience and the simulacrum or image of experience as propagated by the engines of the artisticocommercial complex. Areas of study might include any and all of the various devices that the artisticocommercial complex employs to ensure the pervasive spread of a consumerist subjectivity that remains unaware of metaphorical or figurative expression, is deficient in modes of satire and irony, and stays wholly depoliticized thanks to the many mind-numbing varieties of entertainment available on television,

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in the movies, on the radio, in magazines, and soon to come in the virtual reality arcades and 500-channel cable TV subscriptions. Indeed, moronics could expand into the political or sociological realms, as no doubt some shrewd Chamber of Commerce officials will soon clue in to the potential municipal marketing appeal of having their town become the new "Seattle." The influx of media figures alone ought to suffice to lift any recession-ridden town out of the economic doldrums. Rand McNally could include a "deviance quotient" in their survey oflivable cities. After all, what civic leader would not love to lord a "Seattlized" profile over colleagues at a national convention of city luminaries?

This is my modest proposal, conceived for the benefit of times that deserve no less.

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26路

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Joe Fodor Ken ye na the wee laddie gaun sprinklin' ay, hear ye na his trickie tinklin' be ye so auld ye na hae an inkling hard abeigh the sink eyes closed sae ye na see them twinkling as he gaed a drink? queer, na like other laddie boys who fain work not their wicked toys 'plashin' Manhattans, 'n Rob Roys Gurglin' charmin' juice fin' him tro the party noise drainin' his bonny goose He widdles nae cow milk nor tea but only fair auld Scots whiskey ne' er port or wine gi' e he but 'tis hardly a matter his dearest member bless'd be none fain do't better Come, we shall a'be drinkin' a toast wi' the wee Bonny Boy, our host pourin' liquid fire fra his post for gud, na badder an' dinna quit, but gae his most 'til empty were his bladder

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What is Alternative?

Business Man: 'Here is one of the best employment makers we have. Since its co-optation the alternative lifestyle has created over 20 million jobs, and increased business volume to more than 100 industries nationwide.'

Police Chief: 'Alternative lifestyles are on the side of law and order. The culture industry is actively cooperating with law enforcement officals to stamp out . conditions not in the public's best interest.'

Poet: 'Ah, Alternative l The lifestyle of the rebel...endlessly questioning authority. Not accepting of mediocrity, continually striving for something different. Unafraid to weep, blazing new paths to liberation of the soul.'

Tax Collector: 'The alternative industries are mighty important to the taxpayer. Public revenues from alternative industries exceed four billion dollars a year... more than 10 million dollars every day.

And remember what is good for the culture industry is good for America."

28 • BAFFLER

•_

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.................

0

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··· ·

Teacher: 'Alternative lifestyles make good sense. By giving children a safe and productive oudet to vent their negative energies, it frees their minds to focus on what really matters ... citizenship in our consumerindustrial state."

A+R Rep: 'It took the alternative industries decades to perfect the simulation of deviance. Now we want to keep alternative lifestyle retailing as cutting-edge as the product itself. We have a mighty interesting program and we'd like to tell you all about it. Write us.'

May we send you the facts?

Average Citizen: "Say listen, you fellows. You think you know what alternative is. I'll tell you what alternative really is. Tome, and millions like me alternative is just one thing... a grand lifestyle"

Consolidated Deviance, Inc. would like to inform you about the real nature of the youth culture fabrication industry; about our cooperation with authorites to 'clean up or shut up' irresponsible youth cultures. ConDev wants to protect your right to enjoy lifestyle in decent, pleasant, and non-threatening environments.

a

Send $2 to: Consolidated Deviance »date<i ~ c/o the Baffler

Alternative...

"

~

cd

%.

P.O. Box 378293

g Chicago, II 60637

~$ QI "'Od:ro()~·

A LIFESTYLE OF MODERATION FOR THE NATION BAFFLER •

29

A wide-ranging, thoughtfully selected collection of over 100,000 titles, housed in space designed like no other, has made the Seminary Co-op a favorite of book-lovers for over thirty years.

Seminary Co-op Bookstore

5757 South University Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637 (312) 752-4381

SEMINARY

Mon-Fri: 8:30-9:00 Sat: 10:00-6:00 Sun: 12:00-6:00

BOOKSTORE

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57th Street Books

1301 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 (312) 684-1300 Mon-Thurs: 10:00-10:00 Fri & Sat: 10:00-11:00 Sun: 10:00-8:00

A branch of the Co-op, 57th Street books carries a wide variety of titles in a congenial, well-lit space, perfect for browsing.

Specialities include literature, film, children's books, music, mysteries and science fiction, computer and cook books.

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TheProblem With Music Steve Albini Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit.

Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, "Actually, I think you need a little more development.

Swim it again, please. Backstroke."

And he does, of course.

LA&RScouts Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A&R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band.

The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire," because historically, the A&R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each.

This is still the case, though not openly.

These guys are universally young (about the same age as the bands being wooed), and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave. Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. AI Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX"fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrangand other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well.

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There are several reasons A&R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip" to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences.

The A&R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it.

When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him, and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85?

Didn't we have a blast.

By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum.

There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.

These A&R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on.

The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little "memo," is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band sign it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength.

These letters never have any term of expiry, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes.The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A&R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises (something he did with similar effect to another well-known band), and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A&R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it.

The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.

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D. What I hate about recording 1. Producers and engineers who use meaningless words to make their clients think they know what's going on. Words like "Punchy," "Warm," "Groove," "Vibe," "Feel."

Especially "Punchy" and "Warm." Every time I hear those words, I want to throttle somebody.

2: Producers who aren't also engineers, and as such, don't have the slightest fucking idea what they're doing in a studio, besides talking all the time. Historically, the progression of effort required to become a producer went like this: Go to college, get an EE degree. Get a job as an assistant at a studio. Eventually become a second engineer. Learn the job and become an engineer. Do that for a few years, then you can try your hand at producing. Now, all that's required to be a full-fledged "producer" is the gall it takes to claim to be one.

Calling people like Don Fleming, AI Jourgensen, Lee Ranaldo or Jerry Harrison "producers" in the traditional sense is akin to calling Bernie a "shortstop" because he watched the whole playoffs this year.

The term has taken on perjorative qualities in some circles. Engineers tell jokes about producers the way people back in Montana tell jokes about North Dakotans. (How many producers does it take to change a light bulb? -Hmmm. I don't know. What do you think? Why did the producer cross the road? -Because that's the way the Beatles did it, man.) That's why few self-respecting engineers will allow themselves to be called "producers. " The minimum skills required to do an adequate job recording an album are: - Working knowledge of all the microphones at hand and their properties and uses.

I mean something beyond knowing that you can drop an SM57 without breaking it.

- Experience with every piece of equipment which might be of use and every function it may provide. This means more than knowing what echo sounds like. Which equalizer has the least phase shift in neighbor bands? Which console has more headroom? Which mastering deck has the cleanest output electronics?

- Experience with the style of music at hand, to know when obvious blunders are occurnng.

- Ability to tune and maintain all the required instruments and electronics, so as to insure that everything is in proper working order. This means more than plugging a guitar into a tuner. How should the drums be tuned to simulate a rising note on the decay? A falling note? A consonant note? Can a bassoon playa concert E-flat in key with a piano tuned to a reference A of 440 Hz? What percentage of varispeed is necessary to make a whole-tone pitch change? What degree of overbias gives you the most headroom at 10Khz? What reference fluxivity gives you the lowest self-noise from biased, unrecorded tape? Which tape manufacturer closes evety year in July, causing shortages of tape globally? What can be done for a shedding master tape? A sticky one?

- Knowledge of electronic circuits to an extent that will allow selection of appropriate signal paths. This means more than knowing the difference between a delay line and BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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an equalizer. Which has more headroom, a ,discrete class A microphone preamp with a transformer output or a differential circuit built with monolithics? Where is the best place in an unbalanced line to attenuate the signal? If you short the cold leg of a differential input to ground, what happens to the signal level? Which gain control device has the least distortion, a VCA, a printed plastic pot, a photoresistor or a wire-wound stepped attenuator? Will putting an unbalanced line on a half-normalled jack unbalance the normal signal path? Will a transformer splitter load the input to a device parallel to it?

Which will have less RF noise, a shielded unbalanced line or a balanced line with a floated shield?

- An aesthetic that is well-rooted and compatible with the music, and - The good taste to know when to exercise it.

3. Trendy electronics and other flashy shit that nobody really needs. Five years ago, everything everywhere was being done with discrete samples. No actual drumming allowed on most records. Samples only. The next trend was Pultec Equalizers. Everything had to be run through Pultec EQs. Then vintage microphones were all the rage (but only Neumanns, the most annoyingly whiny microphone line ever made). The current trendy thing iscompression. Compression by the ton, especially if it comes from a tube limiter. Wow. It doesn't matter how awful the recording is, as long as it goes through a tube limiter, somebody will claim it sounds "warm," or maybe even "punchy." They might even compare it to the Beatles. I want to find the guy that invented compression and tear his liver out. I hate it.

It makes everything sound like a beer commercial.

4. OAT machines. They sound like shit and every crappy studio has one now because they're so cheap. Because the crappy engineers that inhabit crappy studios are too thick to learn how to align and maintain analog mastering decks, they're all using OAT machines exclusively. OAT tapes deteriorate over time, and when they do, the information on them is lost forever. I have personally seen tapes go irretrievably bad in less than a month. Using them for final masters is almost fraudulently irresponsible.

Tape machines ought to be big and cumbersome and difficult to use, if only to keep the riff-raff out. OAT machines make it possible for morons to make a living, and do damage to the music we all have to listen to.

5. Trying to sound like the Beatles. Every record I hear these days has incredibly loud, compressed vocals, and a quiet little murmur of a rock band in the background.

The excuse given by producers for inflicting such an imbalance on a rock band is that it makes the record sound more like the Beatles. Yeah, right. Fuck's sake, Thurston Moore is not Paul McCartney, and nobody on earth, not with unlimited time and resources, could make the Smashing Pumpkins sound like the Beatles. Trying just makes them seem even dumber. Why can't people try to sound like the Smashchords or Metal Urbain or Third World War for a change?

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m. There's This Band There's this band. They're pretty ordinary, but they're also pretty good, so they've attracted some attention. They're signed to a moderate-sized "independent" label owned by a distribution company, and they have another two albums owed to the label.

They're a little ambitious. They'd like to get signed by a major label so they can have some security -you know, get some good equipment, tour in a proper tour bus nothing fancy, just a little reward for all the hard work.

To that end, they got a manager. He knows some of the label guys, and he can shop their next project to all the right people. He takes his cut, sure, but it's only 15%, and if he can get them signed then it's money well spent. Anyway, it doesn't cost them anything ifit doesn't work. 15% of nothing isn't much!

One day an A&R scout calls them, says he's "been following them for a while now," and when their manager mentioned them to him, it just "clicked." Would they like to meet with him about the possibility of working out a deal with his label? Wow. Big Break time.

They meet the guy, and y'know what -he's not what they expected from a label guy. He's young and dresses pretty much like the band does. He knows all their favorite bands. He's like one of them. He tells them he wants to go to bat for them, to try to get them everything they want. He says anything is possible with the right attitude. They conclude the evening by taking home a copy of a deal memo they wrote out and signed on the spot.

The A&R guy was full of great ideas, even talked about using a name producer.

Butch Vig is out of the question -he wants 100 g's and three points, but they can get Don Fleming for $30,000 plus three points. Even that's a little steep, so maybe they'll go with that guy who used to be in David Letterman's band. He only wants three points.

Or they can have just anybody record it (like Warton Tiers, maybe -cost you 5 or 10 grand) and have Andy Wallace remix it for 4 grand a track plus 2 points. It was a lot to think about.

Well, they like this guy and they trust him. Besides, they already signed the deal memo. He must have been serious about wanting them to sign. They break the news to their current label, and the label manager says he wants them to succeed, so they have his blessing. He will need to be compensated, of course, for the remaining albums left on their contract, but he'll work it out with the label himself. Sub Pop made millions from selling off Nirvana, and Twin Tone hasn't done bad either: 50 grand for the Babes and 60 grand for the Poster Children -without having to sell a single additional record. It'll be something modest. The new label doesn't mind, so long as it's recoupable out of royalties.

Well, they get the final contract, and it's not quite what they expected. They figure it's better to be safe than sorry and they turn it over to a lawyer -one who says he's experienced in entertainment law -and he hammers out a few bugs. They're still not sure about it, but the lawyer says he's seen a lot of contracts, and theirs is pretty good.

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They'll be getting a great royalty: 13% (less a 10% packaging deduction). Wasn't it Buffalo Tom that were only getting 12% less 1O? Whatever.

The old label only wants 50 grand, and ,no points. Hell, Sub Pop got 3 points when they let Nirvana go. They're signed for four years, with options on each year, for a total of over a million dollars! That's a lot of money in any man's english. The first year's advance alone is $250,000. Just think about it, a quarter-million, just for being in a rock band!

Their manager thinks it's a great deal, especially the large advance. Besides, he knows a publishing company that will take the band on if they get signed, and even give them an advance of20 grand, so they'll be making that money too. The manager says publishing is pretty mysterious, and nobody really knows where all the money comes from, but the lawyer can look that contract over too. Hell, it's free money.

Their booking agent is excited about the band signing to a major. He says they can maybe average $1,000 or $2,000 a night from now on. That's enough to justifY a five week tour, and with tour support, they can use a proper crew, buy some good equipment and even get a tour bus! Buses are pretty expensive, but if you figure in the price of a hotel room for evetybody in the band and crew, they're actually about the same cost.

Some bands (like Therapy? and Sloan and Stereolab) use buses on their tours even when they're getting paid only a couple hundred bucks a night, and this tour should earn at least a grand or two every night. It'll be worth it. The band will be more comfortable and will play better.

The agent says a band on a major label can get a merchandising company to pay them an advance on t-shirt sales! Ridiculous! There's a gold mine here! The lawyer should look over the merchandising contract, just to be safe.

They get drunk at the signing party. Polaroids are taken and everybody looks thrilled.

The label picked them up in a limo.

They decided to go with the producer who used to be in Letterman's band. He had these technicians come in and tune the drums for them and tweak their amps and guitars. He had a guy bring in a slew of expensive old "vintage" microphones. Boy, were they "warm." He even had a guy come in and check the phase of all the equipment in the control room! Boy, was he professional. He used a bunch of equipment on them and by the end of it, they all agreed that it sounded very "punchy," yet "warm."

All that hard work paid off. With the help of a video, the album went like hotcakes!

They sold a quarter million copies!

Here is the math that will explain just how fucked they are: These figures are representative of amounts that' appear in record contracts daily.

There's no need to skew the figures to make the scenario look bad, since real-life examples more than abound. Income is underlined, expenses are not.

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Advance: $250,000 Manager's cut: $37,500 Legal fees: $10,000 Recording Budget: $150,000 Producer's advance: $50,000 Studio fee: $52,500 Drum, Amp, Mic and Phase "Doctors": $3,000 Recording tape: $8,000 Equipment rental: $5,000 Cartage and Transportation: $5,000 Lodgings while in studio: $10,000 Catering: $3,000 Mastering: $10,000 Tape copies, reference CD's, shipping tapes, misc expenses: $2,000 Video budget: $30,000 Cameras: $8,000 Crew: $5,000 Processing and transfers: $3,000 Offline: $2,000 Online editing: $3,000 Catering: $1,000 Stage and construction: $3,000 Copies, couriers, transportation: $2,000 Director's fee: $3,000 Album Artwork: $5,000 Promotional photo shoot and duplication: $2,000 Band fund: $15,000 New fancy professional drum kit: $5,000 New fancy professional guitars (2): $3,000 New fancy professional guitar amp rigs (2): $4,000 New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar: $1,000 New fancy rack of lights bass amp: $1,000 Rehearsal space rental: $500

Big blowout party for their friends: $500 Tour expense (5 weeks): $50,875 Bus: $25,000 Crew (3): $7,500 Food and per diems: $7,875 Fuel: $3,000 Consumable supplies: $3,500 Wardrobe: $1,000 Promotion: $3,000 Tour gross income: $50,000 Agent's cut: $7,500 Manager's cut: $7,500 Merchandising advance: $20,000 Manager's cut: $3,000 Lawyer's fee: $1,000 Publishing advance: $20,000 Manager's cut: $3,000 Lawyer's fee: $1,000 Record sales: 250,000 @ $12 = $3,000,000 gross retail revenue Royalty (13% of 90% of retail): $351,000 less advance: $250,000 Producer's points: (3% less $50,000 advance) $40,000 Promotional budget: $25,000 Recoupable buyout from previous label: $50,000 Net royalty: (-$14,000) Record company income: Record wholesale price $6,50 x 250,000 = $1,625,000 gross income Artist Royalties: $351,000 Deficit from royalties: $14,000 Manufacturing, packaging and distribution @ $2.20 per record: $550,000 Gross profit: $710,000 BAFFLER路

37

THE BALANCE SHEET This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.

Record company: $710,000 Producer: $90,000 Manager: $51,000 Studio: $52,500 Previous label: $50,000 Agent: $7,500 Lawyer: $12,000 Band member net income each: $4,031.25 The band is now 114 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 113 as much as they would working at a 7-11, butthey got to ride in a tour bus for a month.

The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige.

The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their t-shirts yet. Maybe the t-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys.

Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

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39

Nocturne James Tolan I've been shopping for years, but tonight the shelves are empty and glare beneath fluorescent lights.

The night manager loads unmarked cans into a brown bag for no one who is there.

I ask him about the dearth of goods up9n which I have come to depend.

He smiles and assures me that all I have come to expect is as available to me now as it ever was.

I need only ask ....

He nods and begins to place plain, white paper packages into the shallow curve of bags along the counter.

It is then I realize we gaze together toward the freezers.

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Aeroflot'93: Dispatch from Moscow Nathan Frank Aside from their obvious political consequences, the events of October 3 and 4 in Moscow also contained important meaning for students of pop culture. The primary target of the neo-Bolsheviks' assault was the Ostankino complex, a television tower and revolving restaurant, from which they intended to broadcast rebel leader Ruslan Khasbulatov's appeal to arms. But with the Kremlin desperately seeking to restore calm on the airwaves, the Russian people were treated instead to tantalizing glimpses of the Western cultural smorgasbord towards which their leaders were hoping to advance the country: hour after hour of American television from the 1970s.

Not just any television, mind you; this was a special occurrance, and demanded special programming. Nothing could suffice short of the highest achievements ofTelevision City's golden years: the one-two punch of Charlie's Angels and Fantasy Island keeping Saturday night sacred for ABC, followed by anABC Sunday Night at the Movies showing of Airport '77 from years gone by, complete with station breaks and commercials. Jimmy Walker, Candace Bergen, and Bert Convy were the power troika that reassured the nervous Russian folk in the bloody hours of October 3-4. Steering a supersonic jetliner gashed by explosions to a successful crash landing may be a task too great for Boris Yeltsin or even Charlton Heston, but not for Captain Steubing's love child, later Cruise Director, Julie. Nor for her co-pilot, a half-blind general practitioner from Phoenix played by none other than John Denver.

But had Operation Donna Summer-the pacification strategy devised by the military unit charged with containing the rebels in the White House-worked as planned, the Kremlin might never have been forced to fall back on the comforting images of Airport '77. All through October 3 they had deafened the area from Smolensk Square to the White House with music loud enough to drown out the voices of Khasbulatov, Rutskoi and the various other neo-Bolshevik speakers. And, as with the TV specials to which they路ultimately escalated, this was no ordinary music. Some polka, some Russian folk songs, but mostly Europop that had been shamelessly pilfered from the newly privatized airwaves of Radio Maximum. Babuschkas who had assembled below the Comecon building occasionally broke into jigs, thinking the music was intended to keep them and the other rebels in high spirits. And at one point a witty soldier played the new bubblegum hit by Ace of Bass: "Happy nation/Living in a happy nation/What salvation!" The irony was lost on the angry crowds.

Tab! Wastin' other sueka soda pops!

Load up the elip and wateh the waek drinks drop!

- lee Cube for Tab, 1995 BAFFLER路

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42路

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NOT THE PLASTER CASTERS Janice Eidus I was not a member of The Plaster Casters. I was a free agent. Although-on the surface, at least-I did exactrywhat The Plaster Casters did. That is, we all made plaster casts of the penises of rock stars. But The Plaster Casters got all the glory, all the publicity. Even though I did it first.

The Plaster Casters, you see, did it for the power they thought it gave them-the power that would lead them to the fifteen minutes offame they wanted so much. Which they got. Big deal. Fifteen minutes.

I wanted no glory, no money. I didn't need fifteen minutes. I had a lifetime, and another-far greater-agenda. I never hired a publicist, never contacted a journalist to write up my exploits, or to take photos of me looking wacky and sexy, stirring up a vat of my plaster mixture with a come-hither look on my face, or sitting on ]imi's lap, or cuddling up to Rod. I was as different from The Plaster Casters as Picasso from a greeting card illustrator.

I was an artist, with an eye trained to recognize natural beauty when I saw it. And rock stars were definitely objects of natural beauty, with their lean, hard bodies, their long hair flowing down their backs, their bejeweled ears, necks, and fingers. Rock stars were like Greek statues with attitude.

And so I created homages to them. My sculptures were vehicles through which I rendered both them, and myself, immortal. I isolated their most beautiful, most artistic feature, and I re-created it, re-invented it. Like the poet said-art is about making it new, making it your own. And I certainly did that: when I was finished, after the rock stars had gone, I gave each plaster cast my signature. I painted my initials-the initials of my real name, my given name, the name everyone but me has long forgotten, since everyone else now knows me as Not The Plaster Casters. I used a shimmery, otherwordly silver, a shade of my own creation, a shade that nobody else can ever copy or match. And each initial looks exactly like the letter it is, and yet simultaneously, like a female body, as well, a sensual female with full breasts, slim waist, and perfectly balanced, rounded hips. My signature is the symbol for me, of course, for my own erotic beauty, again something those homely Plaster Casters with their chubby bodies and scraggly hair just didn't have, couldn't measure up to.

My ageless, creamy-skinned beauty-which has only been enhanced over time-is such that the rock stars would beg me to sleep with them, would grow keenly aroused as I patted the plaster firmly onto their members. But I never gave in. I never slept with a BAFFLER路

43

single one, and, believe me, there were times I desired one or another of them so much I could hardly breathe. But I had no choice: I had to be pure, objective. What if I had fallen in love? My art might have suffered, and that would have been intolerable. Besides, my body never went hungry. I had my ways.

Meanwhile, I was doing them all, all the greats: Jimi, Bobby, the two Keiths, David, Mick, Paul, and so many others, all colors, all sizes. Even Janis wanted in: "Can't you do a boob this time?" she asked.

"For you, okay," I agreed.

Her face lit up with her kooky, lopsided smile.

In fact, I ended up doing both her boobs, which turned out, surprisingly, to be small and delicate.

And Janis, Jimi, the two Keiths, and all the others-all of them-they understood the difference between me and The Plaster Casters. They knew The Plaster Casters were mere publicity seekers. But after all, they wanted publicity, too. So they let those clumsy girls paw them and poke them this way and that, but they never respected them or found them erotic, never thought of them as anything more than dumb groupies.

With me, though, they were respectful, in awe. Together, we sought immortality, not just a write-up in Rolling Stone. Mter all, compared to immortality, an orgasm isn't that big a deal.

Their desire to let me sculpt them came from a place deep inside, a place not sullied by commercialism and greed, the very place where their own art came from: Jimi's wild guitar playing, Janis' raw, untamed voice, David's androgynous personnas, Bobby's esoteric lyrics. And to this day, only they-these beautiful, fierce rock icons-are ever allowed to see my work. Dealers are banned from my studio; the public is never invited in. Only the rock stars themselves, so wide eyed and respectful as they follow me from sculptute to sculpture. And when, at the end of their tour, they ask me what the silver initials stand for, I tell them they're not initials, just abstract, silvery shapes. And sometimes one might add, "Well, you know, those silver shapes also look a lot like a woman's body-like your body, Not The Plaster Casters." But I merely smile enigmatically.

I'm always distancing myself-planning the next one I'll be doing, for instance, even as I'm casting the member of another. Mter all, my work is never done. Not by a long shot. There are new ones to conquer, new ones all the time, new ones whenever I blink. And believe me, I know how to separate the real ones from the wannabes, the pretenders, the flashes in the pans. Next week, for instance, I'm doing Michael. The week after, Bono. And the week after that, there's Axl on Wednesday, and Slash on Thursday. Madonna-like Janis-also wants to pose. 'T m bigger than Janis," she bragged over the phone. I didn't deign to reply; my art is not about size or competition. And Bruce and Rod and Billy all want to come back, to do it a second time, to "relive the high," they say.

They all call me. They know where to find me. I'm never cruel, but I'm always honest. Sometimes I just have to say: ''I'm sorry, but you don't have it, that star quality, that beauty, that thing that I, as an artist, require." I had to tell that to Michael's broth-

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BAFFLER

ers, for instance. Some accept my refusal with dignity. Others weep and beg. Others hang up abruptly, stunned and ashamed. It saddens me to hurt them, but there's no room in art for pity.

The ones I say yes to, though, are euphoric. They grow overeager. "When? Tonight?

Tomorrow?"

"Whoa," I tell them. "Slow down."

And then, on the given date-sometimes I make them wait weeks, or even monthsthey fly in from L.A. or London or Seattle, and they arrive at my private studio, way up here, far away from any big city, high in the mountains, where I can best maintain my distance, my anonymity, my purity.

"You look so young," they always say, when I first greet them at the door.

I smile modestly, and then I show them around, giving them the tour. They grow silent, too much in awe to speak, as I lead them from sculpture to sculpture. Sometimes one might whisper under his breath, "Wow, that Jimi, man," or, "Those Plaster Casters had nothin' on you," or one might even sniffle and shed a tear or two, but other than that, they're as quiet as if in church.

Then, when we've finished the tour, I show them where to stand, where to hang their flannel shirts and baseball caps, their lycra biking shorts and headbands.

They begin to strip-some slowly, some hurriedly, some with bravado, some with a sheepish grin.

Meanwhile, I stir up the plaster, watching them all the while, assessing their size, their shape.

"Really, you look as young as I do," the baby-faced ones from Seattle always say, as I mold the plaster onto their flesh, firmly yet delicately, with my special touch.

"It's the art," I tell them. "It keeps me young."

Then, as I stroke the plaster gently, smoothing it down, I add, "It'syou. You keep me young."

Of course, they want to sleep with me, just as their rock forefathers did. They grow aroused and needy. "I want you," they all say. "You're so sensual, so ripe."

I thank them, and then I explain that for art's sake, I can't.

"I understand," they sigh. "Your art is bigger than we are."

Again, I smile enigmatically. And when it's time for them to leave, I allow them one kiss goodbye, but no more than that, even when my body craves much, much more.

"Goodbye, Not The Plaster Casters," they wave, when I finally send them on their way.

"Goodbye," I wave back, standing at my doorway, watching them walk down the long, winding mountain path.

"Goodbye," I wave a second time, when they turn around for one final look, hoping to preserve me-Not The Plaster Casters-forever in their memories. And I don't begrudge them that final look. After all, I already have themwith me forever, here in my studio, hardened and perfectly formed-to do with what I will. And that-like my silver initials-is my secret, the part of my artistic process I keep all to myself, the part that really keeps me so beautiful, so eternally young, so eternally ripe.

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with Seth Sanders A Cosmic Battle for [nsanely low Stakes.

Hilarious that rock criticism started with critics noticing things bands wouldn't notice about themselves (ineptitude, accidental references, supernatural side-effects, mindboggling stupidity) and ended (as it does evety day, coughing up thin blood) continually reiterating the stuff that their PR is made of (Nirvana and "rawness," Urge and posing, Trux and "Glam" or exile, U2 and "innovation"). If you got the press pack, you could write the articles and reviews yourself. The next time you think about anything you like, try to imagine if there could be anything more to it than what it says about itself. There's nothing more helpless than someone trapped in a room where all the objects are marked with the correct names, and no fact raises more doubt about signification than the fact that that's basically how we live.

At the beginning, the very idea of doing rock "criticism" in the same way as one did "theatre criticism" and "literary criticism" was so fucking silly that you couldn't help but appreciate and enjoy the fact that you were doing something totally inappropriate, miscegenated, ill-precedented etc. But the idea that it's really worth having deadly serious opinions about, taking sides as if for the future of something, really strikes me as sad today. If it can surprise you and do something more or less than catch your attention and toy with it for 4 minutes, then wonderful! Groove on it, respond to it, get pissed, take a new pose in the mirror before you go to work-cool! Is that a reason to treat the shit as if it matters? What matters is what allegiances you make as you walk into Tower records. "Uh, what kind of music do I like?" You forgot because it doesn't matter.

Contrary to what newspaper writers need to have us believe, the decision has no consequences. The particular little wall of cds toward which you proceed lets you join a huge, ill-defined, and almost totally meaningless group. I got a Lee Perry comp rather than the new Trux because I thought all my friends would already have Cats and Dogs (but they actually all spent their money on drugs or vacations instead of cd players), and bypassed the new U2 because I can hear it on the radio and the Classical section because I didn't feel like sitting in a chair concentrating on Magnus Lindberg.

It's not just entertainment. A song, an idea, a story or a friend can start you on a mental revolution. But not once the song is part of your canon of what's hip: then, by definition, it couldn't really be new to you. Nobody can tell you what will provoke or change you, except for the people who want to grow you into some mold just like them.

That's why I'm not going to rehash examples or prescribe programs. You can think of them yourself. You'd better. Obviously enough, music doesn't mean anything in particular. That's the freedom part. You are, as the philosopher insisted, out there on your own. You make your own rules, and usually they look a lot like everybody else's rules.

BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

47

And I guess they'd have to if you wanted to play all their games with them. You fucking sellout. Ifit doesn't automatically mean anything and you get to make up what it means, then conversely, it usually means something fairly stupid. I like love. I love love. I hate hate hate. I love hating. I don't wanna see you again. I've got to see you again. Sure, great, whatever. It's got a beat but you probably don't want to dance to it. Ultimately, issues of a band selling out, major or indie label, matter not one whit. Every time you go to something with your usual set of expectations, dull your nerves, settle in, get down with the program, you're selling out. No political program is going to jerk you off and no band is going to do it for you. If there's bad entertainment and you don't make or find something yourself, you get the fun you deserve.

Escape from Desert Island Discs!

In a very generous review of my fanzine, A Nest ofNinnies, Chicago writer Ben Kim made one criticism that I want to address, because it is really a criticism of the whole fanzine genre. Describing the aesthetic of the 'zine,' he termed it "insular and self-congratulatory" (while also praising it as "expansive," leading me to imagine myself as a small but militaristic island such as WWII Japan). Now, he is basically correct, although I might prefer to use a phrase such as "selectively fastidious" to describe my worldview: I think that only three or four of my friends will even get most of the jokes, and you'd have to have exactly my slice of experience to get all of them. But this is deliberate: the hope is that I make the unknown sound interesting enough to explore. I expect that one or two people might actually become interested in the Avestas and Zoroastrianism, and that nine or ten might check out Hijo-Kaidan or Monster Magnet. Yes, you might react already, what an outr and eclectic mix, how amusing. Not at all. This is what I consider a problem: mainstream and "alternative" culture are really surprisingly rigorous and narrow. When I try to at least get a taste of more than one time in history and one type of music, I find myself at the edge of the world, so to speak. Anything more than the Chicago Tribune, MTV, and, for the hip, the Ajax records mail-order catalog, are considered remote and airy realms, the domain of experts and obsessives (really the same thing). Even the people who fashion the material that those "in the know" consume have this anxiety about themselves, as you can glean from reading an underground comic such as Eightballwhere a pathetic, longhaired character harangues the protagonist with meaningless band names until he escapes to the bathroom. Knowing too much is embarassing.

But the amount that is normal to know, experience, and think about is, I think, a little suspect. We are a literate city, and one that is absolutely awash in information of all sorts, whether it be the bulging racks of Reggae at Tower records and the Jazz that can be heard surging forth from clubs and radios, or the long shelves of bookstores and libraries that seem to recede into unglimpsed distances. Yet people quickly find odd little niches, they settle into some taste or style that has been presented to them, and there they stay. It's never for any real reason, it just seems to happen, like AIDS or advances in telecommunications. I choose those similes because they, too, seem to be in

48 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER

the air, just happening, but their courses were largely determined by human action.

When we are teenagers seems to be the only time when we buy or make our own rules for what is normal; it's just as possible the rest of our lives, and indeed, the making can only really bear fruit when it's done with a critical, adult mind. But what ends up happening is a peculiar wrong-end-of-a-telescope effect, whereby the actually incredibly narrow confines of music, ideas, and history that you chew over every day, brought to you by news and TV, seem to surround you as if they were the size of the whole world, and the rest of human culture since the dawn of civilization seems like some weird special interest.

It's the other way around.

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49

A Nest of Ninnies Selections Reviews by Seth Sanders The Germs GI LP Pure punk rock fueled by hate. Darby Crash does a growl that might be "supposed to sound tough" in a world where pain wasn't such a big deal and cars weren't something to be afraid of. But the Germs lived in Los Angeles, and it sucked, and Darby understood JUST WHY it sucked. This record lets you in on it and makes you want to split your head open upon realization. They repeat riffs until you want them to stop, then they keep doing it, droning and sounding awful. "This part doesn't 'rock,' man ... " Then they break back into a hot, chunking beat that hurtles forward into some sweaty, genuinely bad and useless place that you want to follow them into, Darby spitting words in what's, yeah, a FAKE punk voice, a snarl that he just made happen by contracting his throat more than normal and pushing the air through. If you were so squeezed by hate and understanding that you could not speak about it without wanting to vomit, then the only relief would be to sing like that. Like speaking through teeth filed down to points? Although he never did that to himself, by the end of the record you'll never ask "why would anyone do that to themselves?" again. This makes it all too clear.

Apollo 9 single (Bonehead Rex) Distribution mastermind Scott Sendra (who's also in the unbelievably great Down) carefully kept this record under wraps for the coming Gates-drive-by/Clinton anal rape send-up ofAmerican manhood that'll unseat the Great White Phallus as it makes Apollo 9 bigger than Nirvana could imagine. In the meantime, it's kind of hard to explain the fact that the best single of the year (next to Specula vs. the Drug Czar) has only sold 35 copies. Just wait, girlfren! One clean, chiming guitar and one roaring amp that used to fuel the Crucifucks blend with a woman's lilting voice and conjure more sweetness and frustration than anyone could feel: completely staggering.

Negative Approach Total Recall CD (Touch & Go) A clumsy and ugly packaging job around absolute, uncompromising music: "the angriest hardcore I've ever heard." The tracks from the Tied Down LP also embody perfect metal production, the slap of the drums and clear twang of the bass already show A Nest ofNinnies, America's most unremittingly abrasive zine, is edited by our own Seth Sanders.

The next issue promises an interview with one ofthe leaders ofthe Lincoln Brigade, so write to Seth at the Department ofNear Eastern Studies, 128 Gilman Hall, the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.

50 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER

a crispness alien to hardcore's blithering blur. Negative Approach's decline, the months when Brannon kept getting new musicians to keep the name going when the band had died, turns out some interesting, fast gurgling noises I'd never heard (but interesting is different from good). The early live stuff eats all industrial music alive, total violence drowning itself while the song somehow keeps going. Most spelling errors in a single published paragraph ever from T esco.

Specula vs. the Drug Czar: single of the period-year? minute? century? This is the single of the nineteenth century, with Spectreman's bizarre inventorly contraptions, hideous novelry instruments designed to strike fear into every dolt with a fancy guitar.

The Powerful Chest eats Fender Jazzmasters for breakfast. Monstrosities crammed in the attic laboratory, Specter strides forth into the daylight with the most amazing jerky, splintering guitar sound since old Halo of Flies. This is a noise that skitters, wobbles, then punches Motorhead out cold. The A side details the 90s terrorist scene: the drug war is "just another fucking war" while the flip "Kinky Surprise" drips suburban swinger menace. More proof that you don't have to be a Nazi to rock.

Tsunami (some fucking dull single on some boutique label that I haven't bothered to listen to) "I say punk rock means cuddle!" Apparently some of the guys around the DC scene haven't agreed with you on that point in the past, Jenny. Live, this band altered my brain into one of those malfunctioning cassette decks whose record and erase heads are simultaneously engaged. To hear it is to forget it.

Gories Outta Here (Crypt) A breezy, uncluttered sound, a gutbucket thud, melodies that sometimes evoke soul music as easily as punk rock, this band sounds like they could put Billy Childish six feet under without even wanting to. I wouldn't say this is any more authentic, unpretentious, or raw than any decent oi band-they're just doing what they like. But like CCR, the Boredoms, or Sly Stone, they've got a clear idea of what they want out of music, what they want to make music do, and so you get a weird sort of glow from the songs, a sense of vision. In fact, it strikes me that the two bands they sound most like are Pussy Galore and Beat Happening.

The reason why it seems funny to compare them to those two bands is also why the Gories will never be as popular as either. It's no big tragedy, but it does say something about how people look at music. Beat Happening and Pussy Galore had vibrant concepts that you could buy into: they were both good packages. Shit, I was into both of them. The Gories may have one too, but not one that's been publicized to me, the underground public, and that's the issue. I couldn't take a side, like I could with Beat Happening or Pussy Galore, to pretend that nice stuff was happening for the first time or dig drawing dead signs in the dirt. Both of the better-known bands projected an unusual and easily identifiable personality, while the Gories look like they're being and BAFFLER路

51

pleasing mainly themselves. They're a lot harder to put on and wear.

New Radiant Storm King Only Indie Rock Has Hard-Won Integrity and Riffs 7" (Trixie) Bright, funny reflections on being mad and letting your head soak. There's a really good reason why good rock bands like this can't stand having verses, choruses, verses, choruses, marching on to your needle picking up and going back to its resting place. It heightens the sense of claustrophobia and predestination that comes in playing the same kind of music as Dinosaur and Husker Du. We're going to end up liking the songs for some of the same reasons that the band likes them and that Husker Du and Dinosaur made that kind of music. This is called convention, and it does have a depressing quality. Sure, there's plenty of things you could talk about where you'd naturally want to break out into a sort of melodic yell that you repeat every 8 or 16 bars as your feelings climax at prearranged intervals. But there's a lot more you could cook up to fit that, or just do it and see what you end up saying. Strangely enough, it's always the kind of thing you could shout to about 50 people while holding a bass covered in duct tape.

Resist it as you will, there's that sort of payoff lurking around the corner. Or else there's fucking art-rock, for shit's sake.

Books Greil Marcus: I've Been Hosed by One Revolutionary Pop Star Too Many Sort of gross to realize that the sort of delirium Marcus could conjure up inLipstick Traces was induced by exactly the same little bag of tricks that here gets dumped on almost every single band he writes about. Fleetwood Mac opens up a space for a conversation between people who could never meet except here where the pronouns have antecedents in hell. The only thing worse is the suck-the-juice-through-the-jeans-ofthe-status-quo pop "sociology" (Marcel Mauss would never have returned Simon Frith's phone calls) of his friends. Neither Christgau nor I really know what the fuck people are thinking when they listen to fucking Ice Cube records.

So come off it, you pretentious windbags. You have staked your careers on music that means dick, and you must defend its complexity to your dying day simply so that more words, by which you are paid, can come out of your mouths. You ARE the culture industry; you ARE corporate-sponsored entertainment; you are precisely EVERYTHING you now claim to stand above and wisely, lovingly judge and which you once claimed to simply and passionately hate.

52 â&#x20AC;˘

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Sweet Portable You Selections Palace Brothers: There Is No One What Will Take Care of You (Drag City) The most sincere heart-split to come out from this land in many a day, friends, layed out in a sprung-free stylee that brings to mind a holy mingling of the Carters and Blind Joe Death. A gnarled ball of shitweed smokes in the ashtray, a rocker creaks on the porch, guns are stacked neatly in a glass cabinet against the wall. One is entitled to have their own personal theories; I'll keep mind sewn up for the time being. The sun shines as it always has ...

Comprised of esssential elements and swirled by ancient, time-honed mountain melodies strained out in the city sewer,the Palace Brothers contain unshifting elements on which the rest of their components base themselves and flow from: a casually strummed guitar, a lone, high voice, a history of desire and flesh. Everywhere is the smell of cold upturned earth.

The un-sayable thing is what returns you to the opening track, "Idle Hands Are the Devils Playthings," and keeps you halted in a parallel place until the stylus picks up on the final number, "0 Paul," which rings in your mind all encompassingly until you somehow wash it free. And wash is the right term, too, what the band aims at. The film this record lays out to all within speaker range is the equivalent to a stew made from the underside of moss trees, three years of woodsmoke and Fanny O'Connor's peacock feather tossed in for color.

Ever felt really bad? This is the new hole filling century beating depression companion. You can strap yourself underneath the bed with the heat on full blast, breathing in the dust and neglect from your carpet and set up the hi-fi on constant return. Three days later you can emerge with the knowledge tha tyou have, for the first time in a long time (maybe years) have had yourself in a good think.

And I'm forgetting why this record is so important to you, or will be, and that is cause you deeply love real country music. You know of what I speak, right? The lost, gone back on teh slum heart-split from which some part of this undoubtedly came from. Merle Travis, Rose Maddux, Roy Acuff, Jimmy Rodgers. All heroes of ours. We like to listen to these. We don't like to be disturbed. We understand what does and doesn't cause someone to do the unspeakable thing. We listen Palace Brother ...

- Patrick Foster

Sweet Portable You, one of the best-written Janzines in America, is edited by Pat Foster of Wingtip Sloat, and is available from #T-2, 1937 Kennedy Drive, McLean, Virginia 22102 BAFFLER路

53

T romans Water: Spasm Smash XXXOXOX Ox and Ass (Elemental) This is the ball game as we know it in the nineties ... quick, brash, sloppily-good at the right time. Resulted from the boring is this short attention spasm buffet of jaw droppings ... resisting control and appearing unpliable, but, in fact, probably just the opposite ... they are moving from my left to the right, dressed in the home uniforms, red jerseys with the plastic white pants, helmuts gleaming in the sun.

Who's gonna name this, this that seems to be becoming a mini-genre. Most of the 80s breeds, assorted sects, and passable tribes were left unchristened (thank god). I hope they call it something fashionable, not something that makes people cringe when they hear the word. C'mon admit it, you grovel when you hear the word disco, but you never turn it off the oldies station when KC. or Maurice, Barry, and Goofy start singin'. You leave it on and sing it like it was yesterday, just like the rest of us.

1W is pretty scary, I think they must use sheet music but who could read that fast.

They pull from everything and distribute the eggs evenly. Never spread too thin & never giving the complete nod. You know the list of models, forerunners and prototypes ... Minutemen, Tar Babies, Agitpop, Phantom Tollbooth, HalfJap and the usual comparisons to that usually compared to group. And of course not far from later cousins Polvo, TFUL (a whole lotta TFUL goin on) and the Grifters. But come on, that doesn't clue you in at all. These groups only faintly sound like 1W or maybe 1W has completely ripped them off. They don't want to sound like anybody but end up sounding like everyone just a little. This review (huh?) could never be so easy or so hard, you really could talk about anything in any order and still never be as close or as far from the mark. The mark is here and here ... and definitely there, there, and there. You can flip it over after hearing it once and not be entirely sure this is what you heard the first time.

And that is good.

- The Walking Dude

Didjits: Little Miss Carriage (Touch and Go) Comparable to a kleptic, I'd say, not really knowing it was stealin or putting any value in the theft-object itself. Just enough for the high and neverknowin' it was damaging someone or sumpin else, these here are not deliberate enough to be kleptis erectus more like just constantly thinking and dream in of doin' thievin'. They ought cover Dolphy or maybe they did or write a song like the Pet Stoop Boy just make everybodie lose their pantsies, big plans and whose to know or say whether their fulfillup or no.

I have this monster and he's in a cage thinking abouts the minute he gets free ... he's going to this, this, and this. And he's going to keep doing it and never stop cause he knows its snowball-esque. But that thinkin and sceemin keeps him a going... this cage time is a purging and the real beastness will arise after purgeging. Sip another brew my darling.

- The Walking Dude

54路 BAFFLER

The Meices: Greatest Bible

Stories Ever Told (Empty) Oh God, man, I'm gonna be in so much trouble when I get home, of course assuming that this pulsating piece of corporal goddess ever returns my nape and body to that paint-chipped, suburban, ranch-style biosphere. My hermetically-sealed nest of fourteen years. At least it will be fourteen years this Saturday, ceremony beginning promptly at two o'clock.

Mother assumes this frees her from lunch-serving responsibilities, but I know they will just arrive hungrier instead. I will have spent the morning sculpting a sanitaty smile upon my face, wiping the opinions from my mind, preparing myself for their asinine questions and insipid reflections upon their own perverse adolescences. I will open the presents which in reality they are giving to themselves. Piece of shit trinkets I cannot even imagine a use for. But I will smile, mumble, and gaze just above their heads, knowing that my mother is beaming from the worn, overstuffed chair where she will undoubtedly be perched.

I will, however, give them this: they were smart enough to refrain from asking me what I really want.

I plan to tell them as my first foot-fall fills the foyer. I practice it here in this humming machine, racing twin insect-antennae arms into the searing wind, drawing it into my lungs. It tastes and smells like pleasure exhaled, a sigh escap-

Hillor". Ct. OUIO-3059

['. vrlt.lnq to expr •••• , unconUn.d Qutrllq' that ye· ... lind YOUI' pen of ,,,In.a haY'lI't •• d• • 0 .uett I. II brt.-t CI •• tur.

tonrd. co.lnq down to vlrqinia tor on. of your propIIgllndll cllp.--Ir. t •• an. co_.retal .pot.. Th. only r ••• on I ;ot: thl. shlt-va;., d ••or.HUn; • • ub-blu.,-cOllar Ie •• of II job YIl, tiD th.lt

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the ENTIR! NATION to dn; t.he pral ... of your coLd cut

cOlbOI. I have to shoy up at thh rlnkr-dtnk .tore Inry nlljJht. abu •• d and alianat.d by the goo-novhere nature of your outfit. and I.rve ov.rpric.d :nndvich •• to vorthl ••• clod. who don't want to eool( tor the.s.lve. and who

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tilcs they OWN . . -- just beeaule I ' . lIakin; their next lIteal, F'Jcl( that!

Just how the tuck aa I suppoled to Qlt anywhere in life i t you don't put lie 1n on. ot your cO"'retal.?

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the backwater. of Vlr91n1a. tro. a fa.Uy of bUCk-toothed. fatback redn.ck. who •• cheo.olo•• ' 'J(

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thouqht I'd oet a job at Subway. oet a spot 1n your comlllerdals. and then BAM!

~ll

the way to Hollywood!

you've oon. and fucked that up. you 1r •• dy bastardl.

Well. ~OV.

not only will I never .ake it In the lIIovie •• but I STILL "tave to try and live with an inco"'. of S4.50 lin hour.

"

cout)l. hundred extra for "PPlarino in on. ot yout' commercill. would be niel. but ~OOOOOOOOOOOOO.

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R••• loa Iv.r •••• 1:1 on. of ,.01.11' •• ploye •• what it ' .

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lenov. how to STEAL enouqh tro. you tig:ht-thted cocle.uele.r •• but tor your other e.plo, ••• -- the on •• without hig:h school education.. the on •• who don't have the .lIart. to do tln,thing: but •• rv. a. eoql In this warped. lnlane econollY that ••• qu.rade. a. a cornucopia of tree .u'leet choice.

You

and your bo.o. buddle. at Burq.r "'inq lind McDonald. do a r •• arlubly .trective job at te.chlng: hig:h school leid. what

it •• lIn. to bl a t.ro In the .yst ••• and you do an even b.tt.r job ot trappinq \lnfortunat. IIdultl within the iron bUI ot th.ir own lqnonnt •• rvitud •.

We won't be fooled by your tran'parent. non.enlical tltt •• ptS at convtnclnq the world that you g:lv, two .hit. about your •• ploy ••• jUlt b.cau •• 'au put th •• on TV for tva v.e)tl at a th..

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ot card •.

1adi •• and yet,

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will •• lI:e the best.

BAFFLER·

55

ing a stranger's soft, dry lips. I tip my head back and let it fly, hurling towards the sun.

My eyes become slits, treetops blue the edges of my vision. The skin of my face stretched taut and primal.

Her head turns slightly in my direction, releasing a laugh which never reaches my ear, and I feel this rust-eaten beast called freedom surge forward with newfound grace and speed.

- Young Goodman Sweaterback Bailter Space: Robot World (Matador) The air conditioner made a lot of noise, but the cool yellow recycled wind wheezing into our compartment was a little warmer that what we could get from outside the car.

We let it run over the phasing FM mono beat, anyway, absent-mindedly ignored by our concentration and sensorily subsumed under the howl of our velocity.

As we couldn't see very far ahead in the darkhaze, we barrelled on in silence. We denied unnecessary movement to tense tendons, knowing that if we allowed ourselves to relax our momentum would lose its balance, that if our focus slipped from our improbable goal we would miss.

And in this way we fled invisible.

We weren't unique to make this kind of run. In fact, our escape was practically the reenactment of a fairy tale, but that even abetted our bid for freedom. We flushed out the TV fables of Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, and Easy Rider with hopes for a better ending.

- Ian Christe

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BAFFLER路

57

Ho"W" Far Has It Gone?

HCXU FAR HAS IT GONE?

YOU BE THE JUDGE: Are you SICK and TIRED of the 60's generation?

Can you stomach one more "debate" between them and their WWII parents?

AIfISTC1N (J CBfIlAT/1JiAL IIIIRfARE

FIHlIIf

mM

Are you disgusted at the right wing/ left wing power monopoly that leaves us out in the cold?

rlI6AnCH

you feel poisoned by exposure to O-IQY~C) Do their toxic ideologies?

If so you are not alone. HOW FAR HAS IT GONE exposes the REAL roots of the social war between the boomer and WWII generations, and why their anachronistic battles continue to monopolize the agenda today.

The truth about the 60's has been lost in legend, nostalgia, and outright lies.

How far has it gone? Just what is "IT" anyway? "

,

Published by:

T~

OZITHIU1Vl PRESS '-

,

I,

$10.00 per book. Please include postage: $1.25 per book Send check or money order payable to: Beverly Garside, P.O. Box 382, Severn, MD 21144-0382.

Name:

------------------------------------

Address: Quantity _ _ Price each $10.00 Postage

muumuu 58 â&#x20AC;˘

BAFFLER

WE SHIP FAST! ummm

Total_ __

I'

The District Supervisor Robert W. Nedelkoff May, 1946.

Willard Rochester sat in his office in the Federal Building in Manhattan. He glanced at his watch. It was 10: 15 p.m. He heard, clunking below like the steps of Jacob Marley in the basement, the footsteps of the night watchman. He looked at the coffeepot, idly rubbing his belly, and absently licked the lower edge of his carefully trimmed mustache as he pondered whether to pour himself another cup. No, he thought. I'll try calling George again. He should be in by now. He looked at the file before him, yet again. Edwin Stanton Bradley, he thought. Bad name to be stuck with, ifyou're a Southern boy. Maybe that explains part of it. He put his finger on the page where the name of Dr. Lewis Wolberg appeared. I wonder ifhe's talked about it with his head-shrinker. But what would

Wolberg know about the War Between the States? Or Reconstruction - so called? That was before his people came here. He paused, then picked up the phone and dialed.

"The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, operator."

George H. White's head jerked up from the pillow as the phone rang. He stubbed out his cigarette, grasped the bottle of Canadian Club obstructing the phone, set it to the side, and picked up the receiver. His eyes focused on the ceiling and he cleared his throat.

"White here."

"Hello, George."

"Hello, Colonel. How are things?"

"Weeell," Rochester drawled, "up 'til about three or so, there wasn't much doing.

But then one of the fellows from NYPD came over and said: 'While you're in town, take a look at this.' He handed me a file on an Edwin S. Bradley II. Ring a bell?"

"No, not really."

"When was the last time you used a typewriter with a reversible ribbon?"

"I wrote a memo to the Commissioner yesterday."

"OK. The boy I'm talking about - his grandaddy invented the reversible ribbon.

Used it for his adding machines first."

"This kid's from the Bradley family? The adding machine people?"

Though he was not facing White, Rochester nodded. "Yep. Not really a kid, though, George. He's ah ... just turned thirty-two. Just a little younger than you."

"Well, Colonel, what did the NYPD have him in for?"

"We were both out of the country, I think, when this happened, but - you rem emBAFFLER路

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ber when this fairy David Kammerer was killed? This teen-ager he had the hots on stabbed him with a Boy Scout knife, threw his body in the Hudson? Turned himself in after a couple days, the cops didn't believe him, and just then the body comes back up?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah, that rings a bell."

"Well, the kid - Lucius somebody, 1 think - tells a couple friends about it right after he does it, and after he talks they get brought in as material witnesses. This fellow Bradley was one of 'em."

"I see."

"Couple weeks ago, some hepster by the name of Dorio gets picked up in what turns out to be an apartment Bradley has on Henry Street. Possession. So they check the files on Bradley, then hit the pharmacies. Find a couple of prescriptions with a Dr. Greco's signature - made out to Edwin Bradley."

"His real name?" White chuckled. "Either he's a yo-yo, or he's new."

"He's green, all right."

"Morphine?"

"D-I-L-L-A-V-D-I-D." "Colonel, I'm sorely tempted to laugh." "'Fraid I'm not," Rochester murmured. "I mean, George, 1 made some calls, and I've made some notes. We're talking about a kid here who just really got on the wrong track, but he hasn't gotten too wrong yet. I mean, yes, the word is he is hangin' out with Bill Garver."

"Overcoat Bill? I believe 1 could choose better company than that, Colonel."

"Who couldn't?" Rochester replied. "But what I'm getting at, George, is - young Bradley was not living at Henry Street. He's up on West 103rd. Lives in a walkup with a war widow named Joan, she's on bennies in the coffee; she has a daughter - and there's some Jew kid going to Columbia named Carlo Lanin in there, too. The sources say Bradley's a real soft-spoken, polite sort of fellow. Got Southern manners."

"Where's he from?"

"St. Louis."

"Full name?"

"Edwin Stanton Bradley II." "Whoa, Colonel! Sounds a bit more Carpetbagger than South to me!"

"Whah, Ah'd seay thuh same thang mahself, son," replied Rochester, affecting for purposes of emphasis an accent that had partly slipped away in the decades since he'd come north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Then he went back to his normal phrasing. "But the truth is, George, that was his granddaddy's name, the inventor. Born in Ohio. Came to St. Louis in 1878 to make his fortune - not unlike a lot of Southerners, back then. Made the machine, came down with TB, moved to Citronelle, Alabama - not too far from Mobile where I was in '27.

Young Bradley's dad was part raised there, part in St. Louis. Two stars on the Southern Cross."

"And his mother's family?"

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"Why, George, there you have some history." Rochester made a sweeping motion, pushing his empty coffee cup to the far side of his desk. "Remember Carter Ledbetter?"

"Sure, Colonel. The PR man." White shifted his 250 pound bulk slightly as he reached for his bottle. "Worked for the Rockefellers, right?"

"And Hitler, right before he died, 'round '34. I think Putzi Hanfstaengl arranged that. Well, Ledbetter was young Bradley's uncle, on his mother's side. And it so happens that when I was down in Washington in '33, this fella who went to Princeton with Ledbetter had a party for him. I was sitting at the next table, overheard Ledbetter talking about his father, this Methodist preacher, originally from Cedartown, Georgia-" "That's right by Atlanta, isn't it, Colonel?"

"J ust to the west, about 30 miles, I think. Anyway, the dam yankees - present company always excepted, George - came through en route to Atlanta, and Ledbetter was talking about his pappy, at the age of fifteen, fightin' Sherman's men barehanded while they torched the barn and stole the chickens. The way Ledbetter told it, George, I'm telling you, you could just about hear the ember cracklin' at the end and smell the rotgut on them Yankee breaths. If Bradley heard it when he was a young'un, from old Carter or from his mama, much less his grandaddy, then I'm telling you - wouldn't matter ifhe was Ben Butler Bradley, he'd still be a Southern boy."

"I'll trust your judgment on that, Colonel. Are you planning to look into talking with his judge when the case comes up?"

"I think I'll first look to talk to Bradley myself, George. I called up this fellow I know in St. Louis, Blodgett - works at the Federal Reserve there - asked him about Bradley.

Turns out he knows his dad. Says the father's a bit of a quiet type, like his son. but Blodgett mentioned a very interesting wrinkle on all this."

Rochester paused.

"George, in June of'41 young Bradley showed up in Bill Donovan's office." '" 41?" White gasped. "And five years later he's forging misspelled prescriptions?"

Rochester nodded. "Hard to believe. Right after Bill got COl set up, Blodgett mentioned it to Bradley's father, and it turned out David Bruce had discussed it with Carter Ledbetter's brother. So young Bradley, being a Harvard grad - Class of' 36, I thinkhad just got turned down for a Naval commission on eyesight, takes the train to DC and shows up at COl with a letter from his uncle. What Bradley said to his dad and his dad told Blodgett was that Bill was ready to take him on, but James Baxter turned out to have been his Harvard housemaster and hadn't liked him at all, for some reason. Well, hell, Baxter is a Yankee, that explains the half of it."

Rochester reached for his coffee cup absent-mindedly.

"Why, Colonel, it's a damn shame nobody thought to refer him to you."

"Well, sometimes things don't turn out like you'd like' em, George. I tell you, if I'd just been able to bring Bradley into the OSS - we sure could have used a few more men with the right stuff in there. American names, American education, American attitudes.

Anyway, if I'd been able to do that, he wouldn't be where he is today. But, y'know, George, something tells me it's not too late."

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"Kind of wondering, Colonel- was he in the war at all?"

"I called the Pentagon." Willard's eye, wandering across his wall, fastened upon the calendar. "Bradley was called up in January '42. Turned out he had a finger joint missing. He talked to a psychiatrist, who said he'd deliberately amputated it."

"He was that much of a slacker?"

"Naw, he'd done it in '37. The doctor didn't quite seem to get to the reason, but he advised a civilian disability discharge. According to what the NYPD has on file, he was an exterminator after that -" "Like, pests?"

"Yep, in Chicago. He seems like one of those college kids we had a lot of in the depression, trying to figure out what to do. The NYPD file says he was at some nickeland-dime ad agency around' 40, and - why, George, I almost forgot! Blodgett says he was a cub for the Post-Dispatch when he was home one summer from Harvard. 50 maybe he's got that writing bug. You know, that might explain it, right there."

"How so, Colonel?"

"This NYPD file on the Kammerer case I have here says that this Carlo kid was into Rimbaud, 'derangement of the senses' - that whole Upper West 5ide bohemian thing."

"Knockout drops."

"Well, Y'knOW, some of 'em start out with cinnamon oil on a toothpick, and it goes from there."

Rochester paused. "It's getting late, George. I think I'll call this Bradley boy up, and go home. Tell Jake Ehrlich to turn down a Yankee client for me."

"Will do, Colonel."

The phone rang at the apartment on West 103rd Street at 10:30. Joan stopped chewing her plain bagel. She picked up the receiver, but her palsied hand immediately dropped it.

With the aplomb of Sir Walter Raleigh stooping before his monarch, Carlo Lanin dashed across the room, reached down and picked it up.

"HeI-IIoow, Maison-en-Enferrr!" he purred, in his best trans-tunnel tones.

Willard Rochester winced, then spoke.

"This Edwin Bradley's residence?"

"Indeed it is. Would you like to speak to Mister Bradley?"

"Yes, sir, I would. This is Colonel Willard Rochester calling."

"Just a moment, Kernel."

Lanin looked over at Bradley, who was seated in a ratty Victorian chair with the stuffing coming out, doing his best, in posture and demeanor, to look as if he were instead in a rattan chair at Raffles.

Bradley pushed his glasses up with his middle finger and arose.

"Colonel?"

"Says he's Willard Rochester. Isn't that the District Supervisor?"

"Yes. But that's Garver calling. Hold on."

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Bradley picked up the phone.

"Dammit, Bill, this ain't funny! Now-" But the Colonel interrupted.

"Mr. Bradley, I could not help overhearing your exchange with your young friend."

"Hey, dammit -" "Please hear me out, Mr. Bradley. Our mutual acquaintance Tom Waring can vouch for my being, in fact, Willard Rochester."

As soundlessly as the shutting of a padded door in an asylum, Bradley's features shifted from irritation to surprise, and his shoulders sank slightly.

"I never said anything to Garver about Tom Waring. Where do you know him from?"

"As you know, Mr. Bradley, his family enjoys some prominence in Charleston, and I had the pleasure, some years ago, of dinner at his father's house when I was down there on business for the Bureau."

Bradley's face went blank, then a bit curious.

"Is there a reason for your calling at this hour, Colonel?"

"Well, my apologies for interrupting your preparations for, ah, retiring, Mr. Bradley, but I've had occasion to look at a file that the New York Po-lice Department sent to us concerning your appearance in court next month, and there were some aspects about it that I couldn't help noticing, such as, for example, your education down in Los Alamos, just when Tom Waring was there - by the way, I just telephoned him on - urn, to discuss an editorial in the News and Courier."

"And?" "Yes, well, this was before 1 came across your me, and I'll be talking to him again, or, likely, writing next week, and-" Bradley had been sampling a bit of the Benzedrine in the household, and he beat the Colonel to the punch.

"Well, before you tell him I said hello, 1 imagine we should meet first."

"Why, that's just what 1 had in mind, Mr. Bradley. Does tomorrow afternoon at, say, 4 pm, sound right to you?"

"My schedule's not really that cut and dry nowadays, Colonel Rochester. 1 see no problem with that."

"Excellent, then. I'll put it in my book. Looking forward to meeting you, Mr. Bradley."

"The same, Colonel."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

Bradley hung up the phone. Lanin had soaked in every word.

"It was him."

"I t' s the Big Man all right, Carlo." Bradley shook his head, then stared at a corner of the room. "And you know, I guess those junkies are right. He doesn't need to tap my phone. Tom Waring. Jeez. 1 just have the feeling that every other name I'd drop -

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Harvard classmates, the guy who sat next to me in third grade - he'd know."

"K," Carlo Lanin said, dragging the 'initial out. Bradley turned to look at him.

"The Castle."

Bradley nodded. "Yeah. But it's my brother who's the architect."

Joan began laughing uproariously, and on that note the conversation moved on to Rilke for a while.

Meanwhile, Willard Rochester closed up his office. The night janitor approached, a West Indian who had lived in the San Juan Hill neighborhood in the West Sixties until it was evacuated to be converted into commercial properties.

The janitor spoke, his Grenadian singsong only slightly muted by the years in Manhattan. His voice made Rochester think back to a party he'd attended in Newport before the war. A woman over bedecked in jewels had turned to him; they'd been discussing Trinidad.

"The way those people down there speak, Mr. Rochester. Isn't it just pure, ah, wordmusic?"

"Twelve-tone word-music," he'd reflexively replied. From the expression on her face he knew she'd taken it the wrong way: she'd turned to the person opposite and begun to speak. He hadn't controlled his expression well enough. He wondered if she even knew what twelve-tone music was ....No. Forget that. Look at the man. Mild smile. Loosen lips.

Don't show teeth.

"Closing up for tonight, Mister Rochester?"

Nod "Yes, Joseph. You can go in and clean now." Everything locked? Yes. "Thank you, sir. Goodnight."

Another nod Expel air through upper teeth to resemble acknowledgment. Go on.

It was not until the elevator doors had closed that the fist in Rochester's jacket pocket unclenched.

*** The secretaty looked up. Her fortyish well-permed head jerked to the left involuntarily at the sight of the man before her: clearly in his thirties, yet bearing a cadaverous appearance which brought to mind an elderly, none-too-reputable "confirmed bachelor." Individuals like this often presented themselves in this room. She wondered whether the receptionist at Customs got such people. ''1' m here to see Colonel Rochester."

"Is the Colonel expecting you?"

"Yes. I'm Edwin Bradley."

She pressed the intercom button and announced him.

Bradley turned to seat himself, but before he'd fully lowered his weight into the chair, the door behind the receptionist's desk opened, and a pot-bellied man with a springy step emerged. The afternoon sunlight from the window glanced off his high hairline.

"Mr. Bradley! Step right in, please."

Bradley followed him in, and scanned the room without moving his head. The

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Colonel shaking hands with Roosevelt" with Truman, with both Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover. The Colonel and Harry Anslinger. The Colonel and the present mayor of New York. The Colonel and laGuardia - though this last picture was smaller than the others. Bradley looked down at the table. Two folders were on it.

Rochester gestured to the chair and said, "Have a seat." Bradley obliged. Rochester went around and seated himself behind the desk.

"If you don't mind my asking, Colonel, were you in the European or the Pacific theater?"

Rochester looked him in the eye. "Actually, Mr. Bradley, I was in both. Generally in the Army Air Force, doing paratroop training." He paused. "Prior to going overseas, I worked in the Washington area - DC, that is - and also around New York."

Bradley looked at the folders. "If you've gone through those, Colonel, you probably know my military history, such as it is. I studied flying in '41. Wanted to be a Navy flier.

Would've been in competition, I guess."

"Well, Mr. Bradley, I met quite a few Navy fliers in the war. There was some rivalry between the services, but not all that much."

Bradley had tired of small talk. He peered over his spectacles and inquired, in his flintiest tone, "Why am I here, Colonel Rochester?"

To the older man's ear, Bradley seemed to stress his last name, as if the fact that the Colonel shared a moniker with a popular black comedian had just come to mind. Rochester could feel the blood start rushing to his face. Time to get to business.

He grabbed the folder. "You are here, Mr. Bradley, because - well, because in my judgment, a young man who has grown up in a good home, has good manners as, ah, you've demonstrated, has a degree from Harvard, has studied anthropology -" Bradley cut in. "Pardon me for interrupting, Colonel, but how do you know I studied anthropology? I don't think I mentioned that to the NYPD. They just had my degree."

Rochester looked at my table and placed both hands on it, fingers outstretched.

"Well, to be honest, Mr. Bradley, after looking through your file I telephoned an old friend of mine on the anthropology faculty up there, Carleton Coon, and asked about you."

"Did you tell him how my name had come up?"

"No, I really phrased it.. .I suppose he thought I was sounding you out for an undercover job or something."

Bradley's face grew stern. "Colonel, I think you know that, given my present.. interests, that's not really an impression I'm interested in people having."

Willard Rochester thought about giving the trust-fund fiend a look to show who held the cards, but decided against it. Then Bradley smiled.

"Well, Colonel, I have to say I was a lot more interested in anthropology than in my undergrad major, English literature. I haven't met Professor Coon, but doesn't he, iH remember correctly, specialize in the North African tribes? The Berbers and so forth?"

Rochester nodded.

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The Hippogryph Files are drawn by Patrick Welch. Write to Hippogryph at 6 Nevena Court, Effra Road, Brixton, London SW2 IBT, Great Britain.

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"That's one place I would have liked to visit during the war. Algiers, Casablanca, Tangier, that whole area. The Casbah .... " "So you could help, ah, 'round up the usual suspects?'" Rochester asked, in an imitation of Claude Rains that Bradley found amusing.

"Well, I'd read about it before then. 1 was quite a fiend for spy fiction - John Buchan, Somerset Maugham - when I was a teenager."

Rochester licked his lips.

"I read quite a few of Buchan's books when then came out, myself. And I read the 'Ashenden' stories when they were in, was it Smart Set?" Bradley shrugged. "That was before my time, Colonel."

"Later 1 started on D. H. Lawrence and Eliot. By the way, didn't Eliot come to Harvard a few times when you were there?"

"He did, Colonel, but 1 didn't go to any of his get-togethers. Lot of middle-aged ladies, you know, endless cups of tea, and the level of conversation ... " Rochester nodded. "Can't say I've gotten to know Eliot - Carleton Coon used to see him a lot, in England as well as the Yard - but you've got a point. Even if a man whose work you admire doesn't turn out to be an utter disappointment in person, you may find it difficult to really draw out the, ah, character in him that you've encountered in his writings."

"You mentioned Lawrence," Bradley said. "Hope I'm not making you out to be older than you are, but did you... " "Meet him, Mr. Bradley?"

"Oh, you can call me Ed." Bradley was almost starting to warm to the fellow.

"Well, all right, Ed. Now, to answer your, ah, incipient question, 1 was nearly out of my twenties when he died. I found out later I was in Mexico at the same time as him, and I was in Albuquerque once, and heard that he was in Taos, up by where you went to school, but I was working for Customs at the time, and they kept us moving."

"Albuquerque is pretty far inland for Customs, Colonel."

"They had an airfield there already, Ed, and I'd stopped in to talk to the staff about smuggling. As you probably know, New Mexico's got a lot of things moving in and out all the time, from the Colorado border down to Mexico. Speaking of Mexico, did you ever read The Plumed Serpent?"

"Yes I did, when 1 was at Harvard the second time. Mayan culture was my main . " tnterest.

"It was?" Colonel Rochester perked up. "You know, during Prohibition Customs sent me down to Cancun, Belize, Puerto Barrios in Guatemala - you know Puerto Barrios?"

"Just through National Geographic, Colonel. 1 never got around to field work down there. As you know, you haven't really gotpeopleto work with, just ruins and codexes."

"True." Rochester looked down, a bit pensively. "I take it you studied the calendar?"

"That and the hierarchic structure - aspects of it, anyway - were what really fascinated me."

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"As you know, Ed, that calendat was more sophisticated than either the Julian or Gregorian calendars. And yet all three functioned, really, to service an agrarian society."

"The difference being that the Julian and Gregorian calendars employ a decimal system, and the Mayan doesn't, Colonel- or should I call you Willard?"

Rochester smiled with two-thirds of his mouth, thinly and not so broadly as to be a smirk.

"Whichever. I'm from the South, and, as you know, being a Colonel carries some weight with us."

"Even now?"

"Well, perhaps especially now. I received my title through military promotion; I didn't go to a barbecue in Nashville or Lexington-" Bradley raised his eyebrows a bit at the reference to the latter city. The Colonel understood, and lowered his eyes apologetically.

"- or Louisville. Anyway, I didn't get it through the peacetime route of telling the Governor's wife she was so charming a belle that Selznick was a fool not to make her Scarlett."

The Colonel's expression of mild misogyny agreed with Bradley. But he couldn't while away the next few hours talking to this badgeman; some friends of Dorio's were expecting him at a diner at 5:30, and he still had to stop and get their shit. There was no question they'd be on time, and Bradley did not consider it prudent to give his previous meeting as an excuse for being late. He leaned forward.

"My apologies for not having more time to chat, Colonel, but I am supposed to meet a couple of people for dinner at five-thirty. As you know, I am part Yankee - my grandfather was named for a man we shall pass over in silence - and I'm part native St. Louis. My grand-dad was the man behind the adding machine - so I've got some precision and punctuality there, like a stiff-necked 01' Northerner. Now it's true that on my mother's side I'm Southern, so I have to be courteous - and I feat that tardiness, to my dinner guests, would be discourteous. So I'm sure you understand that I need to know whether you're suggesting some direction that I should follow in order to obtain ... " "To obtain. This is your first narcotics-related offense, that's come to the attention of the law."

"And I have to be truthful, Colonel. I'm enough of a Southerner that I'm not going to talk. Not about anybody, not about myself in any way that will implicate anybody. I don't care what other people say about me in this context. Snitching back at a snitch isn't the same as fighting fire with fire."

"That's true, Ed. You're doing your forebears honor." Rochester looked up from the table. There were tears welling in his eyes. "There will be no deals. I'll talk to the judge.

I'll explain that you're an educated, cultured fellow who's just curious about life. Suppose I say that you're an amateur anthropologist, really, who's doing field work on Times Square?"

"Well, do you think the judge will hear that out with a straight face, Colonel?"

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"Aw, Ed, this is a Yankeewe're talking about! I could tell him you've got a Carnegie Foundation fellowship to do this, kind of hint that Jock Whitney might put him on a guest list or John W. Davis may want to call him ifhe goes easy, and he'd believe it."

"We don't want to be untruthful, Colonel."

"No, we do not. But - you would say that your present interests are relevant to your anthropological pursuits?"

Ulte so. " "Q' "And, though having pursued graduate study... " ''I'm not a professional at the subject."

"Well, then shall I discuss it with him?"

"Would I be expected to go to a private hospital?"

"What this judge likes to do, Ed, is send first offenders, ifhe looks kindly, home."

Ed frowned. "What do you mean?"

"You'd be going to stay with your parents."

"That's a bit - well, I'm thirty-two, Colonel."

"Ed, the other option is the narcotics ward of the state hospital in Albany."

"I don't think I'd care for that, Colonel. I, uh, reside with a young lady - as well as Carl, who you talked to when you called last night. Anyway, the young lady is from Albany, and she's heard things about the state hospital, and from what she's told me, I think I'll be able to get through a few months in St. Louis, no matter how muggy summer gets out there."

"I understand."

Bradley got up to leave, but Rochester raised his hand. "But Ed, before you go, just one more thing."

Bradley sat back down.

"You mentioned a young lady from Albany. My apologies for knowing this from the... sources, but she's... she's your, ah-" "Not quite a fiancee, Colonel, but we can say, perhaps, she's my intended. You understand that that's a problem I have with going to St. Louis. She does work, from time to time, but apartments are getting expensive, what with the housing shortage, and her folks do not contribute to her upkeep, and Carlo is in the merchant marine off and on, and-" "And you're the steadiest source of income in the household."

"Yes. I get a monthly allowance from my parents, but it won't be enough to cover the bills. We're behind in our payments already. But if worst comes to worst and she and her daughter are evicted, a friend of ours has strongly indicated he'll let them be his guests until I can remove myself from - well, I was anticipating Rikers Island or the hospital, but now... " "It's good that you have friends that will take her and her daughter in, Ed. Butand you understand I'm not putting this in a file - this is not somebody on the nod that -" "Rest easy, Colonel. Spence may look upon a reefer at times and feel temptation

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com in' on, but I'd say a Ballantine with his prime rib is-" "Ed. Wait. I've heard of Spence." Rochester went through the second file, pausing to look up and explain, "This is the one that led the NYPD to you," before continuing.

Then he reached a page of the manuscript, studied it, and looked up. Bradley was looking out the window. Rochester appreciated the young man's refusal to peer.

"Ed. You can't be serious about putting Joan and, ah-" "Margie. Three next month. Darling child."

"Yes but - you can't be serious about putting them up with - with-" "Colonel, Spence is a reliable, honest, truthful-" "Reliable, honest, truthful nigger, son."

Bradley's earnest face changed to one of such impassivity as would do honor to a fakir on the coals. But it was Rochester's turn to be earnest. He shook his head.

"Ed, you know better."

"No. I don't know better."

"You feel responsible for this woman. And her daughter. There isn't a file on Joan but I've seen her mentioned in reports. We're both gentlemen, but you understand the principle."

Bradley's upper and lower teeth were together as he spoke. "What is the principle, Colonel?"

"That ...well, she's a Yankee, from what these reports say, but they also say she's got good manners and spirit, like-" "Like Scarlett O'Hara?" Bradley asked sardonically.

"Well, dammit, Ed, fictional characters aside, she's, ah-" "White. And Spence is colored. And we know what that means, we Southern men."

"Yes!" Rochester shouted. "We know what that means. We know-" Bradley got up, almost kicking his chair aside. "Look, Colonel. I know we've both read some of the same books, but I never got past page two of The Klansman. What I've read are books that talk about Robert E. Lee going to the Confederate Congress and urging the emancipation of slaves in exchange for battlefield service -" "And you know that his feet were held to the fire, Ed. The Rothschilds were telling Benjamin that that was a condition to recognition by England and -" "You're anti-Semitic, Colonel? And to think your manners when you talked to my young flatmate Carlo were -" "Forget Carlo. I know Benjamin was the 'brains of the Confederacy.' Some brains - rushing off to London -" "The rest of the Cabinet were trying to flee too," Bradley noted. "Now I know just what's coming next - after the war Lee wrote to Albert Pike and Forrest and-" "He did. He may not have said so but he lived five years long enough to know he was wrong to let them - to even think about giving them guns." By now, Rochester's cheeks were puffing out, and his entire face was crimson.

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Klan and told a Negro audience, standing before the Stars and Stripes -" "Got that from some damyankee historian at Harvard, eh?" shrieked Rochester.

"The article I saw quoted from a white eyewitness, a Southerner. Forrest said, 'We have but one flat, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color but not in sentiment.'"

Rochester calmed. "I never saw that article. When was that supposed to happen?"

"1875."

Rochester was silent for a long time. Then he said, "Ed, you're too young to fuck yourself up. You're too smart to spend the rest of your life with the - the humancattle.

Why don't you go back and read Lothrop Stoddard again? I mean, you know you can't help knowing better, son. It's in your blood. You're white and you know it, you've always known it. There are some things you've got to learn, Ed." Rochester's voice grew softer, and his eyes became more intense. Bradley's psychiatrist used hypnotherapy, and Ed felt an uneasy deja vu. He didn't know if Rochester was trying to put him in a trance, and he didn't want to find out. "Colonel, I'm leaving." He turned his back.

From behind him he heard, in a tone so neutral it was difficult to determine whether a request or a command was being issued. "Don't tell anyone about this conversationany part of it."

"Very well, Colonel." He glided out the door, past the receptionist, down the hall and into the elevator as ifhe were walking on air. He turned to the black uniformed man at the controls and said, "Ground floor, please." He thought about making a comment about the weather, to conceal the tension he felt building, but the elevator operator seemed to understand.

*** September, 1993.

In a hotel room in the Midwest, Edwin Bradley stood and raised a glass of champagne. He was at a table with three others: a friend of his from the Pacific Northwest whose label had just issued a record of Bradley's readings, a rock star who had played the guitar backing on the record, and the rock star's wife.

"A toast to the success of our collaboration," Bradley rasped in a voice which, emanating from his pallid yet leathery frame, sounded almost youthful.

"SkoJ!" piped the rock star in a voice incongruous to his large, comic-book-hero's physique. His wife and the label-owner said nothing, their attention having been momentarily distracted by a video appearing on the television set on the far side of the room.

The rock star leaned forward. "Ed, I've been, you know, involved in some of the same kind of stuff you used to do as a young man."

"Such as?" Bradley raised one eyebrow.

"Well," the rock star continued, "what I mean is, when I was using that 01' earinfection medication-" "Ah, yes, works wonders. I remember when 1'd stop by to meet people in clubs that

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music and crowds talking would, ah, angry up my ears. Marvelously effective."

"But what I was saying was I used to run into people who'd been around in Harry Anslinger's time, around-" "Well, his time lasted until 1962. that would have been about a decade before you came in."

"I was born in '68. But I got talking with them about agents in the old Bureau, and I was wondering-did you have a specific man in mind when you wrote about the District Supervisor?"

"Don't tell anyone about this conversation-any part of it."

The Colonel's words rang in Edwin Bradley's ear as if he'd heard them just that afternoon. Well, the old cracker had kept his word. Ed had gotten four months with his folks, no more, no less. And then there was New Orleans, the next year, when the judge, knowing full well Bradley wasn't going to serve any two years in Angola ifhe could help it, told him he could travel out of state before the case came up. The lawyer said that he'd handled that. But then again, the Bureau had a field office in the Crescent City, and the attorney had indicated that the investigation into him had centered on whether he was involved with interstate trafficking of the devil weed-clearly the New Orleans office had info on him from New York on whether he had any propensity to sell beyond what was needed for his habit. Had the Colonel gone to bat for him then, despite their differences on race? He didn't know, so he was cautious as he turned to the rock star.

"I fear, young man, that the circumstances don't permit me to confirm or deny that."

The guitarist nodded. They went back to picking at their vegetarian chow mein.

Bradley wondered, for the thousandth time that year: Never heard about the Colonel

after he left the Bureau, when was that, '51? Some talk on the street he was workingfor the IRS, then was fired, was what I heard before I left for Europe in '53. How old would he be now? Looked to be almost fifty, maybe? More like mid-forties. Outside of that pot-belly he looked fit. When he got in that rage I thought he looked like somebody who could throw a punch or take one. Where would he be now ifhe were still alive?

Bradley checked his watch; it read 12:15. Time to retire before long.

***

The moonlight bore down relentlessly on the stores and restaurants of Pacific Street in Santa Cruz, California. Although the street was the hub of downtown, it was curiously deserted, even though the courthouse clock in the distance read 1: 15.

The nonagenarian pacing down the sidewalk looked around warily. What was he doing here? He was not unfamiliar with Santa Cruz. He'd stopped by here often in the late Fifties, when he was in Monterey to sound out foreign-language graduates for his branch of the service. Then again, in the late Sixties when he'd been up in the Bay Area practically fighting those damn bastards Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver with his bare hands, he'd often headed across the mountains to Santa Cruz. Between his keen ears and the eavesdropping equipment in his pockets, he'd picked up, amid the gossip of the hippies and long-haired trust-funded radicals from UCSC, some really solid inforBAFFLER路

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mati on. And then there was that occasion he'd never forget.

Must have been around the end of the Summer of Love-1967. He'd been doing some fact-finding in the Haight. It was enjoyable. Usually when he did positive intelligence, it was under circumstances that really made him feel the weight on his shoulders.

But when he started out at Divisadero and made his way west, he felt mellow. Sure, he was hearing too much of that damn Otis Redding coming out of the windows of these Victorian houses, but when he was past the Grateful Dead's pad, he'd hear bluegrass and country half the time. Sooner or later, the kids were going to come around.

He'd decided to go down Route 1 to Santa Cruz before going back inland. Sunset on the Pacific-nothing could beat it. Few things soothed his soul like the colors that the hills would turn as he gazed at them from his living room window, but to turn and look at the ocean-or to look straight ahead and get the whole view-why, it was things like that that made him ready to take on the duties of a job in which there was something to be done in every time zone of the world.

Upon arriving in Santa Cruz he'd headed down to a little cafe where he could always count on picking something up. He'd no sooner seated himself than he looked over to a table across the room and saw, sitting smack between two sisters of considerable local renown, his old protege Tyrone. the hair a bit grayer and quite a bit shaggier than the last time he'd seen him (and that went for the mustache, too), but there was no mistaking the ultra-bright, bushy-tailed (and buck-toothed) sidekick of days past.

Rochester had waited for a couple of minutes. Ty's eyes kept scanning the roomhe'd sure kept his intelligence "chops" up, to b~rrow a word from the youngsters. Then he'd spotted him. His eyebrows had done the most prodigious triple-take this side of a Laurel and Hardy two-reeler. Rochester had wanted to walk across the room, give him a bear hug, and say: "Ty, you old rascal! How're you doin'? You know, I was talkin' to old 'Bish' the other day, and he says, 'Heard anything about Ty lately, Colonel? Last I heard he was in some rundown part of LA, but that was a while back.' He was worryin' about you-and I was too. I don't know if you've heard, but I'm a Californee-an myself now. Live just over those hills. Next time you're in the South Bay look me up .... " But he'd just nodded and walked out of the place.

Now he was in Santa Cruz again but things looked different, very different. His shadow seemed to stretch fifty feet ahead of him under the combined illumination of the streetlamp and the full moon.

Suddenly, an animal came around the corner.

Rochester stopped and looked at it. At first it seemed to be an oversized Doberman, but as it approached there was no mistaking its true identity. It was a big, sleek, well-fed California black panther.

Rochester froze, paralyzed for a moment, as the beast turned its head and looked right in his eyes. Then he turned and ran. Behind him he could hear a growl and then silence, but he dared not stop.

As he came out of downtown and approached Route 17 he turned to look. the

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yellow eyes seemed to be hovering just over his shoulder. At first he seemed to be running up the highway at a pace he knew to be too great for an Olympic athlete, much less someone of his age. Then he was leaping high into the air, as ifhe were running across the moon rather than the Santa Cruz mountains. The panther growled again, but this time the animal sounded more distant. Rochester kept moving.

Before he knew it he'd bounded over the mountains and landed in a quaint little relic of prewar-World War I, that is-times. He saw a park with an old fashioned bandstand, ran to the bench, and sat down. He turned his head left, then right. He must have shaken the giant cat. He leaned back, took a deep breath, and wondered where he was. He spotted a sign: Welcome to Los Gatos.

Like a thousand giant fireflies beaming at once, the darkness before him filled with yellow eyes, then silhouettes.

Somewhere, a clock began to toll.

Rochester opened his eyes. He was in his own bed. He looked across the room and saw the dresser, the mirror. He was awake.

The phone was ringing. He reached over to his left side and picked up the receiver as he checked the watch that only left his wrist when he showered. 2: 15 a.m.

"Colonel! Colonel!"

He'd been getting too many of these type of calls in the middle of the night, but he had to be patient. "Yes, Dick. What is it?"

"Sorry to wake you up. But 1-" "Oh, don't worry, Dick, I wasn't sleeping too well anyway. Something I ate didn't quite agree."

"All right, but I thought you should know-somebody just woke me up and said your name came up tonight."

Rochester sat up.

"When, Dick? And where?"

"At a party some of the Mellons were throwing out in Virginia. A girl from Manhattan said her friend Mark Marlowe was going around pitching a book about you at the publisher she works at."

"Just a second, Dick." He put the receiver down, got out of bed, and walked across to his Pc. He turned it on, pressed a couple of buttons, and slipped in a disk. He pressed some keys, and the screen filled with greenish-yellow letters which cast a macabre glow across his wrinkled yet placid face. He picked up the phone next to the printer. "OK, Dick, I know this Marlowe fellow. He's a young nigra, about 30. Used to work in bookstores in Manhattan, then he was hocking, ah, slightly singed Armani suits for a while, if you get my drift. He started going around to publishers and agents last February."

"Has he gone to Oliver Stone yet?" Dick almost yelled.

"Doesn't seem to know the boy wonder, no. From what he's reported to have said, I['d guess he's just going on rumors. You know, Dick, these Times Square hustlers-of BAFFLER路

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the old school-seem to hear about, well, everything. But they always hear it from somebody who heard it from somebody who et cetera, and sooner or later the informants in the chain wind up being anonymous. Not the sort of information you would present to Ray or Clare and expect them to be grateful for it."

"Yeah, I guess so." Dick was calmer now.

"But one thing I've been keeping an eye out for that hasn't happened. I have been very reliably informed that this, ah, garment-grifter knows an olllld friend of yours whom I once spoke to on the phone a spell ago."

"What old friend of mine?"

"Lit'ry gentleman by the name of, ah, Carlo Lanin."

"Hey! That fucking fag's no friend of mine," yelled Dick, reverting to his old Navy form. "Just because I met the goddamn cocksucker twice and-" "And you got into a couple of wagers with him. Now, in my part of the country, Dick, a couple of friendly bets does put a relationship a step above mere acquaintanceship. And to think I didn't have you figured for a betting man! I mean, I never heard of Bobby Riggs hustling you for a twenty-spot or so-" "Please, Colonel. Is Marlowe a problem?"

"Not at this juncture, Dick. What I was about to say is that, ifhe started talking to Lanin, and looking in Lanin's archives, I'd start to wonder. But he hasn't done anything like that yet. 1'd say that if! were in your shoes I'd sip a little Postum, get some shuteye, and just stay calm."

"Well, if you don't see any cause for concern, Colonel, I guess I can do that."

"Anything else, Dick?"

"No, Colonel."

"Well, just tell all the folks at the Army-Navy hello for me, and I'll be talkin' to you later."

"Goodnight, Colonel."

"Goodnight."

Rochester hung up the phone and looked out the window. There seemed to be lightning in the distance, but it looked to be a ways off. Nonetheless he might have to stay in tomorrow and get caught up on work.

He looked over to his dresser. There was a small but authentic Mayan bust on it.

Sometimes when he saw it he remembered a young man he'd met many years ago who was interested in the Mayans. As soon as he'd spotted Carlo Lanin's name on the computer screen he thought about Ed Bradley. Somewhere in the basement he had Bradley's books in a corner. Amazing, the filth in them. What might that fellow have been if he hadn't fallen in with minority types? Rochester wondered. Last week he'd wandered into a B. Dalton's and had seen a trade-paperback anthology of what the cover called "splatter-punk" stories. Bradley's name was also on the cover. He'd opened it up and thumbed through to Bradley's story-a very interesting, if characteristically morbid anecdote concerning "Bloody" Bill Anderson, apparently set in the days following the surrender, when Quantrill had split off to make his way to Kentucky and 01' Bill had

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had to take on the damyankees himself. No doubt about it, Ed Bradley knew his Confederate history. How old was he now? Rochester had flipped over to the contributor's notes. "Born in 1914"-seventy-nine now. Was he finally starting to learn, at this advanced age? Then the Colonel had thought about how old he himself was now, and laughed.

Now he reached over and turned off the computer. He looked at the table next to the printer, on which twenty or so letters were stacked, awaiting an answer.Amazing; Rochester thought. When I met him, he was a kind o/stepfather to a two-year-old girl. Now he could be the great-grandfather-or great granduncle, or is it granduncle? Never can remember-o/some o/these youngsters who write to me.

He got back into bed and went to sleep, the distant noise of cars outside mingling with a rumble that might be thunder.

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WITH THIS POEM ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE Alec Dinwoodie This poem has been sent to you for aesthetic pleasure. The original is in England, but millions worldwide read it faithfUlly each day. It is not a virus, but an opportunity to gain aesthetic pleasure and pass it along to others. To do this you must pay for and distribute twenty gift subscriptions to this magazine, which will be reprinting the poem in all fUture issues. Cooperate within nine days and you will receive pleasure yourself.

Break the chain and you will suffer horribly. This threat is valid even if you are not stupid.

Note the following: a schizophrenic outpatient was disturbed by the poem and didn't want to waste money on the gift subscriptions. Nine days later he could no longer explain the holy texts he had spent years writing. A Rhodes scholar "didn't get it" and wallowed forever in mediocrity. A highly-placed publishing executive offered the poet a job. Three days later he received Kim Basinger in the mail! Women everywhere offered themselves freely to the poet and were rewarded with pay raises and extra vacation time.

Meanwhile, a man in a Third World country never even read the poem and contracted leprosy.

Derek Walcott complained when the poem mentioned him directly, but had secretly enjoyed the part about Kim Basinger. That same week he won a $7.2 million dollar Lotto jackpot and a second Nobel Prize for literature. However, no more of his own poems were published until he publicly vindicated the poet and signed over both checks. Tom Frank of The Bamer liked the part about the gift subscriptions but rejected the poem anyway. His girlfriend left him within a week, and he was plagued by expensive car repairs. When he decided to reconsider, he received a new T estarossa and a much better-looking girlfriend.

Send the rest of your money directly to the poet. Do not ignore this, it works.

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The Name-Caller Steve Healey It's the end of summer and the air is getting sligh tly sharper, slightly more articulate.

The annual Minnesota State Fair just rolled into town-a colossal affair of farm animals, live music, fireworks, exhibits, fried cheese curds, corndogs, carnival rides and games, etc. There's one very popular game called "Dump Bozo in the water." Here's how it works; a guy wearing a cheap clown costume sits on a collapsible board above a vat of water, and fair-goers pay money to throw balls at a small red dot; if they hit that dot the board collapses-Bozo gets dumped in the water.

To make it more enticing the clown shouts insults at the ball-throwers, pisses them off more and more, taunts them with personal barbs that usually come dangerously close to going too far, close to the nerve of a person's real fear. He's a professional namecaller, instantly assessing a person's physical features and gestures, locating their potential weakness, their soft spot, poking fun at it, highlighting it with ridicule and exaggeration, like a verbal caricaturist. He's got insults for everyone: fat people, short people, juveniles, senior citizens, tough guys, blondes, drunks, red-necks, hippies, yuppies, jocks, geeks, snobs, jar-heads, metal-heads, rappers, punks, whatever. He's an impromptu artist: in a blink he can make a parody of you and hurl it back at you.

The other day I was standing there among the many gathered to experience the Bozo experience. A guy in his early twenties stepped forward, paid two bills for five balls.

Bozo eyed him up and down, silently gathered information, ammunition, then let loose on him: "Hey, you grungy, long-haired freak! Where'd you get those ripped-up clothes anyway? Out back in a dumpster? I bet you don't even know how to throw that ball.

Hey you Nirvana-reject, I'm talking to you!"

Bozo released a prolonged cackle that trailed off into something like a smoker's hack. He'd gotten that guy where he lived and he knew it. He'd condemned him with a name. He'd stuck him with an identity, buried him in a category. In a split-second that guy had become a parody of the "grunge" look, a Nirvana-reject.

This says something about Nirvana, who've been deemed, whether they like it or not, one of the foremost icons of "grunge." Their unparalleled commercial success unquestionably changed their public status from obscure indie-rock uglies to high-profile top-40 darlings; and it all happened so fast, so very frighteningly fast. Subsequently there's been a flood of" grunge" bands into the pop music scene and a worldwide "grunge" movement (clothing, attitude, etc.), spawned more by corporate-controlled advertising and media than by grungy youth.

Inevitably, though, the bigger fall harder. The whole "grunge" thing has become so big and widespread and lucrative (without the organic and artistic growth needed for authenticity and humanity) that it's already over-used, stale, a cliche, a gaudy and smelly BAFFLER路 81

parody of its former self. Thus we have Bow berating a young man for his "grunge" motif, for being a silly and cheap imitation of the original (a Nirvana-reject).

Thus even Nirvana, that original seed, has become something else. Whether they like it or not, they've been transformed too, hyped beyond repair, churned through the cultural grinder. Nirvana has become a Nirvana-reject. The band members are probably not much different as people, and even as a rock band they're probably working in roughly the same musical territory as in their days of obscurity. But their position in the public eye, their cultural context, has changed wholesale: they've become enormously famous, enormously popular rock stars. Nirvana has been implicated in the crime because, if for no other reason, their last album went number one with a bullet.

Not only was Nirvana a "grunge" rock band (already I speak posthumously), more broadly their music was (before the hit record Nevermind) alternative rock, or indie rock, or progressive rock, or whatever it's called. So their corporate rock success-story has many folks running through the streets crying the death of alternative and/or indie and/or progressive rock. Nirvana finally erased the line, they say. The corporate world finally got smart and launched an all-out appropriation of the underground scene. Now, they say, all rock is, or soon will be, corporate rock. It's even in the news: last week a local paper ran a back-to-school "what's in/out" list claiming that "alternative rock" is "out."

But names are deceptive. It's more accurate to say that corporate record-labels are expanding their territory because they can make money doing so. They've colonized some of the rock that several years ago might've been considered alternative/indie/progressive. This is called capitalism. But this doesn't mean fewer good bands are around. It means the whole rock industry is growing and the margins are getting pushed farther out. There's still plenty of rock not ready for prime time. There's still plenty of worthwhile, genuine, innovative, provocative, evocative rock music being made outside the corporate empire. It just hasn't been named yet. It hasn't yet become a parody of itself.

And Bow hasn't yet found a way to use it against us.

There are bands making music never heard before, giving complex and intelligent new forms to songs. There are bands advancing the sound of guitars and the interplay between guitars, rethinking and reconstructing rhythm from beginning to end. There are bands adding new textures to vocals, singing words that render the world real, illuminate experience, conjure human emotion, express the absurdities and beauties ofliving lives at this particular time and space.

Here, for the sake of specificity, are some names that haven't yet become trite: Wingtip Sloat, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Dog Faced Hermans, New Radiant Storm King, The Palace Brothers, Circus Lupus, Truman's Water, Trenchmouth, The Grifters, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Polvo, King Kong, Pitchblende. These are some that matter, and numerous others are out there: bands that are creating, right now, imaginative and lasting music in the face of accelerating cultural turnover, in the face of the corporate cliche-maker.

I'm thinking about Bozo again. The casual observer might consider him a victim, a 82 â&#x20AC;˘

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caged derelict wearing ridiculous make-up, getting dumped in water then climbing back up for more abuse. But it's Bozo who's inflicting the real damage, and the many entertainment-starved fair-goers stepping forward to play the game are his victims. He's the name-caller, after all, and these days names can hurt more than sticks and stones. To be named a cliche can be fatal.

I never saw Bozo show signs of weakness. Even climbing out of the water he seemed unharmed, confident, the controller of the game. Sometimes, between insults, he'd scan the audience and mouth a kind of mantra into the microphone: "High and dry. High and dry. I'm high and dry. High and dry." As if he were the pure one, perched just above-and looking down on-the laughable world of the crowd.

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David Berman There were mountain huts full of smallpox strung out along the hillsides between Escatawpa and Morgan City, birds boiling up and out of freestanding chimneys under the routine advent of rainbows and chainsaws, the old sound of cheap labor rising and falling in the weather that was like frosted bank glass and advancing. There were heaps of tangled sawhorses and tripwire, vacant jasper and wolframite mines, mounds of dead Ataris and scarred desk drawer bibles scattered across those abandoned counties that lay inert as rope.

Hazel and Bobby lived together in an old slave shack I used to rent out in the upper fields. They cut canadian thistle and picked sloe berries off the blackthorn for a living, slashing their hands and bickering all day in the frayed heat, visiting me in the cool mainhouse most evenings. We'd sit in the rooms without ceilings, drinking white hill whiskey under the recombinant stars, and Bobby, who loved to go on about things, would reminisce about his dead wife who'd contracted a disease from sleeping too close to the fan. On Sundays they wouldn't move a muscle. They'd just sit there like two piles of coins quietly warming through the afternoon, then slowly cooling off over the evening.

Bobby puts on his sound jacket. Shards of hospital bed are locked in the bass drum. Through the worn dolichoid rafters I can see birds flying over the practice room. The snare is stuffed with traffic tickets and out the window there's my horse walking on the stream, the stream always behind schedule. There's a dust mote hawk landing in slo-mo on my guitar. Hazel's saying something about Earnest Wourlds over in Tullahoma who'd had a dream about a cougar sleepwalking on Polk's grave and how that was bad luck for the region. ("Those that look out the window are darkened." All those faces passed down through the centuries that kicks tart BAFFLER路

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the rivers and grow like nerve endings in a coal cart until they're key-cold and shoved through the repaired death gate, a catafalque set free and released into the dirtways.) "And John and his father John trap mink under the chain lightning in the libraries they've landed in, where all the talk about shadow dappled paths is typeset, published, and poured into a break in the earth," Hazel murmured to no one in the room. You might think it was all words and dark tickets as we began to play "R.M.T." in the swarming weather chart sundown, and it was.

Outside, you'd still hear the music, hear someone yelling "actors dreaming got nowhere to stay/ see my sheet go walking run and fly," and it would sound better from far away, like a faded sketch of a long since forgotten pacer at the Downs, all the while platinum ticks are dropping off the trees like little Romans, onto an auburn shower curtain half-buried in the forest floor.

Already gone were the golden days of e-z credit, the days of approaching squat south-central skylines from underneath the ice blue tides of the windshield, the five-cent war comets, howling saran yaps and careening school chords. All that was left, looking like two lost eyeballs on the field after Spotsylvania, were a couple of black plastic busted knobs in the dirt, one for tone and one for rinse.

This place is like a haunted turnpike, closed down for years, where things still happen in the little turnoffs to the renowned teenagers that never come back (sold to the haunt in the black church). If you come in the day and you're lucky, you might catch yourself a nice photograph of two sweatbees fucking on a coke mirror. You might see my horse breaking across a white wine colored clearing, or maybe hear the old chords coming, for no real reason, out of sockets in the walls. ("because there's an answering machine dogged with ice, deep in the Courthouse Mountains where he lived and died in the breech.")

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The Grace of God Mat Lebowitz "And then I came in and switched places," says Blake, "and she thought I was Chris for quite some time and-" "Which would justifY her enjoyment," says Chris.

Blake rolls his eyes with mock contempt which Chris either doesn't notice or doesn't acknowledge, his own gaze steady through the green lenses of his Ray Bans, through the windshield of his Saab which he guides through the flashing turns of the road which leads us toward Newport. Blake returns his full attention to me in the back seat.

"So I let her think that for a while," he says. "Why not? There's something erotic about contrived identity, am I right Jer?" "Gant," I say.

"Oh sorry, Cant. You know what I mean, though, don't you?"

And then he pauses as though waiting for me to concede or confess. I just stare back at him, my face (hopefully) impassive, with the vulnerable parts protected by my own sunglasses. I feel fairly protected allover. I'm wearing black jeans and, even though it's mid-summer (a blinding hot day outside of the air-conditioned car), a black silk shirt buttoned to my throat, and the sunglasses over my eyes, and a round-brimmed black gaucho hat which I almost never take off. I'm aware that this whole outfit lends an air of spectacle to my persona. On a day like today, anywhere outside of the East Village, I become a walking exhibition. People tend to stare. And the ironic truth is that my desire couldn't be more the opposite. I'm hiding in these clothes. I know that.

I exhale smoke, more or less, in Blake's face. Blake licks his lips, glances at Chris again, then continues his account, self-satisfaction edging immediately back into his tone. "Then I whispered something in her ear, I don't know, some quote from Camus."

He cuts his eyes with false modesty although I don't know who he thinks he's fooling.

It's no secret Delts fancy themselves intellectual. They were first, after all, to allow blacks and queers into the brotherhood, before it had become unanimously hip to be black or queer or, preferably, both. "".and she jumped when she heard my voice," he continues.

"I mean, she jumped as best she could given the circumstances. And then she started saying, real hot and passionate, breathing it, you know, like, through her teeth, through the leading edge of her orgasm, she's saying, 'Who are you? Who are you?'."

"Excellent." I drag hard on my cigarette.

"So, I guess the mystery excited her because she showed no interest in removing the blindfold and as for me, well I'm not one to ruin a surprise so I just let her ponder as 1..." here Blake smirks to validate the pun, "".drove the point home."

Chris says, "Meanwhile-" "Meanwhile," asserts Blake, "this guy" (thumbing toward Chris) "has been watching BAFFLER路

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the whole thing, jerking off in the corner."

"I was preparing myself," says Chris. "Priming the pump."

"Excellent," I say. "So you took turns raping her."

"Hey!" Chris lifts his chin and I can tell that his eyes are focused through the rear view mirror more or less at my own. We're both wearing sunglasses, however, so it's not like we're really looking at each other. Chris says, "She asked me to blindfold her."

"Did she ask for Blake to fuck her too?"

"Man," says Blake. "If that was rape then rapists deserve some special badge of distinction. I've never seen one girl have so many orgasms."

But when I'm getting out of the car, at the hospital ({his hospital is more like a country club-long low brick buildings with rolling hills of grass, and shaded paths and everywhere the smell of the sea), Chris presses my chest with the palm of his hand so I step back against the frame of the open door. He stands very close. I can almost see his eyes beyond the dazzling blue sky which coats the lenses of his sunglasses. Behind him, Blake moves across the parking lot, wind flapping through his blazer.

"She had a choice," Chris says. "She chose to enjoy it. There was no rape involved."

"That's good," I say.

He watches me, his eyes, I know, moving across my features. Then his face relaxes into the familiar, easy, grin. "You've just got to breathe a bit there, Jerry." His hand moves up and grips the back of my neck, at my hairline. He shakes my head as he says this.

"Gant," I say.

"Oh." He's still grinning, nodding. "Yeah," he says. "Gant Player. Very poetic."

"How is he?" I say.

"Who, Carter? He's great. Come on." Chris releases my neck and turns after Blake, his voice immediately lost in the wind. I swing the Saab door closed and jog to catch up.

"He's really healthy," says Chris, sliding his keys into the pocket of his slacks. Both he and Blake are wearing blazers and ties-much more appropriate attire. "Last time I was here," says Chris, "he looked like a marathon runner. He needed to lose weight anyway."

"When was that?" I say. "That you were here."

"March, I think."

"You haven't been here since March?"

Chris swings to a stop so I almost bump into him. "When were you here last?" he asks.

"I live in New York. I can't-" "Save it. You're his best friend, aren't you? Or did you forget that?" Chris abruptly turns and continues toward the block of shade which hides the double glass doors. The wind blows his thick blond hair across his face and with one hand he rakes it back and holds it out of his eyes. "We're all accountable, Jerry," he says.

"My name is Gan-"

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"Jerry!"

And whatever marathon runner had lain where Carter lies now is long gone, leaving a dying, sick and pale, purely Auschwitz victim in his wake.

"Hey," he says. He reaches one languid hand toward me. Even his voice is fragile, fading. "It's the movie star."

"Hardly," I say. Then I realize that he expects the handshake. His skin is loose and dry around the bones of his hand but his grip has frightening insistence. I've managed to remove my sunglasses, now that we're in the pale green fluorescent room, but I can't quite look at his face. I'm having a hard time catching my breath. But I can't get myself to sit down, either, like Blake or Chris, sprawled in the soft leather chairs that surround the bed. Instead, I circle the room, noting the monitors, the wires, the tubes and funnels, the spectrum of vials which literally fill half the Churchill desk that's pushed against one wall. The desk supports his computer and printer as well as the pills, and a fax machine and a phone, just like it did when it was in his apartment a year and a half ago, but the walls of the room emit that vaguely antiseptic smell which, apparently, no amount of wealth can vanquish. "Just a commercial," I say.

"It's nota commercial." His voice quivers, high pitched, rising to battle the injustice. 1 look at him, surprised. His features are sharp, pronounced-shadowed scoops and ridges. His hair falls limp and dark across his forehead. "I saw it three times today," he adds.

It might as well have been a commercial, given the extent of product placement involved, from hair-spray to jeans to cola to toothpaste. But 1 shouldn't complain. The fact that my face is seen (even if only for three minutes and twelve seconds) seventeen times every twenty-four hour period on a channel which is broadcast throughout the world, provides exposure which would have seemed unbelievable three months ago. It got me the J. Crew spread, and then the jeans shoot. My body (torso - neck to hips, in full hard-edged prominence) even now adorns the side of half the buses in N ew York. 1 have offers also for speaking parts in films, not leading rolls, but parts still that other actors would kill for, that other black actors would die for. My agent is ecstatic. He's convinced that he's solely responsible for the next Esposito.

"How are you?" 1 ask Carter, trying to look at him. "1 mean, how do you feel?" ''I'm great," says Carter. His head bobs in the shaky periphety of my vision. 'Tm releasing into prayer and it's working."

"Prayer."

"It's obvious, isn't it? My dad hired a C. S. healer to promote me full time. 1 feel it working. 1 believe in God and God will restore me."

"That's ... good." 1 find his eyes, black and shiny, and then wish 1 hadn't. His eyes are naked and charged with terrifying urgency. For a horrible flash 1 see him inside, trapped.

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"I was looking in all the wrong places. All those pills. The blood treatments. As if anyone could be healed by medicine. As if it isn't obvious that healing comes through faith and faith alone."

"That's right," I say. "I can see that."

"You do?" His body tenses toward me, lifting from the pillow, his stare barbarous, dissecting.

"Yes," I say. "Yes. I do."

"Ah." He falls back, spent and disappointed. His eyes close. "Are you still with that model?"

"No." I shiver with the same empty panic which rises whenever I feel myself recognized now on the street. I look to Chris for support but he's lost in some glossy page of the latest Cosmo. "I never really was."

In retrospect I know it was probably all part of the promotional campaign. We looked good together, everyone agreed. Even the model, Megan Precious, seemed to like the idea, but then again, it's quite likely that she was just following the instructions (and collecting the money) of whatever agency masterminded the grand design.

She came on to me, once. At least I think she did. It seemed pretty obvious, even though I thought I had made my sexual inclination (or lacking thereof as the case, lately, has been) clear. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she was simply following orders. Maybe she was sincerely attracted to me. Maybe all, or none, of the above.

Regardless, the media picked up on it and Started billing us as the next 'hot' model couple, having met on the shoot of the latest video for this 'hot' new band, and the target audience loved the concept (surrogate passion-vicarious satisfaction), apparently loved watching our nearly naked bodies entwine at the beach, in the surf, on the rocks, in bed; and the video, subsequently, climbed to number one, our faces (our bodies) shown seventeen times every twenty-four hour period in sevenry-eight countries around the world.

Back in the car, nobody says anything for quite some time. The air-conditioner whirs its steady exhale. Chris thumbs the stereo into an REM tune that shakes my seat.

The sun is so bright, even through my sunglasses and through the tinted windows, that the outside landscape appears bleached and pale, sucked of color. I light another cigarette.

"He looks great," says Blake, lowering the volume. "Don't you think so?"

"Who?" says Chris. "Carter? He's going to make it. He's a fighter." He touches the stereo again, raising the volume beyond even the previous level.

"I don't want to go to the beach," 1 say.

"We're in Newport," says Chris. "We're going to the beach."

But when they stop at some small surf shop, near Second Beach, I refuse to even get out of the car, never mind shop for a bathing suit. I sit sideways in the back seat, semi-

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reclined, with my head against one window (my hat tipped forward over my eyes-I'm on siesta, I tell myself) and my boots laterally propped against the opposite. I light another cigatette. Chris and Blake are both outside of the car. I can heat them, distant through the glass and plastic, discussing my reluctance. One of them raps on the window by my head but I don't look.

"If I had your body," says Blake, back in the car, "I would display it every chance I had." He's staring out his own window, his tone sullen, contentious.

I don't respond. I pretend, perhaps, to not even have heard.

I used to enjoy the beach. My skin registers 'Latte' on the J. Crew spectrum (another dubious distinction for my resume) and it reacts well to the sun. There was a time when I could luxuriate with the best of them-stretched to embrace the heat of the sky on a long summer day with nothing ahead but a cool night of dark dance hall throbbing rhythm, frozen drinks, some dark eyed blond boy to eventually remind me how beautiful I am. Now they (beaches and most blond boys) serve only to depress me. It's the myth laid bare, peeled open and exposed as nothing but further waste of time. All the reclining, naked bodies wasting time, baking cancerous pink beneath the empty scorching sky.

"From college," says Blake. "We met in the house of Delta Chi." "A frat," says one of the girls. It's not really a question, but I still feel Blake's smirking glance and I heat his pause which is subtle enough to tell only us (his brothers) of the full weight of his contempt.

"Right," he says (a cordial agreement to the undiscriminating ear). "A frat. At Penn."

"Penn State?"

This time even I, inadvertently, flinch. "Right," says Blake again. "Penn State."

"No," says the first girl. "University of Pennsylvania, right?" Then, to her friend, "They don't like to be confused."

"It matters not!" says Blake with a dismissive flap of his hand. "Really. It's only school after all. Correct?"

They all laugh, together, sharing something. I squint across the beach, across the greasy bodies .reclined on blankets beside coolers and radios and books-the paraphernalia of distraction. Even through my sunglasses and beneath the shading brim of my hat it's all almost too bright to look at. Too bare and brilliant, as though illuminated by an atomic flash-the pulse before annihilation-which removes all shadow and leaves the world electric-silent, flat and white.

"You probably watch a lot ofMTV," says Blake. He's been dying to tell them who I am, even though I specifically asked him not to mention it. His agitation is palpable, and the girls have been glancing at me, probably wondering why I don't speak or why I'm sitting cross-legged on the blanket, wrapped head to toe in black instead of spread out half-naked like I ought to be. "You know the band 'Sex and Death'?" Blake asks.

"Come on," I say to Chris. He's on his back, beside me, the same magazine he lifted BAFFLER路

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from Carter's room held above his face, to the side, however, so as not to block the sun.

His sunglasses have been similarly sacrificed in the quest for an even tan, and his eyes, exposed and squinting, shift to my own. "Let's take a walk."

"Do you ever consider," says Chris, "how lucky you are."

His words are a nearly verbatim quotation of the refrain from the video, but if he intended this reference he gives no indication. He has returned his sunglasses to their perch and behind them his expression is blank. Other than the sunglasses he wears only a bathing suit. Just shorts, young, tanned skin, sunglasses, and blond hair. That's what he is: skin, muscle, bone, and a few pints of blood all connected by a tenuous current.

"You were together with Michael-Paul for a while," he says. "Weren't you? Before Carter was?"

I look out over the waves to the vast, unending sweep of horizon. Michael-Paul is seven months dead.

"Very lucky," says Chris.

In the video, the modellip-synchs those words into my ear as she strokes my chest with her fingernails: 'Do you ever imagine / do you ever imagine / how lucky you are.'

The scene is intercut with flashes of a smoldering, post-riot ghetto, as though that's where I come from. As though that's who I really am. I sit down in the sand and I take the pack of cigarettes from my shirt pocket and shake one between my lips and with considerable effort I manage to light it.

"And what's with the smoking?" says Chris. "You of all people. So body-conscious."

I remove the cigarette and study my saliva drying on the filter. "I quit," I announce.

"Smoking?"

I start to nod because it seems the easiest response, but then I take a deep breath and I shake my head. Then I close my eyes and hug my knees to my chest, waiting for whatever comes next.

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Ballad Gaston de Beam Zane slaves over a rock ballad, tears on cheek, flared mauve chaps, bullion lips. two takes, has cigar, calls it a Mayflower nickel, wages, an emotional pilgrimage. not enough, take ten. pauses for recall, popular remainders and pulse, a twinkie that belts out words, a token underground commute. still indy, groomed on grunge, gap, back issues of spin. weened on theft and quick oats. shows arrive late, bail for bankrupt minors. song sinks in scale, rises, fills fans and dies. we give quarter, its claim, provide comfort, crowd and cane. thanks, no, recites Zane, i'm spent, social and sane.

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A

HAWK

G-L\ DES ABOVE

- Barrett Heaton

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The Teen Rebel as Model Cons_er The lip World of Sassy T. C. Frank "The true exemplar of difftrance is she who, by dint of unflinching critical rigor and unlimited credit, has achieved maximum accessorization of her lifestyle" - James Hatt, in conversation.

Sassy does not want you to think that it is just another version of the traditional teenage girls' magazine. On the contrary, as its publicity kit and an enamored media anxiously maintain, Sassyis a publishing phenomenon, a daring departure from convention, a call to postmodern arms for the youth of America. Nowhere in the spectrum of American journalism has the notion of 'alternative' been more reverently enshrined, more fully articulated as the belle ideal for the consuming millions. While its competitors still offer 1950s-style hints on cooking and pleasing boys, Sassy, since its founding in 1988, has leapt headlong into 'underground' culture-reviewing the most daring indie-label bands, endorsing the latest permutations of 'multiculturalism,' outlining the most 'authentic' street fashions. So tuned-in is the publication to the latest dispensation of rebel hip that a 1993 Spin magazine feature called "A to Z of Alternative Culture" included a definition of "Sassyism" that is appropriately thick with references to consumer goods (Sassyism: "Love of Kim Gordon, striped jeans, John Fluevog shoes, wide black belts ... grrl punk, fanzines, and henna"). For rebellion, generically defined, isSassys image-in-trade. With its impudent title spattered across the cover like some defiant graffitti from '68, its jackboot-wearing young writers, its celebration of the new breed of celebrities who wear sideburns and grimy locks, multiple earrings, flannel shirts, and leather jackets, Sassy claims to have revolutionized the genre of teenage journalism. It has won the favor of the nation's savviest media watchers, and for good reason:Sassy's peculiarly massified, mall-inflected version of the traditional avant-garde fetish for outrage perfectly epitomizes the strange turn taken by American mass culture in the last twenty years.

What makes Sassy so intriguing is not its liberationist and anti-establishment leanings, but that it uses these seemingly subversive positions to reinforce the culture and sensibility of the marketplace. Sassy, you see, has a new and effective angle on the great American cultural business of encouraging consumption, and it's become the object of a thousand with-it commentators' praise (and a painful vexation for the people across town at staid old Seventeen). Sassy is just full of sass. It talks (daringly!) about sex. It embraces a curious teeny-bopper feminism, it hints that parents might not always be BAFFLER路

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right, it refers knowingly to the clothes and accessories worn by punk rockers, it teaches that the styles of many different races can be appropriated by the savvy buyer without prejudice. It violates taboos and flouts convention in a most insolent fashion. And all in the interest of selling its readers on that extremely traditional American way of life known as consumensm.

Sassjs central teaching, which it enunciates with vigorous conviction, is a sort of cartoon version of the famous antinomian principle of the sixties, "be yoursel拢" This simple imperative utterly pervades the magazine, as it does so much of our contemporary public culture, informing nearly every aspect: ideas, institutions, but most of all consumer goods, are held up to judgement by the individualist standard and either enthusiastically approved or spunkily dissed. Hence racism, sexism, puritan restraint, and unfashionable clothes, the sins of the fathers, figure repeatedly as the antithesis of sass, trashed again and again in the language of the malls because they prevent so many from realizing themselves. Multiculturalism, 'alternative', and self-indulgence are by contrast the lifestyle axioms of the sassy girl, who cherishes the resulting image of herself as a committed vanguard revolutionary. She is supremely self-confident in her refusal to judge, decide, or discriminate against anyone or anything. She is morally absolute in her establishment-tweaking refusal to elevate anyone discourse over any other. She is also a hellacious shopper.

And not just by coincidence.

The teen magazine once thrived on conformity-related fears. It counselled impressionable and terrified youngsters in the treacherous ways of fitting in with the gang, being like-and liked by-the other fellows. Sassjdoes just the opposite. Today's teen is taught to be herself and (more importantly) buy herself, whatever the price. She is told that a look is over if everyone else is wearing it, and that she must always distinguish herself from the mass in some strikingly visible way. The teen rebel is an icon rather than a villain.

This insurrectionary posture is linked throughout the Sassy oeuvre to a peculiar but omnipresent obsession with consumer goods and the act of shopping. All with most 'lifestyle' journals, five of the mag's regular features are run-downs on the most important categories of consumer goods: cosmetics, clothes, and culture products. "Footwear trend alert!" read one typical installment recently, next to a picture of a woman modelling "designer Karl Lagerfeld's wickedly chic take on Eskimo snow boots." In addition there is always a fashion spread featuring the latest in expensive rebel garb, complete with prices and retail outlets. Only a handful of pages in each issue are not concerned with what and where to buy. Sassiness is, on every level, a philosophy of consuming, a primer in hip.

Every year, for example, the editors set about finding "the sassiest girl in America."

For 1992 girls from across the nation submitted essays on what they would do if they were "Queen of the World," which were apparently judged by typicalSas.ry categories, i.e. are they 'politically correct?' Are they rebellious, daring, unconventional? Are they

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hyper-aware of clothing and fashion? And sure enough, after each of the girls had expressed their love of environment and otherness, directed that "Esperanto would be everyone in the world's second language" (thanks to its "simplicity and unbiasedness") and that "there would be a daily, planet-wide hug break," they all went on a shopping spree at "Manhattan's must-see fashion boutique-Merry-Go-Round."

This year the Sassiest Girl contest's direct link to consuming was streamlined considerably. Not only was it sponsored by Vidal Sassoon, makers of all the products a girl needs to be herself, but the editors decided they no longer wanted to read about contestants' kind-hearted ambitions for the world. Instead, girls were encouraged to direct their entries towards what sort of culture-products people in a "perfect society" would consume. "Tell us about the people who live there," the editors write. "What would their value system be like? More importantly, what kind of music would they listen to?

What movies would they watch? What would be the national food?"

The Sassy ofJanuary 1992 contains a story on the look and lifestyle chosen by two environmentally-aware vegetarian women who tend a shop in the proletarian Long Island town of Sag Harbor. After lauding the women's "truest, coolest" nonjudgmental attitudes ("Like; Trenny used to have a really bad relationship with food and a notpositive feeling about her body"), Sassy swings into what it does best: a long and detailed description of what the two wear, eat, and buy. "We think they dress cool," Sassy announces, '''cause they don't chomp other people's style or follow trends-they just wear what's comfy for them and what suits their personalities .... " Such determined individualism is enough to persuade the Sassy writers that the hip ones' trend is in fact worth chomping: "her love of pastel high-tops convinced [the writers] that the aforementioned footwear is adorable and not geeky or too 1983."

Each issue ofSassy contains a photo section in which unmistakably hip girls model a particular lifestyle and its attendant accessories, while accompanying text lays out the particulars about where and for how much each shocking item can be purchased. Needless to say, simple, conservative looks are never featured, and "preppy" appears to be some sort of Sassy curse. In issue #45 the fashion writer exhorts the reader to "Trash that Ivy League look" with an expensive sweater and some "oversized jeans." "Or snag Dad's favorite Mister Rogers sweater, then run in the opposite direction-pathway so far to cool he won't even recognize it, baby." Sassy recommends only unusual and very transient looks, the better to trumpet one's highly individualistic personality. As the table of contents sneers in #52 Ouly '92), "If you wanna dress all demure and quiet and monochrome, go ahead, but you didn't learn it from us." What Sassy suggests is, by contrast, that one flee from 'normal' looks in every possible direction: "A nutty print tells everybody you're a nonconformist," confides one caption, endorsing a pair of overalls that retail for $130. In #49, (April '92) it's the '70s look that's upheld as the embodiment of daring; in #48 it's floral-patterned overalls; in #51 it's expensive 'Western' garb. In #65 (August '93) it's "Boho Babes" and "Mongolian;" for #66 it's the "ruffian," "gamine" look and Elizabethan clothing. The important thing is, of course, endless change, as Sassy acknowledged in August '93, when one writer admitted, "We in the fashion deBAFFLER路

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partment would rather wear purple velour sweatsuits than be caught dead in flares. I know we liked them two months ago, but we're fickle." Such fashion antinomianism means Sassy (and its adult-priced relatives Cosmo, Vogue and Mademoiselle) will never run out of new looks to hype, and the industry will never have to endure the sort of slowdown that would occur if women were to suddenly decide that they didn't mind a little continuity.

Sassy's ace in the rebel hole is its credibility in 'alternative rock' circles. Editors Jane Pratt and Christina Kelly, along with several otherSassystaffers, form the bad band Chi a Pet, whose colored-vinyl singles appear on the annoying indie label Kokopop. Each month the magazine includes a "Cute Band Alert," which relentlessly delves deeper and deeper into the uncharted depths of 'alternative,' dredging up bands like Ween and Magnapop for readers' dubious enjoyment. An article about MTV personality "Kennedy" notes that she is "hilariously irreverent-and not afraid to be totally obnoxious." A short story that appears in the September 93 issue chronicles a high school girl's liberation through immersion in her local 'alternative' scene. Juliana Hatfield seems to have some sort of ongoing connection to the magazine, appearing both as a cover model and as an occasional contributor. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. answer readers' questions; Jenny Toomey of Tsunami writes a letter to the editor praising Sassy as "a comrade in arms."

But in the Sassy universe 'alternative' doesn't mean anything like, say, 'class-conscious' or 'skeptical towards mass media' or even 'alienated from mall culture.' On the contrary, it means one is closely tuned in to the ever-quickening peregrinations of consumerism. (Here is how the word is correctly used, from a feature on various multiculti and punk rock vests, in the "Stuff You Need" column, August '93: "This is the perfect time to get all the right things for school. You'll definitely want a vest-such a nice alternative to a jacket.") As the reader is introduced to newer and newer-and cooler and cooler-bands each month, she learns to appreciate the virtues of the ever-changing array of products trumpeted by the magazine in both ads and editorial. The fictional account of the high schooler who "goes underground" and discovers herself obsessively catalogues the clothes and looks of the various characters she encounters. One of the more recent of the magazine's many pieces on Juliana Hatfield sees fit to notice that she wore "a striped, ribbed T-shirt" and that "she looked great wearing no makeup because she has perfectly smooth skin." When Sassy meets "Kennedy," it is noted that she wears "A purple Belly concert T-shirt, long Gap shorts and little white socks scrunched down just above dark brown boot shoes." Ads strike the same theme. One for Sears' "Mainframe" grunge line depicts a group of girls dressed up in flannel shirts, stocking caps, and peace symbols next to a van (eternal symbol of rebel youth) painted in Van Gogh fashion.

Without question, the preeminent 'alternative' accessories are Doc Martens boots.

Once a class marker of English factory workers, these unwieldy shoes have come via skinhead to be a veritable Sassy accessoire de rigeur, featured in every single issue. They 98 â&#x20AC;˘

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are worn, for example, throughout the June '92 issue's lifestyle focus on "Surf punks," which offers a particularly telling combination of that planned-obsolescence staple, beachwear, with some barbarous factory-girl 'tude. While the youngsters strike charmingly menacing poses in boots and bathing suits, the copy reads "They are just too carefree and rebellious. Can you stand it? ... Bright, crazy-print bikini top, $49 for the suit, and shorties, $30, by Hot Tuna. Sweatshirt jacket from J. Crew. animal print bikini, $25," etc., etc., etc.

The heroine of the Sassy world is, of course, the teen rebel cast in an unseemly new role: as model consumer, as daring patron of the latest styles, as assassin of the old, as liberator of the shopping-libido. She figures in both ads and text, eternally mouthing off to those imaginary authority figures (symbolized again and again by old-timey sepia tinted pix of stern-looking geeks) who would have her conform, be thrifty, dress dull, dress preppy. Her comrades in rebellion like Keanu and Thurston and Juliana are leading the way to a multicolored future where styles will change even faster than before and the defiant sneers of liberated youth will forever close the door on the antiquated and slow-moving pre-consumer world.

AI> facile and patently ridiculous as all this revolutionary posturing may seem,Sassys deployment of the rebel image indicates a fairly sophisticated underlying cultural maneuver. Despite its fashionably disjointed 'postmodern' appearance, the Sassy text is a slickly integrated and persuasive bearer of a single, decidedly decidable message: the imperative of consumption. In this exemplar of nineties journalism the line berween advertisement and editorial matter has been almost completely erased: so great isSassys zeal for demonstrating the worthiness of consuming as a way of life that the rwo have become almost indistinguishable in graphic style and prescriptive intent. Articles that fail to recommend products are so rare that the magazine begins to reads like a prolonged advertisement, an ongoing shopping guide, a handbook for buying hip.

Consumerism has long made common cause with a certain strain of rebel feminism.

Both Lucky Strike (in the 1920s) and Virginia Slims (in the 1960s) cigarettes grabbed large market shares by establishing themselves as emblems of female liberation. And what Sassy is doing is, similarly, no great departure from the traditional discourse of teen magazines-it just happens to have perfected an immensely successful way of performing that discourse's basic function: moving products. Journals like Sassy and its bitter competitor, Seventeen, have traditionally served as a girl's elementary course in navigating the sparkling world of the consumer marketplace, from which they will one day graduate to the honeyed pages of Cosmopolitan and Vogue. Here young women learn their paramount social role as the nation's chief consumers. Here they come to know the absolute rule of fashion, the necessity of expressing one's (ever-changing) personality through product choice, the inevitability of obsolescence, and the eternal desirability of the New. And sassiness enters the equation as a powerful reinforcement of these lessons. Far from contradicting the magazine's hyper-consumerism, Sassy s repetitive calls for rebelBAFFLER路

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lion are perfectly attuned to the discursive strategies of its product-pushing text. Rebellion against the real or imagined repressiveness of the elder and the moralist (often characterized as racist) liberates one from the last vestiges of the thrifty producer-ethic.

Rebellion against "the establishment" automatically discredits whatever people were consuming yesterday ("not geeky or too 1983"), will discredit whatever people are consuming today, and allows styles to change rapidly and over a much broader range. Rebellion for self-definition mandates that product choice reflect your complex personality, which you will of course eventually rebel against, necessitating a new array of deeply personal product choices long before the old ones were worn out. Rebellion against monolithic Western culture and values opens up a vast territory of unexploited ideas and styles through which we will undoubtedly consume our way in the near future.

Rebellion, Sassy-style, is about change, very superficially defined and not encumbered by any specific direction. And a perpetually changing surface is what Americans must accept if they are to remain the world's greatest consumers and their business machine to continue chugging along in high gear. For this reason, the commercialization of dissent has become the dominant motif of the age, with rebels of all varieties howling for lite-insurrection and the liberation of the selffrom advertisements and sitcoms everywhere.

On TV the same point is made, over and over and over again, in a frenzy of screaming electric guitars played by leather-clad 'alternative' rockers for beer, fast food, cars, and soda pop: the consumer-rebel, tireless champion of the New, is king. Tropicana Twisters fruit drinks positions itself on TV as the enemy of repressive old people (one of whom is a barber!) who deliver such antisassy lines as "we may have to nip this thing in the bud" and "it could lead to dancing." Special Export beer apotheosizes its rebelconsumers as "Ex-Stockbroker" or "Ex-Librarian;" the product itself is "Just Different from the Rest." Not wanting to be left behind, Pilsner Urquell demands that we "Do Something Original," like drink their beer. Seeking to cash in on the lucrative market mined by Doc Martens, Code West footwear calls upon the consumer to "Anti-establish yourself." Reebok celebrates a world with "no rules" and Burger King continues to "break the rules," but Arby's has caught on and now proclaims that its goods are "different" and that "different is good." Likewise Dodge proclaims that "The Rules Have Changed;" but Toyota takes them one further and celebrates transgression in general: "The Line Has Been Crossed: The Revolutionary New Supra."

But there is, of course, one enormous institution that neitheoassy nor any other of these wild-eyed corporate bomb-throwers ever sasses off to: commodity capitalism and the advertisers who make culture of this sort profitable. Rebelling against the styles, ideas, and repressiveness of the past never seems to entail rebelling against the mode of production that caused them-and that caused the rebellion against them also. For the plights of the obvious victims of this social order-unemployed factory workers, migrant farm laborers, the homeless---Sassy expresses regret (and envy for their ever-sonaive wardrobes) but their problems are never to be evaluated by any thought deeper than simple pity. And meanwhile the lives ofSassjs affiuent own are lived out in mo100 â&#x20AC;˘

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notonous trips to nameless malls, fleeting enthusiasm over new products, evenings spent staring into the TV, maybe a new lifestyle now and then. We are awash in masscult rebels, but still unable to grasp the fundamental bondage that makes the dream of rebellion so enticing.

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LIFE AS STYLE

PUTTING THE "WORLD" IN THE MUSIC Herbert Mattelart American consumers are in the throes of a turgid love affair with multiculturalism.

Having depleted our domestic cultural resources, we turn our jaded gaze elsewhere, looking for ever more exotic excitements, ever more picturesque pastimes. Signs of the illicit relationship crop up in films like Mississippi Masala, and Benetton advertisements, but especially in cultural commodities like recorded music.

World music is essentially a new name for an old product, or an old product concept. Non-Anglic music has always been relatively accessible to the specialized record buyer, but only recently has it been sold under the heading of "world," which links it to multicultural sensibilities and allows it to be marketed as a component of the new wave of globalcentricity. But the genre has been introduced with a unique and interesting rhetoric, with publicity that promises to erase national boundaries and unite diverse cultures. Advertisements use lines like "Music admits to no borders, needs no passport," and present the product as a "celebration of diversity within our human unity."

Consumers are encouraged to purchase their way to new cultural horizons, to establish a link with some distant corner of the planet by owning a small part of it as a piece in the puzzle of global understanding.

Yet, like any puzzle piece, the world music artifact is meaningless unless placed in close association with similarly constructed objects. In order for the globe to take shape, the multicultural consumer must acquire many, many artifacts. In order to round out their world-knowledge, consumers are encouraged to enter the genre as a whole, to sample frequently from the rich cultural smorgasbord provided by modern technology, and to learn from that sampling a fierce appetite for the unfamiliar.

In this respect world music acts upon older colonial patterns, like the spice or ivory trades, to scavenge new and unfamiliar commodities for sale in a marketplace obsessed with exoticism. But this is a new strain of exoticism, driven not merely by greed, but by the guilty impulses of a dominant culture towards the subaltern, the "world" that is being ignored and threatened by the expansion of Western ways. Thus world music can pretend to be reversing the flow of information from the periphery back to the core, liberating the unheard voices of far-flung cultures. Its marginal status allows it to be sold as the antidote to global disunity; it is the means by which Western consumers can shed their narrow-minded cultural habits and and buy into a sphere of greater understanding. Without the allure of this marginalism, world music would lose its primary selling point, its means of cultural entry into the bourgeois home market: the genre thrives by exploiting the belief of Anglic consumers that they are missing out on something-the "world," in fact -and, as with any other lacking, that they need to get some, soon.

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The genre's concept of the "world" is ttoublesome. First, the idea of a "world" music that is specifically exclusive to Anglic forms tends to distance us from the rest of the globe and create separate spheres of Anglic and non-Anglic existence. It summons up that favorite fantasy division between the civilized, overrepresented culture of America and Britain, and the bold, untamed "world" of diverse music from far-flung points on the globe, reinforcing the "us" vs. "them" division that has so often been the stock in trade of a dominant culture. Even though British and American consumers are made to feel a sense of lack which they need the "world" to fill, they are still established as being in a position to acquire it, and thus as the dominant party in the relationship. Secondly, "world music" lumps together disparate cultures in a manner that is markedly insensitive to the world's very real cultural boundaries. Such unconcern is typical of imperial powers; the big powers have mapped and remapped the world countless times, regardless of what the locals feel about it. World music operates in a similar fashion, redrawing a global map in which far flung musics harmoniously exist within one boundaried and shrink-wrapped "world" for the convenience of Anglic consumers.

Like so many of today's rebel consumer goods, world music emerged from the good intentions of an actual committed radical. Among the earliest companies to produce what were then called "ethnographic recordings" was the label Folkways, a shoestring operation that recorded everything from Javanese gamelon to rural American blues.

Folkways was founded by Moses Asch, a folksy, depression-era radical who strove to bridge gaps between far-flung cultures, largely from a commitmnent to socialist internationalism. Eschewing the standard marketing and packaging ploys of the music industry, Asch placed more emphasis on getting the records to the public over making any sort of a profit. Asch's efforts were crucial to the development of world music; the proliferation of Folkways records in public libraries has been cited by many of today's world music gurus as having been their first encounter with non-Western music.

Folkways was followed by the Explorer series on the Nonesuch label. Nonesuch improved upon the concept of ethnographic recording by seeking out ("exploring") vast new musical realms to record, and by playing up the intrepid activities of their staff of recording engineers ("explorers"). The label emphasized the names of the explorer-technicians above those of the performers on their catalog of recordings, making people like Robert Brown and David Lewiston international music "stars" for their ability to find suitable material and press a record button. Nonetheless, the Nonesuch Explorer series was still too academic to earn it a substantial following within the bourgeois marketplace, where tastes run towards product that is more flamboyantly exotic.

World music as we know it today may still use the structure of this older ethnographic model, but it drops the academic presentation. Instead it employs the star system of traditional "ethnic" recordings (the Brazilian Bossa Nova of the early '60s, the sitars of the late '60s), and makes sure the star and the music are presented cautiously to middle class America; it tries carefully to avoid fadism by spreading itself evenly amongst a variety of cultural product; and it encourages the consumer to participate in its entire product line as the only real means of reaching the "world," and thus, as the sole means 104 â&#x20AC;˘

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of salvation from a heritage steeped in cultural imperialism.

Things began to change in the early 80's. Multicultural experimentation by Western rock stars like David Byrne and Peter Gabriel got the ball rolling, and Paul Simon made the concept sell with his 1986 LP Graceland (Oddly enough, another mid-80's global venture, the Band Aid/USA for Africa project, was comprised almost entirely of Western performers performing Western music. After proclaiming "We are the world" in 1985, the stars' own record companies decided that, for purposes of marketing, the "world" consists of everything but them.) Labels began to experiment with different releases and were surprised at the success of LPs by artists such as the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir (Ie Mystere des Voix Bulgare~ and Israeli pop star Ofra Haza (Yemenite Songs). By the end of the 1980's, a host of labels, new and old, were joining in the act, and in May of 1990, Billboard magazine introduced its world music chart, thus giving the format the marketplace credibility it needed to further establish itself as a the viable commodity it was becoming.

Although revenues were small at first, world music began to pick up quickly in the American market as late-80's multicultural fervor heated up. Retail outlets saw sales increase dramatically: World music was Tower Records' twelfth largest selling genre in 1989, jumping to number five in 1990. Distributors experienced tremendous growth in the amount of product they were able to ship: the New York-based distributor World Music Institute reports that the quantity of units sold tripled between 1989 and 1990.

The music industry began to make heavy promotional efforts: tours, gimmicks, and advertising for a genre that once had the smallest of promotional budgets. In 1990, the New Music Seminar, one of the largest annual industry gatherings, billed itself as "A Global Affair," and featured dozens of panels and performances highlighting the valuable talent pool offered by non-Anglic performers.

One of the first labels to offer nothing but World music, Globestyle Records, was started in 1985 by a London-based owner of a record label specializing in reissues of vintage American rhythm & blues. Although the label began by licensing already-recorded product from labels in other nations, it soon entered the field on its own, taking digital recording technology to underrecorded nations like Madagascar and Zanzibar, and returning with product that was quickly gobbled up by Western audiences. Under the slogan "Worldwide-Your Guide," Globestyle presented itself as an aural tourist agency, ready to take the listener on sonic tours of distant lands and promising that "the music is only chosen by us if we dig it personally!" The label's Western hip was thus employed to allay any residual fears of the unknown that the consumer might harbor.

The focus of the label is betrayed by its name, "Globestyle," a tag which implies the fashionableness of the product it delivers, sort of a haute couture for multiculturalism.

In this case, the" style" delivered is attached to the globe, but only to that part of it that is non-Anglic. Repressed, over-civilized Anglic music just doesn't cut it in the realm of "globe style;" sitting out as the unhip wallflower while good times are enjoyed by all that are willing to keep up with the fashion, the exciting and diverse "globe style." The fun is not completely inaccessible, however, for although Globestyle music cannot be BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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created by Anglic nations, it can be purchased by them, to have and to hold for subsequent indulgence.

The "style" in the name is important for another reason as well. Globestyle was one of the first labels to adopt polished marketing techniques to a product that had always been sold in a fairly bland wrapper. Globestyle burst upon the (then-named) international music scene with a series of brightly colored, graphically interesting releases with clever liberationist titles like Non Stop Non Stop and Full Steam Ahead, and organized their releases in series like "The Accordions that Shook the World." With its fresh new look, Globestyle immediately stood out from the bulk of ethnographic labels, the majority of which were still sold in plain, academic-looking sleeves and bore uninteresting, explanatory titles like Javanese Court Gamelon.

Globestyle also invented a version of the star system for their recordings. Some of Globestyle's artists were already pop stars in their native countries, as was Ofra Haza in Israel, but others, from less culturally industrialized nations, were presented in a decidedly Western mode in which they were described as "legendary" or "classic," adjectives which seem more fitted to aging rock stars than skilled practitioners of a localized cultural form. The label also offered the first world music compilation albums, single LPs that spanned vast ethnic ranges and represented the "world" as the company understood it.

The Globestyle style paid off, and soon the label found that they had a number of minor hits, including the abovementioned Yemenite Songs, a record that enjoyed a substantial boost in sales after being used by British DJ Coldcut in his remix of Eric Band Rakim's "Paid in Full." Citing its uncanny newfound popularity in the liner notes to a 1987 release, the label proclaimed that "Globestyle boldly goes where Paul Simon later treads," a comment that only begins to hint at the importance they have had in setting the tone for the current world music market sector.

Following Globestyle's success, the U.S. folk and reggae label Shanachie began to aggressively expand into the world music market with the same sort of panache. Under the heading "World Beat/Ethno Pop," Shanachie tied vastly different musical styles together in a single line, a "world," into which a consumer could enter just by purchasing the right product. The American label's major stylistic contribution has been its heavy promotion of the concept of "world beat," a type of music that, because of its (purported) irresistible rhythmic properties, was supposed to be able to erase global boundaries and unite the world as one uninhibited dancing mass. The liner notes of one Shanachie release explained that "World Beat is a fascinating new mechanism which enables traditional music to again play the prominent role it historically has had in rejuvenating the world's popular music." The company's recording process, it continued, "injects [ethnic music] with the intensity and urgency of Western pop, using the full palette of contemporary instruments and state of the art recording techniques."

World Beat is a way of "fixing" or improving ethnic music to make it more appealing to a Western audience. It is a beat-heavy rhetoric that is not only designed to inspire the listeners to dance, but to spend as well.

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familiar electronic sounds of the West, serving now as rhythmic constructions on which to hang those exotic non-Anglic instrumental and vocal passages. The power of the beat is supposed to override performance and language barriers, driving the music home to a Western audience often confused by the lyrics or the unusual melodic construction of the song. American consumerism has always thrived on notions of liberation and the exotic, and with its World Beat concept, Shanachie quickly became the major player in the American world music market.

Perhaps one of the best (or worst, as the case may be) examples of the world beat approach is Aswan Batish, master of the sitar-powered dance groove. With song titles like "Bombay Boogie" and "New Delhi Vice," Batish uses simple preprogrammed drum tracks to provide a rhythmic base over which he weaves lines of traditional Indian music. As presented by Shanachie, Batish's music brings the old and the new worlds together, and takes Indian classical music forward into the frontiers of global culture.

When viewed without the rhetoric, however, the music comes across as simplistic, pandering, and patently disrespectful ofIndian culture. In a 1988 tour supporting his first U.S. release, Batish opened up a series of concerts for the band Savage Republic by presenting himself as a bungling buffoon willing to poke fun at his own culture for the sake of a joke. He clowned around for the audience, giggling at his own cleverness for coming up with song titles like "Sitar Trek" for his toe-tapping talas. In minstrel fashion, he parodied his own cultural heritage for the sake of entertaining a Western audience.

With a somewhat more carefully constructed model of global culture, Real World records was founded by pop star Peter Gabriel and music promoter Thomas Brooman, who were also the co-founders ofWOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance), a British-based organization that spent a good part of the 80's putting together a series of multicultural festivals and ethnographic compilation albums. With Real World, Gabriel and Brooman have moved out of the underfunded realm of the arts, and into the fast track of the music industry. Unlike the previous WOMAD recorded ventures, Real World receives financial and distribution help from Warner Communications, and records most of its material in a state-of-the-art studio equipped with the latest digital technology.

Like "Globestyle," the words "Real World" exclude Anglic contribution, yet articulate a desire to participate by promising all that is lacking from the Anglic experience. It offers the "real world" as its product, a world that includes music from places like Pakistan, Zaire, and Finland (to name only a few), but not England and America, countries apart from the "real," the wild untamed frontier of unheard music. As ever, though, the frontier exists to be settled, and any Western consumer can stake his claim simply by purchasing a Real World record, escaping the falseness of civilization by voyaging into the "real" of the rest of the "world."

As Euro-American consumers are invited to do vicariously, Western performers occasionally venture into the "real world" of ethnic musics. Real World released Peter Gabriel's Passion, for example, a record which consists of world music samples electronically reprocessed by the pop star. Dipping into the vast array of cultural product to which he has access, Gabriel masks it electronically to hide its origin, and weaves it BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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together into a product that he labels as his own. Through this process, Gabriel cloaks his Anglicity in righteous multiculturalism, and admits himself to the ranks of artists in the "real world." Moving beyond older techniques of stylistic borrowing practiced by artists like Paul Simon and David Byrne, Gabriel employs digital technology to enter into a new era of cultural cooptation. Rather than simply mimick their style, he digitally distills their essence, and recombines it in a way that will be more pleasing to NATO audiences.

Likewise, Gabriel's supposed ventures into the frontiers of reality are not entirely representative of the world to which they proclaim allegiance. Unlike other labels, most of the artists on Real World were not recorded in the field, but in Gabriel's rural British studio, where state of the art technology and modern production techniques simulate the "real" within the false.

More legitimate in its technology, yet no less ambitiously named, Rykodisc's World series features the recording skills of Mickey Hart, best known as the drummer for the shitty rock group the Grateful Dead. In 1988, Rykodisc agreed to release works featuring Hart, an amateur musicologist, and the various artists he had recorded over the years, musicians ranging from the Tibetan choir of the Gyoto Monks to the Sudanese oud player, Hamza El Din. Speaking on his motivation for recording such stuff, Hart says that, "My greatest thrill was to listen ... just to sit there in my studio, with my speakers, and the Nagra, sipping a little cognac ... " Apart from indulging his armchair tourism, Hart and Rykodisc attempt to present the "world" (in this case the "real" is understood) to the willing consumer, but their world is a very small one indeed, with only Hart's ears determining its boundaries. Like the other world music labels, the Rykodisc series centers its efforts around the work of one Westerner of widely recognized hipness and the aural artifacts he has collected over the years. In keeping with its commodity-based perception of the world, Rykodisc's series is more of a tour through the library of an aging rock star than it is a representative sampling of a "world," real or otherwise.

As with Gabriel's label, Hart's own musical work comprises a certain percentage of the Rykodisc releases. Like Gabriel, Hart created a fantasy world of non-Anglic culture into which only he and his fans were privileged to enter. Such a situation worked to Hart's advantage, giving his music a new prominence and greater credibility when collected together with the work of a select body of world-renowned masters. As a result Hart enjoyed a tremendous wave of popularity: great sales of his bookDrumming at the Edge ofMagic (Dude! That is so wild! I wish Jim Morrison could read it!) and companion CD At the Edge, as well as sold out tour dates of Planet Drum, an ensemble which featured a cross-cultural assortment of percussionists performing under Hart's guidance. The World series has been more than just culturally successful, it has been financially so, in ways that Hart had never been able to achieve until he associated himself with an exotic blend of non-Anglic performers.

This sort of cultural cooptation is nothing new. Even before Paul Simon and DaVid Byrne lesser historical agents like wars, the slave trade, and international commerce 108 â&#x20AC;˘

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carried instruments like the lute, banjo, and bagpipe all over the globe. Composers like Dvorak, Cage, and Satie openly borrowed cultural forms for rein corporation in their music, and many of today's "standard" musical forms-jazz, rock, and blues-are the products of extensive cross-cultural breeding.

World music is different because of the putative internationalist idealism of its promoters and consumers. But under its banner, people like Hart and Gabriel have emerged as nothing more than just a new incarnation of the economically driven explorer, the sort of rough and rugged type who is able to make the difficult journey to distant lands and return with new treasures for sale in the home markets. These world music merchants do more than just borrow from other cultures; they do the travelling, find allnew sounds, and truss them up with modern recording technology. Following in the tradition of Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, and Christopher Columbus, these new imperial merchants venture into uncharted cultural territory and establish the trading posts for cultural export. All to indulge Western fantasies of exotic "native" peoples in touch with the primal rhythms of the earth, to provide consumers with musical trophies of their enlightenment.

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Interior Alec Dinwoodie l.

The bleached corpse of the afternoon mutes the surface of my window.

Pinned to the wall, a peacock feather pales quietly in its light.

Minutes trickle by. Outside, a man presses his face against my door and whispers. Frustrated cars roar and slide around the building.

The day haunts the walls with drowned hands.

2.

The windows of the house we left, lit through the trees of old, anonymous neighbors.

My father hammered that deck together, braced the basement walls and floor, laid quarter-ton supports in the terraced garden.

My balcony hangs from the third story.

In summer 1'd submerge there, naked below the railing in warmth blazing featureless and blue.

From this cold-knuckled crouch now in our overgrown old yard no motion shows between the blinds: only vague lines of golden light.

3.

London lit by bonfires and pulsing with riot.

The squares rage with whistles and the pouring mob desperate cabs bob in the traffic; bobbies losing helmets swim horses away.

The lights burn on under a yawning New Year.

Where the crowd breaks, or splashes to vapor, the city does not notice.

Our years, our tides bathe it only as mist bathes stone.

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What she does not understand Alec Dinwoodie That I am walking home in a city so old its stone shares substance with its darkness. That loneliness sinks leaden and still older through both. That my throat aches dense to stretch and die strangled on her body.

That it cannot swallow her whole.

That towers and walls fold inward to silhouette against the bruised, deep morning. That they remember a color humming wet behind that skythat I have splashed toward its single note and tasted only murk.

That she herself mouths syllables of harmony, sprays them back between her teeth like shit, or a giggle.

That a shit-dripping pigeon with its beak can pull veins out of marble or a man's leg. That stone dries to mere crust, can shear and crumble and only sharpen its corners for your spine. That a stone sky, the kind I wish for, a vault, would entomb us both. That we'd cling blind in the night of its belly, cramped, squalid as lichen.

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OU'rIIDB 11'1 1II11ID01ll:

a ClRay Day III allil aRaOR Rick Perlstein Outside my window: a gray day in Ann Arbor . Two cops-in shorts, on bicyclesglide by. A roiling sea of blue and gold middle-age bodies ambling onward, purposefully. A sign on my front porch: "Reserved Parking Only." A navy mini-van vomits forth a pot-bellied man with a silly grin. He wears a navy driving cap, a yellow sweater, and he crazily shakes hands with everyone around him. "Greg, ya want some soup?"

It's football Saturday at the University of Michigan. I live in a house near the stadium, and my landlords rent out my driveway and backyard to alumni as a parking lot.

Wait, it gets stranger. The same folks have parked here for ten years, so they're all buddies by this time. They bellow amiably at each other, on, and on, and on, shit-faced.

There are even permanent name tags on the chain link fence surrounding the lawn, marking each family's personal season-parking space. And-the piece de resistance-a port-a-john (the company's motto: "Best in the field") has been installed next to the storage shed where I keep my bicycle. Every morning I thread my bike past this portable privy before making my way to campus. And every other Saturday morning I awake to peer out my window at fifty strangers occupying my backyard as intimately as if it were their own living room. My bedroom windows don't have any blinds yet, making them visible to me, and I to them.

So I pretend I'm a performance artist playing a baroque parody: a scholar living in a fishbowl. Sitting at my desk reading, typing, fixing a snack, listening to Miles on the radio, looking anguished, peering at my musty volume through wire glasses. Foucault. I hold my head, furrow my brow. Scratch madly at my goatee'd chin. I pull at my hair.

Scribble cryptic notes on the first scrap of paper I grab-my phone bill-a meditation on the capillary, rhizomatic technologies of power/knowledge. Those folks outside?

They've paid to drink beer, eat fried chicken, and watch me, a rare perfect specimen. I'm realizing that I haven't fetched the New York Times from my front porch yet. I venture forth. Past the port-a-potry. Past the Tauruses, the Caravans, the Mercuries. Past the Igloo Coolers. Past a forest of vaguely differentiated grunting forms. My public.

Bumping into one, I find myself face to face with another. He startles. I try to put him at ease. "Tell me, my good man," I query. "For you at least, is 'football'-as a discursive formation-better explained by the (admittedly problematic) notion of the Paris Marxists of an 'ideological state apparatus' interpellating individuals as subjects by occluding, in the relatively autonomous sphere of' culture,' the possibility of recognizing the determination in the last instance of all subjectivity by the sphere of material production-or, if you'd rather, do you find it more congruent with the paradigms of a

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more affirmative American cultural criticism-personified by, say, a John Fiske-which would see it as a contested site where intextuated bodies in fact resist, or at least negotiate, that interpellation-in-ideology by identifying with the jouissance of the grotesque Rabelaisian bodies of the players?" However, rather than relaxing him, my neighborly small talk in fact sends him into spasms of confused panic. Another approach seems called for. "Go Blue!" I venture, cheerfully, and his ashen face returns to its former ruddy glow, his mouth forms a grin, he begins panting as if a dog, and waves a pennant, flaccidly, as I retreat back into my fishbowl to enjoy the Times book review section. Ah, yes. The new de Sade biography, reviewed, favorably.

Perhaps, rather, I fancy myself an anthropologist who's stumbled upon a nomadic tribe in the midst of their sacred potlatch ritual (or "tailgate," as the clans in this region call it). I hide myself out of view with my field notebook. Peoples of this culture, it is noted in the literature, often refer to themselves with the names of all-but-extinct animals formerly indigenous to their roving areas. Badgers. Hoosiers. Jayhawks. Gophers.

Nittany Lions. Buckeyes. Note how the superstitious Wolverine clan recklessly consume the fruits of months of tiring agricultural labor (to appease the voracious gods?)"Fried chicken," "potato salad," "cole slaw," "beer." How to account for their irrational, seemingly anti-functional gluttony? By reference to Durkheimian theories of ritual which posit that such exquisite undoings of the rational order in fact serve to re-integrate the functional equilibrium of the society itself? Yes, I think so. The social order is projected onto the celestial order: in Wolverine terms, they must produce scarcity to humble themselves before the gods to whom they owe their existence. The gods properly sated, they migrate on, in packs, cloaked in sacred vestments of blue and gold, stupidly, inexorably, on towards the "game." At precisely one o'clock, what had been the site of a din of sacred activity becomes utterly abandoned, as the celebrants wander away in unison.

What does this mean? I retreat to my field-tent to bang out a grant proposal.

Or more fun: I imagine I'm a zookeeper in my little office in my little zoo house in the middle of the zoo-ensconced in the very heart of the ferocious alumni pen. "But ma! They're sooo cute!" I imagine the visitors chirping. "Can I have one to keep?" I wouldn't advise it, little girl. If you keep them well-fed, sure, they usually don't bite. But what about that fucking annoying mating call? The scourge of the animal kingdom.

Bellowed forth from the heart of their ample guts: "GO-O-O BLOOOO! GO-O-O BLOOO!" For me, it's a minor occupational hazard, more than compensated for by the pleasure their frisky antics afford. But their bleating is quite more than the average person could handle, day in, day out, I reckon.

Watch them amuse themselves dumbly tossing around a brown leather ovuloid!

(When they misbehave I have to take it away.) Feeding time: throw them a beer, watch them suck it down, greedily, gratefully, eyes flashing. See them bray mindlessly about "the game." Cute! Life among the upper midwesternalumnia idioticus. Sometimes, I reflect, they almost seem, well, human. I suspend reverie, however, and attend to the BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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task at hand. My report to the head zookeeper is due tomorrow. The forty-two year old male, the one we've named "Kielkowski," has been pissing on the rim of the port-apotty again. I have to decide whether to put him to sleep or not. The females of the species have been known to maul similar offenders to death; we'd rather avoid unnecessary bloodshed. I pick up the phone, ring a colleague of mine in Indiana at the South Bend Zoo for some friendly advice.

Or: I trade my scholar's black turtleneck, my colonialist anthropologist's pith helmet, my zookeeper's jumpsuit for the hunter's blaze-orange vest. Open season on the yellow bellied, blue-billed Michigander. Will I bag my limit this year? My decoys are in order. Ed's Outdoorsman's Paradise had a two-for-one on these fantastic hand-made signs: "Parking: $5. E-Z in, E-Z out!" Smudged just right-you'd never guess from a distance they was fake. Igloo coolers, stuffed overflowing with bait: fried chicken, cole slaw, beer. A lot of the fellas are using this new stuff this year, "sushi," they say it draws 'em like flies. But I'm not buying, hey, what worked for my grand-dad, it'll work for me, eh? But that don't mean I ain't meticulous: last season I was lazy, but this year I'm going all the way. Went over by Ed's, got me the top-of-the line 'gander trap: the "port-ajohn!" "Best in the field"-heh, heh, heh.

Yep, here I am, up in my tree stand, camouflaged like they think I'm a student, see?

Got the Macintosh, the Foucault, right? I'm playing REM on the stereo, scattered some dirty flannel shirts on the ground, like I say, went all out this year-did I mention I got one of those eco-coffee mugs hanging from my knapsack out by the windbreak? The fake goatee? Heh, heh, heh.

Faintly, in the distance: "Go-o-o bloooo ... go-o-o bloo ... " Shhh. They be coming by round 'bout now, hear 'em-just over the horizon they're comin', all bunched up like that, like they do, heh heh, right, just wait a little, just a little, don't let em see ... now get 'em in your sights there, siowly! ... slowly... shhh, make your first shot count, ain't gonna get much more than that.... NOW! "CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!" "GO-O-O BLOOOO! GO-O-O BLOOO! EROOO ERooooO!!! ERooooO!!!!"

A sickening bellow. Now rising, now falling, now fading, fading off into the distance, and-pay dirt! Looks like I'm gonna be strapping one across the hood this year, aina? ... no taste in the world like fresh 'gander ... heh, heh, heh.

Outside my window: a gray day in Ann Arbor. A town of 100,000. A stadium that holds 100,000. Game time. No one's about; the streets are ghostly, deserted. A cop--in shorts, on a bicycle-glides by. I amble onward, purposefully, towards the library, whistling, savoring the quiet. I strain my ears. In the distance, dispersed by an icy wind: "go0-0 blooooo! go-o-o blooo ... "

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I AM THE LIGHT Daniel S. Libman My name is Howard. I am the light.

At first I was unaware of this, as you are now. But like you I came to understand what I am and what I must do.

I am the way.

Everything I do becomes legend. Remember the rock group Big Panty? Remember their slogan: DO BONGS? I used to work for them. I knew them in high school before they were making any money. I used to move all their equipment around from one show to another. A show in those days was somebody's basement and a party. It was fun.

They were the band but I was the man. They even said so. Between numbers I would call, "Do bongs, Do bongs" and soon everyone was shouting it.

Even now that they are big and play the big halls people are still yelling "Do bongs."

They yell it from the streets when the Big Panty patty limo drives by. They chant it on television shows when Big Panty are on. I am no longer with Big Panty but "Do bongs" lives on and on.

There's a little rock trivia for you. They used to laugh when someone would say "Do bongs." They aren't laughing now of course. Now they hear cash registers.

It is legend just as I too am legend. I am Howard. I am the light.

I went to Mr. Donuts once and saw a girl whose entire face was covered with burns; but her hair was beautiful. It was a brilliant fiery red. It seemed likely that her hair was what had set fire to her face.

I thought about striking up a conversation but it was very late and the only people about were lost spirits and perverts. I didn't want to frighten her.

Besides, I could see her reflection in the mirror eating a donut. She had no upper lip and her top row of teeth was encrusted with yellow muck. She could not keep the donut from spilling out of her mouth. She used one hand to hold the donut and the other to retrieve the pieces that fell, and then stuffed them back under her yellow teeth.

I admired her greatly and wanted to talk to her. But it was late and though I am not a lost soul or a pervert, I could not think of a way to begin talking to her.

And when the loneliness washes over me, I have to remember; unlike you, I am here for a reason. I cannot see a movie every time I don't want to think. I cannot pick up a phone each time the sounds of my own thoughts are insufficient. I cannot bowl instead of cry. It is important to know that to be the one, as I am, I must be ONE.

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The reason the music is so loud is so I can hear it. I have to hear it. I have to be able to hear it. Long shot, liquidator. Nobody is special.

I tell you this not by way of explanation. I tell you this not so you can nod your head and say, "See?" But I do want you to know that I spent some time locked away.

I had a lot of books all neatly packed away on shelves. When they found me, all my books were heaped into the center of my room. I was sleeping on top of the pile.

The problem was that I hadn't answered the phone in several weeks. The problem was I ignored the door bell. I didn't eat. I didn't hallucinate like they said I would.

I participated in osmosis.

And when they came in and found me and yanked me off my support systems, I didn't fight. I let my Walkman drop to the ground. My body rose, lifted upwards. I saw it all before my door actually came down for the benefit of the less divine. It was all there: hoses, screaming, the smell of charcoal. I can't explain it except to say that it happened.

"Do bongs," I told the fireman. He nodded, wrapped me in a sheet, ate a donut. Me too.

I have a plaid bag that I keep my bowling ball in. I found the bowling ball in a gutter. It was in the plaid bag. I keep the ball and the bag together because that's the way I found them.

The Irish have a similar thing for their tea pots. They call them Tea Cozies. An Irish girl named Christine told me about it one night.

She was a fan of the band I used to work for, Big Panty. I used to see her at all the shows. She had amazing red hair that used to fight the light for brilliance. I actually once had a conversation with her. I couldn't keep my eyes off her hair. We talked about tea cozIes. "You actually put them over your tea kettles?" I asked.

"Mmmmm," she laughed. "We knit them."

And this is how I get to sleep at night: I lay in bed on the covers and close my eyes.

Then I pretend I'm being shot in the head. I flinch and convulse three times as three bullets enter my skull and blood showers my face.

Then I attempt to crawl out, but I am losing strength so fast I can only make it to the edge of the bed. I reach up for the phone but I can only raise my arm a little off the sheets before I collapse altogether in a heap. Then I sleep.

But I am always able to fill with blood and rise up. I am the erection. Through me you will find love and joy and an ocean of harmony. I have seen the after-world. It is as written, and St. Peter will greet each and everyone of you. "Do bongs," he will say. "Do bongs St. Peter," you will say back to him. He'll grin and let you pass.

I am that merry wise man.

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The reason I can see the girl so well in the window is because I have no lips either. I have been through it, boy! I have walked through fire and lived.

But now you wouldn't know me from Adam.

The fire fighters think that they extinguished the blaze. They didn't. They carried it out on a stretcher and brought it home. They gave it oxygen. They fanned the flames and sent it out on its way.

You can see the flames licking my face. You can only look for a second before it gets too bright and hurts your eyes. Look away. Don't point, child. Don't stare.

There but for the grace of me go you.

It also works for television too.

When the show stops I get sad. And the commercials take so long. Sometimes I can't barely take it no more. I lay back in the chair and pretend bullets are pelting my body. I shake and quiver and flail about, but there is no escape. They eventually stop but it is too late.

The blood is draining from me but still I want to raise my arms to my Father and beg forgiveness. I can't get them up and soon I lose consciousness.

Then the show comes back on.

My hair was not touched by the flames. I don't exactly know why, but it is the truth.

My entire body was consumed with fire like the burning bush. But I did not speak. I had long red hair, and I still do. I have lost everything but the red hair. It is all gone except for my hair.

The Mr. Donut is the only thing open late at night and that is why I go there. The guy behind the counter is huge. Flesh bursts out of him on all sides. He nods to me and does not stare at my dry face. He doesn't seem to mind that I have no upper lip. This isn't easy to say, but he never, he never says anything. He never looks away. He never flinches. He gives me my cruller and my coffee and I pay him and I leave. It is the only thing I really look forward during the day. I look forward to the day becoming night so I can get a donut.

I like the fat guy that works behind the counter at Mr. Donut. He talks to me and doesn't flinch. He asks if I've found work yet. I shake my head no. He tells me it's tough.

He puts sugar and milk in my coffee. I don't have to ask any more. When he takes my money I can taste powdered sugar. He seems to exhale it. When he brings me my change he nods and tells me to have a good night.

I nod. I sit in the booth and turn on my Walkman loud. Maybe I listen to Fuzzbox or the Go Gas or maybe today I want to hear Sinead. I open the Best Seller I brought with me and read. I can eat with one hand and catch all the food that comes rolling past my charred lips with the other.

Sometimes people come in and get donuts and sometimes they actually stay. Nobody sits in the booths near me. No one talks to me. I couldn't hear them if they did.

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The music fills my head. It is good. I never listen to Big Panty.

Once a girl came in that I recognized. I think she used to come see the band I worked for. They were good once. You may have heard of them. Big Panty.

I used to see this girl at the shows before the fire. Before she got burned up real bad.

She had this amazing red hair that I could see from back stage. It would swirl around her head as she danced like a moving halo. When I came up to her she would talk to me because I wore a Big Panty All Access necklace. She knew I could get her backstage. And I did one night. It may even have been the night of the fire. It may not have been. I don't remember.

At the Mr. Donut she didn't even look my way. She wouldn't have recognized me if she did, but I might have at least reminded her of something. She's gone now and I never said anything to her. She probably thinks I was killed in the fire like so many others do.

You would be surprised at how many people think that. They don't know that I am the fire. I became the fire. Just as Mr. Donut is powdered sugar, I am the fire and the light and the way and the truth. I am.

Dr. Roy Euclid told me that it might be easier to deal with things if I pretend it happened to someone else. So sometimes before I go to bed, before the bullets, I think about that girl that I used to see at Big Panty concerts, and I pretend she is the one who picked up the bad lighter. I picture her putting the cigarette between her lips and raising the lighter just under her nose. She's doing it the exact same way I did. She closes her eyes and brings her thumb down. She bends her neck to get even closer, the exact same way. And then it's her hand that erupts and her face that gets sprayed and her world that darkens. Forever.

But soon the bullets are fired to put me out of my misery. And another day is upon me.

Don't look at me! I am the burning bush. I am the vision. I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob!

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Continued from page 14 revolution affords, the scholarship of academia's Madonna fans now appears as predictable in its conclusions as it was entertaining in its theoretical pyrotechnics. After careful study of the singer's lyrics and choreography, the professors breathlessly insisted, they had come upon a crucial discovery: Madonna was a gender-questioning revolutionary of explosive potential, a rule-breaking avatar of female empowerment, a person who disliked racism! One group of gaping academics hailed her" ability to tap into and disturb established hierarchies of gender and sexuality." Another celebrated her video "Vogue" as an "attempt to enlist us in a performance that, in its kinetics, deconstructs gender and race," an amusing interpretation, to be sure, but also one which could easily have been translated into academese directly from a Madonna press kit.

The problem is not that academics have abandoned their sacred high-culture responsibilities for a channel changer and a night at the disco, but that in so doing they have uncritically reaffirmed the mass media's favorite myths about itself. Discovering, after much intellectual twisting and turning, that Madonna is exactly the rebel that she and her handlers imagine her to be, is more an act of blithe intellectual complicity than of the "radicalism" to which the Madonna analysts believe they are contributing. After all, it was Madonna's chosen image as liberator from established mores that made her so valuable to the culture industry in the first place.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that singing the glories of pseudo-rebellion remains to this day the monotone anthem of advertising, film, and TV sitcom, or that the pseudo-rebel himself-the defier of repressive tradition, ever overturning established ways to make way for the new; the self-righteous pleasure-monad, changing identity, gender,

Wbat's lip for General Motors is mp for America One of the most important elements of the culture industry's cherished self-image as an institution of surpassing hipness is its curious historical awareness. Despite the fact that the three networks and the various Hollywood studios were founded well before World War II, the mass media trace their lineage not to the acts of their corporate birth but to the years of consumer liberation and orgasmic rebellion of the 1960s. Naturally, our leaders are aware that movies and TV shows existed before the counterculture, but philosophically the decade of the 60s is where contemporary culture began. These were, after all, the golden years of commodified dissent, the heyday of consumerism. And it is the counterculture's simple liberationist understandings of culture and society that the media has chosen to erect into timeless truths, not the slowmoving conformity of an earlier and more impoverished time. In TV sitcoms hip characters invariably triumph over squares; in advertising it is always rock 'n' roll that announces a product's desirability, not pol-

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kas. Thus when Reeboks markets a new dress shoe, they take pains not to describe the shoe's various features, but to insist that they are "not sensible," that wearing them will allow you to retain your antiestablishment hip even when in suits. "Hey man," the copy reads, reaffirming our cool but arousing us to the danger of dressing properly, "If you're not careful people will be saying, 'Hey mister.'"

And when the culture industry depicts any period before the happy years of revolution, it is invariably castthrough stilted sepia-tint images of a foreign world. The 1950s, for example, are universally recognized to have been a time of dull gray sameness, of grinding domestic tyranny, of bomb shelters and ranch houses. The Man ruled with an iron fist. Fun was forbidden. When that decade appears in advertising and mass culture, it almost always serves as a foil by which to measure our own liberation, our current high state of consumer enlightenment. Thus the increasing fashion for ads with egregious historical errors, bizarre exagerrations of the squareness of the past that seem designed only to annoy those bookish types who cling to any conception of pastness that defies the "new and improved" orthodoxy of consum-

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hair color, costume, and shoes on a whim-is more a symbol of the machine's authority than an agent of resistance. But academics seem to have missed the point. For years the culture industry has held up for our admiration an unending parade of such self-proclaimed subverters of middle-class tastes, and certain scholars have been only too glad to play their part in the strange charade, studying the minutiae of the various artists' rock videos and deciding, after long and careful deliberation, that yes, each one is, in fact, a bona fide subversive. How thoroughly had they come around to the Industry's way of thinking; how desperately did they want to, want to get along!

But thanks to the rise of 'alternative,' with its new and vastly improved street cred, sneers, and menacing hairdos, the various postmodern courses by which each scribbler arrived at his or her conclusion that Madonna is 'subverting' from within, and the particular costly academic volume in which they presented their 'findings' are now, thankfully, finally, and irresistibly made irrelevant. Just as Madonna's claims to rebel authenticity have been made suddenly laughable by an entirely new package of much more rebellious rebel imagery, so their works are consigned to the same fate. Academia's Madonna fans have built their careers by performing virtually the same task, with a nice intellectual finish, as the toothy hosts of "Entertainment T 0night," and now they are condemned to the same rubbish bin of instant forgetting. Their embrace of corporate culture has brought them face to face with its unarguable conclusions, the steel logic of its unprotestable workings: obsolescence.

In at least one sense, then, the triumph of Urge Overkill is a liberation. At least we will never, ever have to hear this favorite Paglian (or, should we say, all-American) platitude chanted for the thousand-and-first time: "I admire Madonna because

she's a woman who's totally in control of her career." And since it will take at least three years for the first close readings of the "Sister Havana" video to appear in assigned texts, let us enjoy the respite and ponder the strange twists of history that brought academia so closely into line with the imperatives of mass culture.

In this spirit I offer the following observation.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of all this is not scholars' gullible swallowing of some industry publicist's line, or even their naive inability to discern Madonna's obvious labor-fakery. The real disappointment lies in their abject inability to recognize 'popular culture' anywhere but in the officially-sanctioned showplaces of corporate America; their utter dependence on television to provide them with an imagery of rebellion.

Even as they delved deeper and deeper into the esoterica of poststructuralist theory, investing countless hours scrutinizing bad rock videos frame by frame, they remained hopelessly ignorant of the actual insurgent culture that has gone on all around them for fifteen years, for the simple reason that it's never made MTV. And academics, the wide-eyed, well-scrubbed sons and daughters of the suburbs, cannot imagine a 'counterculture' that exists outside of their full-color, 36-inch screens. So in TV-land as well as the academy, Madonna was as 'radical' as it got. Thus did the role of criticism become identical to that of the glossy puff magazines, with their well-practiced slavering over the latest products of the Culture Industry: to celebrate celebrity, to find an epiphany in shopping, a happy heteroglossia in planned obsolescence. As for their interpretations, the professorial class might just as well have been proclaiming the counter-hegemonic undercurrents of 'Match Game' or the patriarchy-resisting profundity of Virginia Slims advertising.

Imagine what they could do if they only knew about Borbetomagus or Merzbow!

erism.

So an advertisement for a car called Acura trundles up a stodgy-sounding aphorism attributed to Lord Asquith, the British prime minister during World War I, then deflates it with the sneering note, "But then, he wore a powdered wig."

Levi's shows us an Asian man on a motorcycle in the desert, symbol of today's multicultural consumerism of mindless velocity (all cultures guaranteed turned to lifestyles overnight!), musing on the visceral pleasure of "losing control" and the fearful caution of the unenlightened people of the past: "In the thirties they thought if you went over 60 your face would peel off." Only the beats, Marlon Brando, and Norman Mailer, with his celebration of the 'hipster,' stand out from the long dark night of repression as harbingers of the way to come; only people like Jack Kerouac, James Dean, and Chet Baker -not Estes Kefauver or Upton Sinclair or Norman Thomas are suitable for the Gap's new retro-campaign for khaki trousers: Legendary writers, critics, intellectuals with courage. All in their cotton khakis. Casual.

Defiant. Khakis just like those we make for you. Gap khakis.

Traditional, Plain-front, Easy Fit, Classic Fit.

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Chevrolet, though, has always had a problem with the 60s-glorifying orthodoxy of commercialized dissent. Over the years it has invested millions (probably billions) in developing a brand image that identifies Chevy with patriotism, one-to-one: "See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet," "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet," etc. The problem is, of course, that patriotism is not an attitude that comes naturally to hipsters and countercultural types, who are usually more concerned with protesting wars than celebrating their country. So for years such figures, with their rock 'n' roll and defiant doings, were conspicuously absent from Chevrolet advertiSing, giving it a distinctly backwards, unexciting feel.

But by deploying the culture industry's understanding of the pre-1960s past, Chevrolet has finally found a way around this vexing problem. The company's latest ads portray the invention of hip as one of the venerable and time-honored things patriotic people celebrate about America. America is now "the country that invented Rock and Roll," and rebellious deviance has been elevated to the pantheon of American Achievements.

Transgression, breaking the rules, is, like hot dogs and

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Fuck you and your underground At the center of the academics' intricate webs of Madonna-theories lay the rarely articulated but crucial faith that the workings of the culture industry, the stuff that comes over our TV screens and through our stereos, are profoundly normal The culture-products that so unavoidably define our daily lives, it is believed, are a given-a natural expression of the tastes of 'the people.' This has long been a favorite sophistry of the industry's paid publicity flacks as well: mass culture is fundamentally democratic. The workings of the market ensure that the people get what the people want; that sitcoms and Schwarzenegger and each of the various sneering pop stars are the embodiment of the general will. Thus, as the academic celebrators of Madonna was always careful to assert, those who insist on criticizing Madonna are deeply suspicious, affected adherents of an elitist and old-fashioned aesthetic that unfairly dismisses "low" culture in favor of such insufferably stuffY pastimes as ballet and opera.

This anti-elitist theme is, quite naturally, also a favorite in sitcoms and movies, which establish their hegemony over the public mind by routinely bashing various stock snobs and hapless highbrow figures. Advertising repeatedly strikes the same note: a drink called "Somers" is to gin, one ad assertS, as a bright green electric guitar, implement of transgressive cool, is to an old brown violin, squeaky symbol of the slow-moving. A Pizza Hut commercial similarly juxtaposes a moralizing, old-fashioned stuffed-shirt man who is filmed in black and white, with a full-color, rock en' roll rendition of the restaurant of revolt. And when the straw man of ' cultural elitism' is conjured up by the academics for its ritual stomping, the feeling is exactly the same.

There is only the dry, spare, highbrow of the privileged and the lusty, liberated lowbrow of the masses,

and between these two the choice is clear.

This, then, is the culture of "the people." Never mind all the openly conducted machinations of the culture industry-the mergers and acquisitions, the "synergy," the admen's calculations of" penetration" and "usage pull," the dismantling of venerable publishing operations for reasons of fiscal whimsy. What the corporations have decided we will watch and read and listen to is somehow passed off as the grass-roots expressions of the nation. And this is a crucial financial distinction, since the primary business of business is no longer, say, making things or exploiting labor, but manufacturing culture, finding the means to make you buy and consume as much as you possibly can, convincing you of the endless superiority of the new over the old, that the solution to whatever your unhappiness may be lies in a few new purchases. It is a truism of the business world that Coke and Pepsi don't make soda pop; they make advertising. Nike may pay Asian laborers starvation wages, but their most important concern is convincing us that it is meaningful, daring, and fulfilling to spend over one hundred dollars for a pair of sneakers. If you feel a burning need to understand "culture," get out of the coffee house and buy yourself a subscription to Advertising Age. The media-flurry over the definition of the "Twenty-somethings" provides an interesting example of the ways in which "popular culture" is made, not born. Between the multitude of small presses and independent record labels that were founded, produced, and distributed by young people over the last decade, we have been a remarkably articulate, expressive group. But this is not what was meant when the various lifestyle journalists and ad agency hacks went looking for "Generation x."

The only youth culture that concerned them was the kind that's pre-fabricated for us in suites on the

baseball, what we Americans are known for.

A historically-minded boy has had a "scary dream," the Chevy ads announce: "America never invented Rock and Roll." The nation has remained mired in the nightmarish repressiveness of the generic pre60s. "There are no rock stars," no celebrities to lead us daringly down the paths of deviance. And no rebel athletes, either, to endorse the $100 tennis shoes made in the sweatshops of Asia, since people play by the old rules and "No one has ever dunked a basketball." Even more horrifying, "There are no blue jeans," none of the hyper-expensive clothing by which every one of us now declares himself an individualist.

There are only milkmen and accordion teachers.

Imagine ... No Rock and Roll.

An entire nation without rhythm.

The national speed limit is a brisk 35.

Gasp! And the poor youngster who has been granted this terrifying vision of consumer dystopia is pictured in the way he would look had Rock and Roll and BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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Chevrolet never been "invented" to rescue us: a shirt buttoned all the way to the collar, a bow tie (!), glasses and a pocketful of pens (ah, the horrors of logocentrism!), sensiblelooking shoes, and holding not a Gibson Explorer, instrument of liberation, but a clarinet, dark and sinister tool of the big bands and their rigid regime.

But then the reader turns the page, and the nightmare is over. We're back in the world of the consumerist present, staring at a gorgeous red Camaro, rock 'n' roll on wheels, "In other words, cool."

Gawk and object all you want, there is nothing you can do besides hope the campaign doesn't work, hope that people will remember that, all through the years of "milkmen and accordion teachers" Chevrolet was just as much a fixture of the American scene as the B47 and Joe McCarthy. Butthen, historical memory is exactly the faculty ads like this are designed to destroy. And the life work of a thousand well-meaning history professors will never equal Chevrolet's power to create bogus historical consciousness. So give an unctuous postmodern welcome to professor Detroit as he deconstructs the real.

So how will you have your past? Plain front or classic fit?

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Sunset Strip and Madison Avenue, and the only question that mattered was how to refine this stuff so that we, too, could be lured into the great American consumer maelstrom. Take a look at the book 13th Gen by Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, the most baldfaced attempt to exploit the culture industry's confusion about how to pigeonhole us. As with the Time article on Pearl Jam, the book's lengthy cataloguing of "Twenty-something" culture never once even mentions an actual indie-Iabel band or a magazine produced by young people; all that matters are the movies, the TV sitcoms, the major-label records that are targeted our way. The book's press kit (which, again, you aren't supposed to see) explicitly cast 13th Gen as a useful guide for executives in the advertising, public-relations, and election-winning industries. We are to be sold, not heard.

Under no condition is "popular culture" something that we make ourselves, in the garage with electric guitars and second-hand amplifiers, on the office photocopier when nobody's looking. It is, strictly and exclusively, the stuff produced for us in a thousand corporate boardrooms and demographic studies.

"Popular culture" doesn't enlighten, doesn't seek to express meaning or shared aspects of our existence; on the contrary, it aims to make people stupid and complacent. "Popular culture" sells us stuff, convinces us to buy more soap or a different kind of shirt, assures us of the correctness of business paternalism, offers us a rebel fantasy world in which to drown our never-tobe-realized frustration with lives that have become little more than endless shopping trips, marathon ftling sesSlOns. "Popular culture" is the enemy; rock 'n' roll is the health of the state.

In such a climate, the old highbrow/lowbrow categorization becomes utterly irrelevant: who cares about the intricacies of Brahms when the world is

being made and unmade anew every day by the power-tie and mobile-phone wielding commissars of public awareness? The great American cultural conflict has nothing to do with the clever pas de deux of affected outrage acted out by sputtering right-wingers and their blustering counterparts in Soho and Hollywood.It is not concerned with twaddle like "family values" or "cultural elitism," but with a much more basic issue: the power of each person to make his own life without the droning, quotidian dictation of business interests. If we must have grand, sweeping cultural judgments, only one category matters anymore: the adversarial. The business of business is our minds, and the only great divide that counts in music, art, or literature, is whether or not they give us the tools to comprehend, to resist, to evade the all-invasive embrace.

But between the virtual monopoly of business interests over the stuff you spend all day staring at and the decision of the academics to join the burgeoning and noisy legion of culture industry cheerleaders, very little that is adversarial is allowed to filter through. Our culture has been hijacked without a single cry of outrage. However we may fantasize about Madonna's challenging of" oppressive tonal hierarchies," however we may drool over Pearl Jam's rebel anger, there is, quite simply, almost no dissent from the great cultural project of corporate America, no voice to challenge television's overpowering din. You may get a different variety of shoes this year, but there is no "alternative," ever.

And yet it is not for nothing that the rebel is the paramount marketing symbol of the age. Beneath all the tawdry consumer goods through which we are supposed to declare our individuality-the earrings, the sunglasses, the cigarettes, the jackets, the shoes; beneath the obvious cultural necessities of an obsolescence-driven business regime, we find something deeply meaningful in the image of the free-spirit. We need the rebel because we know that there is something fundamentally wrong.

"Something fundamentally wrong." So ubiquitous is this feeling, so deeplyentrenched is this unspoken but omnipresent malaise, that it almost seems trite as soon as the words are set on the page. And yet only the simplest, least aware, and most blithely comfortable among us retain any sort of faith in the basic promises of our civilization. Violence, fear, deterioration, and disorder are the omnipresent daily experiences of one class; meaninglessness, mandatory servility, and fundamental dishonesty inform every minute in the lives of another. Conrad's horror and Eliot's futility have become the common language of everyday life. We want out, and the rebel, whether of the 'artistic,' beatnik variety, the inner-city gangster type, or the liberated star-figures of' alternative' rock, has become the embodiment ofour longings.

It is due only to the genius of the market that these desires have been so BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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effectively prevented from achieving any sort of articulation, so cleverly and so imperceptibly channeled into dumb politics and simple acts of consuming, into just more and more and more of the same.

We may never be able to dismantle the culture of consumption and we will almost surely never achieve any sort of political solution to the problems of this botched civilization. Quite simply, no platform exists from which the monomessage of the media might be countered. The traditional organs of resistance, enfeebled by decades oflegislative attack and a cultural onslaught they do not comprehend, have either made their peace with consumerism or cling to outdated political goals.

But through the deafening mechanical yammering of a culture long since departed from the rails of meaning or democracy, through the excited hum of the congregation gathered for mandatory celebrity-worship, there is one sound that insists on making sense, that speaks piercingly through the fog of fakery, the airy, detached form ulas of official America. Punk rock, hardcore, indie rock, the particular name that's applied is not important: but through its noise comes the scream of torment that is this country's only mark of health; the sweet shriek of outrage that is the only sign that sanity survives amid the strip malls and hazy clouds of Hollywood desire. That just beyond the silence of suburban stupidity, the confusion of the parking lots, the aggression, display, and desperate supplication of the city streets, the possibility of a worthy, well-screamed no survives.

Just behind the stupefYing smokescreens of authorized" popular culture" seethes something real thriving on the margins, condemned to happy obscurity both by the marketplace, to whose masters (and consumers) its violent negation will OW I Ifll S ~ be forever incomprehen\A sible, and by the acaWe demicarbitersof'radicalI I ism,' by whom the "culture of the people" is strictly understood to be 11 whatever the corporate donors say it is. Unauthorizedand unauthorizable, '0 .

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postmodern maneuvers of ironic rationalization they make, the institution of celebrity requires, at its base, the unironic, and vety real, mental surrender of millions of people in such places as Toledo and Detroit and Kansas City), the grinding inescapable ruination of the everyday, the mind-numbing boredom, the You're All Twisted, violence, distrust, anger. It is the frenzied transgression of the TV mandatory, the sudden giggling realization that something has finally come close, confronted the electronic fist with such forceful extremist honesty, with an openness so utterly foreign to the • "realistic" violence of the Hollywood blockbuster, the scopophilia of the sex drama.

For them it's fantasies of the comfortable cul-de-sac with state-of-the-art security ~ equipment, the fine car, the airborne cur-'~ tfew enforcement unit, the Lake Forest es-, ~ • tate, the Westchester commute; for us it's ~ ~f. the secession, the internal exile, the purg- s::. ~ .'" , vi ing clean pure no; the unnuanced thrash- ;;; ~ __ ~.~ ~__ ~ n> 0 iil ing release, the glorious never never never, .,. ~~ ;;! the Won't Fit the Big Picture, the self-Ios- . ~ 'i> 0- 0 • 3" ~ " ~ & ing refusal to ever submit, the I'm not not' .S ~, U -0 ; {,~ ~ Q m~ .... c:. n>......, not not not not not your academy. ~ ~ G> 0 ~~. ~ g :; For this expression of dissent there has ~ ~ ';. .~~ ~~ been no Armory show, no haughty embrace 0 g. ~o -g. (I) - ... n> 0by aesthetes or editors. The only recogni~ ~ - ~ cion it has garnered is the siege equipment: 8 ~ I n> ~ ~c~>J of the consumer age, a corporate-sponsored,. ll! ~ iii ~ . shadow movement that seeks to mine it for "~ ~ ,~ ~ ~ marketable looks, imitable sounds, menacing poses. A travelling youth circus patterned, of course, after the familiar boomer originals of Woodstock and Dead shows, is invented to showcase the new industry dispensations. But so strange, so foreign to the executive are our "punk rock" rantings that they are forced to hire 'youth consultants' to explain us to them, to pay marketing specialists vast sums to do nothing but decode our puzzling signifiers. For while we were discovering paths of resistance, the people who are now manufacturing, marketing, and consuming' alternative' product were busily transforming themselves into mandarins at business school, were honing themselves dumber and dumber at the college paper, were practicing their professional skills in the bathrooms of the frat houses. Only lately have they discovered that we're 'hip,' that our look

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has 'potential,' that our music 'rocks.'

So now, with their bottomless appetite for new territory to colonize, they've finally come around to us. For years they were too busy working their way up the corporate ladder to be bothered, but now what we have been building has begun to look usable, even marketable. But they won't find it easy. Ours is a difficult country, with all sorts of arcane pitfalls that will require an ever-mounting payroll of expensive consultant-guides, many of whom will lead them astray just for the sheer joy of seeing the machine seize up, of watching suburbanites wander about dad in ridiculous slang and hairdos. (Who was it that foisted Paw on A&M?) We will not be devoured easily. Few among us are foolish enough to believe that 'the music industry' is just a bigger version of the nextdoor indie label, just a collection of simple record companies gifted mysteriously with gargantuan budgets and strange powers to silence criticism. Few consider the glorified publicity apparatus that we call media as anything other than an ongoing attack by the nation's owners on the addled minds of the great automaton audience. We inhabit an entirely different world, intend entirely different outcomes. Their culture-products aim explicitly for enervated complacency; we call for resistance. They seek fresh cultural fuel so that the machinery of stupidity may run incessantly; we cry out from under that machine's wheels. They manufacture lifestyle; we live lives.

So as they venture into the dark new world of hip, they should beware: the natives in these parts are hostile, and we're armed with flame-throwers. We will refuse to do their market research for them, to provide them amiably with helpfullifestyle hints and insider trend know-how. We are not a convenient resource available for exploitation whenever they require a new transfusion of rebel street cred; a test-market for 'acts' they can someday unleash on the general public.

And as they canvass the college radio stations for tips on how many earrings and in which nostril, or for the names of the 'coolest' up-and-coming acts, they will find themselves being increasingly misled, embarrassed by bogus slang, deceived by phantom blips on the youth-culture futures index, anticipating releases from nonexistent groups. It has taken years to win the tiny degree of autonomy we now enjoy. No matter which way they cut their hair or how weepily Eddie Vedder reminisces about his childhood, we aren't about to throw it open to a process that in just a few years would leave us, too, jaded and spent, discarded for yet a newer breed of rebels, an even more insolent crop of imagery, looks, and ads. Sanity isn't that cheap.

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The standard argument went something like this: our generation was suffering from an identity crisis because business had not yet nailed down a coherent consumer profile for us. But now that has been remedied: with a great plethora of culture products having been specifically targeted just at us, we finally exist. And since we exist, we must have leaders and spokesmen to validate the newborn stereotype and lead us in the ways of consumer correctness. Everywhere the scramble to connect the 'twenty-something' attitude to lifestyles and commodities of all kinds is in high gear, in magazines of "our own" like Raygun and Inside Edge in addition to the frothing ministrations of newly enlightened journals like Details and Spin.

The once-threatening "New Generation Gap" has also been cleverly utilized to saddle us with a host of new "political" organizations (featuring the latest Kennedys!) mouthing the usual tepid bullshit about "leadership" and the futility of "partisanship," droning predictably about the pure motives and clear-sighted nobility of youth, protesting about nothing with an earnest ingenuousness which of course they will auction off as quickly as possible for a place as a token "Gen Xer" on somebody's staff. We have even been blessed with a "political" magazine for "twenty-somethings," a kind of bantam New Republic that fancies itself the responsible voice of the young, crammed with nauseatingly righteous fake idealism. Politics is, as ever, little more than a profession for selfdesignated "leaders" who vie with each other to create ever-vaguer platitudes. The only difference between this latest crop of generational opportunists and the lukewarm DC careerists of the past is that the new version of the standard high-school-civics-course blablabla about "serving" and "bipartisanship" is more watery and devoid of meaning than ever. As if the cliches have at last worn themselves out, lost their narcotic power through sheer mileage, become so self-evidently unconnected to the reality they purport to describe that they have been reduced to nothing but a glorified word game ('When they say "family values," we counter with "bipartisan spirit."'). Maybe the facade is finally beginning to crack.

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We're Marketed Therefore We Are? Stephen Duncombe The marketing of our generation was bound to happen sooner or later. After the success of Linklater's Slacker, the promotion of Coupland's Generation X and the "discovery" of Seattle grunge, it was just a matter of waiting for the wave. And it came. It started in the news weeklies, picked up speed with CNN, and crested with cover stories in both Business Week and Advertising Age. Generation X solved a real problem for marketers. Until we were discovered, they had been trying to tap a wholly fabricated "Pepsi Generation" via the lame superstar route of Michael Jackson and Madonna-lowest common denominator stuff, no ring of "authenticity," didn't build the proper emotive bond that self-identification does. They needed something new. And to capture all those who either opted out or were left out of the identity politics of the 1980s, Gen X was perfect. Even without an identifiable demographic tag like "black" or "queer" we could be marketed: the only essential for a gen-xer was to be born within a certain time and be willing to buy some stylin' products. Bingo, a generation is born. But we know all this.

But it's that we do know this already, and how we've been bitching about it, that's what is interesting. It wasn't until very recently that I heard people talking about their common experiences and saying the ever-elusive, 80s no-no word: "we." Most often this "we" is used in criticizing, ridiculing, and negating the niche market "we," but it's a "we" nonetheless. It seems that it took the target marketing of our generation for us to acquire a communal self-consciousness and develop a coherent voice of our own.

This observation leads me to the not so pleasant conclusion that our generation, as a coherent confederation, was called into being by the market. The question then becomes: does this generational thing only exist as long as it is marketed and is confined to roles that fit within those purposes? Maybe ... but maybe not. Any action can lead to contradictory results. The target marketing of the twenty-somethings may bring about something never envisioned by Nike, Geffen, Pepsi, et al. Good 01' Karl Marx, though his reputation is a bit tarnished nowadays, understood this well.

Writing at the depths of the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, Marx looked about and saw an imposing economic system that relied upon and resulted in the degradation of the people who produced the goods and worked the factories. "Dark, satanic mills," were how William Blake described these sites of sweated labor and exploitation.

Marx didn't like what he saw either. Unlike Blake however, he realized that this was the way things were going, and not being one to cry over spilt milk, he set out to uncover other features of this relatively new system of production. He discovered that the people working in the factories, dragged from separate villages all over the land and thrown into BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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the same cramped place, were starting to realize that they had things in common. Namely: the same boring and degrading work, the same shitty relationship to the bossman, and the power to do diddly-squat. At the same time, because the work demanded it, the factory workers learned how to work together as relative strangers, use new technology, and think in non-traditional ways. They put these new experiences and skills together, let it fester a bit, and voila: class consciousness and the labor union movement. Okay, so it wasn't as simple as all that, but Marx's basic observation was sound: there are always contradictory results from every action, and even the most inauspicious of beginnings can lead to positive outcomes.

Unfortunately, Marx didn't realize that Capitalism could be so accommodating, and that his newly class-conscious proles in the mother countries could be bought off with a pop-up toaster in the kitchen and a Buick in the car park. Or conversely, that his own ideas would be so attractive to those without toasters and Buicks elsewhere, that all sorts of ridiculous regimes would institute the most heinous programs in his name. In any case, since at least the 1930's, in the United States and the over-developed world, the driving force of capitalism has shifted over from production in dark, satanic mills to consumption in bright and shiny shopping malls. Ifin Marx's day people were brought together, whether they liked it or not, by the needs of production, today we are brought together, whether we like it or not, by the demands of consumption.

So what is to be learned from this history lesson? First: history happens, and you can't go back to a plainer, simpler time in a land filled with gentle and humble folk.

During the Industrial Revolution William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement dreamed of this sort of thing, and all it did was attract the disenchanted elite of the day.

Now the furniture they produced sits in the houses of the pigs who run Wall Street. In a similar vein don't even think you can sneak back to your pristine slacker ghetto to hide your head and wait it out, because even that's changing into astyleto be consumed, even as I write.

Second, watch out for the toasters and Buicks. There will be big temptations to cash in on the experience of being a "twenty-something." Visions of being left standing with a wad of dough in your hand when the Gen X thing, exhausted, crashes down and the culture parasites move on to the next trend, dance in all of our heads. Already a friend of mine was asked to do a treatment for a TV variety show named Avenue B, and Mike Gunderloy, late of Factsheet Five fame, told me that he was approached by a TV consortium wanting to do a "reality based" program on zines.

Don't do it. To begin with it's despicable that you would ever be so opportunistic.

But we lived through a despicable age so it's understandable. The real problem is that you won't be the person who makes the bucks. There are much cleverer and much more ambitious people out there in "our generation," who, realizing their career as the assistant photo director at Sassy or as Mary Boone's subaltern is fizzling, will all of a sudden discover that they 'listened to "alternative" music and that they lived in a shitty apartment and that they really slacked all the while. The Best and Brightest will be the b<:St and brightest even at being the laziest and most uncouth. And they know how to sell 132 â&#x20AC;˘

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themselves, they have the experience.

Okay, so those are the things to watch out for. But there's a good side too. All this target marketing and naming and commodifying has made a lot of us finally admit the fact that we do have a lot in common, and in arguing against the culture industry's definition of our lives, we're starting to talk about and become conscious of our own.

The operative phrase here, however, is arguing against.

Born into the atrocities and lies of the Vietnam War, the deceit of Watergate, and the selling of the counter-culture; educated during the Reagan-Bush era of the ascendancy of the investment banker, the retreat of intellectuals into cushy tenured positions, and of artists into swank galleries; coming of age watching an artificial world labeled "ours" by MTV, what else can we be but critical? The shit rises so fast around our necks that to stop yelling "No" means you get swallowed.

Irony is the voice we speak in. It's a way of communicating that expresses the opposite of our ostensible meaning. Unlike an affirmative assertion, irony depends entirely on context and a knowing audience for its meaning. Outside of its original setting and translated for an outside audience, it makes no sense. It's our pragmatic response to a culture which eats up any positive statement, strips it of its original meaning and context, and reproduces and disseminates it as an affirmation for their own message of consumption. We saw the Beatles' "Revolution" sell Nikes ... try doing that with the Dead Kennedy's "Kill the Poor." Irony is a way of keeping the bastards out of our culture.

For better or worse, criticism and irony are the dissenting voices of our generation.

Well, maybe for worse, because there's a problem: criticism and irony are negative.

I don't mean this in a touchy-feely sense of "bad vibes," but in the sense that they can only work as negations of an already existing culture to which they refer. This relationship is complex-see Hegel's writings on the dialectics of the master/slave relationship if you don't believe me-but the problem is still simple: criticism and irony relegate our role and our voice to that of a parasite. While criticizing the culture we are wed to it; we have no autonomy, we are dependent, we are asub-culture.

Irony is also problematic because it sets up boundaries. There are those who are inthe-know and "get it," and those who aren't and don't. This, of course, is the reason we adopted it in the first place, but this exclusivity also complements a tendency in our generation's dissident sub-cultures to move towards smaller and smaller in-groups of readers or participants-a will toward smallness-in the hopes that we will be too insignificant a morsel for the rapacious jaws of marketing to gobble up. Besides being selfdestructive and in the end futile, this will toward smallness puts us again in a reactive position vis a vis the "mainstream." Thry dictate our form.

Being a non-generation for all these years was comfortable. We could count on being safe in the role of outsider; denouncing, critiquing, being cleverly ironic, and arguing against the mainstream. And we were pretty much left alone. But that's all over now, we've been sucked in; sucked into a mainstream which seems to incorporate its own negation, and, if Business Week and Advertising Age are correct, thrives off of it. The BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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angry, outsider generation is just another niche market to be exploited. And as long as we are defined solely by our negation of the dominant culture, we're simply another part of its free-wheeling, pseudo-pluralistic, multi-faceted, self-negating totality.

Don't get me wrong, negation has been, and is, important to defining what we are not, but it has also left us in a lurch as to our own definition of who weare-a gaping identity hole all too willingly filled by MTV. The trick is now to get beyond being merely reactive and work on becoming pro-active, to stop being-albeit critical-consumers, and start becoming critical creators. This isn't easy, as we live in a world where any positive voice, even a rebellious one, especially a rebellious one, is appropriated, marketed, and sold back to us, and all the safe havens have been discovered and eviscerated. So the question is: what do we do? Answer: we create areal outside: a new world within the shell of the old one.

We begin by using the cultural avenues that have been cultivated over the dark ages of yore. Thousands of zines and other small publications offer recess from the constant drivel of pundits pontificating on our generation. And tens of thousands of unknown bands demonstrate that there is life outside of MTV. And so on, with alternative art spaces, computer BBSs, underground and college radio, mail art, street posters, cassette exchanges, and the like. But these things have to break out of the groovy ghettos of subculture in which they exist now.

And they also have to be brought together. There are examples of this, like the recently resurrected Factsheet Five, which links zine writers and readers to one another, or the Do-It-Yourself networks of independent bands and clubs and record labels. But even these nascent associations need to become part of larger federations. We need to create a loosely coherent movement of alternative organizations that help connect, support, and politicize all of the disparate dissident voices of our generation.

Movements, organizations, politics?The instinct is to reach for your revolver, or more likely, the channel changer. There's an old, yet still popular, idea that real culture exists on an altogether different plane than these tawdry, pedestrian things. It's a lie: a myth which conveniently allows artists and intellectuals and other kindred individual geniuses to convince themselves that they are free from and uncompromised by the society which they profess to abhor. Worse, it is stupid. Alone, you rot in your garret, mute and confused, romantic perhaps to yourself, but only yourself. By refusing to acknowledge that these constraints already exist and affect us, we are simply-and blindly-accepting things as they are.

No culture can thrive without social groupings, organization, and politics. These provide participants, audience, support, communication, meanings, and so forth. It's a testament to how deep into the dominant culture we are that we can't think of "movements" except as something waxed nostalgically upon by smug big-chillers; "organizations" without bureaucracies of-now gender-friendly and oh, so stylish-navy blue pinstriped suits; and "politics" except as self-serving activists on C-Span and self-righteous prigs at sanctioned protests. But there is nothing wrong with the concepts per se, just the ways in which they've often been imagined and implemented in the past. At this BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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point in history they're defined for the most part by the corporate culture industry-the only coherent cultural and political organization around-and without another option available for comparison these definitions will go unchallenged.

So maybe we have to work on redefining these things. If we want to have anything other than minute "scenes" which either will themselves into insignificance in the name of purity, or grow and become resources to be mined by the culture industry, we need to carve out a large social, organizational, and political space outside of the mainstream for ourselves. We need a space to get away from parasitical and impotent negation, and a place to imagine independently and affirmatively, without looking over our shoulders to see what market researchers are watching. We need a space large enough, strong enough, and politically coherent enough so that when the market creeps come-and they invariably will-their spin on our life won't be the only one that people see and hear. We need a space expansive enough so that if people want to communicate with more than a couple of hundred others who already think the same way, they don't have to sell their writing to Details or sign with Atlantic. And we need a space combative enough-no flowers in "my" hair-to continue criticizing the consumer culture {and ourselves}, and to be ironic and to be negative-but not because we're forced to. But this space has first to be imagined and built and above all, be allowed to grow and include others now outside.

This last point is crucial, for the goal is not an insular bohemian nationalism, but to become part of a large movement of alternative practices, politics, and associations that offers a different path than that of the corporate consumer pinks, a path open to everyone. We need to take the underground above-ground but, and this is the tricky part, we must keep the sense of "alternative" intact. Not to get hung up on definitions here, but what I'm talking about is a full-on, self-sufficient, and dynamic alternative culture.

We occupy a unique historical juncture. The marketing of our generation has not only coalesced us as a purchasing group but has popularized a sense of group identity.

The question is whose definition of our generation will persevere. The culture industry and their lackeys control most of the means of production, distribution, and publicity.

But they were also careless: they left their xerox machines on when they left the room, they forgot to lock up the computers, their eyes were on Madonna and Michael Jackson when we cultivated our culture and began to develop our own outlets and networks.

And these things can be the beginnings of a new world.

A note of caution however: an alternative cultural does not a new world make. The revolution is not just a T-shirt away (as Billy Bragg ironically reminds). But it's a start in that it creates a free space in which to plot, plan, and build a vision and a model of a world distinct from the world that we grew up in and the one that is still being forced down our throats. And while this space to imagine ain't the revolution itself, it is important.

It's important because the problem is not so much that our generation believes the crap thrown at us by the culture industry, it's that there has been nowhere else to turn.

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Excerptedfrom the works ofGreg Fiering, the graphic poet ofsuburbia. He has also published "Chaotic Neutral" and a sinister pseudo-yearbook from a midwestern junior high school circa 1983. Write to him at 111 East 14th St., Suite 377, NY, NY 10003.

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GEIIDNEY GOES lUNllDElllG11l OlUNID D. M. "D" Mulcahey & T. C. Frank Extreme.

Gedney Market typed on his PowerBook as the elevated train plunged into the ground just before Division Street on its journey to the Loop.

The scrotum-spifflicating gtr ofLuftboffer's Jrontmanlboy-toy Dirk Polnschlaeger strafes

the global village with white-hot rounds of incendiary homocore, leaving only women and children to glean the ruins for traces of. ..

Gedney paused, struggling to round off this metaphor. The deadline quickly approached for the second issue of his new zine, Labor ofLoaf, and Gedney had spent the entire Halloween weekend finishing record reviews. It was futile. His mind elsewhere, Gedney abandoned the effort to the deafening racket of the speeding train. His reflection stared back at him haggardly from the window. "We'll be under the river soon," Gedney thought. "River." The word snapped him back to the somberness of his impending mission.

Gedney had received the news over the phone the night before. "River's dead," his cousin Jeff had told him with a throaty chuckle.

"Wha ... ?" Gedney had been stunned.

"Yeah," Jeff had gloated. "He kicked it, buddy-boy. River Phoenix. You know the guy. Listen, this is gonna be fuckin' huge."

Gedney sat in confused silence.

"It's gonna be Freddie Prinz, if not James Dean. The international youth culture markets are gonna soar like nobody's fuckin' business. Ten times bigger than the Lollapalooza rally back in '91. I'm gonna be watching the Tokyo market tonight, and I'll give you a call in the morning. Tomorrow I want you to be cocked, locked, and ready to rock."

* * * Ever since the unhappy schism with Bratislava and the violent anti-Seattle rampages that had shook the Czech capital in early 1993, Gedney had known that his lifestyle trended elsewhere. The bem used hospitali ty of the Prague's citizens had turned to suspicion, then to outright hostility. When a local waitress at a Moldau-side coffee house called "Sequim Native" had intentionally spilled a double-latte over his new rollerblades and refused to apologize, Gedney had resolved to leave Prague forever.

His bags were packed, but the question was, as always, where to go. Gedney perused the stack of fashion and music magazines that his image broker overnighted to him each BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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week. These offered no counsel-the lifestyle industry itself cast for worthy successors to last year's played out scenes. Pundits sighted the peripatetic indie animus in a succession of cow towns: one week it was Lawrence, Kansas, the next it was Chapel Hill, North Carolina, or Champaign, Illinois. Gedney's spirits sunk to an all-time low when, in June, Strawberry Statement named Cleveland the new American home of hip. But at last, somewhere near the end of that muggy and windless summer, the commentators came to a consensus: Chicago was It. Gedney knew instinctively that Chicago, with its provincial ways and flat terrain, would be fertile ground for the lifestyle innovations he -and he alone -could offer.

The flight was a direct one, and upon arrival Gedney was glad to be finally rid of the Slavic accents he had once found so charming. By studying the various Urge Overkill videos he had aptly versed himself in what he believed to be the Chicago look, and yet he was somewhat surprised to find himself the sole traveller in O'Hare to be clad entirely in velvet.

Gedney wasted no time finding his lifestyle bearings. Wicker Park, he soon learned, was the place to be, and through family connections he acquired a bargain second-story loft on Division street just east of Damen. Within two weeks he had launched his own 'zine, Labor ofLoaf, and had transformed his property into a gallery, coffee house, and performance space.

Gedney decorated the space, which he had dubbed "Studene K1adivo," in an original high camp style admixed with a Czech communist theme (no one, he understood, was interested in the looks of the new, liberated Prague). He accented corners with Lava Lites perched atop plastic statues of happy, muscular Czech laborers, and filled the floor with the shapeless modern furniture of the 1950s. Gedney reserved the area over the bar for the latest and most disturbing works by Art Institute friends: a painting cycle on the

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theme of sharp objects; a cluster of plastic fetuses that, he was told, antedated the Nirvana album In Utero by some months. One wall was plastered with paint-by-number renderings of Elvis, another with idealized official portraits of Lenin. The piece de resistance was "Lelvin," a video installation that was to become the space's trademark. Three enormous video screens played tape loops morphing the images of The King and The Commissar at the critical moments of their careers: a brilliantined pompadour exhorted Petro grad mobs not to be cruel, while a pointy-bearded, jumpsuited Slav crooned to Vegas weekenders about three-year plans. Gedney's friends loved this appropriation of history.

So did the Wackenhut Corporation, sponsor of Wicker Park's annual "Sleeping Around with the Jackals" arts festival. Studene Kladivo was named a "Mandatory Site" by the festival's judges, and Gedney was deluged with admiring visitors. Gedney's lifestyle venture met with quick success. He staged regular poetry 'slams,' after the local custom, and was happily surprised by the enthusiastic turnout. The space had also become the favorite of a small subfaction of the Chicago 'Gothic' clique. These surly, enigmatic types habitually hunched over coffee late into the night -dark clothes, eye shadow, elaborate hairdos -comforting one another after painful tattooing sessions. AI> his space became better known he had even marketed a line ofT-shirts and jeans that bore Studene Kladivo's characteristic Lelvin face logo. "Plus revolutionnaire que toi" was the slogan, a phrase which also adorned the cover ofLabor ofLoaf The first issue of the zine had been enthusiastically received, and Gedney filled hundreds of orders from major-label A&R executives anxious to understand the arcane workings of America's hottest underground.

Gedney's maternal grandparents still inhabited an ancient, ramshackle mansion on Chicago's South Side. After moving to the city Gedney had made a practice of dining with them regularly. On one of these occasions he had met his cousin Jeff Pfingsten.

Gedney had not seen Jeff since 1974, when Jeff had returned from duty in Vietnam.

Gedney and his cousin were complete opposites. While Gedney quaffed smart drinks at exclusive nightclubs, Jeff liked to make himself ill with cheap bourbon. While Gedney typically spent his money on expensive designer labels, Jeff liked to blow his wad on the ponies. While Gedney found difference and heterogeneity subversively alluring, Jeff heaped scorn on anyone whose complexion was darker than a paper bag. Jeffhad served briefly with the Chicago Police, until he was forced to resign amid charges of brutality.

He then took a job as a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade, and by dint of his sheer truculence and imposing physical stature, he rose through the ranks quickly. He now ran money for a phalanx of institutional investors.

Although he feared an imminent clash of personalities, Gedney was pleased to find that his cousin took immediate interest in his Wicker Park operations. All through dinner Jeff queried him about real estate investment opportunities in hip slums. AI> the evening wore on Gedney perceived himself sliding into a strange back-slapping bonhomie he had never experienced in his own social circle. He began to see his cousin as a man not unlike himself-a man with similar passions, fears, desires. "The only difference between us," Gedney mused, "is an expensive education and a subscription to BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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Details." A5 they left their grandparents' house, Jeff suggested beers at a local tavern.

"Gedney," Jeff slurred as he poured out the last of their third pitcher of Englewood Special Pale, "I've never had any use for you artsy candy-asses. But I have to respect you for the fact that chicks seem to dig your shtick. Admit it, dude, with those sideburns and that earring you must be gettin' more play than Shakespeare."

Gedney muttered what he thought was manly assent.

"But I'll tell you," Jeff continued, "I've got this problem, and you may be the guy to help me. I recently acquired a seat in this new deviance futures pit they got at the Board.

The guys are talking about how much coin a fella can make there, and the money I got behind me really wants in. The thing is, I don't know a Pearl Jam from a hole in the ground." Pfingsten proposed a partnership: he would supply the capital, and Gedney would put his lifestyle savvy to a more mercenary use by trading deviance contracts. "I need a ponytail out there," Jeff confided, "and I think you may be my boy."

Daunted by his own innocence of the Byzantine ways of high finance, Gedney had been doubtful at first. But under Jeff's tutelage he quickly learned the technicalities of the business. He would be buying and selling "deviance" futures, contracts based on what the Board of Trade called the "Youth Culture Marketability Index," or YCMI, a weighted arithmetic average of the stock prices of various advertising, media, and music publishing conglomerates. The YCMI could be counted on to respond to corporate profit forecasts for YCMI-listed companies, as well as to the extraneous "sociocultural dysfunction indicators" reported biweekly by the government agencies. Some deviance traders developed sophisticated data-driven trading systems, while others favored gut instincts. With time Gedney developed a trading style that balanced the two orientations. A5 Jeff had put it, all a trader needed was a killer instinct, a little inside dope, and faith in a simple trader's maxim, "The Trend is Your Friend."

Despite his keen lifestyle perspicacity, Gedney's first few months in the deviance pit had seen some signal mistakes of judgement. His inability to separate fact from rumor had lured him into a number of unwise speculations. Gedney had been badly burned when he took a bullish position after an ad exec had showed him tapes of a soon-to-beaired Dr. Pepper spot featuring Smashing Pumpkins. The campaign had been scuttled only days later, costing Jeffs backers a considerable sum. A few weeks afterwards he had missed the obvious short play following the Michael Jackson pedophilia disclosure: while the Youth Culture Marketability Index plunged, Gedney was stuck in an embarrassingly long position he had taken on a rumor that Madonna was undergoing a sex change operation. And last month he had barely suppressed what would have been a fatal impulse to go short based on specious reports that Tabitha Soren had been seen entering a DC abortion clinic on the arm of George Stephanopoulos.

* * *

Today Gedney struggled with self-doubt. His world had darkened with the death of one of his generation's brightest stars. River Phoenix was gone. His thoughts disordered by the bittersweet, erotic pangs of popstar bereavement, Gedney alighted from the train at Jackson Boulevard. He shuffled slowly on the platform as rivulets of London Fog

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streamed past. "What pathetic style," he mused coldly, pondering his fellow commuters. "These pale corporate mandarins of the Midwest. Never to be dangerous, never to be entrepreneurial." Gedney wondered what River, now viewing this tableau from Valhalla, would think.

"Extreme." The word raced through his mind again and again. "What is the image of the rebel? Rebel is as rebel does."

Gedney felt the sullenness drain from his soul as he mounted the stairs to the sunlit street. "This is no time to mourn dead heroes," he resolved. "This is the time to rock and roll. "Today Gedney would inscribe his own name on the city's illustrious roll of speculators, bag-men and chisellers; he would leave this flat burg of ham-fisted hog butchers and belching wheat stackers millions of dollars poorer. And he would be doing it for River, for his anguished, misunderstood generation, as much as for himself.

The Exchange was frantic as Gedney walked onto the trading floor. With forty-five minutes to go until the day's official opening, coiffed and earringed clerks shouted into telephones and the ponytails of traders bobbed furiously as they scoured industry newspapers for details of the idol's untimely demise. Buzz Binyon, the pit boss, was tearing his dreadlocks. He paced back and forth in the throes of the compulsive craving for information that had earned him his moniker. "Gus, Gus, chill out," he screamed into his phone. "This is crucial: I've gotta know whether it was coke or crank!"

"Buzz," someone yelled from the phone bank. "Chip's got Keanu on the line!"

A plan of action came together quickly in Gedney's mind. He knew this much: the market would rally and trading volume would be brisk all morning. Like everyone else, Gedney would go long on the opening. By afternoon the YCMI would have gained ten, maybe twelve basis points. After all, nothing moves youth culture product like youth culture scandal. But the question was, when would the market become skittish and turn the other way? Remembering the reaction to the death of one of his earliest idols, daytime drama actor Jon-Erik Hexum, Gedney knew that any rally would be fragile at best. Hexum had been quickly, almost instantaneously forgotten; in obituaries he had been ridiculed rather than lionized. Recalling what Jeff had told him about "market bubble" theory, Gedney knew that the best way to pick the market's turning point was to cause it. He would circulate his own rumors to prop the market artificially. Then, while other traders were maintaining wildly optimistic positions, Gedney would take profits on his morning trades and go short. He would sell 'calls' as the market reached its peak, then cover them for more profit after its inevitable collapse.

Trading began with an immediate three-point leap in the Index and continued briskly and steadily through the morning. Gedney knew it would likely soften towards midsession, since lunch affords traders an opportunity to gather more information and reassess their strategies. By eleven o'clock the index had reached an apparent plateau with a gain of about eight points. Gedney had made out well so far, but he expected a correction early in the afternoon. Something would have to be done to drive the market higher.

Gedney lunched at Parvenoo's West, the favorite haunt of laSalle Street's up-andcomers. This morning it teemed with exuberant deviance traders. Buzz Binyon's lackeys BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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strutted and preened idly as they awaited his instructions. Gedney took a table by himself and signalled to a waiter he knew from all-night raves at Studene Kladivo. "Say, Federico," he confided in low, conspiratorial tones, "have you heard the latest."

Gedney related how Johnny Depp had been shot and had been seen staggering, horribly injured, into a Los Angeles hospital. Within minutes he could hear the waiter passing on the news to other traders in anxious whispers: "It looks like a suicide pact gone wrong." The rumor travelled quickly. Ten minutes after Gedney had made the initial disclosure, the bartender left his station to tell him "something that you might find useful."

Seconds later one of Gedney's clerks approached him, red-faced and excited. "Gedge.

I caught the buzz from one of Binyon's dudes. Guys are saying now that Johnny Depp -check this shit -slipped River a mickey! There's a warrant out for his arrest." Everywhere traders were calling for their checks. Two men on the far side of the restaurant simply abandoned their meal and bolted for the door.

Gedney remained calm. After a few minutes he walked unflappably to the phone bank and placed a call to Kurt Loder in New York. Representing himself as a wellknown Geffen executive, he whispered, "Kurt. Owen Hatteras here. I'm not sure if I should be telling you this, but we're having some doubts about releasing the record that River's band made last month. We played it backwards at 33 and, during that noise interlude -you know, that grungy part? -we could hear it distinctly. He says, 'Johnny, Winona, I'm sorry. This is the only way out.'"

"Jesus H. Christ." he could hear the low electronic squeak of Loder's whistle from a thousand miles away. "You haven't told Christgau about this yet?"

"No way, babe. But Kurt, I'm torn on this one. Do whatever you think is right."

Gedney hung up, paid his bill, and sauntered deliberately back to the exchange.

Madness now reigned on the floor. Gedney could see Buzz Binyon's sassy dreadlocks bobbing above the sea of flailing limbs, his head thrown back in a deep primordial shriek of acquisitive frenzy, both hands clutching wads of pink 'buy' slips. Grown men were screaming like children to be heard, pushing one another violently aside, gesticulating uncontrollably, scribbling orders and flinging them into the throng of roiling, grasping fingers. Gedney glanced at the board. The index had jumped eight more points since he had left for lunch. He noticed that, for the first time ever, the visitor's gallery above the trading floor was jammed with spectators, the adjoining hallway full of excited tourists waiting their turn to gawk at the imbroglio below. At the periphery of the pit stood a cluster of bond traders who had wandered over to watch the seemingly unstoppable deviance rally. Gedney spotted Jeff among them and the two exchanged a spirited high-five.

"Choice," Gedney mused to himself. "But not yet extreme." It was one o'clock.

Gedney returned to his office, hurriedly typed up a short dispatch, and summoned one of his clerks, a chisel-featured young Pilsenite with sideburns and jewelry worthy of Luke Perry himself "Ramon, haven't you got a friend over at Rubicam & Rubicam advertising that owes you one?" Gedney asked.

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"Sure."

"I want you to go over there and get your friend to fax this on company letterhead to the advertising directors of Spin, Details, Rolling Stone, Sassy, Cosmopolitan, Interview, Esquire, and ... oh, yes, Inside Edge."

The message was simple. It read: Our client Benetton has acquired the rights to a photograph of the late actor River Phoenix being loaded into an ambulance in front of the Viper Room after the unfortunate incident of October 31. As you know, Benetton advertising has long used 'disturbing' images not only to highlight the company's brand name in the minds of upscale consumers, but also to ptoblematize routine paradigms of consumer desire.

Naturally, we have been the victims of considerable criticism for so doing. We are planning to run an ad featuring the River photograph in our December campaign; please advise as to your willingness to print such an image.

Gedney handed the bogus missive to Ramon and walked to the bathroom. He gazed into the mirror for a moment at his handsome face. "Fifteen minutes," he thought.

"Thirty at most." He cocked his head at an oblique angle and stroked his right sideburn longingly. "Farewell, trusty steed," he uttered wistfully as he plugged in his Norelco Groomer, "but we must part."

At two-twenty a clean-jowled Gedney returned to the trading floor. The index had ascended a staggering twenty-seven points since the morning's opening bell. The pit now undulated in orgiastic, Lollapaloozian moshing. Men climbed over one another, ululating and crying in increasingly hoarse tones, their parti-colored jackets torn sleeveless. The clawing hands of the traders had long since destroyed their colleagues' neat

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ponytails of that morning; now they hung limp and depleted. Hair was everywhere on the floor, hashed by wildly churning Doc Martens with discarded paper and crumpled fax transmissions. The audience cheered each advance, and there seemed to be no end in sight.

Coolly, diabolically, Gedney waded through the pit, seeking the newest, least experienced traders. Quietly he began to sell his calls. With ten minutes left until the three 0' clock closing bell Gedney had closed out the last of his morning positions. Now, he knew, was the time to throw the gears of the market into reverse. Abandoning all subterfuge, Gedney threw up both arms and started shorting in-the-money calls at an eighth discount to the market. Pandemonium erupted anew. A bewildered but eager throng swarmed to answer his offer as Gedney feverishly scribbled "sell" orders. As he tore the last slip from his pad and proffered it to the crowd, he looked up to find himself face to face with Buzz Binyon, simmering with incredulous outrage. He stared at Gedney in unmoving contrast to the surrounding hubbub. "Gedney... ," he stammered, "what do you know?"

Gedney could gauge the thin membrane of self-control which now held back the pit boss's rage. He smiled nonchalantly and said, in the local idiom, "All I know, Binyon, is what my mama told me: you snooze, you lose."

Binyon's last restraint burst. He spun on his heels, his dreadlocked visage suddenly pale, crying "Five hundred Dece three-forty calls to offer ... to offer, goddammit!" His voice cracked and trailed off into a falsetto of desperation. Other traders stared openmouthed. But before anyone could move, the bell rang ending the day's trading session.

* * *

Jeff met Gedney as he strode off the floor. "Masterful, motherfucker, masterful.

Tonight I'm gonna set you up with the best trim in town."

The two repaired to the Buckerte Shoppe, an aftermarket trysting spot for deve traders and their slags. Gedney loathed it. But that did not matter tonight: all eyes were upon the bar's TV screen as a familiar tune signalled the beginning of "Entertainment Tonight."

Gedney clicked off the stories as they came: the first dealt with Loni Anderson's reputed bulimia; the second story introduced the Horushaku-jin, the outrageous members of the Japanese neo-Sweathog movement. As the broadcast proceeded, seemingly oblivious to River's demise, the crowd of traders in the bar became restless. During the second commercial break some began to murmur about ET's lack of journalistic responsibility.

The Phoenix story was third and last, the place Gedney knew his generation would always occupy in the minds of his countrymen. He could hear his fellow traders gasp as the program's host, John Tesh, attributed Phoenix's death to a congenital condition that the star exacerbated by spending his final day furiously edging the entire perimeter of his estate's gigantic lawn. Not cocaine. Not lovelorn suicide. Not even crank. It had been lawn edging. The bar full of besotted traders bore witness to their affliction in a plangent communal wail. Men hung their heads weeping as T esh archly intoned, "Why the millionaire idol of the twenty-something outsiders was engaged in a lawn-maintenance chore so characteristic of anally-retentive suburbanites remains unclear."

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Tesh was followed by Siskel & Ebert, who devoted their entire program to reviewing the dead star's movies. To place his works in perspective, though, they had decided to "compare Phoenix's oeuvre to that of the late actor" -everyone held his breath -"".

Jon-Erik Hexum." Gedney beamed in vindication as another gasp arose from the assembled speculators. It got worse as the show progressed. Not only was River Phoenix being compared to a hack soap-opera actor, but he was coming off as distinctly inferior!

Siskel and Ebert had apparently decided to use the star's death as an opportunity to vent their annoyance with all the 'twenty-something' hype, to declare the "young people of today" to be "bogus rebels," their stars unworthy of the exalted position of Peter Fonda and Dustin Hoffman, "idols of a real generation."

A trader standing near Gedney clapped an elaborately tattooed hand over his mouth and ran for the door. Jeffhowled with delight and pounded Gedney on the back. "You're gonna find chunks of those chumps in your stool tomorrow morning when the market tanks, buddy boy," he chortled. "Now how about a victory lap at Hooters?"

"Vh-sorry, dude," Gedney responded distractedly. "I'm bushed, and I've got a big day ahead of me tomorrow."

At the far end of the bar Gedney had spotted a waifish girl who, despite the tumult, stared intently into a copy of Labor ofLoaf She wore an expensive black leather jacket over a black satin bra embroidered with the names of various hardcore bands from the early eighties. Rods, rings, fish hooks and carabeeners pierced the flesh of her ears, nose, brow and midriff. Gedney thought he recognized her striking pro61e and Dorito-colored hair. Yes-she had been pointed out to him a few weeks ago at a party. It was Leek Brewer, daughter of the legendary drummer for Grand Funk. At the tender age of nineteen she was a scenestress of some note, as well as the publisher of a rival fanzine,Polly

Want a Chainsaw.

"The Pork Sword review is an experimental classic," Gedney smirked as he pulled up a stool next to the intriguing female. "I limited the vocabulary of the text to only those words used in Gap ads and the lyrics of the Deguello LP." She looked at him blankly.

"Oh, I'm sorry. My name is Gedney. Gedney Market."

As they talked Gedney's head filled with fantastic visions of revolution, girl style, and the exotic fashions it could entail. Sewing scissors. Fondue forks. Safety pins. Nostaples. Big, industrial ones dyed in dayglo colors. Corn-on-the-cob skewers as earrings.

The possibilities were endless. After a few drinks they decided to hop a cab to the Jesus Martini show at the Grot Boire.

As the taxi flew west over Goose Island, Gedney drifted again into reveries of the great River, whose immolation restored the flower oflife to the dessicated floodplain of culture. Glimpsing the lambent, red-orange sun sinking behind the West Side's jagged industrial skyline, Gedney imagined the sainted Phoenix riding a flaming chariot to a distant, more radiant bohemian paradise, far from the gentrifier Death. Lifestyle firmly in control, beautiful rebel girl by his side, Gedney donned his shades and intoned,

Extreme.

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Grifters: "We did the CM] last fall, in order to meet some people to help us, like a booking agent, which we found, and we are happy with that, it's low-key. But you inevitably run into those people, those label people, and we were taken out, and given the $150 breakfast. You know, there's this incredible amount of money that these people throw ~ down from nowhere.

Well, it seems to be from nowhere, but you know that there's some band that got signed six ~ months ago that's paying for your breakfast, and that's creepy." , "Ten years ago, college radio used to pretty much have a ~ sure hand in guiding bands. Now it's publicists. And I've never seen the shit like I see now ... we were in the office of [one label] """'" ~ listening to somebody say, 'OK, we'll buy a half-page ad if you make it [the review] forty-five hundred words.' So much of it is that V ~ kind of trade-off." , Baffler: "I wonder if what's going to happen is going to be something like what happened in 1977, ~ ~ when every major label bought themselves a punk band, and a year later they dropped them all." Grifters: "I think the ~ <;:) residuals are not going to be pleasant. I think there are going to be a lot of people that slowly get dropped, probably from ~ ~ the initial signing.

There's the big joke about Paw, a band from Lawrence. When all this stuffwith Paw was going ~ ~ down, they did a show in Lawrence, and you could not get a plane ticket through a certain airline to fly there the day or ~ ~ ~ the night before this thing was going on. We talked to people at Island, Capitol, and Caroline, and they were all ~ ~ joking, because you couldn't get a ticket. It was a show of about 800 people and there must have been 500 people ~ <;:) ~ working with some kind of label or distribution thing. Because at this point it was like a fervor, a frenzy to sign 'indie' ~ ~ ~ bands. If you go into it thinking, 'Hey, these people are signing indie bands, we'll be an indie band, and we'll get signed,' ~ ~ if you go into it like that, you'll be fucked, there's no hope." , "Within the last couple of years, I'm sure they had a big meeting ~ ~ ~ and they said, 'We've got to get somebody in here, I don't care whether they were a college jock, or worked in a record store, or ~. whatever, we've got to get somebody in here who's sympathetic to this level. So they hire these people. And I don't say that I'm not ~ ~ going to drink a beer with so-and-so because she works for Varsical [a chemical plant] and they make bad chemicals, because she's a ~ ~ really nice girl, and this is just her job. It's the same thing with theseA&R people. They getthese people who sit there and go, 'Look, !"p ~ it's really going to be OK, because I understand what's going on.' But the problem is that the 'I' who 'understands' is on the low end ~ ~. and VETO is up top, making the decisions. I've only talked to one major label where the guy who was at the top of the A&R thing to.) ~ made me feel like he was smart and had been around." , "The labels hire people that they hope can relate to the bands that they want to go after.

And a lot of times they don't know anything. We talked to one band who were laughing about ~ this girl that came to talk to them. She was withA&M or Atlantic or something like that, and they asked her about what she'd been doing the last couple of years and she started talking about partying with Bon ]ovi and things like that. And they're thinking, 'They sent this girl down here and she doesn't have a clue.' And things like that are the lighter moments of it all, but then you realize just how desperate these labels are for new blood.'" For info about Grifters records, write Shangri-La, 1916 Madison Ave., Memphis, 1N 38104.

BACK IN BLACK ON BEATEN

THE

PATH

Maura Mahoney So you've just completed the inevitable arc from derision to interest to all-out consumer craving over bell-bottoms, and now a new, or rather, a renewed trend has reared up along the ever-jagged cutting edge. And worse, this latest expression of the herd -oops, vanguard involves more than fond memories of the Brady Bunch recollected in tranquility, or the ability to wear clogs with a straight face. This is a trend of the hip-lit variety, fashion as totality; in which the clothes are meant to mirror the artistic soul of the bearer; sophistication is signalled with the accessory of a dogeared paperback; and "la vie intellectuelle" is a self-consciously pursued but inevitably condensed to a prefabricated "look."

Well, put away that crocheted cap, turn off the Pearl Jam, forget you ever heard of Seattle. Your days of automatic street cred simply for moshing and getting your hair to hang just so over one eye are over. It's time to get serious -break out the black turtleneck, rent French gangster films and grab your Ginsberg. Beat is back.

When did the resurgence of this particular brand of ennui and high-seriousness first occur? The obvious answer is that beatnicity itself never fully went away, even though the Beatniks themselves ceased to exist as a coherent group about 1960. With the exception of the early Allen Ginsberg, the beat writers were essentially celebrity-artists, Hemingways minus the extraordinary talent, whose "immortaliry" was insured not by their work but by their lifestyle. Naturally the beat image of the rebellious drifter and the antisocial bohemian is a nearly irresistable pose, and it continued to inspire (with mind-bending irony) countless youths to celebrate anarchic individualism by donning a uniform (jeans-and-turtleneck) and gathering (preferably in large groups) in coffeehouses to brood and read bad poetry together -at least until Mom and Dad had paid the last tuition bill. And in the early 90s, this familiar rite of passage blossomed into newfound popularity for urban poetry readings.

The recent commercial rediscovery of the Beats was inevitable, once coffeehouse poetry became one of those "underground" movements that everybody knows about. The culture industry finally recognized in it all the magic ingredients: it's gritty, urban, and edgy; the people's poets could preen (and dress) like rock stars and have even less of a need to carry a tune; it's "deep" enough to seem elitist yet simple enough to be popular; and best of all, the fans could still wear their Doc Martens. Beautiful. Enter Max Blagg.

As readers of The Baffler know, Blagg is the poet laureate of the ad world, whose verse-spouting Gap commercials last year ("Sky fits heaven, so ride it / Child fits mother, so hold your baby tight," etc.) heralded the commercial dawn of the reb eat era; the BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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commodification of the Poet had officially begun. Such is the power of advertising and image that Blagg became a big of a cult-hero himself and people even assumed he was authentic (although perhaps this is not surprising in a society in which Robert Bly's poetry is thought to have merit). At any rate, the message was clear: all it takes to be a poet is the willingness to declaim -and wear the right clothes.

And the beat-biz just keeps gathering steam. Esquire Gentleman recently announced "we're deep in the midst of a beat revival," and promoted beat style as "a 90s reaction against 80s self-consciousness ... Beat has always been a style for people who don't want to be bothered with style." Undoubtedly such antistyle types will be unmoved by the article's accompanying photos of Donna Karan's, Calvin Klein's, and Dries Van Noten's "Beatnik Collections for '93."

Another writer drooled, "the new beat style is cooler than iced cafe mocha on a warm day ... .It's affected by Generation Xers and tail-end baby boomers who mix cappuccino with hour-long conversations, poetry readings amid acoustic jazz and blues.

(Imagine! An hour-long conversation!) Even Robert Martins, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, entered the fray. Noting that the object of the new trend is to look bohemian and intellectual rather than replicate a specific period's dress, he opined that the current look is a blend: "The 50s coming back and the 70s coming back in the 90s, all of which come out of some kind of matrix of existentialism. " Whatever you do, if you're aspiring to beathood, don't leave your matrix at home!

The Gap's new celebrities-who-wore-khakis ad campaign now includes Jack Kerouac, looking hardened and compelling in pants you too can buy. There's a

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"Kerouac Jack's Bongo Bar" in Chicago, where upscale bohemians choose from a full array of wines amid enormous murals ofJack himself surrounded by his celebrity friends (whose glorious faces are rendered not in Pollock-style abstraction, but with painstaking clarity so no mistake about Kerouac's cool is possible). Kerouac is clearly the poster boy of beat nostalgia -perhaps because his On The Road is such a cherished fantasy ride (and such a quick read) or perhaps because he is conveniently dead and therefore instantly iconic. His aesthetic, the transcendence of sensation and onrushing action, and his pursuit of slick style over substantive content, lend themselves nicely both to advertising and th~t ineluctable late-twentieth-century "art form" -the video image.

And so, predictably enough, beatniks on video came to the global coffeehouse when MTV broadcast an all-poetry edition of its well-known "Unplugged" series. Seven writers, including Maggie Estep (barefoot), Edwin Torres (goatee), and Henry Rollins (tattoo), performed their work in what Caryn James of the New York Times described as "a cafe setting that duplicates the spoken-word clubs that have sprung up in the last few years and pays homage to the days of the Beats (People actually hold cigarettes; definitely retro.)"

In case anyone should fail to recognize that this was very hip stuff, John J. O'Connor, in another review of the show for the Times, reminded us: "The spirit of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats is palpable." And while most of the reviewers acknowledged that the poetry itself was eminently forgettable, nearly all strained for a solemnity that this display of beatnik high-mindedness evidently warranted. One critic stated: "You may not admire their wordplay, but you will be impressed with their energy, showmanship, and sheer gall -if anyone can make poetry cool, MTV can." Caryn James even gamely proclaimed that "there's nothing to sayan MTV moment can't be poetic, as long as you don't think Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot own the poetry franchise" and that "street poetry is a vocal, visceral expression of contemporary life."

Please. While all this interest in and celebration of poetry is laudable, poetry itself is clearly not the point, or surely a little more effort would have been expended on it.

Poems do not have to equal Arnold and Eliot to be refreshing, interesting or insightful; but the producers of the show did not aspire to achieve anything much beyond atmosphere. The "Unplugged" poets offered little more than self-absorbed musings, or pained, soft-headed critiques of the most obvious deficiencies of the modern world. The new beats proved to be not only derivative; they were dull and sanctimonious as well. Their "poems" were merely a gimmick, amounting to nothing but broadsides for correct MTV attitude. New beats "hold" cigarettes because they want to look jaded; they borrow cliches from another era because they lack the imagination to dream up anything new.

The fin-de-siecle beat movement, so far at any rate, is merely another tired, contrived appropriation of a shallow aesthetic, to be enjoyed on the level of a rejuvenated fashion fad, or even as a stimulant to popular poetic expression -not as an intellectual phenomenon. Kerouac's creed, now devoid even of freshness, is being parboiled to nothing more than performance-art dreck, poetry consumed by commerciality, utter conformity masquerading as rebellion.

It's enough to make anyone want to read Shelley.

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THE NOSTALGIA GAP Tom Vanderbilt There is something unsettling about the pattern of 1970s nostalgia which has afflicted "twentysomething" thinking over the last several years, something beyond the immediate banality of an entire generation reveling in the luminescent wash of The Brady Bunch and the kitsch-laden Top 40 hits from what T.S. Eliot might have lamented as "the cruelest decade" (as we stumble about in our own Waste Land, seeking shards of the 70s, "mixing Memory and desire"). The deeper insidiousness lies in the speed with which we arrived to this time of 1970s nostalgia, when it seems that only a few short years ago America was still in the twilight of its homage to the 1960s.

Dating the origins of 1960s nostalgia to The Big Chill the Twentieth-Anniversaries of Woodstock and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band we face a rough nostalgia window of 1982 to 1989. This was the time when moneyed urban professionals attempted to resolve the contradictions within their collective psyche (bridging the gap between Mother Jones and Dow Jones, to paraphrase an ad for socially-conscious investment funds), through a not-quite-12-step recovery process of watching the yuppie veritiof Thirtysomethingand listening to the Buffalo Springfield and Motown. Corporate America joined in this era of good feelings by using 1960s songs to sell everything from California raisins to frequent flyer memberships. To non-Boomer observers, it seemed a fairly simple exercise.

The process of 1970s nostalgia is a much wilier creature, as are it consumers. Whatever the current parlance-13th Gen, Twentysomething, Generation X-here is the generation that was thrust into the zenith of political and social upheaval in the United States in the twentieth century, only to wilt in the merciless apolitical drought which followed. They shrugged off the liberal and conservative crackups and read vague references to the fiscal orgy they were told was bankrupting their future. And in the long shadow of Reagan's morning-in-America rule they sought refuge in an evocation of the collective inner child of a decade in which their most poignant cultural expression was replacing the bedroom wall poster of a toothy Farah Fawcett with the garish tones of Kiss, only to later have that symbolism undermined as Kiss was ritually unmasked (and stripped of drummer Peter Chris). It was a time when Donahue was the only day-time talk show that mattered, as peopled poured out traumas without the 90s addition of a post-show, on-site counselor. Meanwhile, as adults reveled in what Christopher Lasch termed the "culture of narcissism," hordes of soon-to-be disaffected youth reached for the latchkeys.

In the spring of 1991, these memories came back in droves. In typical pack-fashion, the media reported-or created-the trend: "Boogeying on Back to the 1970s: The 152 â&#x20AC;˘ BAFFLER

Ultra-Hip Embrace the Days of Gold Chains, Polyester, Platform Shoes and The Partridge Familj' announced The Los Angeles Times. "70s ("Stayin' Alive") Won't Die (Signs of 1970s Revival)" heralded The New York Times. Like some nightmare vision of Left Bank intellectuals gone awry, people coalesced in 70s preservation societies, adopting the trappings of some artistic vanguard (THE PAST EXISTS FOR OUR PLEASURE, their graffiti might read). They hashed out mythopoetical tales of the Brady trip to the Grand Canyon (and here the 70s nostalgia version of the Grand Canyon contrasts with the 60s version, Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 film of the same name-you decide which was more resonant) and played digitally remastered versions of "Midnight at the Oasis."

What is strange about this equation is that the people celebrating 70s nostalgia are for the most part early rwentysomethings, whereas the 60s nostalgia was powered by early 30s Baby Boomers. Somewhere in nostalgia's hall of mirrors, we seem to have lost-or skipped-an entire decade According to the historical precedent, the early rwentysomethings should not be reminiscing about the 1970s, but the mid-to-late 1980s, when their formative tastes in music, film and literature were being consolidated and they were blossoming into the much desired 18-24 demographic. And this should happen in the next few years. But why did we not wait? Why did we jump the nostalgia gun? If the Baby Boomers had done what we have done they would have been listening to young Elvis and Dean Martin and watching Rifleman reruns, not wallowing in Jefferson Airplane and Hair. If we had followed the historical precedent correctly we would be dragging out collections of 1980s music by the Human League, dusting off the digital watches and the simple onebutton joysticks of the pre-Nintendo era, and watching Hill Street Blues. The answer seems to be that the speed of nostalgia has increased.

We find ourselves in the strange condition of time sped up-a shrinking of the future to look back on the past. The rise of a global media nerwork means that events, styles, trends, fashion and other sources of future nostalgia are disseminated instantly, and as each new trend is promoted and participated in, a previous one is made obsolete.

Culture, like technology and consumer goods, is now run on an assumption of planned obsolescence. "In the eighties," Robert Hughes wrote, "bulimia, that neurotic cycle of gorge and puke, the driven consumption and regurgitation of images and reputations, became our main cultural metaphor." Take, for instance, Duran Duran, a band that cultivated a string of pop hits in the early-to-mid 80s, which later fell out of fashion and become a target of camp, only to emerge a few years later with a refashioned, bankable image and a new Top 10 hi t. It would be misleading to call this a comeback. The band's new media identity shares only a name with its previous incarnation, and the rwo are radically fragmented: while their early songs serve as kitsch-fest fodder, their new material captures healthy market shares. The speed of consumption has accelerated to the point where things that happened only a few years ago already seem laughably archaic, distant from memory and covered by a creeping nostalgia. In the face of this "instant-," or "hyper-" nostalgia, such recent events as the "grunge" movement, the Savings and Loan scandals, or the "Earth Summit" in Rio seem like quaint, if not embarrassing, BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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relics of a simpler age.

There is some concern that with our increased nostalgia speed-a rush to remember-we will miss the 1980s in the blink of an eye, the decade reduced to some peeling billboard on a slick, open road to the halcyon days of the 1970s. Relax. In The New York Times "Styles" section, a kind of Weather Channel for predicting which way the winds of mainstream taste are blowing, a recent headline announced: "Barely Gone, 80's are Back." In the article, Village Voice columnist Michael Musto claims that "we've sped up to the point where we're looking back to three years ago ... everything's happening faster in popular culture." Indeed, with this 80's outbreak, we may become the first generation to be nostalgic for two decades at the same time. Quentin T arrantino' s remarkable film Reservoir Dogs may have hit upon this point: a "sounds of the 70s" radio show hosted by an 80s comedian (Steven Wright) plays over DeNiro-esquenoir-violence (also 80s}-and the result is eerily 1990s. The mingling of nostalgia poses intriguing philosophical questions: Would a future 1990s nostalgia take into account this decade's 1970s and 1980s nostalgia, and then by extension the 1950s or 1960s nostalgia of those decades? Like Magritte's la reproduction interdite, in which a man looks at a painting of himself looking at a painting of himself, stretching into eventual nothingness, a true nostalgia would envelop all previous nostalgias, a rather dizzying prospect indeed.

To even talk of 1970s (or any decade's) nostalgia is to assume some sort of unified vision of what the Mood Ring of Decades actually was. If the 1960s were codified as the hippy-era, when in fact only a small part of the population could have been considered actual hippies, the 1970s nostalgia we are served comes direct from the most lukewarm waters of the mainstream. In popular music, for example, songs such as C.W. McCaIIs's "Convoy" and disco singles resurface, but are presented with the hollow snickers of irony (postmodernism's laugh track), denying any of the slight cultural or political significance they might have once had. This portrayal denies the real artistic importance of a decade of which Robert Christgau in 1981 felt compelled to write, "Rock and roll's first quarter century produced well under a thousand excellent albums. Close to twothirds of them appeared during its last and least romantic decade." For such bands as Wire the year 1977 was "nearly heaven," as they sang on their debut albumPink Flaty yet it had little to do with disco or bell-bottoms. The importance of the 1970s in musical terms has yet to be fully realized: the current revisionism ignores the work of such artists as Miles Davis, Parliament, Isaac Hayes, and Gil-Scott Heron, artists who defined a vibrant musical subculture. Were it not for hip-hop music, which routinely samples the beats of these musicians, this side of the 70s might have dropped into obscurity. For many a song such as Glenn Campbell's "Rhinestone Cowboy" somehow sounds more like the 1970s, which begs the questions: what were the 1970s, or even, when were the 1970s?

The answers to these questions are effectively up for grabs, and the producers of nostalgic culture are just one more party vying to sell their version of the 1970s. While our generation may have been too young to realize the scope and nature of political events occurring in the 1970s, does that still condemn us, once we have acquired the 154 â&#x20AC;˘

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cognitive ability to place the changes of that decade in historical context, to dither on endlessly about the 1970s as the time of The Partridge Family, CB Radios, and Gloria Gaynor? Can we not break free of nostalgia's grasp? Were the 1970s not also the decade when 500,000-strong anti-Vietnam War rallies filled the nation's capital, Sandinista rebels overthrew the corrupt, U.S.-backed Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, and Indonesia, with tacit U.S. consent, invaded East Timor in a bloody "annexation"? Could we hark back to the 1973 collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement, when fixed exchange rates against the dollar were replaced by highly unstable floating rates, laying the groundwork for future unregulated speculation and financial chaos? The obvious argument against this line of thinking is that it would be impossible to be truly nostalgic about these events, as they were not part of our everyday childhood reality.

But in the process of reconstructing the 1970s one has to wonder how much of nostalgia is based on memory or history and how much is pure contrivance. How, for example, can we account for the strange sensation of "displaced nostalgia," where one generation is nostalgic for the music and fashion of a period which passed before they were born? We need only remember the populari ty of the The Big Chilland its soundtrack amongst college-aged youth when the film was released, or the recent acclaim of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confosed, which in large part came from audiences for whom high school was but a far-off contigency in 1976. Linklater's film is devoid of the cheap surface emblems of current 70s nostalgia, and it doesn't seek to answer any grand questions about that decade; rather, it attempts to sort out the simple yet poignant dramas of his youth. Its feel and look is disarmingly authentic, resembling some 70s teen-exploitation film (e.g. Over the Edg/!J one might stumble upon on late-night cable television, save for the occasional slipping signifiers of actors whose looks are too hip to be sincere, 90s versions of the 70s (or, as a colleague noted, "Kate Moss 70s").

Nostalgia is a form of propaganda, an exercise in laughter and forgetting, in which the right visual iconography and perceived authenticity can create a longing for an existence which is no longer possible and was in fact never possible. The popularity of the Latch Key Larry

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Reagan presidency amongst younger voters was driven by this manufactured nostalgia, as his White House "character" was based on a mixture of the unfettered Cold War hardliner, the tough lawman of Hollywood Westerns, and a traditional religious "family man." The fact that he was twice-divorced and rarely attended church seemed a peripheral issue. As Garry Wills argued, the power of Reagan's appeal lay in "the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute. Because of that, we will a belief in all his stories."

The triumph of this will jettisons all hopes for what Walter Benjamin called "revolutionary nostalgia;" namely, an attempt to counter the present political order through an active summoning of the traditions of the oppressed in previous generations. Surveying the present, this vision appears pathetically inadequate. Nostalgia, like most forms of consciousness in late capitalist society, has been sanitized and streamlined for market competition, and to stray outside its confines is a risky endeavor. In his landmark study The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch writes: "Having trivialized the past by equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitudes, people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present."

History becomes, in the infamous phrase, "just another lifestyle choice." The correct cuttings and pastings of fashion, the consumption of products whose value has been wildly inflated in the retro market: the most banal efforts of the heroic consumer are rendered as some artistic "statement." One exudes the stylistic elements of an era without bearing any of its historical costs.

The fashion lines of Ralph Lauren, for example, conjure images of the old untamed West, the graceful reign of colonialism in Africa, the splendor of pre-revolutionary Russia, or the realm of the stately English manor. In theSaforiline, for example, Lauren's empire of nostalgia offers its participants a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper-class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Serengeti; lost in any of this aesthetic splendor is the notion of what Renato Rosaldo calls "imperialist nostalgia," the mourning for what one has by one's own action destroyed. TheSafori line laments the passing of the colonial era as if it were some natural thing, part of a grand existing order, a system that has wafted away on the gentle breeze of history and not through its inherent instability.

Rather than confront the undefined future or the insecure present, the current 70s revivalists reincarnate the culture we once loved (Top 40, network television), then reacted against (with punk, independent film making), then came to love again (but with a safe, jaded sense of camp). We have 1970s parties to both mock and worship that final decade of real innocence (for our generation, the 1980s were imagined innocence), and you get the discomforting impression that we might rather be in that decade. But more often than not what is romanticized is "the way we never were," and history, the one thing that the media-constructed "twentysomething" generation honestly shares, is lost amidst the celebrating. As Fredric Jameson warns inPostmodernism: the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, "we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop

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images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach."

The future of an artistic vanguard seems equally threatened. The notion of a radical "vanguard" has itself already become the stuff of memories, catalogued in so many retrospectives, the work of Constructivists and Situationists resigned to coffee mugs and calenders, their patron regimes long discredited. The great artistic forms such as allegory and parody seem hopelessly lost to us, as we witness staged, line-by-line reenactments of The Brady Bunch, done less for satire's sake than pure verisimilitude. With arbiters of hip such as Madonna in the audience, viewers of the performance spoke with excited reverence of the actors' exacting resemblance to the original cast. Yet, like the replicants in the film Bladerunner, they were clever reproductions whose sole function was mimetic performance, a mimesis not of nature but of television. In this context, it should seem no surprise that the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard has logged so much academic mileage with his theory of the hyperreal, "the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium, such as photography;" i.e. more real than the real itself. The search for the real, in Baudrillard's phrase, is no more than "a fetishism of the lost object." We turn instead to simulations of simulations, "real live" versions of the 1970s televised imagination.

"With the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of styles," Fredric Jameson writes, "the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture." While the most vibrant and compelling art has always counterpoised tradition with innovation, the opportunistic bottom-feeders who plumb the depths of retro offer little more than vulgar spectacles, exhuming cultural corpses in servile prostration to the ever-changing style market. Their art gives no answers and asks no questions. Hollywood, which has always depended on the past, either by remaking films or producing films from novels, milks the profit principle with the following batch of recycled culture: The Coneheads, Tom and jerry, The Flintstones, The Addams Family, Dragnet, The Untouchables, The Fugitive, I Spy, Batman. Bands such as Suede or Urge Overkill, after adding a few fashion flourishes and playing the obligatory Cheap Trick power-chords, are loosely described as "70s-ish," an appellation which should at this point seem almost meaningless.

Scenarios of the future, given a continuation of this speed in nostalgia, border on the absurd. We will look wistfully back to last week's television. The pages of a book will turn yellow and musty as we read. This fall, the Franklin Mint will issue commemorative plates for the first 200 days of the Clinton Administration (some may be more nostalgic for Mr. Clinton's campaign pledges, now products of election campaign nostalgia) The previous month's Top 40 will appear in boxed-CD sets, as television commercials intone: "Do you remember what it was like in April, to be young and carefree, listening to the music that made you feel that way?" Hey man, is that April Rock? Well, turn it up!

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Song ofHer Vomit Joe Fodor Out of Victoria endlessly puking, Out of her mockingbird's throat, the musical splashing, Out of her full-mooned midnight, Over the toilet to the pipes beyond, where the workmen taking their breaks wander'd alone, drinking coffee, smoking, Down from her toothy jawline, Up from her ropy intestines, knotted and knotted as if they were leathery pythons, Out from her stomach of vegetables and cheese, From the memories of her kitty who meowed to her, From her memories, poor woman, from the fitful coughings and sputterings I heard, From under that one swinging 40 watt bulb glowing yellow in a malarial fever, From those piquant moments stolen from time, there in the phone booth, From the involuntary reflex of her epiglottis, never to cease, From the menagerie of words she play'd in, From her word loved and favored above all others, All now at once they return to roost again, As a flock, squeaking and gibbering at dusk, 'til sleep, not avoided, rapidly overtakes her, A woman, but by this weakness, a little girl again, toppling back into the sheets, soiling the futon, and me, chronicler of these times, keeper of her sacred records, While miserable in another state, trapped in a viscous, sticky embrace, Embalm these moments, gently.

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CONSOLIDATED DEVIANCE, INC. (CDEV-OTC) Recent Price

$60

52-Week Range $61-5/8-$33 Ind. Dividend

$0.28

Ind. Yield

0.5%

Earnings Per Share: 1994E $2.98 1993E $2.40 1992A $1.90

As of 6/01/93: 5.675 million (39% is closely held) Market Value $340.5 million Debt/Capitalization 3.7% Book Value/Share $6.99 Shares outstanding

Price/Earnings Ratio: 1994E 20.0X 1993E 25.2X

Return on Average Equity: 1994E 30.0% 1993E 30.0% 1992A 30.8% 5-Year Avg. 31.2% Retum on Assets:

5.0%

OPINION Consolidated Deviance, Inc. ("ConDev") is unarguably the nation's leader, if not its sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing and merchandising of deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful "SubCultsM ", mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid stylistic turnover and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev has brought the allure of the marginalized to the consuming pUblic. Before modern techniques of youth culture fabrication had been developed, stylistic subcultures ordinarily took years to achieve profitability. Now, by contrast, Consolidated Deviance founder and CEO James Hatt boasts that the Company can devise, package, and introduce a profitable SubCulfM into any geographical, class, or racial market in a fraction of this time. Additionally, ConDev SubCultr are always designed for strong clothing and musical accessorization, ensuring ample profit enhancement from ancillary retail activity. While the Company's nearly complete domination of contemporary youth culture is garnering widespread media attention and record-breaking net income levels as a "one-stop hegemony shop," we BAFFLER路

159

do not think ConDev's expansion potential or financial strength has been fully understood by the marketplace. ConDe v benefits in unique ways from economic hard times and dismal labor markets. Mounting Inchoate Generational Anomie (IGA), threatening as it may seem to many in corporate America, will positively impact the Company's sales. As Company income increases at well-above-industry rates, labor costs continue to fall in real terms. With domestic markets far from saturated and explosive pent-up demand for consumer goods in the newly free East Bloc, we foresee strong earnings growth far into the future. We therefore recommend ConDev as a strong buy for accounts seeking aggressive growth.

OVERVIEW OF OPERATIONS

Consolidated Deviance's business, simply stated, consists of translating disparate subcultural signifying practices into easily identifiable and marketable lifestyle consumption configurations, known as the company's trademark "SubCultsM." The company's staff of lifestyle experts researches, invents, and tests a wide variety of such configurations, concentrating specifically on such market-proven attributes as "attitude," "authenticity," and "street-credibility." And although ConDev intends to positively impact the homogenization and centralization of cultural authority nationwide, the Company has found the greatest measure of success, ironically, in the heavy marketing of the musics, looks, and accessories of "local scenes." These geographically particular SubCults™ are presented to the national market as the deeply indigenous and, therefore, 'authentic' expressions of grass-roots alienation.

Merchandise All ConDev SubCults™ are designed to emphasize distinctive and unusual visual signifiers, which both serve to define 'in-group' status rigidly and to ensure exclusive brand loyalty to company products. Typically the most profitable merchandising spin-offs of any SubCul{M are fashion accessories and musical recordings. Other associated products include hygiene and beauty items; liquor, cigarettes, and food; publications; school supplies; and toys.

Intellectual Property Every SubCult™ comes with a complement of signifying practices, ranging from slang and physical gestures to guitar and photographic techniques. While many of these practices remain in the domain of free speech, some are subject to patent. In particular, media programming, such as film scripts, radio formats, and TV sitcoms, has proven very profitable for the company.

Rapid Introduction, Rapid Obsolescence All ConDev SubCult™ campaigns must satisfy the Rapid Introduction, Rapid Obsolescence (RIRO) imperative. RIRO ensures the profitability of youth culture speculation by allowing a greater number of

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fully articulated, investment-grade SubCults™ to arise and be liquidated in a given period of time, each one carrying a full payload of accessories and musical products.

Accordingly the Company constructs each of its various SubCuliMventures with a 'built-in' impulse to self-destruction: within two years after their initial deployment, Consolidated Deviance-brand SubCults™ are usually regarded as unfashionable by the very consumers who originally embraced them. High LTV is achieved by emphasizing the unusual or the awkward in a SubCult'STM visual definition and by emphasizing antinomianism and deviance in its attitudinal definition. Ideally, by the time a SubCult™ has been 'conventionalized', lifestyle consumers have migrated to new SUbCults.TM In the past, American youth culture marketers were sometimes able to profit from campaigns with relatively low lifestyle turnover velocities (LTVs), such as "Classic Rock" or the "Motown". Youth culture fabrication services were performed haphazardly by many different agents in the media and advertising fields, without organization or central direction. But in today's volatile and fragmented global culture markets this approach is becoming less effective. ConDev's ventures have vastly exceeded the industry's previous profit expectations because of the company's ability to generate much higher LTV s. The Company has accomplished this by bringing together the many disparate elements that make up the process of cultural manufacturing, and has conssequently been able to offer clients agreater number of more

coherent potential youth culturesfar more rapidly than its competitors. ConDev is expected to accelerate its production schedule to achieve a standard SubCullM lifespan of less than a year by 1997, an objective which will certainly benefit from economic down-sizing trends.

Marketing Strategy ConDev orients SubCultrM development around the analysis of key consumer research data. The two salient variables in any marketing strategy are inchoate generational anomie (IGA) and spending power (SP). The relationship between the two variables is expressed in the Company's key consumer indicator, the Inchoate Generational Anomie to Spending Power ratio (IGASP). The benchmark (IGASP=1.00) of the ratio has been set at August, 1968, levels, when youth rebelliousness and youth spending power were at all-time peaks in real terms. IGASPs of less than 1.00 are considered bear markets for deviance product (for example, the Reagan years saw IGASPs as low as .67). By contrast, IGASPs of greater than 1.00 indicate bullish deviance markets. In high-IGASP markets and demographic cohorts, company product essentially sells itself. In low-IGASP markets, where RIRO strategy is less effective ConDe v generally aims for the meanest consumer instincts with BAFFLER·

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IMSuSS (intensively media-supported, sexually subversive) concepts.

IGASP curves can be plotted [see figures 1 and 2] to give a picture of the youth culture cooptation possibilities for any market or demographic cohort. Figure 1 shows an IGASP configuration commonly referred to as the "Nike Swoosh," which represents a prime market for SubCuItTM positioning. At the low end of the spending power axis we note relatively high corresponding IGAvalues. This condition is typical of the poor and is therefore neither remarkable nor significant for the marketer.

But at the high end of the spending power axis we also see relatively high IGA values. This indicates that, to put it plainly, the rich are restless and ready for lifestyle experimentation.

IGASP-l.OO

Spending power

Fig. 1-The Nike Swoosh: IGASP Bull Market

Spending power

Fig. 2- The Inverted Puma Stripe: IGASP Bear Market (Class War)

Figure 2 shows a more bearish market configuration known as the "Inverted Puma Stripe." One notes again the high corresponding IGA values at the low end of the spending power axis. But, in contrast to the Nike Swoosh configuration, one sees diminishing IGA values toward the high end of the spending power axis. This indicates stodgy consumer activity among a relatively complacent middle class. This IGASP configuration, incidentally, also represents social conditions that have historically given rise to class conflict.

Media Cooptation Strategy The interest ConDev retains in several large media conglomerates ensures a reasonable amount of large-scale media exposure for any company concept once it has achieved widespread street credibility. But the really important media work comes at a much earlier stage. The launch of each new 162 â&#x20AC;˘

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SubCultTM must be carefully orchestrated to preserve its patina of grass-roots "authenticity." This effect has been facilitated by the company's outright control of a number of smaller publications, several DIY-type record labels, and the ''j ReblVidf' cable channel.

Academic Cooptation Strategy ConDev's founder James Hatt opened new vistas in the early 1970s when he introduced PoststructuralisrrlMinto several academic markets--working out of his garage! Little did he imagine this scholarly fashion would spearhead one of the most exciting marketing industries of the '90s. With the 1991 acquisition of the British think-tank Lifestyle Partners, Ltd., the Company has begun a long-anticipated reentry into this difficult but rewarding market. A certain variety of scholars, the Company has found, is quite willing to celebrate, help publicize, and lend credibility to certain youth culture ventures without compensation. By coincidence, the enthusiasm of academics for particular SubCultsMtypically corresponds to that SubCult'sTM deviance/marginality content, the very factor which, ConDev believes, determines its obsolescence and profitability.

While traders and portfolio managers may sometimes find academic prose impenetrable, pedagogical enthusiasm has been found to dramatically increase a culture-product's "credibility" factor significantly in 88% of the known cases. In addition, it can extend a SubCult'sTM "shelf life" indefinitely by making it attractive to generations of university-aged consumers long after it has become obsolete for the general public. In America this traditionally British device for increasing credibility has not been widely used, although pop star handlers Madonna Inc. have reaped its considerable ad hoc benefits over the last year without having made any advance preparations.

ConDev has announced plans to rationalize the process of academic/SubCultTM interface by endowing a number of university chairs and departments of "subcultural studies," and by acquiring an interest in one of the country's most influential academic presses. This press has recently published a volume of essays seeking to appreciate the "libidinal heteroglossia of Grunge." By taking these steps ConDev believes it can enhance academic enthusiasm for its products and integrate it fully into the larger RIRO process.

British Operations ConDev has held a controlling interest in a small but highly regarded British youth culture consultancy firm, Lifestyle Partners, Ltd. (LPL), since early 1991. Lifestyle Partners is a well respected "think-tank" operation concerned primarily with theorizing youth cultures rather than marketing.

In Britain, where the lifestyle industry is much more sophisticated and more culBAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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turally influential than in the U.S., Lifestyle Partners has amply proven its competitive abilities. It was responsible for two medium-sized youth phenomena in the RIRO category: the "Young POWs" look of summer, 1983, in which British teenagers wore garments that appeared to be tattered military uniforms and consumed LPL's client's pre-packaged "rations"; and the "Juan Valdez" or "Juans" movement of summer, 1986, which saw young middle-class people, particularly in Scotland, taking an unusual interest in the traditional music and garb of the Colombian peasantry.

"Grunge" The profitability of youth culture speculation was demonstrated spectacularly in 1992 by the success of ConDev's Grunge SubCulfM . In early 1991 the Company was able to unite, name, and accessorize an unruly array of disparate youth culture elements with a single slang, sound, and look. Stronger-than-expected American consumption of Grunge™-related product prompted one of the sharpest rallies in the Youth Culture Marketability Index (YCMI) since the "disco sucks" frisson of 1980. In fact, the index reached all-time highs in October, 1992, less than eighteen

months after the company had introduced the Grunge™ subculture. In early January, 1993, in response to rumors concerning Grunge'sTM inauthenticity, heavy selling battered YCMI futures, and Wall Street expected a correction in ConDev shares.

Viewing Grunge'sTM official obsolescence as irrelevant or even beneficial to overall market penetrability, the Company's risk management department aggressively maintained long positions at the Chicago Board of Trade and in the end was proved the wiser. The eighteen months Grunge™ enjoyed before its demise was in fact quite long-lived by European standards, and allowed ample time for the company to maximize profits and liquidate its Grunge™ inventories. Moreover, the sudden decline of Grunge™ cleared the way for the Company's next SubCu}tTM introduction, "Baby Ferns" and "Riot Grrls". And in the week following the airing of Pepsi's 1993 Super Bowl ads, traders saw three consecutive limit-up trading days in the YCMI pits.

Regional Strategy In the aftermath of its Grunge™ venture, Consolidated Deviance is experimenting with a variety of SubCult™ launches in a hitherto unexploited region of the nation-the Middle West. Cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Detroit, and Cleveland have long been considered improbable lifestyle centers because of their class composition: the population profile of each city shows a large proportion of working people (largely unemployed) over the affluent segment with characteristically proletarian lifestyle consumption habits. In addition, the indigenous youth cultures of each metropolitan area exhibited idiosyncratic hostility to both accessorization and stylistic turnover. Nonetheless, ConDev has a track record of finding opportunity in what would ordinarily be perceived as forbidding environ164 •

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ments. The considerable IGA of working-class youths having been only rarely tapped in the past, the Company has decided to launch a particularly rebellious midwestern SubCultTM similar to Grungeâ&#x201E;˘ in order to open the vast working-class market to lifestyle consumption.

In Chicago, Consolidated Deviance has been able, with the enthusiastic assistance of local leaders and media anxious to establish their city as a "world-class lifestyle venue," to introduce a SubCu]tTM that promotes the "glam" clothes and accessories of 1970s arena-rock as emblems of worldliness and decadence. In order to facilitate the development of this attitude into a 'lifestyle alternative' that is fullyaccessible to hip-minded consumers elsewhere, the ConDev decided to concentrate its efforts on a single neighborhood-area, in which it could bring the exemplars of its new SubCultâ&#x201E;˘ together with the leaders of the local 'art' scene, who already retained considerable deviance credibility. A number of galleries, 'spaces,' and 'coffee houses' (which were proven effective in Seattle) have been opened in a quarter of the city suitable for "gentrification." The resulting "underground" has already begun to draw outside media attention, real estate prices have risen, and sales of ConDev's "Huge Overcoat" line of clothing, sunglasses, footwear, and jewelry has shown signs of acceleration.

Production Costs Consolidated Deviance has blazed new trails in labor cost controls. The company's greates asset is a highly educated and highly motivated work force. ConDev has benefitted from the confluence of several trends of the last twenty years: universal access to higher education, mass-media market saturation and the opening of globally competetive labor markets. These trends have produced a glut of savvy and underemployed pop culture pundits. This work force, despite the fact that it is almost exclusively American, highly educated and acutely leveraged, is generally willing to work for low wages and few benefits. It is also inept at, even hostile to, labor organization efforts. Unlike entry-level workers in most industries, the company's fresh post-college recruits are valued for their youth, inexperience and bad attitudes. Nor, in our opinion, is this advantage threatened by a maturing employee base-unlike most corporations, ConDev benefits from and actively encourages workforce attrition.

Retail Outlook

The most nettlesome issue facing retailers today is how to ex-

pand sales in a global economy seemingly determined to destroy the world's middle classes. Consolidated Deviance has largely avoided this problem owing to the unique position of its customer base-youth. In fact, the company has profited richly from the protracted global recession that started in 1990. Of all age cohorts, consumers in BAFFLER â&#x20AC;˘

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the 16-28 year range are the most likely to translate feelings of economic dislocation and personal insufficiency into a frenzied urge to purchase edgy lifestyle accessories. Thus, based on the global economy's dismal prognosis alone, we expect the ConDev product to move briskly well into the future.

True business leaders have always known how to take lemons and make lemonade. Henry Ford knew that the way to stimulate demand for his product was to pay his workers higher wages and make them into reliable consumers. Although this business philosophy was widely decried at the time as heretical, the modern industrial state has prospered under the Fordist paradigm ever since. In a similar fashion, Corporate America is now seeing the wisdom of ConDev's founder, James Hatt.

Jim's concept of medial merchandising! entertainment synergy-the Hattist paradigm, if you will-provides multinational conglomerates the tools to manipulate consumer desire and to shape the articulation of dissent.

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