Recipes for Stupefaction (pt.2)

 

In “The Sahara of the Bozart,” one of his most famed and acerbic essays, HL Mencken referred to the American south with a calculated awe:

It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether…. for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ that it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert….It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of civilization.

Welcome to the final years of the Dixification of the United States. Though Mencken’s damnation of the South was no doubt far too sweeping, as if life there consisted solely of outcasts from Yoknapatawpha County– a bestiary of phrenologically dubious kissing cousins and Snopes-ean psychopaths– one of his sharpest criticisms, that the south of the 1920s lacked even “the impulse to seek beauty and to experiment with ideas, and so to give the life of every day a certain dignity and purpose,” now suits the nation as a whole. Disregard for a moment that Mencken’s explanation for this unprecedented slide into barbarism appealed to the decimation of the antebellum gentry. His argument that the Civil War, in culling the aristocracy, thinned the region’s collective “blood” has a eugenic tone to it now. In our day, when the rankest elitism is slopped out on paper plates like barbecue for mass consumption it often follows that the aspiration for an intellectual life beyond drive-thru/ wallpaper culture provokes a faux-democratic response which posits corporation-confected drivel as some kind of organic expression of the people. Leaving aside cultural studies practioners’ complicity in this valorization of media sausage skins stuffed with sawdust, we can see that Mencken’s criticism still applies: culture comes in many variants but surely the most ubiquitous is that brand which acts as a palliative, an anodyne for all ailments, whether in the form of syndicated Seinfeld re-runs consumed in the aftermath of yet another painful 10 hour stretch of humiliation and purposelessness (work) or the poor man’s time travel across barely apprehended concepts and factoids that characterizes a night trawling the net. In each case culture distracts, and if that function is hardly new– “color” reportage of the late 19th century deemed nickel dumps and amusement parks as much, cementing middle-class complacency and widening the age’s high/low breach the great-grandchildren of those arbiters of bourgeois taste worked so feverishly to anneal– it has expanded, and now threatens to extinguish even the possibility of thought. 

There is a difference between the arrogance of assuming a right to improve the residuum as the fabled and defamed Reformers undertook to accomplish during the Progressive Era– a project that sought embourgeoisement of the masses while retaining the vertiginous gap between haves and have-nots– and leaving people collectively to the stultifications of a culture which operates according to the debasing illogic of a market. Theodor Adorno caught flack for disparaging what he has been misrepresented as terming “Jazz,” particularly his criticisms that such music represents a stereotyped idiom, a regimented unruliness that inevitably accedes to the demands of commercialization. These remarks are apposite to his most discussed work (written with Max Horkheimer), The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, an essay concerned with the creation of mass-society individuals whose deepest intuitions and desires are revealed to be the outcome of technical-economic practices. In On Popular Music, Adorno writes 

The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested”. The most drastic example of standardization of presumably individualized features is to be found in so-called improvisations. Even though jazz musicians still improvise in practice, their improvisations have become so “normalized” as to enable a whole terminology to be developed to express the standard devices of individualization: a terminology which in turn is ballyhooed by jazz publicity agents to foster the myth of pioneer artisanship and at the same time flatter the fans by apparently allowing them to peep behind the curtain and get the inside story. This pseudo-individualization is prescribed by the standardization of the framework. The latter is so rigid that the freedom it allows for any sort of improvisation is severely delimited. Improvisations — passages where spontaneous action of individuals is permitted (“Swing it boys”) — are confined within the walls of the harmonic and metric scheme. In a great many cases, such as the “break” of pre-swing jazz, the musical function of the improvised detail is determined completely by the scheme: the break can be nothing other than a disguised cadence. Here, very few possibilities for actual improvisation remain, due to the necessity of merely melodically circumscribing the same underlying harmonic functions. Since these possibilities were very quickly exhausted, stereotyping of improvisatory details speedily occurred. Thus, standardization of the norm enhances in a purely technical way standardization of its own deviation — pseudo-individualization.

In a culture prefixed with the first-person possessive pronoun– “my” space, “my” insert name of product/institution here, ipod, iphone, etc.– this pseudo-individualization has fully penetrated our consciousness. Reduced from citizens to consumers we download not only our thoughts but the components of our personalities which are accumulated from a stock of existing types and flavors to be assembled and advertised among a shrinking circle of actual acquaintances or uploaded and injected into the world wide web. In the process, whatever cognitive fluency might have been extracted from an encounter with some culture of depth becomes a stutter of repetition and incoherency. Though we maintain a certain self-reflexiveness– an obligatory ironizing which is, after all, the social distinction and lubricant of the hep– the image that bounces back is itself a reflection, mere bent light. 

 

Recipes for Stupefaction (pt. 1)

Is it possible for banality to reach such a stage of perfection that what was merely a kind of numbing vacuity crosses over into the realm of the sublime? Panning across the vicious candy on view in the display case of a post-spectacular mediascape the question is inevitable. Where once somebody intuited a presence beneath that surface– the pale grub of self-interest writhing poisonously under culture’s transgenic leafage– now exists pure absence, a condition of such staggering insignificance that by comparison the insouciant nihilism of pop songs like “Less Than Zero” seem to possess the irresistable tonnage of spiritual redemption. 

Item. The mind-annihilating boredom of listening to conversations weighing the relative merits of Hill or Obama. Should she cash out? Does his wife hate America? What’s a super delegate? Bearing witness to these exchanges takes on a wrenching pathos usually provoked by watching a maimed animal attempting to right itself. What has been broken can never be fixed and neither speaker understands how complete is their incapacity. They continue to struggle back to their feet unaware that conditions have deteriorated so drastically that death will be a kind of mercy. In this scenario political speech empties itself of political significance not through any fault of the speakers but because the situation itself admits to no meaning. “There is no there there” it could be said, and what’s worse no here here either.

Counter-item. Once we could take comfort in bits of language collected at random from film, conversation and literature. Benicio del Toro’s character in The Usual Suspects would be a ripe example, as when Fenster, pressed for information, leaned on hard by the cops, remarks of the man in question, Gabriel Byrne’s Keaton, “He’ll flip ya. Flip you for real.” Mere text can’t do the phrase justice; this fragment persists as a sound-byte mimicked by thousands of reasonably bright undergraduates perhaps one of whom has managed to hit the right intonation. Which isn’t to say del Toro’s a genius, unless genius is purely a product of chance and slovenly elocution. There is no context in which the sound-byte could be inappropriate: toasting the groom, watching the court house burn, releasing a bong hit, listening to Tony Fratto defend torture. Any and all occasions are enhanced by the utterance precisely because it has no value. 

 

Cinema of Empire and Exception

 

 

Gods and Generals (2003) Directed by  Stephen Lang. Cast: Jeff Daniels, Robert Duvall, Stephen Lang, Mira Sorvino, et al

Gods and Generals centers on the short career of Stonewall Jackson, a hero-martyr of the Confederate States of America. The relatively unknown Stephen Lang, who starred in 1990’s Gettysburg (to which Gods and Generals is a prequel) plays Jackson as an early-Victorian David Koresh prone to spasms of logorrhea. Whether extolling the book of Samuel as a model of effective writing, or, mounted splendidly on horseback, gazing down on his faithful slave/cook and explaining that the War Between the States is in fact a matter of defending the Homeland rather than the unpleasant, moribund institution of slave-ocracy, Jackson perorates with all the clutter and sweep of a tidal wave flattening a beach resort . In this respect, Gods and Generals not only aspires to literacy, but continues the corrupt tradition of American cinema’s representations of slavery. Though cinematic tactics have changed– from DW Griffith’s grand White Supremacist apologetics in Birth of a Nation to the remarkably enlightened planter who frees his slaves and even finds multicultural safe-haven from snide British killers in Mel Gibson’s The Patriot– American film never fails to distort the wages of slavery either in stripes and lacerations or the profits accrued for White Christian capitalists. That tradition continues somewhat altered in films such as Cold Mountain, which exhibits the defining traits of an exceptionalist strand of cinema cleansed of history: in that film slaves are distant figures laboring in the fields, present for less than a minute.

True to his historical counterpart, Lang’s Stonewall is a man aflame with Jesus, a fire that only exacerbates the epic scale of his contradictions. Informed he will be leading Confederate volunteers into battle, Stonewall chastely enjoins his young wife to read Scripture,  an idealizing gesture Lang uses to invoke Gilded Age moral virtue. Yet God, the horizon of all meaning for the general, affords darker martial pleasures as a means of libidinal outlet. Prim as a schoolgirl with the ladies, Stonewall bellows “Kill them all” in the heat of battle, thereby demonstrating that sexual rectitude and ardent patriotism are the private and public expressions of a powerful fundamentalist zeal. Significantly, sentiments concerning home do not extend to the nation as a whole but solely to the Cotton States, Virginia in particular. In a riveting scene a mere half hour into the story Stoney argues passionately for the necessity of the bayonet as the noblest and most apposite weapon against the invading northern army.  Again Lang attempts to complicate and elevate Jackson’s character: such a choice of arms is the outcome of a education in the Classics, an emulation of Thuycididean phalanxes lined up against barbarian hordes.

In one of Gods and Generals’s most startling sequences, Stones gets a finger blown off in his first battle and spends the rest of the carnage yelling, mangled hand lifted elegantly as if waiting for a tray of martinis, while local civil war re-enactors are PG-13ed to death. In another– Ted Turner and Sen. Phil Gramm ’s (R-TX) cameo– dandified southern gentry chortle in Confederate costume while a Texas fancylad sings and claps. That Phil would actually don a CSA uniform indicates his weak grasp of the potential power that visual image might have with certain members of his constituency. Not poor enough to get drafted to go to Vietnam, here Phil takes the opportunity to make it up by grimacing uncomfortably for the camera, girdled in braid and sash.

Yet G&G raises the issue of the Civil War epic as a subgenre, and what shared characteristics unite these kinds of films. DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) is some kind of paradigm, though surely there are earlier silents that treat the same set of events. Broadly speaking, BON and G&G share a north-south structure, drifting between domestic tableaux in both regions. Stoney prays at home in Virginia while Mira Sorvino, ensconsed in her parlor in Pepperidge Farms, quotes the kind of longwinded, Swinburnian trash that Mathew Arnold defended in that manifesto of bourgeois aesthetics, Culture and Anarchy. The effect of all this grandiloquence– King James hexameter and late-Romantic narrative verse– is to bleed these scenes of any psychological clarity.  G&G is so baroque, so excessively ornamental, that it becomes virtually impossible to absorb the narrative as history. In this sense the film departs from Birth of a Nation even as it retains Griffith’s Victorian sensibilities. Actors in painstakingly accurate uniforms declaim floridly while rank upon rank of anonymous soldiers fall into the grass. Yet the audience never sees the homes of these soldiers because the film is more concerned with the mysteries of ruling class domesticity than the lives of those who fought on foot. 

Predictably it’s the Irish who work the hardest in this version of the Civil War. Irishness performs the critical function of representing one of the most significant and gendered themes of civil war: brother fighting brother. In keeping with the it-wasn’t-slavery thesis so popular amongst certain revisionists, one Mick remarks on the crushing irony that the Southern Irish are only fighting their Northern countrymen in order to defend their new homes.  Once again, the similarity of this logic to the rhetoric of DHS raises the possibility that G&G is in fact a kind of ideological template for the loose confederation of influence and interests that is the 21st century Right. All of the major features are there: a deep-fried evangelism, parochialism construing itself as patriotism, a psychotic disregard for one’s own moral and ethical contradictions, arrogance, blood-lust.

 

Music as Catharsis: The Search to Reunify the Self

We—you, me, and everyone else—are bifurcated subjects: the subject that speaks and the subject that is spoken of, which creates a largely unknowable breach in the Self that we are all constantly attempting to define, whether we are conscious of that search or not; this breach is the unconscious, the gray fuzzy center of what we are at our core. I believe that musicians, and artists in general, attempt to rectify, to understand this gap through their chosen medium of expression: their art form. This is an extremely personal journey and people are drawn to the type of music that embodies the journey that is most like their own. This attraction is based on many factors that, I believe, stem from a certain element of alienation that is endemic of and intrinsic to contemporary culture in particular and can partially be traced to the steaming pile of horse shit that we call the media. As like people gravitate towards like journeys, they begin to congregate, to coalesce and this is the point at which a “scene” begins to develop. To put this in the terminology preferred by Catherine Belsey, music interpellates people as they attempt to construct themselves into cohesive units, which is a variegated system of communication (both within and outside of the barriers of language) that can be diagramed as follows:

                        TRADITION – - – ARTIST- – - – MUSIC – - – - AUDIENCE.

Which is to say, an artist draws upon his/her experiences and the fundamental historicized legacies that comprise them, distills them into a song as a form of catharsis, then shares that cathartic creation with his/her audience who in turn reap the benefits of their own catharsis by identifying with that journey and being surrounded by people who are reaping the same benefits.

At a point, the authenticity of this relationship between the artist(s) and the audience is called into question. Once a band is hyped, signed to a major label, and commodified, something is lost; people begin to follow the artist(s) based not upon a genuine connection with their journey, but rather for the “coolness” factor of the associated scene. This is, consequently, the death of any meaningful extraction: it has been co-opted by popular culture and its original intention has been bastardized. Video killed the radio star. The precise location of this bastardization is difficult to pin point and, therefore, is entirely subjective. Personally, once Middle America (the red states) has picked up on an indie rock artist I tend to lose faith in its authenticity, but that’s because I’m an indie music snob.