January RantRhapsody
This was our (perhaps) final event at the Bowery Poetry Club, and it was an all star crew. Greg Palast turned a scathing eye on The New Yorker, Marisa Meltzer tweaked Fat Suits, Liza Featherstone Eulogized Gillian Anderson, Bill Eville ruminated on the memory of a homeless man living in his car, Stephen Duncombe rallied progressives to Spectacularize their politics, and I, Mark Read, warned of the dire implications of the pleasures of the ipod. The following pieces were read, on January 18th, 2006, at the Bowery Poetry Club, OUT LOUD.
The ipod cometh
Mark W. Read
I am, as of three weeks ago, the proud owner of a brand new 60 gigabyte, shiny black and chrome “Video ipod”. A Christmas gift from my over-indulgent parents, I’m embaressed to say, who would probably be less indulgent of me were I to provide them with the grandchildren they so ardently, and vocally, wish for each and every yuletide season. Not that I’m not grateful, I really am, it’s just that the oohing and aahing over Christmas booty becomes a bit, well, awkward past the age of thirty. I feel like I’m still wearing my Scooby Doo pajamas and furry LL Bean Slippers, trying to catch Santa in the act at 5am. The carols, the tree, the stockings and, well, the whole rigamarole, really, the whole thing, it’s all a bit infantilizing, and I’ve gotten to the point where I wonder whether or not I’d be better off skipping the whole holy thing. But then again, if I did that I wouldn’t be scrolling through the 2, 757 songs I’ve recently loaded up onto my new itoy as I stroll out into the winter chill of a January New York City afternoon.
I'm late to the game, I know. This is, at the least, a third gen ipod. Pretty much all of my friends have already discovered the joy of these sleek and seductive little companions, these portable electronic oases of solitude in the midst of hurly-burly modern cosmopolitan existence. But it’s been years since I have owned a...what do you call them exactly? A"personal stereo system.?” At least a decade I think. The last I remember wearing headphones in a crowd was as a twenty-nothing slacker in San Francisco, catching the 33 bus over twin peaks on my way to work in the Richmond district. I fell in love with a beautiful faux-boheme princess to the chords of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”: “When we were strangers, I watched you from afar, When we were lovers, I loved you with all my heart” he crooned off key in my ear as I observed her, the mystery princess, similarly adorned with the now-retro looking skull-spanning headphones, listening to her own soundtrack, one which I could only pray matched the romantic ardor of my own. She, furtively meeting my amorous gaze as we steadily climbed up 17th Street, was, in retrospect, probably not furtive at all, but rather frightened by the shaggy, sweaty young prole seated across the aisle from her. But I, hopeless romantic that I was, caught up in the thrall of Neil’s plaintive, achy-hearted singing, smiled knowingly, even lovingly, at her, as she darted off the bus at the Haight Street stop
Anyway, it's been a long time since I've used one of these devices with any kind of regularity, and the prospect of having one in my urban tool kit has brought to the surface some odd memories, such as this one, and also a gathering sense of unease with the pleasures that they provide. I am, you see, of the first generation of Personal Stereo System users. I was in high school when the first Walkmans came out, and remember the craze over them, recall the competitive brand envy- would not be caught dead with a JVC or a Panasonic, only Sony, or possibly Aiwa would suffice to quench my logo-thirst. And I remember how the once boisterous rides to swim meets became substantially more subdued as we adolescents plugged in and tuned out for the long journeys home. But mostly I remember just really enjoying the sense of private space that the walkman provided, a space that, as an awkward adolescent boy who felt deeply misunderstood by his peers, I needed, desperately. As I got older, went to college, and began to outgrow some of the awkwardness of youth, I found that I used the walkman less and less, and, eventually, I gave them up more or less entirely. In point of fact, I quite consciously took a stand against them, on the basis of what might be seen as the rather naïve, but certainly heartfelt and sincere belief, that the detatchment afforded by the walkman was impoverishing to one’s day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience of reality. Frankly, the scene of a bus full of strangers, all plugged into their own personal devices, all removed from eachother, came to depress me, and I decided that I didn’t want, or need, to participate in it..
But then, well, these ipods came along, and everyone I knew was getting one. Which is interesting because, as near as I can tell, these are people who also seemed to have given up the whole walkman-thing, quite a while ago. At first I had a hard time understanding the craze- I mean, is this thing really any different than a walkman? Are Steve Jobs and Apple just so brilliant at the marketing game that they have tricked us all into thinking that this is actually something new? Well, yes and no, of course. Yes Steve Jobs and Apple are very very good at what they do. Yes the the ipod is significantly more versatile, reliable, and just plain cooler than any walkman or discman could ever hope to be. But, no, the actual experience of using an ipod is fundamentally no different than the experience of using a walkman, discman, or MD player.
So, what is that experience? What is the source of this pleasure that I feel when I wedge the round plastic headphones into my ears, press play, and step out into the street? I mean, the solitude, yes, the privacy, it’s a nice feature, but solitude is lonely sometimes, and I feel anything but lonely as The Shins put a noticeable bounce in my step while they sing Young Pilgrims to me. So, what then, is the appeal? What are they really selling?
With the ipod as your companion, you are suddenly the main character in whatever internal narrative your mind generates while you amble through the streets or sit on the bus or the subway. The way that gust of wind blows just as the power-chord chorus kicks in; the way that girl smiles at you as some old Cure tune wraps its way around the moment; the way that homeless woman’s eyes haunt you as the blues magnify her sadness and despair. That alchemy of hearing the perfect song while witnessing the perfect corresponding moment suddenly, unexpectedly, brings you to the height of rapture, or to a vale of grief and mourning. You are the star of the film, the center of the plot, you are the TV star and the Rock star rolled into one. This, after all, is the whispered promise of the ipod: “You are not a part of the herd, you are above the fray, special, unique, important, a Star.” You have entered the Televisual plane of existence, and it feels good.
And this, my friends, makes the ipod one of the most powerful tools of indoctrination ever created, for the terrain of televisuality is the domain of the ad-men and the PR hacks and the stars they would have us worship in their cult of celebrity. As you participate in their televisual reality, you become subject to the rules of the world as they have advertised it to you, a false world, a world inscribed with the values of their cult of celebrity, values that claim surface as all, image as king, and appearance as truth. The ipod lies to you, it tells you that you can be JUST LIKE THEM, the core delusion propping up the cult of celebrity. The dislocated, ambient feelings of Significance that the ipod provides, are vapid to the core, and to believe- really to FEEL- otherwise, even for a moment, is to indulge in a dangerous hallucination. A deliciously pleasurable one, to be sure, but a hallucination nonetheless.
And yet, I still wonder: that girl on the bus, the boheme princess. She smiled at me, I’m sure of it. Didn’t she smile?
Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show
by Marisa Meltzer
In San Francisco, where I live, movie previews are more than just ads—they’re a chance for notoriously politically correct audiences to vent their disapproval of Hollywood, corporate America, and the powers that be. The standard mode of expression is hissing. I've witnessed The Patriot, Rush Hour, and several Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles getting the San Francisco treatment. But over the summer, during a preview for Shallow Hal, no one in the audience saw fit to register sibilant protest against one of the most disturbing and offensive cinematic trends in recent memory: the fat suit. Gwyneth Paltrow stars in the latest Farrelly brothers movie as Rosemary, the 350-pound love interest of womanizer Jack Black, who, because he can suddenly see only “inner beauty,” falls in love with the Skinny Rosemary; the rest of the world sees Fat Rosemary waddling her way through the movie. Watch Fat Rosemary shop for clothes! Watch her do a cannonball into a pool! Watch her drink a really big milkshake—all by herself! The preview audience laughed uproariously. Not a single “ssss” was heard. I felt a little queasy.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black in Shallow Hal
Leaving aside the incongruity of “inner beauty” being taken so literally, the culturally tired but no less annoying assumption that thin = beautiful, and the fact that Black is no paragon of svelte pulchritude himself, Shallow Hal isn’t an isolated case. Au contraire; Gwyneth is jumping on a veritable fat-suit bandwagon. A brief history of the fat suit would have to include Goldie Hawn, living large and vengeful in Death Becomes Her; Robin Williams—annoying as ever—as the chubby, dowdy Mrs. Doubtfire; Martin Lawrence and a pair of really weird saggy boobs in Big Momma’s House; Mike Myers as Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; and Eddie Murphy playing an entire fat family in both Nutty Professor movies. More recently, there’s Martin Short unable to cross his legs in his new Comedy Central talk show Primetime Glick, Julia Roberts scarfing down cookies as a (gasp!) size 12 in America’s Sweethearts, and a fat-family dream sequence on Damon Wayans’s sitcom My Wife and Kids.1 Fat people are now America’s favorite celluloid punchlines. Wanna make a funny movie? It’s a pretty easy formula: Zip a skinny actor into a latex suit. Watch her/him eat, walk, and try to find love. Hilarity will ensue.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black in Shallow Hal
Of course, no conversation about the fat suit could ever be complete without a mention of Fat Monica, inhabitant of several flashback and alternate-reality episodes of Friends. While I will refrain from airing my personal theories about Courteney Cox Arquette’s body image and eating habits here, I do believe Fat Monica really takes the proverbial cake. She dresses badly, has no self-control, eats junk food, has poor hygiene, and is a virgin. She’s the opposite of the control-freak Thin Monica, who has the husband, the job, and the adoring friends. Even worse than all that is the dance Courteney does in full fat drag to entertain the studio audience between takes. She calls it “the popcorn,” and apparently folks watching find it quite comical. It involves her moving rhythmically in her latex suit. A fat person shaking her bod: mmmm, funny.
It’s here that the true nature of fat-suit humor is revealed in all its glory. See, it’s fairly acceptable to satirize a group of people we envy. (Movies like Legally Blonde and Clueless work because we’re laughing at rich white girls. Their problems are supposedly our fantasies—which boy to date, which pair of Manolos looks better with the Versace dress, which color SUV to drive—and these comedies treat them with the utmost affection.) But when the punchline is a group euphemistically (and often erroneously) called a minority, things start to get dicey. Over the past several decades, comedy has gradually become less broad and more sensitive to overt racism (and, to a lesser extent, sexism and homophobia). Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker may trade black and Asian jokes in the Rush Hour series, but we've come a long way since Peter Sellers was cast as bucktoothed Chinese sleuth Sidney Wang in Murder by Death. By now, the cardinal rule of humor—you can only make fun of a group if you’re part of it—is familiar enough to be a punchline itself. (Remember Jerry Seinfeld’s outrage over his Catholic dentist’s Jewish jokes?) But fat people are the last remaining exception.
Jack Black in Shallow Hal
In the spring and summer of 2001 alone, we were inundated with images of thin actors playing fat. It’s not like there’s a dearth of fat actresses out there, as if some casting director is saying, "We've been searching for a fat girl to star in the next Farrelly brothers film, but so far there are no takers." (Camryn Manheim and I aren’t friends, but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t offered Gwyneth’s Shallow Hal part.) With a real fat woman in the lead, the movie wouldn’t be funny—it would just be uncomfortable. Watching actual fat on the big screen would be so authentically painful—because fat hatred is still deeply entrenched in American culture—that audiences would be unable to laugh. It’s not just the exaggerated dimply thighs and man-boobs that keep us buying tickets; the crux of the joke is not the latex suit’s physical fakeness but the ephemeral nature of the thin actor posing as fat.2 We all know that Julia, Goldie, and Gwyneth (and Martin, Mike, and Eddie) will return to their slender glory for the next part, and that’s comforting—because otherwise we would have to confront the mean-spiritedness behind the giggles.
Such virulence makes all this faux fat seem very old-fashioned; it reeks of our country’s less-than-perfect past. After all, it seems like a long time ago—although it was not—that great white actors of the 20th century performed in blackface. The closing credit sequence of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled displays a parade of them. There they are: Shirley Temple, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and more, totally oblivious to the true meaning of their actions. Someday you'll see footage of Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow trundling along in their fat suits, and it'll be depressing and pathetic, but it won’t be funny.
Find Marisa Meltzer at a theater near you. You'll know her by her hiss.
1 The actors who don faux avoirdupois seem fairly deluded about its realism-and the insight it gives them into the heavy life. On one of Entertainment Tonight’s signature hard-hitting interviews, Paltrow weighed in: “It was disturbing and sad. I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” Oh, please, Gwyneth-you slay me with your sensitivity. “Gwynnie," I want to say, “fat and pretty are like chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes that taste great together.” (But at least she was trying to be nice. Julia Roberts’s revulsion with her suit was widely quoted. This is the version that appeared in Salon: “The special effects makeup people offered to get me a really comfortable chair so I could sleep through most of the [fitting] process. I told them absolutely not. I didn’t want to suddenly wake up and be fat. I might never want to sleep again.”) Courteney Cox Arquette, echoing the sentiments of many, told Jane, “It’s hot. It’s really hot. It’s hot to be fat. And I don’t mean hard. I mean hot.” I wonder if it has ever occurred to her-or any of the other actors who have overheated in their latex-that the physical actuality of being fat isn’t terribly hot at all. It’s as if they can’t imagine fat as being anything naturally occurring; it’s just a costume you take off when the day’s over. (back to main text)
2 Fat suits aren’t just for entertainment anymore, they've also become an educational device. Psychologist Lisa Berzins lectures to teenagers about body image issues both in and out of a fat suit and uses the audience’s differing reactions to spark discussion. There’s even an “empathy suit” doctors can wear to get a better understanding of their fat patients. (back to main text)
DreamPolitik
Stephen Duncombe
7.
Dream Another Way
Politics today, whether one likes it or not, is not played out on the well-ordered fields of rationality and reason. Perhaps it never was. Aristotle created a theory of politics in which irrationality was sequestered to a few, last pages, raised solely as a warning. But Niccolo Machiavelli, who examined the practice of politics in his 1532 guidebook The Prince, understood that fantasy and desire were integral to power. Some of Machiavelli’s advice on the subject is crude: the prince “ought, at convenient seasons of the year, to keep the people occupied with festivals and shows”—that is, the time-tested subterfuge of the circuses of the Roman Empire and the processions of the Church. But Machiavelli also displays a more sophisticated understanding of spectacle, acknowledging that it operates not just negatively but also positively, not merely as a distraction from power but also as an attraction to it. The prince must display, if not actually possess, attributes like integrity and good faith that the people look for in a leader. The prince who did not understand the passions of his people would not be a prince for long, and the leader who attended to only what is, and not what things appeared to be, would lead very few not very far. The prince must be feared, to be sure, but he must also be loved by his subjects. “For it must be noted,” Machiavelli writes, “that men must either be caressed or else annihilated.”
Machiavelli, writing in the time of the Medicis, had political options open to him that—thankfully—we do not. Annihilation was an approved political method and The Prince is full of examples where leaders consolidated their rule through the slaughter of a few rivals. Democracy changed this equation. Once popular rule was accepted as a principle in the eighteenth century and then as a slowly expanding practice in the centuries that followed, the assassination of a couple of key noblemen no longer worked as a path to power. Politics now rests upon public opinion and participation, or, at the very least, the passive consent of the majority of the population. As such, the political options open in our age of popular sovereignty are either mass genocide or the public caress. The horrors of the last century (continuing into this one, sadly) are a testament that genocide still happens, but as a political tactic it tends to be frowned upon by the world community. Smart leaders have learned the art of the caress.
By raising the spirit of Machiavelli I’m not suggesting that progressives embrace the brutal and duplicitous politics recommended by the favored author of five hundred years of despots. Nor am I proposing that we adopt a cynical policy of the manufacture of consent through a public relations crafted caress. But I am suggesting that we need to get our heads out of the sand and take a serious look at the political landscape that Machiavelli describes:
It appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination, and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or know to exist in reality; for how we live life is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin rather than his preservation.
The irony here, which Machiavelli well understood, is that only the “imagined republic” is built solely upon reality. The “real truth of the matter” is that states and governments are based, in part, on imagination. Machiavelli is one of the few canonical writers on politics who understood his task not as one of creating an illusion of a world of political reason, but using reason to understand a political world that depended upon illusion.
Perhaps we ought to live by reason alone—though I would rather not live in such a sober world. And perhaps progressives ought to address all their appeals in rational arguments and careful proofs—we will certainly feel better about our Enlightenment-infused selves if we do. But make no mistake: Machiavelli is right, and unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire, and spectacle, and, most importantly, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation.”
The world cannot afford this. The conservative revolution in this country has brought us war in the Middle East, alienated our allies, emboldened terrorists, eroded civil liberties, legitimated torture, hastened ecological destruction, widened the income gap, bungled domestic crises, and increased the deficit. What’s astounding, given this record of signature failures (and unpopular successes), is that conservatives are still in power. They certainly deserve credit for their political acumen and the skill with which they employ the spectacular, just as they deserve condemnation for parading fantasy as reality. But behind a great deal of their success lies the failure of progressives. Conservatives have given us opening after opening, but with our historical reluctance to communicate in the lingua franca of spectacle and our aversion to address the irrational, the only sounds heard from our direction are equivocating murmurs of timid discourse and sighs of righteous indignation.
Conservatives have not attained and remained in power because they’ve convinced everyone that they have all the right answers. That fiction would be too hard to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they have done, and have done very effectively, is convince most people that there is no alternative. Sadly, they are correct. The people who pioneered the expansion of democracy, challenged monopoly, built the New Deal, struggled for civil rights, and ushered in a cultural revolution are largely silent today. We have no alternatives to propose. We don’t because we’ve distanced ourselves from our dreams.
There are good reasons why we’ve done this. The exhaustion or corruption of dreams past, for one. But more pressing is our fear of losing ourselves into the delusional and dishonest fantasies that comprise so much of today’s entertainment, religion and politics. We distinguish ourselves from this immoral morass through our fidelity to the Real and the True, building an identity for ourselves as brave defenders of “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.” Creating a dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, we are resolutely on the side of the former. This is a false, and debilitating, division. Embracing our dreams does not necessitate closing our eyes, and mind, to reality. Progressives can, and should, do both: judiciously study and vividly dream. In essence, we need to become a party of conscious dreamers.
Right now the only people flying this flag are sequestered to the far fringes of progressive politics. Some of this marginalization is of their own choice. Many of the street activists and political performers I’ve described in the pages above are suspicious of more mainstream progressives who, in their eyes, have abandoned the utopian dreams that once directed and motivated the left. They also have contempt for the tactical (non)sense of a bumbling, fumbling Democratic Party. “At least we shut down Seattle and opened up a discussion on the politics of globalization,” they brag (an estimation shared, with some concern, by the editors of the Financial Times). Disgusted by the conciliation and incompetence of their more moderate comrades these progressives often keep their own company.
But this marginalization is not entirely of their own making, for progressives ensconced in the center show little interest in their left flank. The Lower East Side Collective is too small, Reclaim the Streets too frivolous, the Billionaires too theatrical, MoveOn too ephemeral, Reverend Billy too silly, Apollo too earnest, BUST too racy, Critical Mass too chaotic, the Zapatistas too revolutionary, and the New Deal and civil rights movement too dated to appeal to a majority of citizens. There’s validity to this criticism, as many of the groups I’ve been writing about do seem decidedly outside the main currents of contemporary politics. But they needn’t be.
Here conservatives have something to teach us. In a letter to his brother in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that “should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” He continued: “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things,” then concludes, “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” For years these “negligible” and “stupid” people, the far-right wing of Eisenhower’s own Republican Party, dreamed seemingly impossible dreams: to roll back the most successful government initiative in U.S. history, the New Deal, and do away with what seemed like a foregone conclusion for the developed countries of the world, the welfare state. Today their dreams are our reality.
The Republican Party learned to look to its margins. Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan—all these men at one time might have been described as Eisenhower’s “negligible” and “stupid” people, members of a “tiny splinter group” whose fringe politics guaranteed their irrelevance. They are also the very people that led the Republicans to power over the past few decades. During the same decades groups like the Democratic Leadership Council argued—successfully—that the Democratic Party needed to abandon its margins and move to the center. As a result the Democrats have virtually no connection to the aesthetic and political fringes of the progressive movement today.
It’s a shame because these people—in all their marginality—have a better understanding of how the center operates than the centrist professionals inside the Beltway. They understand the popular desire for fantasy and the political potential of dreams, and they know how to mobilize spectacle. They have a better read on the attractions of popular culture and the possibilities of harnessing this for progressive politics than the “pragmatic” center who, secure in their sense of superiority, stick to their failed script of reason and rationality. Left on their own these sidelined activists have been busy experimenting with new forms of political organization and communication. But because of their peripheral position their efforts—with some notable exceptions—have been politically inconsequential.
The Democratic Leadership Council’s raison d’être is to spread the center of liberal politics all the way to the margins of the left. Whatever one thinks of this strategy theoretically, practically it has been a failure. For all their bluster about being the ones who are realistic about power and politics they have not been able to deliver political power to the Democrats (only a relatively powerless president: Bill Clinton). It’s time to cut our losses and try another tack by moving the strategies, tactics, and organization of the margins to the center. This will take convincing on all sides. Those on the margins need to take power seriously, giving up the privileged purity of the gadfly and court jester and making peace with the dirtier aspects of practical politics: the daily compromises that come with real governance. Those in the center have to be open to a new way of thinking about politics that challenges some of their core beliefs about the sufficiency of judicious study and rational discourse and the efficacy of a professionalized politics. The centrists need to acknowledge that their model of politics is, ironically, out of touch with the cultural center of our society. They must be willing to dream.
Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.
I too have a dream. In my dream progressives of all stripes work together. We don’t agree on ideology or come to consensus on policy. (While we may agree on fundamentals we’re still too far apart on particulars.) But we learn to share a political aesthetic that makes peace with the irrational, honors desire, and embraces spectacle. This may seem impossible, but if progressives are serious about winning, if we really want to change reality, then we have to try and do something different, together. It’s a dream.
The ipod cometh
Mark W. Read
I am, as of three weeks ago, the proud owner of a brand new 60 gigabyte, shiny black and chrome “Video ipod”. A Christmas gift from my over-indulgent parents, I’m embaressed to say, who would probably be less indulgent of me were I to provide them with the grandchildren they so ardently, and vocally, wish for each and every yuletide season. Not that I’m not grateful, I really am, it’s just that the oohing and aahing over Christmas booty becomes a bit, well, awkward past the age of thirty. I feel like I’m still wearing my Scooby Doo pajamas and furry LL Bean Slippers, trying to catch Santa in the act at 5am. The carols, the tree, the stockings and, well, the whole rigamarole, really, the whole thing, it’s all a bit infantilizing, and I’ve gotten to the point where I wonder whether or not I’d be better off skipping the whole holy thing. But then again, if I did that I wouldn’t be scrolling through the 2, 757 songs I’ve recently loaded up onto my new itoy as I stroll out into the winter chill of a January New York City afternoon.
I'm late to the game, I know. This is, at the least, a third gen ipod. Pretty much all of my friends have already discovered the joy of these sleek and seductive little companions, these portable electronic oases of solitude in the midst of hurly-burly modern cosmopolitan existence. But it’s been years since I have owned a...what do you call them exactly? A"personal stereo system.?” At least a decade I think. The last I remember wearing headphones in a crowd was as a twenty-nothing slacker in San Francisco, catching the 33 bus over twin peaks on my way to work in the Richmond district. I fell in love with a beautiful faux-boheme princess to the chords of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon”: “When we were strangers, I watched you from afar, When we were lovers, I loved you with all my heart” he crooned off key in my ear as I observed her, the mystery princess, similarly adorned with the now-retro looking skull-spanning headphones, listening to her own soundtrack, one which I could only pray matched the romantic ardor of my own. She, furtively meeting my amorous gaze as we steadily climbed up 17th Street, was, in retrospect, probably not furtive at all, but rather frightened by the shaggy, sweaty young prole seated across the aisle from her. But I, hopeless romantic that I was, caught up in the thrall of Neil’s plaintive, achy-hearted singing, smiled knowingly, even lovingly, at her, as she darted off the bus at the Haight Street stop
Anyway, it's been a long time since I've used one of these devices with any kind of regularity, and the prospect of having one in my urban tool kit has brought to the surface some odd memories, such as this one, and also a gathering sense of unease with the pleasures that they provide. I am, you see, of the first generation of Personal Stereo System users. I was in high school when the first Walkmans came out, and remember the craze over them, recall the competitive brand envy- would not be caught dead with a JVC or a Panasonic, only Sony, or possibly Aiwa would suffice to quench my logo-thirst. And I remember how the once boisterous rides to swim meets became substantially more subdued as we adolescents plugged in and tuned out for the long journeys home. But mostly I remember just really enjoying the sense of private space that the walkman provided, a space that, as an awkward adolescent boy who felt deeply misunderstood by his peers, I needed, desperately. As I got older, went to college, and began to outgrow some of the awkwardness of youth, I found that I used the walkman less and less, and, eventually, I gave them up more or less entirely. In point of fact, I quite consciously took a stand against them, on the basis of what might be seen as the rather naïve, but certainly heartfelt and sincere belief, that the detatchment afforded by the walkman was impoverishing to one’s day-to-day, moment-to-moment experience of reality. Frankly, the scene of a bus full of strangers, all plugged into their own personal devices, all removed from eachother, came to depress me, and I decided that I didn’t want, or need, to participate in it..
But then, well, these ipods came along, and everyone I knew was getting one. Which is interesting because, as near as I can tell, these are people who also seemed to have given up the whole walkman-thing, quite a while ago. At first I had a hard time understanding the craze- I mean, is this thing really any different than a walkman? Are Steve Jobs and Apple just so brilliant at the marketing game that they have tricked us all into thinking that this is actually something new? Well, yes and no, of course. Yes Steve Jobs and Apple are very very good at what they do. Yes the the ipod is significantly more versatile, reliable, and just plain cooler than any walkman or discman could ever hope to be. But, no, the actual experience of using an ipod is fundamentally no different than the experience of using a walkman, discman, or MD player.
So, what is that experience? What is the source of this pleasure that I feel when I wedge the round plastic headphones into my ears, press play, and step out into the street? I mean, the solitude, yes, the privacy, it’s a nice feature, but solitude is lonely sometimes, and I feel anything but lonely as The Shins put a noticeable bounce in my step while they sing Young Pilgrims to me. So, what then, is the appeal? What are they really selling?
With the ipod as your companion, you are suddenly the main character in whatever internal narrative your mind generates while you amble through the streets or sit on the bus or the subway. The way that gust of wind blows just as the power-chord chorus kicks in; the way that girl smiles at you as some old Cure tune wraps its way around the moment; the way that homeless woman’s eyes haunt you as the blues magnify her sadness and despair. That alchemy of hearing the perfect song while witnessing the perfect corresponding moment suddenly, unexpectedly, brings you to the height of rapture, or to a vale of grief and mourning. You are the star of the film, the center of the plot, you are the TV star and the Rock star rolled into one. This, after all, is the whispered promise of the ipod: “You are not a part of the herd, you are above the fray, special, unique, important, a Star.” You have entered the Televisual plane of existence, and it feels good.
And this, my friends, makes the ipod one of the most powerful tools of indoctrination ever created, for the terrain of televisuality is the domain of the ad-men and the PR hacks and the stars they would have us worship in their cult of celebrity. As you participate in their televisual reality, you become subject to the rules of the world as they have advertised it to you, a false world, a world inscribed with the values of their cult of celebrity, values that claim surface as all, image as king, and appearance as truth. The ipod lies to you, it tells you that you can be JUST LIKE THEM, the core delusion propping up the cult of celebrity. The dislocated, ambient feelings of Significance that the ipod provides, are vapid to the core, and to believe- really to FEEL- otherwise, even for a moment, is to indulge in a dangerous hallucination. A deliciously pleasurable one, to be sure, but a hallucination nonetheless.
And yet, I still wonder: that girl on the bus, the boheme princess. She smiled at me, I’m sure of it. Didn’t she smile?
Hollywood’s Big New Minstrel Show
by Marisa Meltzer
In San Francisco, where I live, movie previews are more than just ads—they’re a chance for notoriously politically correct audiences to vent their disapproval of Hollywood, corporate America, and the powers that be. The standard mode of expression is hissing. I've witnessed The Patriot, Rush Hour, and several Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicles getting the San Francisco treatment. But over the summer, during a preview for Shallow Hal, no one in the audience saw fit to register sibilant protest against one of the most disturbing and offensive cinematic trends in recent memory: the fat suit. Gwyneth Paltrow stars in the latest Farrelly brothers movie as Rosemary, the 350-pound love interest of womanizer Jack Black, who, because he can suddenly see only “inner beauty,” falls in love with the Skinny Rosemary; the rest of the world sees Fat Rosemary waddling her way through the movie. Watch Fat Rosemary shop for clothes! Watch her do a cannonball into a pool! Watch her drink a really big milkshake—all by herself! The preview audience laughed uproariously. Not a single “ssss” was heard. I felt a little queasy.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black in Shallow Hal
Leaving aside the incongruity of “inner beauty” being taken so literally, the culturally tired but no less annoying assumption that thin = beautiful, and the fact that Black is no paragon of svelte pulchritude himself, Shallow Hal isn’t an isolated case. Au contraire; Gwyneth is jumping on a veritable fat-suit bandwagon. A brief history of the fat suit would have to include Goldie Hawn, living large and vengeful in Death Becomes Her; Robin Williams—annoying as ever—as the chubby, dowdy Mrs. Doubtfire; Martin Lawrence and a pair of really weird saggy boobs in Big Momma’s House; Mike Myers as Fat Bastard in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; and Eddie Murphy playing an entire fat family in both Nutty Professor movies. More recently, there’s Martin Short unable to cross his legs in his new Comedy Central talk show Primetime Glick, Julia Roberts scarfing down cookies as a (gasp!) size 12 in America’s Sweethearts, and a fat-family dream sequence on Damon Wayans’s sitcom My Wife and Kids.1 Fat people are now America’s favorite celluloid punchlines. Wanna make a funny movie? It’s a pretty easy formula: Zip a skinny actor into a latex suit. Watch her/him eat, walk, and try to find love. Hilarity will ensue.
Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black in Shallow Hal
Of course, no conversation about the fat suit could ever be complete without a mention of Fat Monica, inhabitant of several flashback and alternate-reality episodes of Friends. While I will refrain from airing my personal theories about Courteney Cox Arquette’s body image and eating habits here, I do believe Fat Monica really takes the proverbial cake. She dresses badly, has no self-control, eats junk food, has poor hygiene, and is a virgin. She’s the opposite of the control-freak Thin Monica, who has the husband, the job, and the adoring friends. Even worse than all that is the dance Courteney does in full fat drag to entertain the studio audience between takes. She calls it “the popcorn,” and apparently folks watching find it quite comical. It involves her moving rhythmically in her latex suit. A fat person shaking her bod: mmmm, funny.
It’s here that the true nature of fat-suit humor is revealed in all its glory. See, it’s fairly acceptable to satirize a group of people we envy. (Movies like Legally Blonde and Clueless work because we’re laughing at rich white girls. Their problems are supposedly our fantasies—which boy to date, which pair of Manolos looks better with the Versace dress, which color SUV to drive—and these comedies treat them with the utmost affection.) But when the punchline is a group euphemistically (and often erroneously) called a minority, things start to get dicey. Over the past several decades, comedy has gradually become less broad and more sensitive to overt racism (and, to a lesser extent, sexism and homophobia). Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker may trade black and Asian jokes in the Rush Hour series, but we've come a long way since Peter Sellers was cast as bucktoothed Chinese sleuth Sidney Wang in Murder by Death. By now, the cardinal rule of humor—you can only make fun of a group if you’re part of it—is familiar enough to be a punchline itself. (Remember Jerry Seinfeld’s outrage over his Catholic dentist’s Jewish jokes?) But fat people are the last remaining exception.
Jack Black in Shallow Hal
In the spring and summer of 2001 alone, we were inundated with images of thin actors playing fat. It’s not like there’s a dearth of fat actresses out there, as if some casting director is saying, "We've been searching for a fat girl to star in the next Farrelly brothers film, but so far there are no takers." (Camryn Manheim and I aren’t friends, but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t offered Gwyneth’s Shallow Hal part.) With a real fat woman in the lead, the movie wouldn’t be funny—it would just be uncomfortable. Watching actual fat on the big screen would be so authentically painful—because fat hatred is still deeply entrenched in American culture—that audiences would be unable to laugh. It’s not just the exaggerated dimply thighs and man-boobs that keep us buying tickets; the crux of the joke is not the latex suit’s physical fakeness but the ephemeral nature of the thin actor posing as fat.2 We all know that Julia, Goldie, and Gwyneth (and Martin, Mike, and Eddie) will return to their slender glory for the next part, and that’s comforting—because otherwise we would have to confront the mean-spiritedness behind the giggles.
Such virulence makes all this faux fat seem very old-fashioned; it reeks of our country’s less-than-perfect past. After all, it seems like a long time ago—although it was not—that great white actors of the 20th century performed in blackface. The closing credit sequence of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled displays a parade of them. There they are: Shirley Temple, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, and more, totally oblivious to the true meaning of their actions. Someday you'll see footage of Oscar winners Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow trundling along in their fat suits, and it'll be depressing and pathetic, but it won’t be funny.
Find Marisa Meltzer at a theater near you. You'll know her by her hiss.
1 The actors who don faux avoirdupois seem fairly deluded about its realism-and the insight it gives them into the heavy life. On one of Entertainment Tonight’s signature hard-hitting interviews, Paltrow weighed in: “It was disturbing and sad. I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.” Oh, please, Gwyneth-you slay me with your sensitivity. “Gwynnie," I want to say, “fat and pretty are like chocolate and peanut butter: two great tastes that taste great together.” (But at least she was trying to be nice. Julia Roberts’s revulsion with her suit was widely quoted. This is the version that appeared in Salon: “The special effects makeup people offered to get me a really comfortable chair so I could sleep through most of the [fitting] process. I told them absolutely not. I didn’t want to suddenly wake up and be fat. I might never want to sleep again.”) Courteney Cox Arquette, echoing the sentiments of many, told Jane, “It’s hot. It’s really hot. It’s hot to be fat. And I don’t mean hard. I mean hot.” I wonder if it has ever occurred to her-or any of the other actors who have overheated in their latex-that the physical actuality of being fat isn’t terribly hot at all. It’s as if they can’t imagine fat as being anything naturally occurring; it’s just a costume you take off when the day’s over. (back to main text)
2 Fat suits aren’t just for entertainment anymore, they've also become an educational device. Psychologist Lisa Berzins lectures to teenagers about body image issues both in and out of a fat suit and uses the audience’s differing reactions to spark discussion. There’s even an “empathy suit” doctors can wear to get a better understanding of their fat patients. (back to main text)
DreamPolitik
Stephen Duncombe
7.
Dream Another Way
Politics today, whether one likes it or not, is not played out on the well-ordered fields of rationality and reason. Perhaps it never was. Aristotle created a theory of politics in which irrationality was sequestered to a few, last pages, raised solely as a warning. But Niccolo Machiavelli, who examined the practice of politics in his 1532 guidebook The Prince, understood that fantasy and desire were integral to power. Some of Machiavelli’s advice on the subject is crude: the prince “ought, at convenient seasons of the year, to keep the people occupied with festivals and shows”—that is, the time-tested subterfuge of the circuses of the Roman Empire and the processions of the Church. But Machiavelli also displays a more sophisticated understanding of spectacle, acknowledging that it operates not just negatively but also positively, not merely as a distraction from power but also as an attraction to it. The prince must display, if not actually possess, attributes like integrity and good faith that the people look for in a leader. The prince who did not understand the passions of his people would not be a prince for long, and the leader who attended to only what is, and not what things appeared to be, would lead very few not very far. The prince must be feared, to be sure, but he must also be loved by his subjects. “For it must be noted,” Machiavelli writes, “that men must either be caressed or else annihilated.”
Machiavelli, writing in the time of the Medicis, had political options open to him that—thankfully—we do not. Annihilation was an approved political method and The Prince is full of examples where leaders consolidated their rule through the slaughter of a few rivals. Democracy changed this equation. Once popular rule was accepted as a principle in the eighteenth century and then as a slowly expanding practice in the centuries that followed, the assassination of a couple of key noblemen no longer worked as a path to power. Politics now rests upon public opinion and participation, or, at the very least, the passive consent of the majority of the population. As such, the political options open in our age of popular sovereignty are either mass genocide or the public caress. The horrors of the last century (continuing into this one, sadly) are a testament that genocide still happens, but as a political tactic it tends to be frowned upon by the world community. Smart leaders have learned the art of the caress.
By raising the spirit of Machiavelli I’m not suggesting that progressives embrace the brutal and duplicitous politics recommended by the favored author of five hundred years of despots. Nor am I proposing that we adopt a cynical policy of the manufacture of consent through a public relations crafted caress. But I am suggesting that we need to get our heads out of the sand and take a serious look at the political landscape that Machiavelli describes:
It appears to me more proper to go to the real truth of the matter than to its imagination, and many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or know to exist in reality; for how we live life is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin rather than his preservation.
The irony here, which Machiavelli well understood, is that only the “imagined republic” is built solely upon reality. The “real truth of the matter” is that states and governments are based, in part, on imagination. Machiavelli is one of the few canonical writers on politics who understood his task not as one of creating an illusion of a world of political reason, but using reason to understand a political world that depended upon illusion.
Perhaps we ought to live by reason alone—though I would rather not live in such a sober world. And perhaps progressives ought to address all their appeals in rational arguments and careful proofs—we will certainly feel better about our Enlightenment-infused selves if we do. But make no mistake: Machiavelli is right, and unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire, and spectacle, and, most importantly, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation.”
The world cannot afford this. The conservative revolution in this country has brought us war in the Middle East, alienated our allies, emboldened terrorists, eroded civil liberties, legitimated torture, hastened ecological destruction, widened the income gap, bungled domestic crises, and increased the deficit. What’s astounding, given this record of signature failures (and unpopular successes), is that conservatives are still in power. They certainly deserve credit for their political acumen and the skill with which they employ the spectacular, just as they deserve condemnation for parading fantasy as reality. But behind a great deal of their success lies the failure of progressives. Conservatives have given us opening after opening, but with our historical reluctance to communicate in the lingua franca of spectacle and our aversion to address the irrational, the only sounds heard from our direction are equivocating murmurs of timid discourse and sighs of righteous indignation.
Conservatives have not attained and remained in power because they’ve convinced everyone that they have all the right answers. That fiction would be too hard to sustain in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. What they have done, and have done very effectively, is convince most people that there is no alternative. Sadly, they are correct. The people who pioneered the expansion of democracy, challenged monopoly, built the New Deal, struggled for civil rights, and ushered in a cultural revolution are largely silent today. We have no alternatives to propose. We don’t because we’ve distanced ourselves from our dreams.
There are good reasons why we’ve done this. The exhaustion or corruption of dreams past, for one. But more pressing is our fear of losing ourselves into the delusional and dishonest fantasies that comprise so much of today’s entertainment, religion and politics. We distinguish ourselves from this immoral morass through our fidelity to the Real and the True, building an identity for ourselves as brave defenders of “Enlightenment principles and empiricism.” Creating a dichotomy between the real and the imaginary, we are resolutely on the side of the former. This is a false, and debilitating, division. Embracing our dreams does not necessitate closing our eyes, and mind, to reality. Progressives can, and should, do both: judiciously study and vividly dream. In essence, we need to become a party of conscious dreamers.
Right now the only people flying this flag are sequestered to the far fringes of progressive politics. Some of this marginalization is of their own choice. Many of the street activists and political performers I’ve described in the pages above are suspicious of more mainstream progressives who, in their eyes, have abandoned the utopian dreams that once directed and motivated the left. They also have contempt for the tactical (non)sense of a bumbling, fumbling Democratic Party. “At least we shut down Seattle and opened up a discussion on the politics of globalization,” they brag (an estimation shared, with some concern, by the editors of the Financial Times). Disgusted by the conciliation and incompetence of their more moderate comrades these progressives often keep their own company.
But this marginalization is not entirely of their own making, for progressives ensconced in the center show little interest in their left flank. The Lower East Side Collective is too small, Reclaim the Streets too frivolous, the Billionaires too theatrical, MoveOn too ephemeral, Reverend Billy too silly, Apollo too earnest, BUST too racy, Critical Mass too chaotic, the Zapatistas too revolutionary, and the New Deal and civil rights movement too dated to appeal to a majority of citizens. There’s validity to this criticism, as many of the groups I’ve been writing about do seem decidedly outside the main currents of contemporary politics. But they needn’t be.
Here conservatives have something to teach us. In a letter to his brother in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that “should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” He continued: “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things,” then concludes, “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” For years these “negligible” and “stupid” people, the far-right wing of Eisenhower’s own Republican Party, dreamed seemingly impossible dreams: to roll back the most successful government initiative in U.S. history, the New Deal, and do away with what seemed like a foregone conclusion for the developed countries of the world, the welfare state. Today their dreams are our reality.
The Republican Party learned to look to its margins. Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan—all these men at one time might have been described as Eisenhower’s “negligible” and “stupid” people, members of a “tiny splinter group” whose fringe politics guaranteed their irrelevance. They are also the very people that led the Republicans to power over the past few decades. During the same decades groups like the Democratic Leadership Council argued—successfully—that the Democratic Party needed to abandon its margins and move to the center. As a result the Democrats have virtually no connection to the aesthetic and political fringes of the progressive movement today.
It’s a shame because these people—in all their marginality—have a better understanding of how the center operates than the centrist professionals inside the Beltway. They understand the popular desire for fantasy and the political potential of dreams, and they know how to mobilize spectacle. They have a better read on the attractions of popular culture and the possibilities of harnessing this for progressive politics than the “pragmatic” center who, secure in their sense of superiority, stick to their failed script of reason and rationality. Left on their own these sidelined activists have been busy experimenting with new forms of political organization and communication. But because of their peripheral position their efforts—with some notable exceptions—have been politically inconsequential.
The Democratic Leadership Council’s raison d’être is to spread the center of liberal politics all the way to the margins of the left. Whatever one thinks of this strategy theoretically, practically it has been a failure. For all their bluster about being the ones who are realistic about power and politics they have not been able to deliver political power to the Democrats (only a relatively powerless president: Bill Clinton). It’s time to cut our losses and try another tack by moving the strategies, tactics, and organization of the margins to the center. This will take convincing on all sides. Those on the margins need to take power seriously, giving up the privileged purity of the gadfly and court jester and making peace with the dirtier aspects of practical politics: the daily compromises that come with real governance. Those in the center have to be open to a new way of thinking about politics that challenges some of their core beliefs about the sufficiency of judicious study and rational discourse and the efficacy of a professionalized politics. The centrists need to acknowledge that their model of politics is, ironically, out of touch with the cultural center of our society. They must be willing to dream.
Dreams are powerful. They are repositories of our desire. They animate the entertainment industry and drive consumption. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they also inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than they are today, and then believe we can progress toward that imaginary world.
I too have a dream. In my dream progressives of all stripes work together. We don’t agree on ideology or come to consensus on policy. (While we may agree on fundamentals we’re still too far apart on particulars.) But we learn to share a political aesthetic that makes peace with the irrational, honors desire, and embraces spectacle. This may seem impossible, but if progressives are serious about winning, if we really want to change reality, then we have to try and do something different, together. It’s a dream.
posted by Mark W. Read at 8:15 AM
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