Sir Freddie Laker is dead at 83 years old.
NY to London and back for $247? That’s insane!
Cola War on Terror
Last week’s reading in the Official VM Book Club Of One was The Other Hollywood; this week it’s The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel’s book on the value of aesthetic value, as it were. I just finished the third chapter, “Surface and Substance,” which ends with this passage:
When terrorists slammed two passenger jets into the World Trade Center on September 11, 200, Michael Bierut had his own moment of Nazis-to-Pepsi self-doubt. He was in London and returned home to Manhattan a few days after the attack. “As a designer,” he wrote me, “I am still reeling from the images of 9/11.” The act had been horrifying, but the images it created could not have been better designed: “The timing of the collisions, the angle of the second plane, the colors of the explosions, the slow-motion collapsing of the towers: could the terrorists ever dream how nightmarishly vivid this would be to the vast viewing audience?”
Amid the trauma of mid-September, this terrible juxtaposition — striking images in the service of death — recalled all the attacks ever made on surface for its own sake, and on the designers who create surface appeal. If an event so awful could look so vivid, even beautiful in a purely formal sense, how could we trust aesthetic pleasure? How could designers like Bierut justify their work, except when surface serves some grander substance? The attack, wrote Bierut, “makes me put meaningless content into beautiful packages. I will not approach my work the same way from now on.”
He knew better. The destruction of the World Trade Center was not a carefully composed movie scene, designed to around pity and terror within the same frame of fiction. It was the all-too-real muder of thousands. It was entirely substance. The attack was not packaging, not surface, not performance art. It had both meaning and political purpose. The striking images produced led viewers not to praise but to condemn the attackers who created them. Only those who embraced the murderers’ cause rejoiced in those images. Aesthetics did not prove a superweapon, justifying slaughter. To the contrary, the media images that followed were attempts to capture the events — and the horror and grief — of the day. Those images were valuable because they could say more than words. But the images were not the act itself.
In the horror of the moment, Bierut had forgotten the meaning and value of his work, falling into the puritanical mind-set that denies the value of aesthetic pleasure and seeks always to link it with evil. To wrap meaningless, as opposed to vicious, content in beautiful packaging does no harm. To the contrary, such creativity enriches the world and affirms the worth of the individuals whose pleasure it serves. Colas are not genocide.
Bierut soon had second thoughts. “One of the signatures of any repressive regime,” he wrote the following day, “is their need to control not just meaningful differences — the voices of dissent, for instance — but ostensibly ‘meaningless’ ones as well, like dress. It will take some time for people to realize that creating the difference between Coke and Pepsi is not just an empty pastime but one of many signs of life in a free society.” The Afghan women who risked the Taliban’s prisons to paint their faces and style their hair in underground beauty shops, and who celebrated the liberation of Kabul by coloring their nails with once-forbidden polish, would agree. Surface may take on meaning, but it has a value all its own.
Good Bad Books
A few years ago, I met up with a buddy from my freshman year of college. Over a bunch of drinks, he said to me, “Y’know, you gave me a list of books back when we were at Tulane, and I still have a stack of them sitting on my desk. But I’m gonna get through ’em someday.”
I blanched. “Oh, God. Paul, please just throw them out. I don’t know what books they are, but I can just about guarantee that you should toss ’em. Just please don’t tell me what books they are. I’ll even give you a new bunch of books to replace them.”
I’m pretty embarrassed by whatever I recommended when I was 18 (books, music, movies, etc.), but I’m shameless enough that I’m willing to include that roster in the list of all the books I’ve finished since 1989.
In that vein, ourgirlinchicago has a nice post about selecting what to read next. She wrote previously about calculating the number of books she could expect to finish reading based on the average lifespan, which was pretty depressing in and of itself. Now she wonders what proportion of those books should be devoted to fluff:
[W]hat percentage of that terribly finite amount of reading do you feel should be earmarked for incontestably Great books, and what percentage of fluff — elegant, witty, and delightful fluff, needless to say — are you comfortable including? I’m thinking a full 50%. But I have another wrench to throw into the machinery: how many of your 200 or 500 or 1,000 books will be books you’ve already read? For most of us, I’m guessing, this will be a non-negligible number.
Read the whole thing, but get back to me about this question of hers. Since my list of books is in spreadsheet format, it’s quite easy to put a check-box next to every book that we consider fluff. . .
Sign up
There’s an online Cory Maye petition, to be sent to the governor of Mississippi when it reaches 10,000 signees. Pass it on.
Zombugs!
Enjoy this really freaky story about mind-controlling wasps, you sick bastids.
Agitate
The appopriately named Agitator reports that the law firm of Covington & Burling will provide pro bono assistance in Cory Maye’s appeal to get off death row. Announcement here. For more about the case, check out the Agitator’s previous posts.
From Buttman to Superman
VM contributor and all-around good guy Tom Spurgeon recently posted a neat review of a Superman comic on his comicsreporter.com site. I don’t read much in the superhero genre anymore, but I’ve been a comics reader since I was a little kid. I’ll flip through issues on the newsstand, trying to figure out what happened to characters I used to read about, but that’s about it.
What I found interesting about this review was Tom’s discussion of writers’ tendency to approach superheroes from an ‘adult’ viewpoint. As he puts it:
I’ve long wondered if the problem with Superman is that his creators, going back to John Byrne twenty years ago, have written from what intrigues them about the character as adults rather than what might have interested them as a child. [. . .]
I think of all the big, iconic characters, Superman might suffer most for that now decades-old shift in approach. The other popular, franchise-bearing superheroes — Batman, the X-Men, Spider-Man — at their conceptual core all traffic in emotional states that are of interest to teenagers, to those who fail to outgrow the teenager’s worries and concerns, and to those who don’t mind revisiting them. Beyond the spectacle he provides, Superman’s appeal rockets past adolescence to more of a little kid’s boundary-driven view of the world. Superman is the strongest. He’s the fastest. He’s the toughest. Kids grasp at Superman for the reason they read biographies about LeBron James and Alex Rodriguez and wish to visit the observation deck of the Sears Tower. Superman is the best, and the world gets filled in between what we know about ourselves and what we can figure out about him. It’s a much longer trip to see things from point of view starting out in our adult world than it is to get to the teenager’s insecurities and feelings of omnipotence. This may be one reason some of the best Superman stories are almost automatically written, or, as legend has it, penned by those working through some basic issues in therapy.
I think this is a nice companion to the Stagliano piece below. Go visit Tom’s site somedarntime.
Island of Misfit Sex Toys
A few days ago, I finished reading The Other Hollywood, an oral history of the porn industry, by Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne. If you’re into the subject, it’s a pretty impressive book, even though the 1990-present era receives short shrift.
The quotes selected by the book go a long way to avoid the heavy moralizing that most people bring into their views on the industry. The worst example of that tendency was in Martin Amis’ porn article for Talk Magazine a few years ago. That piece went with the “those poor, manipulated girls” angle, in what I assume was an effort to shame porn-consumers. This isn’t to say that McNeil & Osborne portray the women in the industry as happy-go-lucky. The book has all sorts of horror stories, with self-delusion and self-destruction duking it out.
One of the aspects of the industry that’s always intrigued me is the issue of how performers deal with the day-to-day. I mean, a lot of life in one’s 20’s and 30’s is at least partly devoted to finding a person to have sex with. So, when your “job” is getting laid, exactly how does you balance the rest of your time? What do you do, exactly, when your mental approach to sex is that of an occupation? Where do you find intimacy? (I don’t mean this in a “those poor girls” way; I’m more curious as to what substitutes for sex in that currency)
All of which gets me to the strangely profound closing quote of the book. It’s by John Stagliano, known for his Buttman gonzo video series. Following the death of his girlfriend Kristi Lynn in a car wreck, Stagliano went into a deep depression, and ended up going down to Brazil and almost deliberately getting himself infected with HIV (the details are in the book).
Subsequently, he and an HIV-positive performer fell for each other, got together, and went on to have an HIV-negative child. It’s an oddly touching story, an island-of-misfit-toys romance in an environment where romance is in short supply. Stagliano, as I said, gets the last word, and it’s a doozy:
I was getting f***ed-up the other night watching porno movies. And I thought, this is how you write a movie: You set up this whole scenario where some guy’s doing drugs, he’s about to go too far and OD, and just before he does, he looks at the camera and says, “F*** you, people! You live by a whole different standard than I do! I have this life in front of me that inspires me. Every one of you has done something at some point to f*** up your life — get a little too drunk, do too much cocaine. That’s life, right? And you’re judging me?”
I used to judge these people, and I never knew what was going on inside them.
You know, they’re experiencing life in a certain way that I don’t know about, but I need to know about. We want to push ourselves to experience life and to enjoy it: to be a race car driver, or do drugs, or get f***ed in the ass and risk getting HIV — it’s all the same fucking thing. Pushing yourself to experience life to its fullest necessarily involves risk. And if you sit in your room and never do anything — like my mother wanted me to do because she was worried that if I left the house I’d get hit by a car — you’ll never know what it’s like.
Maybe it’s genetically programmed, like women holding back sex. We’re genetically programmed to say, “Wait a second — oh, it feels good to go around that curve really fast, but I’m gonna crash.”
You know, like Kristi Lynn did.
Dear Muslim Man Complaint Box
Brown and Bubbly
The Superbowl was boring. The game played like a midseason inter-conference game. The officiating sucked ass. The commercials were almost uniformly boring and unfunny, except for the MacGyver Mastercard ad, and the town full of stuntmen.
The Diet Pepsi ads, in particular, were awful. That said, if you check out the “video rejects” link at the grotesquely named “brown and bubbly” site (shouldn’t they have gotten Sir Mix-A-Lot for that instead of Puffy?), you might have a laugh or two. At most.
On the plus side, the Steelers covered the spread, so my double-or-nothing bet (carrying over from last year’s Superbowl) is expunged. And Amy’s “Frito Pie” chili was the bomb.