topic/americana
Don DeLillo,
Italo Calvino,
Rachel Kushner,
Elizabeth Young,
Jennifer Egan,
William Gaddis
the american way
I’m thinking in particular of the series Luxury and Degradation, which features exact reproductions, in oil on canvas, of liquor advertisements that were contemporary when Koons made them, in 1986. The paintings pair well-known slogans—“I could go for something Gordon’s” and “I assume you drink Martell”—with staged images, combinations whose effects are both curiously meaningless and strangely charged. Replicated and monumentalized as art, they are not bubblegum Koons—dazzle that masquerades as innocence and puerility, under which lies a kind of darkness, even nastiness—and instead, flat and caustic at once.
Hard liquor is not the aesthetic or spiritual hearth of a feel-good world, the mirror in which people want to see themselves. Even if liquor does hold some promise of revelry, of escape, the ads for it are a mediated layer away from that. They are corporate fictions that do not ignite privately stored memories from good times, bad times, or any times. Mostly, they ignite memories of looking at the ads themselves—in magazines, on roadway billboards, or elsewhere—giving a sense of déjà vu. (What is being done to me? Something, but I can’t name it.)
Except now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its “Museum of Time,” past the “Welcome to Rockford” sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Burger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry’s Pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merrill Lynch, Lowe’s Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playing its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.
[...] To old, dirty Europe, America has always seemed aglow with toothpaste, Gleem and deodorizers for every intimate inch. Showers seem to gush constantly. And Hollywood -- every image has been dry-cleaned. We know that America is pathologically, obsessively, fanatically obsessed with hygiene. This fear of contamination seems to be part of the psychic pulse of the nation. [...]
—I did. That’s where I got this. Morgie pointed to the tape above his eye. —No matter how much you talk to them, they don’t get it. It’s too simple. It’s too goddam simple for them to understand. They still think their cigarettes would cost them half as much without advertising. The whole goddam high standard of American life depends on the American economy. The whole goddam American economy depends on mass production. To sustain mass production you got to have a mass market. To sustain a goddam mass market you got to have advertising. That’s all there is to it. A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don’t care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.
“What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It’s what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could build if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose. That’s what we really want, Black Knife told me. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America. (That’s what he said.) We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blow up Nantucket. Blow up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We must realize we are living in Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite.”
reminds me of the gambling bit in american gods
There were many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream, and some of the darkest of these visions were those processed in triplicate by our generals and industrialists—the manganese empires, the super-sophisticated gunnery, the consortiums and privileges. Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things which all people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.
“I have fantasies about falling in love with a Vietnamese girl,” Brand said. “But then she dies of a funny disease and I spend the rest of my life in pain.”
The northern monsoon clouds were lifting. The killer teams were sweeping the villages. At night you could see the tracers streaking across the free-fire zones. There are twenty rounds to a magazine.
“America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy,” Sullivan said.
“We’re consultants to government and industry,” Wild said finally. “Want to know about production flow systems? Materials handling? Centralized processing and distribution? Automation you know isn’t necessarily the answer. First you study the operation. Then you analyze the system in terms of costs and functional elements. Maybe automation isn’t the answer at all. Maybe it’s selective automation you want. One or two small changes can turn the trick. Relocate a conveyor line. Design a special component. Too many people think automation is the answer to everything. This is a fallacy. I work with good men. They do their job and they like what they’re doing and they don’t ever squawk. Once I dated one of their daughters for a period of several some odd months. She was all jugs. I liked her. But she kept using a word I couldn’t stand. She was always using it. I tromped over to the museum. I went tromping through the park. I tromped down Rush Street. Automation is no panacea. We understand that in my father’s outfit. Systems planning is the true American artform. More than jazz for godsake. We excel at maintenance. We understand interrelationships. We make it all work, from parcel entry to in-plant distribution to truck routing and scheduling. We know exactly where to put the nail that holds the broom. A lot of countries can’t do that. They don’t know how. Practically nobody in Europe knows where to put the nail. You know that Frenchman who wrote that book, what he said? There are three great economic powers in the world. America. Russia. And America in Europe. We have to show them where to put the nail. But the Russians still lag. They lag in industrial research, in computerization, in automated systems. They lag. We know how to plan things, like overall corporate policy, like inventory management, like distribution, like site suitability. We’re experts in containerization, unit loads, electronic data processing, feasibility studies. We know how to zero in. What’s so terrible about that?”
“And I have the questions,” I said. “We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching?”
“The TV set is a package and it’s full of products. Inside are detergents, automobiles, cameras, breakfast cereal, other television sets. Programs are not interrupted by commercials; exactly the reverse is true. A television set is an electronic form of packaging. It’s as simple as that. Without the products there’s nothing. Educational television’s a joke. Who in America would want to watch TV without commercials?”
“How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?”
“It makes him want to change the way he lives.”
“In what way?” I said.
“It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.”
“What is the role of commercial television in the twentieth century and beyond?”
“In my blackest moods I feel it spells chaos for all of us.”
“How do you get over these moods?” I said.
“I take a mild and gentle Palmolive bath, brush my teeth with Crest, swallow two Sominex tablets, and try desperately to fall asleep on my Simmons Beautyrest mattress.”
“Thank you.”