topic/americana

He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already defeated.

[...] 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. [...]

A brilliant night outside in New York City. It is Saturday and people with debts are going to restaurants, jumping in taxicabs, careening from West to East by way of the underpass through the Park. What difference does it make to be here alone? Even now, just after eight in the evening, the trucks are starting their delivery of the Sunday Times.

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.)

What else could I be? I guess to be an American writer means, uh, that I have dined multiply at drive-through windows and that I have no choice but to occasionally darken the inside of a shopping mall, and that I come from a country of former slave-owners, and that I feel the Manhattan Project as a blot on my conscience that I will never expiate, and that there is something in baseball that I think is close to my heart (it was once a Native American game), and it means that I daily have contact with guys who think that our government exists only in order to hinder the magnanimous philanthropic work of large corporations, and it means that there’s constant vacillation in my head between the ethical messages of Judeo-Christianity and a desire to cast off these messages entirely, and it means, hmm, that I like artificial cheese food products, and it means that I conceive of nature as an expanse of space, and it means that I believe that spirituality is best experienced in landscapes emptied of human beings, and it means that I like to spin the dial on a television set, just can’t stop myself from spinning that dial, and it means that I only speak one language well, and it means that I don’t mind listening to people on the street talking incessantly about stock prices, and it means that I look to Europe for a definition of the high arts, and it means that I sometimes can’t tell the difference between high and low arts, and it means that the sentimental reiteration of family as the origin of all good is never far from my mind, even though I resist this idea entirely, and it means I know a lot about cars, and it means that I can talk for half an hour about the best kind of computer, and it means that I have a lot of opinions about the best operating system for a computer, and it means that I prefer music with guitars to music with electronic keyboards, and it means that I think ketchup is a vegetable, and it means that I am to some degree or other worried about my weight, and it means I believe strongly in ministorage and the ministorage way of life, and it means I can’t imagine anyone would disagree with all these American things. Guess it means a lot of things, huh?

—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.

America's speech waterfalls forth in meltingpot tongues of Babel in

telegraphic ads, pop songs, street-corner rapping, bar room brag & bluster, bad-mouthing, put-ons, putdowns,

the home-made rhetorics of Whitman, Melville, Andrew Jackson Davis, L. Ron Hubbard; the streamclear prose of Thoreau or Hemingway; Gertrude Stein's devotions;

the sportcaster's spiel tracing a horse race over & thru the radio; the hawking, squawking, conning & jiving; preaching, teaching, wheeling & dealing; the jive-ass realms of speech; the hard-sell, the soft-soaping;

gossip columnists, breathless, telling-all; right-on; can you dig it? letting it all hang telling It like It is; out

anyway, it's all semantic;

hermetic trade lingo: jazz musicians, short-order cooks, truck-drivers, car mechanics, stereo buffs, doit-yourself, tool talk -- the technologic speech forms, machine-sprouted vocabularies whose sounds rebound in & out of USA livingrooms & bedrooms;

the self & tribe protective languages, shields against a rude deluge -- layer & layer -- worthless degrading words --

the black man's linguistic counter-attack on white America's word-gas clouds webbed with war-blood; the same cloud hanging over the American Indian (whose language was charged & precise as what a poet wants his to be), the Chicano, the Puerto Rican; curt New England speech brittle as icicles; the Southerner's smoothing-out of word sounds; the Midwesterner's flat speech of plains; the shtetl-to-ghetto Yiddishisms of the Eastern cities; the regional, community, tribal tongues;

shop-talk, cop-talk, bop-talk, TV's hypno-rant; the daily dose of phony baloney; the nightly hot air; animal invective clash of sounds as radical meets reactionary, as power crashes down on the powerless;

these sounds, the languages, these codes & messages, all meet in the ears & eyes of poets who have been Jacob-wrestling Europe since landing on Plymouth Rock.

America was claimed: a new place, a new space to build great cities on.

The poets began immediately to innocently & arrogantly fashion a language to meet & match America's impossible largeness.