Author: Mark Buckner

I read, listen to, and watch depressing books, music, and movies, respectively.

Bear Parade (3): “Something Other Than School or Sleep” (Tao Lin)

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Bear Parade round three.

From the short-story collection by Tao Lin titled:

“Richie” is the first story of the collection. It begins thus:

“Thursday night they kidnap me, my mom, and my dad. They put garbage bags over our heads and push us outside. Inside the garbage bag I think about my American History teacher. I think about what he said to me. He said, Richie, you better speak up, you better talk in class, be more confident. I think about what I do every day. How I slept the entire Summer vacation. I think about how much more I will sleep in my life. I think how I don’t like anything. How I don’t have anything. I think that something might be happening finally. Something other than school or sleep.”

The line “Something other than school or sleep” strikes me.

As a twenty-odd-years-old college student, my life pretty much = school and sleep. A little part-time employment, too. But mostly school and sleep. That is what my existence is. I wish for the feeling “Something might be happening finally.” But for a very long time not much has happened.

Like the eponymous character Richie, in school I’ve been told, “You better speak up, you better talk in class, be more confident.” ‘Participation grades’ are the bane of my GPA. Like Richie, “I don’t like anything.” For a long time I couldn’t pick a major because the way to pick a major is you first ask yourself “What do I like? What are my interests?’ and if you can’t answer those questions because you don’t like anything then you have nothing on which to base your decision.

I mean obviously I like some things. Hyperbole.

Tao Lin has been described as “the Kafka of the iPhone generation.” Maybe it’s a glib description.

But there is something very Kafkaesque about his prose.

I don’t know how to describe “Kafkaesque” exactly. It’s something like ‘the characters experience insurmountable existential conflicts, and it’s hysterically funny’ (w/ “hysterically” meant in the ‘hysteria’ sense, not just the ‘very funny’ sense).

E.g., Richie being kidnapped by a group of high schoolers is funny. Richie not liking anything and waiting for something to finally be happening is existential-y.

Tao Lin gets a lot of buzz online, both good and bad. He’s been accused of being gimmicky for doing things like ‘selling shares’ of his second novel online and ‘whoring himself’ on the internet by posting /commenting / etc. a lot online. Regardless of his gimmickery, I think it’s undeniable that at least sometimes his writing is well-crafted. “Richie” is well-crafted. It’s up to you whether “Richie” is good / bad / enjoyable / unenjoyable, but I think it’s almost like objectively true that “Richie” is well-crafted, or something, if “well-crafted” is defined “employing a tight, logical structure and consistent style.”

I just reread that sentence and thought ‘What?’

From the very first line, “Richie” builds action. The kidnappers are there on line one. Then things keep moving. The story doesn’t pussyfoot around. It builds on itself. I think that’s what I mean by ‘well-crafted’—the story builds on itself. Like if you put a bunch of bricks and cement on an empty lot and then the bricks magically became animate and started stacking themselves and spreading cement on themselves until they were a six-story office building—reading “Richie” is like that, is like watching bricks magically stack themselves.

By paragraph two Richie, his mom, and his dad are in “some kind of underground base.” The kidnappers realize they’ve made a mistake:

“The kidnappers walk in front of us. One of them says, There’s been a mistake. He says, We meant to kidnap only two of you but we kidnapped all three of you. He says, We need to release one of you. He says, After we release one of you, that one, whoever it is, will be sent a ransom note.”

Which is hilarious. And it adds conflict / movement to the story. The story is not pussyfooting around. It keeps building.

“My mom says, Richie, what’s happening, what’s wrong?”

A week passes. They’re moved to another location. A “cage” w/ a bathroom and kitchen. This setting is funny. Paying attention to setting, w/ little details like the kitchen, is good craft. A lot of writers would just say “cage”; they wouldn’t include the kitchen.

‘Tao Lin includes the kitchen’ is a good way to describe him.

The dad calculates how much money he is worth a day–“$7,000”–and decides he should be freed. He feels he’s worth more than Richie and the mom. His reasoning is absurd. Instead of deciding he should be free because of some humanistic reason, he decides he should be free because he’s worth money. That’s Kafkaesque: facing an insurmountable problem—like proving your ‘worth’—by appealing to some sort of hysterical mathematical overrationalization.

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The dad punches the high-schooler kidnappers and escapes. The story keeps moving.

The story keeps moving in a way you might be taught in a college creative writing class. Step by step. One thing leading into another leading into another leading into. Like one day your creative writing teacher would talk about ‘craft’ a lot, and you would glean that ‘craft’ has something to do with a tight structure and consistent style and ‘building things on themselves.’

(What I want to say / argue in general w/ this blog post, I just decided, is: Regardless of whether you like Tao Lin, he almost unarguably has ‘style’ and has the ability to produce a ‘well-crafted, builds-on-itself story.’ And that in itself is impressive. Because a lot of contemporary writers aren’t as detailed.

Why I’m trying to say this is: Tao Lin has A LOT of ‘haters,’ [e.g. see http://htmlgiant.com/craft-notes/tao-lin-on-the-future-of-the-novel/ the first two comments of which say “tao lin is a jackass” and “his work is a barnacle on the whale of literature”] and I don’t think the haters understand why they hate Tao Lin. Their hate, I opine, has nothing to do with Tao Lin’s being a ‘bad writer.’ It has more to do with his style being decidedly different. Meaning their hate is simply a matter of taste. But what people don’t seem to realize is his ability to develop a style so strong that it induces such serious responses—even if that style is something most people dislike and their responses are mostly antipathetic—is impressive itself [“impressive” literally means, like, to just affect someone deeply, and it doesn’t have to have positive connotations necessarily maybe—think of, like, impressing upon a memory-foam mattress] and shows some sort of…talent (?)…or something.

I 100% realize that telling people the ‘real reason’ they dislike something is presumptuous as hell.

I stand by what I’m saying.

Because I feel like it has some sort of larger and more important implications. Like, attempting to understand why you really are for or against {some piece of art} without appealing to shitty circular ‘X is bad because it’s bad’ arguments seems important, in general. Like, my argument for Tao Lin is he’s good because he’s a stylist and exhibits craft, and that eo ipso impresses me, as it shows he sorta ‘knows what he’s doing’ when he writes.

I just reread all that and stared at my computer’s monitor for like 5 seconds and then thought ‘What?’ and ‘Seems like all I’m saying is taste in art is subjective. But with more words.’)

The dad is gone. Richie and his mom are still in the cage:

“Two weeks pass. The kidnappers begin to let me and my mom out for up to five hours a day. My mom is not so angry anymore. But sometimes she is angry. She sits there and her face gets very tense. Her brows angle. When she is sleeping her face gets like she’s fighting a war. But sometimes she hugs me. She smiles. She asks how my life is. I say, Good. I say, Fine. But now she asks me again. She says, Richie, tell me about yourself. I look at her. I say, I don’t know. I say, I’m okay. She comes to me. She hugs me. She says, Richie, please, tell me how you really are, what your life is like. I stare at the ground.”

What’s wrong here exactly?

The inability to discern what’s wrong exactly is Kafkaesque.

Or maybe existential-y. Like, ‘being’ itself is what’s wrong. Or something. What?

Anyway, it’s something I’ve felt pretty much my entire school-and-sleep-filled life: That ‘never-quite-right’-ness of everything. That yearning for “something other than school or sleep / other than {thing(s) occupying the majority of your life}.” And I know I’m not the only one.

“I say, I don’t know what is wrong with me. I say, It gets worse every day. My neck shakes a little. I say, I don’t know. My face twitches. She unhugs me and looks at me. I look at the ground. She hugs me. She says, Richie. She cries. I think, I shouldn’t have said anything. I think, What can she do about this? Sorry, I think.”

The kidnappers decide to release Richie and his mom. They make a “contract” for them to sign. The contract stipulates that they won’t call the police. The story is almost over. When your reading it on bearparade.com, you can see that bottom of the webpage is approaching—your scrollbar is running low on space. The whole story has been building up to this moment. I’ve always been a fan of endings. I think they make or break stories. What are Richie and his mom going to do? Sign the contract? Will they call the police?

No.

“[The kidnapper] says, Hey, do you want to leave or not? He says, Richie, hey, Richie’s mom, you two want to go back to the world or not?”

And it ends just like that.

And I think it’s perfect.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome seems relevant to the ending.

[I’m not suggesting you medicalize the ending. Fiction is metaphor.

Imagine feeling Stockholm Syndrome not towards kidnappers but towards a ‘never-quite-right’-y world.

If you can imagine that, you can understand Kafka(esque) and “Richie” and Tao Lin and maybe me.])

—
@barkmuckner

Bear Parade (2): yesterday i was talking to myself and i told myself that i was going to write a book and give it to you so i put paper in my bag and put a pen in my bag and rode my bike to the river bank and then sat on the ground and thought ‘i will never write a book’ and watched ducks swim away from me–by ellen kennedy

Mark Buckner 2 Comments

Bear Parade round two.

A poetry collection by Ellen Kennedy titled:

yesterday i was talking to myself and i told myself that i was going to write a book and give it to you so i put paper in my bag and put a pen in my bag and rode my bike to the river bank and then sat on the ground and thought ‘i will never write a book’ and watched ducks swim away from me

The title of her poetry collection is very long but it only takes ~5 min. to read the whole collection itself.

Everything on bearparade seems to have a sort of minimalist style.

Ellen Kennedy’s particular brand of bearparadian minimalism is something like ‘lots of declarative sentences and parallelism and some repetition.’ Or: ‘Anaphora‘ + a little ‘polysyndeton,’ + a lot of understatement + deadpan tone.

I think everything on bearparade employs a kind of minimalism because being online shortens your attention span automatically. Minimalist stuff ‘works’ online. Dense stuff doesn’t–you click away from it. Literary stuff is notoriously dense and boring, so bears who parade seem to try to not be dense and boring by using minimalism.

(I think I’m going to start trying to write shorter / more minimalist blog posts. Lots of people’s blog posts here on arts, ink seem ‘hella dense,’ and I’m skeptical people actually, like, read them, beginning to end.)

(For some reason I feel like writing < 600 words is not ‘legit,’ though, for an obliquely academic blog.)

Supposedly Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

But so Ellen Kennedy. Her internet poetry collection is good. It’s relateable and relevant if you’re ~20 and are an internet user, which you most likely are. Like, you’ve probably felt ambitionless and bored like this poem:

i have no ambitions

i don’t want to hate the president

i don’t want to go to harvard

i don’t want to win the pulitzer prize

i just want to sit in my bathtub

and think about relationships i will never have

with people i will never meet

and then go lay in my bed

with a magnifying glass

and count all the stiches in my sheets

until i fall asleep

and wake up

to repeat again.

There’s something about spending a lot of time online that makes me feel ‘i have no ambitions’-y. There’s something about reading a poem online that’s about having no ambitions and which takes very little ambition to read because it’s minimalist and short that makes me feel very…something.

In another poem titled ‘i want to sleep,’ there’s this:

(…)i used schutzhund methods of training to teach the duck to attack on command. we went on a killing rampage that lasted three days. we killed many small children and received the nobel prize for our achievements.

the other day, as i was eating the leg of a small child like a popsicle, the duck turned to me with tears in its eyes and asked, ‘why do you make me kill things?’

Teaching ducks  to go on killing rampages via “schutzhund methods” seems very unserious and stupid. But then you’re hit with the teary eyed duck’s ‘why do you make me kill things?’ and you’re like, “wait…” And then your hit with i felt ashamed. i stared down at the ground and stood very still and very quietly.

Bears’ parading seems to have a sort of tears-of-a-clown quality to it. Like, ‘I’m full of funny non sequiturs and absurdisms, but I’m crying inside.’

And I thought these beautiful lines in the penultimate poem made the whole collection ‘worth it’:

‘i want to rub my face in my blueberries’

‘so do it’

‘okay’

i rubbed my face in my blueberries

i batted my eyelashes against your cheek and left blue streaks on your cheek

i thought about all the times i’ve almost been hit by a car for listening to loud music while walking and laughed.

I feel like if I could read this poetry collection on a computer in the fishbowl after a stressful exam or stressful text message from a girl, and it would make me feel calmer.

—
@barkmuckner

Bear Parade (1): Nosferatu

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“His feet keep walking.

A lonely night.“

I’m going to start a series of posts about bearparade.com, because I really like bears’ parading and feel like maybe not a lot of people know about bears’ parading (?) and feel like it ‘deserves’ attention. Did you know bears parade? I didn’t until like a month ago.

“3. People who have gotten published at Bear Parade know that literature is dead, it has gone the way of painting, poetry, jazz, sculpture, and heavy metal, it is dead. But like learning that there [is] no god, a new freedom arises, knowing that the audience will never be that big again, gives a new view on the literature, I’m not sure if Bear Parade has a correct or incorrect view, but it is a new view, of fun mixed with existential hell.”

Bearparade.com is, basically, a website with free semi-amateurish fiction and poetry on it. Its type of writing is ‘writing that people who seriously read Steven King novels wouldn’t like probably.’ Or ‘writing that people who “read seriously” in general probably wouldn’t like.’ Or ‘the only literary writing people who grew up w/ internet access and w/ unexplained subconscious disdain towards classic books and literature in general could maybe read w/ genuine enjoyment.’

What excites me about bears’ parading is that it seems like the type of writing that people who don’t generally read could maybe read and enjoy.

I like to read—I read both ‘serious literature’ and ‘semi-amateurish stuff on the internet’ and enjoy both—and bears’ parading is the only material I feel like I could earnestly share w/ friends who don’t read.

As a person who reads, I consciously try not to get atop altitudinous horses and tell people that they ‘should’ read. Truly nobody really ‘should’ read; some people must read, because it’s, like, required for their job or something, but nobody really should just feel compelled to read thick novels just because reading thick novels is ostensibly eo ipso good, I feel. But, as person who reads but doesn’t like to tell other people to, I feel like I could earnestly tell someone who doesn’t read that they should read bearparade.com, because I would feel like I’m telling them to do something that’ll result in genuine enjoyment, not telling them to do something that’ll result in ‘enjoyment from fulfilling societal pressures to read oddslot because reading supposedly means you’re an intelligent, artsy, cultured person.’ (It’s a huge, commonly held fallacy that reading is just automatically always a good thing. Like, “I should read The Great Gatsby because reading The Great Gatsby is intrinsically good.” No. Don’t ever read just because you ‘feel like you should read more,’ ever.)

Noah Cicero’s “Nosferatu” is a bear in the aforementioned parade of bears. I’ve decided to write about “Nosferatu” first in my series of posts about bears’ parading because my house is having a ‘vampire party’ this weekend and vampires currently feel relevant to me.

“In a city that does not require a name.

The city has a McDonalds, Wal-Mart, several municipal parks, sewage, city-water, garbage men, coffee shops, several colleges, coffee shops, and even some poets. The city has obese women who sweat when it is hot outside, it has men who think their haircut is more important than commerce, and it has cats who shit in litter boxes and never know the touch of grass on their paws.

This is where Nosferatu walks. “

‘Relevance’ is really important for writing online—that’s one thing I’ve been figuring out, by reading / writing online.

I posted the first page of “Nosferatu” to my house’s vampire party’s Facebook wall, in relevance. Posting “Nosferatu” to a party wall seems like a good example of how I feel bears’ parading is suitable for people who maybe don’t like to read. I would never post, like, a James Joyce excerpt to a party wall. But “Nosferatu” seemed somehow suitable. I would never post, like, an excerpt from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to a party wall.

The writing on bearparade.com is like that friend whom you feel comfortable bringing to a party because she’s cool and can handle herself and won’t embarrass you, whereas ‘serious literature’ is like that friend you feel uncomfortable partying with because, although he’s your good friend and you really like him, he can only handle himself in a few limited social contexts and situations, which is fine, but parties aren’t included in his relatively small social ‘comfort zone.’

I.e.: James Joyce is the awkward guy w/ whom I can’t party, Noah Cicero is the guy who maybe would be too cool to party w/ me.

“Nosferatu’s” word length is probably in the ‘short-story’ range, but the way it’s spaced out—it has a weird style that utilizes very short paragraphs that have like only one or two sentences each—and its presence on the internet instead of on cut-down trees makes me want to arbitrarily call it a ‘novella.’

“Nosferatu” is a ‘novella,’ by Noah Cicero.

“Nosferatu looks sad and says, “Why is everyone criticizing me?”

Leo in an exasperated tone of voice says, “Because you have done nothing in years. Not since the fall of Rome have you done anything. It is like you’ve been depressed for 1500 years.”

I used to wear an uniform.”

“Nosferatu” really doesn’t have anything to do with vampires. Cicero’s choice of a vampire-lord protagonist is arbitrary, which is funny. Bears’ parading is arbitrary, which is funny. I just read “Cicero’s” and pictured the Roman political guy instead of the internet author guy. Which is…

“Nosferatu” is arbitrarily set in a city “that does not require a name.” As our world continues to homogenize—(e.g. there’s supposedly now a McDonald’s very close to the Great Pyramid of Giza)— it no longer seems to matter whether something is set in New York or Berlin or Chicago or wherever; all these places = ‘city’ now. Noah Cicero seems to know that [bunch of different cities] = ‘city’ now, which makes me think he’s smart.

Cicero picks a vampire-lord for a protagonist because the character is dark and detached and badass—and that’s all there is to his decision, it seems. “Nosferatu” just as easily could have been “Holden Caufield” or something. On bearparade.com, it seems the writers pay less attention to trying to make every detail and nuance of their stories ‘make perfect sense’ and pay more attention to trying to write things real people—instead of just, like, English professors—will actually want to read, for genuine enjoyment, which seems very good to me.

By Googling “bear parade” I found some words from Cicero himself about why he likes bears’ parading, and I share his sentiments (literally [get it?]):

“Why I like Bear Parade

1. Bear Parade does not publish idiots. Idiots can write well, an idiot can construct a 1000 page plot full of great poetic beautiful sentences, and still be an idiot. When Gene Morgan reads a submission and it is well written yet idiotic, he says, “This person is a [trucking grasshole (what’s the rules for profanity on arts, ink anyway?)],” and does not publish it.

2. People who write for Bear Parade do not take themselves seriously. People who write for Bear Parade don’t go around calling themselves writers and acting like bookish asses, and learn the names of really obscure shitty authors so they can sound cool inside of a coffee shop. There is no such thing as a “writer”, it doesn’t exist, it is like the word “cowboy”, it is a myth made up by movies to sell movies for the sake of profit. There is nothing awesome about a person sitting alone at a typewriter or computer, they are sitting, alone, their fingers are moving, that scene in that Rimbaud movie with him upstairs in the cold writing, that is really lame, it is a myth made up by the media.

3. People who have gotten published at Bear Parade know that literature is dead, it has gone the way of painting, poetry, jazz, sculpture, and heavy metal, it is dead. But like learning that there no god, a new freedom arises, knowing that the audience will never be that big again, gives a new view on the literature, I’m not sure if Bear Parade has a correct or incorrect view, but it is a new view, of fun mixed with existential hell.”

He goes on, but those first three points seem like the main reason to like–or dislike–bears’ parading. I imagine the bearparade style is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I personally find it refreshing to read something different, on the internet, with nicely colored font. Because I get bored of reading 12 pt.-Times-New-Roman canonical books printed on paper sometimes.

“Ako says, “Nos, you have to listen to me: Leo wants the power. And you don’t want it. You should just let him have it.”

“They are all short, flaccid penises.”

“One last question Nosferatu, do you want to be the vampire-king?”

Nosferatu stands up and says, “I have always been king,” and walks out of the room.”
—

@barkmuckner

Two Things That I Like But That Are Now Dead

Mark Buckner 1 Comment

The first thing that I like but that is now dead is The Simpsons.

(This isn’t really going to be ‘about’ The Simpsons in the end, so if you don’t particularly care about The Simpsons just replace “The Simpsons” with “[other popular American TV show]” every time you come across “The Simpsons,” and overall the point of most of this should still make sense.)

The Simpsons is my favorite TV show ever. I have seen every episode like three times, and there are like 500+ episodes. Do the math. I own seasons 1-13 on DVD. I own a ~1,000 pg. hardcover episode guide. I own another shorter paperback episode guide that has mostly the same material as my hardcover episode guide, for no good reason. I have lots of Simpsons comics. I have Simpsons Monopoly. I have Simpsons Clue. I know how to pronounce “Matt Groening.” I was Bart for Halloween once. Etc.

A week or two ago The Simpsons aired its 500th episode. It was really bad. For a hardcore Simpsons fan like myself, it was even depressing. The episode ended with this ‘cute’ tidbit:

Well, you ‘got me,’ Simpsons: I am now talking about how much your 500th episode sucked on the internet. (But I did get some fresh air before writing this—Wednesday was really sunny and warm and I spent most of the day in the arb.) Another ‘cute’ tidbit: note the “the most meaningless milestone of all!” tagline in the first image from the episode’s opening credits.

Without even going into detail about how exactly the 500th episode was bad and unfunny (and it was indeed VERY BAD AND UNFUNNY), just by pointing out these two ‘cute tidbits’—which aren’t really just ‘cute tidbits’ but are in fact a sort of insidious televisual rhetorical sleight of hand (or so I’ll argue in a sec.)—just with that, I can tell you how I know The Simpsons is no longer a legitimate piece of televisual art and is now just a sort of pathetic, desperate, please-like-me-why-don’t-you-like-me…TV…thing.

TV generally gets a bad rap (deservedly, perhaps), but at its best I consider it a ‘legitimate form of art.’ For a while—like seasons 1 through ~12—The Simpsons was one of the best pieces of televisual art. It was the quintessence of ‘sitcom.’ It was the apotheosis of TV. Its writers were basically better, smarter than 51% of the writers I now read as an English-B.A. candidate. I’ve learned more from seasons 1 through ~12 of The Simpsons than from semesters 1 through 6 of my undergraduate education. That might be inaccurate. But I’ve definitely learned more about good writing—like narration, plot, characterization, puns, etc.—from The Simpsons than from any undergrad English class. That’s not hyperbole.

But the way I can now tell, officially, that The Simpsons is dead as a piece of art, that it’s now just a garden-variety bad-rap-getting primetime-TV P.O.S. is that it’s stopped simply funnily dealing with plain-ole’ middle class familial affairs and started inciting a sort of convolved rhetorical game in which it tries to convince you that you’re sort of a P.O.S. for watching The Simpsons (e.g., “get some fresh air why don’t ya!”) and that The Simpsons is a sort of a P.O.S. itself but that you should laugh ‘with’ it about how much of a P.O.S it is. Or, it’s not really a P.O.S because it knows it is now, at episode 500, a P.O.S. Or something.

What The Simpsons’ cute shots at itself (“Log online! Make fun of us!”) do, really, is set up a rhetorical situation in which it is impossible for you to simultaneously criticize them seriously and intelligently and for you to remain a serious/intelligent art-viewer/person—it makes these things mutually exclusive. The Simpsons wants it to be impossible for you to hold them accountable for being a P.O.S. (read: w/ double entendre, “point of sale” and “piece of human refuse”).

If you think The Simpsons isn’t trying to convince you that it hasn’t turned into a P.O.S. because it is itself ‘candidly admitting’ that it is in fact a meaningless excremental hunk of TV—and even admitting that it knows it’s a meaningless excremental hunk of TV—with cutesy posturing like “most meaningless milestone of all!” and “logging onto the internet and saying how much this episode sucked,” don’t. Don’t let the posturing fool you: these ‘admissions’ of suckiness are Psych101-style reverse-psychology defense mechanisms. They’re rhetorical moves. Most of all, they’re B.S. The Simpsons has turned into, like, that fat kid in fifth grade who made fun of himself so he seemed okay with his being fat and seemed totally not sensitive about it and seemed to totally not care that has friends called him a ‘lard-ass’ everyday but who actually went home everyday feeling terrible and was actually totally sensitive about his weight and cried alone in his room every night while eating ~6 Twinkies and feeling just downright miserable/downright full of Twinkies.

Self-deprecation as a rhetorical move implicitly shields against any real, bona-fide criticism. Think of it this way: If the fat kid calls himself fat and then you call him fat afterwards, your insult loses a lot of its sting, now doesn’t it. It seems pointless. It seems dead-horse-beating-y. You seem like a less intelligent human being for redundantly beating fat dead horses unoriginally redundantly. You seem to lack wit. Likewise, if The Simpsons calls itself sucky before you can log onto the internet and call it sucky, then you’re backed into a sort of rhetorical corner if you want to air some serious criticism. Because The Simpsons has beat you to the punch. Why would you criticize something that’s already been effectively criticized? Sure, you can go ahead and voice your criticism anyway, but the response The Simpsons has set you up to be met with is something like “we all already know The Simpsons is sucky now; even The Simpsons calls The Simpsons sucky now; stop stupidly saying unoriginal things we all already know already, stupid.”

The Simpsons and the fatty both want to look like pachyderms; they want to look like they don’t care whether you like them/think they’re overweight or not. (Except the fatty probably doesn’t want to look like a pachyderm, in terms of size…) The universal definition of ‘cool’ seems to be something like ‘nonchalance’ or ‘indifference’ or ‘not caring,’ so it’s easy to understand what The Simpsons and elephant-sized kid are going for by affecting anti-/apathy towards themselves and their artistic/cardiovascular health: They want to be liked. They want to be cool. They want to be popular. And to be cool and to be popular, they have to convince you that they don’t particularly care about being cool and being popular.

Why? Because I can guarantee you that your idea of ‘cool’ is somehow related to ‘nonchalance’ or ‘indifference’ or something like that. What’s more cool than someone who doesn’t caring about being ‘cool’? What’s more uncool than someone who seems to live and die by your judgment of them? Ergo if something seems to not care about itself or how you will judge it, you will judge it better. It’s a sort of paradox: the only way to be judged well is to disregard how well you will be judged.

So: in order to be judged well, The Simpsons pretends to not care about being judged unwell.

But of course, The Simpsons truly does care about what their fans think—to drop the personification for a second, let’s acknowledge that what ‘The Simpsons’ is really is a bunch of human beings who probably work hard at their TV jobs and who are probably basically decent people who care about the quality of what they produce and wouldn’t feel good, about themselves as human beings, if they mostly produced televisual excrement. In fact, I know they care because why else would they dare you to criticize them? Think about it—if they didn’t care about being criticized, why would they even bring it up, why add the little endnote? Because they just ‘don’t care’ SO MUCH that they, like, HAVE TO let you know about how much they don’t care? Seems unlikely. There’s a difference between genuine coolness/nonchalance and affected indifference.

When The Simpsons says, “Go ahead; criticize me,” I see not a cool, indifferent piece of bona-fide art but a scared, desperate-to-be-liked prepubescent fatty. I see a sales pitch: “Like me because I’m cool.” “I’m cool because I don’t care if I’m still cool at age 500.” “Being a nerd who posts 1,000+ words online about not liking me instead of going outside or something is nerdy and uncool.” “Watching ‘meaningless’ TV and getting excited about a ‘meaningless milestone’ for your favorite TV show is dumb, RIGHT? *wink**wink*.” Etc. It seems to me that one of the big differences between a piece of bona-fide art and a piece of commercial crap is how much effort the thing apparently devotes to selling itself. The Simpsons used to not need to sell itself. It used to just sell other things—like Butterfingers. But now it’s such a bad show that, instead of convincing people to watch it by being good/funny, it convinces people to watch it by half-assedly reverse-psychologically convincing them not to hate it.

None of this is really only pertinent to one specific episode of The Simpsons, by the way. I just used the 500th episode of The Simpsons for this post because it was temporally and personally relevant. But all TV’s been making fun of itself for decades. E.g. there’s the 80’s Married…With Children, which has been described as “a sitcom-parody of sitcoms” (i.e., a sitcom that makes fun of sitcoms). For another example there’s televisual demigod David Letterman, whose jokes’ butts are usually his show/himself.

I’ve never actually watched Letterman or Married…With Children, because I am less than one-hundred years old, but the point is The Simpsons wasn’t the first TV show to try what I would term ‘the self-deprecating-fat-kid technique.’ Other shows have done it, and have done it better.

The second thing that I like but that is now dead is David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace was an American author. He killed himself not too long ago, sadly. His ‘birthday’ was a couple weeks ago, around the time The Simpsons 500th aired. One of the things David Foster Wallace wrote was an essay about U.S. television and irony, which I’m admittedly pulling ~90% of my ideas from here (not to mention the examples of Married…W/ and Letterman). When I saw The Simpsons pull a ‘self-deprecating-fatty,’ I immediately thought of David Foster Wallace. I thought of Wallace quotations like:

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.'”

And:

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will no give or take anything, wear any masks, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to.  We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent…”

Those two quotations are two things I really like.

Valentine’s Day Video 50

Mark Buckner 1 Comment

Today is Valentine’s Day and I’m feeling like this guy:

Robert Wilson. "Video 50," 1978. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Sometimes when I’m feeling like this guy I go walk around in the UMMA. It clears my head. Something about all that marble flooring. The word austere comes to mind.

So I’m in the UMMA. It’s afternoonish and I’m pretty much the only person in there. I feel mildly artsy for being the only person in the UMMA on Valentine’s Day afternoon. And mildy lonely. I feel like an aesthete—“Who needs lousy Hallmark holidays when there’s the cold, austere beauty of the UMMA?”

Loud noises are coming from the back-leftish corner, from the New Media Gallery.

Currently I don’t know that the room in the back-leftish corner is called the “New Media Gallery.” I Google it later.

The noises sound like a film score: orchestral instruments blare and echo off the austere marble flooring.

In general the UMMA’s atmosphere right now seems somewhat funny, because it’s pretty much empty and silent, but then there are all these melodramatic, film-score-y, orchestral instruments playing loudly. It seems ‘surreal,’ not unlike a Robert Wilson avant-garde short-film conglomeration thing.

Which is what the exhibit making loud funny noises and breaking the austere atmosphere of the UMMA turns out to be: Robert Wilson’s Video 50.

I walk over to the New Media Gallery and read this introduction posted at the entrance: “Robert Wilson gained a reputation as a creator of aggressively experimental theater work. Wilson first came to prominence with works from the mid-1970s such as The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973) and Einstein on the Beach (1976).” (My roommate saw Einstein on the Beach a couple weeks ago. Einstein on the Beach was in town a couple weeks ago. In situ I suddenly remember this. And just now ex situ I asked my roommate “if it was sweet” and he said “yeah it was sweet.” He said that it was five hours long and that he thought he wouldn’t be able to sit through the whole thing, but he ended up sitting through the whole thing and not really feeling bored or whatever. I can’t imagine sitting through anything for five hours.) “These lavish, unusually long productions broke and then redefined every convention of theater.” After reading “these lavish, unusually long productions broke and redefined every convention of theater” I feel mildly skeptical. I skim over some more praiseful Robert Wilson bio and get to the part about Video 50 itself. “Video 50 are smaller-scale experiments, but they share with these spectacles the qualities that typify Wilson’s aesthetic: surreal, dreamlike imagery, unlinear narrative, conflation of seemingly unrelated characters and micro-stories, and a mesmerizingly slow pace…Video 50 consists of a random arrangement of 30 second ‘episodes’…The work is immersive and experiential, seductively dissolving the distance between viewer and subject.”

So basically it sounds to me like your SOP for an avant-garde short-film conglomeration thing.

There’s a sign outside the doorway warning about adult content and unsuitability for young viewers, which makes me mildly excited. Eventually I walk through a little L-shaped hall into the NMG itself, passing by yet another warning for adult content on the way  (there turns out to be nothing I would consider adult content in Video 50), and now I’m standing in an empty dark square room. A ceiling-mounted projector projects Video 50 on the front wall. Currently some type of credits are rolling and I’m uncertain whether they’re the end or beginning credits. The only seating in the room are two austere wooden benches, one pushed up against the back wall and the other against a side wall. I sit down on the back-wall bench so I don’t have to painfully twist my neck 90 degrees to see the film(s).

The credits keep rolling—I determine they’re the opening credits, meaning my timing for entering the NMG was perfect—and I take out my trusty Moleskine notebook and begin writing notes about the austerity of the room. I write things like, “The room is empty, except for four Sony speakers placed atop the four corners of a spotless white wall that doesn’t quite reach the ceiling.” Did I mention that today is Valentine’s today?

After the credits, the first “episode” of Video 50 arrives. The first episode is this guy:

I write: 1. Business-dressed man standing by waterfall. Loud waterfall noises. The image sort of flickers.

I write: Screen flickers…shitty projector or intentional part of the film?

Before long the first episode is over and cuts straight into the next episode:

2. A window with white drapes. Wind blows the drapes. Loud whooshing noises.

And before long it cuts to the next episode:

3. A cream-white old, rotary-style phone. It’s ringing loudly.

This is more or less how the entire thing goes: I see a short clip of a pretty random-seeming object or scene or something, and before I can even jot a few notes down describing what it is the episode is over and I’m looking at something new.

I try to write fast enough to make notes for every episode, but I end up missing a few here and there.

4. A door opens. A woman in a pink dress enters the room. Romantic music starts playing.

5. Overhead view of a man smoking and an unlit light bulb. Dripping noises. The man turns on the light bulb. (I.e.,

Robert Wilson. Video 50, 1978. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Robert Wilson. "Video 50," 1978. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

)

6. Cityscape. On a rooftop a woman is being held at gunpoint by a masked, cliché-looking criminal. Crime-film, noir-ish music plays. The camera zooms in on the woman’s face. She winks and smiles.

6 makes me chuckle. I like 6. In my notebook I write “my fav” next to 6.

7. Man holding ice pack on head, sitting on bed. Monkey/animal noises. Then a close-up of a woman in curlers making loud scary monkey/animal noises.

I’m legitimately frightened by the woman in curlers.

8. Woman in bed w/ black phone on bedside table. Slow sad music. Then there’s a naked man sitting by a fire. (Is this supposed to be the adult content? No…parts…are being shown.)

At this point I’ve missed an episode or two and my episode-numbering in my notes is basically arbitrary. My wrist is hurting from trying to make notes as fast as the episodes change. It occurs to me that I’m still alone in the room, and I wonder when/if other museum patrons will enter.

9. Chair floating in an orange-pink sky. Classical piano music. Chair rotates back and forth slightly.

10. White door slowly closing by itself. A second after it closes, a hand juts into the frame, as if it just closed the door.

10 makes me laugh. I don’t know why. I guess the hand’s jutting into the frame was unexpected and funny.

In general I don’t know how Video 50 is supposed to make me feel. I feel it’s entertaining because I never know what the next episode will be, so it’s sort of suspenseful. But I don’t feel too much else about it.

I never really know how to take avant-garde art. But I guess it’s sort of the point of avant-garde art to make the audience feel uncertain about how to take it?

In any case I deicide I more or less like this Video 50 thing, even if only because it’s ‘different’ and I’ve never really sat through anything like it.

11. A man sleeping during a thunderstorm. He snores in a cartoony, ZZZZzzzzZZZ manner.

12. Close-up of a glasses-, mustache-faced man rhythmically touching his temple and grimacing and groaning ad nauseam.

13. A back view of a man wearing a safari hat and looking out at a still seascape. The man makes noises like “hruumph hruumph hruumph” metronomically ad nasuseam.

Even though the episodes are only like 30 sec. long, their repetitiveness and “mesmerizingly slow pace” induce me to write notes like “ad nauseam.”

14. Floating chair in an orange-pink sky (again). Classical piano music.

For some reason I like the floating chair. The floating chair calms me down, especially after having been made antsy by the men making groaning noises ad nauseam in the immediately preceding episodes. I wonder if a lot of thought was put into arranging the episodes in a specific way for effects such as the floating chair’s calming me down after I’ve been emotionally primed by the groaning men, or something.

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I decide it’s true what the description posted at the entrance said, that Video 50 “is immersive and experiential, seductively dissolving the distance between viewer and subject.” While being sucked into the experience, I’ve even almost forgotten that it’s Valentine’s Day.

Upon realizing that I’ve almost forgotten that it’s Valentine’s Day, I remember that it’s Valentine’s Day. I take out my phone to see if a certain girl has texted me.

She hasn’t.

15. Red hammer silently hammering a blue back ground. Then the blue background shatters like glass.

16. Close-up of a large-foreheaded baby crying.

The close-up of the big-headed baby startles me, especially after the preceding shattering.

I write “encephalitic” in my notebook.

For about 10 episodes I sort of lose myself. I get “sucked in” or “immersed” or “mesmerized” or whatever you want to call it. In any case, it’s basically the effect I was looking for when I decided to come to the UMMA.

I come to the UMMA when I’m thinking too much about something, like Valentine’s Day, so I can try to ‘lose myself’ in pieces of art.

What Video 50 seems to want to do is make you ‘lose yourself.’ It short-circuits your brain—you can’t really actually make sense of the conglomeration of floating chairs and encephalitic babies and business men standing near waterfalls, but your brain nevertheless tries to and in trying gets confused and before long you’re entranced and don’t even remember that you’re worried about a certain girl texting you or something.

Unfortunately, my Video 50 dream is broken when an old couple walks into the room and sits down next to me. I wonder if they’re on some sort of Valentine’s Day  date. Maybe that’s what older couples do on Valentine’s Day: watch avant-garde film in museums.

Now because I’m not alone, I’m immediately aware of myself, my surroundings—Video 50 is no longer able to suck me in. I shoot sideways glances at the old couple. I start writing notes about them instead of the artwork taking place in front of me.

I write things like, “The husband is ‘paunchy.’”

I consider leaving. I wanted to watch Video 50 all the way through, but the experience basically seems over for me now. My wrist hurts carpal-tunnelishly from writing frantically. The edge of my right hand is completely covered in ink. I’ve made it to 30 in my notebook.

A lot of the episodes repeat themselves. For example right now the safari-hatted man staring at a seascape and going “hruumph hruumph hruumph” has returned.

It suddenly seems unbearable.

I leave.

—

Images of Video 50 were taken from the University of Michigan Museum of Art website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/view/exhibitions/2011-wilson.php