Old Cars

There are two old cars parked on the block where my office is located. They are there everyday, but I don't know who drives them. One is a Volvo, the other is a BMW. These are the only cars on the block I ever notice--the only ones I like. New Volvos are some of the ugliest cars around, but I would rather drive this old one than almost any new car. Why are new cars so ugly? Ads like that one that tries to entice the customer by putting the new Jaguar alongside a vintage Jaguar just make me think "Yeah, where can I get one of those old Jaguars?"

Old cars were made with an idea of what they would look like on a street--an accompaniment to architecture around them. New cars seem made to keep the street out.

One more thing about Stevie Nicks

How perfect is this quotation?:

I think they all went too far. Their jeans got too low, their tops got too see-through. Personally, I think that sexy is keeping yourself mysterious. I'm really an old-fashioned girl, and I think I'm totally sexy.

1. In typical bohemian fashion, she is nostalgic about her youth.
2. In typical bourgeois attitude, she derides the immorality of the younger generation (marking her passage into a full-fledged symbol of the present middle-aged middle class).
3. In typical bourgeois-bohemian fashion, she disparages the very ideal (sexual openness) she once purported to stand for.

48/68/08

Around 1948, a young man from New Orleans named Anatole Broyard began to gain prominence in the bohemian environment of Greenwich Village, then went on to become a revered critic for the New York Times. Now he is considered one of the "lights" (or perhaps "darks"), of post-war American letters. Aware that an African-American writer, no matter his talent, would always be "a black writer," and never simply "a writer," Broyard hid the fact that he was black for his entire adult life. His relatively light skin allowed him to pass, and he eagerly settled into the kind of white bourgeois milieu that blacks were denied. I think his stint in the Village was essential to constructing the narrative of whiteness that eventually delivered him into the upper echelons of American intellectuals.

In mid-19th century France artists and writers began moving into the gypsy neighborhoods of major cities as a way to avoid high rent and high-nosed morality. These transplants earned the name "bohemian" out of a mistaken idea that all gypsies came from the Czech region of Bohemia. Bohemians idealized what they perceived as the gypsy's pre-modern enlightenment, as well as their ability to live outside of modern culture's strictures. Of course, the bourgeois artists drove the group they feigned to admire out of their former neighborhoods.

This kind of emulation, which at the same time parodies what it seeks to emulate, parallels the relationship between artistic whites and the black community in America. The gypsies, after all, were not just different because of their social practices, but because of the color of their skin; their relation to the rest of modern Europe was the result of that racialized difference. It's no mistake that Jimi Hendrix, probably the most influential black performer of the 1960s (that most "bohemian" of decades), called himself a "gypsy".

For the past year, I've lived on a certain street in Brooklyn that lays claim to being an incubator of contemporary bohemianism. But the attention of a wikipedia article, coverage in Gawker and
yesterday's New York Times, and rivaling MySpace pages lead me to believe that its heyday had passed before I arrived. Nevertheless, my stay here has reinforced some of my ideas about the hipster aesthetic--that contemporary, commercialized bastard of bygone bohemianism(s). To better understand the hipster attitude, I've developed a matrix of four essential attributes on which any hipster can be placed. The matrix has four axes, each corresponding to one of the essential attributes, which are: 1. hippy 2. hip-hop 3. punk/hard rock 4. preppy. Notice that three of these categories associated themselves with (and fetishized) a specific group of racialized others: Hippies had their blues musicians, Black Panthers, and--via their predecessors, the Beats--black jazz musicians. Hip-hop need not be explained. Punks drew original inspiration from the West Indian subculture of urban England. The fourth attribute, preppy, represents the bourgeois aspect that cannot be eradicated from the bohemian and may itself become fetishized, perhaps as a compensatory effort.



A coworker of mine recently suggested that the song "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac (whose first album came out in 1968) might be a satanic anthem. I'm not sure if I agree, but it made consider their song "Gypsy"--the lyrics of which link the return to a child-like state of creativity with the gypsy--as a concise (if vague) expression of postwar American bohemianism. Not surprisingly, I'd say Fleetwood Mac would rank high in the "Nostalgia" category on a list of favored hipster bands (nostalgia being a key operating sentiment in the bohemian world-view).

As much as it disappoints me (and somewhat deflates the impact of this post), I can't find anything to biographically link Anatole Broyard and Stevie Nicks. While Nicks eagerly embraced a "gypsy" mystique, Broyard's relationship to bohemianism was more complicated. He did a sort of double-reversal, adopting the attitude of white, bourgeois "bohemians" in post-war Greenwich Village as the first layer of erudite WASPy-ness that masked his racialized background. It makes this quotation from him at once more apt, and more ironic:

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.

Aphorism (regarding writing)

The most ignorant copier copies best.

For similar (and grander) statements to the same effect, please see my article, "The Brain and the Tomb," in the January issue of The Believer, about a medieval palimpsest that contains the oldest existing writing of Archimedes.

Floating Worlds

This weekend I visited the bonsai garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Most bonsai are arranged off-center--planted to one side or the other of their pot's axis, or with a trunk slanting away from it. A note on one of the walls of the exhibit offered an explanation from the garden's chief Bonsaiman: "The center is for the Deity."

I thought of catamarans, of bicycles, of the innovation of parliamentary government, of donuts and bagels, of LPs, of equal signs, of a passage from Nabokov I had just read:
the very attraction...lies...in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised.

Bonsai is one of those idioms that appears timeless and pure, but is in fact modern and hybrid. The cultivation of miniature plants was a well-established and highly regarded art by the 14th century. A scroll from the Kamakura period (1185-1333) argues that "to appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved potted trees is to love deformity". But these trees were always taken from the wild, and their natural miniaturization merely maintained. It was not until the 20th century, when the previously unknown art became popular in western countries, and the globalization of Japanese culture created a huge demand for the trees, that Japanese craftsmen learned to start with young trees and keep them small artificially with root-pruning and wires.

For two centuries before Commodore Matthew Perry's canons arrived at Kanagawa in 1854, Japan's now-familiar crescent of islands, balanced around the empty sea east of Russia, was itself a blank spot on the West's cultural maps. The only Europeans allowed in the country were Dutch traders, restricted to a post on the island of Dejima. (Interestingly, the bonsai house at the Botanical Gardens is named after Cornelius Vander Starr, the son of a Dutch railroad engineer from California, who founded American International Group--now the largest insurance company in the world. Starr began his career as a mail clerk in Yokohama during the lull between the World Wars.)

Within a decade after Japan was opened to international trade, its aesthetics began tipping the balance of arts far beyond bonsai. European painters, from Monet to Bonnard, became fascinated with Japanese woodcuts. As Paris became a hub of exported Japanese culture, the subjects of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings drifted toward the corners of their canvasses.

How much of this history was Ernest Hemingway conscious of when, living in Paris in the 1920s, he began writing according to a "new theory"? He mentions his germinating technique briefly in A Moveable Feast, in the chapter "Hunger Was Good Discipline":
Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything…It was a very simple story called ‘Out of Season’ and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted it and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Dots

Yesterday I picked up a copy of the business section from the November 19th New York Times that had been left in the bathroom. I was surprised to find the section dominated by media-related stories. Maybe this would not be so surprising to someone who reads the business section regularly. Of the four stories on the front page, one dealt with the coinciding strikes by Broadway stagehands and Hollywood screenwriters; one with the launch of an internet television network; one with a maverick film producer; and the last with the recent, media-magnetic OPEC conference.

I realize that blogs often serve as little more than personalized news digests, so I'll resist, for a moment, reviewing what I read there. The tiles in our bathroom are made to resemble marble, but close inspection reveals that their marble pattern consists of a grid of tiny dots, like a Lichtenstein painting. I don't think I've seen marble-print tiles anywhere else. Turning a few pages into the business section, I found stories of not just of media, but of media doubling media, directing media, and misquoting media:

One article explained that women's book clubs, long an insulated form of media ignored by the larger world of publishing, are now being recognized as powerful trend-setters in the book industry. One woman, who heads ten book groups and lives in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, now acts as a sort of informal marketing liaison between several publishing company and the powerful inner circles of suburban women's book discussion groups.
An entry from the increasingly ubiquitous Wikipedia, another Times article explained, was reproduced, word for word, in a recent book on oil in the Middle East by strangely named author George Orwel. The entry dealt with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Copyright infringement was not an issue with the open-source wiki page, and the author of the entry was not concerned by the borrowing.

The already ubiquitous Paris Hilton was recently credited, by the Associated Press, with raising awareness for the suffering of drunken, rancorous elephants in northeastern India. It turns out that attribution was fallacious, though the plight of the elephants is not: the animals really do go on drunken rampages after getting into farmers' rice beer, but the story about Hilton was constructed around a manufactured quotation in a British tabloid called The Daily Star. It made it to an entertainment news website, then was picked up by an Indian AP correspondent. Earlier this year, the A.P. broke a moratorium on Hilton coverage when she was jailed for drunk driving.

Our marble-print tiles, intended to be slightly classy, instead make the bathroom look cheap. I imagined our faux-marble was supposed to mimic some specific marble variety, with a specific pattern, from a specific location: Chinese cream jade? Mexican Rosa Aurora? Solker Kristallmor, from Austria? Comparisons with online marble indexes instead led me to conclude that our tiles originated in the imagination of a faux-marble designer somewhere, or maybe a committee of designers, charged with creating a pattern that satisfied some Platonic ideal of veined pink marble, without actually resembling any existing specimen.
One (genuine) quotation from the Times story on the unconventional film producer might be clarifying here : A venerable MC once advised the filmmaker, who was planning a biopic about a then up-and-coming rapper, not to "clown out our world." The producer has profitably followed that advice ever since.

A Mantling of the Blood

Recently, while on a farm in New Jersey, I opened a door to what I thought was the bathroom of the office-building. Expecting a toilet, my eyes were instead assaulted by a pair of dead deer hanging from hooks above two small pools of blood. My brain seemed to recognize a corpse first, and a deer second. In the first flash of unconscious thought after I opened the door, I felt what we are supposed to think that doomed character in a horror flick feels when he first stumbles upon the serial killer’s bloody work. The conscious part of my brain almost immediately arranged the scene into something coherent—hunter’s game hung in preparation to be processed—but a vague feeling of alarm lingered. I was on the farm for a photo shoot, and the people on the shoot were using the office building for their equipment. The farm’s owners hadn’t thought to tell us what the back of the building was used for.

It’s hard to say how natural my reaction was—whether there’s something in our brain that’s triggered when we see a slain body, or whether the surprised horror I felt was conditioned by things like the formulas of hack-‘em-up movies. But even those formulas might suggest we have an innate reaction to the sight of a murder victim, if the shock of the scene truly depends on it. Last weekend I saw The Assassination of Jesse James, which is not a horror movie, but a visually poetic elegy for a hunted man, containing a fair amount of realistic violence. In it, the narrator informs us that James’ preserved body drew thousands of paying visitors, and photographs of it sold millions of copies. Whether or not this account is true, it suggests that precisely this thrill--of glimpsing in a corpse the possibility of one’s own end--drew the crowds, as much as James’ fame while alive.
I can imagine that other times and cultures might have been more comfortable around a corpse. In Inca cosmology, for instance, there is no "moment of death"--death is a gradual transformation from a fresh, pliable state, to a dried-up, immutable one. The Incas' view of a corpse must have been radically different than our modern, Western view. In his diaries of the 1660s, Samuel Pepys reports deaths and burials with dizzying frequency, suggesting those occurrences were more habitual in his time. The death of an uncle (whose body is kept at first in the house and then in the yard before the funeral); a woman who sails across the channel with her husband’s cadaver; the abrupt passing of the Duke of York’s son: none warrant more than a brisk report in Pepys’ account. Only the body of a man murdered by his brother in a scuffle near his house rouses an emotional statement in the diary. Pepys writes: “after dinner [I] went in the church, and there saw his corpse with the wound in his left breast.” He calls it “a sad spectacle, and a broad wound, which makes my hand now shake to write of it.” The slain body elicits a response that those of the naturally dead do not—yet I can’t tell if it’s the wound's appearance, or the circumstances of the death that unsteadies Pepys’ typically even, journalistic hand.

Later on the day of the shoot, I passed the same door again, to find one of the farm's owners pushing the hanging carcasses on their hooks into a storage freezer. Hunters drop off their kills, the farm processes them, and the hunters come to pick up the product, she explained. She showed me inside the freezer, where bagged trophy heads sat on a shelf, each bag with the name of the hunter it awaited. She asked if I hunted. To her busy eye, the dead deer were just another farm chore. But as the shoot dragged on in the first autumn dusk of the year, and an ancient basset hound drooped back and forth across the yard, the farm felt disconcertingly emptied (the abandoned buildings near the road, at that moment used for the shoot, had been occupied by cattle until recently), and something of my earlier disturbance lingered.
A painting I saw a few weeks ago at the Met by Jan Weenix, called The Falconer's Bag, takes the trophy as its subject. It depicts a hunter's prize, but is itself a sort of trophy piece--a masterly composition, whose effect is heightened by the fact that its true-to-death rendering of slain birds in front of a classical backdrop could not have been executed from an actual scene. The hunt and its trappings were popular subjects in 17th century Dutch art, commissioned both by the aristocracy, who could participate in the pastime, and the aspiring bourgeoisie, who couldn't. In these "game-pieces," the representation of the slain body becomes an assertion of a successful life. But Weenix's painting retains a sense of twilight, decadence, and loss--as if the birds would not be eaten, but left to rot among the statuary of a baroque garden.
While I waited for the shoot to finish, I read a book of poems by W.B. Yeats I had with me. As if on purpose, I came across the tiny, two-sentence "Death of the Hare." In it, the narrator links a lover's glance with the moment of the kill; later, beside the slain hare, he recognizes in both (as he experiences again) the blow felt at the sight of "wildness lost."