http://www.moistworks.com/

Check out this article- fascinating!

>>
Thursday, December 21, 2006

Locust St.'s Chris O'Leary emailed the other week and asked if MW would be raising a glass to the late, great George W.S. Trow. I wrote back right away, saying yes, of course. Then I got ambivalent. He's an important writer to me, personally - his style and sentences made as much of an impression as whatever he had to say. And, of course, Trow had a great deal to say, and I agreed with a lot of it. More than that - I was always emphatic, but back when I was young and emphatic, Trow taught me that it was ok to be that way.On the other hand, what a shitty death; I'm not sure it's something to celebrate. I asked O'Leary if it was ok if I posted something from years ago instead. So, this is kind of old - it's from FEED, c. 2000, when I was twenty-seven, and not quite putting things together yet. It's long, and idiotic. But, because Trow did get to see his worst fears realized, I hope it's not inappropriate. Whatever the case, you should certainly listen to Johnnie Ray's "Cry," and if you've never heard Joe Bataan's cover, my advice is to listen to it on drugs.

CRYJohnnie RayOkeh : 1961Available on: Cry!Bear Family: 1990[Buy It]

At twenty-year intervals over the course of the past forty-six years - in 1960, 1980, and again in 2000 - three writers associated with The New Yorker published separate installments of what, in hindsight, amounts to a unified theory of culture. Dwight Macdonald's Masscult and Midcult, George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context, and, most recently, John Seabrook's Nobrow.Macdonald, who died eighteen years ago, was the archetype of old-guard intellectualism. Educated at Phillips Exeter and Yale, he served, at various times, as an editor of the Partisan Review, a film critic for Esquire, and a book reviewer for The New Yorker. But it was at Fortune that Macdonald cut his teeth, and Masscult and Midcult - which was originally published in the Partisan Review in the Spring of 1960, and for which he's best remembered today - can be seen as a direct reaction against what he learned there. Henry Luce's magazine empire - of which Time, Life, and Fortune were the cornerstones - was both the reflection and a contributing factor to the rise of a media-industrial complex which propelled America towards the condition of Empire in the 1930s. But the conditions that made Empire possible, Macdonald worried, also led to a homogenization in American life. Long before "atomization" had entered the sociological vernacular, he wrote that "the tendency of modern industrial society is to transform the individual into the mass man... a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities because they are related to each other neither as individuals nor as members of a community. In fact, they are not related to each other at all but only to some impersonal, abstract, crystallizing factor.... The mass man is a solitary atom, uniform with the millions of other atoms that go to make up the 'lonely crowd.'"Macdonald wasn't the first to articulate the threat; rather, his was a popular distillation of Frankfurt School philosophy, much in the same way that Thomas Frank and The Baffler distilled the same school of thought for the dot-com generation. Nor was Macdonald the first to deal with the cultural fallout - a blurring of the distinction between Highbrow and Lowbrow culture that Clement Greenberg had written about twenty years earlier. But Macdonald was eloquent and impassioned, and the timing and scope of his critique, which is rooted in aesthetic considerations but encompasses the political, gives it a resonance that echoes well into the present day. Macdonald drew an explicit parallel between the "mass society" of the 1950s and Europe's totalitarian regimes, noting that both cultures "have systematically broken every communal link - family, church, trade union, local and regional loyalties, even down to ski and chess clubs - and have reforged them so as to bind each atomized individual directly to the center of power." For him mass culture is, in fact, a cult: In a fascist regime, the center of power is occupied by the cult of State, in Communist countries, by the cult of Personality, in an industrialized democracy, by a cult of the People enforced by corporate and governmental beaurocracies and maintained by an army of pollsters and statisticians.

"When one hears a questionnaire-sociologist talk about setting up an investigation," Macdonald wrote,
one realizes that he regards people as mere congeries of conditional reflexes.... At the same time, of necessity, he sees the statistical majority as the great Reality.... Like a Lord of Masscult, he is - professionally - without values, willing to take seriously any idiocy if it is held by many people... The aristocrat's approach to the masses is less degrading to them, as it is less degrading to a man to be shouted at than to be treated as nonexistent. But the plebs have their dialectical revenge: indifference to their human quality means prostration before their statistical quantity, so that a movie magnate who cynically "gives the public what it wants" - i.e, assumes it wants trash - sweats with anxiety if the box-office returns drop 5 per cent. "

The result, for Macdonald, was neither high culture nor folk, but a hopelessly muddled monster that absorbed everything from the avant-garde to the professional wrestling and turned it into a "Kulturkatzejammer" - a "midcult" that was at best a vulgarized reflection of high culture, and at worst a slough of kitsch and sensationalism. Not art, but something like the Soviet's Socialist Realism; an art for everyone and no one, aimed at the lowest common denominator. The alternatives, in his eyes, were to restore the class lines that allowed the original cultural elite to emerge, or to erect a permanent barricade between high culture and the masses. Borrowing a phrase from Stendahl, Macdonald pleaded with the "happy few" - those writers, critics, philosophers, composers, and architects sticking to their posts as guardians of high culture - to ignore the masses altogether, and asked that the "only public they consider... be that of [their] peers." A vague manifesto, to be sure, but a manifesto nonetheless. In comparison, Trow's essay reads like a suicide note.

CRYJoe BataanLatin Funk BrotherFania/Vampi : 1972[But It]

In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first necessary to procure a phantom, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage... -Kierkegaard, The Present Age Macdonald invoked Kierkegaard's specter as an example of the tide he was struggling against, but it wasn't until twenty years later that George Trow gave it a name - celebrity. Trow's celebrity is neither the self that supports the image, nor is it exactly the image itself; rather it is "[a] record of the expression of demographically significant preferences: the lunge of demography here as opposed to there." It lives in a history stripped of context, in which "nothing [is] judged -- only counted" and in which "the ideal [becomes] agreement rather than well judged action." And since it is neither mass nor man, but rather a reflection of statistical leanings, Trow doesn't trace its history in time, but rather plots it as a trajectory between two grids:
[As] the middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy. Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life - a shimmer of national life - and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be.... The grid of national life was very large now, but the space in which one man felt at home shrank. It shrank to intimacy.... In the vast distance between the protection and the protected, there is space for mirages of pseudo-intimacy. It is in this space that celebrities dance. It is, in fact, almost impossible to distinguish Trow's idea of celebrity from his definition of television:

What is it?... Two abilities: to do a very complex kind of work, involving electrons, and then to cover the coldness of that with a hateful familiarity. Why hateful? Because it hasn't anything to do with a human being as a human being is strong. It has to do with a human being as a human being is weak and willing to be fooled: the human being's eagerness to perceive as warm something that is cold, for instance, his eagerness to be a part of what one cannot be a part of, to love what cannot be loved.

Within the Context of No Context, which is composed as a series of aphorisms and miniature essays, is unspeakably sad. Trow's sentences are short from grief. His italics bleed. He published the piece in The New Yorker, and largely disappeared from its pages, and public view, not long afterwards. Where Macdonald is motivated by self-interest, or, to be more generous, class or professional interest - it is, after all, the space of cultural guardians, which he himself occupies, that Macdonald is struggling to protect - Trow's concern is profoundly American. I'd like to imagine that, if we could somehow bring Whitman back to life to deliver his Democratic Vistas in person, it would be Trow we'd pick to pull him aside and explain that, ahem, things didn't work out quite as the old man had hoped.But Trow's roots aren't fundamentally different from Macdonald's. He, too, is a member of the old guard - the scion of one of New York's oldest publishing families - and a graduate of Exeter and Harvard. And though his prose is stronger, and his sympathies wider, he is eulogizing the same thing Macdonald sought to protect.* * *

John Seabrook comes from a similar background. An heir to the Seabrook frozen-food fortune (you can still see the brand, which no longer belongs to Seabrook's family, at your local supermarket), he studied at Princeton and wrote a master's thesis on Eliot at Oxford. But if Trow is a more generous version of Macdonald, Seabrook, who came of age in Tina Brown's New Yorker, is an entirely different animal. Like many New Yorker writers, he is a fine stylist - remarkably fine considering how unselfconscious his writing is; it seems to spill out of him wholly formed and unfiltered - and a keen observer of cultural mores. But Seabrook stands firmly on the other side of a cultural schism which the surface similarities to Trow and Macdonald don't quite bridge. For him, Macdonald's argument and Trow's lament miss the point."One of Tina Brown's gifts as an editor," he writes "was that she saw the American cultural hierarchy for what it really was [italics mine]: not a hierarchy of taste at all, but a hierarchy of power that used taste to cloak its real agenda." It's a revealing aside, not only because it firmly places Seabrook's position on a particular side of the culture wars, but because it doesn't allow for the possibility of taking any other side; it assumes - as Brown herself did - that the realization dictates a course of action. Namely, exploiting that very power structure for all it's worth. Thus, in Brown's hands the role of editor becomes that of trend-spotter and power broker, trading on The New Yorker's ever-diminishing collateral as a last remaining voice of cultural authority (ever-diminishing because a good portion of it was being siphoned off into Tina Brown's own account as cultural arbitrageur) to leverage her writers into positions of proximity to buzz, celebrity, money, and power - all of which increasingly began looking like one and the same thing.

Who's to say what's right these days?
What, with our modern ideas and products? -Homer Simpson

Needless to say, the writer's role changed as well. Seabrook's book is a collection of celebrity profiles he wrote for the magazine over the course of the past five years, stitched together with anecdotes about how he came to write about the particular celebrity in question. The segues consists of passages like the following:
Tina and [Ben] Goldberg [the CEO of Mercury records], I knew, had certain mutual (synergistic) interests. Mercury, it was shortly to be announced, would be putting out a CD series of New Yorker writers reading their work. They also supported similar charities... and were loosely attatched to the same circle of tastemakers in New York City. For me, accepting the assignment would inevitably mean functioning not only as a reporter, but also as a kind of broker in a negotiated relationship between Tina and Goldberg, who were themselves functioning as brokers in a negoitiated relationship between Si Newhouse and Polygram. I knew I would be wading a little bit deeper into the vast, tepid swamp of Buzz, with its surrounding cedar bogs of compromise. On the other hand, the idea of a rock prodigy - a kid who had learned to be a rock star from watching rock stars like Kurt Cobain on MTV - did sound like a good story.Seabrook is so forthcoming about compromises he's made in order to curry favor with Brown that it seems besides the point to fault him for making them. His book is, in almost every way, the most honest and eye-opening account of life at The New Yorker published thus far. But the fact remains that, where Macdonald spotted a blood-dimmed tide rushing his way, and Trow found himself drowning in the flood, a new generation of writers seems to have grown gills, and forgotten what dry land looks like.

CAN IT BE ALL SO SIMPLEWu-Tang ClanEnter The WuTang (36 Chambers)RCA : 1993[Buy It]

"It's not really about is this a terrible thing or is this a good thing," Seabrook told a radio interviewer, not long after his book was published, "because I don't really feel like I can make that judgment. But I can show people what's going through my mind as I think about these things." This sentiment would have outraged Macdonald, I think, and brought tears to Trow's eyes. But Nobrow is, in many ways, the direct manifestation of Trow's ideas. Take, for instance, Trow's invocation of the First World War:
Very rarely are [game show] contestants asked about the old history, the history before demographics became the New History. When this older, more distant world is invoked, it is made obvious that this world is mystifying and too difficult to be comfortable with. One game-show host asked a question about the First World War and then described the First World War as "certainly a military event of considerable importance." He was assuring his audience that the First World War was popular in its own day.and compare it to what Seabrook has to say about the Second:

The Wu didn't seem to know about anything that happened before 1975, which was around when they were born. If you told Ol' Dirty Bastard or GhostFace Killah about, say, World War II, he might say "Whoa, that's some marvelous-ass shit," as though history were just something to roll up in a blunt and smoke. But the Wu were real artists: they got that post-Jamesian flow of urban consciousness that goes through everyone's mind just right.

One might ask, when coming across a passage like this, whether "this is a terrible thing or not" should, in fact, be The New Yorker writer's concern. Seabrook would probably point out that the question has no antecedant, because in his world, the World War happened in a context that no longer exists. "The lie of television," Trow wrote, "has been that there are contexts to which television will grant an access. Since lies last, usually, no more than one generation, television will re-form around the idea that television itself is a context to which television will grant an access." That prediction seems to have come true a decade or more ago, with the advent of Letterman and Seinfeld. Today, the context of television has expanded even further: more and more, it seems, all the equipment one needs to go over at cocktail parties is an encyclopedic knowledge of Simpsons episodes. Come to think of it, seeing Seabrook cheerfully whore his way through the cultural wasteland doesn't bring to mind Trow's essay, or Macdonald's at all. Instead, it's a bit like watching the Happy Hooker wander through Hersey's Hiroshima, taking notes.