Gloss

A postscript:

The standard lifespan for a blog clocks in at about two years, and that puts me as falling just short of the average, which is where I seem to be most comfortable. When I started Gloss in late 2006 it was with the intention of meditating on two conflicting pet theories:

1. I think a. That media can only be a barometric instrument, not an influential one. They can predict where we are headed, but they don’t direct us. b. That in the metaphor of the body politic or the body cultural, media represent not our circulatory system but our endocrine system. What they distribute is not information, but moral values, and they adapt and respond to changing moral needs with a marketplace efficiency. c. that the developments of first television and later internet can be understood as examples of natural selection, which is to say they are the giraffe’s long neck: beneficial accidents that occurred in direct response to a demand. Television was the most efficient possible moral check for society in its post World War II through Cold War stage, and the Internet has succeeded it being the most efficient moral instrument for our more complex current stage.

2. I also think a. Television’s content was designed as a monument to Death. The jump cuts between channels and the randomness of programming have been reflected in a consensus of contemporary artistic interpretations of the experience of the afterlife. That experience is a holdout and willful misinterpretation of ’50s and ’60s notions of consciousness: of the idea of the mind as the sum randomly firing neurons, of life flashing before your eyes, of the split-second moment after death being perceived in the dying brain as infinite (that is, a time trap). The whole idea is tres-Leary, and the theory has found expression in the works of Dick, Linklater, and Lynch. In this vein, when we watch TV, we are practicing for death. We are glimpsing our own afterlife. b. In terms of our accomplishment as a nation, television is America’s pyramids.

If you’ve been a reader you’ll notice I spent most of my time instead posting kneejerk reactions to whatever cultural and political entertainment was happening that day; that represents a victory on their parts.

I might figure out what to do with this site when I get back, but right now I’m off for another vacation in the Pacific Northwest, to gather my inner Dharma Bum and hunt for specimens of the elusive Oregonian tree penis.

It would seem we have all agreed to debate the merits of satire.

Look, satire is a poison pill. It is an art for moralizers and hucksters, closer to sermons or parables than politer forms of comedy. It preaches to the worst in humanity. In the name of pushing boundaries and freeing minds, it reinforces our most reductive understandings of socially acceptable behavior through the mockery of all outliers. Satire’s weapons are not shock but judgment and hate, and in its purest expression satire owes its popularity to simple ingenious packaging: as its audience I get all the juvenile crudeness, gratuitous titty shots, and racist humor I crave, but I get a didactic message and sense of smug self-superiority too.

Satire operates on two degrees of exclusion: the objects of the satire, and
the ones who don’t get the joke. These are the boundaries of satire’s morality. The first tells us the boundary of the acceptable. The second is the boundary of the Elect: not just righteous, but hip.

Satire will take on anything that’s different, but for satire’s two core audiences—intellectuals and Caucasian teenage boys— a good satire is one that skewers the people in power, our teachers or politicians. It doesn’t skewer power itself, but greed, hypocrisy, and the all-around dumb decisions that powerful people make. For all the fun we have laughing at authority figures, the tone of this skewering is not ‘Burn Down the Halls of Government and Tear Up the Pavement.’ It’s beware the trappings of greed and hypocrisy. Be courteous in your financial and social interactions. Kind, warm hug stuff. Pre-Nietzsche stuff. Church stuff. This irony just a type of submission. No political figure has ever been brought down by satire. (*Note: I would love a correction here.)

Which is why I want to reject satire as the great disenfranchiser. If we could be more accepting of the human comedy, we could be better activists, and better comedians. The Kingdom of Heaven shuts its gates to a cabbage patch of stock characters we have long welcomed into our broader American utopia, as a matter of principle: fools, blowhards, hypocrites, freaks, greedheads, rightwing nutjobs, perverts, industrial capitalists, war profiteers, village drunkards, protestors, golddiggers, gun-toting liberals, pundits, reality show contestants, ivy league cowboys, werewolves, nonsmokers, polygamous fundamentalists, online predators, player haters, trust-fund hipsters, college graduates, politicians, street preachers, magazine editors, truck stop hookers, trial lawyers, interns, and people who own yachts. All indecent, dishonest, easyworking Americans who live their lives uncowed by the self-satisfied tsk-tsking of domestic highbrow comedy.

Let me illustrate the satire problem by choosing a randomly selected example: this week’s New Yorker cover. Through the outrage and the outrage over the outrage that this cartoon has caused, it has helped confirm our definitions of the boundaries of acceptable American identity. (Satire names the absurdity of things, not by claiming the thing itself is not absurd, but that the simple consideration of the thing itself is absurd.)

In keeping with satire’s two levels of exclusion, this cover speaks to three parties: the Obama campaign, the New Yorker’s liberal readership, and the Republican attack machine. All three camps agree on one thing: portraying Barack as a Muslim and Michelle as an angry Black Power holdout is political poison. Obama supporters know that he is not a Muslim and she is not an angry black woman. Quite the opposite: they’re just like us. They’re Americans.

Washington Post: The New Yorker Cover and the Challenge of Satire
Esquire: Heaven Hell Dave Chappelle

For the burgeoning sub-genre of Smiths lyrics stuck on a wall please consider Jonathan Hernández’s ‘Heaven knows I’m miserable now’, installed in 2001 at the home of kurimanzutto’s gallerists in Mexico City, an urban center that has been very kind to both Morrissey and contemporary art over the past decade. This time the letters are built from mirrors and accompanied in the show by a mixtape, featuring songs by the Smiths and others:

“The songs take us through the wide range of sensations produced by love: mystery, passion, deceit, seduction, catharsis, emptiness. The CD case design alludes to the ejaculation that Duchamp sent to his Brazilian lover. Behind the barrage of love’s social and artistic paraphernalia lies a single spurt of sperm, an orgasm, physiological satisfaction, coupling, reproduction. Everything else is an illusion, fantasies that make us suffer.”

A review of the show is archived at ArtNexus

Here-wise, Hernández was featured in Unmonumental at the New Museum and recently had his first U.S. solo show at MC Kunst in Los Angeles.

So while I was away the Internet was talking about the widespread firing of arts and movie critics from our nation’s papers, and the situation that puts us in. It may be a general coincidence that the death of criticism, for economic reasons, follows so closely after the death of theory (in this case, supposedly, for non-economic reasons.) It certainly is a personal coincidence that I was catching up on this while belatedly reading Omnivore’s Dilemma. So my thoughts processed like this:

It is only natural that criticism’s defenders are critics. It is much like this week’s letter in defense of corn syrup, penned by Corn Refiners Association president Audrae Erickson. But exactly what are the readers consuming, and what will they lose if criticism disappears? At its most refined, criticism after theory takes a work of art and processes it until it emerges, just to pick a random example, as a vehicle for discussion of Marxist struggle. Now that piece of criticism can be really satisfying, but not everyone is going to believe those ingredients were there in the original. Which is to say that criticism is a value-added. It is something new, and artificial. It is corn syrup, chicken mcnuggets—the same nutrition in higher density.

So life after criticism, if what the papers say is right, will probably see a go-organic or return-to-natural movement, which I guess would mean taking in our movies and music raw and un-pre-criticized. Or it could be a return of artistic locavores—more “Fugazi fucking rock because they’re from DC!” and less “José González fucking rocks because he’s from everywhere!” It would be hard for me to say what effect any of these developments would have on the triumph of global capitalism.

Fact: Corn syrup is the best!