Watch your step at the office

At first I thought it was the screen: its glow embeds in your eyes, numbs your vision, warming your brain to a soft buttery spread only later to gel, caking your cranium with useless residual. But, no, it was not the screen. So I thought next, maybe the desk and chair. Spreading out before you a kingdom's worth of shrugged off, passed over trivialities to rule over from your wheeled, anonymous, adjustable office throne, a Bic Round Stic, your scepter. But it wasn't this, either. Although the sitting there, propped in front of the monitor didn't help. In the end it was me--the inevitable bend in the path I soldiered on, that path that affords such double 17-inch kingly views as this. As pointless the navigation, as mindless the destination.

A thing on Paul Goodman's "Growing Up Absurd"

The full title, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, explains it: this is writer and intellectual Paul Goodman's inventory of social ills leading kids to rebel, drop out, and be generally dysfunctional in the 1950s. Nothing escapes his criticism: poor city planning, the lack of meaningful work, kids' intellectually starved education, churches born of hierarchy and dogma rather than community--he calls out each and every failed institution and stunted revolution as he defends the angry and resigned.

I read Growing Up Absurd at the same time I took an interest in "Leave it to Beaver" reruns. Watching June Cleaver fret over young Theodor arriving home from school ten minutes late or Wally changing his hairstyle shows, I think, the kind of anxiety Goodman was responding to--anxiety egged on by starched social pundits in horn-rimmed glasses cautioning middle class parents about the troubled young man in the black leather jacket that might emerge from their own child. To these parents Goodman essentially says, Of course you don't understand them; they reject everything you've spent your life dealing with, negotiating, rationalizing, and accepting. And for good reason!

Goodman assumes the audience shares his progressive views, and some sections are confusing, as if written hastily. Plus, the negativity made this a pretty tough read. I found greater value in its being a historical document more so than spot-on social criticism.

She died, her wing on her young

Bon Iver's 4AD/Jagjaguwar Session

 

I Figured

Exercising offered no incentive. Nothing immediate, anyway. She had tried less orthodox kinds, like climbing trees and using the Hula Hoop. Stretching, walking, bowling: it all came to naught. Until yoga. Well, not so much yoga as one specific pose that she thought of as yoga; she would stand, back straight, twisted at the hips some 15 or 20 degrees with her head turned the same direction so her chin closed in on the shoulder. She struck this pose more than a dozen times a day now. No, this wasn't exercise, she knew, but it felt good anyway, which was more than could be said of jogging in place or trying a push-up.

On a Saturday evening when the air was dusting windshields with baby drops the meaning went silent and her body contracted from the pose at first through some strange cowardice of the knees, but then from loss of concentration because concentration had turned towards the words which bore traces of a philosophy but sounded a recrimination. She figured she could answer "No, you're right" with either the confidence of a determinist or the shame of a busted teenager, but what she wanted now was to inscribe her name in the mist that sedated all the shatter-proof glass.

Postscript: The age of your friends' anxiety

Wednesday I went on about the New York magazine piece "Listening to Xanax", calling it weak and intellectually lazy. I thought I'd pile on. The author of that piece wrote, "When news outlets began reporting that a cocktail of alcohol, Valium, and Xanax might have caused Whitney Houston’s death, it felt oddly inevitable. Coke binges are for fizzier eras; now people overdo it trying to calm down." Well, as reported everywhere yesterday, "Singer Whitney Houston's use of cocaine combined with a heart condition contributed to her accidental drowning, coroner officials said" (Los Angeles Times).

A manner of speaking (at NPR)

A lot of the hosts and contributors on NPR have acquired that speaking quirk of frequently beginning sentences with the word so. So is now a discourse marker or discourse particle.

The age of your friends' anxiety

The author of the New York magazine piece "Listening to Xanax" declares this the age of anxiety and, therefore, of anti-anxiety medication: "If the nineties were the decade of Prozac, all hollow-eyed and depressed, then this is the era of Xanax, all jumpy and edgy and short of breath." How did an editor at a major, reputable publication think something was being said here?

First we learn of a kind of situational (as opposed to compulsive) anxiety:

“Situational anxiety” today stems from threats that are both everywhere and nowhere at once. How will the debtor nations in the eurozone ever manage to pay back what they owe? How can Israel disarm Iran’s nuclear program without inciting the messiest international conflict since World War II? How can you be absolutely, 100 percent sure the cantaloupe you had for lunch wasn’t contaminated with listeria that will make you or your kids or one of your guests deathly sick?

Oh, anxiety can be scary, she confesses, but it also lives this "second life as a more general mind-set and cultural stance, one defined by an obsession with an uncertain future." Nevermind that the future is always uncertain, flashing warning signs up ahead--more to the point, nobody in the society she's talking about has suffered an anxiety attack or even lost a wink of sleep worrying about the kind of macro political and economic issues she describes. Nobody thinks, "Oh, Lord, what's Iran gonna do? I need a Xanax!"

Because this one was so weak, she quickly switches to another intellectually weak premise, focusing now on what is called functional anxiety--something she acknowledges that everyone has and has always had:

But functional anxiety, which afflicts nearly everyone I know, is a murkier thing. Its sufferers gather in places like New York, where relentlessness and impatience are the highest values, and in industries built on unrelenting deadlines and tightrope deals.

This obliterates her initial premise--that there's something unique about this age in terms of anxiety. But she soldiers on. Her sample functionally anxious subject says,

“I use my anxiety to be better at what I do,” says an executive at a boutique PR firm. “A certain amount of anxiety makes me a better employee but a less happy person, and you have to constantly balance that. If I didn’t constantly fear I was about to be fired or outed as a loser, I’m afraid I might be lazy.”

So, her overly dramatic but otherwise mentally healthy, motivated, ambitious, and competitive friends she describes in the language of mental illness. Here, she extinguishes all hope of having made a point: "Not quite a disease, or even a pathology, low-grade anxiety is more like a habit." In other words, something so ordinary I shouldn't have brought it up at all.

And from much ado about nothing, she explores what to do about nothing. First, she briefly describes folks who resist the drug-first approach, completely misconstruing them as shooting to "cure" her successful friends of their healthy habits:

A cure isn’t what the PR executive with the occasional Klonopin habit wants. “My own personal experience is that there’s a healthy level of anxiety, and I don’t believe ‘healthy’ is the absence of anxiety,” she says. “I live in a world that puts unreasonable demands on me, and sometimes I need help. I wish I could do it without the pills, but I can’t.”

Exactly--you're already healthy, and not this imagined poster sufferer in an age of anxiety.

Besides, no one wants to cure you or your stupid friends.

Notes:

• In the meantime, she ignores obvious related issues: differences in drug use by class (and hers is an upper class, to be sure), the history of anxiety and its treatment (in and out of psychology), the rise of diagnoses, the increase in medications and prescriptions, the trend of first prescriptions causing need for a second, exterior sources of existential dread over time, and on and on.

• Worst anecdote she gives: "A friend of mine had dental surgery recently, a procedure she both hates and fears. So proud was she that she’d sworn off Klonopin that she decided to forgo the medication ahead of her dental appointment. “I thought, Don’t be a baby. That’s just weak. You should be able to handle things.” She had a panic attack in the chair and was “a total bitch,” she says, to the dentist. “Oh, wait a second,” she reminded herself as the drill whined and the tooth dust spattered, “there’s a medical reason for these things.” "

• "Its sufferers gather in places like New York"? In places like ... New York?

On Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot

An eccentric hanger-on holds court in Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (Le Neveu de Rameau ou La Satire seconde). This enlightenment-era novella by the French philosopher and critic narrates a lively conversation between two unnamed characters: a narrator, identified as "I", and the nephew of the French composer Rameau, identified as "He".

The nephew, who dominates the discussion, turns out to be frustratingly paradoxical; until now he has been a great high society flatterer and parasite because he acts foolish for them, but his foolishness is by design, and he's debased on principal and shallow only by having achieved a wide breadth of appreciation. Although often inconsistent, the perspectives he shares with us all have a cynical lining. He voices his most vital thesis halfway through the testimony:

And since I can achieve happiness through failings natural to me which I have acquired without toil and retain without effort ... it would be strange indeed for me to torture myself like a soul in hell so as to mutilate myself into something quite different from what I am. I should give myself a character quite foreign to me and qualities most praiseworthy (I grant you that, so as to have no argument), but which would cost a lot to acquire and land me nowhere, because I should be continually satirizing the rich from whom poor devils like me have to make a living.

You can hear the bitter results of the author's internal conflict--the desire to do right versus what's expedient, whether to pursue ideals or approach life pragmatically. That he can see no middle ground is almost tragic, as he's forged a nihilistic reality atop his internal anguish, leaving a despicable hypocrite to face in the mirror.

I enjoyed it.

This type of book needs a good translator. The version I read, an old Penguin Classic, has a great one: Leonard Tancock, whose brief front matter bio includes this line: "Since preparing his first Penguin Classic (1949), he has been intensely interested in problems of translation, about which he has written, lectured, and broadcast, and which he believes is an art rather than a science." He's a craftsman! And then in the foreword he quickly notes the difficulties presented him in this very situated, socially contextual dialog, then adds that "Complete notes would be as long or longer than the text."

Note:

• The Wikipedia page is pretty good.

Billy Corgan at SXSW 2012

My sense is Billy Corgan can't say word without immediately being crapped on. This comment from SXSW, for example: "I was part of a generation that changed the world - and it was taken over by poseurs."

Corgan was discussing the Internet's effect on musical fame and artistry, and the obstacles that keep new artists from emerging. As the author of this Billboard post put it: "If there was an overarching theme, though, it's that both musicians and technology are feeding the mentality that fame is what should be hoped for, leaving artistry in its wake."

Corgan's comment is mostly laughable because it's such a hyperbolic generalization. But one angle of it may be something: Corgan's generation created Alternative music. Although that label now is as meaningless as Indie is, Alternative* music originally meant that outcasts, i.e., Freaks and Geeks, now had their own community in which acceptance was a foregone conclusion. You like Jane's Addition? You're in. You like Dinosaur Jr.? You're in. The only ground rule: Don't judge based on appearances.

Now, jump ahead to the new generation: To make it today, bands are forced and encouraged to act out, to create online selves so as to be liked; to one-up the next guy to get passer-by traffic--the ultimate in disinterested attention paid on unequal terms--something not altogether unlike the stripper-customer relationship.

The Alternative scene of Corgan's day obviously wasn't the first to welcome outcasts and losers (so to speak), but it was the first to, arguably, make them the mainstream. If nothing else, I think Corgan said something worth considering rather than just venting the bitterness of a has-been or the histrionics of a megalomaniac.

*I mean Alternative music to the extent that such a thing is reducible.

Notes:

• You could also say the when an out-group becomes the in-group, they soon adopt and enforce social rules and prejudices like the previous in-group.

• Internet-wise, as part of Generation X, Corgan's generation could maybe claim to have pioneered the common usage of the public Internet and with having populated it with its earliest content, giving it shape and color, meaning and appeal, from early social networking to wiki-style content development. But, whatever the accomplishments of the next generations, they likely can't be called poseurs.

A possible trend in journalism and writing

I bet critical obituaries will grow more common. The most recent high-profile example is Salon's "Andrew Breitbart, 1969-2012". This trend--if it is one--I first noticed after Christopher Hitchens died. Yes, some figures, like Hitchens and Breitbart, are more likely to draw fire after death, but now everything is politics. So look out--after a celebrity or politician of any stripe dies, writers will rush to publish something harsh. Doing so, they imagine, is just setting the record straight. (Weird how that runs parallel to current journalism's rampant fairness bias--reporters giving equal weight to opposing views when one side's argument doesn't deserve it.)

Mike Nesmith on Davy Jones and The Monkees

Rolling Stone published an email interview with Mike Nesmith that included the following two question/answers:

RS: In your estimation, why did the Monkees burn out so quickly? The whole thing ended after little more than two years. 

MN: That is a long discussion – and I can only offer one perspective of a complex pattern of events. The most I care to generalize at this point is to say there was a type of sibling suppression that was taking place unseen. The older sibling followed the Beatles and Stones and the sophistication of a burgeoning new world order – the younger siblings were still playing on the floor watching television. The older siblings sang and danced and shouted and pointed to a direction they assumed The Monkees were not part of and pushed the younger sibling into silence. The Monkees went into that closet. This is all retrospect, of course – important to focus on the premise that "no one thought The Monkees up." The Monkees happened – the effect of a cause still unseen, and dare I say it, still at work and still overlooked as it applies to present day.

RS: Do you have a favorite Davy Jones-sung Monkees song? If so, what makes it your favorite? 

MN: "Daydream Believer." The sensibility of the song is [composer] John Stewart at his best, IMHO – it has a beautiful undercurrent of melancholy with a delightful frosting, no taste of bitterness. David's cheery vocal leads us all in a great refrain of living on love alone.

What to make of that first exchange? convoluted and cryptic as it is. Sounds like Nesmith argues that The Monkees evaporated not because they were a synthetic marketing formula, but because they were not. They were a real live boy mistaken for a wooden Pinocchio.

Secondly, I like his characterization of Jones' "Daydream Believer". I have always felt that melancholy chord in the performance--and that is the key to the song, because living on love alone can be only a dream. A mighty dream.

Notes:

• RIP David Thomas "Davy" Jones (30 December 1945 – 29 February 2012)