in which she despairs at the state of the world

i'm in despair once again at the state of society. it's brought on by my reading of susan sontag's on photography. every sentence of this book is packed with meaning. it's thought-provoking and stimulates the intellect in a way that i'll admit i haven't experienced in far too long. the book was written in 1977 when it seems that theory still meant something, before postmodernism got hold of it and stripped meaning of meaning.  don't get me wrong, i'll admit i wholly embraced postmodernism - my shelves are filled with deleuze and guattari, derrida, baudrillard and the like. i am an educational product of the early to mid-90s, what can i say, i rolled around in the postmodernists and adored them, despite the fact that they ultimately deprived the world of any meaning at all.

as i've said before, i write in books. i scribble in the margins, i underline, i make stars and asterisks and draw little pairs of glasses where there's something i want to look up. i scrawl lightbulbs where the text gives me ideas and at times can scarcely decipher my own handwriting, so anxious i apparently was to get a thought down that it's illegible. as you can see in the shot above, sontag's on photography is full of scribblings and underlinings already and i'm only about 40 pages in. i've already got enough fodder and photo titles for my photo-a-day project for the entire month of february. but best of all, my brain is thinking again. i'm not sure when it stopped, but it had stopped. and oddly, i hadn't realized it until i picked up this book.

we were sitting at the breakfast table this morning with our tea and the sunday paper and i came across the illustration above. apparently, young people are so taken with the universe presented in james cameron's avatar that they come away from the film depressed. the blue-skinned girl, in 3D glasses is crying on her mother's knee, saying how sad she is and her mother comforts her, saying she understands, her father was the same after he'd seen all of the episodes of the brewer on DR. they're of course poking fun at this notion, but still. the fact that they've devoted a whole page of the sunday magazine to the notion that young people are depressed because they can't live within a movie, is startling. and is what makes me despair about the state of society. i think everyone should go read something real. i know i'm going to...

the end of postmodernity

we've been inundated over the past few days with the news of michael jackson's death. it seems that the canonization began almost immediately, with the amnesiac collective memory forgetting that he had become at best a freak and at worst a sickening, mangled, pale spectre of himself.

i wasn't a fan and never had any of his albums. while i think the music he made in the early 80s was something special in comparison to the crap that's churned out today, it never really spoke to me. i think for me, even then, the premise of a song like billy jean--that he would impregnate someone and leave them--seemed so absurd that i just couldn't get into him. the spangled glove and the red band uniform just didn't do it for me.  give me madonna. give me prince. but you could keep michael jackson.

so, to be honest, i just can't participate in the mass hysterical grief. in fact, i can't muster any feelings about it whatsover, i am completely and utterly ambivalent. but there are a few things i keep thinking about...

: : are madonna and prince, who both turned 50 this year as well, freaking out?

: : can you imagine being the team of doctors and nurses who worked with him at the hospital, trying to resuscitate him? how they must have seen his real face, mangled beyond any normalcy by countless plastic surgeries? it must have been very sad to see him like that.

: : does this mark the end of postmodernity once and for all? because michael jackson was the very embodiment of postmodernity, wasn't he? a parody so unreal he took on a reality as a parody. the ultimate pastiche of references...the moonwalking, the glove, the red leather, the epaulettes, the spats, the bling before it was called bling, the falsetto, the amusement park at neverland, the ever-more-bizarrely sculpted face, living in bahrain, dangling his baby off a balcony. he was the ultimate postmodern icon. so full of multiple realities that he was stripped entirely of reality. how do we even really know what's gone now?

: : does it also mark, once and for all, the end of the 80s? because while his contemporaries madonna and prince seemed to move on and recognize that new decades came and with them a need for new incarnations of themselves, he never really seemed to realize the 80s were over. and although he tried, with the freaky plastic surgery and bleached skin, to change, he never really left that decade of excess, he never gained any ironic distance to it.

at least the good things he did create - his music - will live on and we can hope that he's found the peace he was so clearly searching for and never found.

the procession of simulacra

until recently i thought that, in addition to (the quite stunning achievement of) bringing the entire world economy to its knees, bush had managed to kill postmodernity. it's just not cool to be postmodern anymore. after real planes crash into real skyscrapers and bring them down and the US engages in real wars against an elusive foe who remains at large in a mountain hideout and a guy named saddam who wasn't really involved, but had the disadvantage of having wronged dubya's daddy, it just seemed like there was no more room for unreality and the simulacra and the simulation. those buildings collapsing were simply all too real.

however, i have had to admit in recent weeks that postmodernism (which i always had quite a soft spot for (reality is, after all, frequently inaccurate)) is alive and well.  just a quick reminder as to one of the main tenants of postmodernity, from our good old friend frederic jameson,--there is "a new kind of superficiality and depthlessness" present in the postmodern condition. additionally, there is a blurring of lines between reality and unreality (that's my favorite part). to try to make it tangible--does the constructed "america" represented by disneyland end up more real than the real america? hmm....i think it might be better to turn to the "real" world to explain what i'm getting at...

consider, sarah palin's appearance on SNL. an appearance in which she attempted to take the piss with the one taking the piss with her. incidentally, i read an article in which tina fey said that she had never really known of a satirical sketch of a political figure where it was possible to lift virtually the entire dialogue directly from what the politician said without tweeking it at all for humorous effect. tina fey does sarah palin better than palin herself does. now THAT's postmodern.  as baudrilliard (one of the kings of postmodern theory) says, "...an implosion of meaning. this is where simulation begins." lines are blurred and politics is entertainment. the mocked becomes the mocker and the mocker the mocked. reality blurs into the unrecognizable.

another example is all of this talk about the "real" america (which seems to mean the bits that will vote for mcpalin). it's so absurd now that there is a "real" virginia and an unreal one (don't really know where west virginia fits into that equation). and a pro-america america and one (apparently the part that can actually THINK) that's the anti-america america (damn those of us who went to U of C). see, postmodern:  at once in and not in. the center has shifted and we can no longer identify what's real and what's unreal.

but, don't take my word for it, check out jon stewart:

memory and forgetting

still working on those bookshelves...it's a LOT of books we're talking about here. and i'm remembering so many things about who i was. i was a person who wrote a 32-page scholarly paper (that got an A, i might add) on madonna. for that purpose, i bought books called things like deconstructing madonna and the madonna connection and from hegel to madonna. it was quite fashionable in the mid-90s to write serious, scholarly cultural criticism on people like madonna at arizona state. there were elvis studies departments at major universities. ahh, those were the days. as i recall, my madonna paper was really more about me than her, but i digress...

i also was a person who read (and extensively underlined) slavoj zizek. he's still churning out books, one every 3-4 months, but i can't keep up anymore. i used to purposely feed my inner homicidal maniac with doses of dostoevsky. i read balkan history for fun. i paged through coffee table books on the world of art movement. i used to dream that i was alive and at my prime in 1913 (who knows, maybe i was...but that's a whole 'nother posting).

i was totally into postmodernism, but didn't agree with jameson that it was the cultural logic of late capitalism. i thought it grew more directly as a reaction to modernism and my explanation of how it came about had more to do with russian formalism than anything. ostranenie. making strange, now there's a word i haven't thought of in awhile. the constant search for the new...aren't we still doing that?

how could i have forgotten that person? lost touch with her? life clearly took me in another direction. and i don't regret it, but i do wonder how i've lived without her these past few years. but i am happy i can stroll down the memory lane of my bookshelves and get in touch with her again. because she's right there, within me, just waiting for me to pluck down baudrillard or bourdieu or kristeva or maybe even zizek from those shelves. better yet, how about some of that dostoevsky...