Cancer is a tainted bonus

Aging
VOLUME 53. J U NE - J U LY 201 6 .
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EDITORS
RACHEL ROSENFELT
AYESHA SIDDIQI
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
IMP KERR
SENIOR EDITOR
ERWIN MONTGOMERY
MANAGING EDITOR
ANNA MONTGOMERY
ISSUE 53 EDITORS
MALCOLM HARRIS
ROB HORNING
SARAH LEONARD
ANNA MONTGOMERY
ERWIN MONTGOMERY
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
ALIX RULE
RACHEL ROSENFELT
EDITORIAL BOARD
AARON BADY
ANWAR BATTE
JESSE DARLING
MALCOLM HARRIS
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
ATOSSA ARAXIA ABRAHAMIAN
RAHEL AIMA
ALEXANDER BENAIM
HANNAH BLACK
ADRIAN CHEN
EMILY COOKE
NATHAN JURGENSON
SAM LAVIGNE
SARAH LEONARD
SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT
KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED
ALIX RULE
DERICA SHIELDS
6
D E AT H B Y I M M O R TA L I T Y
BY K E G U R O M AC H A R I A
10
N O T F O R YO U
BY WILLIE OSTERWEIL
14
M U H A M M A D A L I , W E S T I L L L O V E YO U :
U N S T E A DY D R E A M S O F A “ M U S L I M I N T E R N AT I O N A L ”
BY NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
25
PERMANENT RECORDS
B Y M O L LY K N E F E L
29
O N LY W O M E N A R E N A M E D H O P E
BY AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO
32
A D D I C T E D T O FA I L U R E
BY C A R O L I N E D U R L AC H E R
38
H A N D F O R D I DY L L
BY EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY
42
TIME IS A KILLER
BY TIANA REID
46
WE WERE PROMISED HOT TUBS
BY ROB HORNING
49
D O N D E L I L LO D I D 9/ 1 1
BY M A LCO L M H A R R I S
51
O L D A N D DA M N E D L I K E A G R AV E
BY IMP KERR
Editors’ Note
DESPITE
being something of a leveller, it’s unclear what we think of old age. Aging is one of
those manifestly biosocial “constructions”—just a number,
we joke, because it obviously isn’t. When you think about it
in terms of a slur against vulnerability, the workings of ageism attain a greater clarity. Like racism and (cishetero)sexism, ageism is a way of ordering people differentially within society based on how much that society menaces them
with death, imposing a relation to time,and therefore value,
specific to their body type. Age, too, mandates how, where,
and when it is proper to appear—the social impossibility of
its desired segregation notwithstanding.
In the tired regions of the capitalist core (that is, those
regions which have long since sundered the multigenerational household as the central economic unit), old age isn’t
held in the public esteem it vaguely remembers it should be
due. That’s not to say it doesn’t index a real social power—
compound interest carries weight. But old age invokes infirmity and reaction, not wisdom and repose. Many of the
indignities of old age are, on inspection, the indignities of
being socially discarded—feelings of isolation, a fall in status, loss of autonomy. That is, these are not organic facts of
the body but outcomes desired, at some level, by someone.
Why that is, and who benefits, are both painfully obvious
and logically obscure.
The essays collected in this issue look at old age
through the callous eyes of relative youth, but should nevertheless stand the test of time. Meditations on carework,
careers, maturity, radioactive half-lives, and beauty come
together to see old age as an integral part of the total functioning of society, not simply a waystation on the way out
of it.
Autumn Whitfield-Madrano’s contribution reflects
on the way the imperative of beauty can be commodified
by pharmaceutical companies as an expression of hope,
and how that’s in fact something to champion. In Tiana Reid’s “Time is a Killer,” Gena Rowlands and Pam Grier’s performances reveal the fragility and power in a woman performer who is “at the brink of becoming old.” And in Willie
Osterweil’s “Not for You,” the movie theaters where these
women performers could stage their struggles with aging are disappearing, too, as income concentration means
multiplexes shutter and movies are increasingly aimed at a
smaller, richer market.
Old age often denotes more about a person’s relation
to their work history than it does about physical states.
Naeem Mohaiemen and Rob Horning both write about
turning points in icons’ careers—Muhammad Ali and
Fleetwood Mac’s Bob Welch, respectively. For both, the
imperceptible-at-the-time pivot toward decline is revisited to excavate the feeling of the late 70s, a world-historical
moment when revolutionary energies began to be turned
back by the forces of reaction. In Malcolm Harris’s review
of Don Delillo’s latest novel—the postmodernist whose efforts to chronicle that reaction predicted the 2001 World
Trade Center attacks—the clairvoyant is seen to be signaling his retirement. And Caroline Durlacher analyzes how
the career-mindedness of some millennials replicates the
techniques of self-understanding invented by Alcoholics
Anonymous.
While we treat old age and its attendant decay as a constant, there are inhuman materials that surround us which
refuse to go along at our familiar rate. Keguro Macharia’s
moving account of his mother’s cancer and his work to care
for her offers the contradiction of cancer’s fatal immortality
and the social fallout that brings. Cancer generates worlds,
he writes, and produces excesses, “tainted bonuses” that
gather people in their remit. Another kind of fatal immortality is to be found in the superhuman half-life of nucle-
ar reactors, which Emma Claire Foley investigates in her
“Hanford Idyll.” And Molly Knefel considers the longevity
of internet records, which will follow her middle school
students like a perhaps-regrettable but cherished tattoo.
Imp Kerr thinks through eternal youth with a short
piece on the story of Ulysses and Calypso, “technically the
second main character of the book given the arithmetic fact
that on a 9-year trip, ulysses spends 7 years in captivity on
calypso’s island.” Ulysses choses public embrace and death
over concealed (kalupso in Greek is “I will conceal”) youth
and Calypso’s love. The choice seems to have paid off—his
name has indeed been delivered to our present.
Old age is an equalizer that exposes real inequalities,
a fate suffered by those lucky enough to attain it. It is a living record of how time grips our bodies, and therefore a
reminder of the promise of life outside of time. The joy and
serenity of having laid down the hammer after a lifetime of
work seems to be itself a retired concept, if it was ever really
operative for more than an exclusive few. The new old age
now seems to be left to the ravages of the market and its
lust for novelty. At this historical inflection point, we offer
these essays as a record of the changing nature of old age,
for posterity.
6
Death by Immortality
DEATH BY IMMORTALITY
by KEGURO MACHARIA
Cancer is a tainted bonus
Immortality:Debility
“If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Emperor of All Maladies
“(mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging; cancer is thus intrinsically related to age)” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Emperor of All Maladies
IN
2015, my mother turned 70. A good Christian woman, she proclaimed that she had
achieved her threescoreandten promise. Anything after that was a “bonus.” The joke about the
“bonus” has been going on since she turned 65, a joke-not-joke rooted, in part, in her family
history: a father who died at 73, a mother who died (of cancer) at 71, a husband who, carelessly,
forgot to line up for the bonus and died at 51. Less than six months after turning 70, she was
diagnosed with cancer.
7
KEGURO MACHARIA
Cancer is also a bonus. Cancer cells are “immortal”:
they replicate incessantly, refusing to obey signals to moderate their speed or to die. They are, in fact, death-defying
cells that kill. Immortality cannot survive in our bodies.
From a cancer cell’s perspective, debility, that condition
most associated with aging, is for other cells, cells that do
not know how to adapt, how to beat death, how to live forever. That cancer cells produce debility because they are
immortal speaks to one of the central contradictions of
aging: increases in life expectancy are heralded as signs of
progress, even as debility inevitably accompanies such increase. The bonus is tainted. According to cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee, rates of cancer will increase as
life expectancy increases, moving from one in four to, possibly, one in two. The bonus is tainted.
Cancer—immortality:debility—generates and shifts
social worlds: friends send their favorite anti-cancer recipes, sourced from the internet; other friends, more familiar with cancer, demand lists of symptoms, producing and
heightening anxiety; the prayerful line up to offer sacrifices
on your behalf; each glance directed toward you is filled
with questions you cannot answer and demands you cannot process; your post-bonus life, once a source of pride,
is now described as a curse. Strangers become a comfort.
You seek the calming presence of people who know nothing about you, who assume nothing, who nod and smile
and make casual conversation about the weather and the
price of tomatoes.
•
Time breaks into effects—
hot flashes
joint pains
nausea
bone pain, which is not joint pain
hair loss
—You know the treatment is working because you
have no appetite, you have to vomit, you have diarrhea,
your hair falls out, your body is unable to regulate its heat.
You have never paid attention to healthy habits of drinking
water. Now, you gulp five to six 500ml bottles of water a day.
It becomes difficult to be environmentally conscious. You
have cancer. Why worry about carcinogens?
•
Your world contracts.
•
Carcinogen: capable of generating the world of cancer
Cancer shrinks worlds and expands them (one in
four, one in three, one in two—cancer builds populations,
cancer populates itself). Each conversation generates yet
another list: a grandmother with liver cancer, a cousin with
leukemia, an aunt with breast cancer, an uncle with suspected prostate cancer. Conversations with friends add to
this population: “my mother (who died),” “my father ( . . .
),” “my mother (who survived),” and where no information
is offered whether one’s relative died or survived, I dare not
ask. Perhaps there is some comfort to be found in knowing
that many others have experienced this, but I am not yet in
a place where such information yields anything more than
sadness and rage. Each story shrinks the world—cancer
feels like an ever-expanding web, extending everywhere,
touching everyone, binding us to what feels like its inevitability, forming us by what feels like its inevitability.
Aging is inevitable
Cancer feels inevitable
It’s becoming difficult to distinguish aging from cancer—another name for aging might be cancer, or does this
go too far?
(cancer gathers—we have traveled to India for treatment and are meeting other Kenyans and hearing stories of
hope and generosity, of neighbors and friends and relatives
who tell loved ones, “go to India, and we will find ways to
send money for your treatment.” Love gathers, money is
gathered, hope is gathered, worlds are extended, and this
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DEATH BY IMMORTALITY
is something beyond neoliberalism’s atomizing power. I
know that such acts of private donation are subtended by
the state’s failure to provide public health, but I hope that
practices of gathering indicate a public spirit waiting to be
reactivated, waiting to transform our relations to each other, beyond neoliberalism’s privatizing grasp)
Cancer is the bonus that exhausts.
•
Bodies break as they age. We think we know what this
means: hair thins, bones become brittle, muscles deteriorate, instincts slow, cognition declines. Cells grow old and
die—they forget what they used to know. Cancer is a different kind of breaking: homeostasis, a word I learned in
Standard 5, explains it in terms I can understand. Properly
functioning bodies are systems in balance. They make sure
we don’t get too hot or too cold, for instance. Cells are policed and policing structures.
Cancer refuses regulation. It embraces and creates unregulated growth.
•
Unregulated growth: a neoliberal wet dream.
•
Pulled into cancer’s gravitational field, it’s easy to forget that it’s about co-aging: my mother is no longer 40 and
I am no longer the age I was when she was 40. Care work
means something different now, as my own body is breaking
down: my knees hurt, my back hurts, my feet need orthopedic shoes, my hair is thinning, my mental health is changing. She cannot lift and carry and I cannot lift and carry as I
could when I was younger. We are breaking down together.
Care work is making do: learning to admit you need
a break, learning to admit that compassion is a breath away
from resentment, learning to admit that pain travels across
bodies and it is unbearable to share pain, learning to admit
that kinship is always about uneven distribution of labor—
and queers always get shafted. Reflection comes late at
night or early in the mornings before the rhythms of care
set in: wake up, cook breakfast, wash dishes, ensure medication is taken, track side effects of medication, prepare
tea, wash dishes, prepare for visitors, cook for visitors, wash
dishes, ensure medication is taken, prepare more meals,
wash dishes—busyness is both distraction and relief, and
exhaustion can be a friend, pushing aside resentment-generating reflection.
•
Carcinogenic: generating the world of cancer.
•
Carework: a feminist attempt to describe the economics of care, to refuse to privatize care. Still, the pull of
care makes it difficult to quantify work, to think of work as
care rather than duty, to stop believing that attaching work
to care taints care. One struggles to map when care bleeds
into work, how to point to that moment, how to keep available a kind of care that is not work. Work is a demand. Care
is not. Or is it?
Carework.Care:work.Care/work.Care/Work.Carework.Care-Work. Care:Work.CareWork.
Why does it feel obscene to start with work?
Workcare.Work:care.Work/care.Work/Care.Workcare.Work-Care.Work:Care.WorkCare.
It’s easier to ask how care works than it is to ask how
work cares. “Easier” is a gendered and gendering term: care
is more approachable, more gendered as approachable,
more gendering as approachable. Work, on the other hand,
feels impersonal. It is children in primary school who, when
asked what their fathers did, answered “business,” a response that I never understood. Mothers taught and nursed
and cooked and traded and farmed—their work could be
named and seen. Fathers did “business”; fathers worked.
Work was meant to be difficult and opaque; work was gendered as masculine A crude binary, sure, but crude binaries
9
KEGURO MACHARIA
have force. To ask how care works permits us to imagine
human action in a way that foregrounding how work might
care does not: work is alienating, the idea of work is alienating. Yet, to position work as alienating, to expect it to be
alienating, is to begin accepting that care should not be part
of work, to accept that work should be unpleasant. I want to
shield care from work’s unpleasantness, even as work provides the best language to describe how my body feels after
lifting and carrying and washing and cleaning.
•
sotto voce: care, with its unending demands, its appeals to affect and duty, its resistance to regulation, might
incarnate neoliberalism more than work
one cannot dwell on this
•
Carcinogenic: generating a cancerous imagination—
growths, excrescences, excess, bonuses.
•
In emails to friends, I say that I am trying to inhabit a world apart from the one generated by cancer, but my
emails mention tests and chemotherapy and side-effects.
Writing is not self-care—it cannot be. Each word, each
phrase, each sentence, each paragraph costs too much, demands too much, extracts too much, stretches too much,
beyond what a bonus-imagination can imagine. Too much,
approaching exhaustion, where debility meets immortality.
Writing cannot escape the pull of cancer—it is also
carcinogenic, produced in and by and through the world of
cancer. One tries to occupy the interval of care(:/-.)work.
To write not only in the interval, but also as the interval, as
what seeps across care and work, what slices across, what
cleaves, what lingers.
I struggle to within and against cancer’s pull, to find
a place unmarked by carcinogenesis, but this writing is
carcinogenic, produced by the world cancer creates, and
marked by the metaphors it provides. Language shifts now:
growth loses the innocence and pleasure attached to planting seasons, the anticipation of watching flowers bloom
and fruits ripen, the joy attached to fertile gardens that will
create and feed communities.
How can I not mourn such a loss?
It feels silly and self-indulgent to claim that my metaphors have been invaded, no, stolen. Yet, so much care(:/.)work is struggling to articulate what feel like petty losses, struggling not to minimize the losses that accompany
care(:/-.)work: language, sleep, privacy, dreams, laughter,
rudeness.
I miss locking myself away for days, sitting with my
silences.
I think, now, of Shakespeare’s boast that writing creates immortality, but this, I realize, is not an immortality
predicated on reading. “So long as men can breathe or eyes
can see”: it is enough that the potential to be seen exist for
writing to give life.
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see”: are these
lines not haunted by debility?
Symptom: shortness of breath
Symptom: failing eyesight
Symptom: collapsed lung
Symptom: cataracts
Symptom: failing
Perhaps these lines are about writing in the interval,
writing as the interval, that s/place of immortality:debility.
Something lingers: immortal cells harvested from a black
woman.
(Cancer is attachment and extension: Audre Lorde,
Susan Sontag, Henrietta Lacks
•
Between immortality and debility, within immortality:debility, there is the interval. My mother, a good Christian woman, populates her interval with prayers. I write.
Together, we wait.
10
Not for You
NOT FOR YOU
by WILLIE OSTERWEIL
WHO
goes to the movies? In America, a reliable answer to that question for the past decade has been
“fewer people than last year.” The number of tickets sold
hit a 20-year low in 2014. In 2015, Avengers 2, Jurassic
World and Star Wars brought a slight rebound, but that
year’s sales remained below 2013’s numbers. Nonetheless,
theater owners’ and movie companies’ profits keep going
up. The way this works isn’t too complicated, of course:
Have you tried paying for a movie ticket lately?
Still, to justify continually rising ticket prices, movie
theaters have been getting innovative. On a recent visit to
my parents’ home in Massachusetts we caught a movie at
the local multiplex. I used to love that particular theater
because, for at least a decade and a half, its lobby featured
a Time Crisis 3 machine, arguably the greatest arcade
shooter of all time. But Time Crisis 3 was gone, along with
the whole tacky arcade. Its room on the side of the lobby
had instead been converted to plush seating and bar tables
The House That Dripped Blood, 1971
The growth in consumption inequality means more movies are made for the dwindling
numbers of top earners
WILLIE OSTERWEIL
where you could enjoy the $11 draught beers now on offer
at the Bar & Lounge counter next to the concession stand.
Multiplexes across the country have been shutting
down arcades and installing bars for a few years now. Rather than try to fill empty seats, they have also been doubling
down on lower attendance. Rip out the 150 bucket seats
in small theaters and replace them with 45 deep leather
recliners, and you won’t even have to hand people RealD
glasses to charge $16 a ticket. Add dining tables and waiters, and turn it into an AMC “Fork + Screen” for a “dinner
and a movie” experience, and sell them four admissions’
worth of wine and steak*.
As for the teens who used to lurk in those arcades,
who bought tickets to some trashy adventure flick in order to make out in the back, uninterrupted and unseen,
for an hour and a half? Some of them are still cleaning the
aisles, even if they’re now peeling Buttermilk Biscuit Poppers and Crispy Shrimp Sushi Rolls off the floor alongside
Swedish Fish. But they’re not sitting in the theater anymore; they’ve been priced out. Ticket sales to 12-25-yearolds have been falling much faster than the general decline. And it’s not just the price (or the missing arcades);
the whole multiplex environment has become hostile to
their needs: The arm rests on the plush recliners are too
thick to cuddle across, the swiveling dining tables jab your
ribs, and that chemistry teacher who got laid off last year is
anxiously hovering above your shoulder, waiting for your
food order. More service always also means more surveillance.
Of course, the battle to restrict spaces for teen autonomy, as well as teenagers’ capacity to find a place to get
lit, make out, and have fun despite it, is at least as old as
movies with sound. Teenagers will always win this particular struggle, and as long as parents, teachers, churchmen,
* Of course, with the elaborate profit-splitting deals made by film
distribution companies, the movie theaters themselves were already
mostly in the concessions business: Popcorn, along with advertising,
has made up the majority of their profits for decades.
11
and police insist on escalating, teen victory will continue
to come at a horrific cost in drunk driving, sexual assault,
domestic violence, and suicide. But the transition of movie theaters away from teen customers, from 150 relatively
cheap seats to 45 expensive ones, traces an equally meaningful transition in the purpose and function of American
entertainment, culture, and consumerism.
Studies on inequality tend to focus, with good reason, on income and wealth. But marketing, advertising,
mass culture, retail trends, and other aspects of society
that dominate our day-to-day lives outside work are driven
by consumption—the money actually spent on goods and
services, not put into investment, savings, taxes or debt
repayment—which is reflected only indirectly by income
or wealth. Unsurprisingly, inequality in consumption has
also increased steadily across the past few decades, though
this has happened at a necessarily less dramatic pace than
income inequality—sustaining consumer demand is how
capitalists recoup the wages they pay out. But a widening
class gulf in consumption is beginning to make itself evident in our culture and entertainment.
Indeed, “consumerism”—understood as a society in
which consumption growth is the prime motivating factor
for companies and individuals alike—is finally being superseded historically. Though the postwar economy saw a
virtuous cycle of rising wages feeding rising consumption
feeding higher wages—a rising tide lifting most boats—
the long crisis beginning in the 1970s saw profits and wages no longer rising in tandem.
Numerous capitalist strategies have been developed
in response to this crisis, but none have managed to permanently solve the problem of falling rates of profit. One
strategy, broadly called globalization, has been to grow
other middle-class consumer bases in national economies
outside of the US and Europe. These classes serve as managers and mediators in the more crucial development of efficient global logistics networks and supply chains moving
production to sweatshops on the other side of the world.
12
Another approach occurs in the capitalist heartland
itself, blending privatization, austerity, mass incarceration,
and union-busting. Union busting and cutting wages—
down to literally zero in the case of prisons—alongside
job-offshoring produces an underclass who can be made
to work in lucrative and highly extractive service economies, while privatizing and cutting state or social services
forces people into the market for more and more aspects
of their daily survival.
Student loan cash
might get you
to your college
town arthouse
cinema, but you’ll
be paying off that
Revenant ticket for
a lifetime
The solution that allowed much of the American
“middle class” to not feel the first shocks of this long crisis was cheap credit: first with credit cards, savings and
loans, then in dot-com stock market investment, then real
NOT FOR YOU
estate debt, now, increasingly, medical and college debt.
But with each successive debt bubble, the working- and
middle class debtors who take it on get less and less consumption possibilities. A credit card can get you into a lot
of movies, so will refinancing your house; but it’s pretty
hard to go out to the multiplex on dialysis money negotiated with your hospital. Student loan cash might get you
to your college town arthouse cinema, but you’ll be paying
off that Revenant ticket for a lifetime.
As a result of all this cheap credit, mass consumption
didn’t collapse at the same rate real wages did, but, slowly
and surely, it has collapsed. By 2012, the top 5% of earners
in America accounted for 39% of the country’s consumption, while the top 20% made up 61% of total consumption in America—this is a dramatic increase from even
1990, when they did just over half of American consumption. Meanwhile, the bottom 60% of America make up less
than 20% of total national consumption. Of course, that is
still a tremendous amount of economic activity, but it is a
proportionally small one, and shrinking.
The idea that in the postwar period everyone could
participate and be represented in consumer markets was
always a myth, but it is novel that, at this point, the vast
majority of Americans are actually superfluous to consumption markets. Most firms selling things in America
would be committing economic folly to even consider
220 million Americans when taking their goods to market.
This doesn’t mean that they won’t do whatever they can to
squeeze every last penny out of the hood, the exurb, and
the trailer park, but it does mean that the majority of marketers, firms, and production companies don’t even need
to pretend to provide things poor or even middle-class
people want. Mass consumption is no longer meaningful.
Markets aren’t for you anymore.
There is only the upscale market now, and this being
reflected in both cineplexes and how the films they show
get made. The difference between indie arthouse cinema
and Hollywood used to be, simply, whether the movie
WILLIE OSTERWEIL
was made by a major Hollywood studio. But Hollywood
studios have fundamentally decentralized, and, like most
other capitalist firms today, they are now almost exclusively in the businesses of branding, marketing, and management, while production and distribution themselves are
largely franchised, contracted, and outsourced: Today’s
studios link money to production houses, talent, special
effects units, and distribution deals more than they “make
movies” in the traditional sense. As part of this decentralization, the majors all have a number of small, “independent” arms that produce much of the indie cinema that
gets national distribution, while a handful of millionaire
and billionaire producers, whose business cards just have
their own names on them rather than 20th Century Fox,
make the rest. The distinction between indie and “major”
filmmaking can no longer be made on aesthetic grounds
either. Though indies might choose to appear grainy,
black and white, or “naturally” lit, advances in cheap camera technology mean that these are usually choices, not
necessities giving birth to aesthetic invention.
Indie films are just a market segment for big studios.
While most big cities have both multiplexes and an indie
cinema/art house or two, an increasing number of films
show up in both. Handwringing over the aesthetic consequences of the supposed demise of indie filmmaking is
overblown—as Richard Brody argues persuasively, this
trend hasn’t been “bad for movies.” But as something that
reflects transformations in class composition and ideological subject production, it’s quite significant. When Brody
compares the phenomenon of “independent” wealthy film
producers to the way that opera and classical music are
funded, he touches on exactly the point—the increasingly aristocratic nature of pop-cultural production. Turning
from a more chaotic, arbitrary, and of-the-moment mass
market-driven production method, we’ve entered an era
where one side of the market, namely, Hollywood, is driven by five-year plans and endless franchise sequels, while
the other relies on the whims of benevolent aristocrats.
13
This is hardly a death sentence for art: Much of
the history of Western art is merely the reflection of the
whims of benevolent aristocrats. But it does mean the end
of “mass market” cultural production. Instead, the culture
is bifurcated: Indie cinema is increasingly for and about
rich, mostly white people—look at the listings of any
arthouse theater right now and the majority of the films
will be about successful professionals having relationship
problems and family drama, at least one of them probably
in Western Europe—while Hollywood is for the plebs.
But if Hollywood is sold to the people, it is not about
them in the same way that “indie” portrays the concerns
and anxieties of its wealthy metropolitan audiences.
American “mass” culture is not driven nor produced by
appeals to the broadest mass of American consumers. Instead, it is produced by a slow-moving corporate system
that makes films culturally nonspecific enough to sell just
as well in Shenzhen as in St. Louis. Hollywood has increasingly countered falling North American ticket sales
with better showings in global markets, in particular China, and major films are now made explicitly with those
markets in mind. As part of this process, they are stripped
of whatever cultural, contextual, or historical specificities
that might make that sale harder. The universalist, apocalyptic superhero drama, with narratives contained entirely
within their own internal universes, is the perfect genre for
such a market.
At the moment, dinner-and-a-movie cinemas exist
alongside and within older, more teen-friendly multiplexes. But if current economic trends continue, movie
theaters will continue to trend against teens and toward
affluent adults. The number of seats will go down, while
grass-fed, locally sourced burgers with truffle fries, garlic
aioli, and a glass of merlot, not buttered popcorn and a
medium root beer, will accompany the newest Christopher Nolan picture. The teens, and the rest of us who can’t
afford such fancy nights out, will have to find our entertainment in the streets.
14
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
Muhammad Ali, We Still Love You:
Unsteady Dreams of a “Muslim International”
by NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
A Bangla prize fight
IN 1978, MUHAMMED ALI WAS TRAVELING TO BAN­
GLADESH. Our first sighting of him is inside an airplane,
in wide business class seats. He is looking out the window,
although the flight has not yet begun its descent. A moment later, the stewardess serves him a glass of orange juice.
The officious British narrator, journalist Mark Alexander,
sits next to Ali and tells the audience he has the privilege
of “accompanying Muhammad Ali on this rare pilgrimage”
(11:04).1 Looking at such an image, one can easily see the
boxer, the way he perhaps still saw himself at that time—
1. Quotations from Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh visit are from Reginald Massey’s documentary Muhammad Ali Goes East: Bangladesh,
I Love You (1978). Massey left the production company after a disagreement, and the company itself went bankrupt. The circulating
copy is a clandestine recording made by an audience member during
a screening at Brick Lane Circle, London. Time codes given here are
of the London recording.
Muhammad Ali holding Bangladesh flag at press conference. Photo by Md. Lutfur Rahman Binu.
Muhammed Ali’s visit to Bangladesh
15
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Ali at Dhaka Airport. Ali meets General Ziaur Rahman. Ali receiving his Bangladesh passport. Source: Muhammad Ali Goes East.
as a roving Muslim International. Not just a member of
the Ummah, that is, but an oppositional cosmopolitan
subject that Ali’s public persona had helped connect to the
Black American experience. In fact, in 1978 we are already
too late. The radical possibilities of such a figure have already begun to recede, as the fiery and transformative political possibilities of the 1960s gave way to the reversals and
defeats of the later 1970s.
Before we have time to ponder the implications of
the scene, the grating narration (“Bangladesh lies to the
south of China”) guides us to Ali’s first encounter with
Bangladesh’s president, General Ziaur Rahman.2 A few
moments later, an official presents Ali with a Bangladeshi
passport, making him the “country’s newest citizen”
(13:27). The dialogue that ensues is revealing.
Official: “Here is a passport for you…”
Ali: “So I am a citizen of Bangladesh?”
Official: “Yes that’s right.”
Ali: “Can I use this all over the world?”
Official: “Yes, you can.”
Ali: “Thank you so much. Now, if they kick me out of
America, I have another home. Thank you.” (13:58)
I wish the camera would pull back, so we could see
the Bangla officials’ startled facial expressions. Ali was
positioning his new citizenship as an antidote to his rela-
2. For a detailed description of Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh trip,
see Mohammad Lutful Haq’s Muhammad Ali’r Bangladesh Bijoy
[Muhammad Ali Wins Bangladesh], Prothoma Publishers: 2016. The
book was published after Ali’s death.
tionship with the United States, fraught especially following his refusal to fight in Vietnam and the ostracism that
followed. But the exchange was taking place in a country
whose geopolitical tilt had recently shifted away from the
USSR, drawing closer to American influence.
Perhaps Ali did not properly understand the new reality of the region he was visiting, fixed instead on dream of
solidarity between Black Americans and the Muslim Third
World. Ali’s entourage may not have thought it necessary
to study their destination closely. If they had, they might
have learned that the country founded on socialist principles in 1971, after suffering a series of military coups after
1975, was rapidly becoming more conservative Muslim
nation. In Bangladesh, Ali was seen as a world class athlete.
The live telecast of two of his fights (some of the earliest
live transmissions in the new country) made him one of
the first foreign celebrities to gain wide recognition in the
country.3 His earlier opposition to racism in the United
States, and its overseas empire, was little understood inside Bangladesh. Even if it had been, the position would
have been an odd fit with the distinctly pro-American sentiment of the government in 1978.
The international reality had started shifting as well.
By 1978, the contours of a widely shared, anti-imperialist
platform had started to blur. The Vietnam War had ended
in a dramatic defeat for the United States, and the White
3. For a brief description of the impact of these live telecasts, see
chess grandmaster Niaz Morshed’s article on meeting Ali, Prothom
Alo, June 6, 2016.
16
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
House was occupied by Jimmy Carter, the Nixon antithesis. Although Vietnam had galvanized antiwar protestors,
the subsequent war in Cambodia presented a messier
geopolitical equation. In the dying sprawl of the Cold
War, the transnational crises of Iran and Afghanistan unraveled many more certainties. Ali himself was enervated
by financial hardship, years of physical punishment from
landed blows, and a long exile from the sport. In the coda
to the Bangladesh trip, we find him enthralled by Carter’s
“new” America. The Georgia peanut farmer’s ethos (“I’ll
never lie to you”) suggested a path of redemption for the
American project. Only a little while later Ali’s politics
would shift too—away from his 1960s critique of empire
fueled by America’s besieged Black bodies, to an embrace
of US exceptionalism at the end of the decade. By then
his public persona had transformed from a “dangerous”
member of a transnational network to a “goodwill” ambassador for the American presidency.
Dreams of a
Muslim International
Before proceeding further with the film, I want to
examine the idea of a “Muslim International,” developed by
Sohail Daulatzai.4 The concept draws attention to the relationship between intellectual histories of US Black Radicalism, Black Internationalism, Third World decolonization, and the Muslim portions of the Third World—sitting
at their intersecting center a four-way Venn diagram. Daulatzai contrasts his idea of a “Muslim International” with
race scholar Paul Gilroy’s famous concept of the “Black
4. Daulatzai, Sohail. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America. University of Minnesota
Press, 2012.
Atlantic.” Gilroy challenged the idea of a diaspora defined
and separated by national origin, instead emphasizing the
hybridity of survivors of the Atlantic slave trade, who belonged as a result to both Europe and Africa. But Gilroy’s
version of hybridity also sets up a kind of nation-state, because the liminal space of the Black Atlantic still has a many-to-one relationship with America. A “Muslim International” can on the other hand accommodate the multiple
and overlapping diasporas resulting from slavery, colonialism, and migration, as well as communities shaped by adversarial relationships with states, capitalism, and imperial
power. Instead of a many-to-one relationship with America, the Muslim International allows us to conceptualize a
many-to-many relationship. Within this conceptual space,
shape shifting and fluid subjectivity are possible.
At the core of Daulatzai’s disagreement with Gilroy
is that Black Atlantic does not recognize the role Islam and
the figure of the Muslim played in constituting modernity,
through its ostracism as modernity’s quintessential Other. Daulatzai points out the sharp absence of Muslim protagonists, movements, and nations in scholarly narratives
of Black Radicalism. Building a new history of “unacceptable” or “dangerous” Black figures, Daulatzai reaches back
to Malcolm X, forward to Reagan-era hip-hop, and then
arrives ringside with Muhammad Ali. In each case, he
takes a familiar story and finds within it the Third World
Muslim connection. He places Malcolm more firmly in a
Third World context, moving away from the Alex Haley
version of the story, toward Bandung and Mecca. Drawing on recent research on hip-hop’s early Muslim connections,5 he shows the ways in which hip-hop represents an
5. Aidi, Hisham. “‘Verily, There Is Only One Hip-Hop Umma’: Islam,
Cultural Protest and Urban Marginality,” Socialism and Democracy,
Volume 18, Issue 2, 2004; Banjoko, Adisa. Lyrical Swords: Hip Hop
and Politics in the Mix. YinSumi Press, 2004; Dasulatzai, Sohail and
Dyson, Michael Eric. Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic. New
York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009; Mohaiemen, Naeem. “Fear of a
Muslim Planet: Hip-Hop’s Hidden History,” Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Ed. Paul D. Miller. MIT Press, 2008.
17
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
area of fertile crossover and linkage with global “Ummah”
movements, and finally arrives ringside with Muhammad Ali. The boxer rejected the question of allegiance to
America, placing his loyalty elsewhere—with the Muslim
International. In doing so, Ali brought the idea of a Black
world to late 1960s American audiences: “I belong to the
world, the Black world. I’ll always have a home in Pakistan, in Algeria, in Ethiopia.”6
Here Ali aligned himself with a force outside and
against the United States. While Ali uses the term “Black,”
he gestures at Pakistan and visits Bangladesh. In his terminology, Black is an isomorphism for Muslim and Third
World. Around the same time, “Black Britain” came to
represent the allied movements of Asian and Black migrants against the common opponent of British racism
and classism. Ali indicated what was, at least for a limited historical moment, an even more expansive possibility, resonant with Daulatzai’s idea of many-to-many: the
Black experience as entry point into the Muslim experience, and vice versa.
Daulatzai said in his book that Ali became a safe figure
for American consumption in the 1990s. When I spoke to
him about this earlier trip of the 1970s, he wrote back, “In
the ’70s with his fights in Zaire/Congo and Manila he was
going to locations that had very troubling histories with US
empire and CIA intervention, and he was at least tacitly affirming Mobutu and Marcos. Now does that mean he was
“appropriated” or “recuperated” in the ways that my book
says he was in the 90s? I am not sure—I think the 90s was
a particular historical moment of 60s revisionism around
the culture wars, and post-cold war triumphalism that was
entangled with Huntington’s thesis. I think something similar was happening with Bangladesh as in Zaire/Congo and
Manila, although because he wasn’t going there to fight, it
wasn’t such a global spectacle.”
6. Marqusee, Mike. Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of
the Sixties. Verso Books, 2005.
Bangladesh, I love you

Let us return to Reginald Massey’s Muhammad Ali
Goes East: Bangladesh, I Love You, a travelogue whose
stage-managed images invite decoding. The original documentary was made at the request of Bangladeshi business interests and with enthusiastic support from a Bangladesh government eager to project an image of stability
overseas. After airing on Britain’s Channel Four, and a
screening at the White House, the film’s production company went bankrupt and the documentary disappeared.
The film finally reemerged in 2012 when a VHS copy was
unearthed and screened at London’s Bangladeshi cultural
center, Brick Lane Circle. Today it circulates only through
a clandestine recording made by an audience member at
that screening.
Ali was visiting a Bangladesh that, by 1978, was entering the second phase of a prolonged crisis of identity.
From 1972 to 1975, the new country was run by founding
Prime Minister Sheikh Mujib—popularly called “Bangabandhu” (Friend of Bengal)—and his Awami League
[League of the People]. The party’s key principles included socialism and secularism, although there is debate as
to how successful they were in implementing either (their
main political opponent was the Jatiya Samjtantrik Dal,
or National Socialist Party). The 1975 coup resulted in
Mujib’s murder and the League league’s overthrow, and
two more coups followed before General Ziaur Rahman
came to power in 1977.
Zia’s government, like the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party he founded, had positioned themselves as the antithesis to the Awami League. “Secularism” and “socialism” were removed from the constitution, a confrontational stance was taken with India, and a closer alignment
was sought with both the Muslim world and the United
18
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
Ali surrounded by military officers as part of his security detail in Dhaka. Source: Prothom Alo.
States. By 1977 the political situation had stabilized under
the military regime, and an earlier order of business—enhancing the country’s profile abroad—was resumed. The
outreach to Reginald Massey was part of the public relations effort. It was in this context in which Muhammad
Ali’s trip was arranged, although you would never know it
from the film itself.
Massey’s biography says he was born in “Lahore,
then in British India.” After moving to London, he wrote
books on Indian classical dance. His website tells us “some
of his books are standard works and used by international
bodies such as New York’s Lincoln Center.” Approached
by businessman Giashuddin Chowdhury in 1977 about
creating an event that would “boost the image” of Bangladesh, Massey proposed a state visit by Muhammad Ali.
The boxer was by then entering the period of his ca-
reer’s decline, having just been humiliatingly beaten by
Leon Spinks. Massey presented the Bangladesh voyage
as a tonic to reenergize Ali, because “Ali was very downhearted. We told him that he was still a hero in Bangladesh.” The trip was framed for Ali, as a duty in support of
a Third World nation. We see that framing reflected in the
boxer’s speech to the camera at the beginning of the film:
[I want to] help more people in the world to know about
Bangladesh. One of my goals is to greet all my fans, and
do all I can to help more people in the world to know
about Bangladesh. To draw attention to some of the positive things about Bangladesh; so much negative things
have been said. (10:00)
From the moment of the plane’s touchdown, the documentary moves along as an extended travel film, guiding
the viewer through tropes of a visit to Bangladesh: the river
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Ali and Veronica on jeep ride. Source: Muhammad Ali Goes East.
cruise (the passing crowd in another boat yells “Muhammad Ali/Jindabad [Long Live Muhammad Ali]” [16:28]),
the “golden fiber” jute (the camera lingers on two containers marked with destinations of Los Angeles and Savannah), the endangered Sunderban forest, the historic
Star Mosque, the Dhakeswary temple, and the Sylhet tea
gardens. Along the way were other elements which were
not specific to Bangladesh, but were part of the “East” imagery that Ali was dutifully granted: an elephant ride, and,
of course, snake charmers (“snakes are poisonous to all but
the snake charmers,” [15:17 ]). Ali charmed the audience
by exuding largesse (to the people in Sylhet he said, “many
people could not afford to come to Dhaka, so we came to
see you” [30:24]) and his humor (he compared his wife
Veronica Ali to a group of women fans by saying “the ladies
in this country not as tall as her” [29:50]). 19
By the film’s end, Ali has been given, in addition to
a passport, a plot of land in Cox’s Bazaar, and the promise that a boxing stadium in Dhaka would be named after him. He had performed a symbolic bout with twelve
year old Mohammad Giasuddin—later the country’s
three-time national champion. The state visit ended with
a dinner where renowned Bengali singer Sabina Yasmin
sang the special composition “Ali Ali” (later released as
an album). Two million fans had come out to meet him
and they trailed him everywhere on his trip. Business interests were clear in recognizing the branding opportunity, as state-run Uttara Bank took out newspaper advertisements welcoming Ali, in Bengali and English. Driving
along the “miles of unbroken beach,” at Cox’s Bazaar, Ali
waxed rhapsodic: “We in heaven over here. You want paradise come to Bangladesh … eat at the President’s house”
(32:05).
The Zia government’s project to create a new identity for Bangladesh can be glimpsed too. On the river cruise,
people yell “Muhammad Ali/Jindabad [Long Live Muhammad Ali]”, a slogan deeply embedded with ideology.
“Bangladesh Jindabad” was a slogan newly popularized
by the post-1975 government, identifying the geographic limits of Bangladesh (its implicit separation from West
Bengal in India), while evoking the pre-1971 slogan of an
undivided Pakistan. Its use was anathema to followers of
the pre-1975 Awami League government, which promoted “Joy Bangla” [Long Live Bengal] during the 1971 war
Sabina Yasmin sings “Ali Ali.” Exhibition bout with 12 year old Giasuddin, later Bangladesh national champion. Adamjee jute mills bales with two
American destinations prominently displayed. Source: Muhammad Ali Goes East.
20
Newspaper advertisement by Uttara Bank, with slogan “Muhammad
Ali / 18th February, 1978 / The greatest boxer of all time/ Is coming
to Bangladesh,” in Dainik Bangla newspaper. Source: Lutful Haq, Muhammad Ali’r Bangladesh Bijoy.
Ali gestures at the remainder of black eye from previous fight.
Source: Muhammad Ali Goes East.
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
Left: Ali on boat cruise. Right: Ali visiting tea gardens. Source: Muhammad Ali Goes East.
and afterward to indicate linguistic identification as basis for nation. Four decades later, the “Joy Bangla” slogan
has returned in a period of resumption of state power by
the familial and political heirs of the Awami League. The
Bangladesh that Ali visited does not exist anymore, but in
1978 the (possibly stage-managed) slogan “Muhammad
Ali Jindabad” establishing “Jindabad” (an Urdu phrase,
which the 1971 war with Pakistan should theoretically
have made anathema) as the marker of nation. It was simultaneously establishing a new, more market-oriented
and more conservative Muslim internationalism as Bangladesh’s future path.
If Ali had come to Bangladesh because the country “needed” him in the unstable aftermath of its na-
21
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
tionhood—throughout the film he dutifully reminds
the camera, “We never get the news in America about
how beautiful this place is,”—it was also Ali who needed
Bangladesh to revive him after the defeat to Spinks. The
film does its best to keep the focus on Bangladesh’s scenery and its place in the world, but Ali also takes refuge
from a boxing world that has declared him a spent force.
Talking up Bangladesh’s potential, Ali holds his career
at a distance, and sounds almost humble, “So much violence in the world, so much killing … I’m a do what
I can in my power to tell people [about Bangladesh]”
(33:00). Yet, by film’s end, he is raring for a second
chance at Spinks and finally explains why he has to wear
sunglasses all the time: “[He] gave me a black eye! Can
you imagine?” (50:39).

Shadows in
the International
Ali’s motorcade in Dhaka. Source: Lutful Haq, Muhammad Ali’r
Bangladesh Bijoy.
Perhaps Bangladesh was to have been one stop on
a global tour that would rekindle Ali’s connection with
transnational Muslim energies. In the 1960s, his primary site of political activism, as a provocative presence at
press conferences, television programs, and campus lectures, had been the American experience. Internationalism had come to him via the Nation of Islam. It manifested resonantly when he cited his Muslim beliefs in
refusal to fight in Vietnam in 1967. By the 1970s, he was
facing more clearly outward, making a point to reach
out to Muslim countries. Ali’s 1972 pilgrimage to Mecca
connected him with a multiracial Muslim identity (and
echoed Malcolm X’s 1964 trip). His decision to leave
the Nation of Islam and embrace Sunni Islam after 1974
made him even more legible and acceptable in countries
like Bangladesh. However, there were always unstable elements in
this search for a Muslim International. The project implicitly assumed Muslim countries were disposed to be
critical of, and resistant to, empire. During the sixties
the leadership of the Nonaligned Movement may have
made such premises seem uncontroversial.
But not only had Bangladesh’s government become
more conservative over the course of the 1970s, the
country had become an active member of the Arab nation
dominated Organization of Islamic Countries. This bloc,
strengthened by the oil crisis, had started to move away
from the nonaligned consensus. The realignments of the
1970s increasingly presented the dilemma of the Muslim
International in a context where Third World leaders were
no longer taking anti-imperialist positions. Journalist Palash Ghosh highlights how uneasy this internationalism
would become: “Ali mixed with some questionable characters during his many overseas jaunts, including such
22
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
Ali shows his Bangladesh passport. Source: Lutful Haq, Muhammad Ali’r Bangladesh Bijoy.
bloody despots as Uganda’s Idi Amin and Iraqi strongman
Saddam Hussein.”7
The boxer’s visits could give Third World nations
an “artificial unity,” as Grant Farred puts it in his series
on Black vernacular intellectuals.8 Through Ali’s lens,
Muslim majority nations were a source for a liberation
theology naturally allied with Black radicalism. Cassius
Clay’s conversion to Islam had been received ferociously
in America; icons like Justice Thurgood Marshall called
him “the ugly American” and fellow fighter Floyd Patterson declared that the “Black Muslim scourge” needed to
be “removed from boxing.” In response to this domestic reception, Ali’s impulse to seek refuge in the Muslim
7. Ghosh, Palash. “Muhammad Ali In Bangladesh: 35 Years Ago The
Champ Visited A New Nation In Turmoil.” International Business
Times, August 12, 2013.
8. Farred, Grant. What’s My Name?: Organic and Vernacular Intellectuals. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
world was strong, even as it increasingly landed the boxer
in complex situations like Bangladesh in 1978.
In the United States, Muhammad Ali’s rehabilitation
began with the Carter era and its post-Vietnam zeitgeist
of redemption. Once the White House embraced Ali, his
position as a US insider deepened. Buoyed by the success
of the Bangladesh film, Massey began work on a sequel,
which would take Ali to India. Ali was flown there with
his entourage in 1980 and, according to Massey, charmed
Indira Gandhi with a warm peck on the cheek and a quip:
“America kisses Mother India!” The man who once said
“separation” was the only solution to America’s racial crisis was now the gentle ambassador for a post-Vietnam
administration. The contradictions of Ali’s ambassadorship surfaced halfway through the India filming. One day,
while resting at the hotel, Massey received a direct phone
call from the White House. After determining that the
“Southern gentleman” on the phone was indeed Carter,
23
NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Ali surrounded by supporters. Source: Bill Siegel, The Trials of Muhammad Ali.
he passed on the phone to Ali. After a brief conversation,
Ali came to Massey and said,
Brother Reg, My President has ordered me to immediately fly to Africa and Saudi Arabia. My orders are to tell
them all to boycott the Moscow Olympics because the
Russians have invaded Afghanistan, a Muslim country.
[emphasis added]
With that, filming was abandoned—Massey said
this helped bankrupt the company—and Ali was on his
way to Saudi Arabia, where he was warmly greeted by
the King. The Muslim International no longer derived
energy from a resistant Third World position, but instead devolved into realpolitik alignments. Ali was now
an emissary of the United States against Russia in the
Afghanistan crisis, placing himself in the middle of a superpower battle. Perhaps he wanted to believe, with others, that Vietnam was only a wrong turn in foreign policy brought about by individual antagonists at the top.
24
In the redemption script, Carter would right America’s
wrongs. Those hopes soon unraveled, as the humiliation
in Tehran and the faceoff in Afghanistan contributed to
the twin ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, and the
beginning of the neoliberal moment.
Nothing can diminish the courage of the Ali who
said “no Vietcong ever called me n****er.” But it is important to recognize that that explosive moment came from
the combination of an extraordinary man, a time of revolutionary possibility, and the transmission of an ideology of anti-imperialism. As the possibilities of the 1960s
faded, a defeated era produced failures of judgment. The
Afghan war was another Cold War staging ground with
no possible benefit to the lives of poor Americans, Black
or otherwise. But the Soviet invasion did not produce a
moment of global antiwar resistance as in Vietnam, and
so the spoils of that conflict went to warlords and puppet
masters. Ali’s later experiences do not negate the potency
of the Muslim International as a frame for exploring
Black radical thought. It does highlight the limitations
of the essentialism that guided some earlier alliances.
Back in the mid-1960s, events in the US precipitated
fractures within Black radicalism, assisted by provocateurs inside and outside the movement. Malcolm X and
Elijah Muhammad parted ways dramatically, splitting
the strength of Nation of Islam’s membership. The fallout of this event distanced Ali from X as well, separating the fighter from his radical political teacher. Once
Martin Luther King started speaking against the Vietnam War and Malcolm returned from Mecca imagining
cross-race alliances, they became too dangerous to be
allowed to live. With their assassinations, Ali and Black
9. Burke, Daniel. “Why Muhammad Ali Was ‘the Greatest’ American
Muslim.” CNN, June 7, 2016.
10. Ross, Lawrence. “A Silenced Ali Was a Likeable Ali for White
People.” The Root, June 4, 2016.
MUHAMMED ALI, WE STILL LOVE YOU
America lost two mentors and the orienting polarization of incremental struggle versus radical resistance.
The 1970s saw the waning of the idea of a Muslim International that derived energy and guidance from the
African American experience. Over the course of the
next decade, the potential of a transnational solidarity network that was more than purely ornamental was
gradually eliminated.
Muhammad Ali was a quieter presence in his later years. He described the impact of Parkinson’s’ to his
friend Imam Zaid Shakir: “I ran my mouth like nobody
else and now God has silenced me.”9 Lawrence Ross’
obituary asks, “So now that he is dead, we have to ask
the question as to who gets to decide which Ali voice
gets heard and remembered. Which Ali voice, the one
that challenged America to be better, or the one that
imagines Ali being the silent façade on which he could
mean everything to everyone?”10 I want to honor the
Ali who helped dismantle the color line, opposed the
destructive game of Third World as chessboard, and
gave a generation of African Americans the strength to
resist and fight back. But I also want to begin to understand the global and domestic forces that produced his
moments of misrecognition—his inability to discern
authoritarian rule in some of the countries he visited;
and his misunderstanding of the Afghan War as simply
the invasion of a “Muslim country,” vanishing other
possibilities the Afghan people held within themselves.
Ali’s later years carry both the scars of sacrificing his
body to the “sweet science,” and the loneliness of an African American living on after revolutionary possibilities had again been stolen from his people.
Naeem Mohaiemen ([email protected]) explores borders, wars, and belonging through essays and film. His essays include
“Fear of a Muslim Planet: Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop” (Sound Unbound:
Sampling Digital Music and Culture, MIT Press, 2008) and his most
recent film is “Abu Ammar Is Coming” (Experimenter & Lux, 2016).
MOLLY KNEFEL
Permanent Records
25
by MOLLY KNEFEL
ONE
of the most common reasons adults give
for not wanting to get a tattoo is that they might be horrified, later, by what they decided when they were young.
When you’re 60, do you really want to be reminded of
what you thought was cool when you were 19? To them,
permanently committing to an image or idea will almost
certainly haunt you when you’re older. To me, it’s that
commitment to the present that makes tattoos so appealing—making decisions based on what you might regret
when you’re 60 seems like a weird way to live your life.
But I’m supposed to be embarrassed that I loved something so hard I got it pressed into my skin forever, espe-
Blue Movie, 1971
Kids are uploading their adolescence in real-time, and the Internet refuses to forget. Will
it change the way we live as adults?
26
cially if my feelings change with time.
When I look at my middle school students post photos and videos of themselves online, I have the instinctual
reaction of adult horror at the evidence they are creating.
And I’m not alone: There is a great deal of anxiety and
panic about young people and the Internet– how their social media accounts will haunt their college applications,
their job searches, their presidential campaigns. According to the Pew Research Center report “Teens, Social
Media and Privacy,” data from 2012 showed that 95 percent of young people age 12-17 use the Internet, with 81
percent of those using social media. About three in four
use it daily. The public sphere created by the Internet is
ubiquitous, inescapable, normalized. Maybe it’s okay that
they’re posting such ridiculous photos of themselves because there will be no one to run for president who hasn’t.
But it’s not just college bros playing beer pong who need
to clean up their Facebook when they graduate. We’re
years beyond that. As it stands now, when the 13-yearolds I teach grow into adulthood, much of their lives will
be immortalized on the Internet—their cute kid pictures,
their self-made Youtube videos, their proudly documented performances and speeches. Their entire adolescence
will be on the record.
One of the greatest difficulties between young people and adult people, of course, is that adult people have a
hard time remembering exactly what it’s like to be young.
Spending time with my partner’s mother recently, we
found an essay she wrote when she was 15 or 16—we
laughed at the bravado of her prose, but were also moved
by her passion and idealism. Typed on a typewriter,
on yellowed paper, unseen for decades, it was the most
teenage thing ever. She was amazed at revisiting her poetic younger self. And even though much less time has
passed for me, I’m sure I would be unsettled to re-read
something that I wrote in high school. It would be like
emotional time travel.
That physical distance from our youth is integral to
PERMANENT RECORDS
how adults conceptualize themselves, both publicly and
privately. Certainly, any adult who came of age before
the prominence of social media has artifacts from their
childhood that can jog memory—videos, photos, letters,
journals, t-shirts, record collections, mixtapes. But those
adults can also afford to speak generally; they can say,
for example, “seventh grade was miserable,” and back up
their statement with a yearbook. But unless they kept a
meticulous diary, it’s unlikely that there’s a textual record
of how it played out on a day-to-day basis. That distance
is convenient for the public people whose seventh grade
poetry is not indexed by Google. It’s also convenient for
the ego, which is fine with admitting that they had a hard
time but would rather not remember every detail of the
emotional struggle.
A seventh grader today, when they’re 30, might say
“seventh grade was miserable.” That seventh grader currently has dozens or hundreds or thousands of pictures
of themselves on Instagram or Twitter or (decreasing in
popularity, for teens) Facebook. They have passive aggressive Tweets, posts, and comments about who has
wronged them or pissed them off throughout the year—
in the early days of IM, teens were known to print out
incriminating conversations, now screenshots are easier.
They or their parents may have posted videos of their
dance concert or middle school debate night. Their song
lyrics about crushes, their public flirtation, their awkward
arms around each other in posed pictures are all there.
Not universally, but more so than ever before. Without
knowing what the Internet will look like when they’re 30,
the future 30-year-old has an overflowing pile of textual
evidence to back up their claim that seventh grade was,
in fact, miserable. Or maybe it was not actually miserable, but complicated, full of tiny victories and defeats that
felt more intense to their young self than their older self
can remember. With such a thorough record, it becomes
harder to paint entire eras with a single brush.
Deep in the series of tubes lay the Livejournal and
27
MOLLY KNEFEL
Xanga entries of a good deal of millennials and Gen
Xers. God help you if you message someone on Facebook you haven’t spoken with since 2007, because you
will be greeted with the last words you exchanged back
then, staring you down from that little messenger inbox.
Friendster and Myspace profiles lurk in waiting. The
looming Internet history I’m describing is not something
for the future—it’s already here, and it’s something many
adults would prefer not to face. Already, for years, companies have sprung up to help scrub the embarrassing histories of those who can afford their expensive services.
And, as Adrian Chen pointed out at Gawker in 2011, the
existence of such services creates a “Reputation Gap,”
where the wealthy can document their goofy youthful
antics worry free, knowing they can hire a team to clean
them up before their college application or job interview.
Meanwhile, those who can’t afford it—and especially, the
most likely to be already screwed over, like those with
criminal convictions or victims of cyber bullying—must
live forever with their pasts. For those on the poor end of
the Reputation Gap, a horrible experience does not nec-
essarily fade with time. The Internet has a vivid memory.
There’s no leaving seventh grade behind when its gory
details are attached to your name and your search results
forever.
In addition to the scrubbers, there are services designed to ensure employers that they won’t miss out on
anything that may be hiding in an applicant’s Internet
history. Social Intelligence Corp. offers products like “Social Insight,” a “comprehensive picture of an applicant’s
complete publically [sic] available online presence.” Even
more insidious-sounding is “Continuous Insight: Monitoring for enforcement of company policy and protection
against insider threat,” suggesting it’s not only the past
that can get you in trouble, but the present. This is illustrated by the multitude of scandals involving social-media-inept politicians, like Anthony Weiner’s “Whoops,
I tweeted a sext” and a Republican staffer’s “Whoops, I
went on a Facebook tirade against the president’s children.” Who needs their younger self to haunt them when
your present self is right here?
Having a public scandal about your private life may
Who needs their younger self to haunt
them when your present self is right here?
28
be a disturbing byproduct of the internet, but it at least
makes more sense than having a public fall for your past
life. Krystal Ball was 28 when she ran for Congress in Virginia; she was 22 when she went to a party and posed for
silly, sexually suggestive pictures. When those pictures
became public, it was 22-year-old Ball who was suddenly
the campaign’s central figure. Losing an election, at least
in part, because of your younger self ’s dick joke is wholly different than Weiner losing an election because of his
current self ’s dick.
For young people, that space between the past and
the present may be less clear. If a high school senior realizes that she should clean up her online presence as she
applies to colleges, the party picture she posted a year
earlier could still be seen by an admissions counselor. By
2012, a quarter of the nation’s top colleges were looking
at applicants’ Facebook profiles or Google results. Athletic recruiters also see what they can learn about a student
through social media. The idea that teenagers should all
be totally accountable for drinking, doing drugs, and general mischief—which teenagers have been doing since
forever—is a dangerous premise, and one that is once
again more likely to affect already marginalized young
people. Do we really want young adults paying for sins
they’ve already grown out of ?
The stakes are higher for kids who can’t insulate
themselves with socio-economic and white privilege.
For one teenager, a social media post could be an obstacle to a top college. For another, it’s a criminal conspiracy charge. Asheem Henry was a college freshman
in New Jersey when he was included in a massive NYPD
indictment of a crew he spent time with when he was
younger. Amongst the evidence against him were social
media photos from when he was 14 and 15 years old,
which the prosecutor used as proof that he was associated with the gang. The District Attorney’s office charged
Henry as an adult. Social media as evidence is increasingly used as tactic by law enforcement; former NYPD
PERMANENT RECORDS
chief Ray Kelly, in 2013, praised “attention to the new
battleground of social media,” saying it saved the lives
of “mostly young minority men.” For some of these kids,
the cost of being young on the Internet isn’t just their
reputation, but their freedom.
Public figures, too, experience the problem of the
thorough record. Videos of candidate Obama exist to remind his progressive voters of all the ways in which President Obama is different. Little 12-year-old Justin Bieber
still lives on Youtube, innocent and talented, playing an
acoustic guitar. Hannah Montana casts a judgmental
shadow over naked Miley as she swings on the wrecking ball. Former child stars’ headshots are put side by
side with their adorable young selves over captions like
“WHERE DID THEY GO WRONG?”
On the flip side, adulthood as a whole would almost certainly be better if we were forced to reconcile
with youth more honestly. Would a stronger recollection
of one’s initial impressions of life act as a counterweight
to those frequent byproducts of aging—wisdom, loss,
disillusionment, pragmatism? Young people and their
thoughts, passions, and beliefs are already here, of course,
but adults don’t often prioritize listening, especially to
the ones that don’t, in their eyes, belong to them. If one’s
own youth were less easy to escape, would youth in general be less easy to marginalize?
I got a tattoo when I was 19, and I’ve never regretted
it. I never got the one I really wanted back then (it was a
reference to Bright Eyes, another public figure constantly
scorned for the emotions of his youth), and I think I regret the self-doubt and insecurity I felt about it back then
more than I would regret the tattoo now. There is much
about youth that should be forgiven, if not forgotten. But
I think that adults might be better for it if they remembered, forever, how silly or passionate or serious or sad
they may have been as young people. Whoever my young
students grow into, I hope that they feel connected to the
imperfect and unfinished people they are now.
AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO
Only Women Are Named Hope
29
by AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO
The beauty industry may exploit a potent mix of hope and desperation, but we should
always want women to want more
THREE
and a half years ago, I bought a
popular anti-aging cream that purported to give “noticeable results in just one week.” I’d just begun my beauty
blog and thought, Hell, I’ll do them one better—I’ll give
’em a month, but I’ll only use it on half my face, and then
we’ll see exactly how “noticeable” the results are. The
cream did do a little something, but we’re talking a little
something. The difference was truly minuscule.
I bought the cream again.
“Hope in a jar,” or at least the way the phrase is used,
seems to imply its own opposite. It screams of hopeless,
desperate women willing to throw enormous resources
into an industry that promises us perfection that will always be out of reach. It preys upon our weaknesses, it’s a
gross exploitation of the beauty imperative, it’s snake oil
with a steep price tag. Which is to say, it abuses the thing
that makes sick people well, drives much of western development, and for the billions of people who believe in
a Christian god, allows you to believe in salvation: the exquisite human capacity for hope.
Let’s start with what hope is not. Hope is not trust,
which is a reasonable assumption that something is reliable. You trust that your apartment will not burn down in
your absence, that the cafe down the street will have hot
coffee, and that you will wake up in the morning and not
have the flu, even though you know full well that buildings catch fire, that coffee pots break, and that sometimes
people get the flu (and that sometimes they don’t wake up
at all). Hope is not faith, a belief in something even when
there isn’t a verifiable reason for that belief: You might
have faith in astrology, in Jesus, in the existence of your
soulmate, or that someday soon he’ll quit drinking.
Faith might be fierce, but it is also difficult to grasp
for those who don’t share it (which is part of what
makes it either foolish or admirable, depending
on your perspective). Nor is hope desire, which
is the mere want of an outcome. Hope is less
verifiable than trust, more purpose-driven
than faith, and more practical than desire.
To have hope, you need three things: a
30
goal (or, yes, desire), a route toward that goal, and a possibility—but, crucially, not a certainty—of getting there.
Hope is an action as much as a feeling, a decision to advance.
Enter the purchase of “hope in a jar.” There’s your
action, that funnel for your desire, your route toward the
end goal—presumably looking “refreshed” or “renewed”,
or maybe “preserved,” for those whose jarred hopes lie in
the direction of anti-aging creams. The term has its roots
in mythology—Pandora’s pithos, her vessel that released
the ills of the world and left only hope at the bottom of
the jar. When the term was introduced at midcentury, it
was used by the beauty industry as an example of what it
didn’t peddle. Revlon’s Charles Busta said it of his company’s new multitasking products in 1996 (“Until now, the
industry has been selling hope in a jar”), Leonard Lauder
said it the same year of Estee Lauder’s growing research
department (“We’ll begin to free ourselves from that hope
in a jar reputation”)—never mind that a spokesperson said
the same thing of a different Estee Lauder cream in 1989*
(“Customers respond to things that really work, not just
hope in a jar”). In each of these utterances, the speaker
was distancing his own jar from hope, claiming that No,
this product really works. The industry has used this tactic
for decades, choosing instead to appeal to the trust that
science supposedly provides: Pond’s was “Prepared by
Scientists” in 1917; hair restoratives were “offered with
a confidence which has been acquired by a long study”
in 1859. Their jars contain science, trials, 93% fewer fine
lines, not mere hope. Only a fool, after all, would spend
her money on that.
And it is a “her”—men don’t place their hopes in a
jar; women do. Worse, they’re silly enough to spend $58
billion on it each year—this from the pocketbooks that
famously contain a mere 74 cents to a man’s dollar! Surely,
say those who do not hope, it’s not hope that’s being peddled or bought. It’s something else, some combination of
self-loathing, penance, and desperation.
ONLY WOMEN ARE NAMED HOPE
There are two mythologies of womanhood that relate
to hope—one, that women are flighty, vain, desirous creatures; the other, that women are unforgivingly practical
home economists who aren’t going to waste time or money on something unless there’s a good chance it will work.
The first activates the desire of hope; the second, the penchant for plotting a route. Hope requires optimism, and
women have had to be more optimistic than men in order
to survive. Women have also had to be more practical than
men in order to devise workarounds to the patriarchy;
beauty work has been used as one of those workarounds,
with varying degrees of efficacy, for enough of history that
we can consider beauty work not cunning but practical.
Marry all of that with women’s social precarity and it’s not
hard to see why only women are named Hope.
The trouble is that the same act may be both hopeful
and desperate. Some nights, smoothing on my prescription retinoid cream makes me feel like I’m taking good
care of myself; others, like I’m chasing something I lost
the moment I turned 35. When I slide toward desperation, I think of the sort of self-hatred we presume women
have in relation to beauty, and the remedies we’ve come
up with for it—the morning-talk-show “body image tips
you can use!” that tell us to “love your body,” the sad-sack
campaigns from Dove, the you-go-girl memes about Marilyn Monroe wearing a size 12. Hope is a different animal,
one that cannot survive under conditions of self-hatred,
and that is the feeling I reach for. Hope requires a goal,
which requires optimism, which requires that women not
hate themselves. In fact, it requires that women see themselves as worthy of the investment that hope inspires. The
number-one thing I hear from women when I ask about
* This approach invited some brands to double down on irony: The
phrase “hope in a jar” was trademarked in 1996 by a skin care line
named, aptly, Philosophy. Today customers can not only purchase two
ounces of Hope in a Jar moisturizer for $44, they can also buy Renewed
Hope in a Jar ($47) and When Hope Is Not Enough Facial Firming
Serum ($45).
AUTUMN WHITEFIELD-MADRANO
their reasons for performing beauty work is not that they
want to change how they look, but that they want to look
like their best selves. It may be human to dream of transformation, but it is practical to dream of simply looking all
the time the way we do when we’re rested, fed, watered,
well-sexed, and nicely groomed. In other words, the reason we perform beauty work is because we are engaged in
chronic hope. Allow me to pass judgment here: This is a
good thing.
I long to see a greater embrace of hope. Not necessarily the creams and potions and, yes, the jars; those are
incidental to the essence of hope, and if those don’t feel
hopeful to you, they have no place in your life. I’ve been
bashful about the role of hope in my life, afraid to tell you
that I am full of it, afraid that it would make me seem foolish for having it, particularly in the times when my hopes
fall flat (which, if you have enough hope, it will at least a
few times). I’ve opted to present myself as possessing other qualities: taste, restraint, practicality, thoughtfulness.
I’ll let naïfs be hopeful; let me play the adult.
I now see that as small. To dismiss hope as foolish is
to dismiss not only the optimism of hope but its ambition.
I won’t say that women are denied the right to want—we
aren’t, not as much as we once were—but if you, like me,
are someone who has carefully walked the path of the
good girl, even as you are skeptical of its reported rewards,
it still feels daring to admit to want. When you announce
that you hope, you are announcing the desire for more.
And when the “more” in question is something as female-marked as beauty, it seems shallow. Why not instead
want success, power, even money? As if they were mutually exclusive. We still like to tsk-tsk women who openly
admit to wanting beauty—to hoping for beauty—because
we don’t want any one woman to have too much. Of
course the hours spent in front of the mirror, wandering
drugstore aisles, and flipping through haircut slideshows
could be spent figuring out JavaScript, Latin grammar
structures, or the color of your parachute. So could the
31
hours spent researching bulletproof coffee, “lifehacking”
your productivity, and tinkering with small engines. We
think of those as perfectly reasonable things to want and
to do, not as a time-drain in opposition to what we define as a successful life, because they are marked as male.
Yes, we should encourage women to want more from their
own lives. Asking them to regard their own hope as foolish—even if the hope in question seems frivolous—is
asking them to want less.
I have long championed beauty work as a portal to
more important lands: dignity, self-respect, joy, connection, compassion. I wonder, though, whether what I’ve
been championing all along is hope. The desirousness of
a goal, the clear-eyed surety of a route, the delicious state
of knowing something is possible but not at all certain:
Each arm of hope requires a sort of muscular resilience,
a resilience I’d call innocence, except that the uncertainty
of hope requires an understanding that hope might fail.
That resilience is echoed in the manifestations of beauty that are easiest to mock: the strobed and highlighted girls teetering in packs in wobbly heels, the person
whose first public declaration of genderqueer identity
is eyeliner paired with a muscle shirt, the old woman
who overdraws her lip line even as that line has become
puckered with age. Each of hope’s bearers also bears
risk of mockery, risk of disappointment, risk of failure.
That risk is what gives each agent of hope dignity—what
gives hope itself a dignity beyond the pathos of hope in
a jar. Beauty is a familiar of hope, its talismanic embodiment. The highlighting, the eyeliner, the overdrawn lip?
A hard-sided vessel for desire.
This approach invited some brands to double
down on irony: The phrase “hope in a jar” was trademarked in 1996 by a skin care line named, aptly, Philosophy. Today customers can not only purchase two ounces
of Hope in a Jar moisturizer for $44, they can also buy
Renewed Hope in a Jar ($47) and When Hope Is Not
Enough Facial Firming Serum ($45).
32
Addicted to Failure
ADDICTED TO FAILURE
by CAROLINE DURLACHER
Neoliberalism foists on career-minded millennials a self-relation which resembles that of
alcoholics in the throes of addiction
A
friend of mine is in a program now, and she’s doing
much better. Underearners Anonymous (UA), a 12-step
program founded in New York City in 2006, is a program for people who have trouble pursuing their personal “vision,” a term which appears seven times in the brief
“About UA” pamphlet. In one sense, “underearning” is
simply what its name implies: an “inability to provide for
one’s needs.” But it’s not just about earning a higher salary. It is also about “underachieving, or under-being, no
CAROLINE DURLACHER
matter how much money we make.” Underearners cannot
bring themselves to do exactly that which is meaningful
for them. Often self-employed, they fail to charge enough
for their services, or they give them away for free. They
also take on debt, hoard, and waste time. These symptoms
converge in a profile of typical UA candidates: freelancers
who are called upon to play the role of both manager and
employee and fail at both. And they fail precisely because,
as much as they’d like to take an entrepreneurial approach
to their careers, they fear the very the market they must
venture into in order to do so.
Patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the
original 12-step program, UA may be thought of as a
protocol for personal change. My aforementioned underearning friend has shelves that are lined with self-help
books on everything from intimacy and closing sales to
workspace organization, personal finances, and proper
eating. She has read about how to meditate, learn to let
go, care for herself, be present as well as brave, manage
her time, and unleash her creativity. Yet the endless proliferation of the self-help field, with its books, workshops, therapists, groups, and programs, is evidence that
its object is something essentially intractable. “These
are the ways I’ve tried and failed to manage my life,”
my friend says to me. Her bookshelf of dusty self-help
books is proof that even the most eager of self-helping
selves isn’t fully under its own control.
This paradox becomes even more pronounced under the conditions of freedom and flexibility characteristic of late 20th- and early 21st-century capitalism. In
the late 1970s, the French theorist and historian Michel
Foucault presciently identified the subject of late capitalism not as the man of exchange, but as the entrepreneur. There had occurred a “multiplication of the ‘enterprise’ form within the social body,” he writes. In other
words, individuals—and families, schools, communities, etc.—came to view themselves as enterprises and
think of their activities in entrepreneurial terms. Getting
33
an education, owning a house, or raising children came
to figure as investments toward future prosperity. And in
the working world, this means that individuals are less
interested in contributing toward the aims of big companies than in using key positions as leverage in their
own careers. Bosses and employees have been replaced
by clients and vendors, contractors and principals. Each
is pursuing her own interests, even if many participate in
larger institutions. Job security is a thing of the past, aspirants for work have come to be regarded as dispersed
economic units within the field of the labor market.
Each unit forms, dissolves, and re-forms functional
networks from moment to moment. Governing her actions in these networks is a “way of behaving in the economic field” that manifests as “competition in terms of
plans and projects, with objectives, tactics and so forth,”
Foucault writes. These correspond to the current societal obsession with resume building, career coaching, and
retirement planning. Under what has since come to be
known as neoliberalism, which is fundamentally a philosophy that favors the application of the logic of market
competition to nearly every area of human activity, individuals are regarded as ever-unfinished projects that can
be pursued or abandoned. This unexpectedly recalls the
20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of man. In his essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”
(1946), Sartre writes that man is “nothing else but what
he purposes.” Also, he “exists only in so far as he realizes
himself ” and “is no other than a series of undertakings.”
He is, in short, an enterprise.
Thanks to neoliberal enterprise, a lucky elite have
managed to escape meaningless office work. They now
contribute to the endless production of capital through
the pursuit of their creative vision. For them, the vast
field of possibility that is the neoliberal marketplace appears almost as validation of Sartre’s declaration, “Man
is free, man is freedom.” And underearners want in on
this self-determined prosperity. Also wanting in on it
34
are millennials, a generation born between the 1980s
and the 2000s or so. Millennials were raised to believe
that they could become whoever they wanted. Yet this
is actually a frightening prospect, because where an individual’s latitude for self-determination is widest, the
pressure to govern the self is most crushing, as is the
failure to do so. On the 13 to 16 daily UA phone meetings (with US and international access numbers), you’ll
find people with big dreams who are struggling to carry
them out: actors who don’t learn their lines; entrepreneurs who abandon business plans; writers who go to
law school because it’s practical, and then, having grown
miserable, fail out anyway.
Millennials are known for their special mixture of
entitlement and insecurity. As an Urban Dictionary entry
puts it, they think they’re special because mom and dad
told them they were. This means they’re constantly looking for teachers, bosses, and Facebook friends to prop up
this belief. Their parents’ financial well-being has allowed
them to pursue their passions, and yet now they can’t understand the fixation on job security and pension plans
characteristic of the generation that raised them.
Of course, the term “millennial,” inasmuch as it’s
valid, applies only to a privileged subsection of the generation it’s supposed to describe. That is, characteristics
attributed to millennials really only belong to white kids
from affluent families—those who are poised to become
the neoliberal creative elite, specifically. Hannah Horvath, the protagonist of the HBO series Girls, which has
received criticism for the scant attention it pays to less
privileged girls and girls of color, is perhaps the embodiment of this cultural figure. In the first episode, Hannah’s
parents have taken her out to dinner in order to tell her
they won’t support her financially anymore. Among her
protests is that she’s “busy becoming who I am!” In fact,
since she graduated from college, she has been living in
New York on their dime doing an unpaid internship at a
literary magazine. An aspiring writer who after two years
ADDICTED TO FAILURE
has only produced a thin sheaf of pages of her “memoir,”
Hannah says in another bid to keep her family funding
her, “I think I may be the voice of my generation!” That
her parents should forego the comforts of middle age so
that she can leisurely pursue her art seems to her to go
without saying. And her parents might even have agreed
to that deal if it had seemed like a good investment. But
Hannah’s combination of lofty ambition and crippling
self-doubt—which keeps her, a writer, from actually writing—doesn’t promise a good return on principal. So her
parents don’t cut her off only because they want to use
the money to go on luxurious vacations. They also regret
enabling her all these years, and are hoping being forced
to fend for herself will humble her, will help her hit rock
bottom.
12-STEP
programs have attracted tortured narcissists like Hannah since AA was founded in
1935. In fact, cofounder Bill Wilson, who in 1939 also authored Alcoholics Anonymous (known simply as the “Big
Book” of AA), himself identified as one, having worked as
a Wall Street speculator before he underwent a “spiritual
awakening” and turned his will and his life over to God. He
returned from military duty in World War I harboring great
personal ambition. “I fancied myself a leader,” he writes in
the Big Book’s first chapter: “For had not the men of my
battery given me a special token of appreciation? My talent for leadership, I imagined, would place me at the head
of vast enterprises which I would manage with the utmost
assurance.” Wilson wished to become a high-capitalist tycoon, steady of hand, discerning of judgment. He was, in
other words, an entrepreneur.
Wilson became convinced that complete knowledge
of the market was all that was needed to secure total power over the economic activity therein. “I had developed a
theory that most people lost money in stocks through ig-
CAROLINE DURLACHER
norance of markets,” he writes. To test his theory he and
his wife packed their things—“tents, blankets, a change
of clothes, and three huge volumes of a financial reference service”—and embarked on a reconnaissance mission throughout the Eastern Seaboard to investigate the
companies he was considering investing in. “Our friends
thought a lunacy commission should be appointed. Perhaps they were right.”
Wilson’s distilled the intelligence he gathered into
reports to Wall Street, and these won him a job. “For
the next few years fortune threw money and applause
my way,” he continues. “I had arrived. My judgment
and ideas were followed by many to the tune of paper
millions.” He’d proven himself by demonstrating his
command of the market. And yet, Wilson writes, “My
drinking assumed more serious proportions, continuing all day and almost every night.” After the stock market crash of 1929, he “was finished, and so were many
friends.” But he “wobbled” back to the brokerage office
and started again. “As I drank, the old fierce determination to win came back.”
In recounting his life story, Wilson makes it clear that
his drinking is not something tangential or unrelated to
his ambition. Though it may have served as a solace when
his efforts failed, it also spurred him to greater risks. In
retrospect, he understood his alcoholism as just another
symptom of that pride that drove him to seek his fortune
on the stock market. Part and parcel of this was Wilson’s
belief that he could gain such a total view of the market—
an omniscient view—which could allow him to control it.
Others’ losing on the stock market from ignorance simply meant he had to know more. Indeed, he had to know
everything. There’s a saying in AA that an alcoholic is an
“egomaniac with an inferiority complex.” Wilson’s ego
drove him to be the god of the market; his discovery that
he couldn’t be made him feel inferior, and this drove him
to drink.
Like underearners and millennials, alcoholics don’t
35
react well to the market. They respond to its unknowability
with a mixture of overconfidence and fear. Sartre’s existentialist—the man who “is free,” who “is freedom”—would
react better. Sartre answers Wall Street–prodigy Wilson’s
rational atheism, which informed his desire to become the
god of the market, with an existentialist’s committed atheism. A Sartrean existentialist operates according to a “stern
optimism” that stems from the understanding that “there
is no God and no prevenient design, which can adapt the
world and all its possibilities to my will.” He thus acts freely but also “without hope.” That is, the existentialist reacts
to uncertainty in utter serenity, an affect which underearners cannot duplicate. If, in order to better reproduce capital, neoliberalism exploits individuals’ very freedom and
entrepreneurial spirit, then underearners are those who
flinch in the face of that freedom, become paralyzed by
the infinite openness of the market. Whether heroically
indifferent to all that is beyond his control or sternly determined to act despite the inadequacy of his own powers, the
Sartrean existentialist personifies that which underearners
ask for when they recite 12-step programs’ signature Serenity Prayer, namely, “the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change, the courage to change the things I can …
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
If underearners would like to act serenely in the
world, their first concern is more reflexive; it is that of
changing themselves. Sartre holds the individual utterly responsible for his whole being. What horrifies existentialism’s critics, he writes, is that “the coward as we
present him is guilty of being a coward. What people
would prefer would be to be born either a coward or
a hero … Whereas the existentialist says the coward
makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic;
and that there is always the possibility for the coward to
give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.”
By the same token, it seems Sartre would say that the
underearner should simply give up earning too little. If
underearners haven’t consciously willed what they have
36
become, it owes only, as Sartre insists, to a “manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision.” This
may be so. But if Sartre holds individuals responsible for
this prior decision, he does not reveal how they might
access or change it. In that sense, the 12 steps of UA may
be thought of as a protocol for dealing with that “prior
and more spontaneous decision.” This decision involves
the unconscious, seemingly alien, and opaque part of
the self, that part of the self that is as uncontrollable as
the world—and market—outside it.
MODELED
on an egalitarian Christian movement called the Oxford Group, AA rid itself
of that movement’s religious trappings while continuing
to reject membership lists, hierarchies, temples, endowments, and any institutional ties. AA presents alcoholism
as a compulsive disease of both body and mind. As such
it cannot be overcome by willpower alone. Instead, alcoholics must awaken spiritually as they work the program.
They begin by admitting total personal powerlessness
over alcohol and move toward total submission to the will
of a “higher power.”
But what does it mean to need a higher power or to
submit to one? In an essay in his 1972 collection Steps to
an Ecology of Mind, 20th-century British anthropologist
Gregory Bateson argues that the turn to a “higher power”
in the steps of AA “is not a surrender.” Rather, “it is simply
a change in epistemology,” that is, a change in the alcoholic’s fundamental view of the world. Bateson argues that it
aligns with his systems theory, which redefines “mind” as
any sufficiently complex system of “causal circuitry.” These
are systems that react dynamically to changes in situational variables. A human mind, an ecosystem, an economy all
think. “The mental world—the mind—the world of information processing—is not limited by the skin,” he writes.
If Freud reclaimed the unconscious processes of body and
ADDICTED TO FAILURE
mind for the “self,” Bateson counters: “What I am saying
expands the mind outwards.” And this greater thinking
system, though immanent in the smaller and larger processes of the world, “is perhaps what some people mean
by ‘God.’”
If Bateson’s “greater Mind” is God, then the surrender involved in the first two of AA’s 12 steps may be
thought of as an acknowledgement of that mind, of what
may be called the greater world’s subjectivity. If, like a human individual, the world thinks, and it moreover does so
with perfect information, so to speak, then the scope of
human rationality comes into question. In fact, Bateson
sees the source of mankind’s ills as what he considers the
Western conception of the self: a sovereign, purposeful consciousness exercising its will on the world. And
though this self believes it thinks, acts, and decides, it is
in fact only a “false reification of an improperly delimited part” of a larger mind. Because individuals “arrogate
all mind” to themselves, the world around them appears
“mindless,” as theirs to exploit. Wilson was driven to dominate the market because for him, it was a senseless object
that, were he to know it well enough, he could twist to his
purposes.
Along with the arrogance displayed by Wilson in
his relationship to the market often comes purposefulness, which is a second evil of consciousness according to
Bateson. A habit of thought which oversimplifies the relationships between variables, purposefulness occurs in the
mind of an individual who says to himself: If I only plant
vast fields of wheat, I can grow it more efficiently than if I diversify. Then I can feed more people. This logic ignores the
complex, circular networks of causality that had hitherto
maintained a thriving variety of species. If the world is a
mind, when human beings change it, they tamper with a
system whose complexity rivals that of the endlessly mysterious human brain. The world is a subject, too.
Bateson sees these original sins of consciousness as
the root of human evils: violence, racism, sexism, environ-
CAROLINE DURLACHER
mental destruction, and so on. “If I am right, the whole
of our thinking about what we are and what other people
are has got to be restructured,” Bateson implored during a
1970 lecture at the Institute of General Semantics in New
York City: “This is not funny, and I do not know how long
we have to do it in.” In order to change the world, Bateson
says, humanity much change its thinking. “The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new
way,” he continues. And yet Bateson’s theory falters exactly
at the point of this change: “Let me say that I don’t know
how to think that way,” he admits.
Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned
exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still
think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. I am cutting
down the tree. “Myself ” is still an excessively concrete object,
different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”
That which structures Bateson’s thought in such a
way that he thinks himself as “Gregory Bateson,” as an
“I” is nothing conscious, nothing immediately accessible to his “reasoned exposition.” It’s that “prior and more
spontaneous decision” that seems always to precede our
conscious encounters with ourselves. It’s the thing alcoholics and underearners try to reach by following the 12
steps.
AA’S
12 steps are a protocol for change that
begins with a total relinquishment of the power to change.
“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol,” the first
step goes, “that our lives had become unmanageable.” This
is the central enigma of the program: that the first step to
controlling an addiction is to admit your utter lack of control over it. This is because your addiction itself, your unconscious self, is, like the market and the world, another
mind. Whereas Sartre’s hero is utterly alone in his responsibility for acting without hope in a foreign world, AA brings
individuals face to face with the foreignness of their very
37
selves. Even in the realm of self-help, there is no room for
unilateral action.
In a sense, UA is simply an attempt to allow its
followers to function under conditions of neoliberalism. Millennials have infinite possibilities for personal
change. They can take up yoga, join an improv group,
found a start-up and then sell it to a multinational corporation. They’re free enterprises. But in doing this,
they only exercise a freedom determined by the logic of
the neoliberal market. UA does not attempt to change
the structure of this market by, say, guaranteeing its justice, mitigating its effects, or socializing it. It attempts
to make us better capitalists. And yet the logic of the 12
steps themselves address a dialectic between personal
and systemic responsibility in a way that other personal or political philosophies do not. Marx’s communism
involved a self-conscious proletariat, a collective, yet
unitary, self that would become the subject of the revolution. This ended in a compulsory ideology and the
totalitarian will of a single party. AA, on the other hand,
is sensitive to the dissonance within individuals, and to
the dissonance between individuals and the larger world.
“We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves
could restore us to sanity,” the second step reads. With
this step, AA outsources change. The conscious self is
no longer the subject of the revolution.
According to Bateson, this surrender is already the
change the alcoholic seeks. This is because AA changes an
individual’s relationship to change by democratizing it. If
a change is to come, it will come from somewhere else.
The self is no longer the hero. And yet this surrender does
not absolve those looking for change—the underearner,
the alcoholic, the leftist—of responsibility. If we would
like a God to save us, if we would like unleash a process of
change that is greater than ourselves, that represents the
workings of Bateson’s “greater Mind,” the steps must be
followed and the program worked. As they say in AA, “It
works if you work it.”
38
Hanford Idyll
HANFORD IDYLL
by EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY
THE
Internet of 2016 plays host to an eye-catching subgenre of general interest articles that breathlessly describe the lives of wild animals at sites of nuclear catastrophe. In the fevered language of headlines, they imagine for
the reader the post-human life of the contaminated space,
where Fukushima’s wild boars and Chernobyl’s wolves
have managed to acclimate to landscapes considered totally
unfit for human life.
The fact that predators are mentioned most often
as thriving is worth noting: these animals living their un-
imaginable lives on the radioactive frontier flaunt their easy
symbolism, as manifestations of the landscape’s inherent
threat to humans that stretches into a future measured in
impossibly long half-lives.
Many of these articles cite a study published in the fall
of 2015 that describes how some species have flourished
in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, even as their populations have decreased in nearby areas. The study’s authors
describe the remaining fallout as a relatively minor threat
compared to the more pervasive scourge of human habi-
Dreamscape, 1984
At Hanford Nuclear Reservation, wildlife is imagined as thriving, and violent state
policy is extended into an indefinitely long future
EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY
tation. As one scientist quoted in National Geographic
explained the phenomenon: “‘nature flourishes when humans are removed from the equation, even after the world’s
worst nuclear accident.’” He continued, “we’re not saying
the radiation levels are good for the animals; we know it
damages their DNA, but human habitation and development of the land are worse for wildlife.”
Today’s civil and nuclear military landscape is experiencing a strange Cold War afterlife, defined by a collapsed
vision of a future where the constant production of nuclear
weapons was the only possible guarantee of peace. The nuclear age as such is far from over, and who gets to produce
and maintain nuclear weapons is still a fundamental issue
in international politics. Post-Cold War localized nuclear
disasters have shifted the imagination of nuclear danger
closer to home. This in turn has prompted an international effort to reimagine a livable future around and alongside
the instrumentalized threat of nuclear catastrophe.
This amounts to a gargantuan task of containment—
physically, of the nuclear waste left behind from these projects, as well as rhetorically, as governments attempt to present the task of post-nuclear environmental remediation as
manageable, and even advantageous. A technology that was
once seen as desirable exactly because of its capability to
wreak immeasurable destruction has been repackaged as
nonthreatening, with finite, knowable risks, and even as a
source of environmental salvation.
THE
Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern
Washington is one of many sites in the United States’ nuclear program where this logic has structured a large-scale
cleanup effort. The stretch of land on the banks of the Columbia River was judged by General Leslie R. Groves of the
Manhattan project in 1942 as appropriately remote from
human settlements. (In fact, the 586 square miles were part
of land that had been designated by treaty for the use of
39
the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Yakama Nation, and the Nez Perce Tribe in 1855.)
Construction began in March 1943, and the “B” reactor, the
world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor, first produced plutonium in November of 1944. The site’s production capacity
increased rapidly from there, and it supplied the plutonium
for many early nuclear tests, as well as the bomb dropped
on Nagasaki.
After the war, Hanford expanded its capacity as a center of the military’s nuclear project. In 1956, a missile base
was built on Rattlesnake Mountain, a sacred site for several local tribes, and by the 1960s the site was home to nine
nuclear reactors. Those reactors began to age beyond usefulness, and most were decommissioned in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The Department of Energy assumed control of the site in 1977. Three decades of intensive nuclear
production had taken a toll on the land; the waters of the
Columbia River, which had been used in the operation of
the reactors, had registered elevated levels of radiation 200
miles downstream, and airborne fallout was absorbed into
agricultural land and the bodies of livestock.
As the Cold War came to an end, the Department
of Energy was faced with the task of imagining a peaceful
future for a site that was built to produce fuel for a total,
endless war. The cleanup effort began in 1988, with responsibility shared by the EPA, the Department of Energy and
the Washington Department of Ecology. The project’s budget climbed steadily—early estimates set $1 billion as the
total cost, but that has expanded to $14 billion.
In summer 2000, in the last months of the Clinton administration, the Hanford Reach National Monument was
created from nearly 200 thousand acres of land that once
served as a security buffer for the site. Land that was once
meant to protect humans from radiation (and to protect
Hanford from outside interference) is now itself protected
from development and agriculture, part of an edenic landscape imagined into the future.
The Reach is presented as an invaluable resource
40
for those who want to study nature and those who want
to see the area as it might have looked seventy years ago.
The “unique and fortuitous circumstances,” as the establishment of the Nuclear Reservation is billed, have allowed
for the preservation of the area’s shrub-steppe vegetation,
which has been mostly destroyed by development in other
areas. The area’s biodiversity is assured first of all not by its
status as a protected area, but by the fact that its elevated
levels of radiation are framed as uniquely threatening to humans. This may be a side effect of the way the suffering of
non-human species is measured and cared about. Since the
way animals experience pain is still seen as up for debate,
the non-human experience of life on the Hanford Reach
National Monument is simply inaccessible. Animals can
register suffering by leaving or not reproducing; in nearly
all other cases they are understood as thriving.
This managed wilderness teeming with untroubled
animal life is held up as an implicit justification of hundreds
of years of aggressive military policy. “The history of the
Hanford Reach is the history and fulfillment of ‘Manifest
Destiny,’” declares the Hanford Reach information page of
the Fish & Wildlife Service’s website. “At its essence, the
‘progress’ of the atomic age helped to turn the landscape
back in time, at least on the borderlands that make up the
Monument.” Resurrecting Manifest Destiny as the ideological forbear of the Hanford Reach extends the project’s
implicit purpose far beyond environmental remediation. It
justifies all government action on the territory of Hanford
and surrounding areas from the beginning of the United
States’ presence in the area, including the contested treaty of 1855 and the ongoing struggle for Native American
sovereignty on the reservation established by that treaty.
By folding that remediation into a universally understood
‘progress’ and speaking of it in terms of a return to an earlier state of wholeness, the violent implications of nuclear
technology are referenced and quickly put to rest. The strategic necessity of maintaining (and occasionally deploying) nuclear weapons, long portrayed as unfortunate but
HANFORD IDYLL
unavoidable in the context of international politics, is thus
extended inward, onto the territory it was meant to protect.
Its catastrophically destructive potential, the logic seems
to go, can when placed in sufficiently capable hands not
only be managed but targeted to achieve a speedy return
to pristine nature, to the utopia that haunts environmental politics. The state is imagined into eternity, as the ideal
steward of its own engineered idyll, where all risk is finite
and manageable.
The act of political imagination that undergirds remediation efforts at Hanford is nuanced and replete, and takes
for granted the presence of humans far into the future. In
her work on the Hanford site, Shannon Cram describes the
Department of Energy’s classification of risk of exposure to
radiation by eight human types: Subsistence Farmer, Avid
Angler, Avid Hunter, Casual User, Non-Resident Tribal
Member, Industrial Commercial Worker, Resident Monument Worker, and Native American Resident. The apparent health of the Reach’s animals suggests a way of imagining a livable human future on radioactive land, one where
risk and threat of pain are de-historicized and managed
through exacting statistical understandings of every aspect
of a person’s interaction with their environment. Risk for
each of these types takes into account not only the amount
of time they might spend on the Monument, but the precise volume and type of food they might eat, the amount of
air they might breathe. Possible risks are calculated to the
year 2150, based, according to the report, on expectations
of safe storage of waste and the institution’s expectation of
its own survival.
The timescale of the nuclear half-life forces the state
to imagine itself into a deep future, positing long periods of
peace and political stability that will allow for the “natural”
process of radioactive decay and environmental renewal.
Not only are the conditions for this process without historical precedent, they are a far cry from the logic of contingency and emergency management that so often guide
political decision-making.
EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY
It also obscures the fact that in this case, emergency management is in fact the first order of business. Since
April 28th, 50 workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation
in eastern Washington State have sought treatment for exposure to chemical vapors. Their symptoms include respiratory problems, high blood pressure, and nausea. All of
these workers are employed in the maintenance of the site’s
“tank farms,” where 177 50,000-1,000,000-gallon tanks
store radioactive waste from the site’s long history as a producer of nuclear fuel. Waste leaks have been a chronic problem at Hanford. 149 single shell storage tanks were built in
the first two decades of the site’s operations to contain the
waste from plutonium production until a more permanent
solution could be found. Nearly 70 have leaked, and some
of this waste has reached the groundwater. There are also
28 double shell tanks, which enclose their contents in two
layers of carbon steel enclosed in concrete. These were built
in the 1970s and 1980s, though it was acknowledged at the
time that this too was a temporary solution to the problem
of leaking and a chronic deficiency of storage space. Today,
the waste remains in the tanks while the struggle for a more
permanent solution continues.
The cleanup effort has its own uncertain timescale.
In 1998, a British company, British Nuclear Fuels Unlimited, was contracted to vitrify the waste, a process that involves combining it with other materials to turn it into a
more stable glass, which can be stored underground for the
thousands of years required for radioactive isotopes to degrade. Vitrification promises an inherent stability that other methods of storing nuclear waste lack.
But the prospect of actually using it to control the ongoing problem of the site’s millions of gallons of waste in
its aging underground tanks seems ever more distant. Although the process has been used successfully elsewhere,
Hanford’s “Vit Plant” would be the largest such facility in
the world. Two years after the first contract was awarded,
the project’s projected costs had more than doubled to
$15.2 billion, and the Department of Energy transferred
41
the project to Bechtel, a construction company that previously worked on the Hoover Dam and the London Underground. The company started construction on the plant
before the plans had been finished, aiming to complete the
work as they went as a way of saving time and money. At
that time, the vitrification plant was expected to be up and
running in eight years. Since then, this approach has been
called into question as unsafe and impractical; the waste
must be analyzed before it is vitrified, and the complex history of Hanford is evident in the chemical complexity of
the radioactive solids, liquids, and sludge it has left behind.
The process of removing the waste from the tanks through
a series of pipes is a delicate one, and the risks of explosion and contamination are real. In 2015, the Department
of Energy set a 2039 deadline for the plant to be fully operational, with measures in place to extend this deadline if
necessary.
Hanford’s messy, uncertain present sits uneasily with the curious pastoralism of its imagined future,
where the happy animal vanguard of the present makes
way for the subsistence farmers and daytrippers, unworriedly breathing their statistically allotted cubic meters of
air. The presence of radioactive waste might dissolve the
boundaries between animal and human in the face of a
shared threat. Instead, Hanford’s new life as wilderness
seems to rest on the idea of a fundamental gulf between
nature and humans, whose differential relationships to
the nuclear build-up are likewise naturalized and effaced.
The human engineers of the nuclear age, uniquely able to
destroy the environment, can by the same means save it;
descriptions of natural cycles of decay and renewal are
deployed to erase and extend a long legacy of destructive
policy. We are encouraged to think of the future they are
making with complacent hope: if nature’s ability to renew
itself has not been fundamentally disrupted by the nuclear age, we can be imagined back into the landscape without a reevaluation of the past, a redesign of the present or
a new imagination of the future.
42
TIME IS A KILLER
Time Is a Killer
by TIANA REID
Aging, as a staged theme, provokes other forms of performance to become strained
and uncertain
“She was also an actress, which made the
discussions of her even more real because
she could be anything. She was a good actress, she was brilliant at pretense. She was
more real in suspended disbelief than most
things are just standing there. Her body, the
one that you touch with your hands, unfolded into other people, and she was so sunk
into performance that things got funneled
into moments as hard as diamonds. The moments shimmered and hung in the air, they
were at her fingertips, they were her craft.”
—Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood
“She was a great actress, but only in real life.”
—Hilton Als, White Girls
THERE
is a 30-second scene at the end of
Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 revved-up blaxploitation film
Jackie Brown where Ms. Brown (Pam Grier) is practicing.
She’s practicing to brassily draw her gun, a firearm named a
Colt Detective Special. With the gun carefully placed in an
open desk drawer, easily reachable, Ms. Brown purses her
lips three times, sometimes smiling, always grabbing the
gun and pointing, punctuated by a sigh. In each sequence,
part of a triptych, her left forearm is posed gracefully on
the desk, in secretary-like fashion. She is bracing herself
TIANA REID
for what’s to come; she is staring beyond the camera. The
eponymous heroine is a flight attendant for a crappy Mexican airline and, in conjunction with her lack of professional success, is often described as a “middle-aged woman,”
struggling to get what’s hers.
This scene of doubled theatrics illustrates how in
order for Ms. Brown to do her job, she has to play many
roles and as many people. The audience has no access to
the Real Jackie Brown (or Pam Grier, for that matter) but
in the blurring of performance and performativity, theatre
and reality, emerges the undecidability dwelling in the
woman performer who is at the brink of becoming old. At
the crux of this undecidability, this ambiguity of performance and rehearsal, is both a decomposition of what was
once productive and a refusal to stick to the social script.
AS
with pornography, Americans know a good
show when they see it. But Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands), the lead in director-actor John Cassavetes’s 1977
film Opening Night, wants to feel the performance as what
it is: performance. A famous and serious actress, Myrtle is
reluctantly starring in a Broadway play called The Second
Woman, about an aging woman confronting the apparent
hopelessness that will overtake the rest of her life. Mostly however, Myrtle, always with a cigarette at risk of falling
from her open lips, is having an alcohol-ridden emotional-cum-professional breakdown in New Haven, where the
rehearsals are taking place.
In the opening scene of its play-within-a-film, Myrtle’s character, Virginia (also Rowland’s name at birth),
gets home late from the bar. She is confronted with a
rather tedious diatribe by her onstage husband, a photographer named Maurice ( John Cassavetes, also Rowland’s
IRL husband), about the sins and virtues of “older people.” “I’m giving up [photographing] older people…can’t
photograph them without their clothes on,” he says. Cue
43
laughter—and yet he points to a prop photograph of a
woman who looks like she’s in her eighties. Look how wise
she is, he speculates. Women, as carriers of culture, develop wrinkles that tell fortunes. Wise old creatures… Myrtle
as Myrtle will resist the trope. “Age isn’t interesting. Age is
depressing. Age is dull. Age doesn’t have anything to do
with anything,” she says.
The deteriorating woman performer is a portable
American figure: Take the recent Nina Simone documentary, or the 2015 film The Looking Glass. And 1950s Hollywood had Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve. These faded
stars, these tragic heroines, give us the material to put off
the assumed inevitable confrontation with our own dying
bodies. We watch them to know them, to master them, to
compare ourselves with them, to solidify our own experience. We see their crisis as one with age rather than a crisis propelled by socialized abjection. But these performers
also displace our drive toward individual subjecthood in
their fight with and against performance of what it means
to “age gracefully,” which is often code for what it means to
disappear. This dramatic confrontation with seeing the self
as static image takes shape even amidst the very 21st-century idea of inclusion that all a woman needs to be is herself.
In Opening Night, an exhausted Myrtle Gordon is, as
she says, “finding it harder and harder to stay in touch.” She
connects this to her age, however loosely, comparing her
current self to her teenage self whose emotions were on
the bloodied surface. The film is grounded in the warrant
that a woman lives out her life, if she makes it, in two stages, youth and old age. Moving through stages sets off not
merely a loss of beauty and attention but, more interestingly, a decline of control over the power to perform.
Aging, as a staged theme, provokes other forms of
performance to become strained and uncertain. But what
marks this collapse into illegibility? What decides if she’s
pulled it off or not? Who sees the crack?
Myrtle cracks in a watershed moment early in the
film, after the death of a 17-year-old fan named Nancy. It
44
is age, age as progressive and regressive, as stamping both
time and loss, that names the downfall for Myrtle. After a
show, Myrtle is signing autographs and saying hello to fans
outside the theatre. Nancy stands out, even among the Belieber-like frenzy. “I love you I love you I love you,” she
tells Myrtle. Nancy winces and falls to her knees. Though
as a rule Myrtle is rather cynical about her fame, she gives
in a little and gives Nancy an autograph. It starts pouring
rain, and after Myrtle gets in her car and shuts the door,
Nancy quivers in the pouring rain, petting the window
with a soft yet terrifying cower. Myrtle watches for a few
seconds—“something’s not quite right with that kid”—
but now it’s really time for dinner, so they drive off. A minute later Nancy is hit by oncoming traffic. Despite Myrtle’s
plea, the driver doesn’t turn around to see if she is okay.
Death becomes her.
The enactment of gender, on and off-screen, is constitutive of social domination. “You’re not a woman to me
anymore, you’re a professional,” spouts one of the many
men with advice for Myrtle. But Myrtle—a drinker but
still, as many drinkers are, a professional—feels too much
and too hard the vulnerabilities of the stamp of woman.
For one, she does not want to be slapped on stage. She’s
not so much afraid of the slap itself so much as the making-corporeal of her gendered body on stage — it has the
potential to cross that slippery ontological line between
performing woman and being one. The play’s director,
Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara) prefers, as men do, to make
history of violence. “It’s tradition,” he tells Myrtle. “Actresses get slapped.” And inevitably, Virginia (or is it Myrtle?) gets stage-slapped (or is it really slapped?). She falls
to the bright red-carpeted stage floor. Silence. She won’t
get up. The camera pans to the small staff audience. She
screams no, no more, no no no no. Someone in the audience claps. She’s still on the floor. Embedding the messy
stuff of life within the hermetically sealed theatre, she derails the rehearsal.
It’s hard to tell for sure whether this is a politics of re-
TIME IS A KILLER
fusal or a failure to perform. “I seem to have lost the, uh...
reality of, of the, uh… reality,” she stammers on stage in the
aftermath of her fits. This undecidability throws the way aging is understood into crisis. Myrtle does not get up because
she does not see what she calls “hope.” Yet by the cold bliss
of her own inertia, Myrtle exudes a disinterest in aging as
a theme even as everyone around her is telling her she can
relate. Coupled with her visions of Nancy, Myrtle’s stasis
amounts to a dissent to progressive temporality — which is
part of why she was attracted to the stable narrative mores
of the stage in the first place. The aging actress in Opening
Night is not mostly concerned with keeping up sexualized
appearances. What emerges as the ultimate unattainable
thing is the loss of the illusion of performance. Myrtle does
not want to become her role. She wants to play it.
A film rife with theatre metaphors yields little space
to its actresses. What “woman” is is not divorced from the
technologies of its representation if “woman” is, as Dai Jinhua argues, “always metaphoric,” or as Teresa de Lauretis
has claimed, a “fictional construct” that also refers to “real
historical beings” who are bound to those stories we tell.
While “woman” always gestures out to “women,” the actress is singular. In Opening Night, we see Gena Rowlands
negotiating a kind of double confinement. As the real and
the performed cross-pollinate, the rhetorical only goes so
far in giving us texture to life as we know it. Myrtle, who
is not at all oblivious to her condition AS WHAT, boils it
down throughout the film with Xacto-knife precision. For
instance:
• “She’s very alien to me.”
• “I’m just so struck by the cruelty in this damn
play.”
• “We must never forget that this is only a play.”
• “I accept my age... listen Sarah, every playwright writes a play about herself. You’ve written
a play about aging—well, I’m not your age.”
• “I’m looking for a way to play this part where
TIANA REID
age doesn’t make any difference.”
• “Does she win or does she lose? That’s what I
wanna know.”
Despite her poised, dead-smart script, Myrtle is a
woman unhinged, deep in the makeup of her own life. In
Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Cassavetes reflects on Myrtle’s
struggle with the reality of clocked existence: “Sometimes
I thought about [Myrtle] fighting and I would think, ‘Why
doesn’t she just accept being a woman and be glad about it?
Why doesn’t she stop asking herself all these questions?’ ”
For Cassavetes, accepting being a woman is to accept old
age.
Accepting being a woman? I hadn’t once thought of
that. Power is never far from the mind—or the heart. There
are better questions to ask if the answer to the banal ones
are a depoliticized self-acceptance or the lukewarm inclusionary politics of representation. Questions like, Will she
be able to act her way out of it? Is she acting or is this really
her life? What does it take to pull it off? Why is age the only
index that we don’t readily and happily call a social construction?
The notion that actresses are flowery, flagrant, bright
creatures full of excess and digressions is a myth told in sexism’s name. After all, the art of show business is an art of
balance: fully economical, no waste, no room for dallying
around. Even improvisation is a theory of time, meter, calculation, and disciplined intuition. In a particularly pressing scene onstage during The Second Woman, Myrtle Gordon turns to the audience and says, “Time is a killer, isn’t
it, folks?”
Myrtle has no stage problem, and she has yet to
succumb to whether or not she as an age problem. She
knows the rhythm of delivery. The audience adores her.
This bleeding of script and heart anticipates the unfittingly
happy ending. More applause. And yet the film is too raw
and painful to be thoroughly optimistic. We are again like
Myrtle. We don’t know if we’ve won or lost. We don’t know
45
what is being performed.
In Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (1999),
editor Kathleen Woodward is interested in how women
become sequestered off from the world as they get older.
(White women in general, like in the new Netflix series
Grace and Frankie, stage a big fuss when they are no longer seen how they want to be seen.) Many of the shots of
Myrtle capture a face at a slant. Eyes under a veil, figural
fragments refracted in mirrors, head down, a mouth protected by a glass, eyes shielded by sunglasses, body doubled
by Nancy. This body language is a kind of disinterest, a preference of madness and grief over accepting aging as only a
matter of time.
Opening Night experiments with what Teresa de
Lauretis calls “the conditions of visibility,” a far cry from
the logics of making visible or being seen, which often forgets the possibility of the failed performance, the fuckedup, too-old actress on the verge, the one who hesitates to
play her part because it is too close, too close to the role she
cannot desire not to play.
Sontag argued that photography as a medium produces evidence. But film has the capacity to produce phantasm.
Inasmuch as the moving image produces fantasy, it also
positions desire. In an attempt to produce just conditions
in an unjust world, it’s common to, say, quote Aaliyah’s
debut album—released when she was fifteen years old—
and say something like, age doesn’t matter. While Myrtle
laments the loss of power—sexual, social, professional—
that comes with aging, she can still make the ghosts “appear or disappear at any time.” Myrtle refuses the loss of
all self-management but confronts the futility of privately
having to confront a public problem: How boring is aging?!
Time is a killer because it is the merest trifle repeated
over and over again. Naming aging as boredom is a response
to the numbing effects of time. For Myrtle, boredom gets
after the way time kills, even if boredom is a scapegoat for
more illegible sensations. Myrtle is the woman who refuses
to grow old because she refuses to grow bored.
46
We Were Promised Hot Tubs
WE WERE PROMISED HOT TUBS
by ROB HORNING
The French Kiss album cover embodies the idea that adulthood can be one endless
party too, a better one, since everyone has more money, better drugs, and fewer
inhibitions
I
guess I am old enough now for my music-writing “career” to have entered officially into the obituary rather
than the discovery phase. It’s just more likely at this point
that a musician I already love will die than it is that I will
find new musicians to get that attached to.
Anyway, I wanted to write something about Fleet-
ROB HORNING
wood Mac guitarist Bob Welch after I heard about his
death, maybe something about the neglected Mac albums that feature him prominently, Bare Trees or especially Mystery to Me, or maybe something about his
special flair for vaguely cosmic, meandering midtempo
love songs like “Emerald Eyes” and the epic “Future
Games.” But then I remembered I had written an appreciation of sorts a few years ago of his first solo album,
French Kiss (1977), the apex of his success. Now seems
as good a time as any to opportunistically rework that. At the Princeton Record Exchange, there are probably enough copies of French Kiss in the dollar bins to
wallpaper an entire apartment. It’s a testimony to how
popular the album became when the single “Sentimental Lady,” a re-recording of a Bare Trees song, went to
the top of the charts. Any reasonable person would
identify that song as Welch’s chief legacy, but whenever
I think of him, I think of this album cover and what it
did to me as a child. Somehow I got it into my head that
this is what adulthood would look like.
When I saw this cover in a Listening Booth as a
kid, I concluded that this was the essence of adult enter-
47
tainment. Clearly it was meant for people who weren’t
embarrassed or reluctant to have left youth behind. As
you can see above, the left half of the album cover
seems to have set itself on fire in an effort to cleanse
itself of the seedy filthiness of what’s happening on the
right. Welch, balding but with the long scraggly wisps
of the middle-aged man who hasn’t given up, wears
pleated white pants and what looks to be a misbegotten
cross between a track suit and a rugby shirt, opened to
expose his sparsely haired chest. He seems barely able
to stand as he tries to … what exactly? At first it appears he’s trying to ignite some unidentified smokeable
object (cigar? roach clip? gnarly half-smoked butt from
the ashtray?) but on closer inspection he might just be
trying to throw a lit match into his mouth. He has on
oversize, burgundy-tinted sunglasses that almost but
not quite conceal heavy-lidded, utterly wasted eyes,
which stare out vacantly at the camera.
Draped on him is a tall, heavily made-up woman
wearing a red dress or maybe some sort of terry bathrobe that exposes her leg up to the top of her thigh,
where her bronze tan begins to fade. Her spindly fingers, with their long, blood-red nails, are stretched
across Welch’s chest. (Both she and Welch wear rings
on their ring finger, but you don’t get the impression
they are married to each other.) Most strikingly, she is
tonguing his face, or perhaps his earlobe—confusing,
because isn’t French Kiss when you put your tongue in
someone’s mouth?
This cover tells you everything you need to know
about the ’70s ideal of languid self-indulgence: It gloriously conjures up cocaine spoons and key parties,
empty promises made in hot tubs, interchangeable and
indifferent bodies letting it all hang out in discos, sex in
sports cars and hotel rooms while the 8-track of something like this album repeats and repeats.
The rock milieu today seems suffused with nostalgia about the time when the genre’s aging audience
48
was teenagers. It implies that those were inevitably the
best years of our lives and that being grown up is one
compromise, one sellout, one dreary responsibility
after another. In fact, it’s hard to think of anything in
contemporary culture that celebrates adulthood today
as a distinct, appealing stage of life with its own special
allure. But French Kiss’s cover embodies the idea that
adulthood can be one endless party too, a better one,
since everyone has more money, better drugs, and fewer inhibitions.
This mood is epitomized by “Sentimental Lady,”
which opens the album and encapsulates the era’s zeitgeist. Lindsey Buckingham produced this remake after
replacing Welch in Fleetwood Mac and gave him the
biggest hit of his career. If you want to get a sense of
Buckingham’s genius, it’s worth comparing the deluxe
version with the not-bad original. He revamps Welch’s
serviceable album cut into something indelible. From
the shimmering arpeggios that open the track to the
pillowy backing vocals from Christie McVie to the
spare guitar solo over the bridge to the elegant, contrapuntal layers of sound during the fadeout, “Sentimental Lady” is as perfect a specimen of the California
soft-rock sound as ever blessed FM radio, and it surely
must have mellowed many a midlife crisis. Welch is no
one’s idea of a strong singer; he had a wispy voice that
was equal parts Neil Young and Glenn Frey. But “Sentimental Lady” makes his weakness a strength, as the
indifference built in to his laconic intonations takes the
cloying edge off the lyrics (“You are here and warm /
But I could look away and you’d be gone / That’s why
I’ve traveled far / Because I feel so together where you
are”) and generates a bracing undercurrent of tension:
He seems both deeply in love and deeply bored.
The rest of French Kiss doesn’t live up to “Sentimental Lady.” Welch had a second hit with “Ebony Eyes,” which has a “Begin the Begin”-like opening
guitar hook and a chorus punctuated with a string ar-
WE WERE PROMISED HOT TUBS
rangement typical of the many attempts to assimilate
disco to soft rock. The video has some of the same
sleezy vibe as the album cover, though: Welch wanders
around what is supposed to be a high-class supper club,
wearing a beret and holding both a mike and a cigar
while a biracial couple dances some warped version of
a tango. Several of the clientele hold masks in front of
their faces. There is also a guy who appears to be on a
date wearing a Shriners hat.
“Hot Love, Cold World,” the album’s third single, is less memorable—a stab at funk with some incongruous soloing more suited to Welch’s subsequent
work with his ill-fated progressive-metal band, Paris.
The rest of the album is rounded out with material that
sounds like the Elton John of those years (“Don’t Go
Breakin’ My Heart”, bicentennial anthem “Philadelphia
Freedom”)—peppy and synthetic, replete with choppy bursts of strings and overexuberant backing vocals,
often from Welch himself, multi-tracked unmercifully.
This was the AOR-certified hitmaking formula of the
day, and Welch adheres to it dutifully, absconding on
the spacey contempletiveness of his Mac songs to engage in some slick pandering.
The cynical expediency with which Welch dispatches tracks on French Kiss seems like a taunt, as if
he’s daring you to call him on merely going through the
motions. But his barely disguised jadedness is part of
what makes the album such a piquant 1970s memento
now: This suits the way we’ve been trained to remember the ’70s, as a time of soulless selfishness and narcissism, of baby-boomer egomania gone amuck. Welch
makes selling out—agreeing to the compromises of
adult life—seem like a grand fuck-you gesture whose
material rewards always garner you the last laugh on the
earnest. For this reason, French Kiss is still bleakly compelling, like that one last line when it’s already five in
the morning and you’re way past strung out. You can’t
even feel anymore, but that’s no reason to stop.
49
MALCOLM HARRIS
REVIEW
Don DeLillo Did 9/11
BY
MALCOLM HARRIS
Surpassed by history, will the novelist
put down his pen?
Don DeLillo, Zero K. Scribner. 2016. 288 pages.
FOR
a writer who has made a career out of understanding the increasing pace of contemporary life, DeLillo has remained steady, putting out a new novel every few
years since his hyper-productive 1970s. The six years he
took to write Zero K, his most recent novel, is the longest
he’s taken since his 1997 masterpiece Underworld, which
weighed in at 800-plus pages. It’s hard to write about the
cutting edge of geopolitics, art, and ideology at that kind of
interval. Zero K ends with the protagonist enraptured by
the beauty of Manhattanhenge, a biannual phenomenon
when the setting sun aligns with the New York City grid.
At some point in the past 50 years, this might have been in
a cool factoid for those not in the know and a nice moment
of recognition for New Yorkers. But in the age of social media, it feels like an aunt posting a viral BoredPanda video
on Facebook two years too late.
To be fair, DeLillo saw this coming. In Mao II his protagonist—a reclusive novelist—gives voice to fear that the
medium is going out of fashion:
The novel used to feed our search for meaning…. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we
turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel…. We don’t even need
catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.
And later in the novel:
For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and
terrorists are playing a zero-sum game…. What terrorists
gain novelists lose…. The danger they represent equals
our own failure to be dangerous…. Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major
work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings.
It’s one thing for the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to call 9/11 a work of art—he apologized—but it’s another for DeLillo to have repeatedly theorized it as a work
of art in advance.
50
As I read through DeLillo’s novels in college, I began
to hold him personally responsible for the terrorist attacks
of 9/11. (Not solely responsible of course—there’s plenty
to go around.) His fixation on terrorism, finance, and the
Twin Towers themselves in novels like Mao II, Players, and
Underworld, which includes a hazy picture of the twin towers on the cover and a character who contemplates crowds
fleeing from towers and terror in the sky, made 9/11 seem
inevitable in retrospect. Any prophecy that comes true has
to be at least a little self-fulfilling. There is no way to read
DeLillo’s novels and not understand that—at least on a
subconscious level—he saw it coming. I’m not sure how I
could ever recover from something like that, but I’m not
Don DeLillo. DeLillo’s 9/11 novel Falling Man—published in 2007—is not among his better 9/11 novels.
I don’t know if there’s any causation in the correlation, but since 2001, DeLillo’s novels have been formulaic. There are tight patterns across his books since the ‘70s
not because he deals in existential human qualities but
because he’s been focused on the same process of global
transformation the whole time. He spotted early that the
flows connecting the world—of information, resources,
attention, people, ideas—were increasing. His protagonists tend to be secular mystics who sense monitor those
flows: an advertiser, a rock star, a financier, a military strategist, etc. They feel the shifts in the world as it moves, and
as projections of the author’s awareness they’ve all seemed
prescient. But DeLillo’s four most recent novels are different. The narrative drama that separated the author from
his characters—who mostly speak and think on the same
deep wavelength, including the children—has evaporated.
Zero K is typical of his late work. Our main character
Jeffrey Lockhart is a young 21st century flow-monitor of
indeterminate type. He is the once-rejected now-heir—
echoes of Steve Jobs’s daughter—to an infinitely rich and
powerful financier, Ross. (In 2003’s Cosmopolis these two
types were combined into a single young and infinitely rich
and powerful financier character.) Ross has been investing
TITLE
in a secret futurist compound in Central Asia, where his
dying wife Artis is planning to freeze her body for future
experimentation and, if all goes as planned, resurrection by
nanobot. Ross is conflicted, caught between living without
Artis or jumping into an imagined future with her. Jeffrey
doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.
There’s not a lot of story in Zero K; it’s more of an evocation, a tone poem. As a meditation on why a thoughtful
person might want to freeze his or her body in a mountain compound in a country they can’t name, the book is
surprisingly good. The idea doesn’t end up sounding reasonable—like Jeffrey, we’re never convinced—but DeLillo puts the urge in historical context. Like the pyramids,
someday the long-defrosted fossils will be found, and they
will give testament to the fantasies of our own Ozymandias. Or maybe, just maybe, science (infused with lots of
money) can construct a walkable bridge to the future. Artis and Ross Lockhart are, strictly speaking, leaving their
bodies to science, but his investment also means they’re
leaving science to their bodies.
Not much else in the novel is very meaningful except
as a mashup of recent DeLillo tropes. There’s the isolated
desert of End Zone retread Point Omega, the traffic-locked
car of Cosmopolis. There’s the required discourse on a work
of real-world contemporary art: In Point Omega it was
Douglas Gordon’s stretched video installation 24 Hour
Psycho; in Cosmopolis, Spencer Tunick’s piles of naked
bodies; in Falling Man, the controversial mock-jumps of
Kerry Skarbakka. This time it’s Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass—a giant rock. These descriptions are interesting,
but I find myself wondering first why DeLillo doesn’t just
write art reviews, and second how he keeps slipping these
ones by his editor.
Besides Ross and Artis, Jeffrey has a relationship with
Emma, mostly notable for her 14-year-old son Stak, who
she and her maybe-still husband adopted as a toddler in
the Ukraine. Stak plays a significant role in the story not
because his relationship to Jeffrey is intimate or special but
MALCOLM HARRIS
because Stak is the more interesting character. DeLillo’s
fixation on precocious kids seems a little goofy when you
think about Jerry McGuire, and any fan of the author would
be more surprised if Stak didn’t speak Pashto. Stak is another flow-monitor, betting on an online terrorist futures market—an idea once proposed in real life in the early 2000s
by former National Security Advisor John Poindexter.
The problem with
this novel of ideas
isn’t the ideas; it’s
the novel.
Zero K is listless, as is Jeffrey Lockhart. He seems
barely able to summon the energy for his late-onset identity crisis, and I found it hard to believe that by young adulthood, such a smart man had never considered the possibility that “Ross Lockhart” wasn’t his rich jerk of a dad’s
given name. When he turns down the keys to his father’s
kingdom, Jeffrey has mentally reduced the stakes of the decision so low that the reader doesn’t care either. There’s a
good short story here about a certain delusion of grandeur,
and DeLillo’s dialogue remains compelling, if increasingly univocal. The problem with this novel of ideas isn’t the
51
ideas; it’s the novel.
I don’t expect DeLillo is going to join a think tank
anytime soon, any more than he’s going to join a Ukrainian
nationalist militia like Stak ends up doing in Zero K. He’s
only interested in people who actively shape the world
with their faith, ideas, and understanding, but over the
course of his career that has ceased to be part of DeLillo’s
job description. And he was one of the first people to realize it.
“When the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically,” DeLillo writes in Mao II, “there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the shitpile of hopeless
prose.” I don’t think DeLillo has lost his talent, and I don’t
expect he ever will. Scholars will be unraveling the man’s
influence on the American novel for generations. But his
window, his historical moment, seems to have closed.
When Artis “wakes up” in her frozen state, she’s
trapped in a hell dimension of pure self-consciousness.
“I think I am someone. But I am only saying words,” she
thinks. “The words never go away…. It is only when I say
something that I know that I am here.” It’s a torturous caution against immortality, which is probably a topic on the
minds of most great novelists turning 80.
Read in contrast, the closing lines of Zero K sound
like they could be a retirement announcement. Jeffrey
watches a boy watch the epic sunset:
The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not
seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.
I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s
light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.
The sky collapsing, the lit towers bleeding into the
streets: It’s a reversal of sorts. The boy cries in wonder, not
terror. There is harmony for a moment between the city,
the sky, and the child. If that’s what the novelist Don DeLillo chooses to leave us with, then I hope he’s as prescient
now as he was 15 years ago.
52
Old and damned like a grave
THE BERKLEY HORSE
by IMP KERR
Imp
January 28, 2009 7:29 AM
Trash past death, 2009
Imp
November 12, 2008 11:59 PM
nora and nobra are on a boat. nora falls off.
if someone comes at me with the whole oh you’re a superstar
angle, i just play that character, but:
it always makes me perplexed when people refuse eternal
youth. i didn’t read homer’s iliad but i read the sequel, the
odyssey, a long time ago, and i believe that at the end of the
iliad, ulysses leaves troy to return home to ithaca, where
his family and his fans are waiting. the trip (the “odyssey”)
takes almost 10 years during which he meets (a) junkies, (b)
circe who turns men into swines, (c) alluring rowdy killers
(half bird half lesbian), (d) giants with unpronounceable
names, (e) etc, and (f) calypso, a sea-nymph interested in
witchcraft who used to have a career in porn jacking off sea
elephants before focusing on wannabe heroes. all viragoes
when not creeps, with the notable exception of
(g) nausicaa, who is awesome and will ultimately save ulysses.
i got interested in calypso (from the greek kalupso, “i will
conceal”)—technically the second main character of the
book given the arithmetic fact that on a 9 year-trip, ulysses
spends 7 years in captivity on calypso’s island.
calypso falls in love with ulysses, and like terence stamp
in the collector, she tries to seduce him, to force his love. it
doesn’t work. ulysses isn’t interested. “i want to move the
hell out” are the only words he knows.
despite the lack of reciprocity and, we must admit, ulysses’s
bad grace, calypso’s libido doesn’t fade, nor even plateau,
she wants him so bad, he’s so handsome and veiny.
53
IMP KERR
Trash past death belt, Van Cleef & Arpels, 2012
Ulysses
at this point we all rightly observe, in petto, that ulysses,
for his trip back home, is going to have to sail and face the
crowded seas, the lures, troubles, dangers, perils, freaks,
and get into a lot of does god exist kind of games. he is going
to risk his life. on the other hand, on calypso’s island, he’s
safe. and yet—our nota bene—this assured safety proves
insufficient to decide his love.
so in phase two calypso ups the ante and offers ulysses immortality and adds eternal youth, on top of, remember,
abundance of love, seaside dinners, star gazing, smiley culture music… (clearly homer had access to decent mdma.)
are you starting to get the picture? (1) staying young for
ever, but staying with calypso for ever, too (you gotta be
in it to win it), or (2) risking your life to go back home, reuniting with your spouse, being celebrated as a hero, being
worshiped (for your victory over troy, the trojan horse, et
cetera).
we know that the laws of megalomania suggest that being
admired by a crowd is a strong plus, and if you draw a line in
the sand, immortality/mortality, and reexamine these two
words carefully, what you see, in the current context, is that
accepting immortality means staying on that island hidden
from the world, “concealed” (hence calypso’s name), which
equals being eternally young, maybe happy, but with nobody except calypso knowing about it. it means being forgotten, ending up nobody. say goodbye to your hero’s career
(heroes’s exploits must be known in order to be praised).
yes it’s starting to look like a really bad deal and of course
ulysses refuses, he leaves, he chooses death (one day he’ll
die). what matters to him, is being immortal in people’s
mind, in books, in history. not on that island, not only in
calypso’s eyes.
celebrity the new drug.
it may sound weird, but if you want to be eternal, accepting
immortality from a sea-slut should be at the very bottom of
your list.
ulysses: “i’m so glad someone invented death.”
background reading: jean-pierre vernant, le refus d’ulysse, 1982
54
Celebration of Life, 2009
THE BERKLEY HORSE
Edited transcript of Jimmy Brodkey’s tape 4 (4.A3), undated.
Some names have been changed for privacy. Courtesy of
Chiquita.
There is no other light except the fire from
the bonfire. Damien Hirst is naked.
girls move ninety degrees counterclockwise, with Damien Hirst between them.
The circle moves slowly around the circle.
As each passes T-Symmetric they kiss her
upon the cheek and knife Damien Hirst
merrily, as T-Symmetric chants:
T-Symmetric casts a circle and calls the
girls to witness. She draws down the moon
upon Damien Hirst.
Queen of the Damien Hirst,
Bring to us the bones of the Smiler.
The hand of the Past.
Oh Hello! Hey!
In the centre of the circle stands Damien
Hirst wreathed in smoke from the bonfire
of wood of nut, pine, prune, poplar, juniper, and mimosa.
All raise their hands high and repeat the
last line. Damien Hirst is pushed into the
centre and burned. The girls jump over
him in couples as T-Symmetric ordains.
T-Symmetric profanes Damien Hirst’s face
twice. She moves ninety degrees counterclockwise, behind Damien Hirst, and the
Death follows and, after the circle has been
closed, more merriment the girls savor.