Jonathan Krohn, 14, has written a book. It is 86 pages long. It is entitled Define Conservatism. LOL@ his age, his prepubescent voice, his home-schooling, the fact that he plays golf. Etc.
More interesting: the book's title. There is something about it that stands out. On the one hand, it has the naive, overly-literal simplicitly of a 14 year old who wrote a book: i.e., his book is an attempt to "define conservatism," which he claims has been bastardized into a political stance as opposed to a philosophy (? I think this is what he is saying, dunno tho). Thus, we might argue that he titled his book to straightforwardly reflect his aims.
On the other hand, there is something of a conscious aesthetic choice. "Define Conservatism" has something of the ironic over-simplification, the post-double-entendre, about it.
One almost has the sense that Krohn is playing with our preconceptions; the title acts as an ironic gesture that anticipates objections based on his young age. I know you think I'm young, that I speak in declarative sentences and ask my parents the meaning of various common words. But in fact, it is you who is woefully ignorant: you who lambaste conservatism (that's you Barack - the "most radically leftist president in my lifetime!") don't even know what it means! Just as "Gay Ideas" - which evokes both a naive intellectualism (I'm gay, and these are my ideas), a naive homophobia (what a gay idea!), and a reappropriation of that homophobia - makes a highly self-aware aesthetic gesture that supersedes its supposedly straightforward denotative meaning, "Define Conservatism" seems to hint at a sophisticated grasp of the aesthetic possibilities of language - and perhaps the creation of an entirely new politics based on the endless play of signification. Look 4ward 2 seeing more!
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
This commercial, which I just saw while watching the Hannity report on my flatscreen television, may at first seem to reify blah blah sexism. However, we might look more closely to find the potentially subversive element lurking within. As the burglar waits in the dark, his reflection on her pristine floor-to-ceiling windows the only hint of his presence, so too does this subversive kernel lurk within the fabric of this supposedly "mainstream" commercial. As in Britney Spears' performance at the 2007 VMAs or Hans Holbein's "Ambassadors", there is a "tache" (stain) on this work. But in a move that makes this work perhaps more radical than the aforementioned canonical texts, it consists precisely in the (unheimlich) aesthetic contours of the work.
"Treadmill" appears to be a commercial targeted at the merely-conservative, middle-American male or even the particularly interpellated soccer female. An attractive but "mainstream" 30-something woman prepares to "work out" in her spacious suburban home. She talks on her cell phone to her girlfriend, puts on some trance music, and gets ready to "blow off some steam"/burn off the cheeseburger she snuck for lunch. The threats that she faces (her house being burgled, possibility of rape) and the vehicle for her subsequent rescue (institutionalized authority of the panoptic "security system," comforting voice of the white male phone operator) seem to reify this conservative ethos. A male viewer might want to get Brinks for his stay-at-home wife; the stay-at-home wife might see it as a way to protect herself from the fears that she must invent for herself to assuage her constant boredom.
Yet there is something both menacing and awkwardly comic about "Treadmill," and moreover the menace and the comedy are mutually reinforcing in a decidedly unheimlich way. The threat of sexual abuse - the fact that the burglar (there are actually two - are you seeing the possibilities here?) decides to break in while looking at the woman, dressed in her tight running clothes, knowing that some sort of confrontation would ensue in the "break-in" - is quite risque for a Fox ad. More intriguing is the shot at 0:15-0:17, a zoom in from behind the woman on the treadmill. Whose perspective does this shot represent? The viewer of "Treadmill," a sexual pervert who has violent scopophilic designs on the soccer mom? (This would be a traditional film-theoretical, Mulveyian position). Or perhaps the woman herself, fantasizing about her own violation from the security of her treadmill and iTunes?
And what of the awkward little dance our fair-haired heroine performs at 0:20 when she jumps off the treadmill? How does she know to head for the loveseat, in which the cordless phone is buried? Here we go: because she knew that Matt From Brinks Home Secuity was going to call. Why does it matter that he has called? The "breakers-in" have already left. Most crucially: Matt From Brinks Home Security is going to "send help right away." Again: why? why is she reassured by this? What kind of help does a lonely, scared woman at home need? And what kind of help can Matt From Brinks Home Security provide?
The tache, then, is the fact that the woman's self-negating desire is revealing to have structured the very aesthetic form of "Treadmill" itself. The woman - who exists, needless to say, only within the diegesis (or does "woman" exist at all?) - has structured this explicitly "sexist" and sexually violent tableau via her own fantasy, which itself is a symptom of the larger cultural gestalt in which the viewer is thus seen to participate. The unheimlich of "Treadmill" - the simplistic, declarative title serving as deadpan reminder of the totalizing nature of suburban spleen - consists in our realization that the double-mediation of the fantasy (the masculine-interpellated viewer's [even if female] voyeuristic/sexually fantasy of transgressing this 'idyllic' - for the Fox News demographic - scene) is rendered comical and unerotic because the female character who is supposedly the object of the scene is in fact its subject.
Harper's MAGAZINE (smoking cigarettes and discussing the relative merits of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein in a Soho office building)
Graduate school
the opportunity to continue driving your "vintage" car in nice weather, reading theory on the beach, listening to LCD soundsystem while driving to class (UCLA)
being super interdisciplinary, getting real rigorous (chicago)
mnstrm academic prestige (YALE)
i-BANKING: whippin tradez, broing out at the office, feeling real good walking home from work, or taking a black car - really, whatever you feel like. you're liberated - you don't need need the convenience of a cab, instead you can flรขneall the way from the FD to the LES. on the other hand if you're tired, it's not a problem, just take the black car. the confidence, convenience - the choice - to contemplate that which you understand, dialectically, from a position of comfort.
I stole this highly bloggable video from HRO, but I think it's worth a second analysis driven by an ironism with a different number of repetitions of the word "post" in front of it (this is a de facto admission that my blog is now nothing more than a reblog of HRO, and certainly not the most successful one at that - see HRO Exegesis). Charles writes:
I haven’t ever really listened to the Presets too indepth, except for this one Lifelike remix of them. But I have heard that they are ‘amazing’ live, and they probs are. N e ways, this music video is pretty meaningful bc it was directed by the same person who made M83’s “Kim and Jessie.” I think I can really identify with this music video because I am a teen from the suburbs who wants to go to the city and ‘get my dance on’ but then also get meaningful at a beach bonfire. <3>
Okay. But also: I think I can really identify with this music video because I am a "young adult" from a city nostalgic for a suburban experience that I didn't have. I want to go to the Hollywood walk of fame and "get my dance on" as if I were a t(w)een from the suburbs. What's authentic about this video is that is evokes a nostalgic longing for an experience of urban life as something aesthetically supple, something new and forcefully alienating and beautiful. The first shot of a sped-up LA freeway scene (0:30), interspersed with our tween walking to school in his uniform, is infused, if not with the wide-eyed, naive awe of a suburbanite's first view of the big, godless city, then with his first wonderous view of a TV commercial for a global investment bank with calm professionals presiding over the chaotic urban scene outside of their gleaming office tower. Though it's not particularly interesting to point out that this shot is "cliche" (here we go again), the aesthetic power of the shot is due more to an evocation of the form which we might imagine a suburban longing for the dissolution of subjectivity offered by the anonymous metropolis, cars whizzing past, would take. Indeed, we don't ever have to "imagine" what form it would take, because the desire itself is cultivated by, e.g., these advertisements (and more forcefully, Hollywood film - it is not insignificant that this is L.A. and not New York).
The shot is thus all the more powerful because we've seen it before. The desire being evoked here is not our desire for "that (postmodern) urban experience"; rather, it is a nostalgia for that desire. This also extends to the way the video treats a notion of "Hollywood culture." As our tween sashays down the Walk of Fame, bowling over Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, there is a gleeful kind of irony which, precisely because it is not "post-" (or rather, because it is "post-post-"), feels naive. Wouldn't it be nice to just genuinely ironically enjoy pop culture, instead of having to try to ironically enjoy it? This need to try (Baudelaire's "heroic" affirmation of the present in all its squalid glory), and the effort to navigate the neverending series of quotation marks it unleashes, is a trope to which the French are especially (uniquely?) well-suited.
The French director of this video, Eva Husson, also directed a video for M83. Though I think the unheimlich humor of the M83 video is slightly tangential in regards to this aesthetic, M83 is perhaps the best example of the contemporary Baudelairean attempt to confront postmodernism. Is it a surprise that M83 is French as well?
These could be shots from the Presets video. On the one hand, blissful, "authentic" suburban tween life; on the other, the promise of the Real of urban anonymity and amorality. And again, with the suburban scene, it is the highway in the background which makes the photograph particularly moving; rather than a pure bucolic/rural - and thus historically "previous" to the urban - ideal, it evokes a knowing naivete and willfully heroizes precisely the ironic/knowing aspect. With the urban scene, this is again a generic shot, and what's important about it is the intentionally pseudo-authentic details (grainy stock, saturated colors). Note the similarity to shots from Heat, Miami Vice, and Roadtrip 2K8:
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO DATE A HOTSHOT COSMOPOLITAN JULY 2006 BY JULIA ALLISON
Congressmen in Washington are like movie stars in Hollywood. They’re everywhere, they’re always shorter in person – and yet, everyone is still totally impressed.
As a government major at Georgetown, I was a shameless political groupie. I tracked the rarest of species in our nation’s capitol – the young, unmarried, good-looking politician. Actually, I only found one. The year before, he was one of People’s 50 Most Beautiful People. Like a teenager with a crush on Brad Pitt, I taped the photo to my desk, where it stayed (embarrassingly) for 8 months.
Of course, I never expected to actually meet him.
But one evening, out to dinner, I spied him at the table next to mine and courageously introduced myself. I was 21; he was turning 32 that evening. A junior in college, I had never dated a guy older than 24, let alone one with such a formidable resume: Ivy League school, law degree, a prestigious political family, and – oh yeah – an office on Capitol Hill with 20 staff members.
I didn’t realize it then, but I had already fallen into the insidious “he’s better than me” trap – by putting him on a pedestal, I was unconsciously telling myself that I wasn’t worthy. In the coming months I would realize how misguided this mindset was.
Our five-minute intro turned into an entire evening of flirting as he invited me along with as he celebrated his birthday. We went from the restaurant to a swanky hotel bar, where he asked for a birthday kiss – and I practically fainted from excitement.
When he said goodnight late that evening, it never occurred to me he would call again. But I was wrong; he called the next week, and the week after.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so surprised – as the dating columnist for The Georgetown Hoya, I knew a thing or two on how to keep a man’s interest. Or at least, a college guy’s interest! But one of the most eligible bachelors in DC? I really believed I was in over my head.
The concept of him being interested in me was so shocking that my normally healthy self-esteem couldn’t get to my brain!
Unnerved by talking with him on the phone, I would prepare little “cheat sheets” so I wouldn’t blank on conversation topics. (Who does that??) I would compare myself constantly to him: He makes six figures, I get an allowance. He meets with world leaders, I stopped by my professor’s office yesterday.
Again and again, I fell short in my own mind. Of course, I’m not the only woman to find herself involved with a man who she views – either consciously or unconsciously – as “superior” to herself. He doesn’t have to be a movie star; I’ve watched beautiful, confident girls reduced to awkward, desperate messes wondering why their boyfriends – the star of the basketball team or a rich doctor or anyone else who generally intimidates them – would ever want them.
I was pretty far along that road when he asked me on a weekend ski vacation. I lost five pounds, bought a new pink ski suit and compulsively planned out every outfit. Then we got there – and … he couldn’t ski. Not sort of couldn’t ski, but god awful, I-hope-he-doesn’t-break-his-leg couldn’t ski.
Out there on the slopes, he wasn’t a hotshot politician, he was just a guy. A guy with no coordination. Later, watching C-Span together (although I’d really rather watch Oprah), he got the Kuwaiti ambassador’s name wrong – and I corrected him! Suddenly, I began to see beyond the image to the real person, who wasn’t so intimidating after all.
And when I took the big man OFF campus, I realized that I … well, I just wasn’t that into him. Sure, it was an ego boost to date a prominent A-Lister. But beyond that, we didn’t have much in common.
The irony didn’t escape me. All this time I had been building him up in my mind and underestimating my own qualities, forgetting that no one can be in a good relationship with an idol – it has to be equal. And if you don’t have self-respect, how can he respect you?
The whole thing made me laugh. After all, I had asked myself so many times, “Why does he want to be with me?” when I should have been asking “Why do I want to be with him?”
Posts
