Back to the Future

Simon, via his own bloggige, bringing this article to attention, re '80s revivalisms as demo-trageting marketing trend. Which reminds me of why this is the one "decades blog" that I was always hard-pressed to ever contribute to.

 According to the marketing logic cited in the NYer article,  I should be winsomely nostalgic for the 1980s. It's the decade in which I went to high school, entered adulthood, finally got out of the shithole town I'd grown up in by eventually going off to college, & etc etc. Yet it's probably the one decade I feel the least the nostalgic about. Why? Because it was a totally shit decade. Because of the politics; because of the economics; because of all the shit music and shit fashion, all of which was inescapably hegemonic at the time due to the way media and culture worked in those days.

 All of which is why, quite frankly, I'm quite fine with seeing the decade being associated -- by way of the cited marketing campaigns -- the last place that most people would ever go to shop for electronics, a lowest-tier fast food chain, and a video game that is unanimously considered the worst in history. Seems only fitting.

When Logic And Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep -- if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching -- need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.

Thomas Pynchon Vineland

Last Words

From Philip K. Dick's final interview, 1982 (via here, continuing from here):

"We’re not seeing the clock turned back to 1912, before the graduated income tax was enacted; we’re seeing it turned back to Imperial Rome, where I think it was Seneca who said, “There’s no use giving food to the starving. It’ll just prolong their miserable lives.” Rabbi Hertz quotes him. The Roman attitude was that being hungry, poor, and sick, you deserved to die anyway. Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca and all of these people, don’t even include it as a virtue — they actually include it as a vice, that you would help the needy. We’re now seeing a return to the old imperial system of, “Let the disadvantaged sink to the bottom, let ‘em die.” This is so tragic and so inhumane.

“But I can’t work up any animosity toward Reagan. I see him as caught up in historic trends that are so powerful, he was literally brought to power, the way Hitler was, which was legally and by a very large majority. And look what happened last week with Tip O’Neill’s fight against Reagan’s budget cuts. Did you see Tip O’Neill standing there at that microphone? The guy was ruined. His face was sagging, he was shaking. You didn’t even have to have the sound on.

“There is one thing in Deuteronomy where he says, “You must always pay the hired man before sunset. For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” And in the notes Rabbi Hertz has for that, there is: “The workman is so poor that unless he is paid by sunset, he will not be able to buy food for his family.” I just lay there thinking about that, “For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” It is so incredible that we have fallen away from something that was so basic to our civilization, for maybe as many as 2,000 years.

“We are in a time when there is a cruel spirit across the land, and it seems to be gathering momentum. I have some very close, personal friends who are showing symptoms of great cruelty…”

To Be, Or...

The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating, problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods. It is a true part of the culture of a confused society.

- Raymond Williams, 1980