(Attached Spoiler Warnings apply only to video embeds, not to the text)
It has been 40 years since that landmark of creative television, The Prisoner, concluded its brief run with the climactic episode Fallout. This series finale was so controversial that reportedly series creator and star Patrick McGoohan had to hide out to avoid being attacked in the streets. Just as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow was cited by an imprisoned Timothy Leary as “…an authoritative text on how to understand and neutralize the Cybervillians, the secret police of all nations...[that] exposes the weirdo psychology, the kinky sociology, the ruthless inhumanism of all the national espionage combines,” so does The Prisoner offer similar methods of resistance, revelation and escape from any given year’s Village and new Number 2.
It seems redundant to mention that a show about a retired secret agent who was “disappeared” to a place where he was held and interrogated without due process was remarkably prophetic. In the intervening four decades, ubiquitous surveillance and loss of privacy have become the norm. Even the show’s torture, though often science fictional, strikes a chord with any human rights advocates considering current events. But it was McGoohan’s genius to transcend the pop conventions of 1960s media spy fare in offering something more allegorical, surreal and cerebral. The Prisoner’s influence on other media, most notably on Lost, should be apparent. The short-lived Nowhere Man and even story arcs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer owe much to the show.
While McGoohan has resisted the many different interpretations and expressed disdain for cultish fans, structurally and symbolically his show seems akin to multi-layered Sufi teaching-stories. Pointedly, its last episode pay-off is notable for its defiance of genre conventions, its somewhat dated freak-out exposition, and daunting openness to interpretation. The very aspects which angered most fans are also the things that give the show universality while, in open reverence for the right of “the individual to be individual,” offering so much in the way of individual interpretation, depending on what one brings to the viewing experience. It has often been noted that McGoohan artfully deals with themes that will be familiar to any reader of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. But it is seldom mentioned that there is much here for consideration of those who cherish the works of Jilaladin Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Aleister Crowley.
SPOILER WARNING
Four decades later, The Prisoner is more relevant than ever. Our shrinking Global Village stands exposed. The ways in which we are all, in one way or another, prisoners are all too apparent. Freedom seems like an ever-receding goal. Escape has been sublimated and replaced by escapism. Too often we rail at external authority without due consideration for the authority that is implicit in our own domestic apathy or the corporate media simulacrum that dictates everything from what’s newsworthy to fashion and behavior.
SPOILER WARNING
Like the best art, The Prisoner will change and teach us if we let it. Its dystopian dream remains all too familiar. Its techniques for resistance and escape remain useful. And its challenge to be a free individual is timeless and inspirational.
The door to your cell is open. What will you do now?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Bougainville, Diderot and The Earthly Paradise
Denis Diderot accompanied Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer, navigator and mathematician, on his global circumnavigation/ voyage to the South Pacific. I became interested in Bougainville's voyage because my father walked in his footsteps as a Marine in World War II and was part of the first wave attack on Bougainville's eponymous island. Diderot's essay takes Bougainville's arrival at Tahiti as its point of departure.
Diderot's essay, with its colorful dialogues, seems to be a mixture of French Utopianism (many of the French, including Gaugin, regarded the South Pacific islands as the real Earthly Paradise), social satire of European mores, and philosophical/ anthropological observations. Bougainville's voyage and Diderot's commentary sparked Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking and led to the sterotype of the "noble savage." Pointed observations regarding sex and religion are particularly interesting and often amusing. The entire essay can be found here or collected in The Libertine Reader.
As this excerpt opens, the ship's chaplain has succumbed to the charms of Orou's youngest daughter, despite earlier protestations. His exchange with Orou continues:
OROU: "I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?"
The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman.
OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone.
OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion.
CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws.
CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."
Diderot's essay, with its colorful dialogues, seems to be a mixture of French Utopianism (many of the French, including Gaugin, regarded the South Pacific islands as the real Earthly Paradise), social satire of European mores, and philosophical/ anthropological observations. Bougainville's voyage and Diderot's commentary sparked Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking and led to the sterotype of the "noble savage." Pointed observations regarding sex and religion are particularly interesting and often amusing. The entire essay can be found here or collected in The Libertine Reader.
As this excerpt opens, the ship's chaplain has succumbed to the charms of Orou's youngest daughter, despite earlier protestations. His exchange with Orou continues:
OROU: "I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?"
The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman.
OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone.
OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion.
CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws.
CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Subculture that Wasn't
Last Friday I was visiting with a friend who had just attended Movement: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival and came back refreshed and effusive about everything she saw and heard. There was something genuinely touching about her enthusiasm, particularly the fact that she was sharing it with me, a longtime loather of rave music in all its micro-categories as well as a notorious cynic with regard to the utopian pretensions of the rave movement.
Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”
Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”
Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.
“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”
It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.
My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.
In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.
Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”
Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”
Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”
Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.
“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”
It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.
My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.
In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.
Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Requiem
It was unavoidable. Mobs of old guys are shaking their calloused fists and ranting about the goddamned good ol’ days when punk rock punched a hole in the sky and the ever-patient satellite of VALIS blasted us with its pinkly delicious message of cosmic love and cultural transgression. It was 1974. It was 1980. It was timeless. We were young and we would never die. There was rioting, fucking in the streets, non-musicians releasing amazing albums (which were still spun by specially trained bees out of vinyl with gatefold sleeves that shamed the Renaissance masters, goddammit!) and the unavoidable orgasmic bliss of shaking things up. This immediatist breach, to hear some rant, was the last time that real people made music that was so strange and baffling that Biz assimilation was just impossible. Out there, in the Wasteland where the tire-fires never stopped and the ruins of civilization so-called stood like sarsen stones above the 24/7 freakout, we did the St. Vitus dance and slammed our sweaty bodies together until the low brown clouds glowed with morning light or nuclear terminus. Somewhere in the dim cathode twilight we could still hear the existentialist mumblings of Peter Ivers before he was unceremoniously snuffed-out like a microcosmic cover-version of the heat-death of the universe. We gathered in squalid nightclubs, deranged, full of life, burning brighter and brighter until the inevitable fall, unsustainable but not giving a shit because we were outside of time. It was surely the culmination of an act of magick, decades in the making, weird old Harry Smith plucking the Monochord with a shellac plectrum, shaking feathered sticks and unearthing dinosaur-bones of mad, mad music from the bedrock, from beneath the floor, down there rattling like haints. Who’s down there? The devil! Arne Sarknussem! The Living Heads of Mu! Now we walk through this land of ghosts where well-coiffed fascists wield the razor of public relations, wondering how we lost the secret and when that weapon was turned against us, retooled, moneyed, omnipresent. It’s Crystal Night again. The Buzzcocks were right, seeing far into the hazy expanse of a 4th, 5th and 6th Reich hosted by kinder, gentler Nazis where the occluded spawn of morons would take refuge from genocide and corruption in superficial media-death. Now it seems like a lost dream, as if the Finnegans never woke and would never wake again. When these stories are told, younger eyes roll. There is nothing in their experience like this. The evidence still spins, vital, liberating. The Monochord still vibrates and if you find that foolish, quiet center inside of yourself, it will, sure-as-shit, fill with the old madness of a world gone by. There are techniques to defy mass-mesmerization, free spaces to be seized, inside and out. One day there will be music that, while strangely familiar, will move us in new ways, casting out ancient demons of control and once more setting us on that long, well-traveled road. Drink up, dear souls, for tomorrow may be the day. Like epopts, we will die before death and see with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears. And the corruption that we shuffle off will fall like black snow, like ashes from the mouth of a harbinger.
Shhhh! Listen now…
Shhhh! Listen now…
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