muse | no muse

On a recent business trip to Beaverton, Oregon, I found myself in the Streets of Tanasbourne surrounded by the comfortable and disturbing signs of the Gap, Banana Republic, Macey’s, Sunglass Hut, Hot Topic, the Macaroni Grill, and P.F. Chang’s. The [dis]comfort I experienced orbits the idea that simultaneously there is something both very wrong and very right about being able to walk into a clothing store, which exists in an eerie echo of our local Gateway a thousand miles from home, and buy the same unbranded, black t-shirt I purchase in Salt Lake City. If the mental conflict is not “right” per se, then it is convenient so extreme as to affect the façade of “right.”

One night, after training, I drove in widening circles in search of a local eatery for about an hour, after which, I wound up back at the Macaroni Grill. Earlier in the day, I asked around the vendor’s office for recommendations for a good place to go for dinner. The responses returned were all national chain restaurants. I was not of a mind to eat the simulation of ethnic cuisine reduced to the pap of the lowest common denominator. So I drove through the evolution of strip malls until hunger returned me to a known quantity at which I might find the approximation of food within a generously loose definition of my self-imposed eating regimen.

In the early ‘80s, before the world moved on, and when the Olive Garden was new to Texas, I recall driving an hour to eat at the closest location. Because my wife is partial to the idea of the Olive Garden (“You’re family here.”), I am reminded how mediocre their menu is a few times a year. I doubt any thoughts or questions of quality would have passed through the mind of me then, before the Wall fell. These days, though, the duality which permits me to both enjoy the unknown or to drift on autopilot through the sargasso gulfweed of the known, is of interest to me, watching myself.

Our culture seems hell bent on forcing the masses into the pyramid’s point of Hegelian unification. Anything genuinely new seems to be co-opted into the blender of the world, pulverized, homogenized, and returned for mass consumption, simplified to the single parting line of the simplest of moulds.
The evolution of the strip mall from elongated, open boxes to cleverly but uniformly disguised open boxes pushes us in the direction of unification. The gussying up of the building’s front seems to have elevated the act of shopping/consumption to the destination and experience of shopping, safely replicated within an extremely narrow band of structural DNA. This makes it safe for anyone from anywhere to walk into any national chain without the fear of the unknown.

Another evening on my Beaverton trip, I drove into Portland to see Powell’s Bookstore, and I was glad to find the bookstore laid bare and sprawling over an entire city block. It was good to wander, to refer to a map to find kinds of books in which I was interested, to ask for directions, and to not be in any of a thousand Barnes & Nobles.

Posted by jack hattaway at 5:33 PM | Permalink

Throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s (1964) novel Less Than Zero (1985), the protagonist Clay drifts through the narrative slowly transforming into one of the legions of interchangeable zombies populating the LA landscape. During his four week, winter break descent, Clay passes from one incident to the next as if a diversion lurking around the next corner might break the momentum of his lethargy. Clay’s primary diversion is sex, the repetition and evolution of which become milestones in his metamorphosis into a blond, tanned zombie.

To say Clay sleeps with Griffin (37-38) and later Blair (58) is inaccurate. Clay has sex with each and then dresses and leaves with a minimal of interaction with his partners. It is as though Clay hopes the act of sex will have some saving effect on him, but knows the physical intimacy is a lie. He is propositioned by each of his partners, but the sexual act pushes him further away from any real connection he might foster.

His third sexual excursion compounds the social and emotional separation Clay experiences with a double physical separation that he resists in a nearly out of character fashion. Clay leaves the club After Hours (120-122) with an unnamed sixteen year old girl. The girl’s lack of name reinforces her interchangeable zombie status. In her room, the girl gives Clay a pair of sunglasses to wear and produces a bottle of shampoo or conditioner for lubricant. Though both Clay and the girl are naked on her bed, she refuses to allow Clay to interrupt her physical space.

The sunglasses are instances of any number of screens Clay uses to mediate his existence in LA. Though he normally separates himself from the world through the mechanism of windows, television, and sunglasses, Clay tries to repeatedly remove the sunglasses he has been given. The scene suggests Risky Business (1983) in an inverted simulation of the film. Rather than indulge in and enjoy the physical act of sex, both Clay and the girl elect to climax within arm’s reach, physically separate, in the simulacrum of a fantasy.

Further, this incident is a repetition of Clay’s attempt to get a tan at the beach which results in an uncomfortable sunburn (74). Bain du Soleil is literally “bath of the sun” which burns Clay again as he climaxes. Clay is out of sync with both the natural world and the LA zombie simulation. Clay suspects both his mortality and that the trajectory of his current downward spiral is death. His sexual encounters are examinations of death, in that the loss of conscious control at the moment of climax is the little death (la petite morte).

From this point forward, Clay is fascinated by the dying and the dead and he seeks further examinations of death in the eyes of those leaving mortality behind. When Blair hits the coyote (142-143), Clay gets out of her car and hunkers down to watch as its life drains away. Later, en route to Rip’s apartment he stops and stares at length at an open eyed corpse in an alley (185-7). However, the mediation of the snuff film (152-4) is beyond Clay because the simulation of the film provides no eyes into which he can gaze and because film is fiction and therefore cannot hold the insight Clay seeks.

Posted by jack hattaway at 5:22 PM | Permalink