"erratic eruption" of reading-related ruminations

THE PAST

First, to go backwards (as is my mercurial wont to do so). A friend of mine hosted a Halloween party this weekend in which the guests were to dress as their favorite infection, broadly defined. You want to be the Tea Party? Go for it, makes good sense. Boym's reading inspired me to dress as Lady Nostalgia and hand out Nilla wafers instead of madeleines. And my boyfriend fashioned me a newspaper pillbox hat (thank you, Interweb) in no time. The ease with which I managed to put together an early- to mid-20th century mash-up costume required some introspection. This whole time I would have sworn I wasn't all that nostalgic.* I'm no futurist but I am a planner. Onward to the Future, and all that. But seriously. I had about six pairs of shoes, three skirts, and couple sweaters to choose from, each more steeped in nostalgia than its predecessor. So maybe my thinking isn't terribly nostalgic, my consumption most definitely is. Which is why, as much as I want to believe Canclini, I'm not so sanguine.

But a quick past-tense sidebar. Or another one. I'm a huge fan of Marc Maron's WTF Podcast for manifold reasons. For one, I love the candor of the interviews. He really manages to dig into the comedian / comic actor's mind and unearth some real insights about the human condition. Comedians gladly line up because of the subculture's authentic sense of community and camaraderie. Packishness, in the nicest way possible. For another, and I'll stop here, he's managed to do this entirely outside of the entertainment business's draconian and often soul-eating parameters. It's because he spent the majority of his career as his own worst enemy, burning bridges and alienating entertainment executives (and friends too) as if with an apparent supernatural edict. By 2009 he had no prospects, so he picked up a digital recorder, started interviewing comedians from his garage in Highland Park, and put them up as a free podcast. He is now one of the darlings of the comedy world. Happy story. Okay, maybe there's something to this consumer citizen.

Back to consumptive nostalgia. What strikes me about Mad Men is that although it's marketed and consumed as reflective nostalgia, to hear the creator and cast tell it, the house view is determinedly restorative. This was acutely clear when I listed to Maron interview Jon Hamm a few weeks ago. Because, let's face it: our favorite ambiguous dreamboat is a card! Hamm holds his ambivalence is actually reasonable, given the time. His Don Draper searches and falters, suffering from the same "insecure sense of entitlement" shared by the rest of his generation and all those hence, Bauman's strategy of rationalization and irrationality exemplified on AMC.

THE PRESENT

"There is no charge for awesomeness -- or attractiveness." And there is nothing stronger than a fat panda with a big, soft belly and a high-kick who finds the answer to all of life's problems in his own reflection. I realize the tone of the previous sentence makes it sound as though I'm not so into Kung Fu Panda, but that's not true. I find the movie enchanting, onomatopoeic eye candy. My problem is that its message hints at Bauman's dual aspect of power and responsibility of the individual, specifically the darker Herb Cain-esque inanity-slash-social-slur that if you're not rich, that's your own fault. It's not fair to single him out, I realize, as this mentality is regrettably pervasive in our culture. I only point to it for its temporal resonance and frankly, because I was a bit mega-kapow kicked in brain hearing an African American rejecting structural inequity whole cloth.

THE FUTURE

Of course Po's big soft panda belly and its Valley of Peace home aren't the only things that benefits from flexion. Bourdieu's flexploitation and policy of precarization remind us that all the materials in the real and comics worlds (see actual spiders' and Spiderman's webs) are the ones with the greatest give. They have the greatest tensile strength, married with malleability. Therefore, our sense of instability is the foundation for our actions. To wit and per Mad Men, postwar America had the baby boom to give it meaning, wherein increasing reproductive rates helped firm up collective feelings of "responsibility, patriotism, and achievement" (May 1998, p. 160) amidst otherwise insurmountable feelings of impotence within the world.

Years later, writing months before September 11th, Bauman proposes we continue to be swayed by this insecurity and "new and improved" (p. 27) fears. He later avers, however, that "wisely...consumer markets seldom" (p. 27) sell salvation from natural dangers. I'm not up on the latest in militant militia marketeering, but I had a feeling that Bauman's sigh of relief in early 2001 might today be replaced with a sharp intake of breath and knitted brow. And so I did a Google and discover our last three classes sync up nicely on the Terra Vivos site. Yes, this is an egregious example, but were we so inclined, we could all go in on a cooperative doomsday shelter. The management at Terra Vivos appeal to the site visitor's sense of nostalgia, fear, and neoliberal consumption, offering up a subterranean, post-Quickening development, complete with homeowners' association bylaws. Please click through this website; everything is so strange, from the nefarious engineering specs, to the friendly promise of lounge areas and dental care, to the use of Vimeo for their marketing videos.

* Okay, I'm lying. Whenever people ask me 'when' I'd like to be from, I say 1920s New York, seated right there at the Algonquin Round Table.