If I tried to combine every thought that came in my head while watching this video into a coherent essay, I would have something book length, so instead, I’m just going to spit it out.
Wow. Mind blown.
First of all, great job, Grand Rapids. Sincerely. The city put together a mammoth effort, even without the help of Kickstarter, and came up with an Internet video that was not only successful, but put others in the category to shame. I tend to think with art of a more casual sort, if you don’t have a concept that in itself is necessarily going to knock it out of the park, at least go big on the effort. Done and done.
And in throwing their hat into the meme, white America reminds the internet that it exists. The internet is not just pro-democracy fronts and third-world music blogs, folks! It is possible to have a good old fashioned Main Street parade online. No taco truck reviews, no workers’ rights, no sex, no militant screen printing hacker collectives. Football, American made cars, and, well, apple pie.
I don’t say this simply to be facetious. Main Street America does exist, and it would only be a publication as idiotically outdated as Newsweek, (see link for back story on that) who thinks that it is somehow more an arbiter of taste, more up with the times and pace of the internet than a city on a river in Michigan. All those “real Americans” you saw in the video have Internet connections, and you better believe they cancelled their subscriptions to Newsweek, if they even had any.
And isn’t it somewhat refreshing, to see the meme of America rescued from hate-filled invective, pulled out of the politics for one minute, to mug for the camera in a way that makes us seem welcome in “real America” once again; to make Chambers of Commerce look like nice community organizations, rather than the money behind union crushing, the propping up of corporate property rights, and anti-gay legislation? I mean, it is almost enough to make me forget the experiences I’ve had being called “fag” while crossing Main Street, USA, and make me think about living in the Midwest again. Almost.
Not that any of these nice folks in Grand Rapids would do something like that. They all look like nice people, with nice lives. And with the sort of effort necessary to put a project like this together, the goodwill and support for the community provided by local businesses, lawmakers, and everyday people alike, they might have a different sort of town that defies the norm, where people band together and form a community, indeed, the only thing that’s ever formed community, unlike many so-called defenses of “family, community, and small business”.
And so I wonder if, after raising $40,000 to make this video, the next weekend they all got together to put in bike lanes. Or to build low income housing. I just wonder, I don’t mean to imply that they should have done this instead. They can do whatever they like with their time, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making a video, any more than there is anything wrong with putting in a statue of Robocop, as elsewhere in Michigan. But a community is defined by what they choose to do with their community. And a definition is not only what is said, but also what is not said. This might be the cornerstone of self-expression, whether you are a city or a person, or any other entity.
This juxtaposition between the little that is said and the lot that isn’t said is not an accusation in my mind, but when I watch two videos back to back (as the vicissitude of the Internet decided for me), the question is automatically posed. And what is the question, anyway? I’m not entirely sure. But when there’s a nice singalong going on in the streets of one town, when somewhere across the world there are beatings and worse going on in the streets of another town, there should be a question asked, shouldn’t there? Even if we can’t quite bring it to our lips.
I wonder if, maybe not unlike in the classic song Grand Rapids decided to sing, this video could be the moment that something died. Not in a fiery plane crash, of course. But in the sense that when something is memorialized, it in its reality is somewhat ceased. You don’t plant a gravestone for something that is still living. Don McLean reacting to the 60s with nostalgia for something that people wanted to believe still existed, even though that sort of Americana was now a ghost. The ghost of Main Street America, in a world of Tahrir squares. And yet they can still sing this song, with help from their platinum sponsors. That’s something, right? Isn’t it? To whom?
Lastly, in a fit of SF splendor, I imagine this clip resurfacing after a number of years, and discovered by some disaffected youth, longing for the way the continent “used to be”. In a saga reminiscent of Damnation Alley, they set off across whatever this terrain will look like then, attempting to find the promised land of Grand Rapids. What is it that they will find? Probably not radioactive, mutated cockroaches. But other than that, I can’t say that I know with certainly in any direction.
The title is “Apopheniac Communiques”. Along with seven fantastic contributors, I’ve put together 28 pages of art, poems, short stories, and commentary. It’s full of low-fi awesomeness, pasted together by hand in the “traditional” zine style. Is there a pattern? Is there a theme? That will be for the reader to decide, but suffice it to say, we’ve already put a call in to the proper authorities who deal with such miracles.
In keeping with the classic tradition, I’ll be offering copies in the “mail-art” format: for $2 in either fungible currency or un-cancelled postage, I’ll mail you your very own printed copy, on cream-colored paper, in beautiful 4.25″ x 7″ format.
Mail those monies here:
POSZU
4835 SE Sherman St.
Portland, OR 97215
AND… because it’s totally crazy, I’ll accept Bitcoins as payment. In fact, I’ll let you name your price if you choose to pay in BTC. Email me to get my public key and to give me your address.
The zine is licensed under Creative Commons (Attrib-Comm-Sharealike). And hey, if you just want to see what it looks like, even though it would never, ever compare to having a real life zine in your hands, here is a link to the full PDF.
I like to think that inside each eyeball of a statistician, lies one of these little whirligigs, constantly spinning as he or she apprehends the world.
I hardly would like to implement a hierarchical taxonomy of American culture, either with upper and lowercase C’s, or with any other modifier to the word. No judgment, please, on what is good culture or not. No suffix of “Americana” for example, to connote a certain sort of nod and wink behind the back of certain less popular states in the middle of the country. Nor would I, through my abrasive tone of a curmudgeon seeking to willfully impose anti-establishment incitement upon people far too busy to think about such foolish things, and as part of my lifelong role as generally ungrateful son of these shores, seek to simply lambaste and deride any particular part of the cultural content of this vast continent. Whether through the expositionary exhibition of suspicion and distrust at which I excel, the ad hominem insult and verbal roll of the eyes I all too often express, or the openly paranoiac philosophical theory I pull out of my pocket and wave in the air when I’ve had one too many and forget that I’m in a public bar and that they’ll probably call the cops. I would hope not to take on, any more than the average writer, such tendencies we typically summarize as bias; the mental price of doing business that we inwardly acknowledge as what we must reign in and control if we wish to take part in a liberal society. I have my own opinions about what is good culture and what is… well, otherwise than that. As do we all. I acknowledge them, but have no need to tack them to any cathedral door, nor cast them in stone and deposit them on a courthouse lawn.
Not to say that there is any good reason to hide these opinions, so long as they are presented as a (albeit, often argumentative) theoretical basis for self-motivation to aid the production of worthwhile cultural products, rather than those that are… less than worthwhile. I would hope and expect that anyone else would be just as willing to justify their own pursuits by judgments about its cultural worth, at least internally, so as always to be pushing the envelope towards whatever it is that they seek. Just as I would also expect that upon confronted with criticism towards oneself, a person would be able to either surmount that criticism in his or her own mind, or otherwise interpolate it, to emerge with one’s own course improved and/or reified. Whether that course is the creation of a controversial piece of avant-garde artwork, or the decision to take a cruise to Cozumel. Maybe the rationale is apropos of nothing; but this is still a rationale, and ought to be defended as such. “What is the reason? No reason!” Perfectly acceptable and difficult to refute. And therein, a cultural process on such firm ground should not be wary of receiving criticism. And so we shouldn’t shy from giving it, if we feel it is necessary.
But, this sort of epistemology and hermeneutics of judgment and justification is dry and dull. Because really, once you have attained a certain perspective of relativism for critical judgment, you are simply locked into a cycle of your own self-improvement. If all criticism can be taken or given constructively, then everything, critical or not, becomes constructive. And there is no choice but to construct. This is good, of course, because you can finally stop castigating television for ruining society and start working on actually improving society; you can stop complaining that there is nothing worthwhile in the world and begin making what is worthwhile; you can stop basing your career around proselytizing against certain things, and base it on supporting things. In general, criticism becomes a very positive activity, because even when you are lambasting the shit out of some poor artist/tourist you detest, you are only ever preaching to the choir. Your negativity is transmuted into positivity, because once you’ve realized the person you are criticizing probably doesn’t give a shit, you are only going to be stimulating yourself in your own chosen direction. The thesis and the antithesis are synthesized; the dialectic is complete; we wake up and try harder tomorrow. And this is boring. You can’t burn anyone at a stake once you realize everyone is playing different roles in the same stage-play that is the human species. Real progress, as it turns out, is as boring as world peace.
Luckily, there is another sort of epistemology that we can turn to for that carnivalesque excitement. The sort of rush, a will to power and manifest destiny that will get us out of bed in the morning. We’re not slaying barbarian hordes, and there probably won’t be a medal in it for you. But we are discovering and claiming resources, in the biggest gold rush in human history. The borders are open folks, and tickets are cheap. Welcome to the cultural gold rush. Get in while the getting is good.
Let’s turn that mischievous metaphor aside, because it is mischievous, and because it is not really accurate. There used to be a resource market in culture. This was called Classicism, Antiquities, Anthropology, Folklore Studies, Archaeology, History, Literature, and more generally, the Humanities. There was a rush to accumulate all kinds of cultural artifacts and artistry, once these minerals were discovered. As the waters of criticism receded, the value of everything was laid bare, and it was ripe for the taking. Land once considered valueless was determined to have vast veins of semiotic deposits. Economies that had been sinking for centuries were boosted when the boom of cultural production came to town. Entire civilizations were revitalized. Great mercantile exchanges were founded back in the home countries, to which the cultural colonists could send the fruits of their prospecting, for sale on the open market. Entire educational industries developed, feeding on the flows of these resources, and the liberal arts education was one of the hottest commodities out there. Good for a thousand uses, the liberal arts education was made of cultural minerals, and ran on cultural minerals. Nearly every home in America had one—the first member of the family to obtain such a commodity was more celebrated than the main bread winner of the household. And with this gadget in his or her (but often his) possession, the task of winning the bread often fell on to the shoulders of this new education-bearing class.
But you know all this. Ancient history. We might have learned it somewhere along the way, as sort of an explanation for while our modern versions of that cultural commodity don’t seem to pack the same punch. Or maybe we deciphered this history through our own intuition—via our suspicions that somehow they’ve changed the formula somewhere along the line, or that perhaps the construction quality just isn’t what it once was. At any rate, there is a sense of the old, the obsolete, the outdated to our current liberal educations. That maybe this commodity had more of a relationship with ancient history than it ever had with us.
Thankfully, I don’t have to solemnly add that the former boom towns are now decrepit wastelands, and that the once proud factories stand like ghosts, uncanny reminders of the curse of economic cycles and the fleeting, transitory nature of any wealth and success. On the contrary. The culture industry is just as strong as it was, and it is probably more profitable now than ever. More educational commodities are produced each year than the last, and the countries that mine the cultural minerals are getting more of a share of those profits than they ever did. Something is changing, it just isn’t reducible to GDP.
The functional monopoly is fading. The luster and quality of the mineral isn’t diminishing, but its effectiveness is. Not in a way that it is being less effective, but that its presence doesn’t guarantee anymore success than a synthesized substitute. What is running out is the metaphor. Now it isn’t liquid gold. It’s only book learning. The molecular structure is less structured. The reaction was only ever a catalyst—and now the reaction is running on its own.
Okay, really—enough of the poetic license. I’m overstepping the bounds of my land grant. You don’t need me to dig this out for you, and that is the whole point. Cultural products and the skills we use to develop them—be it liberal education, a general appreciation for the humanities, an artistic goal, or even cold hard cash—are better distributed than ever before. It turns out that culture is not a mineral after all. It doesn’t have to be compressed in the earth for thousands of years before it becomes virile. It is not only found in certain places. It doesn’t only form in the rare pinch-point between a set of specific historical circumstances or at the hands of great persons. Meaning is now found in the least assuming of places, and in this way, meaning means more to the people to which it means than it ever did in the past. The metaphor that constricted how we understood and used culture, is broken. Anything goes, as long as it explodes. If you can light it on fire, it’s fuel. Culturally, that is. Maybe for other things later.
One of the best ways to see this is by, as ever, seizing the means of production. Visit the mines and the factories. The former centers of educational production are well-funded, but they are beset by problems. As they add wings and libraries, found new on-site museums and repatriate artifacts, they only draw further criticism. They get the money they need eventually, and perhaps they even spend it well. But are they doing it right? Are they up with the times? Are the customers satisfied? Is the product worthwhile? No one seems to know anymore. We go to the museums, we read the books, we take the classes. But have we learned anything? What’s more frightening than this fate is not knowing how to fix the problem or whose fault it is. Everything seems educational, and yet we don’t feel any smarter.
But this is not the end of the tour. Perhaps it has always been around to a certain extent, and we just ignored them in our thrill at the tall skyscrapers and massive smokestacks, the expansive parking lots and the expensive executives of the major industrial centers. There is, mostly unseen, a cottage industry in culture. A distributed, effective, industrial grassroots. A thriving network of culture that we hardly notice, and perhaps doesn’t even notice itself. These are, for lack of a better unifying rubric, the Small Museums of America.
You’ve seen these museums advertised when you drive along the interstate. The Museum of Western Industry and Mining. The Cowboy Museum and Alligator Center. The Tri-Country Fabric and Textiles Museum. The Town of ______ Heritage Center and Museum. The _____ Museum, with the blank filled by some unknown person’s last name as indicator of, what? How are we supposed to fit these small museums into the ecosystem of our cultural industries? The large museums, the Smithsonian, the British Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art all hold particular places. They fill roles in the canon. The big exhibitions travel to a certain number of pre-designated spots, like a large concert tour. We know how to treat these institutions. We know why we visit them: they are the central trading houses of certain cultural markets. We know what we can find there, and we go there for that purpose. But what about the small museum? Is it a tourist trap, just meant to suck a little cash out of the pocket when you stop for lunch? Is it simply something to do, in an area that has no other attractions? Or is it a vanity museum, only in existence by bequeath of some person or group that would like to see a particular “museum” dedicated to a certain topic in a certain place, and this was the limit of their resources? How do we know that anything important really happened in this place, and that this museum has any cultural artifacts of real worth?
We don’t know. It could be a worthless waste of five dollars. It could be a waste of time and gas to drive that far from the highway to find out. Or worse, it could simply be boring. Any of these things are possible. But here is something that we do know: it will be a museum. What good is a shitty museum, you might ask? The very thing that makes it a museum. Perhaps amateurish pit stops along the highway could be enjoyed on the level of kitsch, or in that nod and a wink Americana way I mentioned previously. But there is something about a museum that cannot fake or mimic what it does. There are no fake factories: a factory produces things, and if it does not produce, it is not a factory. Similarly, there are no false museums. You could argue the merits of that museum’s production, but you could not argue that it produces. The very act of calling oneself a museum denotes a very real effort to collect a certain amount of objects, and to present them to the public in a meaningful, cultural way. It is a dedicated arena of exhibition, whatever that may entail. Perhaps it is a collection of memorabilia, with only handwritten index cards to identify them. It could be a house full of antiques, with a volunteer staffer the only guide for their interpretation. It could be art that would never be shown on the walls of a canonical museum, and yet someone picked them to hang on these walls, in lieu of others. Every museum is curated. Every museum exhibits. And every museum wants you to come and see what it has waiting for you.
If you talk to the people who work at these museums, you will find a good number of volunteers. You will find people who already have an intimate connection to the subject matter, and not just a desire to work in museums. They will tell you about how they got barely enough donations to stay open this year, and how they have plans to add another room, or to build an accurate recreation of _____, if only they can reach their new fund raising goal. They will tell you of other small museums in the area that are similar and worth your while, or completely different and worth your while. And they will be glad to see you, and glad that you are hear to see what they have to show you.
Yes, it’s off the beaten path, and it’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s something different, something unique, and something new. But what it is, more than anything else, is culture. This is the stuff, right here. Not the true, the authentic, and the real: but the actual, the close-up, and what remains. A lot of this stuff, if it was not in the Small Museum, would not exist. No one else wants it, and no one else has the money and time to care for it. But this museum does, and so it exists, entered into the vast catalog of human culture. It might not be the most superlative instance of whatever it is, but it very much is what it is. There is an element of actual being to these things, a different sense of the world historical. They are not perfect specimens, preserved against the ravages of time. But they are what’s left. They are what could easily not exist, except for the fact of their exhibition. And in this way, they are art. They are cultural production. They are nothing more than what someone took the time to create with his or her own hands, and in that, they are everything. It is not a class of culture, or an aspect of culture that we’ve previously overlooked. It’s culture, no different than a Michelangelo or an Air Jordan sneaker, for exactly the same reasons. It is this culture, the vastness of the Small Museums in their totality, that is reducing the vitality of the canon. For better or worse. Far be it from me to judge.
What you get from a visit to a Small Museum is all up to you. There are no guarantees from this sort of cultural criticism. Like all consumption, what you get largely depends on you. The Small Museum is something of the “getting to the bottom of things”. As I stress, this verticality is not in the sense of a hierarchy or systemic ranking, nor anything radical or of deconstruction. But underneath the larger structures of our cultural production and distribution, there are minor structures and systems. Smaller, and yet the same. The hand that picks two shells out of thousands from a beach, tosses one into the ocean, and puts the other in the pocket. The mechanisms of choice. The Boolean logic binaries hiding within the vast spectra of aesthetic preference. The oddly human way in which we pour our memory over unsuspecting inanimate objects using our senses. This is going on all the time—not so much at the root of everything, but comprising the root, the stem, the sap, the leaves, and the fruit of everything. Everything that we would want to refer to within the easy confines of a metaphor. Once you’ve visited some of the Small Museums of America, you’ll want to see more. It will become a “thing” with you. You might, if you let it get to you, even start thinking of non-museums as Small Museums. The gum on a sidewalk. The bathing suits that people choose to wear. The names of gun shops. The taste of shitty beer. Other people might think it’s odd, even though they are doing the same thing more and more often, even though they don’t realize it. We are all judging, offering our criticism, and then turning around and showcasing, exhibiting, viewing, consuming. And then moving on. Others might treat you as an odd specimen. But don’t let it bother you too much. We’re all moving in this direction.
If you like, you can accompany me on my visit to yet another Small Museum of America next week. We’re going to the Museum of Walmart Parking Lots. Don’t forget your permission slip, and $9.99 for an extra value meal.
This one could probably double for a Spider-Mad-Men mashup. If for some reason you wanted such a thing. I would have added angular ties, if that was the direction I was going for. But this one remains strictly Lynch. You can tell because of the weird shoes the one woman silhouette is wearing.
This was done for Warren Ellis’ Remodel thread. I always like those, but I don’t draw very well. I do, however, make posters. This will probably be the only Steampunk thing ever to be found on POSZU. And, frankly, it’s not even a very good poster. But I wanted to play along, and so here it is.
I do like the mask though. In my vision, the Steampunk Batman franchise would use the mask as it’s Bat-logo.
Today on TMPD, we’re going to be reviewing the book cover for Tim Maly’s new book.
The art is eye-catching, if not original. Echoes the widely distributed paperback version of Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, and a particular Joy Division album cover are fairly present. Still, regular readers of TMPD will know that I am a big fan of minimal, flat shapes, InDesign gradients, and simple, retro-looking fonts. Also, although I often force myself to use color, I can’t help enjoying the simplicity of grey scale. 40% and 70% white over black give a very classy, thin ghosting effect, reminiscent of the Twilight Zone, somehow.
Not sure how this design relates to the subject matter of the book. I do like the island silhouette motif–its a repeatable icon that could be used in branding or as chapter headers in the text. But are the different takes on the outline meant to stand for certain utopias discussed in Maly’s authoritative treatment of utopia’s afterlife? Or are they simply meant to be variations on a theme–signifying the epistemological category of utopia in general, or the critical approach Maly employs in bringing them all together in context? Those who have already read the book, or are seeking it out by name, will be aware of the prose on its own merits. So is it really necessary to overload the cover with line drawings of “network” imagery? Perhaps a simple dust jacket with the title and a bit of color would have been more appropriate. But, the goal of the cover is to sell the book–so clearly that is what the publisher intends with this approach.
[Note: the PDF has some rendering issues that I haven't had time to figure out. So sorry for the weird dashed strokes that appear in certain places. If you are indeed downloading this for any reason.]
Well, I thought long and hard about whether or not I should post this one. But here we are.
For starters, Cyborg Month is officially over. But more pressing than that, was the issue of whether or not I really wanted to admit that I’m that much of a geek that I not only conceptualized a poster to commemorate Cyborg Month, but then spent more than several hours bringing it into existence. This is probably bordering on the fan art territory, to be quite honest. And that is a slippery fucking slope.
But then I was looking at these awesome Czechoslovakian Book Covers, and I was thinking how it is a shape that book covers, especially for academic titles, are so serious with their design, and don’t venture into art quite so much anymore. I was also thinking of the ubiquitous conference poster, that anyone who has spent time in academia will have seen slathering the walls and bulletin boards of their department hallways. What an excellent opportunity for art! Here are posters that are going to be printed, regardless of whether they have anything on them. Why not use that as a space for artists?
So here is my contribution of a poster for the 50 cyborgs not-really-a-conference-not-a-book-either. Advertising something that is already over, without really advertising it, and mostly just contributing to general Internet over-exuberance. The scheme was actually something I came up with for a customer, that I can tell they will not like, but I liked it, so I wanted to actually use it. Looks like a vintage set of Uno cards, kind of. The draw 4 card especially, which I can’t find an image of on the Internet (only the current version). Oh, and the circuit diagram is actually a working circuit for a voltage amplifier. Yikes. Went there.
So here we are. I’m a geek; cyborgs are awesome; and I spend a lot of time rotating and re-sizing vector art on the computer to amuse myself. If you are a cyborg geek as well, you are welcome to a full-sized PDF of the poster, available here. Everything on POSZU is Creative Commons Non-com, Attribute, Share-alike, by the way.
You may have heard how Jimi Heselden, the owner of Segway, died recently after tumbling off of a Segway.
The day of the accident, many Twitter posts reported this fact as “Segway inventor dies in Segway accident”. When in fact, this was not true: Dean Kamen is the inventor of the Segway, and had sold the company to Heselden and other investors earlier this year. Kamen is, assumedly, doing just fine.
I didn’t remember who actually invented the Segway; I had to look all this up on Wikipedia. But when I first read the news that “the owner of Segway died on a Segway”, I automatically assumed that it was indeed the inventor who had perished, until I re-read the headline twice, and began to wonder. I then confirmed that Heselden was the owner and NOT the inventor. I have not seen a news story about the accident that clarified this, though none explicitly made the false assumption, either.
So why did we all assume the inventor had died by the hands (wheels) of his own creation? Maybe it was an honest mistake. The Segway was unveiled in a flurry of speculation and hype, in which many predictions about the invention were made by other self-made inventors like Steve Jobs, who claimed it would be more significant than the personal computer. As this hype washed over us, the archetype of “the inventor” hung over this device, like Edison over the lightbulb, Einstein over relativity, and Jobs himself over a number of ubiquitous devices. A singular person had designed this wonder, and eventually we would celebrate him and his invention in the manner of these other “great men of history”. So when we hear the Segway has turned on its master, we assume that the robot has risen to kill its maker, not the current majority stakeholder in the first of no doubt several backing-capital turnovers.
But the mistake is not so honest. There’s something we like in this lie. There is a story we enjoy, so much so that we prefer the fiction to the fact. There’s something that completes an archetype. It’s not just the trope of technology destroying those who wield it. It is the Frankensteinian horror: the flesh of the hands that brought life into mechanical hands, hands that so artistically made objects into living things, being slashed to bloody bits by those cold metal fingers. The plot of Edward Scissorhands is an example, as is The Terminator Saga, and many other tales of industrialized pathos, the Fordian Doom bending back to poke us through the brain, to snap our twig-like limbs, and to crush our skulls under heavy metal feet. Not just destroying the world, but killing the maker himself (invariably, “him”-self). From ingenuity to invention, from dust to dust.
If you frequent Twitter, or certain circles of it, anyway, you might detect a subterranean desire for this particular sort of ironic pathos. Though it is clearly not just Twitter, but a feature of our current consciousnesses. Twitter only amplified this unconscious sentiment, 140 characters at a time. We cross our fingers and pray that the daily stream of bad news is some way ironic, or symbolic, or in other ways fitting to the overall tragedy of human existence. This is not the sort of thing we wish for out loud in polite company, but we all do it. We wish that the executives of BP would die in fiery fuel oil explosions. We hope that those who mock our beloved Internet become ill for not checking their symptoms via Google. Or at least those who refuse to admit the usefulness of 140 character messages end up being saved from rampaging mutated kittens by sending a SMS to emergency services. We wish that there was some sort of perverted justice in the world to take the place of regular justice that just does not exist.
And that is only the most defensible category of this urge for symbolic death. In the case of the inventor of Segway, there may be some angst towards an expensive device over-built in hype, but it would not fulfill anyone’s sense of justice to see the man perish at the hands of his own machine. It would merely make it more interesting. Such an end would conclude the bizarre chapter of human technological history that is the Segway with a larger-than-life meaning, a tragic symbolism worthy of Greek mythology, an almost Promethean demise in which an inventor gives something of great promise to the world under the best of intentions, only to have his breakthrough mocked, derided, accepted only by the most suburban of police forces and mall security squads, only to have it eventually be the very sword driven through his heart. This is the death we wished for Dean Kamen (at least symbolically), and gave to him undeserved through a sadistic, Freudian Twitter-slip.*
I’ve been trying to think of a name for this urge–this desire to make bad news more allegorical than it is. This morning, I think I came up with it: “Ballardianfreude”. The word “schadenfreude” comes from the German words “schaden” (adversity) and “freude” (joy). It describes the pleasure we gain from others’ misfortune, the joy in adversity that is not our own. J.G. Ballard was a master of modernist irony, describing in all its disgusting glory the oxymoronic pleasure we get from pain, the doom we find in technology that sustains our lives, and the beautiful trap we have built for ourselves out of this modern world. Inside, between the gnashing gears of our transmissions, lies the deep pleasure in the dirty oil, beneath the shining carapaces of bezels and dashboards, the gleaming exteriors shining with speed that will, after Ballard, always evoke their guts, and ours. It is with these eyes, that once opened to the sexiness of car crashes and the orgiastic organicism of overpasses cannot fail to continue to find these artifacts of apophenia, with which we seek out items to reinforce our Ballardianfreude. The only thing more uncanny than to find out we are all going to die is to discover that for no reason, some of us are going to live. Against the positive humanism that turned against us to castrate our dreams, we place the negative affirmation of Ballardianism, the reassurance of beauty and meaning in death. And in this deployment of Ballard’s themes, we in this age, find a certain joy.
And so we seek to find it. For every inventor, an untimely death. For every worldly success, a deep unconscious failure. For every dream made real, a thousand chained to the rocks, with their livers ripped out by ravenous carrion eaters every time the sun rises.
Of course, the pleasant upside to Ballardianfreude is that we are constantly disappointed. The world isn’t as dark as we see it, just as it isn’t as light as we’d like it. Reality is the constant fuzz of gray that a television displays when it is not tuned to a channel or to a pirate broadcast, but to the inherent noise-interference of the universe. A world of constant accidents, some comedic, some tragic, and some utterly meaningless. A man dies in a scooter accident. These things happen every day. The relief from meaning lies in its absence, the surreal reality of the possibility of patterns. Tomorrow there will be traffic accidents and bridges constructed, broken hearts and newly discovered dreams.
The true meaning lies in the sound and the fury. Something is, utterly, utter nothingness. Signifying that.
* Like the undeserved ire for Kamen, so suffers the Segway. I am equally guilty, simplifying the Segway to improve my story. While the Segway didn’t live up to the hype, it is a great tool for personal mobility, especially for the disabled. There are also many off-shoot designs for different purposes. If I live long enough to where my legs begin to fail me, I hope there is some easy device like this in existence that allows me to get out and continue to explore the world, while standing upright.
Well, I think it’s safe to say that doing these posters is some of the most satisfying work I’ve been up to lately. So satisfying, that I’m running out of Twitter-quips to turn into posters. If you’d like to compose something witty and succinct, hit me up @interdome, and maybe if you sound as self-satisfyingly sardonic as me, I’ll immortalize you in a poster.
Today’s poster is inspired by @djrupture, who hasn’t been tweeting as much lately, but if he starts doing his breakfast posts again, then I will most definitely have to do a breakfast poster. “Breakfast posters”: the future of digital print. Forget direct mail. Breakfast is where it’s at. You heard it here first.
Now, I am not the major Terminator fan that is nailing his ass to the wall. Well, at least not exactly. You see, I am not a fan of the Terminator, that is to say the T-800: not even as an anti-hero. What I am a fan of, is the film, The Terminator.
And this is the ambiguous technicality on which I will make my case. Not the technicality that Jonah Campbell mentions in his footnote–that in fact, yes, there is dialog in the film explicitly referring to the T-800 as a cyborg. I am referring to the film itself–the film, The Terminator, is a cyborg. This is the ambiguous part.
Because, a film is not a cyborg any more than the character of the T-800 is a cyborg. In the same way that the T-800 is not so much a classic cyborg as it is a special effect, a movie melange of various horror themes involving technology and human mortality, as Campbell describes, it would be disingenuous and perhaps a pretentious stretch to claim that a work of culture is such a cybernetic feedback system.
But I am a dealer in post-structuralism, and disingenuous and pretentious are two of our main product lines. So here goes.
There are two features of any film. (There may be more, but let’s start here.) There is the plot, or narrative of the story being told, and there is the aesthetic form of the film. One might isolate these into content and form, but I wouldn’t go so far as that. I only separate these two aspects at all, by means of their function for delivering the culture-item itself to the viewer. Film excels at delivering this distinction. There is a quality of film, which I could delve into in a whole other essay, that still attracts the eye, and pulls it in to its artistry, even without the smooth sugar of plot to help it down. Perhaps it is in the timeline of film, the fact that film will progress even without a story. Or maybe it is the moving, visual quality that attracts the attention. I see this most explicitly in Eastern European and Russian film. Tarkovsky, Vertov, Tarr. The ability to just look, without saying anything.
Even Western blockbusters and spine-tugging B-movies still tap into this feature of the media. Horror films, by the fact of hackneyed and predictable plot rendering its narrative aspect practically moot, let the image and spectacle of violence, music, and anxiety build to avant-garde levels. This is the way we are introduced to The Terminator–as another sci-fi afternoon at the movies. An unbeatable villian, from a future where all is war. He guns down cops without a thought. And he will not stop until he kills one particular woman.
But there is more to the film than meets the eye, and it is not just the red eye of a machine burning beneath a suit of flesh. There are little tidbits scattered throughout the film. These are small things–little bits of aesthetic that could be easily missed in the pulse-pounding chases and the furious suspense and the eventual violent release. But while your endocrine system is responding to the plot, your aesthetic systems are responding to these small elements. The naked male body of a body-builder, triangulated between a vitrivian man, steroid experiment, and zeitgeist politician. Punks on the edge of society, receiving their just comeuppance, or meeting their (no) future? A female sex object, that will not take off her headphones, even during sex. A motor scooter–the closest we’ve come to a jet pack in the automobile age. Exotic reptiles, kept as pets. Breaking a date on a friday night. A joke, in the form of an answering machine message–”machines need love too.” Cops addicted to nicotine and caffeine. Targets assassinated according to their order in a phone directory. The announcement of one’s own death delivered live over broadcast TV. Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, Blade Runner, dystopic future prison-states and other natural wastelands. Vehicles and weapons, interchangeable, dumped as soon as they cease to function. A synth soundtrack–the fusion of futurism and current culture, an entire history to itself. A bar called Tech-noir. Dogs as man’s best friend, and machine’s worst enemy. Mutilation without pain. Killing sprees. Fast speeds. Robots as toys. Robots as manufacturing workers. Robots as distractions. Robots meant for killing robots. And a Polaroid camera: an image, an emotion, and entire life developed in the briefest of market transactions that will become a key piece of history, to those who will live to see it.
I could delve into each of these images and themes (and boy would I love to, if anyone read 10,000 word articles on the Internet), and unpack and interpret them and their cybernetic connotations for our culture. But, sticking to the post-structuralist promise, I will keep it meta. Each of these images is a cultural mechanism. A feedback loop in celluloid, plugged into our brains. Written in the programming language of Hollywood, Year 1984 AD. Together they form a cybernetic system, regulating the functioning of our aesthetic being, expressing a particular continuity through our emotions of fear, paranoia, and desire. Paranoia of a machine-man is a cyborg reaction. Paying admission to collective horror at simulated violence on a projected light screen is a cybernetic affect. Dancing in a dark, dirty dance club is a feedback loop. Falling in love at the end of the world is the expression of a pattern. Reading the coded messages in a film as part of the experience of viewing a film is culture, and our culture is part of a system, and the programming therein makes one B-movie into a film that defines not only part of an era, but part of us.
So, it is still perhaps disingenuous for me to say that The Terminator is a cyborg, if I am also going to argue that our entire culture of expressive media and consumption of that media is part of a cybernetic structure. But it is. Our notion of what cyborgs are, and aren’t, and what this might mean for our bodily integrity, our history/future, and our entertainment on a Saturday night, serve to prove the point, not only of cybernetic systems, but also of ourselves. We are the emotions we experience at the movies. What we want to show each other, what we want to see, and what we want to feel, is ourselves. Around and around again, always adjusting, always re-orienting, never quitting, as long as we’re alive.
In the end, we are cyborgs, starring with red eyes into a dirty mirror, and using a scalpel to pull a bloody bit of ourselves out, so that we can watch it fall into the water, and scare ourselves to death.
And we’re back with another Motivational Poster, this one completely without the courtesy or permission of @dcurtisj. Not to say he wouldn’t be courteous if asked–I just didn’t ask.
Love this slogan. M and I laughed about it for a long, tasing fifteen minutes. She tried to roll it out at work, but they weren’t having it. Too bad. No one can escape the future, so you might as well learn to like it. Hopefully this poster will motivate you for that.
This one has a lot to like. A symbol, ready for branding a tased future, pastel colors, and enough repetitive circles to make you puke. Which is a good thing, because if you’re puking, you are more likely to survive being tased. Really. There is scientific evidence to back this up.
Another motivational poster, though not from Twitter, this time. M, my partner, just read The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, which she enjoyed. She also enjoyed my other posters, and so she asked me to design a poster around the text above, which she thought was a hilarious line from the book. That’s the line, as near verbatim as she can remember. I don’t normally do requests, but she gets that privilege. Though let’s be honest: if someone had a request, I’d probably do it (if I could think of something.)
InDesign practice-wise, the logos were the easy part. Doing the speech bubbles took forever, trying to shape all those tiny curves. Anyone know of a preference setting so that the Zoom hotkeys will zoom on the current view, not on the selected object? If you do, let me know over Twitter, or something. (@interdome.) Was getting car sick from scrolling around.
So now she has this lovely poster to grace her bedroom door. I struggled with this one for a bit, until I hit upon the icon theme. It ends up fitting nicely with the “motivational” qualities of the rest of the series. We’re thinking of surreptitiously hanging these up and grocery stores. You could think of it as a guerrilla art campaign to “Ban the Bag”, or we could just be jerks. Either one is really fine.
If you are as tickled by it as she is, even though you are not my partner in the eyes of the State and therefore required to act with at least brief bemusement as required by law, you can download the full PDF here.
Another motivation Twitter poster, words courtesy (and all of these are without permission, I might add) of @AmericanRoulete.
As you might be able to tell, I like minimal. For some reason, I was thinking airline advertisement. I wanted to make the faded curves fade on a gradient, but I ran out of time. Anyway, it’s kind of more jarring this way, and jarring is good, as long as it isn’t amateurish. But too late for that anyway.
At the very last minute, I decided to make it work on its side as well, which I might like better, but I can’t really tell.
Looks even more like an airline ad now.
You can print it out and try flipping it around for yourself, with the PDF, here. Feel free to try it with art facing the wall. That might even be best.
This poster could be better, but I have so many paths on the pasteboard now it’s making everything slow and irritating, so like that, it’s done. I wish the center colored heptagons were 3D, like a prism, but it is what it is. I don’t want any of these to take more time than I can devote in one day.
This Twitter post stuck in my head all day, and so I made it a little bit of InDesign practice. I’ve done a lot of text layout, but I’m trying to get better at gradients and color art.
The double-meaning kinda goes the other way in print rather than Twitter.
The nature of a symbol is that it is immediately known upon perception to convey meaning. Even if the meaning is not understood, it’s presence is apparent to the beholder. Like a spark jumping to conductive material, across a threshold of resistance. Conscious humans and symbols are a part of a biunivocal framework in this way–saying the same thing with two different mouths, or perhaps, saying words while knowing an ear is listening. Speaking to, rather than simply vocalizing. Communicating, not just making noise.
But this solidly unifying feature of symbols, finding strength in the bipartite connection between consciousness and its material expression on walls, in books, in language, in art–belies the problem: how does one identify a symbol?
A symbol could be anything. An italicized word, a scrawled bit a graffiti, a sigh at the end of a spoken sentence, a dented fender left unfixed. Meaning is an extensive concept of metaphysical significance–it seeks to search out from its prescribed boundaries, and incorporate other things into itself. Things that did not mean anything before begin to mean, because of their provenance to other meaningful things. Symbols do not just communicate with human consciousness, but with anything else the human consciousness perceives. There is no limit to perception other than perception itself, and so the word on a page does not have more meaning within the confines of the black ink than in the pure whiteness of the paper, but in between the two, and everything else: the music in the room, the temperature of the air, the sitting position of the reader, the other things that happened that day, the thoughts lingering in the mind through which the words will be read, and with mix and melange with the words and ideas later that night in dreams.
We try to keep our symbols simple. It’s easier that way. A certain number of consonants, a limited number of vowels. “Typical” vocabulary, regional dialect. The edges of the TV screen. Sometimes we just want the radio on in the background; we’re not always at the opera. But therein, a privileging of symbols necessarily occurs. We can change the volume of the radio, and take it with us in the car, unlike the sublime roar of a forest waterfall. Poems are spoken directly, and to the point. The form is an aspect of the symbol, and we tend to prefer the unified, the intentional, the deliberate and the apportioned. It suits us, that is, the symbolic perception relationship between symbol and human consciousness. It still has a freedom of interpretation, but it is more clear, and distinct.
And yet, we continue to look for more. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have looked for symbols in the structures of the natural world. In the stars, in the flights of birds, in the movement of water, in the folds and strata of the earth. Divination, these days, is understood as a foretelling of the future, because of our modern obsession with the progression of history. But divination is not just about the future. It is about time itself, about the current operating structure of the earth, whether controlled by metaphysics, gods, demons, or other perceived forms of technology and magic. The often quoted symbolic adage about distinguishing technology from magic is itself only a way of dividing the choir of symbolic angels into a tabulatory rubric suitable for logomancy. Which is the technology, and which is the magic, which we are supposed to be unable to distinguish from each other? And what are we supposed to gain by saying this? It only matters if you are going to give one a different meaning than the other. What’s the difference to you? What can magic do for you that technology can’t? Or vice versa?
Magic used to be what was erroneous, dangerous, or banned. Magic was a symbol with its own meaning. It was the power that we wished that we had, and the power that those with real power didn’t want us to have. There were certain acceptable forms of meaning, for directing attention onto particular parts of nature. Acceptable ways of reproducing, of owning property, of measuring the year, of celebrating ourselves. Magic wasn’t a different form of meaning, just different content. The idea that noticeable signs in the livers of animals might be tied to the fabric of fate is really not so different from the idea that the fates are all linked to a single theological presence that we cannot control. Both are ways of apportioning meaning in what we perceive, only one finds that meaning in the dark innards of livestock, and the other finds a threat to its meaning in the former.
Technology was a magic, but more self-reflexive than hepatomancy or theology. It began in a similar way, observations of meaning, the search for symbols, and the invention of either when it suited the human consciousness. A better way of counting required numbers; a way of tracking the seasons involved observing the stars; an awareness of the importance of blood and the interior of bodies led to attempts to see further inside, to figure out what we were really made of. What we learned or invented was passed on, in a stratification of meaning we called knowledge. If it worked, it stuck around, if not, it was improved or abandoned.
But a funny thing occurred. A strain of knowledge grew that sought to refute itself, to quickly abandon untenable theories of meaning and suggest new theories, that looked everywhere for the smallest traces of meaning, which it would unite and synthesize into theories. We called this science, and it took technology as its material. It wasn’t enough to simply have a plow that worked, or to generally have an idea of when the solstice would return. It had to work better, and it had to be exact. Any unpredicted meaning was a sign of weakness. It wasn’t enough to simply have knowledge, it had to be scientific knowledge. Numerology wasn’t as functional as mathematics; astrology wasn’t as accurate as astronomy; hepatomancy wasn’t as useful as medicine. Theology, eschatology, and metaphysics were not as fruitful as chemistry and material physics. Technology needed to separate itself from the magic and the religion. This was a meaning with a particular ethic, and a particular form, both of which could not square themselves with these other sorts of meanings. This didn’t mean that other ways of accumulating knowledge would disappear–we were still human, after all, seeing symbols on any surface to which we turned our eyes–but it meant that there was a difference between this meaning and other meaning. The power this meaning accumulated only grew.
Until the present day, when the power and rule of technology is so wide, that it is impossible for us to see it all in one glance. The symbol of scientific meaning, whether it be an equation, a code, or a method, cannot provide a viewing lens back upon itself at all times. The expanse and extension of this form of meaning’s plateau is just too great. Magic was isolated enough to form a localized genealogy of symbolic knowledge, and religion was simplistic enough that it could be apprehended through the single image of a human, mystic, prophet, or martyr; a unitary or categorical notion of the ineffable; or a simple list of precepts. Technology, however, is everywhere, and there is no technological specialist on earth that can understand the meaning of more than a fraction of the technological expanse.
What we’ve created is a world, on top of the old world. A new realm of symbols that transfers the realm of previous symbols, and transfers that realm again, and again. The symbols have lost the unity they had only just attained in magic and religion, now shifting through patterns so diverse that they continue to move even as they are locked into meaning. It is almost as if this plateau of human meaning is generating the meaning itself, and we are only able to glean the symbols of this meaning when the technology allows us to. As if it is the human consciousness, and we are only the brief, unitary symbols that float over its expanse, and make up its perceivable entity. We are the moments of its meaning, and it is only in rare moments that we are able to find any meaning for ourselves.
It is a time of technomancy, when we look to the technology we have devised with confused eyes, scanning over it for any sort of knowledge, any brief symbol to which our human consciousness might connect, to which we might join in a connection of understanding of the technological structure that surrounds us. We are needing magic to understand and deconstruct the magic we are already practicing. There are ghosts in the machine because otherwise there would only be more machines. It would be a terrible fate to have to apprehend the technological world with the pattern of meaning that would have us write it all down and remember it all. These ghosts, thankfully, are the parts of our technological world that we can write down and forget. We can cross our cell phones, grip the edges according the methods we have been taught, and think that we understand, because we’ll never be able to learn the rest. This is the real life in which you will never have to use calculus.
The blessing of a dream is not in what the dream foretells, but because you had a dream from which you might be able to tell anything. The symbol engines are churning still, even though we’re feeding them the dirty fuel, the kind they haven’t burnt for centuries. The leaking trail of anxious meaning emanating from underneath the designed shell of your consciousness means that at least the symbol lines are still pumping–if there was no pressure in the system at all, then we’d really be in trouble.
You know it means something, and something important. Not only because of the classic propaganda poster stylings, but because of the evocation of the swastika, and the extreme violent of the hand gesture, and the desecration of widely-known sacred object.
But what is it saying? Is it a pro-Nazi poster, claiming that the Bible is the enemy, and it should be violently stabbed? Or is an anti-Nazi poster, claiming that the Nazis are the enemy, because they would do such violence to a Bible? Do you react more strongly to the soul-violating desecration of the Bible, the physical violence of the bayonet, or the symbolic violence of a swastika? What are your emotions being harnessed to support? Should you be stirred by this violent harnessing, or feel even more violated for someone attempting to hijack your emotions for a cause you do not support?
On a wall during wartime, we would instantly know the answers to these questions, because the context clues would unite with the signs that are present, and meaning would flow. But as it is, it is “ceci n’est pas propaganda”, because the force of its meaning as propaganda has been removed, by a disavowal similar to Matisse’s famous surrealist move. You know it is propaganda, but at the same time forced to admit it is only a meaningless sign intending to be propaganda, because the meaning it intends to have has been disturbed by a cutting of the context net. So it intends to be, and yet is not, while still clearly being.
Until, you realize the caption is written in ENGLISH, thereby re-uniting you with the context. If it is assumed to be a legitimate, vintage poster from the war against the Nazis, then the context was obviously that of England or America, or another English speaking country, which all happened to be on the same side of the war. Therefore, context is re-established by divorcing the language of the sign from the immediacy of your own context. The caption is no longer a mere caption, but an “English caption”, which is not just the transmission of a message but a contextual message itself.
You might, as I did, not being a native French speaker, be amused by the fact that in French, negatives are actually given a conjugation that to English speakers might appear to be a double negative with the “ne (no) ‘est (it is) pas (not)” construction. And so the binary separation between “is” and “is not” in English, in French is a separation that unites a phrase around the verb, and thereby twice cuts the verb off from the sentence rather than simply modifying it. And then the difference in language adds additional ironic context to an ironic picture-phrase combination.
But in the case of the propaganda, the language difference is the only thing to deliver us from irony. Unless, of course, the caption was rephrased to say “This Is Not The Enemy”. Or, better yet, “Ceci n’est Pas Le Adversarie.”
I’d also like to introduce the swastika that was marked on the Arizona Capital in refried beans, after the controversial passage of the law illegalizing non-legal immigrants in the state, a potentially ironic response to a political controversy fraught with its own ironies.
Hurcho Canino was seated at the front of his flock, next to the co-head of the church, Betty March. Canino was formerly in M&A. His long life of flying perhaps pre-disposed him to be the pastor of the church, but to his followers he was certainly embued with the word, and his oratory skill, not to mention his oracular abilities, came straight from heaven. Ms. March had formerly been in ad sales management, and it was her skill with books, and certainly, with a sort of evangelical sales process that led her to be Canino’s organizational partner as well as spiritual partner, and of course, sexual.
Across the aisle sat Mrs. and Mr. Davis Wright, who had sold all their property and donated the money to the church. In their late 60s, both of them were in poor health, and sort of looked on the church as a surrogate for the “lifestyle centers” into which many of their generation were transitioning. They were certainly taken care of by the congregation, and perhaps better, than they would have been at the sort of second-rate facility with minimum-wage caregivers they could afford. They seemed content at being together, not such believers in the word as they were in the community. They liked to be close to Pastor Canino and Ms. March, and so they were seated in first class at the insistence of the congregation. They were the elders of the group, if you will.
Behind them were Nephala Ngai, a 21 year-old girl hailing from a central Asia country (no one could quite remember which one it was). Next to her was Bran Wilco, 22, male. If the Wright’s represented the elders of the church, Nephala and Bran were its youth–both attractive, dynamic, responsible young people, held up as the church’s promise for a new generation, and the potential of what its members could and perhaps should be. Nephala was traveling back to her Orlando-area college after a break, and heard Canino preaching. Perhaps it was the jet lag or the adjustments to altitude after her long flight back across the Pacific, but she was immediately converted. It was similar for Bran, but not quite as miraculous. He was flying home from school after graduating. During his journey, he had been mulling over his options for the rest of his life. There was his father’s business, more school, or something new. Huracho Canino, testifying just inside the security check point, was the something new. Nephala and Bran were in love, and filled with the ecstatic joy of the church.
Willis Jone and Ki’issa Marx were next to them. Willis was the caretaker of the church, or as much as there was one, what with no property owned and occupied by the organization. In his early forties, he had been a baggage handler, and so he knew the grounds of the airport well. Ki’issa was his partner, and had worked at the airport Starbucks. They had joined the church individually, and at first had kept to themselves. However, with the church’s emphasis on finding a partner through its community, and with a little bit of helpful, though not in anyway aggressive, pushing by Ms. March, the two shy former airport employees finally found each other, with as much rejoicing as they had in finding religion. It certainly was a blessing, the members of the church agreed, and the two assisted Canino and Ms. March in many of the church’s day to day operations.
The first six seats in the coach section were occupied by the David family. Graham and Marian, father and mother, in the two aisle seats; Feliza and Joe, 17 and 16, beside them at the windows; and Francesca and Saran, 18 and 19, in the window seats behind them. The family were good Christians, and had been on a family vacation to Europe when they first met the church. They listened to a long service during a two-hour lay-over, and then when their connecting flight was delayed due to equipment problems, joined a prayer session with the congregation. By the time they were on their way back from their one-week trip, perhaps it was the tour of religious sites that had failed to impress them as much as they thought it would, or maybe it was the raw power of Canino, sitting in the linked seats of the gate waiting area, holding hands with the other parisioners, and the beauty of his words, warm and deep, displacing the static of the terminal intercom announcing flight delays, but they had decided to keep their bags packed, and join the church as full members.
Next to the two eldest David girls were their boyfriends, Boris Fondura and Manx Lepatto. Boris was sitting with Francesca, and Manx with Saran, though most of the folks were sure they had been paired the other way around at least only a week ago. Not that it really made a difference. It was difficult for Graham and Marian, patriarch and matriarch of the clan, to accept the sexual partnerships of their daughters after only recently being fully committed to the virginal commitments of Christianity. But, when Pastor Canino and Ms. March explained to them how sex within the caring, open community of the church was not the potential pitfall for health and morality that it was in the rest of the world, but an opportunity for spiritual growth, things were a bit easier. Certainly the transition was helped along by Boris and Manx’s intelligent dispositions, as an aerospace engineering and architecture student respectively. Boris’ knowledge of the aerospace industry was especially influential, as this was, after all, the Church of Airport Salvation.
Feliza and Joe, though being a bit younger, each had potential partners as well, who were sitting together in the next row back. The younger children were seated with their parents because of their age. The church recognized open partnerships only above the age of eighteen, though of course proper fraternization was acceptable at appropriate times, and in appropriate places like the food courts, the waiting areas during or after services, and the concourse walkways. But not in the smoking lounge, the Pilot’s Club, and certainly not, say, the family restrooms. Joe and Saran Montez had been seeing quite a lot of each other. Saran was a sixteen year-old runaway orphan, saved and reformed by the church. She was seated next to Constantine Lemancha, a former runway model in her late twenties, who had had issues with drugs and eating problems, but now was a model reform case for the congregation. After the adjustment to Boris and Manx, Mr. and Mrs. David had another trial in their youngest daughter getting cozy with an, albeit slightly, older woman. But surprisingly enough, as these things often are, the second step was much easier than the first. They came to see that a relationship with an older woman, who had already discovered many of life’s unfortunate traps and lived to tell the tale, might be a good influence on their teenage daughter.
Next to these two sat George Bailiff and Geraldine Drescher. George was a former red cap, who with the help of pastor Canino, found god and rebuked his alcoholism. His carry-on was a hard-shelled case with the hymnals, which he would hand out once the seatbelt-sign was turned off. Geraldine had been a TSA agent. She had remained at her job after joining the church, and it was her influence at the security checkpoint that allowed the church to peacefully carry on its existence at the airport. As the time grew closer for this flight, and the church stepped up its activities and its recruitment, there was a good amount of friction between Geraldine and her superiors, and so she had been forced to leave. But to reduce the possibility of a negative media incident, especially after the scandal in terminal D with the full-body scanners unrelated to the church, TSA had let the church continue their services past the security points, as long as they obeyed the carry-on rules and entered during non-peak times.
Behind them were Dan Sizer and Debra Myers. They were actually the first couple married by the church, but they had naturally decided to keep their names the same, to not complicate their forms of picture ID. Their marriage had been a beautiful ceremony, at the round end of terminal C, late at night after the last red-eye flights had departed. They were married by pastor Canino in front of the large picture window, with the lights of the runway twinkling beyond. And as if as planned, just as the ceremony concluded, a gigantic, brand-new Airbus 380 taxied past, fully illuminated in the bright lights of the docking area. George got a friend in the red caps to drive the happy couple the length of the terminal in an electric people-mover, decorated for the occasion, and the people of the church catered the reception themselves in the closed food court.
Mingas Taylor and Tiral Bengos were across the aisle, and they were a much-loved couple, the core of the laity, as it were. As restaurateur and head chef of a restaurant in Miami, the two men had cemented their relationship before joining the church, and their humor was appreciated by all. No one was really sure what inspired them to join the Church of Airport Salvation, but they did, selling their restaurant and apartment in Miami and buying a small row of town houses not five minutes from the economy parking. They rented the rest of the rooms to parishioners, and drove them all to the parking lot every morning in their big white van they drove up from Miami, still with the restaurant logo on the side, so they could take the shuttle to the terminals. They also prepared food for the congregation on numerous occasions, doing surprisingly much with very little. Their wedding cake for Dan and Debra was masterful.
Next were Sechan Quan and Mendoza Pongo. Sechan was a former communist from a minority party in Southeast Asia, who had defected to North America, and discovered the church in his travels. Mendoza was an Ecuadorian immigrant with somewhat troublesome immigration status, necessitating his frequent travel–the source of his original introduction and perhaps predilection for the church. This pair worked closely with Canino on many of the theological matters of the church, both being well versed in bureaucratic policies and the syncretisms of governmental beliefs in several traditions. They wrote the pamphlets the congregation distributed in front of the airports, and had established some of the well-known tenets of the group derived from Canino’s sermons. The key, as they saw it, was to make every-day practice fundamental to the spiritual goals of the church. If they were all waiting for their spiritual flight, then it made sense to spend as much time as possible in the airport, checking their status. If this was to be a journey in spirit, then physical possessions would only act as luggage to be lost in transit, so they should abide strict carry-on requirements at all times. If the membership of the church was to be those with the same spiritual itinerary, drawn from all walks of life to the same schedule, then their meeting and seat pairings were not just the luck of the draw. Those they met in the security line, in the waiting area, and on the flight were to share more than just the proximity of travel, but a certain closeness of bodies. They would be searched together, watch after their belongings together, and sleep and eat together. The members of the church were, in this sense, married in the partnership of spiritual travel. With Canino’s help, they composed these tracts on their wifi-capable computers, and printed them in the business lounge of the Pilot’s Club, and distributed them for the enlightenment of the church.
The seats next to Sechan and Mendoza were empty. Behind them, sat the three ladies, Megan Oftan, Pansy Thorpe, and Ferg French. They were not sexual partners, so much as simply spiritual friends. They had been some of the most evangelical members of the group, covering the entire scope of the airport, including the charter terminal, handing out literature and inviting people to worship. Megan had been a religious studies student, and had been studying the Airport Salvation sect for class. But she had been taken with just how modern the religion was, how it was a faith for a fast-paced, jet-setting world, and how it mimicked a Christian faith in organization, but without pinning itself, nailing itself down, so to speak, to a timetable of the savior’s return. Pansy Thorpe had actually joined many religious groups before this church. She had been an Adventist, a Buddhist, and for awhile, even a Moonie. But in the end it was the temporary aspect of the religion that won her over–for once, someone was offering her membership not based upon personal allegiance and self-sacrifice, but simply by spiritual alliance. The “camaraderie of air travel” they called it. Something that had been lost to the industry and religion alike. Ferg French did not like to talk about her past, and nobody pressed her. She had been an outspoken proponent of the final flight, asking Canino time and time again when they ought to buy their tickets, when they ought to collect their personal belongings, if it was true that their destination would not be an earthly one, etc. She seemed most impatient to leave. All three of these ladies looked forward to their departure expectantly. But, when finally Canino announced their flight, they became very quiet, and withdrawn. They sat together on the flight, holding each others hands.
Drew Mats and Pagar Antillo also held hands, in the next row. Pagar was eight months pregnant with Drew’s child, and for awhile there had been some quiet debate about whether or not they would join the rest of the congregation on the final flight. The debate was wrapped in language about what the soonest to a due date an expectant mother should fly, but underneath, there was the natural human fear of exposing infants to danger. They were flying north. It was a regularly scheduled flight, with a regularly scheduled flight number. Drew was a world traveller, and there was nothing new in just another hub route. But there was the silent knowledge imparted in each of Canino’s sermons, his prophetic depictions of this flight. The plane would take off from the earth, not only in a physical sense, but spiritually. They would arrive at their ultimate destination, this was foretold. But whether this destination was in the same realm as that they left, no one knew. Perhaps the weight of their unborn child would keep them from boarding the flight with the others. They were both committed to the church, but the strain of bringing a life into the world might cause them to… well, act accordingly. And Pagar had not fully recovered from her mother’s funeral, the journey home from which, had precipitated her joining the church. And yet, despite death and oncoming birth, they were on board, carry-on items stowed, seat belts fastened.
Next to them were Derd Hussle, and Wren Taylor, who both looked a bit nervous as the airplane pulled back from the gate. They needed this, especially Derd, who hadn’t quite recovered from his stint in the Army. Wren was more used to the anticipation and worry, being a former serial monogamist, now enjoying the stability of the church and their mutual journey to salvation. But still, their sweat dripped between their clutched hands. They looked behind them, at the mostly empty plane. Though security had cleared them all individually one more time before boarding, the passengers scheduled for this flight had asked to be switched when they heard the Church of Airport Salvation was going to be on board. There was nothing violent about the group, and nothing to indicate that anything unfortunate would happen to the plane. But Americans are a suspicious group, and prone to the apocalyptic influence of religious language. And when you combine that with air travel–well, no one blamed them, not congregation, airline, nor TSA. Since they couldn’t help but have overheard Canino’s “farewell sermon” just prior to boarding, filled with language of the promised destination and the departure from the stand-bys of earthly life, all the non-church passengers paid for the insurance policy on ticket re-scheduling, and the airline, in 0rder to make as little a fuss as possible, helped them re-book with other carriers without surcharges.
Zephyr Megalia, a flight attendant on this fateful journey, had served tea and orange juice to Canino and Ms. March, and in a brief discussion over the beverages, was not immediately converted, but quite intrigued. So, after doing the safety demonstration, she took an empty seat across from Omar Orchette, a convert to the church from Scientology, and Polly Hocker, a convert from the Hari Krishnas. Why airports, she wanted to know. They explained to her what they both had realized: religious conversion at airports was the cornerstone of modern civilization. It wasn’t so much about what religion you converted to, it was about being in a building that was a cathedral, traveling through the labyrinths of a infrastructure that was spiritual awakening to the needs of the world, implementing a belief system in practice that was never good enough to cope with the trials that life threw at a person. It was about being late, and being delayed, and being uncomfortable, overcharged, underprotected, disoriented, and jet lagged. It was about all of this, and about being together with other people in the same condition, at the same time, whatever time that was. Interesting, Zephyr said. So where are you going on this flight?
Greg Shultes, seated behind her, leaned forward in the aisle. The former aluminum wholesaler smiled, as did his partner, Sasha Ball, a former heiress. We don’t know, he said. But this is the flight we are all finally meant to take. And we’ll going to take it together. He and Sasha kissed, as the plane accelerated, lifted backward, and the Church of Airport Salvation rose into the air together.
The flight time was supposed to be four hours and forty-five minutes. Canino had already said that there would be no sermon on the flight, and so the passengers prayed individually. Some of them sang hymns, led by Adam Montez and Clara Reatrow, a failed journalist and a musician, respectively, who were the last two passengers on the plane. Above the constant whine of the engines and the omnipresent roar of the slipstream, the congregation sang the praises of their belief, their togetherness, and their journey. Ferg French said the Departure/Arrival prayer to herself quietly, counting the number of times on the edge of her boarding pass, making small indents with her fingernail. Zephyr Megalia handed out packets of peanuts, which the parishioners held in their hands, cupping the small crinkling foil packets, not a one opening them.
As they passed through fifteen-thousand feet, the pilot announced inclement weather ahead. They hit turbulence around thirty-thousand feet, but the church sang on without fear. At forty-thousand feet, the pilot put on the seat belt sign, and the plane shook, wings visibly flapping outside of the window. Thunder rolled over the noise of the plane, and lightening flashed outside.
After twenty minutes, the flight passed the turbulence, and into calmer air. In another two hours, they began their descent. As the plane landed on the runway, and then taxied to the gate, the passengers were completely silent. They deboarded the plane as they had done many times before, except they called no one on their cell phones. They had no one to call who was not on the plane.
Entering the terminal, there was a minute of odd culture shock as they realized it was a different terminal than the one they had left, a different airport than the one they had come to know so well, together. But they knew what to do instinctively, and walked together, partners holding hands, down to the baggage claim, where they retrieved the little luggage that had been checked.
The airport was a smaller one than they had left, and it took a while to secure ground transportation for the entire congregation. They tried to get rooms at the same motel, but it was a big party for one location with no reservation, and so they ended up split into three groups at three different motels off the highway that led to and from the airport.
In the days that followed, they looked for apartments and houses in the area. The members of the church eventually found places to live, and jobs. There was some discussion of whether or not they would continue to meet for church, daily, weekly, or at all. Many members were for it, at least provisionally, as was Ms. March. But Canino did not have the sermons in him anymore. The word had left him. And so they drifted apart, and on to other things, and other religions, some of them. Some of the partnerships continued, and some of them did not. Some of them flew again, others did not. Some of them lived for a long time, and others died relatively soon after.
But most importantly, after they left the airport, the membership of the Church of Airport Salvation were never all in same place again.
