Ersatz Perfection and Other Pedantic Crap
PART I: Inexplicable Book Trends Toward Narrow Focus
I went into the bookstore today to look at books. Like a lot of bookstores, this one had a wall of new releases, which seems to get updated about once a month. So I generally stroll into this place about once a month, flip through the stuff that’s come out, and then take a walk. Fascinating, right? Anyway, I’ve noticed that every month’s new releases always contain the following:
1••• A book with a pair of shoes on the cover
They might be big shoes next to little shoes, elegant high heels on rusty corrugated metal, a sole brown wingtip, tap shoes on fire, but there’s always shoes. Sometimes there’s feet in them. They’re usually outside, but not always.
I’ve noticed that the trend in modern book design, especially for fiction, has been to have some bullshitty visual pun on the front, but enough already! Seems like I can’t pick up a book nowadays without having to look at some photo of a burnt out light bulb next to a working lightbulb, some whimsically arranged scissors, a bunch of little boxes full of things like buttons, fingernail clippings, and gumdrops, a hat on a mesa, an egg and a spoon, or some other stupid fucking thing.
This is just in the genre of book design for an audience that probably subscribes to the New Yorker. Otherwise you have your trashy book covers with the embossed lettering and drawings of nooses or ships, your romance book cover with the heaving bodices, your Penguin Classics book cover, your urban erotica book cover, your Dover Thrift clip art book cover, your author-on-the-cover book cover, your illustrated by a prominent graphic artist book cover, your inspirational title in big friendly letters book cover, and a lot of other kinds of book covers.
So I guess that pictures of shoes book covers are a genre within a genre. I can’t wait for this precious crap to pass over.
2••• A pop history book about something insignificant
You’ve seen these around. They’re always like “Oysters: the Shellfish That Transformed Lower Manhattan,” or “Hats: the Thing That Covered People’s Heads.” “The Something That Changed the World.”
Who reads these stupid fucking books? I’d like to know. I mean, I read a book about cockroaches once, but it was because I had an infestation of cockroaches and figured that I ought to know what made them tick. I suppose that these books are innocent enough, but they often involve a kind of willful misreading of history. Much in the way that overzealous college students can reinterpret popular media to support their theories about gender, politics, labor, etc., these authors filter a shitload of history through a seemingly insignificant object. It’s a neat trick. Kind of reminds me of when a friend of mine got obsessed with that Antique Roadshow show. It’s captivating to think that something sitting in your attic might be valuable.
3••• A work of fiction beginning with “The” and ending with “-ist”
You’ve seen these around as well. They’re very similar to the pop history books described above, but they’re fiction. I complain about these all the time. Off the top of my head, I have seen:
The Aerialist
The Archivist
The Lobotomist
The Intuitionist
The Verifactionist
The Orientalist
And I’ll bet there’s a ton more. Now, I haven’t read a single one of these, so I don’t know if they’re good books or not. Well, I read part of the Intuitionist and thought it was pretty good, but then I had to return it to the library and some other jerk checked it out and then I got sidetracked so I never finished it. So keep in mind that the sweeping generalization I’m about to make is pure conjecture and may not have anything to do with the aforementioned books—in fact, I don’t even know if they’re all fiction—but there is a definite trend towards dumbed down metaphor and symbolism nowadays. It seems that a good number of novels involve someone who has some sort of profession, hobby, or neurosis. Sometimes the book is actually named after this. Anyway, this provides the engine of the book. The plot moves along, and the writer kind of just keeps bouncing events and characters off of the wall of this profession, which provides the reader with a cubic shit ton of easy to understand symbolism.
Now, I’m not saying that writers have to cloak things behind all sorts of layers of meaning or anything like that. I’m just observing a trend, that’s all I’m doing here folks. I’m not saying that this is the dominant trend in modern American fiction, but it’s there.
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PART II: A Pile of Little Perfect Things
Like most people of my generation, I have a pretty easy time learning computer programs. If you spend a little while screwing around with a program, you can pretty much figure the thing out. I remember when stuff like Photoshop started getting popular, and everyone was crowing about how this was going to let people who didn’t have technical illustration skills be able to create art. Of course, this turned out to be a big pile of bullshit, as there is no technological thing that’s going to allow someone to be good at something that they have no proficiency for. A computer program can make it easier for a person to edit video, but it can’t make them a good video editor.
Anyway, this hasn’t stopped every asshole under the sun from using their computers to make things (including me). So you start getting this weird effect where things are shitty in a technically perfect kind of way.
For instance, most people are terrible at designing posters. Back in the olden-timey days, that would mean that their posters would be sloppily hand-lettered, you know, with some public domain image that looked all xeroxey and terrible. Still, there was a weird unity to the shittyness; it bore the mark of a human hand.
Nowadays, making a shitty poster is a whole new ballgame. There will be three or four different fonts that clash like a motherfucker, all of them perfectly aligned and spaced. Maybe one will have a stupid “twisy” effect, and another will have a drop shadow. Serif fonts, sans serif fonts—they’re all just thrown together.
Let’s say that there are three pieces of clip art beneath. Two are by the same artist, and the third is by a different artist, but they’re all the same size so your eye gives them all roughly equal consideration. The shadows cast on the objects in the three pieces of clip art don’t match each other, nor do they match the drop shadows behind the poster’s lettering. So what you get is a poster lit from four different light sources. The perspective in these posters is usually a non-Euclidian un-fucking physically impossible migraine-inducing nightmare. And the poster says something like “Bean Supper at St. Mary’s Parish Center.” It’s gotten so I barely notice this stuff anymore.
So what you have is just an assemblage of unrelated yet perfectly formed things that don’t go together. It’s kind of funny, but this is becoming a style, and it’s being co-opted by actual designers. They sort of knowingly toss these things together for effect, and sometimes it can look pretty good. Most of the time though . . . it’s like a weird old woman who collects little Hummel figurines and keeps arranging them on little shelves. But no matter how she arranges them, it’s just a bunch of little Hummel figurines.
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PART III: It’s Not There So You Can’t Hear It
So, a lot of albums are being recorded on people’s laptops using ProTools these days. It’s innaresting, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. First of all, you ought to know that I have a bunch of records. I like records for the usual reasons. They’re big with big colorful sleeves, you can get them cheap, none of my friends try to borrow them, and they sound better. Yeah, I said it, they sound better.
Now, I know there’s been a lot of studies that have supposedly disproven this, but fuck ‘em. They’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. It’s pretty obvious that I’m an armchair audio guy, I don’t know what hertz are or any of that shit. And my understanding of how sound reproduction works is limited at best. But from what I understand, CDs work by sampling sounds very quickly—it’s like the audio equivalent of making a flipbook or something. This means that not all the sounds being generated by the musicians are making it onto the recording. I guess that’s kind of abstract, but I liken it to the first time I got a stereo with buttons that controlled the volume rather than a knob. It was infuriating: most of my CDs sounded either too quiet or too loud, and it was impossible for me to find the comfortable in-between.
With vinyl, however, you get all the sounds. Unfortunately, you get surface noise as well, and playing a record will eventually wear it out. So it’s a trade off—sound that can get damaged vs. sound that is incomplete. I prefer the former, and find the latter a little bit creepy. Or depressing. Or something. Absent and erased.
For instance, one of my favorite bands is Public Image Limited. They recorded a great album called Metal Box/Second Edition. Most of the songs were kind of made up on the spot, and they were great. The sound was incredibly bass heavy. They got that sound by having the bassist play a Fender P Bass into an Ampeg Bass Amp with the cabinet pointed at a wall in a concrete room. Rather than have a mic directly in front of the speakers, room mikes were placed around the space to pick up the ambient sound and vibrations. The resulting album was originally pressed onto a bunch of 45 rpm records, which are especially good at replicating bass sounds. I buy a copy of this record and put it on my turntable, and a vibrating needle reproduces the sound waves created in that room nearly 30 years ago. It’s amazing! Having a CD of that album doesn’t really measure up. And mp3s . . . bleah.
Digital audio technology takes masterpieces and chops them up into a bunch of unrelated stills, and it’s a bunch of crap. I read an article recently about a band where the musicians live in NY and the singer lives in LA. They write their songs in Pro Tools by just sending the digital files back and forth until, somehow, a song is made. Weird. This means that they have an infinite amount of time to make things sound infinitely perfect, and the timing is infinitely precise because none of them are playing at the same time so no one has to follow each other. On one hand, that’s kind of neat. On the other hand, it’s like a science fiction movie about teleportation that goes horribly wrong.
Or—
A singer sings the saddest song about heartbreak that was ever voiced by a human being, but she sings it into a computer. The computer understands this wrenching vocalization of love and pain as:
10101001010100101010010100101001
10100101010100101010100001001001
00000101001011000001010101101010
01010010101001000101011111100100
10101001010100101010010100101001
10100101010100101010100001001001
00000101001011000001010101101010
01010010101001000101011111100100
etc.
The computer takes these 1s and 0s and make an ersatz replica of what the singer was originally singing. You buy the CD and understand: this singer is singing about heartbreak. The message got to you through an army of robotic interpreters. People who champion digital audio are the only human beings on the face of the earth who would claim that something is gained, rather than lost, in translation.
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PART IV: The Forest, the Trees, etc.
We’ve all had shitty jobs and annoying bosses. I’m actually on fairly good terms with my job right now, if you want to know the truth, but I’ve had a bunch of bad jobs in the past. These jobs were bad for a bunch of different reasons, and different people bring different problems. I had a job once where I was driven crazy by a supervisor who micromanaged everything. He was always on everyone’s case, and everything took forever to accomplish because of all the oversight. I felt bad, because he was a nice guy. It was just that he drove himself batshit trying to make sure everything was exactly perfect, and the company suffered as a result. No one could get anything done because everything had to go though him, and it created a bottleneck sort of effect.
Had he just been a manager, people would have resented him for that. Instead, the resentment was toward his percieved ability to understand their jobs as well as they did. “Who the hell is this guy to tell me how to do my job? Hell, I been doing this longer than . . . ” By looking so close at every little thing, the poor guy just set himself up to be fallible in a whole new set of ways. He lost all critical perspective.
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Part V: Lightbulbs Aren’t Important
I was flipping though a Joseph Campbell book the other day. I haven’t had time to sit down and read any Joseph Campbell books yet, but I’ve been flipping through them. I wish I had time to read them cover to cover. This particular book was transcriptions of lectures he gave.
One of the lectures dealt with him trying to explain the concept of reincarnation to his students. He did so by pointing at the overhead lights in the classroom, saying that the lightbulbs weren’t important, but the light they generated was. No one cries when a lightbulb burns out, they just replace it.
Well, I though it was pretty interesting. I really wish I knew where to find it, so I could quote him directly, but my books aren’t in alphabetical order, and some of them are in boxes.
