BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: AUTUMN 2000

from the stone age :: 11/13/00

It’s already cold in Chicago: every chair in his apartment, except the one he’s in, is heaped with stripped-off coats, sweatshirts, sweaters. He is trying to read a magazine. There is a fullness in his bladder that he is trying to ignore— a result of the large cup of coffee he finished twenty minutes ago, in an attempt to warm his hands and self. He picked up the magazine so that he’ll have stuff to talk about when he goes out with Freya tomorrow. If she even comes (she hasn’t called him). His conversation with her made him realize just how out of it he is. The Queens of the Stone Age? Stoner rock? What even is that? Do people still listen to, like, the Pixies? He’s becoming the old person that he always felt sure he would never become. There’s no comfort in the recognition; it doesn’t even offer him an opportunity to gripe dramatically, angstfully: to be the old person griping about having become the old person you felt sure you’d never become doesn’t make you cool, in the same way that being tortured made you cool when you were, say, seventeen— it makes you the dullest of clichés. He’s not going to think about that. He looks back down at the magazine and tries desperately to read a sentence about electronic music from Cologne in a way that will enable him to care about it.

No luck. He thoroughly lacks whatever life-context would be necessary to make that sentence meaningful. Maybe he should get on the Internet and look for corroborating material: he knows the Internet is all about context, really, that’s the way links work. Every word is, in principle, a hot word that is linked to endless chains of reference, which, in turn, are linked to other referential traces. But in a way he doesn’t trust the Net anymore; he’s heard that they’ve turned it into a giant mall, and that cut down on his desire to explore it.

He flips away from the music article and finds himself instead in an article about a museum exhibit on athletic shoes. He’s on more familiar ground here: he observed, some time ago, that museums had begun to stray away from showcasing the works of individual artists, and had instead begun to showcase the works— the products —of corporations and businesses. The Guggenheim’s Art of the Motorcycle exhibition: Yamaha, BMW. Just another case of institutions building relationships with other institutions, no different, really, than McDonald’s winning the rights to dispense a new batch of Rugrats toys. The Armani exhibit, sponsored in part by InStyle, a magazine owned by Time/Warner, a media empire owned by America Online. And now here’s Nike and Puma at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The Air Kukini. The Monstro.

He feels concerned about these developments, even though he knows that all of these exhibits have been popular. (And was there ever a time when art was not a product, anyway?) People seem to enjoy exactly what Jakob thinks is least good for them. It’s like those commercials for the PlayStation 2 that have been running during The Simpsons lately: the ones that are actually supposed to be commercials from the future, advertisements for the PlayStation 9, a videogame system you inhale, a crystal full of cybernetic nanospores that interact directly with your dendrites and axons, plunging you into a virtual world complete enough to realize every critique of virtuality that he’s read in the last two years of grad school. And yet this is a commercial. Sony is selling this future. The beginning.

In a way he likes it, too. The commercial is more entertaining than the surrounding program. It’s a good quick chunk of science fiction inserted into the evening. But he’s always wondered whether science fiction authors want to see their futures come to life. The world of Neuromancer doesn’t seem desirable: its sky the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. And yet there are people he knew in high school who wanted nothing more than to be Case, and to have a Molly with razor-nailed fingers as their own girlfriend. He shifts in his seat, bladder telegraphing discomfort. Even the critics now seem to celebrate the development of a dystopian future. Look at Baudrillard for Christ’s sake, a French genius seduced by the play of America’s surfaces. To want to hold a paperclip, a mug, a stone, to desire something because it is solid and (temporarily?) unchanging— that desire seems hopelessly out of step, makes him feel (old).

Do people desire virtuality? Do I? He thinks about Freya, tomorrow’s date, thinks about why he’s interested in her. Is he interested in her, actually, or in the idea of her, what she stands for? He doesn’t know. Shit. This isn’t something he would have thought about when he was seventeen. He has to piss: can’t ignore it any more. He gets up and heads into the bathroom. On his way past the sink he notices his toothbrush: it is shaped and striped like the athletic shoes in the magazine. Athletic-shoe-ified. He stops.

This means something. What does this mean?

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