9 :: from the stone age ::
[posted 11/13/00]
Jakob 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. He picked up the magazine so that he'll have stuff to talk about in case Freya comes out with Fletcher and him tomorrow. She hasn't called him.
He's never really felt cool, but after talking to her, he feels less cool than ever. The Queens of the Stone Age? Stoner rock? What even is that? he thinks. Do people still listen to, like, the Pixies?
He's becoming the old person that he always felt sure he would never become. He sighs at the recognition, and he sighs again when he realizes that he can't gripe about it in a way that will make him seem attractively tortured. Angst at seventeen looks good; angst at thirty just makes you a cliché.
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 context would be necessary to make the sentence meaningful. He supposes he could get on the Internet and look for corroborating material: the Net's all about context, or so say the cyberculture theorists he's read, anyway. But in a way he doesn't trust the Net anymore; he's heard rumors that now there's nothing left but mall.
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 of corporations and businesses. What would traditionally be called products. The Guggenheim’s Art of the Motorcycle exhibition featuring the works of Yamaha and BMW. 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, displaying the Air Kukini and the Monstro at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cross-branding. Institutions building relationships with other institutions. No different, really, than McDonald's winning the rights to dispense a new batch of Rugrats toys.
Maybe he worries too much. He knows that there was probably never a time when art was not a product. And he knows that all of these exhibits have been popular. 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 done up like 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 complete virtual world. The future world that the ad puts forth realizes every critique of virtuality that he's ever read. And yet this is a commercial, a future that Sony is selling. The beginning.
He has to admit that there's an appeal. 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 to call their own. 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 unchanging— that desire seems hopelessly out of step, makes him feel, well, old.
Do people desire virtuality? he wonders. 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? The hot record-store girl? He doesn't know. Shit. This isn't something he would have had to think 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?
::
