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The Boy Bedlam Review
Manifesto and Prospectus
October 2006; revised and extended April 2007
I. PREFACE
In the present age, a statement of intent to launch a PUBLICATION
of ARTS AND IDEAS may aptly be called a leap of faith. In an age wherein
the New York Times “Arts and Ideas” section enjoyed but a
brief tenure, and n+1 publicly questions its raison d’etre,
in an age in which newspapers, magazines and the televised media alike
reduce their writing and cultural staffs as they wrestle for advertising
and dishonor themselves in their own advertisement, in an age in which
writings are so numerous, and so impoverished in quality of thought: and
readers, as evidenced by revenue, are so few or so distracted (the terms
are equal) -- it might strike some as the height of financial folly to
initiate any further quixotic enterprise in language.
We have no market research establishing an attractive niche, and scant
thought toward advertisement-appealing demographics.
In short, we do not establish as our goal to draw or gather
a readership. We intend to create one.
For the announcement of a PUBLICATION, a publication of culture
that is true, is not the fulfillment of a demographic: that is
to say the acceptance and embrace of a lifestyle ideology. No: it is the
belief in a community of thought. The radical, the virtually
heretical belief that a community of thought can transcend lifestyle,
transcend credit-card purchase patterns, transcend both creed
and the infantilistically binary politics of our era: a shared community
of thought for the Common Good of the creative, sensatory, and
intellectual aspects of a fully present human being in 21st Century America.
II. FIVE ELEMENTS: CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA
In the last fifteen years, five elements have fused to irrevocably alter
the way that America thinks about itself.
The first was the explosion of the literary and cultural canon.
The second, arriving with the first just as the driver arrives with his
car, was the rise of study in marginalized cultures: the post-colonial
consciousness and voice.
The third is the birth, and rapid adoption and expansion, of the Internet
and digital technology: undoubtedly the most profound revolution in communications
technology since the invention of the movable-type printing press.
The fourth element is the globalization of free-market capitalism –
a direct result of fast communications technology developing at the same
time as American materialist/entertainment culture bounded the fallen
Berlin Wall.
Wired Magazine gurus fantasized about the complete personal freedom
and creativity available through digital communication – but such
techuptopia dreams were deferred by the global capitalistic structure
they helped create. Globalization: what a strange, paradoxical beast!
It ensures a galactically myriad amount of consumer choice – a whirling,
dizzying cosmos of discrete material particularities, and entertainment
options, that craze the magpie mind, and overwhelm its capacity to contemplate,
savor, or judge.
Competition in the free market, which once drove manufacturers to “build
a better mousetrap,” is today – especially in the industries
of arts, culture, entertainment, and politics – the competition
of branding, marketing and advertising: faster, louder, wider, and simpler
messaging.
At this stage, it was natural for the multinational conglomerate corporation
to dominate the distribution of the media product. Larger revenue reserves
can create more comprehensively integrated, media-saturating marketing
and advertising campaigns – and advertising saturation is key to
ultimate product sales.
As a result, we have seen that the multiplicity of choice in the globalized
market ultimately produces a narrowing of choice. There is so much more
– but we have heard about much, much less. We American individuals
are each Croesus-rich in the marketplace of goods and services; we are
but beggars in the marketplace of ideas.
Our very condition of modernity, of cosmopolitanism – the increasing
worldliness of the 1990s as the superpower binarism of the Cold War disintegrated:
infinite consumer choice limited only by the bank account; sexual diversity,
gender instability, and mutability (or insistent identity) of race and
ethnicity – this truly frightened many: the meek and the shy, the
Left Behind of the late ‘60s who looked upon the waxing chaos of
‘68 with horror, who felt civilization buckling and bursting at
the seams. And those who felt bossed, blown, broken by circumstance, by
the instability of the world, the job market, the fidelity of their husbands,
the late-night drunken return suffused with stripper perfume, the surprise
in the den late at night masturbating to online pornography, the disgust
of America’s figurehead given head, the fantasy of a dignified office
stained, as a little blue Gap dress, by Presidential semen, the graphic
demonstration that a cigar was not just a cigar – in other words,
those incapable of facing the cultural evolution of the very definition
of American freedom, as America evolved from an industrial to a service,
media, and information economy in the years after World War II –
specifically, those Americans who felt they lacked power in an increasingly
libidinized country – sought stability in a simplified, manichaeist
conception of Christianity. As Ralph Peters said, in a September 4, 2006
Weekly Standard essay, superficially referring to fundamentalist Islam
but easily transferrable across the religious divide:
The uneven ability to digest the feast of information
suddenly available even in the globe's backwaters doesn't bring humanity
together… Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had
been ordered, and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of
previously unimagined possibilities while having one's essential verities
challenged. Feeling helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization
turns to the comfort of explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia
that assures him that, for all his material wants, he is nonetheless
superior to others.
The confident may welcome freedom, but the rest want rules.
This anxiety over rapid change and moral decline helped bind the Christian
right to conglomerate commercial interests, creating contemporary neo-conservatism.
Thus Ken Starr, thus John Ashcroft, thus 9/11 and Cheney and the hypocritical,
corrupt televangelist Presidency of George W. Bush: the fusion of apocalyptic
Christianity, multinational conglomeration, media consolidation, the narrowing
of choice in the marketplace of ideas, creating the Fifth Element.
The principles of American democracy taught to Generations X, Y, and the
Millennials have morphed thus into untenable national myth, and thence
into untenable national religion – an ideology untethered to the
cultural contexts and ethical systems from which it came.
We exist, today, in a state of extreme instability: the very condition
in which NEW ARTS, and NEW IDEAS, can arise – must arise –
so that we may comprehend ourselves anew, stand again with confidence,
and seize our inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
This is now beginning to happen. But we need to consider how we evolved,
as a species, as a civilization, and as a nation.
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le cirque : hypnotizer
by falling_apart
Around Midnight
by Eric the Hack
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