A Subject/Object/Charlie Brown Christmas

 There’s nothing original or interesting about being a Christmas hater. Indeed, it’s just a seasonal riff on “that thing everyone likes, lemme tell you what, I think it BLOWS!” (OK, I kind of do that a lot).

 But I can’t say I’ve been much of a fan of Christmas ever since it stopped meaning Matchbox cars and Encyclopedia Brown books. It’s not too hard to figure out why – the crass commercialism, the religious simpering, counterpointed with Sunday-suit Southerners bemoaning the secular war on Christmas (in which I proudly believed myself to be at least a corporal), and of course the awful music. So I hid my head under the rocks, and around holiday time, if I was lucky, in response to Bob Geldof’s question, the answer was “no.”

However, no matter how bitter my experience with the holidays, I still always loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, if for no other reason than that Charlie Brown seemed to get it, and when he moped around Charles Schulz’s magical-realist version of snowbound Minnesota to Vince Guaraldi’s piano lines, it seemed deeply and truly real. Yes, Christmas is a pay grab, and his holiday blues are a frankly reasonable response.  His teacher wants him to read Dostoyevsky over Christmas break. Lucy offers him therapy for 5 cents, and of course she’s also the one who pulls away the football.

It’s now behind a paywall on Apple TV+. Fuck you.

Furthermore, even if I couldn’t stand Christmas music, even if I still feel a frisson of horror with the first department store carol of the season I hear, there were two songs that I could always rely on.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” – Joni Mitchell, “River,” 1971

“Charlie, if you wanna know the truth of it I don’t have a husband, he don’t play the trombone, I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Charlie, hey, I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day” – Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” 1978

 Because for most of my adult life that was my Christmas – in milder climates, away from the meter-high snowbanks and goose down coats and hot spiced beverages on abandoned train bridges and candlelit fairytale evenings of my youth. Trying to figure out what it was to live on my own terms, to the extent I could.

And every Christmas, I had to determine whether or not I’d be bowling alone.

But sometimes the stars align.

Two old friends – Jordan and Amanda, if you’re reading, I love both of you dearly – needed someone to housesit and dogsit on Christmas Eve, and they were kind enough to leave me a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a joint, 30 bucks for delivery Chinese, Almost Famous on VHS, and the company of their lovely if overactive husky in their house in North Seattle. Which would itself have been a lovely if anesthetized evening. Hold me closer Tiny Dancer.

But what made it truly special was the following night, when homeboy had to pick up a shift at a frankly sinister dive bar-slash-pizza place on Pike Street (any Seattleite should be able to figure out where I’m talking about). Black glass tables left over from the ‘70s, boxes of Franzia, burnt-out fairy lights, and a decidedly marginal customer base. It was the sort of place where I could and did take Jager bombs with the crust punk on one side of me and the philosophy professor reading Derrida in the original in the other, none of the three of us particularly liking either Jager or Red Bull, but all three of us enjoying the goofy ritual of it. And on that December 25th, it was full of the people I needed to be around.

It became obvious, as the Rainiers and the Seven-and-Sevens flowed. I met another guy with a passion for writing, who’d just gotten out of Snohomish County Jail for beating some dude into the hospital. A middle-aged woman in a white fur coat and a few solicitation charges kept buying me shots of Rumpleminze. It’s a story I tell to anyone in earshot around this time of year, the story of our one-night-only little Island of Misfit Toys, the Jews and the Indians and the disowned gays and, as it happened, a skinny and lost Midwesterner with literary pretensions, scarves, and a bad attitude, who felt, for the first time, like he’d finally found that milieu he’d come looking for.

Charlie Brown never got to grow up, or maybe he never had to He began life in the Truman administration and departed this planet along with Schulz himself, the man having left a missive typed out by Snoopy on top of the doghouse, in February of 2000, in the last few months of the end of history.

Maybe they would have all made it. Maybe Linus would have become a meek and mild liberal Lutheran pastor in the kindly and deeply vanilla Upper Midwest tradition. Maybe Lucy would have realized that she didn’t need to be a shit and gracefully aged into a delightfully cynical old bat who still leaves her husband on read just to fuck with him, but loves him to death all the same. Maybe Schroeder would have gotten into Juilliard and written an opera in between visits to Greenwich Village backrooms. Maybe Peppermint Patty would likewise have made it onto the women’s basketball team at the U of M, with Marcie pining for her down the hall. Maybe Pigpen would get the right meds. Maybe Charlie Brown would be sitting there across the bar, a little too serious, having finally gotten around to that copy of Crime and Punishment he’d had to read, which he was the only one in class to actually read, cigarette burns on his matching scarf, and maybe we’d talk for a bit about some random shit, and he’d be a little too serious and a little too intense and we’d go out to smoke a spliff in the sleet and he’d mention all the dumb crap he’d done as a kid just to get the attention of a little red-haired girl.

Or maybe not.

But there’s always hope.

Merry Christmas you fuckers.

Stop Recommending Me Books, Mindy Kaling

While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.

For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.

Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.

 

I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.

Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.

A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.

That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”

(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)

And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.

My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.

Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:

“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”

That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.

Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.

And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.

 

But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.

Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known. 

 

So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?

Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.

No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.

This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.

Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.

But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.

Get the fuck out.