Issue #18/99, September 14 - 28, 2000 
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Weird Like US: by Ann Powers Simon & Schuster 2000 $23.00 |
The Parlance of Our Lies
By John Dolan
Sometimes the author’s photo says it all. I’ve never met Ann Powers, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her picture on the back jacket. Most authors’ pictures fill me with bile, but not hers; as soon as I saw her, I was hoping her book wouldn’t be too bad, though its topic—a survey of, God help us, “Bohemian America”— was about as ominous as it gets. Only a few weeks ago I reviewed Bohos in Paradise, a book purporting to describe the habits of the “bohemian bourgeoisie,” one of the most vile things ever written. These self-congratulatory essays on one’s lovely habits and clever friends are bitter reading.
But after I saw Powers on the jacket, I truly hoped her book wouldn’t be awful. It was as if I remembered her from somewhere, from Temple Beautiful or even Berkeley Square in the eighties. She’s one of those New Wave girls whose faces look somehow battered, like the faces of white fighters who are better at taking punches than dishing them out. You can tell she’s sort of stocky, too. She’s unbeautiful, and says so herself many times—a girl for whom the Barbie model was ruled out early, and whose every venture into the wide social world of the clubs took more courage and heart than most of us will ever have. A Catholic girl, as she admits early on. Irish Catholic at that, the most lethal strain—you can see it in her deadly pallor and snub nose. She’s typically blunt and honest about the misery from which Punk rescued her: “Without that music…I would have remained the overweight outcast who published her poems in the Our Lady of Fatima grade-school newspaper but didn’t have any friends.”
Punk and drugs got her out of that Hell, and unlike many a writer saved by these grimy deities, Powers has the decency to thank not only the music but the drugs. (And let’s say it here, because it needs to be repeated: drugs are good. Drugs saved a lot of us, and don’t deny or forget it.) She connects her salvation to revenge on the jocks in some very nice prose:
“The LSD’s buzzy light kept doing its trick of plucking profundity from the simplest passing thought, and my brain gleefully began to build a whole world—one where everyone babbled in their own stream until all the streams flowed into one big splashing whirlpool, sucking under every jock and prom queen who had ever cracked a joke about the freshman who spent lunch reading fantasy novels in the library, drowning them in the backwash of their own dumb power while my hot-pink friends and I rode high, masters of the chaotic waves.”
“Hot-pink”—yes, that rings very true, because when they managed to escape that freshman’s grim fate, these girls often revealed themselves to be very romantic, as well as very smart. To put it bluntly, they liked men after the cooler girls had defected to Lesbia or simple misanthropy. They wanted very much to be glamorous, and they went places where their smarts would be appreciated and their looks not held too cruelly against them. They were, in the San Francisco of the eighties, the last true patriots of coupledom of the non-real-estate-based sort. I remember with respect and—well, to put it bluntly: gratitude. They kept their promises, and did more than their share to keep their social groups coherent and effectual. God knows the worthless boys they cultivated were incapable of maintaining the cohesion of these nerd herds. Many a damaged male—me, for one—owes whatever little life he has to these girls, the noncoms of Punk’s doomed, beloved army.
Powers’s problem is that as an American writer, she’s not allowed simply to tell what it was like being in the social world she exemplifies. She does that very well when she gets the chance, but to write an American book, you have to do what the typical Soviet writer did: cram whatever you really want to say in the middle, and tack on an ideologically sound frame at the beginning and end. Powers’s book takes the key social forms of what she calls “Bohemia” chapter by chapter: sex, drugs, belongings, art, bonding rites.
That term, “Bohemia,” makes one wince, summoning up merciless legions of Tom Waits fans with Jefferson Davis beards, launching volleys of sneers and shrugs at the last bastions of Punk seriousness; but Powers, a smart and honest writer when she’s allowed to be, knows this herself: “I declare Bohemia disgustingly dead.” That’s fine. Would she’d ended the chapter there. But of course she can’t. The dead must always come to life, in our tedious Christian poetics, so a few pages later, sure enough: “I declare Bohemia resurrected, though it has lost that tarnished title and adopted a new group of aliases: slacker, genderfucker, riot grrrrl, hip-hop nation, ecotopia, recombinant techno-revolution.” At this point one would like to raise one’s hand and offer the author a simple, heartfelt one-word comment: “Yuuuuuuck!” Or, with the proper Marin-County diphthong, “But that’s steeeeeeeew-pid!”
The funny thing is Powers knows those names are the “aliases” of vile people, people who really must be executed once we gain control. (I volunteer, right now. I want this on record: I was first!) After giving this distasteful list, she adds, “Or [Bohemia] slips around anonymously, like some veteran of the Federal Witness Protection Program.” That’s more like it, though perhaps in the future we could leave the Feds out of it. (They too will look all the better once they’ve been stood against a convenient wall.)
You get the feeling that Powers is too smart to buy all those fancy names for cowardice and bad taste, and that she’s including them simply because she’s writing in America, the most ideologically constrained nation in the world. An American can’t simply write a fond appreciation of her way of life. She has to genuflect to a bunch of vile commissars first. And this is what Powers does. The genuflection comes in two stages: first she bows to the academics who call themselves chroniclers of social change, then she prostrates herself before the two American gods, The Future and The Greater Good of Our Society. It’s sad—well, it’s disgusting more than sad, actually. In the first place, the best thing about America, really the only good thing, is that there isn’t a “People” there and thus there can’t be any “Greater Good.” And whatever there is of value in American culture at any moment, the very last people to see it, or to allow it to exist once they’ve noticed it, are the academic critics.
But Powers’ grovel to the academics is brief and painless compared to the way her first and last chapters kneel in the dust to The American Way. Suddenly this woman who’s capable of sketching social situations concisely and amusingly starts to sound like something generated by Presidential-speech software:
“To reclaim a bohemian history can only make alternative America more powerful. This chronicle is one chapter in a saga whose last page will never come, unless human beings lose their capacity to confront, investigate, and dare to walk out to the frontiers of their own lives and survey the possibilities.”
Who’s talking here? Neil Armstrong? A small step for Bohemia, a gigantic serving of maple-flavored IHOP syrup for the reader. And it just goes on and on: “At the same time, I do think our moment offers unique challenges…. As history has often borne out, the real work of a revolution comes after the bonfires die in the streets.” From Neil Armstrong to Al Gore in one paragraph. I was so shocked by this debasement of what had been halfway-decent writing that I went back to Powers’ picture on the back jacket, wondering whether I’d missed something. But no; she was one of those girls. Her San Francisco patriotism shows it: “I challenge anyone who has felt [San Francisco’s] enchantments to demand humility from its citizens.” I can’t quite share her simple love for the Bay Area, because I grew up there rather than coming on a Hajj like she did. But it’s the correct, authentic stance for someone with her background.
And yet she can be intimidated into writing those shameful passages I’ve quoted. Lo, what a proof of the terrible power of the American polity! The rhetoric demanded by its commissars is always the same: platitude followed by a list of names. That’s the model Powers uses; after making her Demo-Convention speech about How Bohemia Can Make America Stronger, she names and grovels before a list of some of the sleaziest, dumbest fakes on what passes for the US cultural scene:
“David Foster Wallace explores the surreal corners of suburbia in his writing, while Mary Gatskill strips bare the romanticism of urban hipness in hers…while the music of Courtney Love [!!!!], Beck, and the Beastie Boys are doing the same for pop.”
Once Powers gives in and starts this inept schmoozing, her prose goes straight to Hell. She even echoes that Big Lebowski phrase, “the parlance of our times”: “From slackerism…to post-feminist grrrrl power, the parlance of so-called Generation X has been absorbed….”
“The parlance of so-called Generation X”? Ah Annie, maybe ye were too quick, girl, to throw away the priests. Ye’ve got some black sins, girl (or “grrrrrrrl”) to tell him. Stop by a confessional while there’s time. You never know when you might get hit by a bus and find yourself at the Throne of Judgment, trying to explain away phrases like “The parlance of so-called Generation X.”
And remember, this is a basically good, intelligent person we’re talking about. God damn, what an apparatus of coercion America has perfected! I’ve lived off-planet for eight years, and you really do forget the sheer force with which that culture warps its products, this America that insists on lies, and nothing but lies, all day. To earn the right to tell about her life in a communal flat in San Francisco, Powers must frame her anecdotes with such vile sermonizing that it was only because of my emotional reaction to her jacket picture that I was able to read through the book at all. I’ll let Powers close, with her wonderfully Soviet explanation of why she has the right to tell her stories:
“If we [Bohemians]…begin to reflect openly upon our choices, we can provide a moral vision that challenges the antiquated one that conservatives cling to and that most Americans seem eager to reject.”
There, dude, is the parlance of our times.
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