Polaroids from the Dead: And Other Short Stories

by Douglas Coupland

  But quickly enough, in the middle of this palmed drive, off to the left, there is, what seems to be at first glance, a road of a sort one might find in a failed housing subdivision in, say, Georgia or Mississippi: faded macadam crumbling on the sides surrounded by what appears to be…nothing. Break away from University Avenue to walk down this road and suddenly, inexplicably, all evidence of maintenance vanishes—all evidence of humanity vanishes. We have traveled back in time a million years. Where are we?

  This is the Arboretum Restoration Project to preserve marsh and restore oaks. The grass isn’t mown here—it is an experiment in anti-landscaping: to restore what once was. Wear thick pants if you visit—the oatlike grass is dense with last year’s dead brown thistles, brambles, fan palms, orange California poppies and skinny fractal-shaped skeletons of some sort of plant that is, for the moment, out of season but seems to grow quickly enough when in season. There are adolescent oaks, swampy patches, ant holes and chatting birds. A myriad of plants, many of them rare, are tiny but lush in April, and will soon render the landscape almost impenetrable.

  The overall feel on today is prehistoric. There is a mood of dilophosauri and raptors lurking hungrily in the oak copses—of the savagery that lurks to recapture even the most Disneyfied of environments in the absence of vigilance. This is a landscape in which nature is being allowed to recreate the complexities inherent in the wild. The sounds of engines in the near distance fail to reassure.

  From within the Arboretum, the only manmade structure visible, and then barely, is just above the trees off to the southwest, a campanile. One heads toward it, and soon enough one is out of the paleo-landscape and into a youthscape of volleyball, Rollerbladers, sunburned coeds and Hondas.

  The campanile is the carillon tower of the Herbert Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, founded in 1941 by Hoover, a Palo Altan. In the piazza fountain outside the building’s main entrance, frat kids slosh one another with gobs of water scooped with Frisbees. Inside the tower’s main doors, the atmosphere instantly becomes diametrically sober. To the right is a somber oil portrait of the somber Hoover.

  On either side of an almost parodically grim 1940s information booth in the cool, echoey antechamber, are two museum rooms, one on the left dedicated to Hoover’s wife, Lou Henry Hoover, and one on the right to Hoover himself. One feels as if one has accidentally strayed into an offbeat museum after having a flat tire in a strange town—like a “Museum of Walnuts,” say, or “Life with Manganese.”

  Hoover’s room is the size of a 7-Eleven but with high, cool stone walls. Waist-high glass display cases around the room’s edge offer fragments of Hooveriana such as a chunk of Hematite ore collected by Hoover in Kalgoorlie, Australia, in 1912, and bits of Belgian lace—rewards from Hoover-organized World War I relief efforts. There is a 1921 letter, approved by Lenin, from Maxim Gorky to the West, pleading for aid for the starving Russian people. On a 24-inch Sony there is a haunting five-minute loop of black-and-white footage of Hoover himself, declaring that the institute and the 1.2 million documents it houses “aid in the development of makers of peace.”

  In the center of the room is a vitrine containing a pewter model of the Hoover Dam and a small cast-iron sculpture titled Tolstoy and Plow, by Solovieva, in honor of Hoover’s reorganization of the Kyshtyn iron mine in 1910. And at the end of the display is a wall-mounted copy of Hoover’s 1941 book, The Problems of Lasting Peace. Time and memory may not have been overly generous with Hoover, but there is no denying the essential fine intentions of the man—intentions bred in Palo Alto.

  For a dollar one can ascend to the fourteenth-floor tower, the only manmade sightseeing spot in the entire Silicon Valley. One is informed that the gentleman who once operated the tower’s carillon has retired, and that the bells play only rarely now, the last time being the 1992 visit to Stanford of Mikhail Gorbachev.

  It is a beautiful day, and the view is staggering. To the north are San Francisco and the bridges of the Bay. To the south are San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View and other cities—the forges of the post-industrial age housed in their industrial parks and flanked by Palo Alto-ish suburbs whose well-considered greenery almost visibly pump oxygen into the blue sky of this fine spring day.

  To the west is the campus—Rodin’s Thinker in the library quad below and the spiney mountain of the Peninsula some miles away. And to the east lies the other side of the campus from where whooping noises from the stadium are carried upward in the wind. And past the campus is the city of Palo Alto itself.

  Palo Alto—one hundred years old. Palo Alto, dreaming of peace, dreaming of the day it will have its ten thousandth birthday, quietly knowing that peace is not the natural state of the world, that the world is actually more like Jurassic Park, a patch of which the university maintains in the form of the Arboretum Restoration land, clearly visible from Herbert Hoover’s bell tower, like a seed lying in dormancy—a seed that may or may never germinate, depending entirely on the will of the people.

  Palo Alto, California

  April 16, 1994

  © 1996 James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

  18

  JAMES ROSENQUIST’S F-111

  (F-ONE ELEVEN)

  IMAGINE LIVING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD (VANCOUVER) AND ATTENDING A SMALL elementary school in a remote suburb next to a forest, beyond which there is nothing except forest and alps and tundra and ice for thousands of miles until the North Pole, which is, in itself, nothing in particular. Next stop after that: literally, Siberia.

  Imagine the year is 1970 and you are eight years old. Imagine that you have no religion. Imagine that the houses lived in by you and your friends are all built by contractors and furnished with dreams provided by Life magazine. Imagine that you inhabit a world with no history and no ideology.

  Imagine then attending this elementary school on the edge of the world and opening a copy of the encyclopedia and finding under Art, a long, thin panel of a certain painting: F-111 (pronounced eff-one-eleven). It contains, among others, images of an angel food cake, tinned spaghetti, the words “U.S. AIR FORCE,” a nuclear explosion, and a Firestone tire, all splashed across the length of an F-111 fighter plane. All of these images are painted in shocking, bright colors—all of these images that flow daily inside your head—images now all recontextualized in a seductive, validated World Book-ified context. [Fun fact: My computer’s grammar-check function tells me to “avoid jargon words like “RECONTEXTUALIZED.” And right it is!] There is even a young girl, roughly your own age, underneath a hair dryer. In all probability, she has her own ABC Afterschool Special.

  Epiphany.

  Warhol (another art discovery I made shortly after I discovered Rosenquist) said that once you saw the world as Pop, you could never look at it the same way ever again. Absolutely true. Early family memory: Young Douglas cutting up Life magazines bought for twenty-five cents apiece at a local secondhand book store and pasting fragments of pictures together—making “Rosenquists” while annoying his brothers, baffling his parents. Ahhh…a vision of postmodernism.

  We emerge from our mother’s womb an unformatted diskette: our culture formats us.

  The best Life magazine years for Rosenquist-style montages were from about 1948 to 1962. That’s when the imagery was at its most generic—its Sears Roebuck-iest—when guns and butter were roaring ahead full blast. In 1955 it was not an issue for Hormel or Van Kamp’s to spend X-thousand dollars to show a full-page photo of ham.

  I remember bowls of Campbell’s vegetable soup; beach balls; astronauts; swing sets; wood-paneled station wagons. Yet even by 1970 it all seemed somewhat extreme. But it was big and sexy and full of money—Pop!—and best of all, it was generic. The generic postulates an ideal—something that was, if not missing, then rather beside the point on the edge of the world in 1970.

  These Life-ish images are now, of course, the images that have come to define the probably-never-existed-anyway ironic norm of Cold War Boom cul
ture: Dad smoking a pipe; Mom in an apron. It’s beyond a joke. It’s no longer even worth being ironic about. And, as irony itself seems to be on shaky ground these days, ironists, seeking ever more obscure tactics, need pooh-pooh the clumsier, more puppy-like ironic thrusts of early Pop. This, of course, makes necessary a revision of Pop. Was Pop ironic? Was Andy all irony? Was Rosenquist ever at all ironic? Who was sincere…if at all? And which artists will emerge from this neo-Marxist theorizing intact?

  It’s nearing twenty-five years since I first saw F-111 and I have never actually seen it in real life. I have seen it only, in varying sizes and gatefolds, in books and magazines. Trying to imagine its size and luxuriousness is a part of the experience. It’s always amusing to see the way in which magazines and books try to deal with the painting’s awkward dimensions. Other Rosenquist paintings I have seen in person—the earlier ones—have surprised me with their guckiness: masking tape ripped away revealing unclean lines; dribbles; muck. Only Rosenquist’s later works have the seamlessness the earlier works seemed to have been dreaming of.

  Rosenquist was always the hardest Pop painter to find information on. I remember once locating a photo of New York’s art-collecting Scull family (Warhol immortalized its matron, Ethel, in the portrait, Ethel Scull 36 Times) eating dinner in front of a Rosenquist painting titled Silver Skies (more Firestone tires plus a goose’s head)—a painting located in the Scull family’s dining room. Their dining room. I thought to myself, “This is a family that does not live next to the wilderness. Who is this family? What do they believe in? Do they have religion? And on Sundays, do Mr. and Mrs. Scull take the kids out to see F-111? And afterward do the Sculls lunch at Le Cirque with the girl under the F-111’s hairdryer (and her agent)?”

  If you look at the work of the Pop artists, much of it seems to be contemplating some future day when human ideas can be more readily mediated by machines. The painstaking mid-sixties graphics of Tadonori Yokoo now seem like the template from which most computerized graphic design (in Asia, at least) is drawn. Jasper Johns’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s muckiest creations scream Photo Shop software; Warhol is a pure endorsement of the color laser printer twenty-five years in advance.

  Last December I was in San Francisco, at a digital animation studio. While talking with a producer there, we got to discussing our favorite artists, and Rosenquist’s name came up. I said that someday I would like to do a Rosenquist Simulator—a PC-TV product that cuts, pastes, fades and dissolves whatever nontext TV channels are on at any given moment—in order to generate an endless, living Rosenquist for the living room wall. He said it would not, actually, be a difficult thing to do.

  Much of my faith in the future—most of my faith in the future—was invested, however wittingly, in the world of art, and Modern art at that. It was through art that I ultimately came to learn that no history is, in itself, history—possibly its most liberating and uncruel form. (You sentimentalize bourgeois consumption patterns; you must be punished.)

  I think all the Pop artists loved the subjects they painted. Detachment, what there was of it, was a put-on. F-111 is one of the largest antiwar paintings ever created. Pop artists loved the machine that formatted the diskette that was them. F-111 says to me, “Love the machine that formatted the diskette that is you.”

  Culture ho.

  19

  POSTCARD FROM LOS ALAMOS

  (ACID CANYON)

  THE LOCAL OLDIES STATION, KBOM 106.7 (“WE DON’T GLOW, BUT WE’RE RADIOACTIVE!”) plays Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do?” as we skim over a chewing-gum pink road built of gravel hewn from nearby Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour-like mesas. Climbing the steep grade of New Mexico Route 502, we pass an unmarked white eighteen-wheeler sandwiched front and back by pairs of Chevy Suburbans with blacked-out windows. The Suburbans are a miniplex of antennas, dishes and wires; communications between all five vehicles crackle almost visibly, like Van de Graaff generator sparks. The bodyguarded eighteen-wheeler is headed up Pueblo Canyon to the Los Alamos National Laboratory; it is carrying a load of, well…er…(insert the name of something extremely frightening here).

  Los Alamos, population 18,000, eighty miles north of Albuquerque, is a must-see destination for the small, emerging dedicated band of nuclear tourists. It is a defense-contracting-based town, home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is managed by the University of California (five-year contract recently renewed). It has to its credit, among an extraordinary number of other nuclear inventions, the mixed honor of being the place where the first atomic bomb was assembled. It is part of a travel menu that also includes the fabled Doomtowns of the Nevada test site, the aging plutonium production culture of Hanford, Washington’s tri-city region (Richland/Pasco/Kennewick), the Missile Garden of Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the Trinity Site, near Alamogordo, home of the world’s first nuclear detonation.

  Los Alamos’s main nuclear tourist destination is the Los Alamos Sales Company—probably the world’s only dealer in what owner Ed Grothus calls “nuclear waste.” (In fact, it sells non-radioactive cast-offs from the laboratory.) Set atop a lovely hill tufted with ponderosa pines and junipers, the company is housed in two structures: an A-frame building that was once a Missouri Synod Lutheran church, and a small supermarket, the Shop ’n’ Cart, that went out of business in 1985.

  To tour through the Black Hole, Grothus’s affectionate nickname for his facility, is to take a tour through a land of dead technologies and dead ideology. Old grocery-era signage still hangs from the supermarket’s sagging, water-stained ceiling. Aisle 2: soap, bleach, detergents, fabric softener, dog food, cat food. The aisle now contains a jumble of dusty petri dishes, O-rings, microphones, augers, liquefied gas dewars, bins of bulk resistors, pre-amps, glass piping, vacuum jars and -o-meters of all sorts.

  In the church there are four Noguchi-sculpture-ish pod lights hanging from the ceiling’s apex. The pulpit is stuffed, helter skelter, with dead adding machines and attenuators. Where pews once sat lies a Toyota-sized linguine of black multipair cables. The structure is full to overflowing with the chassis of ammeters, DC voltmeters, microfiche reading machines, thermocouples and paper-tape punch-control devices. Broken radio tubes, lost SHIFT keys, wire fragments, number plates, transistors, small springs, patches of rust and cogs litter the floor. Honeywell seems to have done very well by Los Alamos. Ditto Union Carbide, Polaroid and Eastman Kodak. Some of the products and their names and makers have an almost touching, dated, extinct or nearly extinct feel to them:

  a vaporizer by Chryo-Chem Inc., of Carson, California

  a Heiland Strobonar 91B

  a single-phase insulated transformer by the Square D Co. of Milwaukee,

  Wisconsin

  a Racal-Vadic VA3434

  a DT-360 from the Data Technology Corp.

  Near a rear door, covered in pine needles, there is a December 1975 issue of Datamation magazine; a closeby date book is opened to September 23, 1980, as if that was the day, in a science-fiction movie, on which time came to an end.

  Los Alamos, like most other defense-based civic economies, is searching for ways in which to repurpose itself. And as with so many other Cold War-era tech towns, its mood is reflexively conservative. President Clinton’s 1993 swords-to-plow-shares speech in Los Alamos met with tepid response. As Ed Grothus says, “Everybody turned out, but Los Alamos isn’t Clinton country.” Santa Fe, thirty-five miles to the south, is looked on as an ideological and perhaps economic threat. New Age is pronounced “newage,” to rhyme with sewage. The joke du jour is, Q: Why did the Santa Fean cross the street? A: He was channeling a chicken.

  Though the city’s Chamber of Commerce 1994 Visitor’s Guide pitches the post-Cold War Los Alamos as a superior recreation and tourism destination, the city exudes denial. It has the time-stunted feel of having been constructed sometime between the Rosenberg trial and the year Bewitched went off the air. Street names include: Kristi Lane, Scott Way and Tiffany Court. There is virtually no architectural evid
ence of the 1980s in Los Alamos or even the late 1970s. There does exist, however, an aura of low-grade, Pynchonesque paranoia. Local high school kids speak easily of “Acid Canyon,” a nearby locale where toxics were allegedly dumped, and of brain cancer and leukemia clusters. Cub Scout merit badges apparently once touted mushroom clouds.

  But change is happening quickly in Los Alamos. Ed Grothus, now seventy years old, is beginning a liquidation process of his inventory so that he can pursue other interests, most notably a Museum of the Nuclear Age, filled with the best of what he has salvaged over the past forty years.

  And the local newspapers have been flooded with news from Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s openness initiative. In recently disclosed Los Alamos experiments of the 1950s and 1960s, people, children included, swallowed or breathed radioactive materials so scientists could study the absorption of those materials into the body: iodine in the thyroid and encapsulated radioactive uranium and manganese in the intestinal tract, and dinners of radioactive zinc, tritium and cesium. And the machines that manufactured and created these capsules, powders, broths and solutions—all of these dreadful snacks—now sit quietly, with great probability, somewhere inside the Black Hole, covered in dust and perlite, locked forever in a sort of Our Town-ish death-dream, a dream of McCarthyist rants, of tract housing, of dogs in orbit and of that one bright light that made so much forgetting possible.