by David Byrne
I head back along Oxford Street, which is a handful to navigate with all its double-decker buses and cabs, and then south through the little grid of Soho. I pause to watch a big Muslim demonstration in Trafalgar Square with signs urging everyone (everyone meaning Muslims and Christians) to get along and to have some mutual understanding and respect. Lots of praying and chanting. I wonder if “respect” in this case isn’t really a code word for “enough with the nasty Danish cartoons”? Those recent cartoons must simply confirm what Muslims already suspect the infidels think about Islam. The subtext—that the West thinks Muslims are mainly dirty, conniving bearded terrorists or arms dealers—can be read and inferred in so many newspaper articles, action movies, the reporting and punditry on Fox News, and in Western political speeches. It’s not that those programs and action movies come out and say these things, but it’s easy enough to read the implied message.
Back at my hotel I look around the sleek lobby. The staff seems mainly to be young Russians and Italians dressed in black. Two African businessmen in suits sit on a nearby sofa and leaf through newspapers. Waiting. A young Japanese man calls for a taxi. A few couples emerge from the elevators. Some of the couples are almost my age. (I’m in my midfifties.) They appear to be from the provinces and don’t seem like lovers here for a tryst or businesspeople. What brought them here? The piped-in music from the adjoining bar and lounge is revving up to full disco level now that evening is approaching, and the lobby, all dark and moody, has transformed into something more like a club than a hotel. The couples and tourists now seem pretty out of place, as if what they thought in the afternoon was a hotel lobby had sneakily morphed into a dark nightclub while they were out sightseeing.
Reality-Based World
The Independent newspaper says that after World War II a number of studies and some reports by military officers estimated that only one in four soldiers had actually fired on the enemy. The others weren’t psychologically ready to kill, so they simply didn’t. Very annoying for the higher-ups. The ubiquitous image of soldiers rushing into battle with guns blazing simply didn’t happen. A man named Dave Grossman was brought in to remedy the problem. He used “operant conditioning,” a Skinnerian psychological term, combined with simulations that mimicked actual combat conditions. Previously, firearms training mainly involved shooting at distant targets and aiming carefully. Grossman’s psychological conditioning techniques were further refined over the years, with the addition of simulators—devices that bore a remarkable resemblance to today’s first-person shooter video games. (One wonders if the military should get some credit for designing what eventually became video-game software.) The efficiency of the soldiers trained by using these simulations was quadrupled, so it was proven to be extremely effective.
Based on this evidence Grossman wrote a book called On Killing and has since become a critic of the impact of commercial video games, claiming that they are in effect training young players to be killing machines. He believes that shooter video games teach adolescents (and frustrated nerds) to have the killing instinct, to quicken their reactions, and to lower their inhibitions. He has a Web site: killology.com.
This sounds awfully close to the complaints of shocked liberals when they observe their kids playing a round of Grand Theft Auto. Playing war games and mowing down zombies is pretty ubiquitous among adolescent boys, and most usually grow out of it and realize that it is playacting. But Grossman, an insider if ever there was one, seems to be claiming that some line gets crossed.
Similarly the recently deceased professor of communication George Gerbner claimed that when consumed in sufficient quantities, modern media, like television, substitute their realities for the reality out in the streets, “on the ground.” He claimed that people who watch a lot of TV begin to live their lives as if the TV reality were an accurate reflection of the world outside. After a while the TV reality takes precedence over the “real” world. Given what’s on TV, this televised version of reality paints a picture of the world as a dangerous place, full of crime, suspicious characters, and double-dealing—and with an inordinate portion of the population devoted to law enforcement. Cities as portrayed on TV are filled with blatantly sexy men and women, stereotypically oddball characters and disreputable agents, and the cops who are there to deal with all of them. The world is divided up into beautiful party people, lawbreakers, and enforc ers. To some extent this skewed picture of the world, according to Gerbner, eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the TV-saturated public begins to act as if the TV reality is real and behaves accordingly—reacting fearfully and suspiciously to a world perceived as being primarily populated with drug dealers and con men, according to Gerbner’s scenario—then eventually the real world begins to adjust itself to match the fiction. The fact is there are such things as cops, drug dealers, sleazy bitches, and attractive folks with ready banter and clever quips. These stereotypes are not entirely made up. Their existence can be confirmed, just not in the proportions seen in TV land. But as any marketing or advertising person will tell you, perception is all.
I wonder if this view of Gerbner’s isn’t too alarmist. Part of the reason there are so many gunslingers and cops on TV might be because that is the contemporary dramatic narrative context of the age-old story of the brave and questing hero. It’s a conveniently available, semibelievable, and plausible setting in which to place these eternally recurring myths. Life-changing stories don’t usually take place at an office desk or a computer terminal—and those banal workaday locations are not very conducive to visual media anyway. When I was growing up, TV was all westerns and cowboys. Then, a few years later, TV shows were all about spies. The cowboys had vanished. But I knew—or I think I did—that the world wasn’t really ever filled with that many cowboys west of the Mississippi, or that half the men I saw in suits weren’t in fact glamorous spies. The images and the emotional buttons they triggered still enthralled me, though.
Now, if we were to take what we are presented literally, the world would be made of smart-asses, cops, sexy bitches, and gangsters. But maybe they are all just a vehicle for the same old stories, stories we love and need, but don’t really take seriously as a mirror of reality. No one seriously thinks that because Shakespeare mainly wrote about royalty that people thought the world was all upper class, a universe made up entirely of tragic kings and princes. The bubble universe of the royals, and that of the aristocracy, is by nature more artificial and more theatrical, and therefore easier to view as an allegory. That makes it a better setting for storytelling. Likewise cops, robbers, and sexy bitches. Maybe all those exaggerated characters always simply mirror a different kind of reality—the one inside.
What’s Then Is Now
The past is not a prologue to the present; it is the present—morphed a bit, stretched, distorted, and with different emphasis. It’s a structurally similar, though very much contorted, version of the present. Therefore, in a sense, time—history—can, at least in our heads, flow in either direction, because deeply, structurally nothing has really changed. We think we’re going in a line through time, making progress, advancing, but we might be going in circles.
What we call history could be viewed as a record of how basic social forms have distorted or morphed. It simply changes shape, but the underlying patterns and behaviors are always there, under the surface—as they are in biological forms. Aspects, organs, limbs, and appendages swell and others contract to the point of atrophy in order to accommodate current evolutionary needs and contingencies, but they could just as well flow and shrink in the other direction, should specific needs and surroundings change. History might behave in the same way—the names and numbers change, but the underlying patterns remain.
Morning, I wake up and it’s sunny! I cycle back along the South Bank promenade until I reach the Tate Modern. There, tucked away inside another exhibition, is a single room of spreads from a Russian magazine published in the 1930s called USSR in Construction, which was often designed by
Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and other fairly radical artists of the time. The layouts are beautiful—obviously intended as propaganda (the magazine was printed in a few languages)—sometimes corny as hell, but gorgeous.
If one didn’t know anything else about the Soviet Union, one might look at these beautiful and radically innovative graphic layouts and think, Wow, what a cool place, what a hip scene it must be, and what an enlightened government they must have to produce and sponsor such an amazing magazine. (One might have said the same thing decades later about the U.S.-sponsored international shows of abstract art and state-sponsored jazz tours—which was indeed the intention.)
Here are some spreads by Rodchenko:
Here is a layout featuring “illuminations” added to a tractor factory for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers—sort of workplace as pleasure palace/theme park. Google, the current hip place to work, where the workplace is hyped as a cool campus, has some catching up to do.
Other images in this magazine feature elaborate foldouts, duotones of smiling peasants posed next to Stalin, and one incredible spread of a paratrooper—the top of the page can be unfolded to become a duotone of a parachute sail. Glorious and unsubtle propaganda. I guess all these artists were buying the party line at that point or hoping they might change things from the inside.
It’s an odd sensation looking at these—both chilling and thrilling. One knows, with hindsight, what horrors Stalin would perpetrate, yet one wants to separate the innovative graphic work from the perverted version of the ideology that it was selling. It’s an old question: how cool and detached can we be in appreciating design and formal innovation? It’s not too hard to admire the occasionally innovative contemporary TV commercial for junk food or overpriced jeans, but lots of folks have issues with the formal and technical innovations of Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl.
What is often referred to as socialist realism was not exclusively a Russian movement. Propaganda murals extolling workers and industry were produced in New York and elsewhere. Bas-relief sculptures were carved on buildings in lower Manhattan depicting the press workers who labored inside. In my neighborhood there is a large bronze statue on the sidewalk of a man sitting at a machine, bent over, sewing, and another sculpture of a giant needle and button. Glorious sweatshop workers! But the cult of the living great leader didn’t seem to take root here as much as it did in the East.
I head directly across the river via the pedestrian bridge to St. Paul’s Cathedral (very spooky organ music is playing inside—big, ominous chords). The revolving entrance door has these words on it:
That’s quite a claim for a revolving door! I guess it says it backward when you’re inside.
What’s Music For?
My friend C and I have lunch with two youngish guys who run an art gallery here while its owners are out of town—one is a thin German man who has just moved here a few months ago and the other is an Englishman transplanted from another local gallery. The gallery is in Mayfair, the zone of gilt-framed, stodgy landscape paintings; antiques and antiquities; luxe designer boutiques; and shops that seem peculiarly British—one is called the Cufflink Connoisseur, while another displays polo gear and riding crops in the windows.
The gallerists ask me what I’m up to in a way that says “have you done anything since Talking Heads?” It’s always a little weird when people obviously think I haven’t done much since the hit records they remember from their childhood. The subject turns to live music we’ve seen or heard lately and the German man says he’s only been to about five live shows in his entire life; he grew up on techno and electronic dance music and that’s pretty much all he listens to—DJs. I ask what time those “shows” begin and he tells me that the big-name DJs usually don’t go on before one. I feel a little old-fashioned—I’m usually in bed by then.
The Englishman comments to me that Germans are obsessed with techno, which gets a slightly puzzled and possibly annoyed look from his associate. I think to myself how very different our concepts and uses of music are, how varied they can be. I assume that for the German gentleman music is a sort of machine, a tool that facilitates dancing and some kind of release. Its function is therefore simple, clear-cut, and it either does its job or it doesn’t. I imagine it’s pretty context dependent too. Not too many offices have booming techno bouncing off the walls. Music, for him, will be associated with a specific place and time of day, like going to a gym or an art museum—it’s not necessarily something one experiences at home. Maybe there is some social interaction at those techno clubs as well, so the music helps provide a way for that to happen too. Music, in this view, is definitely not about the words, that much is obvious.
What is music for in my case? Well, I like dancing to music too, though I find that more syncopated rhythms—funk, Latin, hip-hop, etc.—get me moving more often than the repetitive metronomic thump of house or techno. I suspect that syncopated rhythms simultaneously “activate” a variety of parts of the body (and mind) in different ways, and that the pleasure derived from this palimpsest of rhythms acts like a biological metaphor—a metaphor and mirror of social and organic rhythms and processes that we find enjoyable. I don’t find this music to be context specific. I’ll bop around my loft or sway to an iPod on the subway. Most often when listening and not dancing I choose music with singing as I find that the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a rhythmic pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. We call these songs. Sometimes the words help too, but I’ll often put up with lame lyrics if the rest of it works.
So that’s two “uses” I have for music. I also sometimes listen to sound tracks, contemporary classical music, and vaguely experimental music—usually as a background, a mood enhancer, or for atmosphere. We get doses of music this way in films and TV all the time. This is music as air-conditioning. Damn, I forgot to mention to the German gallerist my recent collaboration with Paul van Dyk, the techno master—I would have scored some points and cred if I had.
I remark that the waiter seems to be wearing eyeliner, which prompts a change in subject to the local Abercrombie & Fitch store, where I am told all the shop assistants must be (or must at least appear to be) models in order to be hired. This former bastion of WASP outdoor wear—which intentionally used to be about as sexy as the boxy Brooks Brothers look—has remade itself as a kind of homoerotic Fascist-chic outpost. Talk about a makeover! Is there a Tom of Finland lurking behind or within every buttoned-down square? Two male models stand at the entrance of the shop in hot pants, and the walls inside are plastered with photos and paintings (paintings!) of shirtless male models. The ploy has paid off handsomely; youths of all types fill the place daily. It sounds like a wonderful kitsch theme park, like a Leni Riefenstahl film or toga epic come to life. But what does it mean that gay kitsch sells clothes to straight youth? Calvin Klein has been doing it for decades. His black-and-white ads look like images from soft-core gay mags from the 1950s or ’60s. Surely using this sales tool is intentional and is not just an excuse for him to meet the models. Do the straight kids who shop there, many of whom would never knowingly be associated with anything gay, think, Oh, they’re just cute guys?
It’s still gorgeous and sunny, so I’m off again, south, across the river, now to the Imperial War Museum, where there is a great show of camouflage that includes two of the outfits used in my film True Stories! Here’s a ship in what was called “dazzle” camouflage:
As my friend C says, “Where would that be camouflage? In a circus?” We think of camouflage as the ubiquitous blobby patterns that the military love to sport, whether it’s practical or not, but it seems when camouflage was invented it had a wider scope. It wasn’t just to blend in with the forest or desert. It was also, as it is with many insects, used to confuse front and back, shape (and therefore purpose), and size. There were examples of lovely pop-up tanks and trucks intended to increase the apparent size of convoys and regiments. Potemkin tanks and artillery, which could be collapsed and folded up. A small deta
chment would carry fake additional vehicles and hope that the enemy, seeing the apparent size of the opposing force, would think better of attacking.
Cultural Stereotypes 1
As I head back to the hotel, the light is fading. The winding side streets are pleasant to ride on, especially in sunny weather. This city is fairly human scale and cottagelike, as C calls it. There must be regulations limiting building height in many neighborhoods. Over the years this has forced the city to sprawl beyond reason, which has in turn increased the traffic. The buildings mostly remain under ten stories, and this scale and the architectural details tell a story about how the English see themselves as a people and as a nation. “We might be sophisticated, posh, and upper class; creative titans; world conquerors and explorers, but at bottom we are all simple country cottage folks.” I’m not saying the architecture literally tells a story. I’m not talking about inscriptions engraved on the walls. It’s achieved via metaphor. A story told in lintels and windowsills, through the queen—with her dowdy clothes—and the royals’ country hunting costumes. The windows everywhere, with lots of little panes and mullions, are significantly more enclosing, sheltering, and comforting than giant modern picture windows. The little panes hark back to the countryside, to a mythical, simple life.
I emerge from the side streets onto big thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly, which are pretty hairy to ride on with those giant red buses and no bike lanes, but overall I’ve been lucky with the weather and riding.
I have drinks with Verity McArthur from the Roundhouse, a local venue recently renovated, and Matthew Byam Shaw, a producer of the play Frost/Nixon, among others. I meet them at a private club in Covent Garden called the Hospital, apparently thrown up recently by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics) in a former, well, hospital. Almost all the patrons have their laptops out at the lounge tables. They’re socializing, e-mailing and instant messaging (I guess), and drinking, all at the same time. Maybe they’re all frantically busy with social networking—trying to figure out what to do later in the evening? Or maybe interaction with live people just isn’t quite stimulating enough?