Of the trouble with consumption and its pleasures

I am a Marxist living in contemporary Los Angeles. I also happen to be a Marxist with a taste for caviar and nice red wine, oysters and the general revelry that is always fomented by consumption (not ‘shopping’ so much as out-going–to dinner, to bars, to see movies with boats of overpriced popcorn in tow). I am also (like all humans) a social creature, and the spaces of consumption are all too frequently also the places we gather. If you too are a Marxist or a Post-Marxist or any kind of reasonable, left-wing social critic, you will have already formed a clear response as to why this is not a particularly new conflict, nor one which requires a long-winded defense of position. But you’re reading this so probably you aren’t any of those things, or not comfortably situated as such. So, here goes:

The fact of the total surrender to commerce as the site of both pleasure and resistance, to play and to purchase, is–to put it mildly–an engaging problem. Not just for me but for scholars and activists and those (perhaps fantastically) nostalgic for a public space that belongs, instead of a public space that belongs to. It is also the source of considerable anxiety for the average person. If the present political discourse in the U.S. doesn’t convince you of this, think of the places you long to be and think of what it will cost you, in hours of labor, to get there, to visit, to stay.

One is rarely sure how to ethically engage in the world if the dynamics of global capital find one vexed. The thing about such problems is that they are always simultaneously economic and political, global and local, personal and social. Or, at the very least, I am not the only one who has to think “oh how I long for that lounge chair on the far-off white, coastal sands,” while simultaneously thinking about said sands as exclusive, expensive, impossible, troubled…

There is something to be said for desire being, ultimately, the near-perfectly harnessed fuel of late-stage, global capitalism. The problem is, of course, that desire is also what frightens the shit out of those of us whose shared desire (among many and conflicting) is to believe that capitalism is, in fact, late-stage; that the small spaces of resistance left to us, even if they too are the spaces of consumption, are still charged with meaning and possibility. We are terrified that our desire, as it turns out, is just as functional to keep this weird, post-modern version of abstraction moving mechanically forward. And–even more than that–we, despite such fears, continue to feel like we have to believe in such possibility. Because otherwise, wouldn’t we just give in and invest?

I don’t claim to know with certainty, one way or the other, whether such spaces or those of us who inhabit them have revolutionary potential. Nor do I feel I should apologize for the very obvious fact that the system is the system we live in and that my own desires are conditioned and in many cases entirely manufactured by that system. It allows me to eat oysters and love commodities which I know are built, very specifically, to sell themselves to me. It even gives us Marxist critics a handful of bars and restaurants to meet in. But, if Marxism has any say in the world today, desire may well be also how capitalism builds within and against itself the very contradictions that will ultimately make it unsustainable. People love things. This is true. But they also, even when they’re not so good at it, love sharing things with each other. They are biologically predisposed, in fact, to love. Mirror neurons. Facial recognition. Gestural cognition. We are animals who desperately need other animals, who need shared environments. We are only always in an ecology. There is no vacuum, no subject sans milieu.

Is this an excuse for the pleasures afforded us meager subjects by commerce? By caviar and Pinot Noir? The short answer is yes. The long answer is no. Otherness and exclusion always, even if just a little bit, also always excludes and others us. Me. You. And all those somewhere, fictionally, in between and outside.

I’m not joking when I say I love love. It might be the last space that really does belong. But it can easily belong to too. So what of pleasure? One eats and drinks and is merry, I suppose. But it’s worth thinking about what such eating and drinking and merriment might be if it were, legitimately, a communal affair. Speculation, of the sort not quite done by capital, goes a long way. What did Marx do, after all, if not desperately imagine a future? His did not, alas, come into being. But if we’re not careful, our own imagined futures will become advertisements for Corona and private, polluted beaches. And, what’s more, beaches onto which we will never be able to wander.

There’s no opting out. So eat your oysters. But with that slithering sumptuous little creature, swallow down as well what kind of creature you are.*

P.S. The joke of the title image for this post should be clear enough: Capitalism can’t kill love. Even if it can often co-opt it.

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*I do not normally engage in such politically charged exposition on this blog. But I believe it. So, read and be warned or scoff, but know where I stand.

Of the joys and perils of karaoke

A friend of mine and I like to go to karaoke about once a month or so, if schedules and desires align. We usually go to the Smogcutter, a spectacular dive in Silverlake where Charles Bukowski is rumored to have whiled away many a drunken hour. Last night, however, we went for a slightly more upscale, scenester local–the Bigfood Lodge in Los Feliz.

I have a total of two tunes in my repertoire, and only two. This is due partially to the fact of my genetics. I cannot sing on key, ever. No one in my bloodline can and my guess is our heirs long into the future will be damned with this same curse. There is a salve for our inherited deficiency, however. Songs sung either in the ‘scream’ register, or those sung in falsetto can, on occasion, be the right fit for the likes of us. They must be very carefully selected, however. I have more than once grabbed the mic only to clear the room with a poorly calculated choice. Dylan is out. Don’t even try. Cash can be done, but only with immense finesse–that I happen to lack. No Bowie. And never, ever Journey.

I prefer a very specific era for my chosen gems of these two genres–the 80s. This allows for maximum camp and performative potential and minimum requirements for faithful rendering.

I hesitate, dear readers, to tell you what these two songs are, lest you ever have the pleasure of sharing an evening with me and a karaoke machine. I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise. But for the sake of participatory journalism and the culture of personal revelation via blog, I’ll do it anyway. Drum-roll please: Emotional Rescue by the Rolling Stones (Mick in falsetto is ridiculously good) and Life During Wartime by the Talking Heads (screamie genre here, at least when I perform it).

Last night the bar was low on Stones, so I went the Heads route. I would argue that, and I realize this is a biased judgement, I killed it. That crowd of hipsters may have hated my sweater and my boot-leg jeans, but they loved me as David Byrne. Dare I say that I warmed the cockles of their cold, aloof, hipster hearts? I do. I dare.

And that, oh comrades my comrades, is all that one can ask from a good Monday night on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Fame matters here, banal and bizarre though it often can be. My city is one whose primary industry is the production of vapid and vacuous reality television and blockbuster violence (and yes, some really wonderful stuff too, though in much smaller proportions). It is a place where people tweet their star sightings, where red carpets are always at the ready. At least on the karaoke stage, though, anyone can have their fifteen minutes. And then, unlike those pour souls followed by film crews, creep back out into the quiet night, anonymous but joyous just the same.

On the Santa Ana winds and catastrophic ecologies

My sleep was fitful during a few stormy nights just a week or so ago, my dreams dark and bizarre. I blame this on the gale force winds that sometimes hit Los Angeles and that did so with even more power and fury than usual this season. Raging until power lines ripped, windows were shattered by flying fences, palm fronds dove like Trojan spears–the Santa Ana’s let Los Angeles residents know, once more, just what meager creatures we all are, how close to disaster our city always sits.

These winds have been blamed for peaks of madness and suicide in the L.A. population. They’ve been linked in odd historical and cosmological trajectories to the worst moments of the city, to the cruelest among its people.

An old tree just down the block, huge (and maybe a cottonwood?), was ripped from the roots and blown over. It crushed two cars and blocked our street for a few days. The wreckage of concrete it left at its base is still marked off by the standard orange cones the city puts out. To say the least, it was an impressive feat of nature that felt, at least in the middle of the night, like a strategic attack.

Didion wrote, “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England  determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”* Everyone in Los Angeles seems to know that, more or less. And when we forget, and sometimes even when we don’t, the winds return.

John Fante’s dusty Bunker Hill rooms are covered with the stuff kicked up by just these winds. I sometimes think L.A. noir couldn’t exist without them. The superficial, fame-obsessed, health and fad driven people L.A. residents appear to most to be seems a kind of knee-jerk response built into us by such stark and remarkable chaotic phenomenon. And the other side of Los Angeles, the enormous wealth gap, the wild diversity, the unruly post-modern sprawl–all somewhat less depicted in the larger mediated world–are also in their own way linked to some very contemporary urban relationship with disaster. Or with the disaster that (any Angeleno can tell you, conspiratorial or otherwise) is always already becoming.

I also think: if the weather you get comes only in the form of rupture–‘the big one’ that will come; the huge forest fires, sudden and rageful, that gulp the money and property crawling up the most uninhabitable of hills; the mudslides; and, yes, those dry, hot, whipping winds–you tend to have an odd sense of the natural. Like Hollywood films that come from the usually sunny and temperate climate of Los Angeles, you expect mostly beauty but also (though you expect it in some easily digestible delivery) terror, chaos, destruction. It’s only once in a while, in the not so filmic ‘real life’ the population lives here in the city that nature, uncontrollable and wholly other, wins. We are the very people, after all, who lined our river with concrete.

This antagonistic and asymmetrical stand-off between Angelenos and the habitat they really do call home means everyone wonders (some aloud, some in their dreams) what nature, in the end, will be capable of doing to this city.

Tonight, driving home through Silverlake, through the well-paved and now mostly cleared-of-debris streets, three coyotes ran out of a strip-mall parking lot and passed through the glow of my headlights. They continued quickly up the entirely residential hill toward something. Who knows what? It was a little bit wonderful to see them. It was a little bit sad. It was also a bulky reminder that this ridiculous post-modern sprawl is an ecology. One which might, I sometimes think, only be understood by those sad, strange sufferers of wind-induced madness.

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Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. New York: Penguin Books, 1979. 220-221.