for 22 August 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
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Whee! The People
Are you going by 40th street black now? I'll have to go back into the archives and compare stuff. Reminds me of techno DJs who find they have to change names when they switch genres (from jungle to deep house or bigbeat, for example). I'm just writing to say that that was great (Whee!The people) for reasons I'm only guessing at right now and it has lots of interesting implications for the town I'm living in, Prague, but in the opposite direction. Given the hordes of Americans that stomp through, maybe you've been here. It's one of the only towns really unscathed by WWII, and it was one of Europe's gems to start with. I worked at a paper a few years ago here which once ran a picture of a double-steepled cathedral on the main square that made the steeples look like mickey mouse ears. The point being that the effect of Disneyland is to make it difficult to take something as beautiful and old as Prague seriously. "It almost looks like the real thing," people joke. Prague as theme park vs. Prague as financial center is a serious issue for planning folks here as modern methods of using office space tend to clash with those from, say, the 16th century. For the city to thrive, both of those worlds have to be coddled to and zoned for. Downtown Prague today is a mix of sunglassed, screaming Italians, Czechs dressed up in Mozart outfits handing out concert invitations, chubby Americans in Jams and college t-shirts, and suits talking into their mobile phones in any language as they sprint across the old square. If Disney were to build a park somewhere on the outskirts of town, out by the industrial and business parks already growing there, I think Prague would have a schizophrenic meltdown. Great stuff. (Any articles or book suggestions that pertain would be appreciated.) Robert McLean <mcleanr@ini.cz> Thanks for reading and sending a note. My e-mail was briefly switched with St. Huck's. Taking my own look through his archives, I wish I were him instead of me full-time. Thanks for the interesting take at Prague, which I'm guessing is nothing like Youngstown, Ohio but sounds equally terrifying. If Disney doesn't end up building there, perhaps the closest things to Mickey Mouse (squeaky voice, inexplicable world icon status, eerie and unsettling late-life makeover), Mr. Michael Jackson, will make good on his promise of a Neverland (Really) East. Best, 40th Street Black  Second time writing to you. Thanks for your response to the last. Theme parks! Deep thoughts about trivial pursuits, eh? Yet, this at a time when I'm actually agonizing about whether or not to attempt an unbudgetable trip to Kennnywood PA before they close for the winter and tear down the infamous Steel Phantom. In this case, nostalgia over the impending loss of something I've never seen is motivating me to consider going somewhere I'd never be motivated to otherwise go--I'd never imagine making a trip just to ride a rollercoaster unless I knew it was about to be torn down. Is that effective marketing or what? They'll probably make up, in last-minute Phantom-mourning attendance, what it costs them to tear it down and build a new ride. Also compelling, since I live in topical Orlando, are your thoughts on Downtowns and Park Culture; here we have lost our downtown, as a once-vital entertainment venue, to the ersatz mini-metropoli of Downtown Disney and Universal CityWalk.In this case, amusement parks are posing as places of business, rather than vice-versa, but then again, that's what they really are anyway, right? Still, it's sad for us, since Downtown Orlando used to be really hopping every night; now, if we want nightlife, we have to go hang with the tourists, rather than them getting to come hang with us. In any case, it's still a matter of the better-presented rides overshadowing the sideshow. I enjoy your writing. Stuart Nichols <snichols@rollins.edu> Thanks so much for writing. I was interested in hearing from someone who lived in Orlando. I watched some footage of basketball player Grant Hill making his trip to Orlando to decide whether to play for the Magic - because the lives of multi-millionaires are more important than my own - and I was struck by the fact that what they were selling as Orlando seemed to have nothing to do with any sense of the city, where I seem to remember at one point there being a clear distinction made by civic leaders. I hope you get to ride the Steel Phantom. I'm all for manufacturing nostalgia that whips you around a steel track as opposed to sitting there staring at you over half a vodka-tonic. 40th Street Black Dear 40th St. Black, excellent article on a fascinating subject. Years ago the journal Glyph - which I am sure has long ago vanished from sight - published an article by Louis Marin entitled "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia." The title says it all. Marin was a bright guy but his point of view is that of a snooty educated European revolted by the horrors of American commercialism. But if Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno could praise France - in 1947, when they wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment - for its whorehouses and pissoirs, I certainly don't feel apologetic about Disneyland or its assorted congeners.When I was in graduate school years ago, I lived next door to Belmont Park in Mission Beach here in San Diego. It had a great creaky old roller coaster - which I once rode on to sober up on a Sunday morning - and during the summer months, when the park stayed open until eleven at night, the entrance was littered with the puked remains of cotton candy. But my only memories of Belmont Park are fond ones. I'm happy to have had a chance to observe first-hand the gutsy pleasures of an institution like that - in contrast to the more pasteurized ones of Disneyland - just as I'm happy to have had a chance to see live burlesque when I was in my teens. There's a wonderful painting by Paul Cadmus of the Coney Island beach in the 1930's that really manages to get the raunchy unstructured spectacle of Americans at play on canvas - like a great shot out of an early sound film. Best wishes, Dave Clayton <daveclayton@worldnet.att.net> Hi Dave. Thanks so much for you note. I found a photo of the Cadmus painting — http://www.photo.net/ photo/pcd0222/cadmus- coney-island-58 — if anyone is interested. It's extremely vivid. My Belmont Park was "Adventureland," in North Webster, Indiana, home of the "Wild Mouse" roller coaster, the amusement equivalent of trying to drive your totaled car away from an accident because you told the officer you could. Nothing was more terrifying than the lean on that first curve. I sure hope we're never expected to apologize for Disney; the straight-to-video stuff would take up six months of free time all by itself. Best, 40th Street Black Muggling Through When I got to the end of "Muggling Through" I kicked myself for not recognizing Reason's "Pop culture is good 'cause lotsa people like it" stance before seeing your byline. Bloom's an ass, but I have to agree with him about the Potter books. They're not bad; I can see why people enjoy them (I did too), but I quit half-way through the second book because there are too many other, better books to read. I have to wonder if a lot of Potter fans wouldn't feel the same way if they had someone more winsome than Bloom to help them find the really good stuff. Good critics are more valuable than the NYT best-seller's list. SMTIRCAHIAGEHLT Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu> Who says everyone has to run around reading really good books all the time? There's plenty of room in the world for OK books, especially when they're made for children. But you're right — we've spent a long time reading books based on whether or not they got good reviews in the NYT Review of Books. Boy, did we end up reading some bad books. While You Were Gone? What a turd. Gripefully yours, Sucksters Dear Mr. Mxyzptlk, what a great job of pricking of Harold Bloom's flatulently over-inflated balloon. As one who had a chance to observe Bloom in action some years back —when he was a guest speaker at a conference on fantasy and science fiction lit where I gave a paper —I relished every word. Actually, I think Bloom is quite good as long as he sticks to the turf he knows, that of English Romanticism. He deserves some real credit for having rehabilitated Romanticism from the trash can to which the New Critics had consigned it. I am old enough (56 going on 57) to have had an instructor as an undergraduate at San Diego State College who was a Yale product, a student of Maynard Mack, Cleanth Brooks, and W.K. Wimsatt, who could hardly mention Shelley's name without foaming at the mouth. What I find interesting is how quickly Bloom got off the "deconstructionist" bandwagon once he saw it was running out of gas —probably the guilt by association with Paul de Man's political past unnerved him as well. But the pompously oracular position Bloom is trying to strike on these shores is utterly farcical, quite apart from the conceptually threadbare quality of his most recent excogitations on literature. Bloom seems to be aspiring to the sort of eminence held by European intellectual figures like Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, J.-P. Sartre, or Jacques Lacan. But those characters were a dying breed at the height of their fame, and no one in this country has ever occupied a comparable position —all to the good, as far as I'm concerned. Henry David Thoreau remains the prototypic American intellectual in my books. But Bloom is hardly alone in suffering from this folie de grandeur. Susan Sontag, who used to offer an interesting antidote to the pieties of the academic establishment, has become just as stuffy, if not as overtly conservative, as HB —she seems to have taken herself for the reincarnation of Hannah Arendt. Once more, my congratulations! Best wishes, David Clayton <daveclayton@worldnet.att.net> Oh, intellectuals and all their foamings at the mouth. It's enough to make you eat a six pack of chocolatey ho-hos and watch 10 straight hours of Brittany babbling on about her oh-so-precious virginity on Big Brother. Thinking the Salon Big Brother coverage deserves a Pulitzer Prize... Sucksters For what it's worth, I was watching Letterman or one of the other late night talk shows when Bill Cosby came on in order to promote his (then) new movie, Leonard Part VI. He actually apologized for the poor quality of the movie, stating in his own defense that, "They payed me an awful lot of money." I believe that this apology came even before the move came out. However, this incident was so many years ago, that my precise memory of it has faded. Mark H. Ehrlich, Esq. <mhe@aviationattorney.com> That would have to have happened many years ago, because we're pretty sure that most promotional contracts celebrities sign state pretty clearly that you're not allowed to openly trash a movie as long as it's in the theaters. Or maybe that's something their contracts should say. Either way, it's amazing he got away with it. If only everyone would tell the truth, we'd never have to waste our time with shitty movies again. Damn that Joel Siegel! Sucksters 10 points if you get the reference. With respect to today's Suck, I think Harold is suffering from a mental attitude that does not allow him to take a more sociological approach to reading. The readers of recondite stuff don't need his approval, and those of us who are Potter fans are fans because the books are either 'cracking good reads' or because for all their flaws we can close our eyes and see the story happening in a way TV can't touch, or maybe because of the unbelievably angry subtext of the books, which takes on the British class system with about as much steam as George Orwell. JK writes from the rage of the outsider and this animates her stories above the usual kiddie kark. And she dares to be politically incorrect, which takes more balls than the feminists are displaying these days, alas. Critical thinking, I agree, is missing. I can wail at the wall of western civilization along with Prof Bloom on that one. But the smartest purveyors of literature use the popular stuff to point to Other Things; they don't sniff and wail about clichés. It's a long way from Archie comics to Maus, and it's a fuck of a long way from Transformers to Ulysses, but it's up to the critical thinkers to connect the dots, and I don't see Bloom doin' it. Thanks for a good column. Best regards, Allegra Sloman (Mrs.) <allegra.sloman@xantrex.com> Wow, sniffing and wailing about clichés sounds pretty fun. Suck: Sniffing and Wailing About Cliches Since 1995. Sucksters Whee! The People Note that, by your definition, Paris is a theme park. While business is still done there, it's all been moved to the outskirts (easily reached by excellent public transportation), where highly efficient high rises hold the high-tech companies that power France (and that the French prefer to pretend don't exist). Downtown is Gigi and baguettes and the world's best produce and some really pretty street scenes. It's all done so well that the Parisians, by and large, don't seem to realize they're extras in the park. It's not unique to Paris of course: there's Prague and Florence and Amsterdam and.... It's just that Paris is bigger and does it better.I'm sure there's a moral there somewhere. Alan Kornheiser <ASKornheiser@prodigy.net> I'm more than suggest Europe be viewed a gigantic theme park complex, if only for the chance all currency would then be destroyed in favor of the convenient, around-the-neck day pass. 40th Street Black |
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