Shoestring Century

In the last post, I stated almost in passing that we live in the shadow of a “fraudulent” culture.  That kind of claim requires further explanation.  Let me illustrate my view of the gap between a healthy, genuine cultural event and an unhealthy, synthesized cultural event by describing two evenings that I spent out on the town in 2009.   You decide which – in form, not in content – presents a better way forward.

#1:  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness Tribute Show

The setting:  20/20 Cycle, a bicycle repair shop five minutes East of downtown Seattle.  Twenty eight musical acts assembled for a one time performance of The Smashing Pumpkins’ epic 1995 double LP Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, in its entirety – one band per song.  Ticket sales and donations benefited Hollow Earth Radio, an internet-based free-form radio station.  Crowded onto the shop’s low stage area were a drum kit, a couple of amps, and a couple of mics.  The room, whose walls jutted with hanging canisters of screws, dangling inner tubes, and other mysterious implements, was packed with bands and their friends.  The bands themselves could have filled the place; nevertheless, there was room to snugly mill about, and the main room was vented  when people walked around the block to have a smoke or stepped into a closet to tune up.

The set began with a buzzing, off-kilter keyboard rendition of  Mellon Collie’s instrumental overture.  While we weren’t immediately treated to the crashing opening chords of track two, “Tonight, Tonight” – that followed a few obligatory minutes of stage shuffling – once  the next band was ready, they let it rip with guitars, bass, violin, drums, and voice (all said, it took about four hours to execute the two hour song cycle.  Not a bad 50/50 noise-to-instrument-plugging-in ratio).  Several numbers were approached with postmodern detachment:  ”Bullet With Butterfly Wings” received lounge treatment, with the singer stopping after every other line to wonder aloud about the meaning of what he had just belted.  For every shambling mess, there was an aching, perfected rendition – “Bullet” was immediately followed by a crystalline version of “To Forgive,” whispered by a burly woodsman-type who was flanked by a banjo player and violist.  An informal survey of which songs drew the smokers back indoors and to the side of the stage suggested which compositions had grown in stature over the past 14 years (“Here Is No Why,” “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” “Lily, My One and Only”).  James Iha’s stock seems to have fallen through the floor:  the second-fiddle’s single contribution to Mellon Collie, the cloudy, maudlin “Take Me Down,” was the only song with no bands willing to learn it.  That was until a few performers (including the author) volunteered to take the stage for a completely disrespectful, terror-metal-tinged one-minute facsimile of the track.

I heard no one at 20/20 Cycle praising Billy Corgan’s compositions – but then, I’ve never heard someone praising the “Our Father” after reciting it in mass.  We were doing something far beyond assigning Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness four stars, or a 9.2 out of 10 - we were living it.

#2:  Seattle Premiere Screening of The Age of Stupid

The setting:  AMC Pacific Place 11, a movie theater in Seattle.  The setting, in a truer sense:  anywhere in the Western media-consuming world.   My friend and I were about to see our share of the worldwide premiere of global warming docudrama The Age of Stupid, which was bookended by live footage of MTV’s Gideon Yago interviewing Kofi Annan, Heather Graham, Moby, Thom Yorke, and other famous individuals at an austere outdoor “green carpet” event.  Rather than discuss the movie, I’d like to describe who I met outside of the theater.

My friend and I reached the cineplex on the late side and were greeted with the full attentions of four middle aged ladies sitting behind a long table.  One of them requested that we fill out a survey after leaving the screening.  A bit weary of any political movement that would use focus group tactics (and it is a movement… director Franny Armstrong says that The Age of Stupid was designed “to turn 250 million viewers into active citizens, and get them all focused on the crucially important Copenhagen Climate Summit”), I asked her who was paying her to hand out the forms.  She didn’t know.  One of the ladies gave the name of a market research sub-contractor.  I asked, genuinely not knowing, what entity was paying that company, i.e. who the money was behind the night’s feature.  Nobody there knew, although one of them replied with a sense of relief, “You know, you’re the first person all night to ask a question like that.  I ask those kinds of questions, too!”  At this point, another employee informed me that if I filled out a survey I would be given a $10 Wal-Mart gift card.

Okay, I’ve pretty well given away my preference by now.  This movie premiere, as a social event, was fraudulent.

Enticing people with celebrity appearances… Paying marketers who pay attendees (in gift cards)… Sitting people in a dark room silently for two hours and then, when the lights come up, recruiting them into an action campaign called Not Stupid (playing to the ever-popular social anxiety of being considered stupid)… Nowhere in this process is there genuine human-to-human interaction.  The entire event is manipulated, with roles predetermined, and your role is to be one of the hoped-for 250 million viewers.  In the video found at the end of this essay, we see a celebrity at the U.K. version of the film’s premiere say that he hopes The Age of Stupid will ”remind people how important society is.”  Indeed.  I walked out of the film early – not in protest, but simply because I already know how important society is, and the Manics were about to go onstage at a nearby rock club.

If you’d like to see footage from the “People’s Premiere” of The Age of Stupid, click here. I wish I could present a similar video from the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness show at that little bike shop in Seattle, but it seems the moments that build a genuine culture don’t often happen on camera.  They don’t have to because they’re carried from one individual to the next.  While The Age of Stupid proposed scores of solutions, the Mellon Collie show already was a solution.