Yakk in the USSR, or How I Learned to Love the Bubble

March 31, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

A specter is haunting the bubble generation — the specter of negative job growth.

America’s millennials, Emily Bazelon reports, cannot come to grips with post-bubble existence:

Apprehension, with an enduring edge to it. That’s the general mood among the twentysomethings I’ve heard from during the last several weeks in response to a question I asked about how the recession is making them feel. The fear isn’t just about the present but about the long-term future. Octopuslike, it has many tentacles. But the most strangling aspect, I think, is the perception of my Gen Y e-mailers that they dutifully set up their lives based on assumptions that suddenly no longer apply.

When dreams of McMansions and SoHo lofts come crashing down, it’s tough. One twentysomething Bazelon interviewed characterized her predicament of having to sleep on an air mattress in a shared bedroom as “the ‘real world’ thr[owing] up all over us.’” We only hope Bazelon’s interviewee finds someone to hold her hair through such queasy economic churn.

But perhaps these bubble boys and girls haven’t been so much vomited on as crapped back in time. An excerpt from a 1960 edition of Time Life’s World Library book on Soviet Russia:

Long accustomed to a bleak existence, Russia’s people in the past few years have witnessed a marked improvement in living conditions [...] Even a well situated family feels it is lucky to be able to rent a cramped 31/2-room Leningrad apartment.

Rather than rue their condition, twentysomethings should put things in perspective; if they were living in Soviet Russia, they’d be living high on the hog — air mattress and all. This family looks quite happy:

The Alexei Dmitrevs Grooving on Their Uptown Digs. Leningrad, 1960

The Alexei Dmitrevs Grooving on Their Uptown Digs. Leningrad, 1960

Then again, they probably aren’t saddled with $100,000 in student loans. And they can see a doctor for free.

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Bubble Sexy

March 31, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Do you think with the bursting of the bubble, bad plastic surgery will become a thing of the past? One can dream, I guess. From awfulplasticsurgery.com:

Maybe she just ate a bit too much MSG.

Maybe she just ate a bit too much MSG.

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Goodbye Motherlode

March 30, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Sometimes I’m sad the bubble burst.

The age of lenders pushing jumbo mortgages gave rise to eateries pushing jumbo portions — The Cheesecake Factory, as well as my personal fave, Claim Jumper. A California chain famous for its obscene portions and California Gold Rush theme, Claim Jumper opened its doors in 1977. Its website promises that “when you step inside a Claim Jumper you will discover an environment that is warm and comfortable,” which is quite true; patrons are greeted by roaring fireplaces and over-sized booths of a deep, soothing mahogany. The lighting is low, and the exposed woodwork makes you feel as though you happened upon some Teutonic hunting lodge nestled deep in a fairy-tale forest.

But the machinic din of masticating mandibles dispels all illusions of comfort and relaxation. Dining at Claim Jumper is work. The portions demand the utmost intestinal fortitude — and elasticity. Sandwiches like “The Motherlode” require that you consume pounds of ham, roast turkey, tri-tip, bread, pickles and Thousand Island dressing. The “Honey Blonde Fish and Chips” looks like half the seasonal haul of Portugal. But taking the cake is … well … the cake: the “Chocolate Motherlode” is six shortening and sugar laden layers of chocolate cake, chocolate chips and chocolate fudge nearly a foot in length.

The Chocolate Motherlode

The Chocolate Motherlode

It was always good fun to visit Claim Jumper on a Friday night and witness a porcine couple grimly eating their way through a Motherlode. The determination on their faces was almost melancholy, as though they were backhoeing all that bleached white flour into a spiritual void they knew they could never fill. You just knew they were trying to reward themselves for two-hundred hours spent working in a featureless cubicle or behind a cash register. Perhaps it was during one of those visits that I came to realize the bubble had to burst, that such lugubrious excess couldn’t last forever. At any rate, visits to Claim Jumper proved object lessons in unsustainable consumption.

Claim Jumper is still in business. But it might not be for long, if bailout after bailout augurs austerity for the hapless homeowner now bedeviled by negative equity. Perhaps the place could trade down, swapping the fool’s gold of Velveeta for oozing Cheddar, say, and in this way survive. This would, however, mean a diminished gustatory experience, to say the least.

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Bubble Aesthetics

March 30, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

From engrishfunny.com:

gallery-culture-toilet

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Hugs for Generation Y

March 29, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

The Royal Gazette recently celebrated the virtues of of Generation Y, that anthropic manna from heaven which descended during the holy neoliberal protectorate of Ronald Reagan. An excerpt from the article:

The members of Generation Y are sometimes referred to as the “Millennials” or “Echo Boomers”. I mention this because Deloitte, the professional services firm, issued a report this week, stating that Gen Y is becoming an important part of the workforce, as well as the newest customers for financial services companies. The US insurance industry, for example, is looking to this group as an opportunity for growth and significant long-term opportunities.

I must admit, it comes as a surprise that the The Royal Gazette views the “Echo Boomers” as a growth opportunity for the US insurance industry. Given the fact that the insurance industry in this country is currently in shambles, one wonders why Generation Y represents the last straw for the likes of Liberty Mutual and, gulp, AIG. But it’s not just the insurers who see Generation Y as a new source of fodder. Financial services also sees those born after 1983 as a means for staging a comeback.

Why, pray tell?

According the to The Royal Gazette, Generation Y is possessed a repertoire of rare qualities. To wit:

• As financial freshmen, Gen Yers have easier access to, and more information about, financial products and services than earlier generations did at this stage of life. However, when it comes to implementation, they are still novices.

• Gen Yers are self-directed and resourceful in conducting research on financial services products, but often seek recommendations from, and validation of, their decisions from family, friends and financial advisors.

• Tech-savvy Gen Yers grew up as “technology natives” and view technology as an extension of themselves, compared to baby boomers, who view it more as a tool.

Generation Yers, according to this market research, are a bunch of vacuous opportunists who can’t even tie their shoes without consulting mommy and daddy — iClods ripe for fleecing, in other words. I can’t help but think of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, but with Generation Y as the lax and happy Eloi, twittering and texting their way through life, while the hungry, simian Morlocks, armed with reams of actuarial and psychographic data, patiently await sunset to feast upon their toned, blemishless flesh.

Unfortunately for Generation Y, that sun now sets, as bailout after bailout fails to satiate the Morlocks of Wall Street. Baby Boomers and Generation X have grown weary witnessing their tax dollars thrown onto the FIRE sector. Only Generation Y, Facebooked and YouTubed into comfortably numb self-regard, remains seemingly oblivious to the economic meltdown toward which we are careening.

That’s perhaps for the best. If Generation Y is indeed becoming an important part of a workforce that no longer exists, then why spoil their party before it’s necessary? In fact, The Royal Gazette says we should go out of our way to be nice:

So, if you see a generation Y-type person, give them a hug, why don’t you, and maybe they will influence you in ways you cannot imagine.

But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. With unemployment at 8.1% and rising in the United States, Generation Y doesn’t exactly have the skill set required to deal with grinding poverty and a lack of employment opportunity. So when the shit hits the fan this summer, I’ve my own words of advice if you see a generation-Y type person: Run.

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Wacht Auf!

March 28, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Looks like the first of the G-20 protests are underway. EuroNews 24 reports that the G20 march, which signals the beginning of a week of protests, started today:

Thousands of demonstrators gathered to march through London on Saturday to demand action on poverty, jobs and climate change at the start of a week of protests aimed at the G20 summit in the capital.

Trade unions, aid agencies, religious groups and environmentalists have come together under the slogan Put People First to urge world leaders meeting on April 2 to discuss the worst economic conditions since the 1930s.

The march takes place against the backdrop of a deepening global recession and growing public anger over bankers’ pay and the painful fallout from the crisis.

In Britain, unemployment has risen above 2 million, house prices have fallen 11 percent in a year and industrial output has recorded its worst drop since 1981.

This is going to be a summer of rage for the working class, said protester Bryan Simpson, 20, a clerk from Glasgow. Working class people are expected to pay the price for the debts of the banks.

The upcoming week should certainly prove interesting, and I’m sure quite a few banksters are breaking a sweat right now. I can’t say I feel sorry for them; the working–and middle–classes will bear the brunt of their stupid avarice. So it’s nice to see the sleeping giant stir for once. Let’s hope there’s more civil disobedience to come.

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Annexing Bohemia

March 28, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

Whither away the American intellectual?

The American public intellectual didn’t so much disappear as was transformed, or was perhaps transmogrified, under an increasingly puissant regime of Capital in its post-industrial iteration, where emphasis shifted from production to consumption.

Consequence: the expanding hegemony of consumerism gradually eroded the public intellectual’s function to such an extent that it could more efficiently and more cost-effectively be given over to “creatives” — the sort of neo-Boho folks Richard Florida so publicly gushes over, those who keep at-risk neighborhoods from going completely crackward and who make a virtue of myopia. Under such a profitable arrangement intellectualism’s ethos came to represent not so much a community of thinkers dedicated to pushing the polity in a particular direction as a cadre of hirelings crafting slogans to drive the consumer to market. What allows these debased intellectuals to coexist with their thoroughgoing reification is the frisson of “‘Wow!” attending popular items of consumption, which comes from jiggering the economies of function and form to best effect, but which also signals at each stage of the process an alienated creativity.

Despite it’s vexed relationship to various art and literary markets the Bohemia of decades past became, then, the agent of its own undoing, because this relationship, along with the defiant, contemptuous gestures it frequently engendered, became the codes of rebellion that, once alembicated through the nimble minds of Madison Avenue “creatives,” stood as the very message to brings future intellects into the consumerist fold, where self-expression is soothingly indexed to a plethora of established “lifestyle” mediations, thus making way for the Hipster ascendancy. In the brisk movement of a curdled dialectic Bohemia became its impossibility; thus any intellectual renascence today will only have us longing for its earlier inception.

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Shopping is better than sex.

March 27, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a Jersey mall decree?

Perhaps.

The purveyors of America’s malls have not been daunted by the current economic crisis. Dubbed the “Xanadu Project,” the 5-story retail and entertainment complex built recently in East Rutherford, New Jersey, is slated to open summer 2010. It contains 4,500,000 square feet of retail, sports and entertainment space. Once the Xanadu Project opens its doors, its patrons will be able to skydive, or at least play at skydiving, at SkyVenture, a state of the art skydiving simulator; lap up the latest and greatest from Hollywood at Muvico Theaters, one of the nation’s largest movie theaters; take the kids to the LEGOLAND Discovery Center; and satisfy cravings for all things saccharine in a “city,” complete with a 30-foot chocolate waterfall, fashioned entirely out of sweets, thanks to It’s Sugar!, the largest candy store in the world. Surprisingly, reactions to the building of this consumerist pleasure-dome have been largely negative. In a recent article, Time described the project as potentially (hopefully?) “the last shopping mall.”

It [the Xanadu Project] rises out of the tidal murk of the Meadowlands — the polluted northern–New Jersey wetlands on which the sports complex of the same name was built some 33 years ago — like a garish species from a monster movie. What is that swamp thing? It’s a mishmash of big-box structures covered in aqua, blue and white tiles, with a little mustard yellow and brown thrown in to finish off the 1970s-nightmare look.

Project Xanadu

But despite the enormous cost ($2 billion to date) of this seemingly ill-omened venture in capitalism, the developers of Xanadu maintain a rosy outlook for the mall’s future: “It’s not like people aren’t looking to recreate,” says Larry Siegel, president of Xanadu. “They are. But people may not be able to rent that house on the beach or pay a few hundred bucks for a three-day pass at Disney. But they can come here and spend $100. If people spend the time here, they’re going to spend the money.”

Maybe. It certainly seems like the recession has yet to effect the average American’s desire to shop; while they may be shopping less often, and for less, they are still shopping. It is, after all, the national pastime. But the Xanadu Project seems like the last, distasteful gasp from a way of life that is fast dying. Its garishness betrays a desperate belligerence, as though it could overcome by brute force the dour economic indicators threatening to render it obsolete before even staging a grand opening. In this sense Xanadu will inevitably fall victim to the confused and short-sighted assumptions that gave rise to it in the first place — that the wheels of consumerism will continue to grind on, regardless of economic realities. That the family who cannot visit Mickey Mouse and friends will settle for dropping $100 on a visit to LEGOLAND and a nip of a chocolate cataract. That spending time will naturally lead to spending money. That the economy, despite being hobbled, will continue to permit discretionary spending on a scale that is out of touch with certain unpleasant realities.

If we’ve learned anything from the current economic crisis, however, it’s that you can’t assume anything. There is a certain poetic justice in the Xanadu Project’s being located in the desolate, unclean northern-New Jersey wetlands, as though it is only a matter of time before all 4,500,000 square feet are reclaimed by the wastes from which they rose.

At any rate, I doubt Kubla Khan will shed a tear, especially considering that this is in fact not the first Xanadu Project. The timelessness of Xanadu means any attempt to realize it will be ill-timed. Case in point:

The first and last rollerdisco musical. The fad, a hothouse, dérivé thing to begin with, died before production wrapped, leaving us with the sort of marvelous abortion the latest Xanadu promises to be.

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The Confidence-Man

March 27, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

I just chased a door-to-door, magazine-subs-for-charity huckster from my threshold. He somehow circumvented the tenant-controlled front door, knocking instead at my kitchen door, which leads to the fire escape!

I remember my neighborhood in Tucson being lousy with such garrulous, darting fiends. They’d flagrantly ignore “No Solicitors” signs to pay me calls that, no matter the hour, were always awkward. An equally awkward exchange would inevitably follow: I’d pinch my chin and shift from foot to foot (nervous tics), while he (never would a woman appear at my door) would fast-talk me, pleading on behalf of orphans of some undefined disadvantage, or for his own educational and recreational prospects—a curious melange of college matriculation and sunny idylls at some Mexican resort formed the prize after which he was striving—bidding to overtake some “girl who’s won the contest year after year,” an unvarying element of the schtick supposed, I guess, to play upon some masculine insecurity of mine. My purchase of a wildly overpriced subscription to Maxim would thus consecrate some freemasonry of manliness between us.

All bullshit, of course. I stood and heard the pitch as long as my patience allowed before rehearsing my standard excuse for demurring. I told him that the interest employing him doesn’t offer the magazines I like to read. If it offered The Economist or Harpers, for instance, then perhaps I’d be inclined to assist him in his battle of the sexes. This was generally effective in years past, icing further converse.

Today, however, the salesman parried my feint by producing a tattered list of a book I could purchase for a local children’s hospital. This unexpected sequel brought me up short; I care about children’s well-being very much, and I’m all for kids reading, so in spite of myself I began to warm to his spiel. Enough caution and suspicion remained with me, however,to check me after I asked him if he’d leave me with some literature about his program (I happened to see he had a pocketbook of sorts filled with yellow and blue cards), a request he refused to honor, claiming his overseer “charges him for anything he leaves with customers.” I thought, How much could a yellow card possibly cost? If its a draconian sum, then he’d best find another line.

I think he found me a bust, and left as briskly as he came. I felt angry and depressed—angry and depressed enough to compose this blog entry. The experience returned me to my contempt for contemporary existence. An existence where come-ons, rip-offs, Ponzi schemes, usury and con-games buzz around me like blowflies, mostly because of my modest, slightly downmarket address. Do these salespeople ever infiltrate gated communities? Does one really need to pony up a premium just to be sheltered from such intrusions. I don’t hate the salesperson; he’s just a stooge whose dimwit cupidity’s been harnessed by a cleverer but just as money-loving sociopath. I blame the system that produces such individuals. Just one more symptom of the Republican Revolution, begun in the Eighties, whose “supply-side” deregulation, along with an almost pathological antipathy for entitlement programs, have incubated such grubby little monsters.

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“We All Float Down Here, Georgie!”

March 27, 2009 — Anton Steinpilz

If you’re familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben (he’s all the rage in lit-crit circles these days), particularly his concept of Homo sacer, you know that Homo sacer is a juridical designation that has its root in Roman law and applies to individuals who for legal reasons cannot be sacrificed. That is, they’ve been juridically divested of qualia which conventionally apply to them in ordinary circumstances, like, say, those of a law-abiding American citizen who enjoys rights and protections secured her by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. That being said, I cannot help but continue thinking Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception quite apposite when it comes to everything that’s going on in the current housing market debacle and the government’s seemingly ineffective, and perhaps detrimental, means to address the problem.

The sovereign’s organs, in this case, the Fed and the Treasury, determine the states of exception that lead to thrifty and prudent people getting screwed by the inevitable inflation to follow. The sovereign and homo sacer, used here in a more attenuated sense as s/he who has been placed outside fundamental economic laws that punish improvident behavior, occupy spaces beyond the thresholds that contain prudent householders and renters, whose own financial well-being has been thrown on the fire in order to deal with the aftermath of the housing bubble. Troubling thing is, though, these thresholds tend to drift and to contract, until the very status invoked as the ideal — “homeowner” as fully realized American citizen — no one any longer actually has. Democratizing access to a certain status, in other words, effectively destroys that status.

I find in the Fed’s current remedies to the mortgage crisis — buyout–bailouts and tax “carry–backs” — a certain homology with the machinations in Bush’s Justice Department. It’s the same logic as that underwriting the notion of “the ownership society” which allows mouthpieces in the DOJ, and even, at the time, Bush and Cheney themselves, to claim that none of the anti-terror legislation ushered in over the past seven years has done anything negative to essential constitutional protections like habeas corpus, when, in fact, habeas corpus has been stripped of all its legal “teeth.” It has been reduced to a purely a formal, conceptual entity, a placeholder in conversations about the constitution and the law; just as “the small business owner” is a purely rhetorical construct for campaign speeches, its objective correlative having been all but driven out of existence by big box stores.

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