The endless dying agony of the terminally happy

Joan Didion famously wrote that the 1969 Manson Family killings marked for many people the end of the sixties. Sometimes dying cultures or lifeworlds are really interesting the way they flail about while in the process of croaking. Actually, it is the Seventies when things really shifted. The decade divides sharply in musical culture, because 1975 was the legendary marker for the beginning of punk (at CBGB’s in downtown New York, with Patti Smith, Television, and the Ramones—with the Sex Pistols starting English punk a year later and the more nihilistic but great LA punk of the Germs and X following….). What punk aimed at was the culture of the Seventies. The “hippies” we hated were not the protestors and acid-trippers you see in Milos Forman’s film (based on the 1970 Broadway musical) “Hair,” but the people who joined the new religion of being laid back. We were not laid back. A student bank teller in Berkeley once shouted at me to “Relax!” Some people prefer others who are laid back. If you lay back, you might enjoy your experience, or you might just get fucked.

A high school friend of mine ran for school President on the slogan, “If you give a damn.” I think he gave a real damn about the fact that obviously no one did. The cheerleader girl who won was a poster girl for suburbia, whom I retrospectively would come to admire because of the one thing, not interesting so much as actually good, that she did while in office, which was to organize a blood drive for a girl dying of leukemia. The drive was successful in raising the money that with a bit of luck might have saved the girl’s life. I read in the school paper about the nice memorial service lots of kids went to; I didn’t know her. I ran for office myself the following year against another cheerleader, and I recall myself wondering, unfairly, if she was as plastic as her tits seemed to be, as she was unnerved and I nerved when the school unter-boss who was in charge of the little student bodies running for their glitter star pro forma student leader offices, announced that in lieu of the planned speeches (I had a prepared one I had stayed up all night writing and practicing), he would give everyone 30 seconds to speak and then bang a gong. When my turn came, I looked around. me and at the audience and said, “This is a fashion show!” And I went to sit down in the stadium bleachers in disgust.

Then the young preacher lady who moonlighted as a therapist offering me counseling sessions over Mexican food went for the kill after giving me a ride while I was hitching to school, as I always did, since my bachelor engineering professor father, who was right-wing and annoyed at me for writing some shit and working on a local political campaign instead of giving more attention to my classes, didn’t think I deserved money for the local bus. This woman, who later became an out married lesbian and the requisite social activist in her denomination (she cares about the poor; thanks, heavenly boss, that’s a nice thought) after getting a Harvard PhD in some field of psychology perhaps almost as consistent with her “Christian” beliefs as the song she taught her youth choir, “Love is surrender (to His will).” (Note please, now it is His/Her Will, God is bisexual, isn’t that wonderful? He’s still the boss of it all, of course…). She read my being a bit hyper and pissed off, having been eating caffeinated water for the previous 8 hours, as warranting the decision that I was either on drugs or crazy, so she arranged for my Dad to come while she delivered me to a psych ward, after first taking me to a therapist friend of hers, a 30-ish man, who sat me in his lap and said, I want you to know I love you, as he pawed me respectably, and said no, it’s not gay, they all ask me that, and that’s funny, but I just want you to feel the love, see, everything is love. Obviously, she figured my distant and cold (German, Protestant) father didn’t show you love. (This was true at least in the terms of this eager disciple of divine comforts. In fact I found out much later that my father’s own mother, whom I remember as not lacking solicitude, never really touched him; as it was explained to me, the Germans just are like that, which is ok by me considering the alternatives being presented at this time….and the fact that I think whatever love is and however it is shown is maybe not so readily canned; consider, while they had lots of great fucking to remember each other by, Héloise and Abelard loved each other well and truly for a long time without much in the way of either ecstasies or caresses. Then again, when love is a duty, we should maybe wonder if with the aid of a religious discourse it hasn’t been packaged and sold to mums and dads who love their kids so much they’ll do anything to see that you get the chance to succeed in realizing their ambitions for you. Nigel must be happy in his world…). Well, I was unmoved but unprovoked as this man proceeded with the gratuitous intimacy. (By the way, shouldn’t more people wonder whether they really know what someone should be traumatized by; the assumption is that there is a book of problems those poor people down on their earth-bound luck, which names them all, so there’s little need to ask.). When this ceremony of love-making was over, the nice rescue lady took me to the hospital, where a doctor who did not have much at all for me to say to him informed me, “Your thoughts are very far from your feelings.” Isn’t it wonderful when there are loving people around you who are so eager to help you say what they know you are “feeling”? Setting aside the question whether God’s true names or attributes are Relationships and Feelings. A tv commercial for a social charity organization a few years later had the line “I don’t know you, but I love you!” I always wanted to write a punk song with the line, “I don’t love you, but I know you.”

In a film by Polish-French erotic filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, I think it may be, in fact, “Cérémonie d'Amour,” from 1987, whose English title “Love Rites” omits the crucial significance of the French word "ceremony," which can also mean an execution, the song "I'm not in love" by the American bank 10cc is played in a way that makes clear the dark irony of much of 70s pop culture, which, like much of the ethos I found then and even a decade letter on the West Coast, somehow could only ever criticize, let alone condemn, anything, by seeming to confirm it. The scene is unforgettable: the song plays while a man unceremoniously fucks a young woman from behind. Yeah, he's not in love. I think this is set in a brothel. I listened to this song again tonight, for the irony, and I think the song doesn't have it, but has a different irony, that's merely salutary: The singer means, "being in love" is a cliché, but I'm feeling an actual feeling..... Hmm, yeah, my generation shifted from ironic criticism to the more satirical kind in much of punk and the music of the time. It's in the Talking Heads, it's in Blondie, it's in a lot of music from then. But to give you an idea of what I mean, in California seem to say in a voice suggesting great enthusiasm notions that they actually don't like, and it's like they are suggesting that you get the point, hard to get presumably because we don't feel and think negative thoughts out in this sunny land. Really. People would say, "Yes, yes.. and what's more..." when what they really mean is, "No, I don't agree at all! What I think is,...." Often people would say "So, do you believe that we should all just 'go with the flow'?" The right answer is no, but actually not quite either, because if you go with the flow at the level of feeling while negating the thought at the level of thought itself, like, I mean, you know, like when people are like actually saying something, like that could you know be true or false, and you could even, imagine this, agree or disagree, like wow, that's a concept, isn't it, man. I get what kind of trip you're on, some people would say, which means: I understand your point of view within (what matters, which is) your style of speaking and acting and being, here wherever is like an actor. To go along with a sentiment in the feel and melody of it while criticizing the idea is a kind of sentimentality within an irony. A lot of 70s music was like that, especially emanating from California. The Eagles were often like that. "Hotel California" is a great song that lays it out clearly, but in another song a guy, using the singer's lyric "I," is driving while, um, pleasuring himself. There was this whole coke and disco culture and people were into stupidly engaging in pleasures that showed how they had superficially liberated themselves as hippies of a few years back, and the liberation was into squalid narcissistic behaviors, using other people for empty pleasures. The critical energy that came from not liking this culture so much fueled a lot, including Paul Thomas Anderson's terrific and dark "Boogie Nights," from 1997, a film that captures that decade better perhaps than any film not made then, like Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris," which I have written about elsewhere, and which still surely remains the best cinematic portrait of that time. The thing that's crucial for understanding the ironic sentimentality thing is that people wanted to criticize something from within, and by the time punk came along, the disco and coke and sex culture was history as far as those of us who were into it thought. We could say goodbye to it without a kiss. We could now say, again, or as if for the first time, This is garbage, fuck this. And that mattered a lot then.

Don’t forget, in our ‘communicative capitalism’, the therapeutic state that is so eager to help everyone, save everyone, all the people at risk, by helping us to only express our feelings. Oh yes, all art, all ‘communication’, which as you know, is best done by the animals that New Agers want to be except when it’s really plants, and they talk about being rooted, — all you should be doing or allowed to do is express your feelings. I guess even Shakespeare’s characters do that, though it seems to me they also do a bit more.

Who the fuck ever isn’t at risk? A world of safe spaces is a prison that thinks itself a kindergarten, and knows that to be utopia. People are imprisoned because they are judged dangerous. Everyone is dangerous, living is dangerous, it probably will kill you eventually, statistically this seems almost certain you might say. Even if you eat health food or are, as a cute Jewish girl in my coop house once said to me, demonstratively and with a big smile, “I am environmentally correct.” Well, then, someone must find you good to eat. I’m hoping you’re not the girl who cried wolf, because, Goldilocks, it ain’t me, babe.