Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
The media is the psycho-social viewmaster through which we watch our own disgraces.
Feb 10, 1998 | This is something like modernism, right? The way coverage of the whole Monica Lewinsky affair has turned all the biting back on its own ass like some rash-crazed dachshund? I wish I had been to grad school so that I could give a really good long-haired, Artforum-style analysis of the whole thing and invoke Lacan and all that; all I know is that it's rich material for that kind of cultish intellectual dissection, this idea of the press covering the press for press as press. I think it's kind of interesting how ever since Princess Diana crashed in the tunnel, the media is regarded as a kind of rabid, sociopathic organism that can't help itself; we somehow can't expect the paparazzi not to furiously hound the star stories of the day any more than we could expect piranhas not to eat the horse that falls in the pond. We allow the media this horrifying lack of boundaries because we are so addicted to their production of context, without which we are tetherless in a sea of incomplete and fleeting images. The media provides us with the Cliffs Notes on how to feel toward big complicated subjects: Impatient for JonBenet justice. In love with Kobe Bryant. Bloodlustful for Iraq. The media is the psycho-social Viewmaster through which we regard the circle of tiny slides, whose images are otherwise imperceptible.
I came to this conclusion by visiting the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles around the same time I was reading Joan Didion's "White Album." Joan had just said, on Page 1, "We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
Not knowing anything about it, I went to the museum with my fianci, whose idea it was to cruise quickly through before seeing the explanatory slide-show in order to get an uncharted impression of the whole thing first. This "museum" has a lot of really strange junk in it. Little dioramas of trailer homes. Some old woman's collection of pincushions. A bad watercolor of John Merrick. Letters written by crazy people to the Mount Wilson Observatory. A stuffed rabbit. Instructions on the old practice of "Telling the Bees" to soon-to-be-married apiary keepers.
I couldn't figure out why all this stuff had been assembled in this strange little gallery of rooms, and it drove me bats. The lack of context was actually painful; I found it was making me really uncomfortable and irritated. I had to know what the theme was, the overriding philosophy of the museum that tied all these peculiar things together, something to make the exhibits stop their orbitless swirling and give the whole experience a collective anchor, a nucleus, or I was going to have some kind of mental rupture. I felt instantly better after seeing the slide show, and I kind of admonished myself for not being able to enjoy the randomness it all seemed to have at first. It seemed lazy to need to be told how to classify the curiosities, but I felt entitled to a statement of purpose. I was so in need of one that without it the whole museum seemed like a rental car with no steering wheel; full of reckless promise, but ultimately unusable.
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