December 28, 2006
Dr. Hodgman, I Presume
Tags: ARFFF 2006.5, Hodgman vs. Livingston, Metaphysicians of Tlon, the primal scene of American historiography, The Muppet Movie, how history judges a dream-thief.
We’re still visiting family in (y)our nation’s capital and I’m finding it hard to write the second half of my books of 2006 post without more of the books in front of me. In its stead, I thought I’d excerpt two remarkable books I did bring with me on this trip. The books are John Hodgman’s crypto-pseudo-almanac The Areas of My Expertise, and James Livingston’s philsophical critique of American intellectual history, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy. 
The two books have nothing in common except that: I brought them both on vacation, they both impressed me, and they look almost identical. OK, maybe not identical identical, but they’re trade paperbacks of similar size and their covers have nearly identical color schemes. All week I was picking up Livingston and expecting it to be Hodgman or Hodgman and expecting it to be Livingston. You think you’re so clever, you tell me which is which!
“Only in the United States do the losers, deviants, miscreants, and malcontents get to narrate the national experience—not, mind you, as exiles or emigres such as Leon Trotsky or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but as accredited professionals boring from within their own cultures and disciplines.”
“The Metaphysicians of Tlon are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.”Selected Passages:
“Herbert Hoover’s cadre of fighting, pneumatic robots was but one of the amazing technological advances he obtained from the visionary inventor Nikola Tesla. … As Tesla slept, Hoover sent agents into his room equipped with one of Tesla’s own Dream-Coils, and thus gained the secrets to the Long Range Death Ray, the Mechanical Snake, the Ultra-Car, the Hover-Yacht, and many more revolutionary devices. Hoover was glad of them when the hoboes attacked. But in the very twilight of his presidency, wary of how history would judge a dream-thief, he ordered all of the prototypes and their designs destroyed. They are now gone forever.”
“Until the twentieth century, the primal scene of American historiography was typically a confrontation between cultures construed broadly as incommensurable ‘races.’ … ‘Progressive’ historiography of the early twentieth century constructed a new primal scene by introducing the figure of industrial or financial capital, and making it the predator of the small producer and the freeholder. Since then, the hegemonic narratives of American history have habitually been built around this primal scene of proletarianization. … It is instructive, I believe, that social, labor, and cultural historians—the cutting edges of American historiography—cannot agree on the timing or even the etiology of the event in quesiton, and yet can insist on its synchronic significance. That such a consensus exists in spite of the obvious chronological confusion indicates that the ‘moment’ of proletarianization is more historiographical convention than historical event, more construction than recollection.”
“Suppose you are an asthmatic child, unsuited for play in cold weather … There are still any number of indoor amusements that will not overtax the lungs or the inhaler. For example: Inhaler whittling. Fabrication of elaborate kites that shall never be flown. Pill-swapping. Bird-loathing. Lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. Finding new quiet radio programs to listen to. Hiding.”
“Don’t we need some way of appreciating the comic potential and redeeming value of the post-artisanal market society that entails proletarianization, corporate bureaucracies, scientific management, and consumer culture? Don’t we need some way of telling the story of nineteenth-century artisan-entrepreneurs which does not treat the decomposition of the market society they created as a tragedy—in other words, don’t we need a way of criticizing the corporate, postindustrial capitalism of the twentieth century which is not merely a protest against proletarianization? We do, of course, but it is not to be found in the extant critique of consumer culture … Pragmatism qualifies as a narrative form, a frame of acceptance that treats the rise of corporate capitalism as the first act of an unfinished comedy, not the last act of a bitter tragedy.”
“The poet and explorer Carl Sandburg asserted in his poem ‘Chicago’ that the city was populated by half-naked, white-toothed, magnetic dog-men who had enormous shoulders. At first it was believed that Sandburg was merely a dope fiend. Later it would be learned that he was in fact speaking of Omaha. Also, he didn’t exist either. Time and again, the Chicago-is-real theory simply does not stand up to scrutiny.”
“If the effect of the industrial revolution was ‘the de-domestication of women,’ as Fortune magazine claimed in 1935, that effect was not felt by native-born, middle-class women until the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism made paid employment a respectable and finally typical stage in their life cycle. So if the cause (in both senses) of modern feminism is the extrication of women from an exclusive preoccupation with domestic roles—a process that both presupposes paid employment and permits the detachment of female sexuality from familial objects or reproductive functions—and if modern feminism is by definition a cross-class social movement because it claims to speak for all women, it would seem to follow that the necessary condition of modern feminism is the rise of corporate capitalism.”
“The Muppet Movie: This was a movie about puppets who go to Hollywood to become stars. As they travel, they frequently consult the script of the movie in order to know what to do next. When they reach Hollywood, they begin making a movie about the movie the viewer has just been watching. The puppets build plywood simulations of props that, earlier in the film, were presented as real. … The frog and bear and pig simulations panic as the fake/real and real/fake worlds nearly destroy each other. The puppets then look directly into the camera and instruct the viewer that ‘life’s like a movie: write your own ending.’ This was the only film in which the French literary critic Roland Barthes received a screenplay credit (he also did uncredited work on Corvette Summer.)”Number of Hobo Names in Each Book:
LIVINGSTON:2.1.* HODGMAN: 700**
*James “Cyclone” Davis. Richard Hofstadter is not, it turns out, a hobo name.
**800 in paperback edition.
December 23, 2006
ARFFF '06
Tags: All reading for fun at Fessenden, our quirky electronic childhoods, the great American elevator inspector novel, I don’t know Dick.
It’s year in review time, Loyal Dozens, that magical time of year when we review the year that went by since the last time it was time to review the year between the times when it’s time to review it. I’ll dispense with such fripperies as the year in movies, music, or current events, but I read a lot of books and every year I like to take some time to record a few that stayed with me, both for their own merits and for vaguely autobiographical purposes. (I try to associate the subjects of books with the places and times where I read them. Even though you can find a copy anywhere, for instance, it’s cool to me that I bought Colson Whitehead’s old weird NYC novel The Intuitionist, along with Ann Douglas’ Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, at the awesome Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village. Or that I read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon while actually en route from Paris to the moon.) This is made easier this year by the LibraryThing account I started last December. Most people use LibraryThing to catalog the books they own, but I use the library so prodigiously that my the set of books I possess bears only a passing resemblance to the set of books that have passed under my eyeballs. Instead, I used LibraryThing to catalog books as I read them, regardless of their provenance. You can, if you care, see all the books I read in 2006 here. But here are some highlights, starting with fiction first.
5. HOW TO BE BAD, by David Bowker. Read April 24-25, 2006, in the maternity ward of Victoria Hospital. This book makes the list in spite of the fact that I have no memory of it—or, to be precise, I remember vividly the night I read it, but I have almost no memory of its contents. I believe it’s an unobjectionable “bookish author stand-in meets sexy bad girl and is drawn into a thrilling demimonde of crime” story, spiced up with a bunch of metatextual references and allusions to the novels of Nick Hornby. (It hadn’t occured to me before reading this how large Hornby’s shadow must loom over Gen-X British authors hoping to break into the lad lit game.) But I can’t remember the name of the main character, or what sort of crimes he gets drawn into, or which combination of he, the sexy bad girl, and/or Nick Hornby live happily ever after. Because I read this book while sitting next to L in the hospital waiting for the Ukelele to be born. Maybe I never got to the end. Maybe I was just a few pages from the thrilling conclusion when the delivery kicked into high gear (the nurse, a laconic Native woman reminiscent of Fleischman’s secretary Marilyn on Northern Exposure, shrugged around midnight and told L, “oh, you could probably start pushing now if you like”) and my life was forever bifurcated into Before and After. The book I had in my hand that night was at once instantly forgotten, and something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
4. A BUNCH OF BOOKS, by Philip K. Dick. Read in the feverish post-baby summer, often with crying newborn in arms. Armed with Jonathan Lethem’s essay parsing the good Philip K. Dick novels from the stinkers, I read a lot of Dick in May, June, July, and August: reading Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and A Scanner Darkly for the first time, and rediscovering Ubik, Radio Free Albemuth, and The Man in the High Castle, which I’d read as a teenager but resented for not being more like Blade Runner. I now have a bunch of ideas for a super keen PKD role-playing game, but the specific mechanics continue to taunt and vex me. The novels made entirely appropriate reading for a summer of sleep deprivation, a crumbling grasp on reality, and the dawning realization that my free will had been broken and my life taken over by an invading alien in diapers and jammies from Baby Gap.
3. THE INTUITIONIST, by Colson Whitehead. Read ostentatiously in a succession of East Village hipster coffee shops because yes, I am (or was before the baby) That Guy. Donât even bother trying to write the great American elevator inspector novel, folks, because It. Has. Been. Done. Again I defer to Jonathan Lethem: “This splendid novel reads as though a stray line in Pynchon or Millhauser had been meticulously unfolded to reveal an entire world, one of spooky, stylish alternate-Americana, as rich and haunted as our own.” Man, true. Colson Whitehead’s mysterious urban gothic milieu—the city is unnamed, but can only be an alternate New York—is the old weird Harlem to Ben Katchor’s never-quite-was Lower East Side. And the elevator shafts plunging through the heart of this novel offer the richest, strangest metaphor for race in America since Moby Dick. Oh, OK, smarty, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.
2. ABSURDISTAN, by Gary Shteyngart. Read November 3-5, 2006 on flight to and from Charlottesville, VA. Well, I ought to put one book on this list that was actually published in 2006. It’s made a couple of best of lists; in fact it tops the NYT’s (alphabetically-ordered) 100 Notable Books for 2006. “Why praise it first? Just quote from it at random,” said the Times. “Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself.” I loved Shteyngart’s debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. I gushed about it, and also tossed in an anecdote about Peter the Great’s “Cabinet of Monsters,” around this time two years ago. Absurdistan covers similar ground—in fact, Shteyngart’s first novel makes an appearance in his second, as the hack work of a poseur named “Jerry Shteynfarb,” who trades on his foreignness to mack on chicks—but the second novel is altogether bigger, sloppier, and richer. It’s the story of Misha Vainberg, bon vivant son of a murdered Russian mobster, whose heart is in New York but whose visa-less body is marooned in a crumbling ex-Soviet republic. Misha thinks and talks in hilarious, off-color stereotypes, and nobody really escapes getting skewered. I have no idea how accurate is Shteyngart’s portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and post-Soviet Russians, but I give him the benefit of the doubt; whenever he turns his gaze on subjects I do know, like American post-college slackers, he is funny, incisive, and a little cruel:
Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. … At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicious white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch.
That sounds about right.
1. MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville. Read, mostly in bed, a few pages at a time, from August through November. This is a funny thing to say about one of the reigning classics of the American canon, but why didn’t anyone tell me Moby Dick was so great? The back cover of my copy, a British paperback edition, studiously undersells it: “Ignored for many years after its first publication … Moby Dick can be read as … a sociological critique of American class and racial prejudices, a philosophical inquiry into the structure of good and evil, and a repository of information about whaling.” Mmm, hard to see why that took a few years to catch fire. But here’s what they don’t tell you: it’s fantastic! First of all, and this was complete news to me, it’s hilarious. Melville leavens everything with these droll, dry asides, ranging from ridicule of racial chauvinism (way ahead of its time for a white American author) to dark laughter at humanity’s folly to fart jokes, plain and simple. Second, it’s filled with buckets of blood and gore. People complain about all the whaling trivia, but as it turns out, nineteenth-century whaling was insanely cool. There were about a hundred hideous ways to get drowned or crushed or maimed on a whaling voyage, and Ishmael catalogs every one with happy pedantry. Like the part where two severed whale heads are lashed to either side of the Pequod’s hull (like Locke and Kant, Ishmael jokes) and then one of the harpooners—Tashtego?—is scraping spermaceti out of one of the skull cavities, and he falls into the huge head, and gets stuck! Inside the head! And then the head falls off the side of the ship, and sinks with him in it! And Queequeg has to dive in after the head and swim down underwater and hack his way through the whale’s skull with a machete to rescue his buddy… That is so hardcore ridiculous awesome. Why isn’t that on the cover? I read this book slowly, a chapter or two in bed most nights between August and November, and still I was bereft when it ended, too soon. Talk about your old, weird America: Melville is the uncut mother lode.
Next Time: Non.
December 14, 2006
Wichita Mind Control
Tags: Old weird America; Ratched, Wormer, and Hogg; the banality of anti-Americanism; your cheating humu humu nuku nuku a’pua’a.
“One measures a circle beginning anywhere,” said Charles Fort. Our expedition to the old, weird America will begin in Kansas: home of Dorothy, Bob Dole, Clark Kent, Brown v. Board, and the world’s largest ball of twine (disputed). This may seem an odd place to begin. Isn’t Kansas the anti-weird? The bluest of blue states, the pancake-flat heartland? Well, yes and no. Frank Baum knew what he was doing when he put the gateway to Oz there. But before we hit the road, a little discussion of what the old, weird America is good for, and why we might value it at this particular point in time.
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. … When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
—the opening lines of The Wizard of Oz, duh.
I’ve had to make certain adjustments in teaching U.S. history to Canadian, rather than American, students. When you’re teaching U.S. history in an American classroom, you can almost always get some frisson in the classroom by shooting down comfortable myths about the nation’s past. Even in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, the very lair of Chomsky and Zinn, there will be at least one brave patriot willing to defend Thomas Jefferson or the Frontier Thesis or the G.I. Bill from your freedom-hating latte-liberal depredations. But with my Canadian students this gets me nowhere. They don’t push back against criticism of America. What do they care?
I could flip things, I guess, and spark more debate in the classroom by launching a spirited defense of American policies and institutions. Which is what I do when talking about America’s unquestionable, no-fooling, gifts to the world: “all men are created equal,” the D-Day landing, Chuck Berry, Texas BBQ, and so on. But my heart isn’t in it at this exact geopolitical moment. And it’s not like I mind if Canadians are critical of the United States. I’d be worried if they weren’t. What gets to me is what Tony Judt called “the banality of anti-Americanism.” In the Canadian case against Uncle Sam, the Trail of Tears, Abu Ghraib, Jerry Springer, and Kraft Singles all are crimes of essentially equal magnitude. None provoke horror or soul-searching or intellectual inquiry, just a smug shake of the head. “Americans. What can you do?”
I shouldn’t pick on my students. They’re smart and interested and a pleasure to teach. But they are the children of a culture in which it seems one can make any ludicrous generalization about “the States”—the term itself a warning sign of cud-chewing provinciality—without fear of contradiction. In the little town where my parents live, the term “American” refers to all summer tourists who drive noisy, irritating jet-skis, regardless of their citizenship. Actual Americans who prove themselves better than this stereotype—like, say, my wife—receive the ultimate Canadian compliment: “oh, you don’t count as an American.”
Greil Marcus adapted the phrase “the old weird America” from Kenneth Rexroth’s “the old free America,” a phrase Rexroth used to describe the country he found in the work of Carl Sandburg. “Those words … almost made me dizzy,” Marcus writes, but he recoiled from them, because he felt they fixed the free America, the true America, in the past, rebuking modern Americans but ultimately letting them off the hook. The old weird America, Marcus insists, is not a rebuke but an inheritance and a challenge to live up to, “an insistence that against every assurance to the contrary, America itself is a mystery.”
Consider Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. Smith released it in 1952. That was the first year of the hydrogen bomb and the peak of Senator McCarthy’s sway on American life. Frankie Lane and Doris Day topped the music chats. Pundits declared the decline of the American male because women—in 1952, mind you—had too much power in American life. Is it any wonder the Anthology blew all the folkies’ minds? What must it have looked like in 1952, with its cryptic liner notes and its theosophical-alchemical organization and its spooky familiar-unfamiliar tunes? What must it have sounded like? The Wichita, Kansas Public Library in 1952 was probably the last place and time you’d expect to get your mind blown. But that’s where the artist Bruce Conner came upon Smith’s Anthology. “It was like field recordings, from the Amazon, or Africa … a confrontation with another culture … arcane, or unknown, or unfamiliar views of the world, hidden within these words, melodies, and harmonies,” Conner remembered. “In Kansas, this was fascinating. I was sure something was going on in the country besides Wichita mind control.”
“Wichita mind control.” That’s a good name for it, the pressing weight of Cold War conformity and atomic fear. Or Patriot Act conformity and post-9/11 fear, come to think of it. That’s how many of my students are inclined to imagine America, I think. Not as Moloch, not as Amerikkka, not as the Great Satan. Just the Wichita Public Library, 1952. Dorothy’s Kansas in black and white. A town council staffed by Nurse Ratched, Dean Wormer, and Boss Hogg. Footloose before Kevin Bacon comes to town, Pleasantville before Reese Witherspoon. “How had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?” Oedipa asks in The Crying of Lot 49. “How had this Melvillean collection of “mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals” been brought to accept such a diminished conception of itself?” “This is the quintessentially sixties question,” observes historian David Harlan with a bit of a sneer. But it is not without relevance today.
I snickered a bit myself in my previous post at the Barking Irons guys, launching the “revolution against branding” with their $60 designer t-shirts. But actually I think what they’re doing is pretty cool. (And I want one of those shirts. Did I ever tell you about my zine about t-shirts called SMXL? No?) The Times article quotes the Caserella brothers calling the Collect, a polluted pond drained in the early 1800s to form the notorious Five Points slum, the “original sin of Manhattan,” which is a neat idea. If Manhattan has an original sin, it surely involves real estate (cf. every second episode of Law and Order). And the t-shirt auteurs wonder if the city’s forgotten past can offer “an intellectual antidote to the superficial, surface-driven present.” Again: with $60 t-shirts? But still. The Caserellas have the right idea. The weirdness of the past is the best inoculation going against Wichita mind control in the present. Alternative pasts allow us to imagine alternative nows. Strange histories help us to see the ways the present is strange: the things we take for granted, the choices others made for us, the injustices we don’t protest. The old, weird America is an alternate history, not one that takes off from a historical turning point into a future that might have been, but one that snakes back from the present into a hidden past that really was. It insists that America is older, bigger, and stranger than we know. Ideally, it asks us what we intend to do about it.
Now for me personally, as an outsider, the value of the old weird America is not always about finding a usable past in this way, but it is related. It’s about the joy of surprise: after years of studying this stuff, I am still learning new things all the time, and delighted every time I do so. Maybe you knew this already, for instance, but I learned just this week, from the podcast I mentioned last time, that the steel guitar, probably the most essential and instantly-recognizable instrument in honky-tonk country, was invented in Hawaii in the 1880s, and came to the mainland as part of a Hawaiian music craze kicked off by the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. In 1916, Victor sold more Hawaiian records than any other genre. Legendary guitar players like Bob Dunn took correspondence courses from the Hawaiians by mail and several early hits for Hank Williams and others like him were note-by-note reworkings of WWI-era Hawaiian novelty tunes. That is so damn cool. Add to that the minstrel roots of country, and it seems that American roots music consists in no small part of songs written by New York immigrants in imitation of imagined black slaves, played on Hawaiian instruments adapted from the Portuguese laborers who brought the guitar to Hawaii in the first place. A Melvillean collection of “mongrel castaways and cannibals” indeed.
Finally, the old weird America is another way for me to hook into Canadian students who might otherwise think they know it all about that country they’ve seen on TV, to crack through some of their assumptions and preconceptions and get them to really puzzle over the history of the United States. There is no learning without puzzlement. Any time I can get them to say, as the kids say, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, that’s a teaching moment. And American history will always reward a quizzical second look. What is the connection between Ignatius Donelly’s Populism and his devout belief in Atlantis? Is there none? What is going on in Randy Newman’s “Sail Away”? Is he serious? Is he joking? What is the joke? What is the deal with The Wizard of Oz? Why is it so creepy? What is the matter with Kansas? Well, I’ll get to that next time: nothing that a little weirdness can’t fix.
December 06, 2006
The Old, Weird America
Tags: Harry Smith, $60 t-shirts, Hoover’s hobo-fighting robots, regrets.
My colleague Alan stopped me in the hall the other day and said, “I don’t want to start this conversation by saying ‘hey, Rob, you’re into weird stuff, aren’t you?’ but, um, you are into weird stuff, aren’t you?” It’s a fair cop. He wasn’t inviting me to his swingers club or anything like that. The local news had called looking for someone to do fifteen seconds of talking head on the history of Halloween. Which I ended up doing.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed the change to my sidebar, which no longer mentions robots. (I still like robots, I just rarely post about them. Though to be fair, I never promised I’d post about robots, I just said I liked them. Which I still do.) Now the sidebar promises dowsing for “the old, weird America.” That mellifluous phrase comes from Greil Marcus; it’s the title of his book about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and his name for that semi-buried world of often eerie Americana that Dylan and the Band tapped into by way of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. The old, weird America is a land of juke joints and revival preachers, medicine shows and haunted battlefields. It’s the music of Harmonica Frank, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. It’s the home of Tom Joad and John Henry, Mike Fink and Stagger Lee. Where preachers speak in tongues and tricksters make deals at crossroads, where grifters run long cons and hoboes lure young lads with songs of candy, where eggheads make breathless, pointless lists of rustic exotica, the old, weird America is near.
(Speaking of old, weird America, check out Greil Marcus’ official home page. Jeez, Greil, I know you love musty old Americana, but it’s time to redesign that puppy. And your web designer’s page—underemployed brother? retired uncle? nephew who’s a whiz with computers?—is even more old, weird 1997.)
Robert Darnton wrote, in his excellent essay about George Washington’s false teeth, that “the taste for strangeness does not suit the favorite flavors of history in the United States.” With due respect, I’m not so sure. When I started this weblog way back in ought-four, I was actually going to call it “Old, Weird America,” but with my uncanny ability to misjudge the zeitgeist (Internet start-up or History PhD?), I didn’t. I think I was worried how the word “weird” might look to a skittish job search committee. Score 1/2 for the Tribbles of the world. But now I’m kicking myself, as I think the old, weird America—the idea and the phrase itself—is on the verge of having an Elvis moment. A random sample of utterly non-scientific evidence:
The Harry Smith Project: a tribute album that just came out with artists like Beck, Elvis Costello, Wilco, and Lou Reed covering the songs from the original Anthology. A movie about Harry Smith—musicologist, mystic, dope fiend, hunchback, theosophist, Templar—is in the works too, or really ought to be.
New Weird America: the inevitable label for a current eruption of psychedelic folk music embracing both outsider artists like Jandek and intentional weirdies like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart.
Barking Irons: An ultra-hip line of T-shirts inspired by the secret history of nineteenth-century New York. Call it old, weird NYC: that Five Points, Bowery, Gangs of New York-y cauldron of booze, violence, and minstrelsy that spawned America’s urban culture. Barking Irons’ creators consider themselves part of a “revolution against branding“—their T-shirts retail for about $60 US.
Down in the Flood: I must mention this great podcast on American roots music by Jason Chervokas. The canonical old, weird American soundtrack is of course Smith’s Anthology, and then the Basement Tapes are what got Greil Marcus going in the first place, but if you want more old weird sounds cruise the gems in this podcast. I especially liked the episodes on the minstrel roots of country and on John Henry and Stagger Lee.
The “secret history of hoboes” section of John Hodgman’s indispensable almanac The Areas of My Expertise, and especially the interwob’s unexpected reaction: a collaborative art project to illustrate Hodgman’s entire list of 700 hobo names. Hoboes are indisputably old, weird America, even without Hodgman’s delirious un-history of Herbert Hoover’s pneumatic hobo-fighting robots and the failed hobo coup of 1932. Sayeth Hodgman on a Boing Boing Boing podcast: “The response to the hobo section of the book has been so outsized compared to the rest of the book that it has really touched I think some sort of generational muscle memory of some lost primary source that we all read in seventh grade.”
Mark my words! (Or don’t: I’ve been predicting a Dobie Gillis / Gilligan’s Island revival for years.) While it’s probably too late to rename this site now, lest I confuse my half dozen loyal readers, I am packing the woodie wagon as we speak for some expeditions into the old, weird America. Maybe I’ll get around to posting them before this old, weird moment is gone.
