Learning the Hard Way (Vol. 38 No. 1)

In the American Heartland, "vegetable soup" evidently means "beef stew with three frozen peas and two carrot cubes."

This installment of Learning the Hard Way was brought to you by the Chances 'R' Restaurant & Lounge of York, Nebraska.

Quotable

Advertising is brain damage.
-- KALLE LASN, IN ADBUSTERS

(Words his fellow Canadian William Gibson did not heed...)

Nigh Fi

BOOK REVIEW: William Gibson's Spook Country

Human history is the record of Man trying to impose Geometry on Nature.

---

In the first 32 pages of Spook Country,William Gibson namechecks at least 37 brands and celebrities familiar to contemporary denizens of meatspace. Johnny Depp, Helmut Newton, Charles Saatchi and River Phoenix are among those getting some much-needed and long-overdue publicity.

And Gibson's just starting to get his Cindy Adams mojo going. This reviewer began a tally for the whole novel, but it distracted too much from, well, the reading part of the reading experience. At an average of slightly more than one boldcappable person or product per page, there are an estimated 400 such references between its covers. He only neglected to ask Chip Kidd to design the text a la Howard Stern's Miss America.

Where Gibson could have typed "Japanese draft" or "Mexican beer" to satisfy his readers' thirst for details of his characters' canned hops preferences, he goes one better: turns out they like Asahi and Tecate. Interesting. Similarly, you might expect that his heroine might tote a fashionably-modded laptop. Just so you know, it's a "sticker-encrusted Powerbook." Now that's a relief. Who could root for a PC user?

This surely must have a point, given that Gibson's steampunk cred is surpassed only by his buddy Bruce Sterling. But after a while one gets the icky feeling that Gibson may seriously fetishize the "high-thread count" sheets in luxury hotels and the flawless leather in custom Maybach sedans. Even when his characters go native with a post-denouement breakfast at a greasy spoon, he just has to make the short-order cook a retired chef from the original Queen Elizabeth who makes the best bacon on earth. Enough, Bill: Take a three-month gig with TimeOut Vancouver and get this out of your system.

---

Gibson is a canny, tactical writer, and so one knows this affectation is neither accidental nor a service provided to the highest bidder, but rather a well-considered plan serving some grand literary purpose. Unfortunately, no such purpose ever comes into focus in the book. 

We flatter ourselves that these brands will endure, and that the future will care. Will anyone in the early 22nd Century remember Lego or Starbucks, let alone Pendleton shirts or the Mondrian Hotel?  Raise your hand if anyone here in the early 21st Century knows the early 20th Century cultural symbolism of Wanamaker's or the Hupmobile.

Gibson's dedicated fans (including this one) count on him to spin such drossy questions into something akin to gold, or at least a slightly less precious metal. In Spook Country, however, the conceit proves leaden.

So what is the author trying to accomplish with this plethora of proper nouns? Two theories:

THEORY #1: Gibson has decided to become a writer of the moment, not for the ages. He's said as much in interviews, and this theory is backed by several topical plot twists and political jabs -- for example, the question of what has become of the billions in cash airlifted into Iraq by the U.S. But when a writer's anatomizing such meaty issues, it's superfluous to mention whether he's cutting with a Ginsu or a William Henry steak knife. It's understood that this feels that world events have become stranger than sci-fi (a problem identified 15+ years ago by Tom Wolfe in Harper's) so he's hied himself into the present. Call it nigh fi. It's just unfortunate that this feels more like an attempt to capture the attention of niche audiences he may not have reached before, such as the bright young slacksters* with sticker-encrusted notebooks or the ad execs dreaming of Jetstream ownership.

THEORY #2: Gibson believes not only that in the future that explications de texte will be so thoroughly and easily linked, via <a href="http://www.jeremikarnell.com/2007/08/william-gibson-.html">rapidly-evolving hypermedia</a> we can't possibly imagine, as to render the above complaint moot -- but also that people will care enough about his work to make use of that technology. Like the paintings of Norman Rockwell, which painstakingly and faithfully recorded the most mundane details of mid-20th Century life (what kind of shoelaces did policemen wear in 1949?), books like Spook Country may at minimum serve future cultural anthropologists as a useful distillation of Western consumerism c. 2007.

The latter seems the more likely scenario, as it dovetails with the one truly pungent and prophetic Gibsonian idea in the book: Namely, that in the not-so-distant future the whole world will be completely blanketed with site-specific geotags and video which not only show you where you are now, but what was there previously. An art-world character (whom I unfortunately kept picturing as Edna Mode from The Incredibles) explains:

Odile squinted over the rim of her white breakfast bowl of cafe au lait. "Cartographic attributes of the invisible," she said, lowering the bowl. "Spacially tagged hypermedia. ... The artist annotating every centimeter of a place, of every physical thing. Visible to all, on devices such as these." She indicated Alberto's phone, as if its swollen belly of silver tape were gravid with an entire future.

In such a future, one will be able to stand at a spot such as 9/11's Ground Zero with a pair of virtual reality goggles (eventually to be miniaturized into ordinary eyeglasses, and then contacts) and not only be able to retrieve photos of all current occupants of the new Freedom Tower, but also to see the Twin Towers mushrooming into rubble, and the Trade Center under construction in the 1970s, and Alexander Hamilton building New York into a financial center in the 1770s, and so on back through Peter Stuyvesant, Peter Minuit, and the Manahatta tribe cutting the most short-sighted real estate deal ever. (And why stop there, when there are mastadons and dinosaurs and primordial protoplasmic seas for Matt Barney and/or Pixar to render?

To the extent that human history is the record of Man trying to impose Geometry on Nature, Gibson may be onto something here. He posits that avant-garde artists will lead the charge into total pop-historical recall -- with spooks, military-industrial crooks, and commercial interests (represented here by the blessedly fictional wideboy Hubertus Bigend of the Blue Ant ad agency, previously introduced in Pattern Recognition) swiftly co-opting the artists for less-than-idealistic ends.   

What disappoints most about Spook Country is that this stimulating prediction -- one on a par with Neuromancer's prescient 1984 invention of Cyberspace -- is not meaningfully married to the other main plotlines of the book. [SPOILER ALERT] A secondary narrative involves a radical, autonymous Cuban-Chinese cell aiming to stop government kleptocrats from getting their hands on a shipping container full of ill-gotten war booty. Here the book reverts to the conventions of "run-and-gun" action/adventure genre, as Gibson skilfully but somewhat perfunctorily steers together disparate characters and mysterious agendas toward a conflagration which creates, at least temporarily, resolution for the principles, if not a new world order of the sort sought in previous books by Wintermute or Herr Virek.

This display of mastery of his craft has more appeal than, say, the advent of a new McCartney album; but not much more. Your heart sinks, knowing that Sir Paul's latest songs will be well-crafted, beautifully produced, and utterly lacking his old instant spark of joy. Gibson is nowhere near as accomplished, nor as utterly spent, as the auteur of both Good Day Sunshine and See Your Sunshine.

Even diehard loyalists should acknowledge that Gibson's books all have basically the same trajectory, for until now it's always been an enjoyable ride: the drip-drip-drip revelation of an agenda hidden from a protagonist drawn inexorably by the tractor beam of a secretive patron into the Death Star of a new reality. Without exception, his books contain at least one scene where the scales fall from the eyes of the lead character -- who, whether male or female, is attractive and rugged and vulnerable and talented and jaded and lost and seeking for a meaning which may or may not be illusory, but at least always winds up being highly lucrative. S/he will come to realize, step by step, that while pursuing some rather enigmatic, slightly desperate, increasingly dangerous mission on behalf of a very rich, powerful and shadowy force beyond the ken of mere mortals, s/he has been a just a pawn in their game. The stated mission will always differ radically from the true agenda.

Readers get to ride shotgun with this protagonist, who is kept always off balance and in motion, while we get to feel somewhat superior as we tick off each clue, one step ahead of the manipulated characters. One can look forward to that moment in each novel when Gibson blows your mind with What It All Really Meant, How the World Really Works, and Where that World is Headed Next.

---

In this iteration of the once and future Gibsonian plot, the lead charcter Hollis Henry is a former alt-rock cult icon, a composite perhaps of the Pixies' Kim Deal and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, who has turned halfheartedly to journalism to keep busy, or something. (It is never convincingly explained why such a figure would want to become one of the ink-stained wretches despised by most great musicians. Think: Bob Dylan or John Lennon shredding reporters at press conferences.)

Yet as with Case and Cayce before her, Hollis gets swept into a vortex of perfidious global intrigue which, through a combo of dumb luck, good instincts and an aptitude for surfing the shockwaves set off around her, leaves her on top of the final heap -- having gained insight into who she really is, where she really came from, whom she should (mis)trust from now on. Phew. Along for the ride are both grizzled veterans of a pre-internet hacker/intel culture, and insanely talented youthful heirs to their legacy, to be briefly alluded to in future Gibson novels as legendary figures of the past.

The problem: Gibson has not really committed himself here to making these characters more than placeholders for a certain demographic type or cultural stance. Each of them is consumed with tragic nostalgia: How did my genius grandfather really die? Why did my bandmember have to an overdose? And, will I ever find a partner who understands me who is also really sexy? Unfortunately, Hollis remains an oddly nondescript presence to the end. Though we learn many details of her likes and dislikes and suspicions and memories and desires, she never really transcends her initial character profile. Even the acrobatic young counterspy-cum-keyboard player Tito fails to generate much more than the run-of-the-mill sympathy one might feel for a young hero with an exceptional knack for backflips and rappelling. (What, don't you know anyone like that?)

The action is punctuated with flashbacks intended to tug at the heartstrings. But these have about as much pull as attending a stranger's 20TH high school reunion: means a lot to them, nothing to you. The lone exception is a hapless Ativan-addicted linguist, Milgrim, whose chemical dependency and shabby treatment at the hands of a FBI/CIA/NSA/mercenary handler engenders  at least some sympathy for his feeble attempts to shake loose of his pharmaceutical and human tormenters. When he finally does, you're happy for Milgrim, whereas the other characters' successes are no cause for jubilation.

All of Gibson's favorite tropes and trendspotting talents are on parade here. He remains tops at encapsulating the minute but telling changes in our culture. He hits upon striking images, such as a "swarming, glittering ball of red ants" floating together to survive in post-Katrina floodwaters. He observes how "the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness." He makes a strong case that our current government's focus on security is really a fixation with control. He tracks the evolution of our built environment with the astuteness of a good city planner. (In run-down Vancouver, he notes how bars "seemed to possess these vestigial hotels"). And he continues to coin new terminology that will of course become part of the real-world zeitgeist.

But no deeper connections between cutting-edge "locative art" and blunt-force spookery are never made beyond the overlapping interest in certain technologies which both find useful. You don't need a spy satellite to spot  how the Cuban-Chinese gang's quest for poetic justice will physically converge with Hollis' coolhunt for the next big paradigm shift in digital art, and with Milgrim's strung-out bid to escape with enough pills and cash to get himself back together. Yet that cargo container which magnetically draws them together does not really link these characters and threads any more significantly than people in a teenager's MySpace extended network. Strangely for Gibson, the aggregate redemption of all three of the main characters is less than the sum of their meager parts.

Perhaps he has just become a victim of his own proficiency this time out. He can riff on and plot and predict the arc of our popular culture so well, and has the mechanics of storytelling so down, that it's almost guaranteed that on occasion he's going to misfire. It's allowed; Gibson's credit is still pretty high with his readership, and the more easily-digested nature of Spook Country may go down easier with both critics and a wider reading public. One just hopes the next attempt leaves the reader with more to hold onto than a typical installment of a Hollywood movie franchise. The book seems constructed to require a sequel (The Spook Ultimatum? Spy Hard?) and maybe that next installment will redeem some of these seeming deficiencies.

---

Like Raymond Chandler, Gibson's clipped potboiler style occasionally flies off into purple flights of sentimentality, and the resulting contrast can either satisfy or feel forced. Up to this point, he's made up for it by unfailingly staking out challenging tech terrain, blazing a remarkable track record of correctly anticipating the next phase of our bit-driven culture. The ability to predict the future never goes out of style, but here Gibson's gift feels more like a fictionalized Wired feature than a true novel.

It's no sin to for an author to try to stay au courant and be popular in his or her own lifetime. Gibson is not obliged to toil in obscurity nor to overreach for the humble immortality of a non-player like Joseph Cornell. Still, one can think of writers who managed to be both highly ideological -- whose characters were stand-ins for various demographic types and philosophical debates raging in their particular age -- and also quite popular. Dickens and Dostoyevsky are two examples of topically-minded authors who transcended the faddishness and specificity of their epochs. Gibson is capable of aiming both high and low, but Spook Country trains its sights only on the knees, not the heart.

* "Slacksters" TM John Cusack and Steve Pink, Grosse Point Blank

Chugach doodle

Edward Avedisian, 1936-2007

Edward would be irritated that anyone was posting on the net about his life or death; I wish I could hear his tart response to this remembrance.

But then Edward's way was to be irritable about everything and everyone, except his partner Judson. That irasciblity was what we liked about him, along with his pleasingly peculiar artwork.

Reclusive, eccentric, misanthropic, Edward was my neighbor in Hudson for nearly a decade. While his 60s abstract paintings are in major collections (the Whitney, MOMA, et al.), he renounced the art world in the 70s, and for the past few decades has been painting landscapess, mostly in seclusion, which became more and more odd and intriguing as the years passed.

He was the crankiest of cranks. All of his friends have stories of Edward making unspeakably rude and offensive remarks. Many of his patrons threw up their hands in exasperation after trying to be supportive, and getting little but abuse in return. Edward couldn't abide small talk, and would snap at almost any characterization of his work, especially if the comment was flattering.

He was not overeager to be understood, either personally or in his art. At some level, I think Edward probably did want to be well-known and even liked, but strictly on his own terms. And he was self-possessed enough to accept becoming less known and less liked, if that was necessary to maintain his personality and the integrity of his work. You just had to learn not to take anything he said personally.

Locally, the story goes that Edward packed up one day in Manhattan, leaving his wife behind, taking up with a biker guy, and decamping upstate -- where he has been hiding out and leading an almost off-the-grid existence ever since in a crumbling Federal building on Hudson's Warren Street. Some say the critic and curator Henry Geldzahler helped him buy the Hudson house (where Geldzahler's then-boyfriend Chris Scott also lived until his death in 2004).

Edward had an acid aversion to the art world, and only in recent years did he grudgingly agree to allow a few of these to be shown again, garnering mostly positive reviews in the New York Times and Art in America.

Avedisian was a true artist in that he never painted for any audience except himself -- and the mild-mannered Judson, the biker, who fed and drove and looked after Edward in every way. (He predeceased Edward by a little more than a year, and to be honest few expected Edward to last long without Judson, even with help.)

His bio at gallerist Carrie Haddad's website says:

In the 1960's, Edward Avedisian was one of the youngest of those luminaries producing a grand new abstract painting. Shown first at Ivan Karp and Dick Bellamy's Hansa Gallery and then at Robert Elkon, Avedisian's insouciant mix of pop playfulness, color field cool and high formalist style put his art in a unique, and at the time generously rewarded, position. Paintings made it onto the cover of Artforum, were purchased by all the major museums, were among the few abstract works shown as representative of America's post-war achievement at Expo 67 in Montreal and comprised a cornerstone in histories of the period written by Barbara Rose, among others.

Yet, Avedisian left New York in the mid-1970's, moving upstate along the Hudson River, severing his exhibition ties. Had Avedisian merely left New York City to establish his studio in a quieter place once his position was secure, had he continued to develop the abstraction for which he became known, then this would be just another permutation of the life lived by many successful artists of his generation. But, as these new paintings indicate, Avedisian's break was far more deeply expressed.

Over the past twenty years Avedisian has developed a new style: figurative, ostensibly naive, contentious. The world Avedisian paints is that of his upstate environs and he does so with a disarming directness. At the core of his new paintings lay a furtive sense of narrative: tow pick-ups are parked beside a farmhouse, a couple repose behind roadside billboards, men work on their trucks. Avedisian, always contemporary, has evolved into a different kind of American painter. After becoming a cosmopolitan maestro in the sophisticated symphony of sixties abstract painting, Avedisian has become provincial in the most explicit sense. It will be an interesting reconciliation between Avedisian's early achievement and his mature work. This mature work is, in many ways, a challenge.

Indeed, his work does more than absorb or divert you for a moment. It does challenge the viewer to take a fresh look at the world through an unexpected and strange lens. Ignorant observers may dismiss Edward's mature work as naive, unschooled, even clumsy; more thoughtful viewers can't help but be struck by the sophisticated color and composition. Any perceived ungainliness in the lines and forms is deliberate, intended to cause a double-take. Once his cockeyed aesthetic becomes familiar, it turns up all over the map: in a misshapen tree, or a towering snowbank, or gathering rainclouds, or a beat-up pickup truck, or a billboard in the wilderness, or a hooded figure walking down an alleyway at sunset. You come to see the world through Edward's eyes, and to notice Avedisianscapes everywhere.

Landscape painting is one of the more difficult forms to master without falling into cliche. But Edward managed to avoid the merely picturesque or hackneyed -- not by being cool and reserved, but by not shying away from the sentiment, colors, communities and sexuality that moved him. Edward and Judson loved nothing better than to drive in the rougher countryside of Greene County and beyond (where they were not infrequently busted for marijuana). Many of his post-abstract paintings seek to document these landscapes being enjoyed by pairs of men. He also had a taste for the gritty urban cityscapes of Hudson and Catskill, often painting composite images which capture the quality of both better than a more literal intepretation could.

His handling of form is genuinely weird, and to my mind original. If comparisons to other artist are necessary, it could be said that he shared the lumpy aesthetic of late Philip Guston, with the saturated color sense of David Hockney; but that still doesn't fully capture what Edward was up to, and he'd hate both comparisons.

There are many tales, some of them tall, about Edward's unusual way of being. He and Judson lived in just a few rooms of their spacious brick home, much of it unheated. Their back porch and yard were overgrown with vines and weeds, and strewn with found objects, some indistinguishable from trash. For the past year, a tattered white tarp was stuck high in a tree, and would wave in the cold winds coming down from Canada as if surrendering to pirate ships on the Hudson River.

He did not suffer visitors gladly, and few got into the house unless he needed money, which he'd raise in a hurry by selling a painting for much less than its worth. Most buyers were allowed past a bare front room, furnished with a beat-up couch and the four or five paintings he was satisfied with at the moment. It seems he was a stern critic of his own work: the remains of a previous, evidently unsatisfactory painting can often be detected through brushstrokes behind the upper layers of his paintings.

Edward did enjoy scaring the bejeebus out of friends and plumbers by taking them down to the dirt basement, which appeared to be full of recently-dug graves. These eerie mounds were in fact the household's preferred means of disposing of kitty litter, both he and Judson being great feeders of felines, domestic and stray. In addition to cats, he was (like the literary critic Harold Bloom) an unabashed fan of trashy cable television; he could often be spotted in a high side window of his house, watching the street with one eye, and a flickering TV with another.

Another bit of (believable) hearsay involves an complaint in the 80s lodged against Edward for failing to cut the waist-high grass in his backyard. A Hudson policeman arrived and demanded a look. Departing from his usual reluctance to show the house, Edward made sure the policeman got a good eyeful of Judson's elaborate collages of hundreds of pictures of penises, the many cat bowls, the ramshackle kitchen, and so on. By the time they reached the back porch, the square cop was plenty ill at ease, but managed to point out the offending weeds. Edward is said to have replied: "Oh, no, that is an extremely rare Japanese grass, an endangered species, the EPA would be here in a second if I cut it..." Unsure of himself in these weird surroundings, fixed by the intense stare of his ghostly suspect, the policeman was glad to have this flimsy excuse to beat a hasty retreat, and the tall grasses remained.

He enjoyed scandalizing people with his caustic comments, but I never felt he did so for show or even out of malice; he was just as likely to take himself down a peg. The complaints were not simply gratuitous; every conversation with Edward would make you think twice about some assumption you'd mad (about Hudson, or a mutual acquaintance, or life in general). He did, over the years, become estranged from many friends and patrons due to his impossible attitude. But it was just the way he was built. I considered it a small miracle that we remained on good terms during the years living at 32 Warren.

I'm most fortunate to have a terrific Avedisian painting of a kelly green house and a forest-green conifer covered in snow, set against a flat cobalt-blue sky, with tree stumps and a car in the foreground (poorly reproduced above). Avedisian's odd juxtapositions of round and pointy shapes, along with the perfectly-pitched shadows cast by two leafless maples, are unified by color to radiate a convincing late afternoon light. It could be Troy, or Catskill, or Hudson, or Saugerties. Out of the corner of an eye, the painting seems spotlit even when it is not. Nothing in the painting is accurate in any sense of academic drawing, but this understated painting immerses you into a fully realized, vivid world. Roberta Smith wrote of this image:

The recent landscapes evoke the early modernist landscape traditions (Fauvism, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Munch), but with a contemporary sense of scale, surface and off-handedness. The best is a winter scene in which two bare trees cast lavender shadows on the side of a light turquoise garage, giving the thick semi-abstract forms a sudden sense of worldly space.

Having no pretensions to living well by any conventional measure, Edward and Judson preferred Hudson the way they found it in the 70s: depressed, falling down, beset by crime. So Edward took any opportunity he could get to tell new arrivals to scram back whence they came. He frequently denounced the civic and domestic improvements he'd watched over the years; it was impossible to get him to register to vote, though I tried every couple of years.

When I moved to Hudson, Edward tweaked this first-time home owner with piercing comments intended to deter me from going overboard in fixing up my house, and he mostly succeeded. Those who would sanitize and gussy up places like Hudson have much to be learn from his attitude of leaving solidly-built, well-made things well enough alone -- rather than gilding the lily (though his own house could have used at least a little gilding, for comfort's sake). Watching the literally organic development of his backyard, full of trophies of their forays into the hills plus stuff they just couldn't be bothered to haul to the dump, one got a whiff of Appalachia in the Hudson Valley. He and Judson were in their own way the ideal neighbors: never noisy, rarely seen, but always provocative conversationalists on the rare occasions they did emerge to get some sustenance at a neighborhood potluck.

Though not everyone was willing to put up with Edward's complaints, still he enjoyed a ton of support in the last difficult years from a number of friends, notably Carrie Haddad, Wilson Kidde, and Whitney Spooner. I sincerely hope that his work, which is all he really cared about besides Judson and the cats, will be well taken care of. Now that he is gone (and his aversion to the art world with him), one hopes and expects that the small recent revival in interest in his work will lead to a more thorough rediscovery and celebration of what he accomplished -- which was not just considerable, but utterly sui generis.

A number of his late paintings can be found at the Haddad Gallery in the 600 block of Warren Street in Hudson. One block down, modern collector/dealer Mark Mcdonald also is known to have a fair sampling of Avedisians, including early work, though not necessarily on site.