Mixtapes & the glass teat
The electricity here has gone haywire enough to shut off my alarm (no, for real) so I'm in a bit of a hurry, but I'll post two quick things: Firstly, my summer 2005 mix is up on Stylus today, down at the bottom; Also, here's something I wrote a few days back on Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat. This was originally going to be the first part of my piece on "Until Then", but after writing very slowly for a few hours I came to the sudden conclusion this wasn't the direction I wanted to go in (too much thought, not enough feeling), scrapped it all, and half an hour later had the finished piece.
But I think it's still worth while.
-----
One of the most enlightening things I’ve read in a long time is The Glass Teat, Harlan Ellison’s seminal collection of writings on the television of 1968-70. Not so much for the actual television content (although Ellison is as powerful, insightful and cheerfully misanthropic on that as on everything else) but for the feeling of powerless, throttled rage that Ellison feels. He was living in a state (California) with a governor (Reagan) he loathed who was elected by over a million votes, and during the period in which The Glass Teat was written Nixon, who Ellison seems to hate only slightly less than Hunter S. Thompson did, became President of the United States.
When and where I grew up, it was taken for granted that Nixon was a bad man, maybe an evil man, that his administration had done some very shitty things but that as a result of those things Nixon and the equally loathsome Spiro Agnew had been toppled from power. All that was left were my dad’s old Mad magazines and the dim shadow of what it must have been like to live then.
Well, Ellison did live then, and he was scared. He was terrified. At the time it seemed like there was nothing to be done – hell, the first edition of The Glass Teat was pulled off the shelves thanks to Agnew! Things had seemingly hit bottom and kept going, and no matter how blatant Nixon and his cronies were about their abuses of power it seemed like nobody cared, that those who protested were voices crying in the Silent Majority wilderness. At one point, Ellison wrote with total sincerity that he fully expected civilization to come to an end in the near (then) future. What had seemed to me growing up the sort of dead certainfait accompli that only exists in history was in fact a desperate battle, one that Ellison and doubtless many of his comrades in arms thought they were losing, and losing badly, even as the tide slowly turned.
I'm sure you can imagine why this sort of thing would be a true comfort for me these days. Maybe decades from now we'll look back and realise the turning point was 2008, or 6, 4, or even 2001. Who knows? "Press on regardless" is the message I take from this book, and it's a comforting one.
But other than the "same as it ever was" effect of The Glass Teat, there is something else salutary about Ellison’s rage: It is the rage of the person who sees how it could all be better, how things could work for so many more people if it weren’t for weakness, greed, ignorance, and the myriad other factors that lumped together grotesquely swell into what we may call human evil. The sort of rage that inevitably winds up being channeled into something approaching productivity.
-----
And then I would have somehow started talking about the song. I'm still not sure how I would have worked it.
But I think it's still worth while.
-----
One of the most enlightening things I’ve read in a long time is The Glass Teat, Harlan Ellison’s seminal collection of writings on the television of 1968-70. Not so much for the actual television content (although Ellison is as powerful, insightful and cheerfully misanthropic on that as on everything else) but for the feeling of powerless, throttled rage that Ellison feels. He was living in a state (California) with a governor (Reagan) he loathed who was elected by over a million votes, and during the period in which The Glass Teat was written Nixon, who Ellison seems to hate only slightly less than Hunter S. Thompson did, became President of the United States.
When and where I grew up, it was taken for granted that Nixon was a bad man, maybe an evil man, that his administration had done some very shitty things but that as a result of those things Nixon and the equally loathsome Spiro Agnew had been toppled from power. All that was left were my dad’s old Mad magazines and the dim shadow of what it must have been like to live then.
Well, Ellison did live then, and he was scared. He was terrified. At the time it seemed like there was nothing to be done – hell, the first edition of The Glass Teat was pulled off the shelves thanks to Agnew! Things had seemingly hit bottom and kept going, and no matter how blatant Nixon and his cronies were about their abuses of power it seemed like nobody cared, that those who protested were voices crying in the Silent Majority wilderness. At one point, Ellison wrote with total sincerity that he fully expected civilization to come to an end in the near (then) future. What had seemed to me growing up the sort of dead certainfait accompli that only exists in history was in fact a desperate battle, one that Ellison and doubtless many of his comrades in arms thought they were losing, and losing badly, even as the tide slowly turned.
I'm sure you can imagine why this sort of thing would be a true comfort for me these days. Maybe decades from now we'll look back and realise the turning point was 2008, or 6, 4, or even 2001. Who knows? "Press on regardless" is the message I take from this book, and it's a comforting one.
But other than the "same as it ever was" effect of The Glass Teat, there is something else salutary about Ellison’s rage: It is the rage of the person who sees how it could all be better, how things could work for so many more people if it weren’t for weakness, greed, ignorance, and the myriad other factors that lumped together grotesquely swell into what we may call human evil. The sort of rage that inevitably winds up being channeled into something approaching productivity.
-----
And then I would have somehow started talking about the song. I'm still not sure how I would have worked it.
